Soup in a bag

My desk looks out across a small terrace to the greenery of the Baptist seminary, and beyond that the apartment and business towers on Sathorne Road. Many of the apartment balconies are overflowing with voluptuous plants, a common practice among people whose history as agricultural villagers is still in their DNA. The office tower we call the keyhole building because of a three-story all-the-way-through hole near the top of it has a small jungle sprouting from its upper reaches. The lower buildings, where the less affluent live, have, in addition to plantings, laundry drying on the apartment railings.

Down below our seventh-floor pad, on Suan Plu, Soi 8, an array of food vendors have thrown up stalls to feed the workers at a condo tower going up down the soi. I love the aromas that drift up while I’m working. (For now, we have to use our condo’s AC only at night.) One day somebody was roasting chilis and I had a coughing fit. Joe said he could hear me from the other room and knew exactly what had happened. I once clipped an AP story from The Boston Globe about an entire London neighborhood that had had to be evacuated because of the chili pepper fumes from a Thai restaurant.

Our end of the quarter-mile-long Soi 8 is residential, but the end closest to Suan Plu, a main business street, is a vibrant hodge-podge of fruit stalls and eateries of every description. Some are actual restaurants in buildings with open-air fronts. Others are portable operations; the proprietors arrive every morning with their amazing wagons. There’s a line in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where the first locomotive arrives in a rural Columbian town, and a stunned resident remarks that it looks like a kitchen dragging a house. Thai food wagons aren’t steam driven, but they are just as impressive to behold. And along with the cooking paraphernalia come the red or blue folding metal tables and the little plastic stools for the customers to squat on. These portable operations take up all the sidewalk space---there’s an elaborate procedure involving the municipality and the police for acquiring these culinary fiefdoms---and pedestrians walk about not on the sidewalks but in the narrow soi along with the cars, trucks, motor bikes and sputtering three-wheeled tuk-tuks.

We’re trying out the vendors one by one. A favorite we’ve gone back to for the perfect red curry and stewed morning glory vines we call simply “the place where we had lunch on the first day.” Since we don’t read any Thai script, we don’t know what any of these places is named. Another favorite is just “the som tam lady” (spicy green papaya salad), and “the pork soup place next to the one-armed man selling lottery tickets.” We’re learning how to order, although yesterday I blundered when I asked that my pork soup be “pet.” I meant spicy, which is “bet,” with a sound that’s between a “p” and a “b.” Pet means duck, and the proprietess couldn’t understand why I wanted duck in my pork soup.

One of the best noodle places is a popular dive I think of as Winetka. That’s because one of the overhead ceiling fans is broken and as it turns it makes a noise like Slam Stewart’s bass solo on Big Noise from Winetka.

The one English sign on the soi is for a place called Uncle John. It has Western, Thai and Indian items on its menu, including beef Stroganoff. We thought it might be a tourist trap, but our friend Dick Sandler, an American who has lived in Thailand for 40 years, assured us it isn’t. It’s run by the banquet chef at the Sukhotoi, a five-star hotel, apparently as a satisfying hobby. We ate there last night---Caesar salad, club sandwich, Pad Thai---and it was superb. It set us back six dollars each instead of the usual $1.50 but it was a nice change of pace in a city where good Thai food is everywhere but decent Western food hard to come by. Uncle John even provides actual paper napkins instead of a roll of toilet paper in a plastic dispenser. It was odd, though, eating this food on a stool in the street where you have to be careful a motorbike doesn’t run over one of your feet.

One Western institution we visited yesterday morning was the Au Bon Pan on Silom Road, the major commercial artery about a 40 minute walk from our condo. We had coffee waiting for a nearby shop to open, and we remembered the last time we’d been there. Strategically situated at a main intersection where many of the army-police-Red Shirt confrontations took place last April and May, Au Bon Pan had become a hangout for the Western press---delusionally we believed that included us. At some level, the reporters no doubt saw this place as a kind of American protectorate. It must have come as a shock when---soon after we left---the Reds smashed all the sandwich shop’s windows and fired grenades into the façade of the five-star Dusit Thani Hotel next door. The Dusit is where many of the Thai upper crust hold their weddings and monk novitiate dinners, so when it came under siege you had to know that for the impudent Red Shirts the end was near.

Political calm seems to be holding. The status-quo-oriented Yellow Shirts are now mad at the government because it has not been tough enough with Cambodia in a border dispute that’s been going on for many years. The yellows have been holding an ongoing rally---the som tam vendors love it---outside Government House. Last year four soldiers were killed in a clash, two Thai, two Cambodian. That situation was defused when the two opposing commanding generals engaged in---I’m not making this up---an arm-wrestling match. There are Thai “patriot” groups that want war with Cambodia over borders that have gone back and forth for centuries, but today the situation looks not as fraught, mainly because the noisy but impecunious Cambodian communist government seems to have backed down. PM Abhisit says the Thai government may call for elections in April. We hope it’s while we’re still here.

Soup in a bag: or, more precisely, four plastic bags bound by tiny rubber bands.
Bag 1. Rice noodles, sliced pork, scallions
Bag 2. Clear pork broth
Bag 3. White vinegar with chili peppers
Bag 4. Chili powder, palm sugar
Mix at home, maybe add a little fish sauce.
Cost 30 baht---a dollar. Heavenly.