Jackpot – literally!
I just found the place where I’ll probably eat dinner every single night for the next four months! It’s a huge, seemingly endless ‘point-place’ – a point-place is what we’ve been calling any eatery with pans/pots of freshly prepared food, some identifiable and most not, which you can easily point to and have the cook put a big scoop right on top of a big bed of rice. These places require no Thai speaking skills, are unfailingly delicious and usually dirt cheap.
Anyways, I just stumbled across one down the road with upwards of 60 pots (no clue how they do it, nor do I want to know!) arranged on long tables with tons of people roaming around. I spent a few minutes sizing it all up, trying to figure out how it works and what I should do about ordering. Scoop myself? Find a plate or a bag? Where does the rice come from? I watched all the Thais and realized that the key is to be assertive – grab one of the people in aprons, point to what you want and let them know if you want a bag or a plate. Luckily the girl knew the word ‘bag’ since the Thai word, which I made an effort to learn yesterday, had already slipped my memory (although it’d be easy to point to that too).
A woman on the curb scoops steaming rice into small plastic bags, ties it up, then the girl puts that bag along with my bag of hot food into yet another bag (environmentalism has not hit this place quite yet), tells me what it costs, I pay her my 25 baht (again, 85 cents or so) and I’m on my way. It was way more food than I could finish, so I get breakfast out of the deal too!
Strangely, all of this food is making me lose weight pretty efficiently! It’s probably some combination of eating spicy EVERYTHING, eating artificial NOTHING, walking everywhere and, of course, spending only about an hour a day at a computer as opposed the 9+ that was the norm before I left.
In any case, it’s little things like this point-place that will really make me miss Thailand when the time comes to leave…
Tags: Travel
allisonrae
September 12th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
You found more good food and yet again you make me hungry. you suck