Iron Chef Nathan

9/25/2006

This morning I had a Thai cooking class, which was great. 7 people in my group went to the cooking school in the morning. The school is run by a lady named Yui at her house. She was very nice and has a website at alotofthai.com. We cooked 3 dishes, which were pad thai, hot and sour prawn soup, and green curry with chicken. The place had individual stations for all of us. Basically we watched Yui prepare a dish while she talked about all the ingredients, and then we went to our individual stations to reproduce the cooking with some help. The pad thai that I made (see picture) was excellent. I didn't really like the soup, but I think that I did make it correctly. The green curry was also very good. One thing that I did learn was that it is very important to wash your hads thoroughly after working with chiles. I touched my nose, which immediately began to burn. Later, while I was watching my face, my eyes started to sting. In addition, after cooking we went to a local market where Yui told us about all the different incredients, including everything from stick rice desserts to fried chicken heads. I don't think I'll be doing much more cooking in the future, but it was a great experience.

I spent the afternoon doing all of the blog posts up to this point. I basically just summarized the stuff I've written in my journal.

I don't think that I like Chiang Mai as much as the other parts of Thailand that we have been to so far. It's much more touristy than the other towns, and it seems like every step you take you are being hassled by someone to buy something or to take a ride. I probably don't like it as much as other people might because I'm very cheap, and much of the city is dedicated to shopping. Nevertheless, Chiang Mai is a bustling city and thus shows an important facet of life in Thailand thus making it interesting in that respect.

Tomorrow morning we leave Chiang Mai and Thailand to go to Laos. I probably won't have access to computers too much, so I'll try to update this blog when I get a chance. Please let me know if this is at all interesting or if I am completely wasting my time.

Nathan