คนไทยแล้ว (Thai person already)
The title is not true insofar as it would mean I had mastered language and customs, but it was gleefully shouted at me by a real Thai person when, one day after school, I rolled up to the songteaw stop on a motorcycle taxi, grocery bags in tow. I think if she had seen what was in the bags (salted peanuts and yogurt), the woman would have been less inclined to celebrate my Thainess.
While I have really started to appreciate the food of Thailand, it has still been difficult to be really satisfied health-wise. To begin with, you need to be okay with eating small amounts of meat to have any culinary variety here, but proteins are often redundant, with eggs and meat in the same meal, and not really enough of either. Then I can go eat more eggs for protein, which is, of course, more of the same and gets boring. Other times, the meal will be entirely meat, rice, and sauce, often with a very fatty cut of meat. This is great for getting enough protein, but if not paired with a significant amount of fruit, can wreak havoc with my digestion.
The other big problem is the abundance of cheap ice cream and deep fried cheese (yes, cheese, it's apparently traditional; may be another thing to research). Packaged snack foods also tend to be very airy and flavorless or incredibly salty, either way composed mostly of refined grain and fat, so not only are they not healthy, they get old fast.
This combination of unbalanced meals and poor snack choices was what led me to Tesco looking for healthy things to eat, ergo peanuts and yogurt in the bag. When I got home that day, I also went looking in the local stores for what I would call granola bars. The product is different than American granola bars (mostly because it comes in a loaf rather than individually wrapped), but the idea is the same - rice crisps, peanuts, soy or some other kind of bean, and potentially other fillers pressed into a slab and glued with a sweet mixture. The texture is between granola and rice krispy bar, in other words, perfect.
Although this post is really just about food at this point, I suppose I should make some effort to connect to the title. The best gauge of fitting in I can come up with is language proficiency, and while I certainly couldn't make small talk, have an important conversation, or learn anything besides math in Thai, there are reasons to think that my day to day skills are fairly advanced.
When my classmates who really try to speak Thai talk to me, they tend to slow down a lot, but, in just the last week or two, I often find myself wanting to tell them to just hurry up already. Then they might say something more complicated, and we are just fine with taking all the time we need.
During the first trip (full post possibly coming) we had a competition between exchange students to list Thai words within a category, and I got food. Call me arrogant, but I fully believe that I would have won had I not, in the 6th or 7th round, forgotten that fruits are food, and decided to chance that nobody else had said "noodles." See, I had been rattling off four different kinds of curry to applause from the Thai chaperones, and I could have said about eight different fruits off the top of my head, but I was too stupid to do that. As it was, I got second place, and no rubber chicken.
Last example, while out on a 12k run I somehow managed to convince several would-be good samaritans that I (1) knew where I was going, and (2) wanted to be going there on foot. I felt good that I did make it the 12k, but on the whole it was not a good day. I carried two bottles of water, drank them both, and I'm still pretty sure I almost passed out. I have no idea what the heat index was, but it was definitely in the dangerously hot range. That was a few weeks ago; now we're in a cold spell, but as far as I know, it will only get hotter.
While I have really started to appreciate the food of Thailand, it has still been difficult to be really satisfied health-wise. To begin with, you need to be okay with eating small amounts of meat to have any culinary variety here, but proteins are often redundant, with eggs and meat in the same meal, and not really enough of either. Then I can go eat more eggs for protein, which is, of course, more of the same and gets boring. Other times, the meal will be entirely meat, rice, and sauce, often with a very fatty cut of meat. This is great for getting enough protein, but if not paired with a significant amount of fruit, can wreak havoc with my digestion.
The other big problem is the abundance of cheap ice cream and deep fried cheese (yes, cheese, it's apparently traditional; may be another thing to research). Packaged snack foods also tend to be very airy and flavorless or incredibly salty, either way composed mostly of refined grain and fat, so not only are they not healthy, they get old fast.
This combination of unbalanced meals and poor snack choices was what led me to Tesco looking for healthy things to eat, ergo peanuts and yogurt in the bag. When I got home that day, I also went looking in the local stores for what I would call granola bars. The product is different than American granola bars (mostly because it comes in a loaf rather than individually wrapped), but the idea is the same - rice crisps, peanuts, soy or some other kind of bean, and potentially other fillers pressed into a slab and glued with a sweet mixture. The texture is between granola and rice krispy bar, in other words, perfect.
Although this post is really just about food at this point, I suppose I should make some effort to connect to the title. The best gauge of fitting in I can come up with is language proficiency, and while I certainly couldn't make small talk, have an important conversation, or learn anything besides math in Thai, there are reasons to think that my day to day skills are fairly advanced.
When my classmates who really try to speak Thai talk to me, they tend to slow down a lot, but, in just the last week or two, I often find myself wanting to tell them to just hurry up already. Then they might say something more complicated, and we are just fine with taking all the time we need.
During the first trip (full post possibly coming) we had a competition between exchange students to list Thai words within a category, and I got food. Call me arrogant, but I fully believe that I would have won had I not, in the 6th or 7th round, forgotten that fruits are food, and decided to chance that nobody else had said "noodles." See, I had been rattling off four different kinds of curry to applause from the Thai chaperones, and I could have said about eight different fruits off the top of my head, but I was too stupid to do that. As it was, I got second place, and no rubber chicken.
Last example, while out on a 12k run I somehow managed to convince several would-be good samaritans that I (1) knew where I was going, and (2) wanted to be going there on foot. I felt good that I did make it the 12k, but on the whole it was not a good day. I carried two bottles of water, drank them both, and I'm still pretty sure I almost passed out. I have no idea what the heat index was, but it was definitely in the dangerously hot range. That was a few weeks ago; now we're in a cold spell, but as far as I know, it will only get hotter.
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