Ahan Falang

Ahan= food
Falang= foreigner/ guava

Wan nee, kulap gap sai tam ahan falang. (Today emma and I cooked foreigner food)!!
It was exciting. Last weekend I went to both Khon Kaen and Ubon Ratchatani (two big cities both at least 4 hours away). Because I live out in the boonies of Isan ( I love it here, but it's very thai, no foreign stuff to speak of), I took the oppurtunity to buy some neccessities.
1. cheese
2. more cheese (feta for emma)
3. PEANUT BUTTER
So, today emma came over to my house after I slept at her's last night. I'm not sure whether sleepovers are common here, but our host parents seemed okay with it.
After we woke up got dressed, ate the food emma's host mother made for us (even though we weren't hungry and we didn't ask for it) and went to the fresh market. This place is incredible, it is massive and has huge amounts of fresh produce. I had heard from the english teacher that potatoes were sold across from the smelly meat market. Sure enough, we found potatoes directly across from the pig's head sitting on a table next to (I'm assuming) the late pig's intestines. Emma took a picture to commerorate the moment.

We found the potatoes, and GARLIC, bought the two vital ingredients and went on our way to my house. Together we are quite a sight, two 5 ft 9 blonde girls on bicycles. WE rode out back to my house, past the trees, past the rice paddies and turned onto Ta-U-Ten road to find my little development of houses, 100 houses all place within 10 ft of each other with the same blue and gold iron rod gates and red roofs. The men at the exercise park waved at us as we rode past.

Once at my house we had a bit of a dilemma. What do you do with potatoes if you have no masher, oven, grater, peeler, or pot big enough to boil in? We decided on using the Wok, Margarine, garlic and salt. It worked well enough and they were fairly tasty. I even got a small cooking lesson from Emma.

Unfortunately, we could not figure out how to turn the stove on. My host parents were at a funeral and my host brother was at soldier camp. I had to go over to the next door neighbor and ask. I first got the cleaning lady who couldn't speak any english. I know the word for fire, cooking, help, friend, and many others, but I didn't know how to say stove or how. There were a lot of charades on my part trying to show a stove.

I finally got my host uncle (married to my host mother's sister--they live in the house next door). He spoke a little bit of english, but didn't understand stove. I finally convinced him to come over and show me how to work it. He asked what we were cooking.
Since we didn't know the word for potatoes we showed him. He muttered under his breath, "oh, ahan falang."