Dinner, Floating Ice Cream, and Beetles

Wednesday, 25 August 2004

Tonight, Ku Ai took us out to dinner, along with Wondee and Pi Utt. We went to the street market vendors near the chedi. We had a variety of dishes from squid, shrimp, and liver (which I have not yet acquired taste for), the popular Thai favorite, Tom Yum soup (hot and sour soup), as well a vegetable dish with salty red egg, and a chicken stir fry with vegetables. The soup was very hot, with about a dozen big red hot chili peppers. I had to pace myself on that one. Since the soup goes on your whole plate of food, it made everything spicy, so we cooled off with ice cream afterwards. A couple vendors away is a popular stand with a guy that serves "floating" ice cream, as Ku Ai put it. But, what he really meant was "flying" ice cream, for the man throws the ice cream scoop about fifty feet into the air before catching it in the bowl. It was quite entertaining.

But, if you think that was entertaining, my next feat was perhaps even better. Yes, I ate a beetle. While walking around visiting the food booths and clothing vendors, Wondee stopped at the one with all sorts of insects, and they asked, "You try?". I responded, "What do you eat?" and they said it's delicious. She picked about a dozen beetles. They looked like three times the size of a big brown flying cockaroach in Hawai'i. She would squeeze the body to check out the eggs. Then, she peeled the skin back, broke the body in half, and squeezed out the eggs with her teeth like she was eating edamame. I took a tiny bit, and it tasted and looked like salty sticky white rice. Then, she broke off the legs and ate the meat inside, and that tasted a little better, like crab meat. Very interesting I must say. It's not my favorite dish so far.