Wish we were doing something special

It’s hard to admit that we’ve not been doing anything special since our return from Thailand. Taxes was the big thing. The pile of mail was less owing to more online payments, efficiency of my sister trashing junk mail, and being gone only 3 months. One thing that took more time than usual was overcoming jet lag.  Jumping back into the Durango routine only goes so far when trying to make up for 13 hours of time difference.  Staying up until 9 PM is our primary goal, but we’re still waking at 3 AM for the first 5 or more days.

The only fun item waiting in Durango was a Thunderbolt Display I purchased from Janet while I was gone.  Overkill for sure, but I’ve always coveted a second 27″ monitor and now I get to try one. The biggest benefit besides have two screens of origami screensaver to show off our 20,000-photo library, is that I’ve started editing that photo library.

The only person I know that’s meticulous about organizing his photos is Don Pole, and we’ve never gotten close to his surgical precision. A second display isn’t mandatory to accomplish sorting, editing and trashing photos in your photo library, but it makes it more fun. As of this posting I’ve eliminated 5,000 of 25,000 and probably have another 5K to go.

The other motivation was to put my photo library in iCloud Photo Library, so that I could have all my photos on all my Apple devices.  In Thailand this year I kept wanting to show a particular photo of home or our travels and it wasn’t on my iPad, iPhone or Stanna’s MacBook.  Now they are.

I‘ve also been prepping for a reprise of two separate San Juan Mountain Association talks given last spring: UltraLight Backpacking Gear and Using GaiaGPS. Just talking or a PowerPoint doesn’t cut it for me, so designing displays, and a live demo of what’s in your pack, needed preparation. The display on the left shows shoe weights and that 6# water bottle demonstrates how much 1 Pound extra on your feet feels like on your back.  There are 10 different displays of various gear choices including food choices.  The GaiaGPS smartphone GPS mapping app talk will introduce hikers, bikers and trail riders to the app, using a large screen TV  display of my iPhone so that folks can visualize better than on a 4.7″ screen.

One habit that’s been hard to break is photographing all our meals, so since we’re back in the Southwest here is just one smothered burrito.

And for those wondering about cycling: Spin class has been there for burning calories three times a week and Durango weather was perfect last weekend for a 38-mile ride.

Our 33rd anniversary dinner, thanks to David & Pam’s belatedly-used gift certificate.  Hard not to take that food porn, but the meal was delicious.

 

 

Night Life

One of the favorite tourist attractions in Thailand is a Night Market: an evolution of food stalls for those pre-cooked foods, like pad Thai, soups, meats, fish and sweets, or ingredients for cooking your own meals like noodles, rice, eggs, raw meats and fish, and now combined with clothing, arts and crafts.  Heavy emphasis on the clothing and souvenirs.

The other kind of Thai night market is one that starts about midnight and peaks between 3 AM and 5 AM. One that takes place in that seemingly-abandoned-in-the-daytime open air market with a shambles of rickety tables that mid-morning has only a few tables selling vegetables  to housewives.


Trang, being the provincial (state) capital, has the regional market that supplies all the mom and pop neighborhood stands as well as other smaller, but lesser. open air markets.  It all starts at 2 AM where the wholesale vendors of fish, pork, chicken, a cornucopia of vegetables, pre-packaged meals, drinks and snacks, display their overflowing bounty on those rickety tables.  Bundles and bags of goods are quickly shuffled out to triple-parked trucks and three-wheeled scooters, where they’re off to the next stage in the distribution channel.


This market consolidates fish trucked-in in 150-gallon plastic coolers, meat slaughtered the evening before (and butchered on site), pre-plucked chickens (also butchered insitu  into all the salable parts), pick-up loads of one type of leafy vegetables {unknown to us) or another (bagged in 5 and 10-kg bundles), heaps of pineapples, bananas, and fruits, plus all the home-made banana-leaf-wrapped snacks of sticky rice with meats or sweets by the hundreds.

Some foods and snacks are prepared in the stalls, assembly-line style.  They are deep frying Thai donuts, other sesame dough-balls with sweets inside, coconut covered treats with fresh coconut meat ground on-site. Still other stalls, countless of them, bag liquid drinks like coffee, coconut milk concoctions, and soups for resale.  Green noodle and coconut milk desserts are bagged individually and assembled together for last-minute enjoyment with ice in a bowl at a roadside restaurant or as a home treat.


Cycling thru the countryside I see scooter-up roadside stands with tables of plastic boxes of pre-packaged foods for breakfasts and lunches. Mom’s or dad’s take their kids (helmet-less) on the back or stuffed in between their legs on the family scooter to school each day, stopping at the neighborhood stand for a school lunch. [Easily 70% of Thai families’ only vehicle is a scooter.] Now I know where these lunches come from.  I’d always assumed the family in the house behind had prepared the goods.  Maybe they do, but I’ve learned they can be purchased wholesale along with the chicken that gets deep-fried at that same stand each day.  Everyone in Thailand has a job.

We’d asked about the Mu Yang (roast pork) that is famous in Trang, where was it sold? So half-way thru our early morning tour, we rushed off on our scooters to see one of the in-town families that slaughters and roasts their pork each day for sale and consumption. I’d seen the process before in a rural setting, Stanna hadn’t.  This operation was an urban business only minutes from the train station.

SunSern let himself in thru a front gate and on to the backyard business of a family that prepares six or more whole pigs for roasting each night. Permission secured (Thai folks always say yes to your viewing how they make or do things), we arrived just in time to see them lower three of their pork carcasses down into the in-ground oven.  Wooden staves are burned to charcoal and pushed from a keyhole slot to the bottom of the brick-lined vertical oven.

The top is then covered with corrugated tin roofing panels and checked for bubbling of the meat that has been coated with the secret family sauce. One hour later, after numerous flashlight inspections and listening for crackling, the roast pork is hauled out and cooled for sectioning and sale at dawn. Trang’s roast pork is the most delicious meat I’ve ever tasted and we got to pick some off the cooling carcasses.

Back to the market, by 4 AM the place was hopping with buyers picking up their pre-arranged orders or selecting baskets full of goods for resale at their own stalls or stands.