Friday, August 27

Lately, we've been keeping the windows open all the time instead of using the AC. Cross breezes flow through the apartment, and we can hear roosters and birds and the hushed roar of traffic below. Sometimes the winds blow strongly and scatter the pictures I have up around my desk or ruffle the bedspread, and sometimes the rain will fall hard and water will collect on the window sills and floors, but mostly it feels airy and relatively cool and a little less sealed-off than an air-conditioned apartment.

Now! Onto What We Ate This Week!

I've been cooking using the ingredients we bought at the Khlong Toei market on Sunday. I made a pad sew ew ish dish—I used more Chinese broccoli and tofu and fewer noodles than you'd have in a real pad see ew, but the sauce was the same:

I wanted to do something with the rest of the shrimp and the fresh petai beans (AKA stink beans), and when I looked up recipes for shrimp and beans online, several Creole recipes using lima beans or butter beans came up. I made a kind of adapted recipe, using the shrimp heads to create a stock for the beans, and then making a roux that I mixed into the beans (thinking, as I always do, of Martin Tusler’s roux song). I served the beans over white rice with pan-fried shrimp and chopped green onions, with chilies and the shrimp heads on the side.

Another evening, I made duck breast, cooked slow so the fat could render, potatoes fried in duck fat, and straw mushrooms with roasted garlic.

I also made mushroom and carrot fried rice with duck:

And I made stir-fried gai lan, fermented sausage, seaweed, and roasted garlic, with a duck egg and sticky rice:

Here's a lunch at the cart outside our place—Roman got fried chicken skins and added them to his kra pow moo krob. I thought it was madness adding chicken skins to crispy pork belly, but he was thrilled.

And here's my kra pow moo and Roman's kra pow moo krob from the same cart, different day:

This isn't a great photo, but here's a lunch I picked up on the street—green curry soup with chicken, congealed blood, and potatoes:

We got papaya salad with pork for lunch another day:

And on Fridays we eat doughnuts.

 

We also took a long walk along the canal this week...

Roman stopped to smell the flowers...

And tried to catch a monitor lizard for our dinner...

No luck, though.

Also, this outfit happened:

Roman and I laughed when we saw the shirt for sale on our street because it seemed like the most Thai thing ever—Nirvana shirts and Mickey Mouse are both really popular here, so why not combine them on a t-shirt? Better yet, make it a tye dye shirt! And then one day, Roman came home with a present for me...I can't really explain the shorts though.

Would you believe I still don't have a work permit? I have been to the Immigration Office with Ms. Rundon from my school's HR department at least six times. I've gotten passport photos taken, opened a bank account, gone to a doctor's office to get a medical certificate and to the police station to get fingerprinted for a background check, I've had our realtor fill out and submit a TM30 form, and I've waited weeks to finally go to the US Embassy to get an affidavit signed regarding my BA degree.

Along with all those forms, Ms. Rundon has been collecting countless forms in Thai that are all part of my huge application packet. After the last trip to Immigration, I now have the correct Visa type and Ms. Rundon has been doing all the legwork to get my work permit—which it seems she can do without me present. On Monday morning, I went to TCS and brought Ms. Rundon my passport and the medical certificate so she could finally go in and get the permit. But then she texted me in the afternoon (probably after a failed attempt, poor Ms. Rundon!), letting me know she couldn't use the (stack!) of photos I'd had taken and given her. She sent me this pic:

This was my original photo:

It seems they rejected it because I'm not wearing a collared shirt! So then I had to go into another photo place and get another stack of photos (thet need 6 small photos and 12 large ones—who knows why). I borrowed a shirt of Roman's, because the only thing I have with a collar is a little 50's style dress, and I'm not sure a navy blue pattern with red and white stripes counts as a “polite color.”

Roman and I felt that, in his too-big shirt buttoned all the way up and with my hair tucked behind my ears (as the woman at the photo place instructed me to do), I look a little like a prisoner in a Soviet camp, or a member of a kind of boring cult.

Anyway, I arranged to have a Grab driver deliver the photos to TCS (this is a thing!) and I'm hoping I will actually have my work permit in hand shortly.

What's on the other side of that wall? He'll never tell...