AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

That was from my tongue, and my mouth, and my throat, and my sinuses, and my esophagus, and my brain, and my stomach, and very soon to be the rest of digestive system.

There's a foodcourt on the 4th floor of the complex where my school is. A Thai foodcourt has a bunch of very simple stands with dishes ranging from 20 to 40 baht ($0.50 - $1), like a Mom 'N Pop version of a mall food court. So in the spirit of adventure, Lisa and I went up there last week to try it out.

Usually, at the schools and the malls, where the same system is set up they usually have a ton of dishes on display and you can just point. Here, I don't know why, the fronts are pretty empty and I guess the food is all prepared in the back, which makes it hard to order if you can't read the menu. (It would take me a long time, and I probably wouldn't know what most of it meant anyway.) So we found one lady that had food displayed AND she spoke English! So we went with her. I got some sweet pork thing and Lisa got fish curry. Mine was fine, but Lisa was freaking out about how hot hers was. The lady hadn't even mentioned a word. She obviously knew we were lame westerners without the strong palette of a Thai! Ugh. So Lisa got through it, in pain, and I reminded myself always to ask if it's hot or not.

So then I went back again and got something else that was supposed to be chicken with cashews dish but they didn't have chicken, so it was weirdly seasoned rice with pork and cashews. It kind of sucked, but it was food and I ate it. I had some vouchers left over so I went back today to finish them off. (Oh yeah - you pay a cashier ahead of time for a bunch of vouchers in different increments - 5, 10, 20 - and then hand them over to the people, not actual cash).

I went back to the lady. I told her I only had 20 baht so she showed me the dishes I could get. There was one that just looked like pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and no chilies, so I went with that one. I asked if it was hot and she said, "not very!"

LIAR!!!!! I walked over to a table in the corner (I was sitting by myself, again, totally not cool in Thailand) and began to eat. OH MY GOD. Ok, so what had happened was that the chilies had been sliced up and there were itsy bitsy pieces of chilies, and their juice and their seeds, ALL OVER EVERYTHING. My poor cucumbers - ruined! But there was a lot of rice so I thought maybe it could even it all out. I started eating and I couldn't believe the immediate response. My mouth hurt, my eyes were tearing, my nose was running and I think my tongue was throbbing. I thought maybe I'd get used to it if I kept going, and I was hungry, and I've been wanting to be able to "eat Thai food" so I kept going and got through a little more. I didn't get used to it, I actually started feeling really weird and got a little dizzy. So then I stopped, about a third of the way through. I then went through the rest of the plate trying to get any seeds or itsy bitsy chili pieces off or the cucumber, rice, onion, even tomato and eating it that way. It helped a little but there was still chili-ness all over everything so I finally gave up with about a third still left on the plate.

This meal hurt every part of my body. Mind you that I'm a supertaster (it's been scientifically proven) so all you normal tasters, you couldn't even understand the pain that I've just been through.

So, after the meal, I went to 7-Eleven and got ice cream which I've just been putting on my tongue and letting it sit there until it melts off. I don't want even want to eat it - I just want it to heal my mouth.

---
Update on teaching: I changed the rice on a plate idea to a strawberry milkshake recipe. I had the recipe on the board and then pictures of ingredients that were wrong (too many strawberries, too much sugar, not enough milk) and had them get to it that way, while trying to avoid explaining quantifiers as much as possible. (Quantifiers = "spoonfuls" of sugar, "cups" of milk). So I didn't draw rice, but I did learn how to draw a pretty nice blender. Then we talked about Bangkok and it's problems in combination with countable and uncountable nouns, like traffic (uncountable, uses much) and traffic jams (countable, uses many). Not easy! But we decided on TOO MUCH NOISE! TOO MANY TRAFFIC JAMS! NOT ENOUGH PARKS! Then, the last activity was say one complaint you have with the world. I said, "There is too much pollution." A 13 year old girl said, "There are too many women." "Women?" "Yes, women." And then I heard her say it in Thai to her cousin, so she actually meant that. That was weird. But there are a lot of women (females by birth plus ladyboys) in Thailand, so I could see why she might feel that way. Wow, spicy food to ladyboys in one blog, yay Thailand!