January 20 2004

Thai food: Pad Thai cockroach Fantasia

Pad Thai cockroach Fantasia

It's not every day that you see Thailand's vermin performing the Chinese dance of the mushrooms from Walt Disney's Fantasia, but this is exactly what happened the last time I bought pad Thai noodles at Ekkamai bus station.

A fat old lady took my order and, as I waited, I noticed a couple of cockroaches emerge from the broken sewer hatch underneath her stall. Suddenly a little face appeared behind them and out popped a mangy-looking rat. The old lady beamed with delight. "He name Peter!" she laughed.

She threw down a handful of food and things started to get weird. More cockroaches appeared and, soon, a dozen of them were dancing around the rat, each one carrying a bean sprout. As if this weren't trippy enough, the old lady was, by now, shrieking with insane laughter and repeating his name.

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Peter looked up imploringly. Accustomed to the kindness of strangers, he was obviously wondering what he might get from me. My first thought was to kick his scabby arse into the busy Sukhumvit traffic. Sensibly, he retreated down his hole and, with that, the spell was broken.

[Posted to Diary by David]

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