Chiang Mai Day Three: Currying Favor

This is about the third day of my trip to Chiang May. You may want to start at day one.

Thursday, January 4th, was our last day in Chiang Mai (and in Thailand). We had signed up for a Thai cooking class at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, which was recommended by Lonely Planet (so we knew they spoke fluent English and were much more expensive). We were a little sad about it because it was a "shopping at the market" class, and we were sick of markets, but they announced that everyone else would be going to the market while one couple stuck around to learn to make red curry paste. We explained that we also wanted to learn to make red curry paste, and so they let us stay. Score.

Making curry paste involves a lot more pounding on things than I had anticipated. The basic method is to take a lot of dried, roasted ingredients and pound them for a while with a mortar and pestle. Then you add some fresh ingredients and do it for a while longer. Eventually you get curry paste.

A little while after we made the paste, the rest of the class returned from the market (suckers) and we started cooking. We would first go to a classroom where we would watch the teacher make a dish; then we would go to the kitchen, where we each had a cutting board and stove. The first dish, and by far the best, was coconut soup with chicken. (One good thing about cooking class is you get to eat the food after you cook it.) Next came flat noodles with pork (and as they expected, half of us didn't eat pork, so they had saved some chicken). We then cooked and ate two dishes for lunch--a reasonable fish curry (using our curry paste) and some stir-fried mushrooms. Finally, we made a papaya salad and steamed banana cakes.

The best part about cooking class, though, isn't the food. It's the teachers. The first woman was the head chef at the school's restaurant, and a good part of the lesson was her telling us how the things we were doing would increase the price we could charge for the dish. She would show us a curry dish and say "30 baht" ($1), drizzle some coconut cream onto the top and say "90 baht", throw a few sliced chili peppers on top and say "120 baht", and finally cut a few scallions into flowers, stick them in, and say "300 baht!" From what I can tell about the way restaurants price their food here, she was just being honest.

The second woman was the highlight. She spoke in this unnerving monotone (my guess is that when she was learning English, she was told that unlike Thai it's a non-tonal language, so she does her best not to use tones), and while she did a good job showing us how to cook things, her dialogue was a little creepy (e.g., "My name is Pim, but you can call me beautiful. [Picks up and caresses knife.] Am I beautiful?"). The class was worth it just for that, no question.

I ate approximately nine meals over the course of the six hour class, and so the rest of the day's activity was lying around. And that was more or less the end of my Chiang Mai trip. Chiang Mai is a great city, one of the nicest places I've visited in Asia. It's touristy and a bit crowded, but it's also beautiful, tourist-friendly, has delicious food, and is very close to elephants. Can't really ask for more.