chiang mai northern thailand calm

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hi there,
this is my first blog experience!welcome to my chiang mai.
as the airports in bangkok are closed today, i hope you will not look too unkindly on the goings on there. politics is profoundly murky. so let's not go there.

chiang mai is calm and our lives go on here. i will post pics tomorrow. today i want to focus on the food here. it is filled with herbs and a sprinkling of spices. you will find food as cheaply as usd$0.50 which will fill you and of course you can have food costing you far more!
my favs are their pork dishes! from crispy fried to soup infused to steamed salted and smoked, all of them are wonderful. there is something in the food for the pigs that somehow makes for a tastier pork dish - seriously! it could be that there is a lot less usage of western medications to dose the pork with and also much of the meat is produced by small holders.

photos to come soon of some of these dishes.

one local way of eating here, in the Lanna tradition, is to have many small dishes on a table set on the floor - yup a low table, the hand is used (traditionally the right - but increasing modernisation has resulted in lefties no longer being frowned upon). only one hand - the right or left. sticky rice (glutinous rice) is used here more often than white because it keeps better being a farming culture - much time is spent out in the field and white rice could go bad before the farmers could eat their meal. back to eating, a small dab of the dish is scooped up with the sticky rice and this is transferred to the mouth - popping it in preferably without the lips/toungue touching the fingers of the spooning hand. yes some food will drop and that is fine. if the place is clean, you can pick it up it and eat it, if not use the other (non-eating hand) to pick up the dopped bit and place it on your small plate in front of you.

water should also be drunk using this hand (the non-eating one).
ok hope i have given you a bit of insight into chiang mai's culture.

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