Tuesday, 15 November, 2022 – Elias is halfway through Wednesday, as I write this. He’s going to Chiang Mai on Thursday and he will see his friend Libby, from DU, for about 6 days, I think.
I have gone through the folder where Elias has been uploading photos and found a few from November 8th that I had not posted yet. I have to admit, the food pictures are starting to look the same to me, since I do not know enough about food to discern differences. David can look at two dishes and rattle off the main five ingredients he sees in each of them. I look at them at them and think, “Fried something with green onions on top. Noodles of some sort. A sauce … on the side?” Also, I think it looks good and I would eat it, without knowing what was in it. I ate a lot of stuff in Hong Kong and Thailand that I really had no idea what it was. Which may have been for the best.
These are pictures from his dinner with Ward and his girlfriend (whose name I would like to know). I really like the one in which Elias captured her laughing. My guess is that Ward suggested this place to eat because he knew the food was good. What’s interesting to me is that the restaurant looks like every other restaurant in a row of restaurants. There are a few little, low tables with plastic or metal stools. There’s a little kitchen and a small staff. Beer is served in the bottles. The kleenex tissues on the table are quasi-napkins, presumably. I don’t remember ever getting napkins in Hong Kong; we always had a package of kleenex with us. Always. And the bucket? What’s in there? In Hong Kong, the table had a jar of chopsticks in it and you just had to grab yours out of the jar, after the food came. How do you know what place has great food and what place has mediocre food? Are there telltale signs of a great restaurant? Do they advertise? Are there Thai food critics?
I don’t know why there’s no location metadata on these two images. So I cannot locate them. Sorry!
I am not sure what I am going to do when I do not have Elias’s trip to write about anymore. I know I have been writing about myself too but without his trip as a pretext, simply writing everyday about myself feels yucky. Self-absorbed sort of yucky. I will say, writing about Elias’s trip has definitely helped me develop the habit of writing daily, and reminded me of why it is so hard to create new habits. We’ll see. No one is reading this anyway, so I can babble on and on without bothering anyone!