Author: hunnibell

Thirty years ago, in 1986, I experienced Thai food for the first time and the rest, as they say, is history.

My world-traveling friend, Laura Cooper, was in town between trips. As we strolled down Harvard Square’s Mt. Auburn Street (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), a Thai woman caught our attention. She had a slight build and shoulder-length jet black hair with thick bangs, which described 95% of Thai women at the time. She looked to be a bit older than us—we were all of 25.  Standing outside a restaurant, she handed us a Dendrobium orchid. My random knowledge of this particular species stemmed (no pun intended) from my brief stint in California working at a family friend’s flower stand. As it turns out, the sum total of my lifelong knowledge of flowers started and ended there: Alstroemeria, Freesia, Anthurium—impressed yet? But I digress…as I often do.

I would later nickname the Thai woman “Butterfly” because she flitted around the restaurant. I’m not sure that I ever did come to know her real name. Little did I know at the time that all Thais are given playful nicknames as babies and these nicknames are often used throughout their lives in place of their legal names, except on legal documents! Unlike American nicknames, which are usually shortened versions of one’s given name, Thai nicknames are frequently drawn from animal names (e.g., pig, crab, spider, tadpole), skin color (e.g., red, black, orange), or physical traits (e.g., fat, small, dimpled).

Laura asked me if I had ever eaten Thai food and when I told her I hadn’t, she insisted I try it. I considered myself the adventurous sort, so we ducked into the restaurant for lunch.

The tinkling of the Thai classical music, the gold-leafed décor, and the tantalizing aroma instantly seduced me. Only my tastebuds were left to be titillated.

Being the globetrotter that she was, Laura had been to Thailand and had recently visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp along the Cambodian border, which closed later that year. Based on her familiarity with Thai food—not to mention her intimate knowledge of me—I readily accepted her recommendation that I try the yellow curry with shrimp.

While we waited for our meal, she entertained me with stories of her Thai travels and launched her pitch to convince me to go there. My only foreign travel experience had been a 2-week trip to Belgium the year before. I had done so at the encouragement of my then-supervisor, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The thought of traveling alone to parts unknown was not intimidating to me for some reason, but I figured I should at least be able to place the country on a world map before buying an airplane ticket—and at the moment I wasn’t sure of the difference between Thailand and Taiwan!

The food was served in an oblong dish trimmed with a hand-painted traditional blue and white “pineapple” pattern that is ubiquitous throughout Thailand. (These days, however, the patterns are more often than not stenciled rather than hand-painted.) A neatly formed mound of steaming jasmine rice sat to one side of the dish, while the curry rested next to it, seeping slightly into the base of the rice mound.

The utensils provided were a fork to the left of the place setting and a tablespoon to the right. Laura explained that Thais eat with a large spoon in their right hand and use a fork in their left hand to nudge food onto the spoon. No chopstick skills required!

That yellow curry with shrimp, which would become one of my staples at the Siam Garden over the ensuing year, was simply divine. It was sweet, sour, salty, and spicy all at the same time. Bite-sized chunks of fresh onion, whole cherry tomatoes, and succulent pieces of pineapple punctuated the perfectly cooked shrimp.

I decided then and there that any country with food that tasty was a place I needed to visit!

Let’s just say I work best under pressure.

As the 30^th anniversary of my first trip to Thailand in 1987 started to come into focus earlier this year, I decided I should write a book about that fateful journey to commemorate the milestone and to get some of my stories down on paper before time and senility robbed me of them. If the truth be told, the same thought came and went at the 20^th anniversary and again at the 25^th anniversary.

I finally came to the astute realization that a book might be a bit of a stretch for me, especially given that I had not yet written a single page. So I decided a blog would suffice. Do it in bits and pieces; don’t over-analyze it; just get going!

The blog approach offered the added advantage of allowing me to write about the months leading up to what I hope will mark my “Return to Koh Tao” in December of 2017. A blog can change course, backtrack, repeat itself, and evolve in a way that a book generally can’t.

So on July 31, 2016, I took the plunge and created my WordPress account. Now it was legit—I was on the internet. I chose a template and because my own photos (Kodachrome slides) were buried deep in storage, I used a photo I found online several years ago as my backdrop (giving due credit to the photographer, of course)—a single image to serve as a placeholder for many of my own to come.

I set about creating the Home page, the About Me page, and the Contact page. That was easy and fun. The only thing left to do was to whip off my first blog post. And that is where everything came to a screeching halt. I had convinced myself that the first post had to be stellar. It had to set the stage and tone for all that was to follow. It felt more and more daunting. What could I possibly write that would hold a reader’s attention?

Days turned into weeks as I created artificial deadlines to buy myself more time. First it was the Queen of Thailand’s birthday on August 12, celebrated as Mother’s Day in Thailand. That would certainly be an auspicious occasion on which to launch my blog, I rationalized.

The day came and went.

Next up was my daughter’s birthday at the end of August. Surely that would be a fitting date on which to begin since I had met her father in Thailand.

Nope. Didn’t happen.

And then October rolled around and, sadly, the King of Thailand died on the 13^th of the month.

King Bhumipol Adulyadej was highly revered by the Thai people and was the longest reigning monarch in the world. He also had the distinction of being the only monarch born in the United States. In fact, he was born in 1927 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, less than a mile from the very restaurant where I ate my first Thai meal.

If the king’s passing wouldn’t be a catalyst for putting pen to paper (or keystrokes to computer), what would be?!

The answer, it seems, is externally imposed deadlines.

You see, at the architecture firm where I work we have a monthly presentation by staff members. The schedule rotates and I’m up next. My presentation is scheduled for Tuesday—just two days from now. (Tuesday also happens to be my birthday.) Since I decided several months ago that my presentation would be about Thailand and I already told everyone at work about my blog-to-be, it is clearly time to write or get off the pot.

So here I sit, on the eve on what would have been the king’s 89^th birthday, writing this rambling excuse of a blog post—29 years almost to the day when I first set foot in Thailand.

And while I always like to say that I work best under pressure, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I work only under pressure!