Thai Food and Leo's Monster friends

 




The Thai restaurant “Have a Jeed “was our favorite place during our stay. Both me and Leo enjoyed the same dish, minced hot stir-fried pork rice. Of course we have Korean style stir-fried pork rice back in Korea, but it is very different. Although both pork based dishes are spicy, the former has more strong scent with many spice and aromatic ingredients. In my opinion Thai cuisines are more popular in the West than Korean food. So far, Thailand is the most preferred Asian destination for foreigners, and the Thai government is promoting Thai cuisine to Westerners (including opening a cooking class and linking Thai cuisine tourism programs), so the image of Thai cuisine in the West is very good. In fact, Thai cuisine is often discussed as a benchmark and reference target example in the context of Korean food globalization.

It also suits the taste of Koreans who like spicy food including me. As I mentioned, Thai food's spicy taste is different from that of Korea. It has a unique cooking system that contains various spices and ingredients that I am not familiar with. It looks like some people visiting Thai never be able to make themselves familiarized.

The characteristic feature is that the food itself is light, but it uses a lot of spices to create a fragrant taste. Thailand is a country that does not have any food ingredients that are specifically taboo, so it uses all kinds of ingredients to taste. Ingredients that pose a barrier to Koreans are cilantro. Thai cuisine also includes high proportion of cilantro in soup. This may be the reason some people have a difficult time to enjoy Thai food.

Generally, famous dishes include stir-fried noodle pad thai, soup tom yam kung, and curry panang curry, and fried street food bugs. Thai food is still unfamiliar in Korea.

In addition to cilantro, there is a strange sour taste, which is the fundamental reason why Thai cuisine does not gain much popularity in Korea. This is because Koreans are not accustomed to the sour taste of soup. There is a perception in Korea that soup dishes should be refreshing, so Thai soup dishes with relatively less refreshing taste are inevitably unpopular.

 The proportion of meat is relatively low. Meat and seafood are commonplace foods in Thailand as well. Even though Thailand is a Buddhist country, monks eat meat because of its generous principle of meat consumption due to the characteristics of Southern Buddhism. Tropical crops, such as coconuts and papaya, are frequently used as ingredients for vegetables. Snakes, insects, and other foods occasionally appear, and they are in a specialized position.





Since Thailand is home to many exotic reptiles, Leo was really excited to go there and insisted to go to Lumpini park, which is the first public park in Bangkok. This park was near Grand Center Terminal 21 and took us short time to go there. There, Leo chased monster size water monitors busily devouring foods given by tourists. We thought about special herping Tourism programs, but later decide not to use because of Leo was too young for observing venomous reptiles and doing night trip. Next time, we may think about going deeper part of the country and do something we didn’t do yet.


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