Mook's Village

One of my favorite weekends was the one we spent in Mook's home village. It is tiny and rural. On Friday night, we had a wonderful dinner, Thai style, sitting on the floor, each with our own bowl of rice. In the middle are many plates of different foods, curries and soups and fish (that still look like fish) out of which people take a spoonful of food at a time and put it on their plate. The food is then mixed with rice and loaded onto the spoon with a fork and eaten. The spoons and forks are both very thin and made from aluminum (I think). Knives are more like machetes and are only (mostly) used when cooking. All the food is served, more or less, bite sized. If it is too big for one bite, it can be cut with the spoon, or broken with the fingers. And it all tastes wonderful! Even the things I was skeptical about at first I have grown to really like.

In the morning Mook (my host) took me to the local Forest Temple (there are two kinds of temples forest temples which are a bit stricter and village/town temples – for example forest monks eat only once a day, while town monks eat twice). It was a Monk's Day and she went to "make merit." (I think Merit is a bit like the Old Catholic idea of "Indulgences," where you buy your way into heaven by making contributions and doing good things for people. Gifts and acts to temples, monks and people socially higher than you are worth more than those to people lower than you – I think. And temples often seem to have a place where you can buy incense or flowers or a little square of gold leaf that you can rub on a statue of a monk or a Buddha to make merit. When someone dies, the merit you make can be sent to them to make sure they go to heaven (rather than hell) before they are reborn. I'm still figuring it all out.) Mook got up early and cooked then came to pick me up and the two of us rode on her motor cycle (still in the clothes we slept in) about one km out of town to the temple. There were already a bunch of people there (some from here village, but many from another village). The food was put in a dish and arranged beautifully and then carried to the temple (in this case a wall-less wooden building with a wicker floor about a foot off the ground and a low thatched roof that housed the statues of the Buddha) where it was presented to the monks (two of them). The monks took a spoonful from each dish that was presented to them and put it in a huge silver bowl. After they had accepted food from everyone, they covered their bowls with a cloth and said prayers to the community. When the monks finished, the people collected all the left over food and took it to another "room" of the temple, sat together and ate it. Mook and I went home to our own breakfasts and morning baths.

After resting quietly, clean and fed, Jacob and I journaled waiting for Mook. There is a bit of a hurry-up and wait aspect to my experience here (or rather, wait, wait, wait, and then run!) I don't know if it is Thai culture, because I completely miss out on the planning stage (not speaking Thai), or the people I associate with (Mook defiantly has the Mother or Big Sister approach to things – telling me it is time to go to bed, or checking that I have taken a bath, or repeating things 6 times to make sure I know the plan, or yelling out "Beck! Let's Go!" To which I reply "Ba, Ba!" (this means "Go. Go!" -- or somthing like that -- in Thai.) She does this to everyone, and they all tease her about it, and laugh appreciatively when I call her "Mother Mook" – the humor here is much, MUCH less PC than in the States. People are teased for being fat or bald or gay or having big ears, or what ever strikes the teaser's fancy. And the teachers laugh at the students and call them buffalo (stupid) when they don't know the answer, or slap their hands with rulers or kick them or hit them with a rod on the bum! It is very different from the US.). It could be all three.

So, after a quiet morning, Mook's cousin got tired of waiting for her and started to take us on a tour of the village. We got to see her sister's house being built – they are taking apart the old one and using parts of it to build the new one. Then Mook (who caught up with us at this point) took us to see rice noodles being made! Very cool! Mook caused a bit of a catastrophe when she lifted the sheet of plastic to show us the dough being mixed and didn't put it back properly -- it was held in place by the tiny plastic clothes pins that are everywhere. The same kind of clothes pins that I use to hand out my laundry every couple of days. The plastic bag slipped into the mixer and we had to try to untangle it from the huge metal bar around which it had got firmly entangled! (the mixer is a bit like a giant Kitchen Aid). After that fiasco (at which everyone just laughed!) we followed the process of the, now liquid-like, dough from slurry to noodles. The most amazing part, I thought, was the process of actually turning it into noodles. The dough is sprayed though a shower-head type thing into a vat of water which instantly cooks it and turns it into noodles! The noodles are then shuffled from one vat of water to the next, gradually cooling down to a point where human hands can wrap them up and put them, in bundles, into the leaf baskets that hold them until they are used. (I love the fact that foods are wrapped in leaves and bamboo stalks and stuff! In fact a lot of things are packaged in "natural" or "recyclable" materials. And then a lot of stuff isn't -- and there are plastic bags and bottles and who know what all lieing in the grass all over the place.) Mook, in typical Mook fashion, encouraged us to help sort the noodles and put them into the leaf baskets. Jacob declined, but I helped (and got to taste fresh noodles in the process). I pity the poor person who got the package of noodles I helped prepare!

After the noodles we got to watch and then practice weaving Thai silk! The looms are strung up under the house in the "cool" and are entirely made of wood and string! Amazing! The poor woman Mook fast-talked into letting us work on her cloth tied a string around the bit she had woven so it would be easy to pull out our amateurish contributions. I took a weaving class in College and actually got relatively good at it -- nothing professional of course, but OK. But these looms were much bigger and the threads much finer. And it is not as easy as it looks. I managed to send the shuttle either only about half way through the threads (and so had to dig it out and try again) or flying out the other end so hard that everyone gasped! It was a fantastic experience! One so much bigger than I can describe.

The rest of the day was spent just hanging out, relaxing. We drank a lot of coconut water from fresh coconuts, made Thai sweets, chewed on sugar cane, snacked on various spicy Thai salids (sum tum I suppose, but made with cucumber rather than mangos). Wonderful! Perfect!