تفسیر درس

Street Food – Commentary Lesson

Hi, this is Kristin. Welcome back to the commentary for this month’s conversation, Street Food. I think I’ve mentioned before that I lived in Thailand, in Bangkok, Thailand. Actually, I think it was mentioned in the conversation. AJ and I both lived in Bangkok, Thailand. So I thought I would start off this commentary describing in a little more detail the street food in Bangkok because I love…I love, love, love the street food culture there.

So as mentioned in the conversation, one of the ways food is sold on the street is by carts and that’s pretty typical to see carts in Bangkok. So a cart is something that you push and it has wheels and then it’s got a burner for actually cooking food on it. Or it, maybe if you’re not selling something that you’re cooking, it just has an area to store the food that you’re selling.

So in Bangkok you can find all sorts of food from noodles and curries and soups, spring rolls, all kinds of meat on sticks usually. You’ll see them on sticks like barbecued, barbecued meats. You’ll see people selling fruit from carts, like pineapple and watermelon and cantaloupe. You’ll see people selling tea and coffee from carts. And a lot of times they’ll make the tea or coffee and then they’ll pour it into a bag with ice and hand you the bag and put a straw down in it.

You’ll find juices being sold from carts and coconuts, like young coconuts. Bugs, all kinds of insects you’ll see being sold from carts. And dried squid, what’s some other things? Ice cream, ice cream…this is so funny, here in America we have ice cream sandwiches. So you have the ice cream and then you have something like a…little bit like a cookie that you put on either side of the ice cream so it makes a sandwich. It’s not as hard as a cookie but it’s kind of like a cookie.

So in Bangkok I’ve seen food carts selling ice cream sandwiches and they take the ice cream and actually put it between bread so it’s a real sandwich, like we would eat a sandwich, y’know, with some meat or vegetables on bread. They’ll put ice cream on the bread.

You’ll find mango sticky rice, this is one of my favorite desserts. It’s really ripe mango, so it’s yellow mango, because you can also eat kind of a, I guess it’s a white mango. It’s different. It’s more sour. But this one’s really sweet, yellow mango, and they put it on rice. The consistency is sticky. And then they pour this coconut cream on top. It’s really, really good.

So you can find all sorts of things being sold from food carts. When I was living in Bangkok, I would pass a lot of carts and think, “Gosh, that food looks so good. I would love to try it. But I know that there’s meat in it.” And being a vegan, not eating any meat or anything that comes from an animal, I chose not to try it then.

But then I found a restaurant that actually serves a lot of food, Thai food, that I would see being sold on the street. So that was so great when I found that restaurant. It’s all vegetarian so there’s no…there’s no meat but they have like things in the food that looks like meat but it’s a completely 100% vegetarian restaurant.

And another thing…way that I used to see food being sold in Bangkok would be from stalls or booths, like was mentioned in the conversation. So, y’know, that could be at a market like I mentioned in the vocabulary lesson, the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok. Something else that was always really fun to go to, it’s no longer there, but there used to be this big night market in Bangkok.

And so at the night market there was this really big area that was only food. So in other areas of the market they were selling clothes and household items and candles, soap, whatever. But then in one particular area there was only food being sold from these stalls or booths.

And they even had a stage where you could sit and eat your food, drink beer if you wanted to, and watch performances going on, watch shows happening on the stage. So this was fun for me and my friends to go to sometimes, to the night market, and go to the food court. And it was…it was outside so it was all open air, meaning there’s no roof overhead and no walls. It’s just out in the open. I actually went to a food court like that in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia one time, too, which was really nice.

Going back to the food carts, it’s really…it always interested me, the food cart culture because you would see these, in one particular area of Bangkok where I lived, you would see many carts come out at night in the streets and I would always wonder where they came from, where these people would store them when they finished selling for the night and then went home. There must have been some area where they, y’know, were able to put them when they were finished.

Something else that I really liked about Bangkok, this probably doesn’t really…it’s not probably technically considered street food, but there would be what I called pop-up restaurants. So, for example, there was one near the house where I was living. It was not technically a restaurant, but like I said, not technically street food either.

It would only be open at night and it would be…you would go, there would be a part of a building where…that was inside, like a restaurant, but that’s where the kitchen was. You didn’t actually eat there, eat inside like you would in a restaurant. They would set up tables and chairs on the sidewalk. So this particular one near my house in Bangkok was right on…the chairs and tables would be set up on the sidewalk right on a really busy street.

So it was a really good restaurant and I loved to go there to eat but then you’re sitting there and it was so loud because all the cars going by and there’d be so much pollution, it was kind of crazy to be sitting there eating with all this pollution and noise, but the food was so good, I loved it.

I remember I had two friends visit me when I was living in Bangkok and they came from the United States, came over to visit me. They’d never been to Thailand before. And I remember one of their first impressions when we were out walking around they were so surprised by all of the street food, by all of the carts they were seeing selling food.

Because, as was mentioned in the conversation, we don’t really have a street food culture here. You might find some areas, probably in cities, where there might be some food trucks and in some really big cities like New York City, for example, you might see some carts selling hot dogs, for example. But in general, in America we don’t have street food. And so my two friends came from an area of America where they…there is no street food.

So for them to see this was really surprising and kind of exotic and they liked it. The only time one of them, the guy, his name is Gene, the only time he’d really seen any street food in America was when he had gone to some concerts, in particular this band called the Grateful Dead, you’ve probably heard, if you’ve been with Advanced Conversation Club for a while, you’ve heard us do a conversation about the Grateful Dead, one of Joe’s favorite bands.

My friend Gene had gone to many Grateful Dead concerts and those concerts, when they…they’re no longer a band, but at those concerts you could find people selling food and other things, clothing, y’know, whatever, in the parking lots of wherever the concert was happening. So he had seen street food at these concerts, these Grateful Dead concerts, but he’d never seen it other than that.

And I remember him saying when he was looking around at all these people in Bangkok selling food from their food carts, he said, “Wow, I wonder if people who were selling food at the Grateful Dead concerts if maybe some of them had traveled to Thailand and gotten the idea, y’know, to sell from a little cart or a little booth at the Grateful Dead shows.”

So I just thought that was interesting. And it was fun for me when they were there to, y’know, look through their eyes to feel what they were feeling and seeing for the first time, coming to Thailand and experiencing something like street food that was so different and unusual for them.

So I was wondering, do you in your country have a street food culture, and if so maybe you could share that with us on the Ning site. Let us know what your street food culture is like. We would love to hear about that.

Alright, this concludes the commentary for the conversation Street Food. Have a good month and I’ll see you next month. Bye-bye.