At this point, I'm going to go ahead and presume that you are all quite bored of learning the letters of the alphabet (this week: E! Elephant, Ear, and Egg!) so I'll move on to a subject that I know most of you care deeply about; the subject that is quite possibly the reason I moved out here in the first place: the food.

I've got to admit, that like a lot of other things, the food here doesn't quite meet much expectations of it. Not so much that it is bad, just that most of the time, it is weird. I can't handle traditional Thai breakfasts simply because eating rice three times a day, every day, might be a tad overkill. So most mornings before I head to school I just eat a banana a peanut butter sandwich. And I recognize that that is entirely boring, but it gets the job done.

My eating habits get much more interesting at lunch. The school serves us lunch every day. There is always rice, always chilies, always fish sauce, and almost always some creepy unknown meat soup/curry that terrifies me. A couple days ago they served us chicken foot soup. I am brave, but sorry, I'm not brave enough to eat a stewed chicken foot (they still have little claws on!!). Sometimes there are greens, sometimes there is egg, sometimes there is meat that doesn't frighten me. Those are the good days. We eat our lunches off big metal prison trays and use extremely bent forks and spoons. We drink water. On the days when all I eat is spicy rice off a dinged metal prison tray, I feel very pious.

After school, there is always a necessary snack. Often it is fresh fruit. The fruit here is certainly a highlight of this whole adventure. Fresh papaya, pinapple, and mangoes whenever I want them and I've discovered all sorts of amazing new fruits like rambutans and mangosteens (mangosteens make my heart melt.... they are so so so good).

And then in the evenings I just eat street food from the vendors around my apartment. I have a favorite egg lady (an omelette over rice is an amazingly perfect meal) and a favorite curry lady (who last night had the most incredible ridiculously spicy mushroom curry) and I visit one of those two stands most nights of the week. But I also sometimes branch out and find soups or noodles or unidentifiable fried things. The problem is that so much is unidentifiable, and I never quite know what I've ordered until I'm tasting it - and sometimes not even then. Thai people eat all the parts of the animal, and they use all sorts of sticks and leaves and berries that people back home would never be willing to eat. So a perfectly safe looking curry can sometimes contain "foods" I'd never expect.

On weekends my eating habits tend to diversify, but that often means I want hummus or Indian food or simply a salad (fresh, raw vegetables are a surprisingly difficult thing to find here) so I spend the money to go to more touristy parts of town where I can find the foods of other cultures and where the local food is advertised with signs in English and higher prices.

Overall, I suppose the food is good, aspects of it are great (the fruit! the curry! the noodles!). But sometimes its scary. I tried pig intestine. It was bad. I tried fish cheek. It was good! I am finding it amazing how satisfying spicy eggs and rice can be (when supplemented with carrots from the grocery store). And my tolerance for spiciness it becoming impressive. I eat things that make my lips burn and my face sweat and that is just normal at this point. The Thai teachers laugh at us at lunch, because we actually spice up the food more than they do.

There are a million foods I miss from back home. Coffee, wine, crunchy whole wheat bread, and cheese are at the top of the list. Luckily, mangosteens go a long way toward making up for all that.