eating asia: crickets, pancakes and coconuts.

i apologize in advance, but none of my travel stories are going to be in any chronological order. i just had some really amazing pancakes for breakfast and because there is internet, i feel the need to tell you about the food here right now.

i guess it was kind of a given that the food was going to be good, but really i had no idea. i am eating all the food and so far i had:

three plates of pad thai. after the first one i was wondering what it was they call pad thai in south africa, because it definitely isn't pad thai. basically i have been to heaven and back with each plate (okay, maybe not the one we had at the restaurant at the petrol station, but it was still really good for petrol station food).

lots of sugared peanuts as a pre-dinner snack. yup, they are sugared here and i like it.

sticky rice topped with coconut for breakfast and blue sticky rice as a topping on coconut icecream.

THE best coconut balls. it must have ranked up there was one of the best sweets experiences of my life.

sour mango with spices.

two crickets. which very actually quite nice. one guy said they tasted a bit like bacon and they actually do. i just feel a bit bad now whenever i hear the sound of crickets in the evenings.

i have sampled four local beers: singha and chang in thailand, ankor and cambodia in cambodia. and of course sampled is a bit of an understatement.

i have had original long island ice tea in a bucket on khaosan road and the head to match the next morning.

lemongrass icetea! that deserves a special mention because it come very close to the thyme tea in the atlas mountains in goodness.

two of two breakfasts consisting of pancakes. america, go away! -your pancakes have nothing on cambodia's. they are doubly as thick, doubly as fluffly, and they are usually served with sweet milk, butter, and fresh fruit.

of course i had lots of coconut juice, most of it served straight up from a coconut which you can get in most restaurants and from the street stalls. but even the one they sell in cans here is not bad at all, because it is unsweetened and has little bits of coconut floating in it.

khmer food in general must be one of the most underrated cuisines ever. it is absolutely fantastic and has its own set of spices, herbs, and flavours. so far i had beef with starfruit salad, fresh springrolls, chicken amok served in a coconut, flat white noodles with vegetable, and have successfully declined to eat a dried snake snack.

to my demise i have realized that i have no problem with eating three full meals per day, even with the constant heat and humidity of a bikram studio all around. i also have not unrolled my yoga mat once. and i have no idea how i will ever go back to eating simply asia or chef pon's. however for now i don't care, because i'm on holiday and there is some more pancakes waiting for me – with fresh fruit, which surely counts for something!

p.s. i have since added the following: the hottest, most delicious green papaya salad, more fresh spring rolls, one with bacon which was a bit odd, a platter full of fresh fish, a home cooked meal with deep fried mushrooms and morning glory with lotus seeds, a shot of spider wine, and this morning i actually ate a spider leg (probably tarantula, it just looked like beef jerky). okay, it was actually more the quarter of a leg, but still, i felt quite heroic and wouldn't be surprised to meet tobey maguire any moment now. 

Coco love.

I think we have sufficiently exhausted the fact that I love all things coconut, right? Lucky for me I double checked my old blog posts to see if I had already written about my love for coconuts before writing this one. NOT! I found the one where I did and I even called it life lessons from a coconut, because that’s how important I think they are. You can read it again here and then go out into the world and eat/drink more coconut.
The drinking part was always a bit tricky in Cape Town as it was really hard to find coconut water for a long time. PnP carries fresh ones sometimes, but I learned that lesson in the Seychelles – they are bloody heavy and won’t easily fit in my yoga bag.
Luckily Wellness Warehouse has caught up with my wishful thinking and is now carrying nicely bottled coconut water from Coco Life. Tada. Let me just say having my little bottle after class yesterday was the highlight of my day. And yes, it was even better than the kittens. That's why I thought I should work on more of these highlights and I wrote this letter:

Dear Coco Life person/people/owner/marketing/PR team,

will you please sponsor me? Feed me coconut water trice a day or at least once after each Bikram class? I will even wear a t-shirt with your logo if I have to though I'd prefer little shorts. You know cotton, tight, short shorts, saying coco life across the bum. Smart people and cute boys looking at my behind in class would surely get the reference to the Coco de Mer coconut which actually looks like a bum. What do you think? You can also just send me coconut water if you are not keen on the shorts/bum idea, I won't be upset, promise!

Sincerely,
your biggest fan*

Any


I will keep you posted on the progress.

 *I know it sounds a bit creepy/stalkerish, but they need to know that I'm not joking around, I really am their biggest fan.

Life lessons from a coconut.

I have toyed with the idea of writing a story about coconuts for a while. If you wonder why that seems necessary, it’s quite simple actually: I love coconuts. Anything with coconut in it to eat makes me swoon and the smell must be one of my favourite smells of all times. So I thought the coconut deserved a little ode.
I’m not even sure when and how it started, it may have been since I moved to Cape Town as coconut and New York doesn’t really seem to work well together, but I can’t really point a date and time. Come to think of it, I did start a quite obsessive love affair with coconut water already back in NY as they would sell it at my yoga studio. The best thing ever to hydrate, I would gulp down a tetra pack before class and probably two after and in between when a shopping marathon proved to tiresome.
Can you imagine my excitement when I went for strolls in the Seychelles and they would sell fresh coconut water in shell and all at the side of the road? I must have been too excited as I managed to schlep a 1.5kg coconut drink around for about an hour while slowly savouring it.

Life Lesson 1:
It’s very exhausting to carry a coconut and drinking the water will not make up for sore arms the next day.

Not the right kind of coconut for eating, but makes for a more dramatic picture.

I was even more excited to realize that one can actually just take the coconuts, which lie on the beach, and take them home to eat. That is if you didn’t make the mistake to lie under a palm tree and get hit by one. That happens more frequently than you would think.

Life Lesson 2:
 Even in a fight 100-year old tortoise against falling coconut, the coconut wins. True story, I saw the surviving tortoise and she did not look pretty.

I was staying far away from any trees and would just quickly run towards a coconut, grab it and dash away. Back at the guest house I would spend hours trying to bash it open, which becomes the ultimate DIY project if you don’t have a hammer or whatever professional coconut-opening-equipment there is. It is however a very satisfying way to spend an evening when you only have one TV channel in French. The reward is a fresh coconut snack and when no one else is around, you can actually pretend it tastes so much better than the pre-cut coconut you can buy at a store and that it was worth chipped nails and the trouble you got for bashing in a tile on the veranda.

Life Lesson 3:
See above. Maybe if you pretend long enough that it was worth it, you can at least convince your friends when telling vacation stories.

I however was not put off and my love for anything with coconut in it has continued. Bread, cake, macaroons – you name it. About two years ago, I discovered something else coconut related – Coco Extreme. A fragrance which smells of nothing but coconut and sun tan lotion and beach (A Thai hooker or boozy Malibu smell comes to mind if you wanted to be mean). A fragrance which goes perfectly with summer for obvious reasons, but also works in winter if you need a reminder that there will be a summer again sometime soon.
The other day a friend came to my house and she used my bathroom for, I guess the most elegant way is to say, a Number Two. She came out, closed the door and I interjected, saying she should rather leave it open and we would air out the flat. She said it wasn’t so bad as she has used my air freshener. I was a bit puzzled as I don’t use air freshener ever. I prefer matches. Guess what – a really expensive French fragrance can in an emergency situation a) be mistaken for air freshener and b) quite adequately do the job too. That is if you don’t believe like I do, that any kind of fruity air freshener only makes the smell worse. So I literally twice as now the coco smell was, true to its name, very extreme in my bathroom and well, my friend had just sprayed about $5 worth of fragrance into the air.

Life Lesson 4:
Don’t leave any fragrance that doesn’t come in a chic glass bottle and spells Chanel, Gucci or Dior on top of the toilet.

Lessons learned. Yet my love for coconut remains as unbroken as most of them I attempted to break.

Fieldtrip.

Luckily I have a job that not only allows but encourages me to leave the office. It’s called location scouting and brought me to Green Point today. I was happy to get myself out of the house and was hoping for an improvement of my mood by improving the scenery. It worked like a charm as I got to see the Green Point Park, which I had never seen before and it is stunning and a great mood improver especially with weather like this. Especially the little signs everywhere made me laugh. Perfect inspiration for parents with naughty children.

 



Macro shot for Marie.

So now I feel very inspired to write about coconuts, why women like Julia and me are still single even though Jennifer Aniston is not, and how I want to have a diamond cut named after me. Will tackle all of it tomorrow and just use this space to thank my wonderful godchild Eliza whom I just chatted with. She had to run and realized that I hadn’t told her much news yet and guess what she said when I said there was nothing exciting happening in my life right now. “I always like hearing unexciting things from you.” You made my day, girl!

Quizzing the teacher.

Here my answers to the questions any Bikram Yoga teacher should ask themself:

1. Why do you like it hot?It reminds me of August in New York – the best month in the whole world!

2. As a child, what did you want to be “when you grew up?”
A dentist, a hairstylist, a secret agent, a princess and funny enough a woman in Africa.

3. Tell us about your first kiss: who, when, where?
Kim Roth, 20 years ago, in a tent at a family party

4. What’s your most prized possession?
These days my sheep wool slippers. In general my scarves.

5. What is your most embarrassing moment on the teacher’s box?
I don’t have a box. Kind of sad now that I think about it. If I had one, it would probably have been the time when I said “And now bring your weight into your balls.”

6. What’s the best/worst thing about being a Bikram Yoga teacher?
Best: The way people smile at you when they leave the studio.
Worst: Lots of sweaty laundry.

7. Describe your perfect yoga shorts.
Indestructible cotton shorts from the GAP.

8. What’s the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning?
I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, can I stay in bed please?

9. Have you ever been in love?
Yes, I think so.

10. Say one nice thing about the person who first told you about Bikram Yoga.
My lovely, wonderfully crazy sister-in-law. She is lovely and wonderfully crazy.

11. Words or phrases you overuse:
What not.
And then ...

12. Do you remember what your first Bikram class was like?
Uncomfortable due to the floppy, polyester running shorts I was wearing.

13. What’s your guilty pleasure?
Pinot Noir and pasta.

14. Do you have a “most memorable Bikram moment”? First class I ever taught. I walked in, stood in front of the class and felt a very profound sense of purpose.

15. If you could have any job, what would it be?
Travelling writer or writing traveller.

16. What’s your favourite smell? Coconut.