Taste of Home

Today, I was grocery shopping for my family. Just scanning the shelves in the produce department at Foodland, trying in vain to find cilantro. Then I saw a bag of peanuts on the shelf. I looked more closely...Boiled Ground Nut...hey! Those are boiled peanuts! Shamelessly, I picked up the bag and sniffed it. Yep, that's the right smell. It's only 27 baht (that's $0.77, for those who don't do regular baht-dollar conversions), so I had nothing to lose. Arriving home to share my find with Tim, we decided they weren't bad. Pretty good, in fact. Not as salt-drenched as those you find at roadside stands in the deep South, but beggars cannot be choosers.

The grocery store outing was an all-around pleasant experience today. I had a good taxi driver (although he did inform me that he thought Americans were fat because they eat too much bread and too little rice; I conceded that he might have a point), the construction on Srinakarin Road was finished, making it less of a struggle to reach the desired destination, and I had my darling daughter as a shopping companion, bringing back pleasant childhood memories of mother-daughter shopping excursions.

I am also finding more and more that I have the ability to communicate with those around me. It's limited, but it's improving. I wowed the folks at the grocery store today with phrases like, "I'd like half a kilo of ground beef" and "Are these the noodles you use to make Pad Thai?". It's funny, whenever I'm out and about using my Thai, I get a mental picture of a sweet Asian woman tootling about in America, using her limited English to construct stilted and gramatically incorrect sentences, then smiling broadly with pleasure when someone understands her. I am Mrs. Chou. Humbling, but surprisingly fun.