Postcards from Thailand

One of the Thai government’s money-spinners is to charge 1,000 Baht (a little over twenty pounds) for a reentry permit to allow one to leave and reenter the Kingdom. Without a reentry permit your visa is automatically cancelled when you leave. Until recently getting a permit was a simple affair of turning up at the airport, handing over a completed form, a photograph and a pile of bank notes, then waiting about 20 minutes. Then the immigration department, in its wisdom, decided that that was too simple and closed its operation at the airport. Now one has to go to the immigration department Bangkok.

In the past the department was in downtown Bangkok and could be reached by skytrain plus a 15 minute walk. Then the immigration department, in its wisdom, decided that that was too simple and now directs applicants to its new offices in the far north of Bangkok, miles away from the nearest skytrain or metro service. In fact, the nearest bus route passes almost a kilometer from the immigration department. Fortunately, I have a car, so after a 55 minute drive I reached the department.

The building, which houses several government departments, is very striking.

It features what is perhaps the largest atrium I’ve ever seen.

I hate to think what the cost of air conditioning such a vast volume must be. I was, however, amused to see on the top floor the offices of the government’s Greenhouse Gas Emission Organisation. Practice what you preach, anybody?

Anyway, the actual process of getting the reentry permit was pretty quick – less than half an hour – and department seems to be much better organised than before, so, despite that inconvenient location, things do seem to have improved.

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Yesterday the latest installment of the Harry Potter saga was released in Thailand – that’s before the UK and USA releases. I find the whole Potter thing rather tedious. The story-telling is so linear and formulaic. Still, I had my arm twisted to see Harry Potter and the Dreary Hallows, or whatever it’s called.

It’s hardly a spoiler, since everybody knows that Dobby (an ugly elf with a nauseatingly obsequious manner) is killed off in this installment. Normally such an event would be cause for celebration, but for Harry Potter fans it is, apparently, a moment of incredible tear-jerkingness. As those around me fought back the waterworks, I had to struggle not to laugh at the sight of Daniel Radcliffe cradling a rubber doll. Does that make me a bad person?

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The Thais have a word for it: khorapchan – though quite why they needed to borrow an English word when corruption’s a deeply embedded tradition in the Kingdom, I don’t know. In a recent poll of more than 4,000 people, 95% said that corruption was Thailand’s biggest social ill. It’s said that 25% of all tax revenue “disappears” though graft, and that a staggering 90% of all flood relief aid (billions of Baht) has been syphoned off. In an audit of 373 randomly checked projects, 274 (73%) showed signs of corruption. Well, at least there was no corruption in 27% of projects – or if there was, it was well concealed. (A similar audit of about 2,000 roadbuilding projects a few years ago revealed corruption in every single one of them, so perhaps things are getting better.)

And the good news just keeps on coming. The National Anti-Corruption Commission has just announced that it will make Thailand corruption-free within the next few years. Oh look! Is that a pig flying past my window?

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“English Teeth, English Teeth!
Shining in the sun
A part of British heritage
Aye, each and every one.
English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
Always having fun
Clamping down on bits of fish
And sausages half done.
English Teeth! HEROES’ Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let’s sing a song of praise to them –
Three Cheers for the Brown Grey and Black.”
– Spike Milligan

British teeth have something of a bad reputation, particularly in America where our gnashers are frequently the butt of a joke. One does wonder whether our colonial cousins have chosen this particular target because it’s the sole area in which they feel superior. But no! Americans can also claim superiority in the field of torture, even if that fool of a Bush thinks that waterboarding isn’t torture.

Yesterday I discovered that Thai people are pretty adept at torture, too. I was forced into an uncomfortable position, blindfolded, injected with drugs, repeatedly found myself choking and struggling for breath, and had my teeth drilled à la Marathon Man by a non-communicative masked woman. Of course, here in Thailand we call it “a trip to the dentist”.

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A foreigner has had the audacity to open a Thai restaurant in Bangkok! Sacré bleu (or the Thai equivalent)!! Even worse, he’s claimed in a newspaper interview that Thai cuisine is “decaying” and that he wanted to “revive it”!!!

Who is this upstart? It’s Australian David Thompson, owner of the world’s first Michelin-starred Thai restaurant (Nahm) (there are only two) and author of what is possibly the best book on Thai food ever written.

Of course, he’s right. In the past, Thai cooks would spend hours pounding away with pestle and mortar to make exquisite, complex curry pastes. Many restaurant chefs nowadays wouldn’t know what to do with a pestle and mortar – they buy their curry pastes in tins and add food colouring to make the resulting dishes appetising. And rather than frying the pastes in cracked coconut cream, they use oil – a less demanding and faster technique.

And new dishes are taking over from the traditional. Som tam (green papaya salad) has evolved from the sour, chilli-laden dish of Isaan into a tamed down version for the sensitive Bangkok palate, with copious amounts of palm sugar and just a few chillis. But now it is being made with carrot and cucumber, in fact almost anything that can be cut into shreds. There are even places making it with strawberries, melon and pineapple.

Laap (a fiercely hot salad of barely cooked minced meat and ground toasted rice) is now rolled into balls and deep fried. Tom yam gung (hot/sour prawn soup) can now be ordered mixed with evaporated milk or “dry”. It’s also a popular flavour of crisp. Green curry can now be had as fried rice. Traditional noodles have been displaced by spaghetti and macaroni. And salmon is now available in every supermarket, ready to be made into salad, curry or soup.

So, what is authentic Thai cuisine? The short answer is that nobody knows. The written record is very short. Any records that may have existed at the end of the Ayutthaya period were destroyed or have become lost. The oldest recipes date back only to the end of the 19th century in the form of “funeral books” when the printing press arrived in Thailand. When someone prominent died it was common to collate their favourite recipes alongside a biography of the deceased and religious texts in the form of a book. This book was then distributed to the mourners at the funeral ceremony. These books a valuable resource for food historians. The fact, however, is that the history we have is brief and only relates the the food of high status individuals. We can only speculate as to when certain dishes arrived in Thailand or were created, and we have little idea what the ordinary people ate.

When I see frankfurters slowly turning on a grill in 7-eleven (convenience store), and the steamed buns which sit there for hours, and the plastic wrappers in the chiller cabinets containing equally plastic processed meats I despair. Does Thailand have a pride in its cuisine? Of course it does. But does it really do enough to support and maintain its culinary heritage? Perhaps a wake-up call from an Aussie upstart is just what’s needed.

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A few weeks ago something resembling a small oil derrick appeared on the vacant plot of land adjacent to my house where the next phase of the moobaan is to be built. Realising that it was unlikely that they’d be drilling for oil in Bangkok I surmised the contraption was a pile-driver. A few days later, when the pounding started, I was proven right. Over the next few days, every time I looked up, the “derrick” was closer. I never saw it move, just its inexorable approach. I was reminded of nothing so much as a weeping angel.

(Weeping angels, which resemble stone angel statues from a Victorian cemetery, are malevolent beings which feed off the potential time energy of their victims. They turn to stone when observed, but move swiftly when not looked at. They featured in a recent docudrama, Doctor Who.)

Personally, I’m not a great fan of the Doctor Who revival, though the episode “Blink” featuring the weeping angels was quite exceptional; trying to put a story into a single episode doesn’t allow for the same development and complexity of the older series. Yesterday I watched “Revenge of the Cybermen”, a four-parter from 1975 with Tom Baker as the Doctor. 35 years on and it’s still captivating. Has any other programme from this era survived so well? This was surely the golden age of Doctor Who.

(Note to self: move sofa three feet forward to provide space to hide.)

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