One night, while sitting around the dinner table, finishing a delicious meal of lasagna, Julie’s father told the family he had an announcement to make. Excitedly, he proclaimed, “this Thanksgiving, we’re going to take a trip to Thailand!”
As Julie’s mother and father beamed with excitement, groans from Julie and her brother Sam emerged. “What about the turkey and pies and cranberry sauce?” “We’re going to miss our traditional family meal!” “What about turkey sandwiches and turkey soup for leftovers?”
Julie’s parents explained to them that although Thanksgiving is a grand holiday, they wanted the family to be introduced to other cultures. Since everyone had some time off, and since Thailand is so hot in the summer, going on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.
Sam and Julie still weren’t convinced that this was going to be fun, but since their parents had already decided on this, they agreed to give it a shot.
The big day of travel came quickly and Julie and her family boarded what was to be a very long trip from California to Thailand. The entire trip took them 17 hours of flight time!
Tired and a bit cranky from being on the plane for so long, Julie and her family emerged from the Bangkok airport to find themselves surrounded by a completely foreign land. Julie’s first reaction was to the heat. The air was thick with humidity and the temperature was about 85 degrees. Coming from Northern California where the weather is dry and cool at this time of year, Julie felt like she could barely breath. But looking around, people seemed to be carrying on with daily activities and barely breaking a sweat. “This heat is going to take some getting used to!” she told her mother.
Before leaving for her trip, Julie read a bit about Thai people and the culture. She decided to test out one of the things she read which said that Thailand is known as the Land of Smiles. She read that in most rural areas and even in the big city of Bangkok, people tend to smile at one another. Although, in Bangkok people might not smile first, if you smile at them, they will most certainly smile back at you. A person passed by Julie and she gleamed a big smile at him. Sure enough, he smiled the friendliest smile back and continued on his way! Julie was beginning to think she was going to enjoy this trip after all.
Julie and her family spent only one night in Bangkok before continuing their travels to the island of Phuket which is 539 miles south of Bangkok. Though it’s an island, it is connected to the mainland by a road bridge. Her father bought them all bus tickets with the Thai currency called baht. Unlike the green money from the United States, baht are all different colors with lovely descriptive scenes of people and places in Thailand.
Embarking on the next leg of their journey by bus, they took in the beautiful Thailand scenery as they drove. What amazed Julie was how different the language looked on the road signs. It sounded weird when she heard people speak, but all foreign languages do. Written Thai incorporates an alphabet of 44 consonants and 32 vowels. That’s a huge difference from our alphabet of 21 consonants and 5 vowels! And the letters look more like pretty designs than letters. The written Thai language is completely different from ours.
After yet another long trip, Julie was ready to settle down on the beach and later eat some food. This particular day was special to her because she knew that all of her friends were eating turkey that day with gravy and mashed potatoes. In the US, it was Thanksgiving, but it certainly wasn’t feeling like Thanksgiving in Phuket. Instead, Julie, Sam and their parents were lounging on a long stretch of beach that overlooked the most amazing clear, turquoise colored water.
After relaxing on the beach, they decided to enjoy their Thanksgiving meal. Since they had been in Thailand, they had sampled some Thai food, but they hadn’t yet sat down to a full meal. Today, they planned to eat until they were stuffed, but this time instead of turkey, they filled their bellies with all sorts of unique flavors. Yellow, green and red curry spice helped flavor chicken, prawns and noodles. Coconut milk and fish sauce combined with chicken and other ingredients ended up being Julie’s favorite dish called Tom Kha Kai or chicken coconut soup. There were lots of eggs, cilantro, peanuts and onions which brought out the flavor in many of the dishes they ate. As full as they were, they found some room for dessert. No apple and pumpkin pie for them this year though. Instead, they finished their feast with kow-neeo ma- muang (sticky rice with mango) and eye-teem kati (coconut ice-cream).
Delighted with their “Thanksgiving” meal, Julie proclaimed that as much as she loved her traditional turkey, she might just need a little coconut milk and curry to dip it in instead of gravy next year!
