Aritifcial with pepper

I've been in Thailand for a full week now, feeling very settled into my work and play.  I'll be spending about 3 days per week at ISDSI, and the other days working on freelance projects (a girl's gotta keep generating income) or exploring the city or taking advantage of any mini-adventure opportunities that come up.  I spent yesterday working for the ECHO Asia office on a series of large illustrations on canvas sheets, depicting seed-saving techniques...I will see those sheets in action tomorrow at a seed-swap event in a village populated by displaced hill tribe people.  On the other end of the humanitarian spectrum, I'm designing a t-shirt for the ISDSI crossfit gym.  More about that later.

And yes, in case you were wondering...the food continues to be amazing.  One of my goals this year is to learn how to prepare some of these dishes.  To the right here, you'll see the ingredients for som tam (green papaya salad).  I learned that food should contain something sour, sweet, salty, and hot to get a good balance.  In this case: lime, palm sugar, fish sauce, and chilis.  The fish you see over there was awfully good too.  My friend Laura referred to the crispy basil/lemongrass/garlic scattered on it as "the magic."  I'm not entirely sure that it doesn't also contain crack cocaine, since it's very addictive and I want more (just kidding, Mom).

I started Thai language classes today, and my head feels like it might explode from all the newness I tried to absorb.  I hope some of it sticks and doesn't just pass through my brain without stopping to visit for a while.  Fortunately today's class was all about food words.

I'll leave you with this menu, from last Sunday's restaurant adventure.