People know a Baht, know their audience, and the food carts have it dialed.

When I walk to work at 7:00. I step from my culdesac onto the main road and the first stand has a huge wok of oil boiling little fried donuts the proprietrix and her son flip with lengthy chopsticks. The next cart does ried chicken and side pork: think about this and it's a perfect start, an inch-thick slab of uncured bacon fried to crispy golden and served on a bed of sticky rice; or I might've said the only breakfast better than leftover pizza is leftover fried chicken until I had fresh fried chicken with a ginger-lime-chili drizzle. Some places do a fairly typical pho noodle soup, and some do noodles.

Of course, Mr. Farang here usually has a banana, orange, mangosteen, and maybe a rambutan. Some part of me keeps saying, “Fried chicken will never change, but fresh fruit will be gone come October.” Silly, I know, but give me credit for spending my life thus far in the depths of snow country.

When I get to school, a line of students wearing either yellow and purple AMC jerseys (American Missionary College) or Srithammarat buttondowns is lined up out the gate and down the walkway. When they come on campus, the students wai to the senior execs to show good faith and respect. It's somewhat awkward as I'm about the only teacher who walks; everyone else drives in through a back entrance and I cut through the line of students making bow-steps.

When I leave, stepping out of the gate is like stepping onto the food strip at the Nebraska State Fair: solid vendor stands for a block and a half, and each has a display of fried whatnots on a stick—half a dozen varieties of hotdogs sliced to curl in characteristic ways (the chili ones are cut in thirds to look like chicken feet, the ones with diagonal hashes are Vietnamese style, the ones with diamond checks are Thai German &c), white sausage and fish balls and thick slices of forcemeat (olive and chilli and cheese bits in different types of meats). One place does seafood in a nearly tempura style, so you have a prawn, fillet of fresh riverfish you would never want to meet but tastes like delectable cod, skewered calamari, fish balls (as mild as a good weisswurst—bockwurst--but with just a hint not so much of fishiness but ocean), maybe some tofu, and a hunk of another sort of fish that you would never want to meet but tastes like grouper. There's a falafel sort of fritter that has corn, garlic chives, probably cilantro and maybe some chilies.

What am I saying—of course there's lime and chili. And once I tried what looked like a healthy sort of somesuch—I pointed at a big vat of corn kernels. Ha! Turns out, they're sitting in a bath of water sweeter than the sea is salty, and they're finished with a big dollop of what looks like orange sorbet but tastes like it might be a granular distillation of the raw sugarcane people grind in market stalls; which is to say, the nice, healthy vegetative option is sweet enough to pucker teeth.

By dinner, the stick stands have moved out and rice stands set up—rice and soup in individual carts or stands, the sort pushed by pedal or hand. And my friends the dinner folks have moved in—multiple stands transported by trucks with the backdrop of plastic cleaning bins of questionable cleanliness. And these are where you can get sahm tahm, spicy green papaya salad, tom yum swimming with seafood, grilled clams the younger daughter opens after taking pity on the poor farang who can't crack the suckers. And it varies daily, based on the market's availability. One day's tom yum has carrots and

mushrooms,the next has tomato and broccoli. And one of the most exciting things I've ever seen, they once had horseshoe crabs. I'm sure they do more with them, but when I pointed enthusiastically, they peeled up one side of the thing and tossed its eggs into the papaya salad where there usually would've been a small black crab.

True Tom Yum: muddle peppers, lime, garlic, galangal, lemongrass, and super tom yum paste, add water to boil, then a handful of prawns, half a softshell crab, lumps of riverfish, calamari, clams, mussels, whatever else is fresh, fresh mushrooms or whatever else came to the market, boil it and serve it in a flaming pot. Let it be accompanied by a plate of rice with grilled something or other, a plate of spicy meat, and a litre of water for about $3.50. It will be very hard to eat out back home.