Top Chef - Pattaya

The ABV team organized a Thai cooking class for us as a team building exercise on Saturday, 27 October.  We joined local Chef Sherri on a trip to the Pattaya market where we bought ingredients including marble eggplant (pak chee), kaffir lime  (bai magrood), palm coconut sugar (nam tan peep) and noodles.  We also saw some interesting items like pigs’ heads and live turtles.   

Chef Sherri shows how to pick the veggies.

 Preparing the food was a great time and thankfully Chef Sherri instructed and prevented any disasters.  I may have annoyed her when I kept asking how many minutes were left.  Top Chef must not telecast here?  The menu included Penang Curry with Chicken, Pad Thai, Spicy Noodle Salad (Yam Woon Sen) and Papaya and Sticky Rice (Khao Neaw Malakx).  We definitely had some ringers in the group.  Mauricio was a pro using the pulverizer to make a fantastic curry paste.  Anna, a self-proclaimed novice, made amazing dishes.  We were all very full after the event.  What else is new?

We met in the office set up for us at the hotel on Sunday evening to organize for the work week.  We’re all set for the great project kickoff with the local team on Monday!

Denise checking out the tofu at the market.

Sherri and attentive students.

 

Yam Woom Sen ready to eat!

 

 

Pigs head are often used as offerings.

Rapid Start

Krishan, Denise, me, Mauricio, Anna, and Jean

I arrived in Bangkok at 11:05pm local time on Thursday night by way of Seoul.  Door to door was just over 24 hours so I was pretty wiped out and happy to get to the very comfortable Pullman Hotel.  Friday (Day 1) started with meeting the team in person for the first time at breakfast.  We have nice global representation with Krishnan (India), Anna (Greece), Maurcio (Brazil), Denise (Chicago) and me.  Australian Business Volunteers representatives (www.abv.org.au), who coordinate our project logistics, include Jean from Australia and David and Tang from Thailand.  Working on about 5 hours sleep in the last 48 and it was all business the first day.  We headed to the IBM Bangkok office where we spent the day with the local team to learn more about our project scope.  Not much time to do any sightseeing but we're enjoying the fabulous Thai cuisine.

On Saturday we traveled two hours to the project location in Pattaya, Chonburi.  The city is  a lot bigger than I expected with a crescent beach and massive hotels.  More meetings today and of course some more eating.  I did run on the treadmill for two miles but I think I'm going to need to increase the distance if we keep eating at this rate.  Pad Thai with shrimp or chicken is my favorite and one of the most common dishes here.

Thai folk dance demonstration

We met our local team of translators who will assist us for the next three weeks. I made a Thai phrase cheat sheet but I'm struggling putting the sounds together.  I think I've got "thank you" down, pronounced cop-koon-kup.  Say that fast three times

We met our local translator team at lunch today.