Have you sampled their cuisine sur place though? And I'm not talking about restaurant offerings but what Thais eat themselves. SE Asians generally eat some of the weirdest foods on the planet IMHO. Thailand has several species of large beetles (2 inches and upwards) with wings and the flying skills of a stuffed Oliver Hardy on a late Friday night that come buzzing in whenever there's heavy rain, usually within an hour of sunset. They fly towards any source of light you may have left on, and usually keep missing it by ten yards or so, crashing heavily against walls instead, before dropping off and crawling to a corner to die. I asked my landlady about them and she pulled up one, "aaah, these, vely good in a soup, stew, mmm!" In general, they take the craziest spices you could never imagine, throw them together with a hundred forbidden chemicals and marinate the hell out of every thing that crawls, flies, swims or flollops, fry it, dry it, mai mai it and eat it with gusto. The stank alone reminds you more of a morgue than of a kitchen.
It took me several weeks of explaining before they realised that I like my fruits SWEET and ripe. "Aaaa! [staring at me in wonder] But why?" What a mystery. Why, indeed, don't I like my mangoes, durians, champadaks, dragon fruits, cherimoyas, mangosteens, rambutans, longans, litchis and so on hard, unripe, bitter and eye-wateringly sour? What a strange farang.
No, Thai tastebuds love all things sour, crazy spicy, pet pet and just plain weird. The upside is, they sold me their home-grown mangoes for a penny because they didn't think they were worth anything (only the single most divine taste experience granted unto men by gods, save perhaps a perfectly ripe Khadum Thong durian)![]()