TRAVEL. CULTURES. FOOD.

Exploring Foreign Cultures Through Your Taste Buds

Traveling is more than just sunsets and pristine beaches

We look at the menu. There are no pictures of the dishes served and we can’t read the symbols. "This is gonna be fun”, my husband says. While others might have gotten up and left, we decided to stay. We were in for an adventure.

Currently living in Thailand, we often encounter situations like these. Since we don’t live in a touristy area and don’t visit European restaurants, we often struggle to read the local menu.

While we can’t read the Thai alphabet, we often order our dishes by pointing at pictures and the foods displayed. Thai menus often include photographs of the meals being served.

But not so much in this local restaurant next to our residential complex. But instead of giving up, we ordered a beer and dove into the translation apps.

It was our first time fully working with a translation app in order to read the menu. We often go for lunch to a local restaurant next to our work place but order our dishes in Thai. We can order a handful of meals in Thai. But that’s about it.

And since we love trying new dishes and exploring different restaurants we get a new experience every time we go out.

Here we go, together with the app we find the salads, soups, and rice dishes. We can separate meat from seafood dishes and noodles from fried vegetables. Even though we don’t fully know what each of the meals looks like, we’ve got an idea of what to order.

When we go to a restaurant we usually order a few starters or small dishes and share them between us. That way we can try a huge variety of foods.

One of the meals I chose from the translation app was called “waterfall”. Simply because I had no idea what it was. Unfortunately, the waiter crossed her hands for me since she couldn’t even say the widely-spread “no-have” the Thais use so often.

This brings me to the next point. You should never just choose one meal and think you’re done with it. Select a plan B and even C because most probably they’ll tell you they don’t have what you order.

In this case, I had looked at the salmon salad before and chose it instead. The waiter then repeated all the dishes ordered — in Thai. We nodded with a smile on our face having obviously no idea what she just said.

Just bring another beer and we’ll be fine.

For the results of this very entertaining order, just have a look below. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the dishes are called. For obvious reasons.

The next time we went to a new restaurant that also had no English-speaking waiter and a menu in Thai we felt like pros already in ordering with the help of the translation app.

You might be wondering why we have issues at all ordering if we use a translation tool, but wait. I’m not talking about a translation from English to French or Italian. Those are rather accurate. Once the translation app needs to go into a different alphabet the accuracy gets lost. Plus, I can’t type in those symbols from the Thai alphabet, so I need to make use of the scanning feature.

However, we’re learning along the way and are already better at guessing what is what. Below you can see chicken wings I ordered, fried vegetables, and Basil-Fried-Pork which we requested to have without rice on the side.

I’m telling you, we're getting there. Even though we also had to opt once to plan B because we got told “no have” for a dish we selected. But, we were prepared for that scenario.

In case you are wondering why we are ordering meals without rice, well, let me explain to you this. First of all, we’ve been trying to cut out carbs and fried dishes as much as possible from our diet. When we were living in Germany.

But now, being in Thailand, this puts the challenge to a new level. Every single meal you order comes with either rice or pasta (called here noodles or ramen). So now, we try to eat not more than once a day a bowl of rice or pasta. Which is a more realistic goal.

And here we go again. Exploring a new restaurant recommended by our friends. It was rather huge with three different seating areas. While there was an option of sitting inside, we opted for applying mosquito repellent and sitting instead outside next to the lovely pond.

Reading the menu was no challenge this time since they had the dishes translated into English. Our choice fell for “morning glory”, seafood with fried vegetables, and some spicy Thai sausage with raw vegetables on the side.

As always, we were enjoying our meal even though I was suffering a bit from the spice level. While my husband, being African, is used to spicy foods and can handle Thai-level spicy food with no issues, I need to be more careful with it and feed my stomach little by little.

This restaurant was a bit more expensive than the ones we usually go to but all the dishes together with three big bottles of beer cost us only 25€.

And then there is this market-style collection of food stalls in the middle of our housing complex where we often go to when we’re too lazy to go far or look for a new restaurant.

You can get here everything from steaks, soup, rice dishes, desserts, and smoothies.

The workers at this small market are all really friendly and greet us every time we walk past with their limited English or full in Thai. They all smile at us and try to explain what they have to offer when we are interested in ordering something from them.

I think we should eat here more often. “It’s our people here,” my husband said. We should support them. Not even mentioning the fact they all create amazing dishes.

So here we go. A small selection of what we eat “downstairs”.

While these are by far not all the foods we’ve eaten here in Thailand, this is at least a selection for you to get an idea of what lands in our bellies. Plus, these are the dishes I remembered to take a picture of before digging into the foods.

We truly enjoy how easy, cheap, and convenient it is to eat out and usually only cook once or twice a week in our flat.

I’m sure I’ll have another post following describing more dishes. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this one and didn’t burn your tongue on the spicy dishes. I’ve got a feeling I had too much chili today…

Traveling with your taste buds. An experience to dig deeper into foreign cultures.

Join my email list here if you would like to read more travel essays or sign up for the Medium membership to receive unlimited access to my and other writer’s stories out here (I will receive a commission fee in return).