Last weekend I went to Isaan for the first time with my friend Des. We went to his hometown in Nang Rong in the Buriram province, which is about midway between Bangkok and the Cambodian border. It was pretty cool. Isaan is the Northeastern part of Thailand, the heartland of the country. It’s kind of like the Texas—everything there is big. The plants are huge, the insects are scary, and the fish will bite your leg off. Fisherman there don’t have to cast and reel hooks vigilantly to try to catch something significant. They stick a series of poles attached to fishing line in the mud on the side of the river, and by the time they walk back to the first one, the Loch Ness monster is practically throwing itself onshore from the end of the line. The people talk in their own unique dialect. Time goes really slowly compared to Bangkok. The days last for weeks. It’s not as pretty as the rest of the country, and most tourists don’t go there (unless they’re visiting their girlfriend’s parents), but what it lacks economically it more than makes up for in the people’s heart, drive, and innovation.
One of the more interesting aspects of my trip to Isaan was the food I encountered. It’s weird. Northeastern cuisine is distinctly hotter, spicier, more sour, salty, and risqué than the sweet and comparitaively mild Bangkokian food. Many of the dishes utilized fruits and vegetables that I’d never seen before; in fact, upon asking, my friend didn’t even know the names of some of them (probably due to the fact that the vegetation is so ridiculously abundant, people gave up naming it all). Some of the dishes were pretty bizarre to the western palate, though. For example this one dish I had was called goy, which is your basic spicy, minced meat larb, except the meat is raw. That’s right, raw. Uncooked beef and liver with lots of chili. In some variations, they serve this dish with cold, uncooked blood. I’ve had congealed blood before, as it’s served in many Thai soups, but in goy, uncooked, uncongealed blood is served with raw beef and liver… I mean, that’s kind of like chopping up some chili, throwing it at a cow and taking a bite. I tried goy (without the blood) and I have to say, it wasn’t bad, though I quickly washed it down with sticky rice, desperately trying not to imagine what I was eating was the same thing you see behind a butcher’s counter... You only live once, I suppose.

Another dish is called goong ten, which literally means “dancing shrimp.” In this dish, they take all these spices and vegetables and put them in a container, scoop a ladleful of tiny, live shrimp into it, cover it, shake it up, and it’s ready to go. The dish is served with the shrimp still living, “dancing” right off your spoon. I passed on that one.