This is my favorite noodle cart setting up for the night, usually around 5pm, at the top of my lane. This guy makes the best noodle soup I have tasted in Thailand. I eat there a few nights a week. Thailand may boast the finest street food on earth; it has long attracted migrants from across Asia, so its street cuisine, both at vendor carts and in tiny restaurants, blends many styles of cooking. Here's a slide show that was in The New York Times recently that describes dining out Thai style.
The Thai lifestyle and eating habits lend themselves to street meals. Since Thais normally eat many small meals rather than three squares and traditionally prefer to meet outside the house, street food suits them. Most Thai dishes can be cooked relatively quickly, and Thais are fastidious about cleanliness, important to customers worried about eating alongside a road. It never ceases to amaze me that foreigners travel half-way around the world to get here - and then eat in western style restaurants with western-style prices rather than enjoying fresh and inexpensive delicious Thai food cooked to your specifications right in front of you!
Every Sunday these monstrous buses are parked on a street near my guesthouse unloading Thai tourists for Chiang Mai's now famous Sunday Walking Street that I wrote about in the last post to this blog.How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life. — Katherine Mansfield
