Cooking class and fish spa

On Friday morning, our local coordinator organized a two hour cooking class for us at a cooking school just outside of Chiang Mai city center. We started by visiting the chef's local market to learn about local varieties of ingredients like fresh turmeric, lime leaves, and sweet Thai basil. He also showed us how to pick out the correct coconut cream and we watched coconuts being manually separated into coconut meat, cream, and milk.

I had just eaten breakfast and had not had a full night's sleep in over five days. The combination of a full stomach and lack of sleep made me just uneasy enough that a wave of nausea hit me as we walked into the market of food stalls and the smells of frying meat, fresh fish, and raw meat wafted through the air. Then the chef handed around a few curry pastes for us to smell. I didn't trust my stomach to smell the first two, but thought I'd give the third a try, the one he called chocolate paste. He laughed as I reflexively reeled backwards and my throat flooded with saliva. The paste was actually made of fermented shrimp and smelt like rotten soybeans. If you are lucky enough to not know that smell, just imagine the smell of something horrible and long dead. Very funny, chef!

Not surprisingly, I think the cooking studio was an extension of a family compound that housed and employed the chef's extended family. An older woman lounged in an elevated, canopied sitting area set-up in the yard under a large tree and rocked a two year girl in a child sized hammock while a younger woman worked in the kitchen preparing the raw food we would use in our cooking class and glanced occasionally and what looked to be her infant son sleeping in an even smaller hammock set-up along the far wall of the kitchen. In the adjoining room, our class of volunteers worked on making two curry pastes - one spicy and one not-so-spicy. In a room diagonally opposite, three other customers started their full day cooking course by making spring rolls and frying them in woks over single burner stoves. There weren't any doors separating the rooms, the front half of the house did not have exteriors walls and openened onto an outdoor sink and small herb garden. The layout gave the house an open, airy, homey, and welcoming feeling. The curry and spring rolls were delicious! I really enjoyed the course and can't wait to start a full week of evening courses this upcoming week.

In the afternoon, three housemates and I decided to give a fish spa a try. I had seen segments on British and American news shows about this new fad in health treatments. I had not considered trying it, though, until getting to Thailand namely because they are everywhere here in Chiang Mai and, at 80 baht (about $2) it is really cheap. According to Wikipedia, the fish employed in Fish spas are called Doctor fish and are a special breed of fish that eat the dead or damaged part of a human's skin, thus, leaving behind only the healthy skin. Apparently, it is a good treatment for psoriasis.

To me, the fish looked like smaller versions of the bottom dweller scavenger fish that I have seen used in many fish tanks to help keep the tanks clean. I wish I could say it was a relaxing and enjoyable experience, but it felt more like enduring a strange and uncomfortable spa treatment. I would recommend anyone with ticklish feet avoid this. It took me the first five minutes of the treatment to just keep my feet in the tank. The vibrating and tiny sucking sensation was just too much for the bottom of my feet. I decided to plunge my feet to the bottom of the tank so that the bottoms of my feet were inaccessible to the nibblers and was only able to endure the fish nibbling the rest of my feet and calves after my friend sharing the tank with me put in her feet, thus, drawing most of the fish in the tank to her feet and distracting them from me. The myriad of tiny sucking felt like vibrations. I was only able to distinguish the bites of the larger fish and the more tenacious ones that weaseled their way in between my toes and under to the arches of my feet. It was a long twenty minutes that I was happy to finish. They did a great job on the callouses on the sides of my feet and toes, but I would much prefer a pedicure at double or triple the price.