Thai expeditions

My hometown isn't the most diverse place in the world, but we do Asian-style foods okay; there are quite a few Chinese places (Americanized Chinese, but still) and two or three Thai places in town, and if we venture into the city, there's some Indian and a Brazilian steakhouse and whatever. Compared to Chicago, this is all laughable, but no one comes to New England looking for exotic food, unless someone considers seafood exotic.

Hyde Park is an extremely gentrified neighborhood for Chicago, but 55th Street is semi-famous for its three Thai restaurants (Siam, Thai 55, and Snail), and restaurants of other persuasions besides. 57th Street also has a pretty good Americanized noodle place called Noodles Etc, where a sort of pan-Asian (mostly Thai and Japanese) cuisine exists for dirt-cheap (aka student-friendly) prices. All this is to say that campus does not lack noodles of all sorts, in particular Thai food, and Chinatown (where the legitimate Chinese food resides) is only a 15- or 20-minute Red Line ride away. The dining halls are not open on Saturday nights, leaving us to the mercy of local restaurants and the like, and so U of C students tend to spend more time eating vaguely Asian food than eating any other type of cuisine, when it comes to going out for dinner.

Nonetheless my friend and I decided to hit up a local Thai place today, mostly because I found myself craving something noodle-y and peanut-y after having refrained from Thai food for the past several weeks. I had pad see ew (apologies for the bad transliteration; I've seen it Romanized in many different ways), which is similar to the ever-popular pad thai, only with much thicker noodles that are, in my opinion, probably better than pad thai noodles. I tend not to be very adventurous with cuisine (for several years I only ever ordered pad thai in Thai restaurants, and this isn't exactly anything far removed from that), but living in Chicago does seem to make people more embarrassed of culinary boredom and predictableness, so over the past year and a half I've been trying different things out, even if one of the listed ingredients makes me squirm. I've had "real" Chinese food, both dim sum and otherwise, Greek food, Indian/Pakistanti a few times, plenty of Thai, real Mexican food, and much more.

After lunch we found ourselves dealing with the usual small-town boredom that settles in when you live in a place where the only establishments under-21-year-olds are welcome to are restaurants and stores. Having dealt with the restaurant portion of that, we wandered around the Dollar Store for a while, ostensibly trying to find something tacky my friend's mom had requested for Christmas but in reality only finding cheap party supplies and state-themed shot glasses. (If you've ever wondered how long people can spend in a Dollar Store, today showed that it can be at least 45 minutes.) After that it was more small-town boredom at the library, a favorite after-school hangout for many middle schoolers and early high schoolers, much to the librarians' annoyance. When you live in white suburbia, you tend to spend a lot of time wandering around in stores, libraries, parks, and parking lots, even, just talking and joking around, wasting time, trying to enjoy other people's company.

At the risk of being redundant, boring, and awkward, we ended off the day by swinging by the high school as the students were dismissed. This at least was somewhat productive; we had an amusing conversation for 15 or 20 minutes with a senior (I still think of him as a sophomore) in the frigid high school parking lot, and by the time we went inside most anybody of interest had already left, fleeing hard and fast for the weekend. I can't say I blame them. A lot of days on break here in suburbia feel kind of like the weekend, but most other people have real life to attend to, still.

At school on a Friday night, I'd be going to dinner before the dining hall closed (at 7pm central, of course) and then hanging out in the lounge playing video games or watching trash TV or sometimes watching other people play deeply involving board games, like Settlers of Catan. If the homework load is low, people will try to figure out who is throwing a party, where, and who wants to go to it. The night would probably inevitably end in someone's room, watching YouTube videos and shooting the breeze until the middle of the night. Here nights are spent alternating the internet (YouTube videos, music, blogs, Facebook, IMing, Twitter, etc) and occasional TV shows with books, with lots of texting throughout. Occasionally there will be a dinner out with either family or friends, and at this time of year the party parade starts up (in another few days). Seeing friends is just harder, since at school your friends are all within spitting distance, for the most part, whereas here you have to drive for at least ten minutes to see anyone else.