How many people does it take to order dinner?

One of the things I did not anticipate was the difficulty we have ordering food here. There's a restaurant at our neighbourhood pool that we really like, and we will often order dinner to go. This represents a pretty major challenge. The two women who work there speak zero English, and there is one guy who thinks he can speak some. This always leads to awkward encounters during which the guy rambles incomprehensibly to us while we nod and chuckle uncomfortably. Dave and I have settled on a default arrangement wherein I am the one who gets to act like the village idiot trying to communicate our dinner order, and he gets to hand over the money at the end. Hmm, who has the better deal there? The other night we couldn't understand how much money we owed, so Dave just held open his wallet and the guy removed a few bills. The restaurant staff had a good laugh over that one!

We discovered a way to bypass the awkwardness of in-person ordering -- the restaurant offers home delivery. The only problems with this are one, the menu is all in Thai, and two, communicating on the phone is even more difficult than it is in person (although, at least when you're on the phone and things aren't going very well, you can just hang up. It doesn't work out so well when you're at the restaurant and you try to turn around and run away!)

The other day Dave and I hatched a plan to have our housekeeper phone in our dinner order for us. Great plan, except our housekeeper doesn't really speak English either, and since the menu is in Thai, we can't even point to what we want. We tried to solve this problem by using an online Thai/English translator, but neither of us could match up the long, swirly words we were seeing on the screen with the listings on the menu. The only word we could pick out was chicken, and that was only because it's three letters long.


Too hungry to concede defeat, we called in the big guns -- my mom. We called her at school, basically to beg her to order our dinner for us. As we were talking, the superintendent of the school happened to walk into my mom's office. My mom asked her if she would be willing to call the restaurant for us, so yes, the superintendent of Chiang Mai International School called and ordered our cashew chicken for us. Great service they've got at that school!



Dave and Isabella, sitting on the patio of Miguel's restaurant (run by a Canadian guy -- no gestures required when ordering here!)