The Songkran Festival in Thailand (traditional Thai New Years) is the biggest and most sought after holiday on the Thai calendar.  Songkran is usually thought of as a few inebriated day of throwing buckets of water and shooting water guns where everyone is a target.  However, with 66 million Thai inhabitants, there must be a bigger picture, so I turned to 27 of my Thai students to get a more local picture of what characterizes Songkran.
Tallying the results and analyzing the trends I came up with a single sentence …

I had been eying, smelling, hearing, and came close to touching, but still had not officially tasted the famous Dampa seafood extravaganza in Manila, the Philippines.  Dave Damron from Life Excursion (check out his site) donated a small monetary fund which translated directly into getting dirty in some Dampa, also known as engorgement.

Dampa is a wet market full of all living and dead great tasting things from the sea.  Stalls at the market are piled high with an abundance of ultra fresh, squirming goodness.  I went to the Macapagal Blvd. …

25 March 2009

In an ex-pizza hut in Honolulu, Hawaii, Fresh Catch, a fabulous local Hawaiian style eatery serves up all things beautiful from the sea.
I started off sampling a few of the various styles of  “poke (pronounced po ke’)” they make in the restaurant.  Poke is raw fish, marinated in a combination of shoyu (soy sauce), chili, seaweed, sea salt, sesame oil, onion, or green onion among other things.  Fresh Catch happens to have a wide range of different poke’s and stunning ones at that.  Firecracker salmon, and the shoyu …