Eat bugs---part 2

Corrections (Joe is looking over my shoulder):
The fish sauce went onto the grasshoppers but not the grubs. Grubs are better crispy. The roach-like thing was a cicada, Joe thinks. He says now we are looking for lightly battered, deep-fried pandas.
In an earlier entry I said 10,000 tourists a day arrive in Thailand. The actual number is 30,000. Ten thousand of them are from the West.

A mystery we are trying to solve: Our health is generally good, but Joe's nose is running and we both have occasional bouts of spaciness. It's not the altitude; Chiang Mai is only about 1,200 feet. Is it the sun? The incense in the air? The green curry soup we have become addicted to? And what about the exhaust from the tuk-tuks, thousands of motorbikes and "red-taxis" (pick-up trucks outfitted like paddy wagons that you flag down to negotiate a fare)? These vehicles seem to have no emission controls, and a kind of black-lung fog hangs over the city like something from a 1950s bad sci-fi flick. Joe just noted the hundreds of farang trustafarians on the streets here---it's a kind of Chiang Mai Summer of Love---and wonders if the atmosphere is a result of a kind of constipated spiritual heat inversion. We invite speculation about this additional mystery of the East.

Joe, who had his excellent all-day curry-making class today, also asks: Does anyone know where fresh galangal-root is available in the US? This is urgent!

Tomorrow (Monday) we head for the hills. More when we return.