We arrived in Chiangmai this morning after a short flight, as we’ll be spending New Year’s here. The first few things on my list of what to do was… to eat as much khao man gai (the Thai version of Hainanese chicken rice) and khao soi (Northern Thai coconut, kaffir lime, and lemongrass egg noodle soup with chicken) as possible. I only recently learned of khao man gai earlier this year when a food-obsessed colleague of mine insisted we try it at a tiny spot in Elmhurst, Queens, my old neighborhood. When I went with him, I realized it was just like Hainanese chicken, just with added spicy sauces on the side (the Hainanese version uses a more traditional Chinese ginger-garlic dipping sauce). Thais have adapted it to make the dipping sauces for the chicken spicy, and the two places we visited that have khao man gai here have been both spicy and herby in a way that I’d never had before. The first place had a very gingery, nutty dipping sauce with a very hot ending. The second place had my favorite dipping sauce – a strong and forward initial burst of kaffir lime, lemongrass, and ginger, followed by a nuttiness likely from peanuts, and then a spicy finish from the chilies. The sauce was so addictive, as was the moo satay dipping sauce we had for our grilled pork skewers.

The khao soi we had was completely unlike the khao soi we first tried in Toronto at Chris’s brother’s favorite Thai restaurant when we visited him in September 2013. He told us that khao soi was his favorite dish at this spot, and when we had it, I felt that while the bowl of egg noodle soup was tasty, the coconut milk made it far too heavy to enjoy a single bowl all by myself, so luckily we were sharing all our food. In the khao soi we enjoyed today, the broth was far more chicken stock than coconut milk, as it just had a hint of coconut milk flavor. The dominant flavors were actually the same herbs noted above – kaffir lime and lemongrass. A bowl would have been easy to eat by myself, and the chicken on the drumstick in the broth was so tender that fell off the bone as soon as I poked my chopstick into it.

I’ve been lucky in that while living in Elmhurst, I was exposed to so much Thai food from the north that I’d never tried before residing in Queens. So much of the Thai food we have in the U.S. is generic – bland papaya salads with no heat, overly sweet pad thai. But this trip so far has been a food revelation. Americans in general love and accept Thai food, but the Thai food we’ve had here is so different than the average Thai food you get back home, with the exception of the authentic spots I’ve tried in Queens. This is a huge reason that travel is so exciting; it exposes us to the real flavors (literal and figurative) of a country that you cannot get just by reading textbooks, online articles, and seeing images in videos. It also makes you realize what you don’t know because you only know what you know and have been exposed to. Travel can help undo the stereotypes you had of a culture, whether it’s of its people or its cuisine, and help you understand what you previously didn’t understand.