cafeteria dessert

The school dessert today was the most unappetizing mess I've seen since I've been here.

Lunch is set up kind of buffet-style for the teachers, with plates and silverware at the start of a long table, then two huge pots of rice, the farang (foreign) dish - usually cooked meat, potatoes, carrots, and some kind of brown non-spicy sauce, and then the various Thai dishes. Second-to-last is the dessert of the day, and the end of the table holds a basket of fruit.

Today's dessert was wrapped up in banana leaves folded into small pyramids. Sweet sticky rice desserts are also wrapped up in banana leaves, so I hoped these were just extra-small servings of sticky rice.

The contents of the tiny leaf packages were a far cry from the delicious, sticky, coconutty rice I love. I unwrapped my dessert to find a pyramid made of a substance which bore a most unappetizing resemblance to mucous. Most desserts here involve flavorless gelatin in one form or another, and this extra-thick, extra-sticky opaque brown blob was no exception.

The outer layer surrounded a filling of uncertain chemical composition. What I do know is that the dry, crumbly yellowness inside tasted like black pepper. It was the strangest thing, and definitely not delicious.