Housing is fantastically cheap in Thailand, if you know what to look for – or stumble onto something through dumb luck.
I prefer the dumb luck method, as most of my life could be considered dumb luck – or perhaps just dumb. No comments from the Peanut Gallery, please.
I have written previously about obtaining a Thai girlfriend and how to keep them relatively good-humored and stable. But, like all men who brag about their love life, I have finally been run down, roped, and branded, by a Thai woman who owns her own car. That’s no big deal in the States, true enough, but here in Thailand for a woman to not only have her own wheels but to cow the bank into giving her about the best loan rate I’ve ever heard of . . . well, it boggles the most penetrating wit! Her name is Joom, and she has ambitions. Not just to marry me and live off my income, but to have her own independent source of income. Again, to be as politically incorrect as possible, most Thai women are only interested in snagging a man to take care of them the rest of their lives.
So this is a woman I am attracted to on a higher level, as well as the physical low-down level. Besides, all her kids are grown and have immigrated out of Thailand – so there’ll be no step children to deal with.
My first point of business with Joom was to get her work as a private driver, so she could make enough money to make her monthly car payments all by herself. We’re getting close to that goal already.
Next, since I work the graveyard shift at TEFL International and have to leave Joom to her own devices early in the evening so I can get some sleep, I was anxious to find something for her to do w/her spare time – something profitable.
Thailand abounds with hollow-eyed farangs who keep predicting that a good Mexican restaurant would clean up in Thailand. I don’t know why they believe this, but I’ve heard enough of them to believe it myself.
And so that’s what I told Joom we would be doing – or rather, she would be doing. I would teach her to make tacos, corn tortilla chips, quesadillas, and refried beans.
But first we needed a storefront to open our little business, which, by the way, is called Joom’s Mexican Café. Her current apartment was unsuitable – little more than a room w/a bath in the back. So we went hunting for a spot where she could both live and run the café.
Didn’t take long. We soon found a four-story storefront just a few doors down from TEFL International. Rent was 6-thousand baht/month. With the dollar worth 31 baht that put the rent at . . . um, carry the six and add the four . . . $190.00 a month. No restaurant license or liquor license needed. (You’re supposed to apply for these things, but nobody ever does outside of Bangkok proper – and we are 169 blessed kilometers away from there.)
Next step, making salsa!
You can’t have a decent Mexican café w/o a good bowl of salsa and a plate of tortilla chips.
So I sat down with Joom, a peck of fresh ripe tomatoes, several green peppers, 2 large onions, and a large bunch of cilantro. No garlic, thank you. I’ll tell you why in a moment. It cost exactly 2 dollars to buy all the produce. Joom quickly grew bored of the infinitely tedious job of dicing up the tomatoes, so she got on her cell phone and invited a gaggle of her friends over to help – I was delegated to go buy several quarts of cold Leo beer for the mob. The job was done, in the famous words of Oliver Hardy, “in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail.” I instructed Joom to add some salt, a dash of vinegar, and . . . my secret ingredient. It’s something that Alex Janney, proprietor of Que Pasa Restaurant in Nonthaburi, told me about. And I’m not about to tell you what it is, amigo! Suffice it to say that it is a very common & inexpensive bottled sauce the Thais put on everything from chicken to ice cream. Oh, and a generous dose of MSG. As a flavor enhancer, of course, but more importantly, as a preservative. In a hot tropical climate like Thailand, MSG keeps foods from spoiling much longer than anything else.
We filled the crockpot with homemade chili, fried up the tortilla chips and were ready for business! We grated cheddar cheese (ruinously expensive – by far the biggest cost factor in making Mexican food in Thailand) and sliced up black olives. We firmly believed that “if you cook it they will come.”
Well . . . they didn’t. We haven’t had one blessed customer yet. Rather than throw all that food out, we’ve been eating it until it comes out our ears and inviting friends over to scarf it down (and I’ve about worn out a pair of flip-flops trudging to the store for more Leo beer – apparently in Thailand not even your own mother will come visit you if there’s no hootch in the house.)
But I’m still hopeful, still one of those hollow-eyed farangs that believes there are millions of baht to be made selling refried beans and enchiladas in Ban Phe, Thailand. Tomorrow we’re making gazpacho!
