The next day another of Debbie's former students, Wantanee P., escorted us around town. She is a professor of pediatrics in the nursing school and was educated at the University of Michigan and UW, where she received her PhD. 

Wantanee has a good nurse's down-to-earth manner and a good researcher's ease with people, and she proved a terrific guide: full of lore, and willing to answer all our questions about the foodstuffs, much of it worrisome-looking, that we passed on the street. So we stuck our bags in the trunk of her car, which she then parked in her husband's bank's garage for safekeeping, and we wandered the streets, perusing the food stalls and ducking into stores. We talked to a gold merchant about traditional Thai designs, a gift shop proprietor about handicrafts, and encountered an old woman and her granddaughter frying bananas in coconut batter. 

I paused at one of Thailand's ubiquitous pirated DVD outlets to ask if they had I, Claudius on hand. The woman who ran the little kiosk did not, but seemed to have everything else ever committed to celluloid, and tried to sell me a complete set of all of the BBC's nature shows to date, perhaps a hundred DVDs tucked into in an aluminum suitcase.