Ethnic Thailand

On the road to Bangkok back from Phuket, I stopped by a modern-traditional floating market. In a hunger-madness, I tried to find Thai food (unfortunately there's no Tom Yum) that fits my Indonesian tongue. Then I found an unique green papaya salad called Som Tam. At first, I saw the making wasn't interesting because the ingredients,such as chili, sugar, garlic, lime, fish sauce, dried shrimp, local salted rice field black crabs, shrimp paste, pla ra / padaek, tomatoes, Yardlong beans, hog plums, raw Thai eggplant were hit all in once. It made me didn't want to eat it, because the salad looked disgusting. But, when I tasted Som Tam, it was butt kicking and very delicious. You can taste the sweet-sour-salty sensation from sugar, shrimp, crab, and fish sauce, and added with spicy flavour from chilli, so it was a refreshing salad for body and soul. It was like Tom Yum (Thai’s spicy-sour soup) in salad way.
Mostly, Thailand foods use many different kind of herbs and mix them with chilli which creates sweet-sour-salty-spicy unique flavour. With a single bite, you would know what is Thailand, what is Thailand trying to give you, why you visited Thailand. Som Tam papaya salad is the complete package to describe its country. It describes about many kinds of ethnic culture in Thailand which adapted from ancient India, Cambodia, and China. Those combinations consist religions of Animism, Hindu, and Buddha. Those culture dominated Thailand with Pagoda shaped temples and buildings. Original recipes taste like traditional human beings in Thailand, like Padaung (long neck), Moken, and Shan. Well, we can understand the overview cultures in Thailand through original foods which are Som Tam and Tom Yum.
And for your information, Thailand foods has successed entering big 50 of the most delicious foods in the world.