If you have a nice dinner out on the patio of a Thai home with your Thai and farang (foreigner) friends, you for sure will be visited by Mosquitoes (in Thai “Yuung”). But the brunt of the attack is going to be on the farangs (foreigners in Thailand). Everyone else laughs with the common joke that “farang blood is sooo sweet”, as battalions of the winged bandits are furiously attacking your feet and legs and making you go a bit nuts. There is no question that by the end of the evening or sooner, you will be very uncomfortable and looking to do almost anything to relieve the intense itch from all of those little red spots on your body.
Maybe the joke about your sweet blood is not so far off the mark. Our American diets are not bitter, and what we eat is what is pumped all over our bodies in a prepared banquet for our tiny flying enemies. There are particular foods, much of it in the Thai diet, that apparently are not tasty for mosquitoes, so it seems reasonable that if we change our diet a little (another small sacrifice for living in paradise), we may become less appealing towards the little blood suckers. Continue reading