best fruit shakes

there is a little café tucked into the side of the street, next to the huge fluorescent chain coffee shop, where you can have a good bowl of muesli and fruit with coffee for 50 baht, mango and sticky rice for 20 baht, or fried noodles for 70 baht. the youngest girl, with her jet hair pulled into a side ponytail, catches flies on the end of a toothpick dipped in honey while her mother and father and older sisters serve the mostly western breakfast crowd. this morning i came in early enough to watch one of the women juice halved mandarins by the bushel and pour the sweet, thin juice into plastic bottles to be sold in the front of the restaurant.
i’m sitting outside of the large coffeshop next door, it’s about 5 in the afternoon, raining, and i’m drinking a cappuccino. the owner and one of her daughters just came out of their little café, exhausted, and sat on the wall, apparently waiting for a ride. i wonder why the girls are not in school, or what would happen if the café closed, where they would go. i chuckle at the difference between thai and western cultures: in the states, a restaurant wouldn’t even be able to be thought of in the conditions this one is built. an open concrete space between two stores, covered with patchy corrugated metal, the cold counter near the street entrance where the fruit shakes and coffee is made; a kitchen hidden in the back through a doorway with broken plastic fringe separating it from the diners; a girl washing dishes in buckets of stagnant water visible around the cement-brick corner. two glass front coolers with bottles of water, soymilk, coca-cola, coconuts filled with their sweet water and flesh, 20 baht.