I love spicy food. I’m not sure at what point I realized that — no one in my family is a huge fan — but on most ethnic menus, I first look at the items with chili peppers or little bonfires next to them. Sometime before we left on our trip, Chaz and I were talking about spicy food with our friend Joanna. She is not a huge fan, and commented that she doesn’t usually like spice because of the tongue-numbing feeling that comes along with it. In most cases, I can ignore that feeling as long as the underlying flavors still come through. In certain moments I do agree with her. At my favorite Thai restaurant in Providence, I had to downgrade from four-star to three-star spiciness on a frequently ordered chicken and eggplant dish after I lost all sensation in my mouth.

When Chaz and I were sampling hot-and-sour soup in Hong Kong, something new struck me about the familiar dish. Whenever I order hot-and-sour soup at home, my father predictably tries it and proclaims that it tastes “like battery acid.” And to be fair, hot-and-sour soup can have that tendency and often is hit or miss. Too much hot and there’s no flavor; just eye-watering liquid. The soup we had in HK was spicy, but there was more to the spice than there ever is at home.

The same was true of the chili pepper chicken we had at a Szechuan dinner in Hong Kong. Yes, it blew my head off. But when the steam cleared, there were tastes on my tongue I had never experienced before. The spices had been soaked into the chicken in a way that never happens when I try to make chicken myself.

The food here in Thailand is incredibly spicy, but every dish is a different kind of spicy from the next. The herbs and peppers we have seen in the markets resemble nothing I have ever seen before, and the resulting flavors are just as colorful as the ingredients they come from. In several different restaurants, we have been presented with tiny chopped-up spicy peppers to season our dishes. The effect of these peppers versus, say, dolloping hot sauce on your food is like day and night. Even buying street food comes with a delightful spicy experience: a plastic baggie of sauce, ranging from red to green, sticky to liquid, spicy-sweet to almost lime flavored. The ingredients just taste different here, and help to accent the vegetables, noodles and meats, rather than mask the natural flavors with indiscriminating heat.

The spiciest thing I have eaten on our trip to date was a papaya salad. Papaya salad is very common here, sliced and diced in the middle of bustling streets and beautifully prepared at the city’s nicest hotels. At one of Bangkok’s most visited sites, the Jim Thompson house, we took a recommended mid-afternoon break at the museum’s cafe. The papaya salad, garnished with peanuts and fresh shrimp, truly lit a fire in my mouth.

Normally when I think of spicy food, I think of peppers (like the ones above) or goopy sauces. And yet, it was the subtleties of a citrusy salad dressing that sent sparks shooting through my head. (Truly: it took about 10 glasses of water and two pieces of gum before I felt totally normal again.) The appreciation for market ingredients and how they fit together continues to surprise me as we try new foods. It seems like there is just so much more attention paid to detail in the cooking here.

In one of our first meals in Bangkok, we ordered papaya salad on a street corner. Though not as beautiful as the one photographed above, it was still spicy and flavorful, with a light sauce picking up on the natural crunch and zest of the fruit. The woman serving us barely spoke English, and so we had ordered mostly by pointing. Before serving our food, she brought over a spoonful of warm broth for me to try. It was the dressing for the salad: she had been stirring in spices over a simmering pot and wanted my approval on intensity before she poured it over the salad.

And when all is said and done, just in case the food isn’t blowing your mind in every sense of the phrase, every table comes with a full selection of extra spices, ranging from baby jalapenos to finely grated red pepper. So until I lose all feeling in my tongue, bring on the heat. For now, it tastes delicious.