Bangkok, May 21, 2007
Good gawd, y'all. The real-time blogging experiment, that went fairly well from southern Italy, sure did fail miserably when put to the test up against the heat and humidity and balls-to-the-walledness of Southeast Asia.
We're back in the States, now, squatting with Husbear's wonderful folks in Mandeville, Louisiana. There's ice in our drinks, dinners out are novelty-sized, and our cats were so happy to see us that they pooped in the tub. (FATTY!)
Husbear's brother was happily married off on Saturday, and he and his lovely lady wife are down in Costa Rica right now on their honeymoon while we get to know their amazing bundle of three-year-old manchild.
But there's still blogging to do, while this trip is fresh in my mind!
First things first. Since the place we originally checked in to in Bangkok's backpacker haven, Khao San Road, was filthy and disgusting, we had to find a new place to stay. (Lesson - avoid the Siam Oriental if you're staying in that area.) On the way, we were almost dragged bodily into one of Bangkok's approximately 73 trillion tailors.
We did want to get clothes made, just not immediately, and something about the name of this place really put us off...
We had some trouble finding it, but were soon checked into the hugely preferable Baan Sabai, off of Khaosan Road on a quieter street called Soi Rambuttri. Bangkok is really difficult to navigate - the city appears to be completely unplanned. Case in point - the fastest way to get from Khaosan Road to Soi Rambuttri is to cut through a felafel place, but you have to go upstairs through their internet cafe. Huh?
A group of smily ladies were selling fruits in front of the Baan Sabai, and we slowed to buy one of their durians. These fruits are revered by many Asians and hated by most Westerners. Their smell is... pungent, to say the least, sort of blue cheesy and garlicky and ammoniac, and the best description we can give of the flavor is to liken it to a garlic walnut pudding.
They taught us to say "Thank you!" in Thai and sent us on our way, giggling.
It was, at this point, well past lunchtime. We had passed a small enclave of street stalls while we were looking for the Baan Sabai, and we went back to them for lunch. We were too hungry to really do any comparison shopping, so we basically ended up at the first place to shove their menu at us, but we did have a pretty reasonable pad thai and a good tom yum goong (hot and spicy shrimp paste soup).
We had no idea what to do with the sugar the cook placed in front of us - I guess we telegraphed our confusion, since she came back and covered our noodles with sugar, chile, and lime juice. Those three ingredients, plus fish sauce, can be found on every Thai table. They make up the main components of Thai cuisine - hot, sweet, salty, and sour.
After lunch, we did several hours of comparison shopping at a few of the many, many travel agencies to be found in the area, trying to set up the next month of travel. Apparently, it's almost always easier and cheaper to set up ongoing travel from Bangkok after you get there. Visas are easier to obtain, air tickets are downright cheap, and train and bus travel doesn't make much sense before you get there.
Four hours or so later, and several hundred dollars poorer, we staggered out of our chosen travel agency. We were to return the next day to pick up night train tickets to Chiang Mai for a date a few days down the road, as well as air tickets from Chiang Mai to Saigon and then back to Bangkok. Pretty easy to take care of, though we had worked up an appetite...
A vendor of what we'd heard was a ubiquitous backpacker treat, the banana pancake, was frying up crepes right in front of the travel agent. So we stopped.
She took a little knot of dough out of the metal container on the right, worked it into a large disk, and cooked it on the griddle. Just before it was done, she sliced a banana, put the slices on the pancake, and folded the pancake around it; she then put a dab of bright yellow fat (coconut or palm oil?) underneath the pancake and fried it crispy. Then, off the heat and topped with sweetened condensed milk! A yummy, sweet treat.
We walked slowly up and down Soi Rambuttri, looking in shop windows at tailored suits, checking out used bookstores, and seeing what black-market DVD's were going to be played to an audience at the various guesthouses. Across a major street, we saw this woman walking along with two panniers balanced across her back with a yoke.
A Thai woman stopped her in her walk, and she put down the panniers and started preparing her specialty. Chilies and garlic went in, followed by sliced green bananas (peel on!), a handful of unfamiliar and very astringent green seeds, lemon slices (again, with peel), a whole small crab - seriously - dried prawns, and several sauces out of squeeze bottles and jars on her tray. Oh yeah, and a handfull of very tiny chilis.
We had to try it, so we ordered one. The five-minute sequence of pounding and stirring began anew. She handed us our styrofoam container of green banana salad, and we tasted it... it was like a huge condiment. Very spicy, sour, shrimpy, and STRONG. I guess the Thais aren't afraid of strong flavors...
We had to sit down somewhere and get a Beer Chiang (Elephant Beer) to wash it down.
We weren't able to finish the green banana salad - honestly, it was just too overly astringently powerful for us! So we watchedthe backpackers go by, and when the sun went down, we returned to the Baan Sabai and changed for dinner.
We were going to do dinner at a place nearby called Hemlock, recommended by Mia at Nosh, an amazing person who sent us an insanely helpful document she typed up with information from her travels to Thailand in February.
The restaurant turned out to be very nice, with somewhat odd artwork on the walls for sale and a yooge menu. We ordered the Miang Kam, which the menu described as dried prawn wrapped in tea leaf. It turned out to be a beautiful presentation and couldn't have been simpler - leaves, and raw chopped onion, lime pieces with the peel, dried shrimplets, peanuts, toasted coconut, and chiles. Fresh, and light, and delicious.
We also orderded a vegetarian jungle curry with tofu, which was flavored with lots and lots of fresh peppercorns and full of bitterly strange little pods of something. (We later discovered that these little balls were called pea eggplants and people love to throw them in almost every type of curry.)
We also ordered Rhoum, which from the description I thought would be like a Scottish fried egg - but stuffed with prawn and chicken in lieu of sausage. Instead:
Seriously filling dinner. Looking back at these pictures, it looks like all we did our first day in Bangkok was eat, but that's just because we didn't take any shopping pictures. Ah well.
On to Cowboy!
Soi Cowboy is an area of a certain... flavor, shall we say, that has a history stretching back 50 years or so. It started as an area where GI's went to blow off steam. Now, it's full of expensive strip clubs where ladies do anatomically improbable things that I won't go in to here.
I will say that I was most impressed by the 30 or so darts fired by one woman and leave it at that. And no, you can't take pictures inside any of the establishments...
We were out rather late. Next day, on to the River Kwai.
girlie
