coconut balls and i'm back

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After a brief hiatus during which I enjoyed the company of amelia, my little sister, temporary travel partner and most importantly, eating companion, it's back to life as usual here.

During millie's visit here I took advantage of the opportunity to use her little cannon PowerShot sd750, neglecting my ancient battered Nikon for the entirety of her trip. It was great fun working with a camera that was manufactured more recently than george W's first administration and which reliably turned on (!) whenever I pushed the power button.

The downside to my using millie's camera, however, is that the memory card she had been using was unreadable on my laptop for some reason. So, after an utterly failed attempt at sending the pictures over skype, deciding that attaching 100s of photos to emails was a waste of time, and quickly reaching capacity on millie's flikr account, we decided that our best option would be for her to burn them onto cds and ship them back over.

So I'll postpone the bulk of my posts about millie's visit until I get my hands on those photos. But for now, I do have a couple of photos from our first day of eating in Bangkok...

After a late night fueled by mangoes and sticky rice, singha and noodles, millie and I were up early... dormitory rooms in backpacker hostels aren't popular for the tranquil atmosphere they offer and our Bangkok accommodation was no exception. We rode the BTS - Bangkok's monorail portion of its public transit system - a few stops down, into the heart of the city. Just one long stride from the crowded, filthy stairway leading up to the Siam BTS station, was a woman selling all manner of thai sweets from a tiny, dented metal cart. After a few seconds watching us marvel over her wares, the woman started to rummage in her apron pocket. She pulled out two bamboo skewers, stabbed them - one in each fist - indiscriminately into her piles of sweets and presented the impaled goodies to us as samples. I got a strange, starchy banana slice which had a texture like maybe a boiled plantain, left out on the counter for a couple of days - not bad, really. Millie got what I think was simply a ball of sweet sticky rice with coconut. I noticed that she was selling the squishy coconut balls which I've become so fond of, and which I describe here, so after exclaimations of "arroi! arroi mahk kaa! kahp khun kaa!" we bought ourselves a bag 'o balls and wandered off to a nearby bus station to take photos of our sweets...

coconut balls in white and purple - the two typical glutinous rice colors

outside. bite. inside.

three sweet, chewy, nutty, sticky nuggets each and all before 9am. much more eating to come...
fin