touring bkk

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Some glimpses of the spatz sisters' roam around the Bangkok metropolis...

A rare quiet city street next to the Grand Palace and __?__ University

the infamous Soi Cowboy red-light district
- we kept a safe distance and got fantastic thai massages (100 baht for 30 minutes) at a little place across the street

Traffic on a main bkk thoroughfare in front of MBK,
a massive shopping complex right off the BTS line

farang-filled Kao San Road
where one can buy cheap aladdin pants, elephant tshirts, fake Ray Bans and other tourist favorites, drink buckets (literally) of cheap booze and spend a quality night with 500 of your favorite drunken British/American/Australian buddies
..needless to say, we didn't spend much time here
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สุขสันต์วันเกิด mummy!

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It doesn't happen often but there are times here when I desperately wish I were at home in Portland. I'll get an email update from the Portland Farmers' Market, hear a news story from the pacific nw, flip through photos of skiing at Mt. Hood or eating pizza in Corvallis, or I'll talk to my family at home about the way our garden is overflowing with ripe tomatoes... and ugh. it's like a punch in the stomach. This morning has been one of those times.. after talking with my parents on skype, hearing tales of beautiful fall days spent outside, working on the house, going for walks and brisk evenings enjoying happy hour at the neighborhood cafe, celebrating my mum's birthday tomorrow, I've been aching for Oregon.

Slightly homesick and facing massive amounts of end-of-term paperwork to complete, I was in ultra lazy self-pity mode this morning so, logically, i put my work aside and played with my computer's "paint" function in honor of mummy's birthday...

Happy Birthday MummyTummy!
Eat a tomato for me.

alright... back to work.

s

som tam and son-in-law eggs

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On our second day in Ayutthaya, Amelia and I got up early to go look at the things we hadn't seen on day one. famished after hours of trudging across the town on foot, we abandoned our original plan to eat lunch by the river and ended up sitting down at a pink picnic table outside a streetside cafe. The small eatery was adorned with dozens of tropical potted plants that all, strangely, had hawaiian leis draped over them, making for an odd sort of jungle/PartyCity theme..

While the decor could have done with a makeover, the food was awesome. (though our judgment may have been skewed by our voracious appetites)

We ordered rice (of course - no meal is complete without it), som tam and khai leuk kheuy to share.

khai leuk kheuy, or son-in-law eggs

again, amelia's claw waits impatiently
before pouncing on the plate of eggs i'm photographing

These eggs are hard boiled, then fried so they're soft on the inside and sort of chewy and crisp on the outside. Then they're sliced in half and drenched in a sweet and salty sauce which seems to consist of caramelized onions, sugar, salt and some kind of fat. The dish is topped with chopped fresh cilantro.

sticky, salty, caramely sauce
this might be my favorite Thai egg preparation yet

som tam thai

Unfortunately, as often happens here, they saw our pale faces and made our papaya salad entirely not spicy. aside from that it was just fine - refreshing on a hot day.

s

inedible ayutthaya part two

more photos from the spatz sisters' trip to Ayutthaya...

amelia points out a notable feature of this.. thing


a thai baby stumbles across the frame
in the ayutthaya historical park


Wat Lokkaya Sutha,
or big reclining buddha


amelia poses with the feet - golden toenail polish and all

[I don't understand the meaning here, but at temples or sacred places I almost always thai people with tiny sheets of gold leaf, rubbing them onto statues or parts of the temple - hence those toenails]

Buddha's head resting on a pillow of lotus flowers





trucks and motorbikes whiz by, mere feet from the crumbling ruins
and from our table at the restaurant where we ate lunch...

lunch post to follow.
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inedible ayutthaya

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Now for some unfood photos....

On our first full day in Ayutthaya we rented bicycles (less than $1 for a full day) and rode around the city visiting all the sites that Lonely Planet told us to. Here they are:

Wat Ratchaburana, if I remember correctly

what remains of the great hall of this building -
apparently a massive buddha statue (like 7 meters tall) stood on each of those disks on the floor






another sort of similar old place.

a rare picture of millie and i together. acting strange, of course.

speaking of acting strange

the three famous bell-shaped chedis of
Wat Phra Si Sanphet

striking sacrilegious poses in a buddha statue-filled courtyard

some of the 1000s of headless, limbless statues scattered through the city

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but wait! there's more, tomorrow.
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blood soup and lowered standards

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I find that the major obstacle (aside from lack of time and internet access) to my keeping up with blog posts is, if you can believe it, is the fact that i'm too concerned with creating posts that are semi-coherent/readable, mildly humorous and/or slightly interesting. Sitting at my computer and writing is the highlight of my day here often. it's not as if i'm crafting insightful literary works, but i do think that if i'm going to keep it up i actually need to lower my standards further, still. So, just when one might have thought the grammar could get no worse, the structure no less organized, the punctuation no less correct (or present, for that matter) and the content no less mundane... here it is:

SSSS v. 2.0 - Not new and certainly not improved!


Now, finally some more of amelia's visit..

A week into her trip, millie and I decided to visit the ancient city of Ayutthaya. The former capital of Siam, it was destroyed by the Burmese army in the 1700s and the ruins that are left make up the Ayutthaya Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We took motorbikes, then a taxi, then a bus, then the bkk BTS (skytrain) to Victory Monument where we were told we could get a van to Ayutthaya for 60baht. With limited-to-no thai language skills, flip flops on our feet and backpacks on our backs, we circled the massive bkk intersection for no less than 30 minutes searching for said van. With the help of some kind thai fellows, we found the tricked-out air-con vans. only 60 baht for the relatively comfortable, if not cramped, 1.5 hr ride.

NZ and Ivy joined us the next day and we rode around the town on bikes, from photo-op to photo-op. Despite being surrounded on all sides by streets packed with smog-belching traffic (it would seem that emissions standards don't exist here), the ruins were a spectacular sight. pictures to follow.

For lunch, we got out of the sun and enjoyed some cheap noodles. We sat down with 20 or 30 other people on tarps laid out on the ground, by the edge of a lake. We got the usual kwai tiaw rice noodle soup with fishballs and meat chunks except that instead of the usual clear yellowish broth, this broth was deep brown, almost black. Cruel sister that i am, I didn't tell amelia before her first bite that the broth gets its color from a healthy scoop of cow's blood. i deserved the punch i got after she'd eaten a few spoonfuls and i decided to tell her.

before discovering the bloody truth

millie, ivy and i enjoying our time out of the sun

mid-bite by the lake

delicious, iron-rich kuaitiow neua

salty, sweet, savory black blood broth
aroi maak maak

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more green things

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Lime green is (disturbingly) a popular color for foodstuffs here, especially sweets. In bangkok with amelia one day, I laid eyes on these shiny green blobs and couldn't resist making the purchase.

nope, it's not gak.
well actually I don't know that - maybe it is


ever-so-cute asian packaging

I'm still unsure what these things were, but they tasted ridiculously sweet and sort of pancakey. Their texture is my favorite part - chewy, soft, slightly sticky and squishy. As it was 8:30 in the morning when we bought them, Millie and I showed a rare ounce of self control and were able to save a few of the shocking green morsels for a snack later (at least 15 minutes) in the day.

holey, chewy green blob innards

We had some sort of strange advertisement day at school last Friday. I'm finally learning not to be surprised when I show up at class and discover that it's been canceled because the kids are all busy with some sort of activity. Friday was one of those days, though I was tipped off by the presence of two huge trucks backed into the school courtyard with no less than 30 crew members unloading equipment in preparation for what turned out to be a rock concert being held in the school's open air auditorium. This was perhaps the strangest even that I've seen take place at school this semester. The courtyard by lunchtime was scattered with vendors' booths advertising such entirely age-inappropriate products as high-end Honda motorcycles, cleaning solutions and monthly cell phone plans. The kids were excused from classes for a full day, i guess so that they could scamper around and poke at the displays at these sponsors' booths and then listen to the deafening concert, which it turns out was being filmed for a local TV station.

the courtyard filling with vendors/sponsors and children

imobile selling expensive cellphones to my 8 year old students

Getting an explanation from anyone about what this all was and, the more intriguing question, why this was going on, was impossible.. so i just wandered around the school grounds, playing with the kiddos, pretending like I was perfectly informed and comfortable with whatever was going on. As usual, there were card tables scattered sporadically around the ground floor. At them, some of the older students were selling mostly unidentifiable foods, so I bought this green wormy-looking dessert:

I think the green worms are made of glutinous rice flour. they're floating in a bath of sweetened coconut milk and crushed ice. a refreshing - if not slightly disconcerting - dessert in the heat.


unclear on exactly what I was eating, I finished the bowl.
(the lovely green and white striped polo i'm rockin is our Friday uniform)


the concert


one of my grade 5 students hamming it up at the concert
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in search of pad see ew

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Ordering takeout thai food in Portland (normally from Thai Orchid), we always ask for an order of their pad see ew - those chewy, wide, slippery rice noodles with broccoli, baby corn and (for the vegetarian in the house) tofu, drenched in an oily, salty, sweet, almost smoky sauce. Regardless of its authenticity, I maintain that the pad see ew at Thai Orchid pdx is the best I've had, to date. We regularly have this dish for lunch at school and i've bought it at street stands and restaurants in samut prakarn and bangkok, but I've been overwhelmingly unsatisfied. The noodles i've tried are normally quite dry and sticky with a very mild soy sauce flavor (the name literally means "fried [with] soy sauce") and it's normally made with pork (sometimes chicken) and chinese broccoli, which is nothing like broccoli at home.

the one pictured here is actually a vegetarian version, and is the closest I've come to finding a replica of the T.O.pdx's recipe. It's from Tony's (yup, Tony's), a hostel and restaurant in Ayutthaya, the ancient capital city of Siam. When millie and I went to Ayutthaya we stayed at Tony's and ate several meals there after discovering that the food was cheap and authentic (aside from the lack of spiciness) and that they would serve it to us in our hammocks in the cool upstairs loft by our room.

pad see ew closeup
- nice and saucy, plenty of veggies, tofu and egg

an exasperated millie struggles to keep her hands off the food while I take pictures



contemplating our next meal up in the hammocked loft at Tony's
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cabbages and condoms

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Yes, that's the name of a well-known Thai restaurant in Bangkok...

sign.

Recommended by local friends and by Lonely Planet for having relatively authentic food, Millie and I figured the place was worth a visit. Tucked away on Sukhumvit Soi 12, this location (there are a total of 5, i think) sits right next door to the head office of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) of Thailand. The restaurant was apparently created to help support the PDA with its efforts to educate Thai people on the benefits of safe sex practices and the restaurant says that all proceeds go towards funding for the PDA's "social development projects."

The restaurant's decor is made almost exclusively out of condoms - this shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, though I was nonetheless taken aback when I first realized that lamp hanging over my head was draped with 100s of shiny red condoms. Between the lampshades, the sculptures, the costumed mannequins and the flowers in the garden, there must be enough condoms in the place to protect all of Bangkok for a full night..

a santa suit and a party dress
both made entirely of condoms (her boots are made of condom wrappers)

Captain Condom

Amelia and I sat in the outdoor courtyard/garden area and ordered a light lunch of som tam (spicy green papaya salad), some tom yam goong (tom yam soup with shrimp) and two fruit smoothies. Both of the dishes, while not spicy, were good and tasted fresh. For dessert we shared a bowl of kluay buat chee - bananas cooked in sweet coconut milk.. by far the best part of the meal

when condom promotion tries too hard
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ducks

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Millie's visit continued..

The morning after phad thai and mangoes/sticky rice, we went for breakfast with nz and ivy to a strange little place down the street from our hostel. It was just a small three-walled room open to the street, with concrete floors, white walls and a few plastic tables and chairs. With no menus, no food in sight, no pictures or other diners we could point to, we struggled placing our orders. i had no idea what i'd ordered until it arrived...

duck

The duck was great both in the soup and on the rice. The soup was essentially a bowl of mild broth with ramen noodles and slices of sweet, tender duck meat. The other plate held a mound of rice, topped with the same duck meat and fatty skin with a salty/sweet soy-saucy kind of sauce. excuse the pathetic description, i really don't know what this dish was. i just know it was rich and fatty and scrumptious.

speaking of slaughtered ducks, I just watched that recent embarrassing moment for Oregon Ducks fans. not an inspiring start to the season..

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