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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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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two thai classics on thonglor

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This post recounts the events of an evening in July, during Amelia's visit...

For her first dinner in Bangkok I took millie to a Thonglor, a sidestreet off of Sukhumvit (the main artery connecting my province to bkk) well known for its street food vendors. One of the more famous vendors is the phat thai guy stationed right on the corner as you turn off the main road into the alley. It's almost always the same guy furiously tossing a wok full of noodles over a pit of leaping flames - a dramatic sight at nighttime - and he makes what, I guess, is a pretty good phat thai. but I'm not partial to the dish, really, so maybe I'm not the best judge. In any case, that's where millie and I and my friends nz and dai went for dinner. We bought a couple of Singha beers to share, and squished together on plastic stools at a little aluminum table in the crowded alley.

nz and dai weave through the alley looking for an open seat

my order (chicken phat thai, spicy)
- that's a chunk of banana flower on the upper left of the plate

millie's order (chicken phat thai, slightly less spicy)

After cleaning our plates I showed millie the real reason we came here...

mangoes and sticky rice with sweet/salty coconut cream!

Even when mangoes aren't in season (like now), this place serves this sweet, creamy, chewy dessert. They charge way more than you normally pay during mango season, but it's worth it every once in a while.

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farang in a tuk tuk

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finally having access to my photos from my nong sao's camera means that I can put up some posts from her visit...

On our second day in Bangkok, we started off with a bag of farang (guava, not foreigner). The fruit stand/cart guys often have a little condiment station on the side of their cart. They always have a chili flake, salt and sugar combo which I love on guava and pineapple and green mango slices. I'm unclear on what the other condiments are.

farang covered in salt, sugar and hot chili flakes

we took our bag of crunchy, salty, spicy, sweet farang chunks and hopped a tuk tuk to Sanamluang - the royal field out in front of the Grand Palace and site of a, then, recent protest by the red shirts.

our Oregonian, Chaco-clad feet in the tuk tuk, sitting in Bangkok traffic
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fried bananas and how on earth do they stay thin?

sdf
An aspect of eating in Thailand that surprised me when i arrived was the profusion of fried (especially deep-fried) foods here. that, and the constant appearance of hot dogs on the culinary stage. At school most of the snacks the kids buy from the cafeteria have, at some point in their preparation, been bathed in a vat of scalding oil and they're usually drenched in some sort of thick, sweet sauce. Walk for five minutes down a street in Bangkok at lunchtime - or breakfast time for that matter - and I would bet you'll see at least that many vendors selling some kind of fried comestibles. and yet, roam the city for a week and you'll be hard pressed to find even a single obese Thai person. There's the occasional chubby adolescent girl, squat older woman or potbellied man but nothing on the order of the massive weight problem we've got back in the states.

From the vendors I passed on my walk home just this afternoon I saw:

deep-fried bananas, deep-fried chicken, deep-fried fish cakes (served with deep-fried basil leaves), deep-fried dough-wrapped quail eggs, spongy deep-fried squid cakes soaked in sweet chili sauce, deep-fried battered slices of white sandwich bread wrapped around banana and strawberry slices (I find this one particularly intriguing), deep-fried chunks of chicken skin,
AND
hot dogs prepared in about 10 different ways [none of which involve a bun, ketchup or mustard]... some wrapped in white bread and deep-fried, others wrapped in a sweet waffle and skewered on a bamboo stick, most of them (in colors ranging from pale pink to vibrant orange) just chopped up and served in a plastic bag, covered in sauce.

you can't help but wonder.. how do they stay so thin? I'll report if i get any leads.


on the morning of Amelia's first day in Bangkok, after enjoying our rice/coconut balls, we ventured down a tiny alleyway bordered on one side by a chocolate milk canal bustling with long tail boats, row boats, canoes. We passed about 5 vendors, all right next to each other, selling som tam (the famous spicy green papaya salad) - the women pounding away with their giant wooden pestles making that distinctive pok pok pok sound as they worked. Farther down the street was a woman whose dinted metal cart was devoted exclusively to deep-fried coconutty battered slabs of banana. We hadn't stopped to look for more than two seconds when she handed us each a slice to try. Burning hot, crisp on the outside, smooth and sweet on the inside and delicious as always, we bought about half a kilo for 10 baht.

fried bananas

packaged in what looks to be paper recycled from some kid's math homework
kjh

coconut balls and i'm back

sdf
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