Thai Street Food Extravaganza... Part 1?

One thing that we really DON'T miss about home is the VERY limited street food. Back home, you can get a sausage. That's it. In Thailand you can get just about everything...

We have been hoping to do a post about Thai street food for a while, but we just haven't had the camera with us during those quick street food runs! Tonight we decided to do dinner, street-food style.

 Mmmmmm fried chicken. Fried chicken in Thailand is SO GOOD with its thin crispy batter. This was fried in a BIG wok full of oil, over a propane burner on the side of the road. Perfection!

 Quartered tiny pineapples. At about 1/4 (or less) the size of regular pineapple, they are sweet and delicious; with none of the sour-ness in regular sized pineapple. These were for dessert.

 Noodle soup in a bag. One bag has the noodles, kale and bean sprouts and the other has broth and various meat (this time it was fish... not as good, we prefer chicken or pork soups).

 Steamed pork shumai, these are little dumplings filled with spiced pork. The bamboo stick is so you can eat them while walking down the street.

 A pork bun. This one was pork and preserved egg but our favourite is red pork. It is a rice-dough bun filled with spiced pork (or other delicious fillings). We often have red pork buns as breakfast on weekends.

 Dinner! Thailand gives out more than its fair share of plastic bags... what else are you going to serve take-away soup in?

 Here's the soup in a bowl.

Here is the chicken, pork bun and pork shumai on a plate :)

Hopefully we'll remember to take the camera out for some more pictures soon!

Snack Foods: Canada VS Thailand

Sometimes here in Thailand we find things that are almost like home... except that we're in Thailand, so of course they're a little bit different. Take Pringles for instance. At home they come in flavours like: salt & vinegar, sour cream & onion, BBQ. In Thailand they come in: nori seaweed, spicy shrimp, and Hazlenut & Blueberry.

Although we enjoy most food here in Thailand, I would not recommend Blueberry & Hazlenut Pringles. Overall in the chip category, for our tastes, Canada comes out on top (we even had my parents smuggle us a bag of ketchup chips and a bag of dill pickle chips over on their visit).

Another thing that Thailand does differently is popsicles. However, this time I might have to give the leading edge to Thailand. In Canada, popsicles are only popular for a few months of the year. Consequently, nobody ever gets tired of the same old flavours and they can keep putting them out year after year; a clear popsicle pete monopoly. In Thailand, you can eat a popsicle in any month... so they have become a little more ingenious with trying to make their popsicle stand out from the crowd. For instance, the Eskimo Monkey:

This popsicle has a frozen jelly outside, that you peel like a banana, and a vanilla ice-cream centre. Being Thailand, the yellow jelly tastes like grape (not banana). Delicious!

Bang Saen

From the sleepy beaches of Koh Mak it was off to the Thai holiday town of Bang Saen. This is a bustling little waterfront town where many Thais come from Bangkok on the weekends to enjoy sitting under rafts of umbrellas so that the sun doesn't actually ever touch their skin. We spent a couple days here visiting my father's PhD supervisor from long ago, who has moved out to Thailand.

While in Bang Saen we got to visit some great places like a big Chinese buddhist temple (couldn't fit more dragons on it if you tried), a mangrove swamp restoration project that is being led by the princess, and the busy pier where they sell 1 million kinds of squid. 

 Beautiful Chinese Buddhist temple. Note all the dragons everywhere (basically every pillar has a dragon wrapped around it)!

 A dog guarding "his" fishing boat at the pier in Bang Saen. He makes sure nobody sneaks aboard while the owners are selling their squids...

 Walking in the mangrove swamp. A mangrove swamp is a salt-water swamp that is muddy at low tide and covered with sea water at high tide. This was possibly Mum's favourite part of Thailand??? Upon arriving she exclaimed "wow! Look at this swamp!Look at this boardwalk! We don't have boardwalks this long in Canada!" Sadly you can't see all the gazillions of mud skippers who were fighting each other in the mud. Since they are the same colour as the dirt, it is pretty hard to get a good picture.

A Thai Buddhist temple in Bang Saen. Many stairs!

It was a great visit, enjoying some AMAZING home-cooked Thai food and some new fruits (now have a fridge full of mangosteen) courtesy of our hosts. It was neat to see a part of Thailand that is off the beaten path for English speaking tourists and catch a glimpse of what the Thais do on vacation.

Long Weekend in Paradise

Wow, these Thais sure do love their holidays! This weekend was another long weekend in a row, this time we had Friday off for Constitution day. Our friends suggested that we head down south to the beach and we were more than happy to agree! After a long bus ride followed by a ride in a songtao (basically a pickup truck with two benches in the back) a long wait for the ferry and a speedboat ride over to the island of Koh Mak, we arrived in paradise.

Koh Mak is a small island near the more popular destination of Koh Chang. It is home to more beachside resorts than convenience stores and as such has a fairly small resident population and a healthy dose of tourists. It is a quiet beachside getaway, unlike its nearby neighbour Koh Chang which is renowned for its nightlife! We decided on Koh Mak because we felt like we could all use a little R&R.

Arriving in Koh Mak was like arriving in exactly what we pictured Thailand to be like. Turquoise blue water (so clear that in some of our pictures it LOOKS like we're standing on a beach when really we're in the water!) white sand and coconut palms everywhere. We spent the remainder of the day of our arrival checking out the area around our resort and figuring out where we could get some good snorkeling in on Saturday! We had a relaxing evening, some dinner and drinks and then went out for a nighttime walk on the beach where we found one of the most interesting things on Koh Mak -bioluminescent plankton! When water is disturbed near these little guys they give off a bioluminescent liquid which apparently is designed to attract other predators that will eat whatever is trying to eat the plankton! This results in really cool effects when you move your hand or feet through the water. We managed to get one of these little guys on film -not an easy feat as they seemed to be a little camera shy!

Saturday was snorkeling day and we set off at 9 in the morning with Steve, the island's resident hippie farang dive instructor. His employee Anuk -a colourful dutch hippie, took us out to the dive spots and we dove in to a whole new world. There were all different kinds of fish, big fish, little fish, colourful fish etc. They were swimming around by the thousands on top of rocky outcrops covered in coral and beautiful sea worms (look like neon coloured christmas trees). We could have sat and watched fish all day... but sadly eventually we had to head back to the resort. Equally sadly, we do not yet have an underwater camera, that may have to be someone's Christmas present since it looks like it is something that will really come in handy out here!

We spent the rest of our weekend in paradise relaxing on the beach and enjoying our new favourite treat -coconut fruit shakes. We also got to taste some of the delicious fruits of the ocean -freshly caught prawns by the kilogram! We weren't aware that you had to order ahead so we had to take a half a kilo between the bunch of us and eat them as an appetizer, and they were delicious! We dipped them into a chili lime sauce and spent the walk between the seafood place and the swiss restaurant (where we had dinner) licking our fingers. Yes, that is not a typo... there is a Swiss restaurant on Koh Mak. A Swiss man recently moved there with his Thai wife and they have opened up a little restaurant on top of a hill serving absolutely delicious Swiss, European and Thai food. We shared a plate of Jager Schnitzel and a tomato salad and then Shane and Harry split a spaghetti bolognese for dessert while the girls shared some fried bananas and iced cream. Then it was off to play in the plankton again (less spectacular the second night) before bed and catching the ferry home early the next morning... :(

At home we could travel for around 7 hours and go to Ottawa, Michigan or possibly nearly to Sault Ste Marie. Here in Thailand we travelled for around 7 hours and ended up in Paradise. We wish that we could bring everybody over to share this with us!!!!


The boat ride on the way in... other islands near Koh Mak!

The water was so clear! This is a picture of some tiny fish right off the pier.

 In this picture Shane's feet are actually under water but it is so clear you can hardly tell!

 A fishing boat. They use the lights to attract the fish at night.

 Our first snorkeling spot of the day. This island is surrounded by rock formations and coral reefs and tons of beautiful fish!

 The pier down to the beach where we had lunch :)

 Beautiful swing... so peaceful!

 Delicious delicious prawns!

 Beautiful emerald beetle :)

 Melly Thai Clissmas :) Shane with the coconut santa

 Hannah pointing at a huge crab!

 Morning beach walk :)

The inside of our little bungalow.

Debauchery and Weekend Adventures

Another exciting weekend in Thailand! This weekend we ventured down to the MBK centre to check out what a mall in Thailand looks like. Parts of it are very similar to a mall back home, and then there are floors that have more in common with the market we visited last weekend with huge crowds of shoppers, narrow aisles and cheap knock-offs of brand-name goods. After some shopping we decided to head to the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre where we were told that if we stuck around until six thirty there would be free food, wine and entertainment to celebrate the opening of a really wild art exhibit of crocheted trees! Very reminiscent of The Lorax...

The wine and food were excellent, the entertainment... well we'll let him speak for himself. Here are a few clips of the musical entertainment we saw on Saturday night...

After the performance we went to an open-air food court near the Victory Monument in Bangkok and had some Kau man gai (rice with steamed chicken and a delicious ginger-chili sauce) and a couple of drinks (supplied of course by the local 7-11). Not feeling quite ready to head home yet, we started brainstorming about what we should do to close out our Saturday night... Since we had a friend with us who will not be in Thailand long we thought that we should try to get the most experience out of Bangkok possible, and therefore the only logical choice was to visit Soi Cowboy, Bangkok's seedy red-light district. One can easily imagine what goes on in Soi Cowboy, so we will leave it up to you... if you can't imagine I am sure that Google has a great deal of pertinent information. Needless to say, we didn't stay long. After feeling like we'd had our fill of the underbelly of Bangkok it was off to bed... after a short encounter with a crazy cab driver (drove much too fast and laughed when we asked him to cha cha ... slow down). Another interesting weekend in the land of smiles.

Shane Nearly Kills a Guy...

What a busy first weekend in Thailand! On Friday night the company that owns and manages our apartment complex held a " Your Dreamland 2010 Party" for all their "foreign" guests. It was basically a photo op for them so they can sell condos and apartments using our shiny white faces... However, said photo op came with free food, booze and traditional Thai dancers... and the traditional Thai pastime of Karaoke.

Although cheesy and slightly strange (as is everything about where we live... more on that another time) this provided an excellent opportunity for us to get to know some of the other local farang. The Dreamland party finished at ten and we all took the party elsewhere... to the sidewalk by the 7-11 to be exact!

Yes, not only can you buy beer at the 7-11 in Thailand, but the clerks actually have bottle openers behind the counter, just in case you want to drink while you browse the fine selection of merchandise. They obligingly opened our beverage and we went outside to the sidewalk where we hung around with a crowd of folks before deciding what to do. We ended up going to sit on some benches outside by the Arc de Triomphe where Hannah got eaten alive by mosquitoes (and Shane got ZERO bites) before deciding to head to "The Clink" a local bar. The bar was a bit of a bust but the night overall was a great success as we met some new friends and got a chance to check out the local area.

The next morning we met up with our new friends to head down to the Chatuchak weekend market. This is the biggest market in Thailand with between 5000-15000 vendors (depending on your Internet research lol) and where around 30 million baht per day are spent on cheap knockoff goods (say hello to my new fake Lacoste wallet), pets, appliances, electronics.... basically anything you could ever want can be found at the Chatuchak weekend market. It is a wildly crowded place full of locals, tourists, and the occasional palm reader wearing all black with a sword strapped across his back. We spent several hours shopping and being generally overwhelmed by everything and came out with a small number of purchases.

After a quick bite to eat we started to head out but were waylaid by the sweet melodious sounds of a Thai guitar player singing various English alternative covers. We sat down and had a couple beers while listening before heading home.

And as for Shane almost killing a guy, have we mentioned the madness that is Thai motorcyclists? Let's just say, next time you see a movie with a wild motorcycle stunt in it, the stuntman is probably somebody's Thai grandma out for a Sunday drive... These guys have no concept of rules or regulations on the road, a fact which Shane learned when he almost killed a motorcyclist opening the door of our cab. Trying to exit the cab (on the curb side I might add) Shane had barely cracked the door when it was hit at full speed by a flying Thai motorcyclist who then performed a stylish quick dismount from his bike before getting up, shaking his wrist and glaring at Shane, and then continuing on his way... just another day on the outskirts of Bangkok. Needless to say, we have now learned to LOOK BEHIND before opening any door of the vehicle. Just because you are on the sidewalk, doesn't mean you're safe.

Lesson 2: supporting the Thai economy

Our second day in Thailand was all about trying to get ourselves settled into a new place. Thai apartments are different from your typical Canadian place, in part because they largely do not feature kitchens. Perhaps cooking is considered a thing that only families do, or perhaps it is merely because food for a single person is so amazingly cheap here, but whatever the reason most apartments do not come with a stove or a fridge... or a kitchen sink. Luckily, the local carrefour is brimming with excellent home appliances, groceries, and other supplies.

A carrefour is basically your local walmart on steriods. FULL of people, groceries, electronics and other goods it is a store where you can get just about anything. They also have a 5oclock mandatory Carrefour dance (hated by the staff but beloved by our employer's 19 month old son) which we sadly missed out on.

After driving back home with our purchases crammed into the tiny vehicle it was time to set up house and then go out for a late lunch. This is where we discovered our new favourite restaurant and favourite Thai lady...
The restaurant is just a little place in the Champs D'Elysees complex where we live. The food is excellent and dirt cheap (roughly $3 for our entire meal) and the owner is a lovely woman who not only helped us order but taught us how to say we wanted something spicy (or not) in Thai and how to say that the food had been delicious. Then she brought us out a plate of fruit as a complementary welcome to Thailand gesture. We now never want to cook anything again... good thing we got that hot plate.

The jet lag is still pretty harsh in the evenings once it starts to get dark (it gets dark around 6:30 here) so luckily we have our pal the Louis Lotus... our King sized bed (aparently they must think all farang (foreigners) want a king sized bed as these come standard in every apartment we looked at). We sleep so far apart we are nearly in different time zones. For your viewing pleasure, a little bit of Thai/English translation...