So it’s almost a cliched thing for people to take a Thai cooking course when they come to Chiang Mai; of course we had to, to shore up our macaroni-and-cheese repertoires. A full day of training, including foodstuffs (i.e. aforementioned trip to Severed-Pigs-Head Market), cost us CAD$23 a head (haha).
We received our expert instruction from [...]
Playing catchup with the blog again; hence, some random bits about Chiang Mai:
Went shopping for our cooking class at the local non-farang market. Loads of goodies: these handy froggies in a bag caught my eye. There were a bunch of big pigs’ heads on display also, but Nazma won’t let me post the photo for [...]
Our buddy from the bus, Boonjan, had left us his contact information, having suggested we go for dinner. Boonjan works in Quality Control with Chevron in the south of Thailand, and after working 14 straight days he heads up north to his wife and two sons for four days, before making the trek down to [...]
We escaped the heat, pollution and general chaos of Bangkok for Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city situated about 10 hours by bus north of the capital. We decided to forego the many Khaosan Road companies advertising bus fares for cheap, having heard they were total scams where people have been gassed and mugged during the [...]
One last post on Bangkok. Finally found our crispy-fried bugs – at a street vendor outside a 7-11 (in case a Mars bar just isn’t enough). As far as we could tell, you had your choice of mantises, grubs, locusts, crunchy-ant garlic stir-fry, big meaty beetle/cockroaches, and a few more I was too busy retching [...]
On the weekends, north of the city centre, Chatuchak Market opens up. We spent 5 hours there and barely covered a sixth of the sprawling mess (the long green section in the lower-left-hand corner of the map). There’s a thriving T-shirt industry here, and pithy, iconoclastic down-with-the-man chest-statements you’d pay $30+ for on Main Street [...]
Bangkok is a big noisy, polluted city and we haven’t been terribly impressed. Even the vaunted red-light streets are full of knockoff-Rolex dealers and touts for “hockey” played using what Nazma calls (in whispered tones) “lady’s private parts“, which I have to say sounded pretty intriguing, if nothing but from a purely mechanical point of [...]
1. The crappiest trance Eurohits from the last 5 years.
2. Jack Johnson, on repeat, forever and ever, in every CD store and every restaurant you pass on the Khaosan Road.
I promise I’ll write about Bangkok itself, the good bits, soon.
After a few days in the heat, and with beauty-salon touts papering our sticky bodies with flyers, Nazma decided we should go for facials. Now before the more manly readers out there start their lambasting let me tell you: it was feeling like my pores were soaking up every diesel fume in Bangkok; plus the [...]
In this heat one ends up spending most of their day guzzling cold drinks. You can buy an icy soft drink anywhere on the street for 10B (28cents). To keep the bottle deposit, the vendor will pour it into a little baggie full of ice, and in the afternoon sun, this is the only way [...]