Our first stint in Thailand began by flying from Wuhan to Bangkok, where we stayed for three or four nights (it all feels so long ago now!) Nathan and I spent the first night exploring the area around our hostel and enjoying a nice Thai dinner at The Mango Tree. I had a delicious tofu and sprout curry and Nathan and I split a traditional Thai dessert, fresh mango with sweet sticky rice. It was a great start to our food experience! The next day our friend Katie flew in from Munich, where she is teaching English this year, and we explored around a bit more before heading that night to see the Siam Niramit show, which was an incredible exploration of the different ancient regions of the old Thailand (Siam) through music, dance, and breathtakingly gorgeous sets. Before the show we were able to feed some of the elephants that were a part of the performance. Here are some pictures from that:
The next day we took a bike tour of Bangkok, which I do not have any pictures from. We rode through some busy parts of town, but then took less traveled paths through some local areas. We walked our bikes through the biggest market in Bangkok which is open 24/7. It is where almost all of the restaurants and stores get their food from and so they have a system where they hire out these market workers who wear bright orange vests and push around giant wheelbarrows of food, and those workers are in charge of getting good deals for the food and then delivering it to whoever hired them. This was definitely a market you could get lost in. We then rode underneath an underpass where a ton of Thai people from the countryside have built their own shacks to live, rather than paying rent on an apartment in the main part of the city. It is much cheaper, albeit much dirtier as well, but as our tour guide pointed out, the Thai people aren't very concerned with having nice housing since they spend the majority of their time out either working or socializing anyway. After making our way through the maze of this scrap metal community we took a ferry to another part of the city, but a much quieter, less developed part. There were a bunch of plantain plantations there and we rode through them on a very narrow concrete path. We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant and ate some delicious Pad Thai. On our way back we rode through a short but intense rain. We were drenched but it was a welcome respite from the heat of the day. Later that night we took another ferry to another part of Bangkok with the Asiatique market, which was basically just a giant tourist market, but a lot of fun nonetheless.
The next day we took a Thai cooking class, something I knew I wanted to do while in Thailand! We stopped on the way at a little stand a block from our hostel that sells Thai coffee, which is essentially just two shots of espresso with sweetened condensed milk. So tasty! We met up with our cooking instructor, a spunky young Thai woman, at the sky train station about a 20-30 minute walk from our hostel and then went to a few markets nearby to get our ingredients for the morning. She showed us the many kinds of basil and garlic that the Thai use in their cooking, as well as some of the core spices such as cumin, coriander, star anise, and cardamom. We then headed back to the cooking school and started by learning how to make coconut milk, which was incredibly easy! All you need to do is soak shredded coconut in warm water for a minute or so, and then strain out the liquid into another bowl. This first product is the coconut cream. You then pour more warm water into the once-strained coconut shreds, again let it sit, and then strain the liquid out again. This is the coconut milk. After this we proceeded to wash and prepare the ingredients for use, and then gathered around a table with our own individual trays to get started. All in all we made five dishes: a coconut/tofu/vegetable soup, a Thai spiced salad, a green curry with tofu and vegetables (and we made the curry paste on our own which was awesome!), Pad Thai, and mango with sticky rice for dessert. We were stuffed by the end of it, but it was a lot of fun and we got a recipe book to take home with a bunch more recipes to try.
That evening we checked out of our hostel and took an overnight bus to Phuket, Thailand where we were to stay at the Seaside Cottages for my birthday weekend. Unfortunately I ended up waking up from the overnight bus ride feeling like I had the flu. We got to our hostel and tried to swim and lay on the beautiful beach for a bit, but I eventually had to go lie down and wait out the 24-hour bug. The hostel itself was gorgeous though. We stayed in these tiny bamboo huts just a minute walk from the beach, and all of the staff were incredibly friendly and kept asking how I was feeling whenever they saw me. There were also a few dogs living at the hostel. One of them we called Wolf Puppy because he looked very much like a wolf and had eyes like a shy puppy. He was very old though, and we would often catch him feebly trying to dig himself a little hole in the sand so he could lay down and have a cushion for his old hips. We got a picture of how old and loved this dog was when one morning the owner of the hostel--an older eccentric man from just outside of Manchester, England--stooped down to rub Wolf Puppy's ears one morning and turned to us and said, "Each day we have with this one is a bonus." There was also a golden retriever there--I believe a girl--who was always sniffing around at our tables for scraps and rubs.
However, despite the wonderful atmosphere of the place, our luck did not improve and just as I was feeling better that night, Katie came down with the same thing, and her sickness continued on through the next day. Again, as my brother so eloquently put it, Montezuma's curse was upon us, and as soon as Katie was feeling better later the next afternoon, Nathan and I decided to go for a swim in the ocean and I ended up getting stung by a jellyfish. It was some of the worst, constant pain I have ever experienced, and continued for a good twelve hours before finally leaving. Continuing in the unfortunate manner of the weekend, though the pain had left, I woke up with a terrible fever, barely able to hold my head up, and shivering in the sweltering heat of the non-air conditioned hut. Thankfully by this point Katie was feeling better and so she nursed me back to health that day while Nathan went to town to buy us bus tickets back to Bangkok for the next day. It was definitely disappointing to have to spend the part of the trip I was most looking forward to sick in bed and unable to just relax, read, and swim in the ocean, but I suppose it is good that all these things happened when we had already planned on just doing a whole bunch of nothing for the weekend. Here are a few pictures I was able to snap as we were leaving:
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| Our hut of sickness |
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| A side view of the hut |
We then took another overnight bus to Bangkok and spent our last day there (before moving on to Cambodia) getting me some medicine since I was still unable to keep any foods or liquids in me and we suspected I had some kind of bacteria. Katie's dad, thankfully, does a lot of traveling for his job and comes to Bangkok often and so was able to connect us with a trustworthy hospital, and even helped us get a room at Le Meredien, a chain hotel that he always stays at on business trips. It was a night of luxury living compared with our cheap hostels, but made so much of a difference--both in body and spirit--after such a rough several days feeling so terrible.
The next morning we set off at 5am to catch a train from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet, Thailand to cross the border at Poipet into Cambodia. And that is where I will pick up my next blog entry, hopefully sometime later this week/weekend. For now, back home (safe and healthy) in Wuhan and starting classes tomorrow afternoon!
Eagerly awaiting Part 2. Btw- Nathan can say 1-10 in Mandarin. He says he can count up to 30 with his friends. I'm sure he'd love to show you!
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