Bangkok's sidewalks vs. my ankles

In a lot of places, you have to look down where you walk to avoid the ever-present dog droppings on the ground. In Bangkok, you keep your eyes cast low to avoid tripping on massively uneven sidewalk. So far, my ankles have buckled a bit but I've always managed to save myself from a nasty fall. It's really only a matter of time, though. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the sidewalks will get me...

Out on the Town

Here are some scenes from two separate nights in Bangkok...

Night one was last Saturday night. Some friends and I went out to a longstanding music bar in Bangkok called saxophone, specializing in jazz, blues, etc. The were having an important anniversary (some multiple of 5, I reckon) and therefore had a packed line-up of some of their favorite acts throughout the night. One of our friends runs a restaurant just down the street and frequents the place, so we had one of the best tables in the house reserved for us. We heard some folk in the form of a Thai Neil Young look-alike, some really impressive blues (although I kinda wish they wrote their own Thai blues songs (i.e., "Sticky Rice Blues")), and the most popular guy of the night, a jazz group with a singer/saxophonist who sometimes strays into Kenny G territory but nonetheless makes the ladeez go wild.

 

Night 2 was just a lonely weekday night this week in which I needed some dinner. Down Soi 11 there are a ton of restaurants/bars and action on the street at night. So, I chose a place that I had heard or read recommended a couple of times, an old wood house with outdoor seating and a view of things passing by on the street. The dinner was great, most spicy Isaan food, and I snapped a few pictures during and after dinner. Fun fact: when you use the panorama app on moving scenes, you create ghosts and half-objects. Whee!

Wood Street

 Apologies for the repeated unintentional (?) double entendre post titles. I will try to stop.

Anyway, I've been looking for a desk for our computer. While desk-hunting probably sounds pretty boring, it's taken me to some cool and diverse places. I've been up to high-so Thong Lo, to the various malls which often have a furniture section on a floor, to a tiny little colonial Burmese antique dealer near my apartment, to Chatuchak Market and finally to Wood Street, whose real name is Thanon Prachanaruemit.

Wood street is lined with lumber shops and furniture stores/factories. The smell of freshly-sawed wood permeates its length. Lots of beautiful furniture, doors, carvings, and just about anything else you could think of made of teak, palm, pine, rattan, mango, etc. I have a feeling it'd be pretty damn close to heaven for my dad or Rick. So, I walked up and down the street, talked to a bunch of merchants and got taken up to see a bunch of pieces not quite ready, improved my furniture-related Thai, and planted the seeds for possible future purposes. I did leave deskless, as I think the best combination of price and design was one I saw at Chatuchak, but I have a feeling Wood Street will be a fun place to return to.

Street meat

Obviously, 'street meat' could mean many things in Thailand, but in this case, it refers to the various kinds of meat, primarily skewered, that you can find on the streets of Bangkok. Now, I've been avoiding talking too much about food. There are plenty of bloggers who write obsessively about food out there and, while I certainly enjoy my food, I find all of the foodporn and armchair restaurant critiquing and quixotic quests for the most authentic variations on a particular dish kind of annoying. I don't really like being told how to eat sushi or why this restaurant doesn't serve 'real' pad see ew or what a close-up of every dish you ate last night looks like. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to street meat. When I was staying at the Marriott, I found a street cart vendor I particularly liked. She sold skewers for 5 baht each (about 17 cents) of various meats, my favorite being thin pork in a Thai BBQ marinade. I would walk by, see how much change was jangling in my pocket, and purchase some protein-on-a-stick. This is what it looked like:

So, it stands to reason that when I moved to my new apartment, I had to find a new purveyor of my new favorite snack. My friend, Damon, who lived in Thailand in the same neighborhood before, clued me in to a guy that he went to. The description he gave was a middle-aged man, usually in a blue shirt, selling his meats somewhere on Soi 11.  Oh, and that his Thai nanny agreed that it was the best street meat she had ever had. Now, there are quite a few vendors on Soi 11. However, after a bit of searching, I found the guy.

I haven't actually confirmed this, but his meat is so good, it has to be him. He cooks his pork much the same way my previous meatmonger did but he takes it to another level by sticking the skewers (perfectly charred) in a plastic bag bath of chili sauce afterward. What results is a perfect harmonious culmination of the four qualities Thais look for in their food: sweet, sour, salty, and spicy. I taste these things a half-hour after I've eaten them and I mean that in a good way (not in a bad way, like the first tube of Thai toothpaste I bought). As you can see, he also sells sausages and some other meats but the pork is king.

I've only been going to him for less than a week, so we aren't on a first name basis yet but I imagine that'll be soon. Or maybe we'll have pet names for each other. It's all very exciting. And it's still 5 baht a stick.

Odds & ends

A couple of random tidbits about some stores/restaurants I've walked by...

When I take the skytrain (like the Monorail back home in Seattle on Roger Clemens-strength steroids) home, what awaits me at the bottom of the stairway of the exit I take from the station is a store with a very eye-catching window display. Namely, taxidermied cats of prey. A couple of huge tigers stalk the area behind the window. I guess that's kind of kitschy, in a SE Asia kinda way, but the 5 or 6 baby tigers and leopards they have doesn't seem too sporting to me...

This place actually looks like a class joint that might have some good quality chow, but the signage gives pause even to an adventuresome eater like myself...

Saturday morning on Soi 11

The back entrance to the apartment leads out to Sukhumvit Soi 11, a street with lots of nightlife and restaurants. I went out this morning fairly early to do my first grocery shopping for the new apartment expecting it to be pretty sleepy, as many bustling night streets are the next day. However, even on a early Saturday morning, there was some good action on the street from street vendors making breakfast to seamstresses working on the sidewalk to other folks out and about.

Off the Marriott teat

The electrical work on my apartment is finally done and that means I've just moved into our new home for the next 2 years. What it also means is that I must give up some of the amenities I've enjoyed during my stay at the Marriott the last few weeks: free buffet breakfast, daily maid service, rooftop gym, pool & bar, comfy bed, and a staff that greets me with some of the gosh darn happiest "sawat dii khas" and "-khraps" when I come and go.

As disappointing on many levels as that might be, I really love our new apartment! Having been a NYC resident for the past 12 or so years, this kind of square footage is pretty mind-blowing. Plus, they just redid the apartment, so it's in great shape with a lot of new components. Now, I've just got to fill it with my things and my family, but that'll happen soon enough. In the meantime, I tried out this iPhone Panorama app for the first time on both of my 22nd floor balconies. Here be the results:

The same but different

* To be fair, the Mexican Whopper Jr. could have taken America by storm as well since I left about a month ago. So, maybe things aren't so different. Somehow, though, I hope this crazy, beautiful idea has its geographic limits and that this Mexican-American hybrid is available only in Asia. Do you think the mayonnaise is flavored? The mind reels...

Chiang Mai

Just returned from a Labor Day weekend trip up to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand. My friend, Andrew, and I hopped a rather cheap Air Asia flight (reminiscent of the JetBlue of yesteryear) from Bangkok and, within an hour, found ourselves in Chiang Mai.

To oversimplify things and cast them through an American filter, if Bangkok is a bustling East Coast metropolis of franticness and upward & forward energy, Chiang Mai is its West Coast foil, surrounded by natural beauty and more evenly paced. I personally was instantly drawn in by the place. The city itself doesn't have a tangible beauty. Calling it 'quaint' would probably miss the mark as well. Certainly, it has some gorgeous architecture and the aforementioned bucolic surroundings. However, what took ahold of me was the symbiotic quality all moving and still parts of the city had, unlike the ramshackle Bangkok.

At any rate, that's probably enough of my first-blog-post-ever drivel. Here are some of the highlights from the trip:

Wats (temples)

Chiang Mai is literally littered with wats and stupas. It's hard to walk too far in any direction without having their trademark roofs emerge into sight. We started our first full day by grabbing one of the ubiquitous minicab truck taxis of Chiang Mai and, after several bouts of the full contact sport that is fare haggling, we headed up up Wat Doi Suthep, a 14th century temple up a mountain of the same name outside the city. The next day, we visited the famed triumvirate of Wat Pra Singh, Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phan Tao. I really dig the aura that's cast at these wats, uniquely holy and calm. If I was a better, or even decent, scholar of Buddhism, I could probably be even more profound than that.

As my pedestrian iPhone shots show, the architecture is really pretty remarkable. Yet perhaps what really completes the scene for me is the backdrop.

                                    

Massage

Okay, onto lighter fare. I'm still quite the novice at the massage business but had two of the more memorable massages I've had to date.

The first, as the sign indicates, is the massage work rehabilitation program at the Chiang Mai Women's Prison. Andrew and I went for foot massages and chatted the ladies up as they worked on our dogs that were barking from walking all day. We got some candid answers and some uncomfortable silences. All in all, the inmates seemed happy to be a part of the program and planned on continuing their work after release. Of course, maybe the uniformed guard standing outside the massage room had something to do with that rosy outlook but I remain an optimist.

I had been eyeballing the fish tank massage deals all around Bangkok and Chiang Mai, in which a school of fish eat the dead skin of your feet. Finally taking the plunge, it amounted to little more than a weird tickle. However, with Andrew and I sharing the tank, it became obvious pretty quickly who had the more beat up feet. Ah well, mama didn't set out to raise no foot model.

Transportation

After avoiding tuk tuks for my first couple of weeks in Bangkok, we ended up breaking the seal and going a little tuk tuk crazy. With less traffic in Chiang Mai, though, the oft-said "you'll smell like exhaust" warning you get in Bangkok was not applicable.

As previously mentioned, competing with the tuk tuks (i.e., honking at foreigners on foot) are the minicabs, which are essentially just trucks with campers on the back, sometimes decorated in some interesting way or another. Here's a driver taking an afternoon nap in his:

Sunday Walking Market

Having been here a little over 3 weeks now, it's really dawning on me what a market culture this is. The Chiang Mai Sunday Walking Market is famous for its size, wares, food and popularity. The main drag in the old town is cleared out and vendors, in color-coded shirts depending on their location, line the main street. (and a several adjacent side streets, alleys, wat grounds, etc.) Amazing people watching here as well a great energy. I ate some grasshopper, saw a puppet show, found a teak box, bartered in Thai...easily one of my favorite experiences in Chiang Mai.

Meatlust

Yeah.

Muay Thai

Caught my first Muay Thai fight. Not the greatest caliber, although we did see a couple of pretty good takedowns. The last fight was a midget against a 12-year-old. Not as wonderful or as terrible as it sounds.

Well, that's about it. The last day we did some great whitewater rafting on the Maetang but after jumping into the pool with my iPhone in July, I learned my lesson about bringing my phone along to watersport activities. The rafting company has promised to send some shots but I'm not overly hopeful. I did get one shot before embarking:

At any rate, I think I may have set the bar a little high (granted, quantitatively and not qualitatively) with the first post but it was one of those trips that was one great episode after another and it was hard to put the camera down. Really looking forward to taking Samantha and the kids up there...