Amazing Thailand

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  Ko Samui, Thailand
Monday, December 29, 2008

After escaping from India Christmas morning (12:05AM to be precise), we tiredly stumbled into our Bangkok airport at 5:30AM, not knowing what to expect next. Little did we know that our trip was about to give us a much needed rest. "Incredible India" was followed by "Amazing Thailand", and this time I could not agree more. It started out with a wonderful hotel complete with swimming pool, jacuzzi, juice bar, spa on the top floor, and a delicious breakfast below. For the first time in I don't remember how long we had fruit! Lots of interesting fruit. One we couldn't identify looked maybe like a giant white kiwi inside. That was dragonfruit, and was very yummy. On our various street walks we found several others that I couldn't even name but Aidess was very familiar with and purchased at every opportunity. I'll let her give the food and fruit details. Suffice it to say that we were in an exotic fruit paradise.
--A: Bangkok was amazing. I'll have to use the names of the fruits as I know them, in Tagalog. We had atis (small brown fruit, white translucent flesh, small brown seed, tastes a little like lychee, but not really), mangosteens (YUMMY), and we had rambotan. It was a good thing that when we saw the mangosteens, we were short on cash and had to buy only half a kilo. I would have had a tummy ache from all the fruit gorging I did. I also had my much sought after green mango. THAT was good! In addition to these fruits we also had pineapples, dragon fruit, and all else. Man it was good! We did not get to have fresh jack fruit, but hopefully we'll get to it in our next countries.

Interesting river boat

In addition to the fruits, I also had my street food. Bangkok has these great street food vendors and contrary to what one may think, they are relatively clean and good to eat, the street "minerals" just adds to the flavor. Trust me, "clean" becomes relative after travelling and seeing what we have seen. I ordered squid with flat noodles and it was very tasty, much like what you would order in a Thai restaurant back home. I had to eat it standing up on the street as I ordered it as take away. Nice.
Mango Tree was our Christmas dinner place. Ernie had Thai curry served in a pineapple boat and I had kangong (SE Asian spinach of sorts), soft shell crabs with green mango salad. Ernie loved his food and helped himself to my greens as well as the green mango salad (with fish-sauce dressing). It was a very pleasant dinner complete with entertainment and fruit drinks.
We also ate at a very popular seafood restaurant. They are known for their fried crab curry. Ernie had garlic prawns. I have to say that though the flavor of the curry sauce that the quartered crab came in, was tasty, I still prefer a simply steamed crab or my mom's wok fried garlic/hebi crabs. But it was still tasty.

--E: Our first day we just rested and walked around the local area. Our hotel was located on a very walkable street with lots of restaurants, shops, and massage parlors. Literally every other store offered massage. I'm not sure how they all stay in business. Christmas lunch was at "Tasty Thai" fast food, the rest of the afternoon was spent planning what the rest of our time in Bangkok would be like, and we ended with a Thai massage and dinner in a local restaurant called the "Mango Tree" complete with traditional Thai dancing show.

Our next day (we only had three in Bangkok) we tried to fit all of the touristy stuff into one packed day.

Aidess enjoying the canal ride

We took a boat ride up river and through some canals, met a woman selling things from a boat (we didn't have time to visit the famous floating market, but saw a brief glimmer of what it would be like), and then stopped at the Grand Palace. Now, by this time we had seen many palaces and temples and castles and mosques and churches, so I thought I had a pretty good idea that this would be like any other. We were blown away by the Grand Palace. Who knew the Thai kings had so much gold and glittery stuff! Literally if the day was too sunny you might get blinded by all the colored glass and good reflecting everywhere. Plus the number of Buddhas between the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, and Wat Pho was impressive, including the massive reclining gold buddha in Wat Pho.

Finally, we walked back through the Flower (and fruit) Market, and took the Metro the rest of the way. That was the next very pleasant surprise. The Metro in Thailand is very easy to use, very clean, and gets you just about everywhere you would want to go. It worked so well for us that the next day we decided to take the Metro everywhere, going on a run of several different shopping areas to see what all there was to buy in Thailand. And believe me, there is just about everything to buy in Thailand (see separate post for some thoughts on this).

--A: By the way, in addition to what Ernie said about the massages, we got
massages on the first day as well as our last day there. The spa was
having a half off deal so we got to get 2 massages each. Nice.

--E: Our time in Bangkok was very short, but it left us with a very good impression. This is the first place we've been that we found ourselves wishing for just one more day before we left. That is, if it weren't for where we were going next -- the beautiful island of Ko Samui....

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Climbing Wat Arun	Overwhelming Grand Palace	Bright and shiny...	Aidess in front of a palace building
Giant reclining Buddha	Fruit market	Little Ernie riding a cow with a monk?

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