Yesterday we flew back to Bangkok from Siem Reap, Cambodia. As you probably know, we're a little behind on our posts, but we promise we will get back to talking about the temples of Angkor once we get to a internet cafe where we can post photos.
We landed in Bangkok and came back to the backpacker district of Khao San Road. We walked around for a bit and finally settled on a guesthouse that caters specifically to Israeli travelers. The menu in the restaurant and the signs in the lobby are in Hebrew, not English or Thai. We are thinking of having humus for breakfast tomorrow instead of pad thai.
After dumping our luggage in the guesthouse we hopped on a bus that took us to the edge of Chinatown to find the Phahurat Market. The guide books describe Phahurat as the Indian section of town so we went with images of colorful textiles and Indian curries dancing in our heads. We didn't find what we had expected, but we found a seemingly endless, buzzing market that went on for several blocks in all directions. We meandered through the rows of stalls and saw fabric shops stacked with beautiful silks, food stalls selling all manner of meat on a stick, and even a store specializing in Hello Kitty. Before leaving the market, we snaked on spongy green fried squares of goodness. We don't know what they are, but the woman who sold it to us swore up and down that they were vegetarian. We think they were eggplant but they may have been made of weasel.
We made our way from Chinatown to the Joe Louis Puppet Theater located in the Suan Lum Night Bazaar. The Joe Louis Theater, despite being inexplicably named for a deceased American boxer, shows performances of traditional Thai puppetry every night. The puppets are all beautifully crafted, delicately painted, and ornately decorated. Each puppet is controlled by three puppeteers and is remarkably expressive. The show we saw was a Hindu epic that used a battle between the gods and demons to give explanation for lunar eclipses and was very entertaining. After the completion of the narrative, the puppets wandered into the audience to harass young women and little children. One puppet even stole a woman's purse and only returned it after each puppeteer received a kiss.
We spent the rest of the night checking out the goods in the stalls of the night market. We found good quality stuff there, from hand made clothing to abstract paintings, to antique furniture. We were too tired to make any purchases, thankfully, but we have floated the possibility of returning to do some damage.
Today, to commemorate American Independence Day, we decided to continue doing what Americans do best: hang out in shopping malls. We headed down to Soi Thong Lo, a trendy street with trendy clothing boutiques, high end furniture shops, and an abundance of sushi restaurants. It was just like being in New York City! We spent some time browsing a shopping center called Playground! (the "!" is part of the name). Much to Jillian's delight, the second floor was littered with enormous bean bag chairs the size of VW Beetles. Jillian leaped into the center of one of the fluffier bean bags while Ari leafed through some magazines for any sign of the elusive Autistic Children. He stumbled upon a picture of one of them, in Play, a magazine dedicated to high end designer vinyl toys. The magazine had an interview with the creator of Tofu Oyaku and nestled between the images of this tofu man, who looks kind of "autistic" himself, was a picture of one of the Autistic Children, Flan Head Man, to be exact. The company is called Devilrobots. Check back here for more details...
We dined on dim sum for lunch, at a restaurant with placards claiming that it had been voted on of Bangkok's best eateries in 2005. Though we weren't sure what we had ordered until it had arrived, we have to say that the restaurant deserved accolades. The dishes were tasty and not too scary, which is all you can ask for sometimes.
With full bellies we explored a few more designer furniture shops, mostly because they had the best air conditioning. Satisfied that we had gotten all that we could out of Thong Lo, we hailed a cab to take us to the Thailand Creative and Design Center, housed on the top floor of the Emporium Shopping Center.
The Design Center was a cool space, though the permanent collection was a little bit of a bore. Unfortunately the museum was between exhibitions, but we perused the library and watched a video presentation on the fashion designer Vivian Westwood. The upcoming exhibit, which was being installed, was a retrospective on her influential work. We were amazed to learn that Vivian Westwood had single-handedly come up with the Punk Rock style - the tight bondage pants with all the zippers, the pornographic T-shirts, the ripped jeans, the spikes - while dating one of the Sex Pistols. If that's enough, she is also responsible for such fads as platform shoes and the return of the corset in the 1990's.
We then tried to take a bus back to Khao San Road, but had not fully accounted for the horrendous traffic that snarls around Bangkok at rush hour. Our bus moved only a few yards in 45 minutes, so we decided to jump off. We walked to the Skytrain station and took the elevated line as close to Khao San as we could get. Instead of trying to cram our way onto another bus, we opted to kill some time at yet another shopping center. Though it may seem like we were degenerating into junior high mall rats we should explain that the malls in Bangkok are cultural hubs with a social scene, and flea market style bargain shopping areas, gourmet supermarkets, and video game arcades. We had been to this particular shopping center on our first visit to Bangkok, but there was no way we could have seen it all in one visit.
After a little shmying, we hunted down what we hoped would be a good snack of fried noodles with vegetables. In the little food court that sold mostly street food, most of the booths had closed down for the night. They didn't have any English on their menus anyways, and we were too tired to eat weasel meat unknowingly. The guy from the only open booth promised that he could make us noodle dishes without meat, so we agreed to let him. It was a team effort with one man chopping the vegetables, another frying them, a third smiling and looking pretty, and the fourth was making the noodles for us. But actually making the noodles. We watched him stretch the raw dough by hand into three long noodles, before slapping them on the counter (we think to get a uniform thickness, but it just looked cool no matter what) and then they went into the boiling water. The last step was when the noodles went into our bellies, which was our favorite part.
We caught a bus back to Khao San Road, wandered through the street markets a bit, grabbed a beer, and went to sleep. All that shopping really wore us out.
Lots of love,
Jillian and Ari
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