all the good food in the world

the past three days have been so much fun!
we have had the pleasure of being a trio wandering these streets and markets and state of the art shopping centers....our friend jeromi from portland met us in bangkok on the morning of his birthday, and the three of us have been hanging out together ever since! we went up to the weekend market again on sunday and began to learn what an adventurous and happy food sampler jeromi is, and spent the entire day walking around in search of fun things to try. of these, the most interesting was a live baby shrimp thai salad that some people were making on a little side stall street of the market...a large basket of little gray shrimp hopping about, mixed up with chilis and sugar and soy sauce and some herbs. as carson took a bite, two of the little shrimp jumped off the spoon to avoid his jaws. these people were so sweet, sharing their bites of shrimp and some homemade rice wine with us as we gawked at the sight of the food. i didn't try any, but carson and jeromi said it was quite tasty! we also watched this man make thai iced tea by having a large silver pitcher/cup in each hand and doing a spinning dance, transferring the thai iced tea between each pitcher in mid-air. it was so beautiful to watch the orange/brown liquid floating through the air gracefully as he spun around. we took a video of it i'll try to post if possible.

the market also proved to be a refuge in a half hour of monsoon-like rain that occurred about an hour after we arrived. luckily in the stalls it was mostly dry, and after it stopped, everything was refreshed. we saw a band of thai bluegrass musicians, quite ironic but fun, and a traveling fiddle player who joined them on their jam. we saw teenage breakdancers on the street and a little girl singing songs while her dad played electric guitar to accompany her.

in the past four days, three of them have consisted of us spending several hours in the siam paragon shopping center that i mentioned earlier. on sunday after the market we went there again, and proceeded to discover that the gourmet market has the most samples of anywhere we've EVER seen. jeromi is a master food sampler as well, and i think he tried almost everything on sample. all kinds of shrimps, sweet and savory, caramel coconut, rice puff crackers, any dried fruit you could think of, soups, sausages and hot dogs, mangosteen juice, durian chips, mochi candies, dried bananas, sugary spicy dried baby crabs, dried pineapple....hours of splendor! i never thought hanging out in a food court and food store could be so much fun, but we continue to surprise ourselves! we spent a lot of time there today too, saw an Egypt IMAX movie at the theatre, looked at posh Lamborghinis and Lotuses and Ferraris at the car stores on the 3rd floor, bought a new Spanish language book for language studies (a budding new hobby born out of our travels), and ate some of the best sushi we've ever had with tuna from the Andaman sea...wow!

yesterday as we were walking near our guesthouse, we ran into our dear friends rata and chino who we met in pai! how serendipitous! we spent a couple of hours with them yesterday, and they left for ko lipe in the afternoon. we think we are going to follow them down there and hang out for a few days...it's a very small island in the south south south of thailand on the andaman sea.

today we took a water taxi down the river to the central pier, where we caught the sky train from to go to siam square. we got to see wats and temples and different sights from the river. tomorrow we are going to take the water taxi again to chinatown and the Indian district, and maybe go check out the 42-odd meter long reclining golden buddha, the largest reclining buddha in the world!

bangkok is proving to be a lot of fun this time around, and i am so glad for that. i was really dreading spending a few days here to wait for our Indonesian visa, but i am having so much fun doing so, especially with our good friend Jeromi to try every food sample in his wake and to share it with us too! :)