Tame and wild

Sawatdee ka! That's hello in Thai to all of you English speakers out there. Bangkok continues to be a crazy juxtaposition. For instance, last night my host and I went out for dinner and a drink. I let him handle the food ordering and just said that I'd try anything he ordered. I'll have to ask Sam what exactly we ate again because the only thing I remember the name of is tom yam soup (spicy and sour, made with chillies, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf and juice, and seafood) and the coconut ice dessert. One dish I think was called a seafood paste; it had a variety of seafood in a thick, curry and basil, well, paste. :-) The other dish was a pork and noodle soup with perhaps the most unusual texture ever. The noodles and broth kind of gave it a viscous, slimy feel that wasn't particularly pleasant for me. The taste was good, but I was having a hard time getting past the texture.

The food, although strange and different for me, wasn't the wild part that I'm referring to. After dinner but before the drink, Sam and I walked around Patpong, Bangkok's famous red-light district. It's a small area, consisting only of two side streets, but it's jam packed at night. For the sake of my more gentle readers out there, I won't go into the specifics (email me if you want the deets!), but you can be sure it's not something I've ever seen before. Let me be clear, though. Yes, it's a red-light district, but it's also a night market where all kinds of things are sold (and no, I didn't actually go into any of the go-go bars).

So then the drink. Sam took me to the Banyan Tree Hotel where the Moon Bar is located on the 59th floor. The drinks are ridiculously expensive here (though not as expensive as the not-blogged-about $35 drink I had at Neos in Dubai), but the view is pretty great.

Today, by comparison, has definitely been tame. Because of some late afternoon coffee consumption, I couldn't sleep last night and didn't go to bed until almost 4am which meant that I slept in until nearly 11am. Tonight Sam invited some friends over and I'll be cooking dinner for five, so I needed to go to the supermarket. I even looked the part of a market goer :-):

The "wildest" thing I did today was order (and eat) something that I didn't know what it was. I still don't know what it was, even after eating it! It was a noodle soup that I got from a food stall and I think the ingredient I was unsure of might've been chicken livers, but I just don't know. Pretty tame, though, because the food is very different from anywhere else I've been so far and I'm kind of just easing into it.

With today's post, anyone who's told me recently that I haven't posted enough pics of myself, should be sufficiently satisfied for the time being. :-D