Nirvana in Thailand

Somebody should probably pinch me right now.  Tara and I just had the most terrific 4 hours in recent memory.  We got to the airport way before our flight because Nattie and Donna's flights were before ours & discovered we couldn't check in for another 3 hours because our flight wasn't until 1am.  We didn't want to hang around the check in area because there wasn't even a coffee shop or restaurant in that section until after you went through security.  So we decided to drop off our bags at the storage area and sky train it into the city.

After getting some recommendations from some helpful pedestrians, we found an area that served the Pad Thai we had been searching for.  We stopped at one restaurant that looked like it could be the one, but once inside it seemed from the odor, that this restaurant may have been hiding a large open air aquarium in the kitchen and that would just not do for our last meal so we bounced.  We were oh-so-glad we did because just up the street we discovered this cul-de-sac of cute little restaurants and bars.  We sat ourselves down at the Muy Thai Cafe and ordered cokes in adorable little glass bottles with Thai logos, Tom Guy soup, Pad See Ew and Pad Thai.  Everything was absolutely delicious, the servers were so nice, and we were seated directly in front of a fan; it was like a little slice of heaven.

 Before leaving we pumped our waiter for information about where to get a massage and with a little navigational assistance from some of the street vendors we found ourselves at a pink storefront near the Asia Hotel getting manhandled in some pajamas made for giants who moonlight as surgeons.

Note we are not fully in this photo because we were laughing too hard, in a place where you aren't supposed to be laughing at all, at how ridiculous we looked to get a decent shot off.  It's hard to tell but we could have easily gotten both our entire bodies into one of the pant legs and I have a pretty fantastic Urkel waist thing happening.

These might have been the best massages yet- we went for straight up back, neck and shoulders instead of messing around with all the arm & leg nonsense.  This lady had one strong set of hands- if anybody grabbed me that hard in my everyday life I would have them arrested, but somehow she made it a delight.  She also cracked probably every part of my spine that could physically be cracked (and possibly some that couldn't be) not once, but twice!!  At the beginning she worked my back like bubble wrap while I was laying down, one spot at a time and for the finale she sat me up, put my hands on my head, wrapped her leg over top of mine & twisted me around on each side like a pretzel while my back went off like a machine gun- un.be.lievable.  After it was over and we had returned Paul Bunyon's loungewear, we were sitting at the front sipping green tea from our chicken teacups & Tara said to me, "I wish you could see the look of bliss on your face right now."  So that pretty much sums it up.

As we set off for the walk back to the train, I was keeping an eye out for a place to have one final banana pancake but it looked like it might not happen.  I thought it might be just too much to ask for and declared that the rest of the night had been so perfect, I wouldn't even be upset if I didn't get one.  No sooner had the words left my lips, when a man emerged from the shadows, pedaling a bike around the corner in front of us.  And attached to that bike- his mobile pancake stand.  Cue angels singing and soft glowing lights from the heavens, surrounding him.  I was pretty sure I was living in a dream, or that I should immediately figure out how to pantomime, "Where can I buy a Thai lottery ticket?"  We flagged him down, he whipped up one final, delightful, banana pancake for me & I was like a kid on Christmas morning as I devoured it on the train.

We got to the airport & through security with plenty of time to spare, which was fairly shocking considering how Tara and I both operate.  I even had time to walk the 6 miles to get my $2 VAT refund, which if I had done the math (even with my trusty iphone currency converter app downloaded especially to do the math, I never do the math) and figured in the effort I probably wouldn't have.  There was a silver lining though- on my way back I lucked into a bookstore displaying Carrying Cambodia.  We had been searching for this book since we had been talking to Andrew at dinner in Cambodia about the incomprehensible, common sense defying, amount of stuff the people in SEA haul around on their motorbikes.  He told us about how somebody had published a coffee table book with amazing photos of Cambodians balancing an assortment of items off their bikes & in our travels we had only been able to find it's Vietnamese counterpart Bikes of Burden.  They only had one copy left so I snatched it up for a birthday present for Tara and off we went for the last leg of our journey!

SEA part 2

Off on another South East Asian adventure!  Or at least after 23 hours of flight time I will be.

As expected, there have been a couple of minor travel incidents.  I arrived at the airport and tried to check in at the kiosk but got an error message and was directed to the "resolution desk".  There. I was told that I did not have a seat on this flight.  It was then that I recollected, about a month ago, Priceline called me and said that American Airlines had changed the flight time to LAX and because of that, we would miss our connection to Shanghi and they needed to change me to an earlier flight.  Not a big deal, except for the fact that apparently they only changed it on the itinerary, not in the actual ticketing system, so the airline still has me booked on the old flight.  This, the woman at the desk informs me, is a problem.  Fantastic.

So I stand there, wishing for a paper bag to breathe into,  while we wait for the manager to arrive.  Arrive she does, and she is......how can I put this nicely?- an unsympathetic bitch.  No hello.  No apology.  Certainly no smile.  Just a frosty explanation that, it's really between Priceline and I because it's Priceline's fault, not theirs.  I'm torn between bursting into tears and leaping over the counter to rearrange her face, but I don't think either of those actions are going to get me very far with the ice queen.  Instead I say that I don't actually care whose mistake it is, I want her to tell me what I need to do to fix it because I'm trying to get to Vietnam for my birthday.  I get no response, she continues typing away at the computer for what feels like an eternity, turns to the other woman behind the counter and says, "That's really all we can do," and walks away.  What!?!  I wait for the woman to tell me I'll be spending my birthday alone in the Beirut airport or  some other equally appealing scenario, but she doesn't say anything either and keeps typing away.  I finally can't take it anymore and ask her if I should continue having a panic attack or if I'm going to get on this flight.  Turns out, "That's really all we can do," means "I fixed it, you're all set, sorry for the inconvenience," in bitchspeak.

Nattie and I meet up and make it on the plane.  I nap blissfully all the way to LAX since planes work better than NyQuil to help me sleep and I only had about 2 hours of napping time last night by the time I finished packing.   Upon arrival it occurs to us that we don't actually have the boarding passes to get onto our next flight, so we have to go re-check in at the desk and get them.  At the desk Nattie realizes she forgot to print out the picture she needs for her Vietnam visa, then busts the zipper on her bag and we two things become evident; we are perfect travel companions and it will be a miracle if we make it to our destination.

Picture-less visa doesn't turn out to be an issue and we make it to our gate without a problem, unless you count forgetting your newly acquired boarding pass and your passport in the bin at the security  screening area- which I may have done and not realized until my name was announced overhead throughout the airport, suggesting that I return to security and collect them.

The 15 hour flight itself was okay.  I woke up from a 2 hour nap to be served some truly terrible airline pork and rice, so I ate the accompanying square of cheesecake and went back to bed.  I got about another 4 hours of sleep in before I was awakened by a baby a few rows back who decided that she was over this whole flying thing & was going to let everyone know about it for the next hour or three.  That was followed by 2 hours of staring a George Clooney's dreamy face for the inflight movie & another sub-par airline meal.  By then I was ready for another nap and before I knew it the flight was over.

We landed in Shanghai and had about 4 hours to kill before the next flight. A couple of facts about the Shanghai airport- they do not sell backpacks, they do not have ATMs, and they do not have soup dumplings.  So all in all, a rather disappointing experience there.

I was knocked out for the entirety of the flight to Vietnam except when they came around with what was by far the strangest assortment of snacks I had ever seen arrive on a tray.  It had onion cookies (who thought that was a good idea?), radish spread, a roll with a mini hotdog hidden inside (that is not the kind of birthday surprise I was looking for, I need to know in advance if I'm going to be consuming a hotdog so I can get in the right mental state), some sort of fruity flavored bread, and two cookies that were a cross between an Oreo and those cardboardy sugar wafers. 

When they woke us up to land I had turned 30 in the interim, and Nattie gave me a disposable camera that prints the pictures with birthday borders on them, so that was a pretty awesome start to a new decade.

The visas that we got online ahead of time proved to be nothing more than a way to rid ourselves of $25 pesky American dollars, as we waited in the same line with everyone else, and still had to pay an additional $25.

After paying a taxi driver an astronomical amount of money to drive us to our hotel, the Ha My 2, and unsuccessfully attempting to haggle with the front desk to get a deal on the room they would clearly not be renting out to anybody else at 1:30am, we ditched our bags and went out for something to eat.

The guy at the hotel gave us a recommendation for a 24 hour noodle place that turned out to be awesome.  We sat down at a little table on the street and had some delicious, delightfully spicy, noodle soup and a couple of birthday beers before heading back, full in my stomach and my soul, to the hotel for our first horizontal sleep in 2 days.

So You Wanna Go To Bangkok- Twice in 12 hours.

Our last day in Thailand...this trip absolutely flew!  We got up early for our flight to Bangkok and miraculously made it there without any international incidents.

We had heard varying reports on the flooding in Bangkok- Lauren has a friend there who said things were drying out but then we also heard a rumor that they were planning to release some water into the city to relieve some of the pressure on other areas, so we weren't really sure what to do for the day.  The floating markets seemed to be out, which made me sad, but I guess taking a small wooden boat on the river during a flood is generally not the best idea.  At the airport we saw a tour company and thought that might be our safest bet- they would know better than us what areas were still flooded.  So we signed up for the Great Bangkok Travel Co. tour of Temples & Shopping.

The beginning part of the tour was actually pretty cool and very informative.  Since we hadn't planned to spend any time in Bangkok because of the flooding, I hadn't so much as read a wikipedia article about it, so it was nice to have our own private guide giving us the history, answering our questions and identifying important structures.

First he took us to Wat Traimit Wittayarama, or the Traimit Royal Temple.  This is the temple of the Golden Buddha.

 

When you exit and go upstairs, there are rows of bells to ring for good luck

And also a place to throw a coin & make a wish....you could hear mine spinning around and around the metal dish, so I figure that must be ridiculously lucky.

Before we headed back out, we took the opportunity to grab our last Thai iced teas in all their delicious orange, tamarind, gloriousness.

 

We then stopped at Wat Pho- home of the reclining buddha.  I had no idea the size of this thing- it's huge!  46 meters long, that's a lot of feet (you do the math)....I don't know what I was expecting, but certainly not this: 

  

Then we strolled around the grounds for awhile.  Wat Pho is the oldest & largest wat in Bangkok and has the most number of Buddha images in Thailand- I probably have pictures of every single one but I will spare you and just post the "thai-lights" haha.

 

It was then time for the "shopping" portion of the tour which was not so cool, as we were shuttled to various merchants who stalked us around their stores and tried to convince us that we needed to buy rubies and silk scarves and have suits made for us.  After politely telling people no to things for about an hour, we were released and walked around Bangkok for awhile.

This guy, not so concerned about the flooding......who knew sandbags make great throw pillows?  Spoiler alert- my whole family is getting these for xmas.

 

Other people proclaimed sandbags to be child's play and erected their own concrete barricades outside their stores to prevent water from coming in. 

 

The traffic was pretty crazy- I think the city feels really alive because of all the brightly colored cabs.  New York could do with a dose of hot pink Hondas to get us around.

Tuk tuks galore!

The shoulder of the "super" highway (everything's better in Thailand) was turned into a parking lot of busses and cars to keep them safe from flooding.  Just a single file line of cars as far as you could see.

Lauren was continuing on to Bali but her flight wasn't leaving until the next morning and ours was at 1am so she got a hotel room near the airport & Amanda and I decided to relax there for a bit.  On the way to Lauren's hotel, we saw the best sunset of the entire trip....this was the kind of thing I was imagining over the ocean lol.

Lauren wasn't feeling well (come to find out later she had come down with Dengue fever and spent the next leg of her trip in a Balinese hospital!) and the hotel thought we were trying to pull a fast one on them by saying we would be leaving soon to catch a flight, so they asked us to wait in the lobby until it was time to go to the airport.  Amanda and I decided our last 7 hours in Thailand could (and should) be better spent than watching Thai television in a beige room, so we hightailed it to the airport, left our bags with our friend from the morning's Great Bangkok Travel Co. and headed back into Bangkok!

There we did some more shopping, picked up some final pandan flavored snacks at the 7-11, and because we were in Bangkok, went to a show-the details of which I cannot describe on a blog that my mother reads lol.  Let's just say I was traumatized enough afterward to need the deluxe rotee with banana, egg, chocolate, condensed milk, and sugar.  Having completed the Bangkok checklist, we headed back to the airport.

We were concerned our flight to Beijing might be cancelled, because that's how I usually roll when returning from a trip & we had seen two other flights to Beijing on the board with that horrifying little red message next to them, but we made it on and landed with no problems.  It was 34 degrees in Beijing, both inside and outside the airport, which made the 5 hour, middle of the night, layover super delightful.

Two things of interest on the flight from Beijing to NYC-
1.  Two grown men got into a yelling match because one of them apparently repeatedly and intentionally jostled the other sitting in front of him on all six of the times that he got up.  Yelling turned into tattling to the flight attendant, who clearly spoke minimal English and had not a clue what was going on or what to do about it besides nod.  In the end, the jostle-ee proclaimed if it happened again, he wanted the air marshall called and after that I spent the rest of the flight secretly hoping it would happen again.

2.  The man sitting next to me ate some sort of salty nuts for about an hour.  Apparently after consuming each of these nuts, your fingers need to be licked individually in a way that I can only compare to the slurping of a St. Bernard drinking from the toilet.  It was so ridiculous and went on for so long that Amanda and I were crying actual tears of laughter.  I think he may have also been allergic to them, as after every third nut he had a coughing fit while I pondered how I was going to mime "epi pen" to the flight attendant after his throat closed up.


I left for Thailand 12 days ago, I blinked, and now I'm back in NY.  It seems unreal that in that short amount of time I spent a day in China, swam in some of the most beautiful waters imaginable, danced til dawn on the beach, launched lanterns with monks, rode an elephant, touched tigers, learned to cook Thai food and met a ton of incredible people in between.  I feel so lucky & can't wait to see where my next travel adventure takes me....

Chiang Mai Finale

Today was our last full day in Chiang Mai and the girls, Preston, and I, had signed up to take a class at the Chiang Mai Thai Farm Cooking School.   We had a really fantastic day that started out with a stop at one of the local markets to get a tour and pick up some ingredients.

 

  

 

 

  

After the market we took a ride about half an hour outside the city to the farm where our instructor for the day, Durian- who told us that her fruit namesake may smell, but she does not- showed us around the grounds.  She taught us about all the different Thai herbs & vegetables and then took us into the kitchen where we all had our own little stations.

 

 

We started off by making a curry paste- we got to choose our color & since I'm now obsessed with massaman curry, I went with yellow.

The next course was soup & I chose Tom Kaa, which is a coconut milk based soup with lemongrass and chicken.  When it was finished we got to take it outside and enjoy it.   We started chatting with other people in the class, mainly about how impressed we were with our own cooking.

 

 

Back in the kitchen, it was time to use our curry paste to make the actual curry.  Directly after that, we made another dish and I chose cashew chicken.  There were three choices of things to make on every course and between the four of us we got to try everything on the menu.  After the first three courses everyone was stuffed and they started busting out the doggy bags, much to the confusion of the French and Australians in the group, as they don't really believe in that sort of thing.

 

Since we were so full, instead of moving on to the noodle portion of the class, they had us do dessert- because no matter how full you are, there's always room for dessert.  It's apparently an international rule.  I made bananas in coconut milk with palm sugar and pandan leaf and I expected to love it, being my two favorite fruits and all, but it was so mindblowingly good that I actually considered licking the bowl (and totally would have done so in the privacy of my own home).

 

15 minutes later we were back in the classroom for noodle time.  I was very excited to learn how to make Pad See Ew, even if I was too full to eat it.   We packed it up and took it back to the hotel to have later, even though I was pretty sure I would never be able to eat again.  It was even great cold and I am totally asking for a wok for Christmas.

On the way back, in the truck, we chatted with a couple that was staying at our hotel, Robin and Dan.  They quit their jobs and are on a traveling adventure for 6 months, I'm 100 different levels of jealous.  They were really awesome and had some great future travel suggestions for us so I'll be following their travel blog when I get back- waystwogo.wordpress.com.

Back at the hotel Lauren went for a massage while Amanda and I went to check out the Night Bazaar.  I was really excited because I like to get interesting artwork as souviners when I go places and I picked up two really cool things here.  One of the random carts on the street had a woman making these flat leather pieces that she was pounding out with a nail and then painting.  She had different buddhist representations, and I went with an elephant- a traditional symbol of patience and wisdom, I could always use more of both.

Then in the very back of the Kalare Market, there was a an artist's studio that had the most amazing paintings.  I was literally there for half an hour trying to decide which one to get, they were all so great.  In the end, I chose this one of monks walking up towards a temple:

Lauren was beat after her massage but Amanda and I decided to go out for a drink for our last night in Thailand!  We walked around for awhile, and somehow ended up turning down hooker alley where there were a bunch of scantily clad Thai women (women?) hanging out in doorways of mostly empty bars.  A couple did have some customers and interestingly, we saw one group playing Jenga.  Hooker alley did have a rotee stand, so we picked up a pancake and headed back to the main street.  We stopped at John's three level bar so we could look out over the city and had a drink while we watched Naomi Watts have the worst day of her life, dubbed over in Thai, in King Kong.