M&C: Bangkok

Woke up around 5:30AM on the morning of the 18th. At a nearby restaurant we went to for breakfast, three men had apparently just gotten off the night shift and were working on their third bottle of scotch. One of them spoke quite good English and chatted us up in a super friendly way, pouring two shots of whisky and insisting we each take one with all of them. We thanked him in clumsy Thai, which got a good laugh out of everyone, and we felt like the adventure was really beginning.

Around noon, we took an hour-long taxi ride (300B; ~10USD) to our hostel in the city where we had booked a private room. That afternoon, we went on a long walk, meandering through the streets. Things were a little quieter than we expected and actually quite peaceful in some areas. Chandler took the first real food plunge, getting pla pao--a massive, salt-crusted grilled whole fish--from a street vendor and proceeded to eat it entirely with his hands, sitting by the side of a canal. Not how it's meant to be eaten, but absolutely delicious nevertheless. On the way back to the hostel, we also got some fresh fruit and a mango smoothie and just enjoyed the people watching and the feeling of being in a new and very different city.

That evening, we went up to the rooftop bar at the hostel to try to force ourselves to socialize a little. Turns out, that's all it takes. We made a friend named Meka, originally from London but living and teaching in Hanoi. We had a couple drinks with him and got dinner together. Afterwards, we walked down Khao San Road, which is famous for its nighttime revelry and hordes of drunken Australians and Europeans. The loud music and packed streets were a bit overwhelming, but we sampled a variety of cheap street foods including grilled pig liver and chicken gizzard, soft meringue in a sweet wafer shell, and a sweet roti with banana, chocolate, and egg.

Today, the 19th, we walked over to the river, about 5 blocks west of where we're staying, and took a commuter ferry south on the Chao Phraya River towards Chinatown. We walked through an absolutely enormous market packed with people. One area was full of meats, seafoods, spices, teas, and other foodstuffs, many of which we had never seen before and/or couldn't recognize at all. We ate at a small dim sum restaurant tucked away in the middle of all this: pork bao, salted egg dumplings, fried taro, and bamboo fungus dumplings with some cold iced tea. Everything was delicious and totaled 200B, about $7.

We grabbed a tuk tuk back to our hostel and had a chill afternoon that included a Thai massage from a place right next door. At around 3:00PM, we headed out again to Chatuchak Weekend Market. We hadn't done much research ahead of time and were pretty gobsmacked by the variety on offer. Part upscale hipster crafts market, part secondhand clothing swap meet, part fine art gallery, and part cheap carnival food, except with fried octopus instead of corn dogs. Lots of amazing things, but we were reluctant to purchase anything that we'd have to carry with us for the next several weeks. We had a slightly underwhelming dinner at a food stall in the market, but also got an absolutely delicious sticky rice mango dessert that we ate in a small courtyard listening to two men play Beatles covers on acoustic guitar.

After a last taxi through traffic back to the hostel, we're pretty tired again and ready to call it a night. Tomorrow we're getting out of the city and heading north to Ayutthaya, the historical capital of Thailand before it was moved to Bangkok. The plan is to spend one night there, then one night further north in Sukhothai, where there are more ruins, before landing in Chiang Mai for an unspecified number of days.