Back To Bangkok: A Culinary Journey - taking in prawn brains, squid egg and fried fish head

---

As we stood waiting for Pao and Nui (friends of my dad whose apartment we would be staying in), we didn’t know quite what to expect. They had said that we would be staying in their apartment, which we assumed meant we would have our own private room, but not much more. Still, it wouldn’t matter, we only planned to spend 1 or 2 days in Bangkok, to see some of the sights we had missed before, and then we would get a move on to the south of Thailand.

When Pao and Nui turned up they did so in style. Not only was their car a large brand new people carrier, but it had a DVD player in the roof and doors that closed themselves (which I nearly broke by trying to close). Upon arriving at their apartment we weren’t disappointed either. Rather than just having a room, we had a whole apartment to ourselves! It turns out that they owned the apartment above theirs and it was all ours for as long as we wanted. All of a sudden our 1 or 2 days in Bangkok didn’t sound long enough..

As we were driving to the apartment Pao asked us if we were hungry? Indeed we were, it was 9pm, we had been travelling for over 12 hours and all we had eaten since breakfast was a few snacks. “That’s good” replied Pao, “I know a place nearby that serves fish porridge, perfect for this time of the day”. My heart sank, it would be too rude to say, “no thanks, is there a Burger King around?” but in my head ‘fish porridge’ involved a rather sad looking fish’s head in an unidentifiable gloop. Not what I would have chosen. Thankfully, it was nothing of the kind. What we got was a kind of seafood soup, which wasn’t too bad. I didn’t eat the bits that I think were squid, but the rest of it was pretty good. We slept well that night, though as often happens, Helen woke up the next morning covered in bites.

The following day we didn’t do much. We woke up to a breakfast containing toast, fresh orange juice, fresh fruit, a pot of tea and a kind of Thai porridge made especially for us by Pao’s maids (something we would get every morning, with the food changing each day) and spent the morning relaxing and meeting the families animals: A curious cat who was scared of everything (making an amusing combination) and a dog that was constantly excited and spent the whole time looking ecstatically happy.. In fact, the only real thing we did was go to the nearby Vimanmek Mansion.

This mansion is apparently known for being ‘probably the largest golden teakwood mansion in the world’! So, for all you golden teakwood mansion fans out there, we’ve now visited (probably) the largest one in the world! Yes, it’s (probably) bigger than all those other famous golden teakwood mansions! To be completely honest, we only went here for 2 reasons: 1) That it was close by 2) Because when Pao asked us later in the day “what have you done?” we didn’t want to reply “just sit around on the Internet whilst eating snacks and drinking coke”.

Though costing a lot to get in and having ridiculously high security, the mansion was quite impressive. It contained things such as the first ever bath in Thailand and was split into sections with each one having a different coloured wall - which made it pretty. It would have been better if the guides had known English, rather than just memorised phrases to repeat incredibly quickly, but it was a decent enough way to spend the afternoon. Afterwards we went to a temple, where I again tried to take a picture of me standing below a bell so that it looked like I was wearing it as a hat. What can I say, I’m a cultural bloke.

Later that day we took Pao and Nui out for a meal (to, at least in part, say thank you). Helen tried a dish that involved taking the insides from a prawn (which I guess includes the brain as, and here’s a fact for you, a prawns brain is in his body!) and mixing it with rice. Pao loved it and Helen agreed that it tasted nice and creamy. The evening was good and we all laughed about how much like my dad (or Dr Hodge as he is always known here) I am, which at the age of 24 is of course what I wanted to hear.

The next day was going to be filled with cultural things, but then Helen suggested something much more appealing. Surely I would prefer to spend the day following her around shops and carrying bags, rather than just visit a few more temples? Unable to contain my excitement, I agreed and we spent the day at the Siam Center, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, shopping centre in Bangkok. All went well, Helen was very restrained and only bought a couple of things and for lunch we went to the food floor were we enjoyed a wide variety of different snacks - including the ‘cheese balls’ in the picture.

That evening we had organised to go out with Prim, one of Pao and Nui’s daughters. She was going to take us out for food and then to a Jazz club. We were slightly worried as we’d spoken to Prim earlier that day and she’d said ‘mum has asked me to take you out tonight’, rather than ‘I thought it’d be nice if we go out somewhere tonight’. Fortunately, again, our fears were unfounded. Prim and her boyfriend were excellent hosts. They both spoke good English (particularly Prim whose English was better than any Asian persons we’d met on the whole trip) they were chatty, friendly and easy to get along with. Similarly the situation was helped as Prim liked many of the same bands as us and many of the same TV shows as Helen.

First they took us to a favourite little restaurant of theirs, not too far from where they live. I thought it was going to be bad once Prim and her boyfriend had ordered sushi and a fish salad for their meals (which we would all share, as you do in Asia) so I went to the nice safe pasta menu. Stupidly though, I asked one of them what one of the dishes was. ‘Oh, that’s prawn egg pasta, one of our favourites! You should definitely order that’ Great, I thought, I’d survived the fish porridge only to now have to order prawn egg pasta as my meal. ‘Mmmmm ok, sounds good’ I replied. After all what could be nicer than eating the eggs of a creature I didn’t even know laid eggs… Thankfully, as seemed to be the case in Bangkok, the pasta turned out to be fine and the sushi was good.

Once we’d finished we took a short drive to a Jazz club. It was a lovely little place and we spent a while discussing how local knowledge was great as you could never find places like this in a guidebook. The highlight of the evening was probably the music, mostly due to the fact that the first songs played were Jazz versions of Super Mario theme tunes and as the guy playing the keyboard was amazing. Just before bed, I opened up our guidebook and had a look under the ‘things to do’ section, right there at the top was the Jazz club we’d been to. Guide book 1, Helen and Dave 0.

We woke up to find Pao in our apartment (though not in a scary way), he said he had bad news. Originally, the plan had been to stay in Bangkok for one more day and then move south to a seaside town called ‘Hua Hin’. Here we would stay in a brand new resort (that Pao part owned) for one night, before moving to another apartment he owned there for a few more days. However, he had just been told that the apartment was having maintenance done and we couldn’t visit. This meant we had 2 choices.

1) Still leave Bangkok tomorrow, stay in the resort for a day, and make our own way South.
2) Stay in Bangkok until Sunday (4 more days) at which point we would be able to spend 2 days at the resort, before making our way further South.

I originally chose the first choice, thinking that we should get moving, but Helen quickly jumped in and pointed out that the second choice meant we had 2 nights in the 5-star quality resort, rather than 1. So that’s what we did.

Over the next few days we finished off all our obligatory tourist visits. On the first day we went to the grand palace, which was very impressive, the emerald Buddha, which was actually pretty small and not made of emerald and the giant (and I mean giant) reclining Buddha at Wat Pho. It was a good day, despite being assaulted by a woman trying to sell us seed for pigeons. First, she offered us the seed, so we said “no thanks” (why would I want that?! I can feed the damn things in England!). So she tried again. “No”. And again “No!”. Clearly we weren’t making ourselves clear, as she started walking after us trying to force the seed into my hands “no, no, no, No!” Eventually she gave up on me and managed to dump some of the seed into Helen’s crossed arms, at which point Helen uncrossed her arms and the seed feel on the floor... There was a short pause before the woman gave us the sort of look that a puppy would give you if you took his favourite toy. We both felt very guilty for a second and almost went to pick it up the seed and give it back to her, before realising that this would only cause more aggravation and as over the last 5 minutes we’d probably made it clear that we didn’t want any.

To round off the day, that evening we went to the cinema. Having spent a good 20 minutes looking at the films, we eventually chose to see ‘The day the earth stood still’ over ‘Madagascar 2’. Unfortunately, after a promising beginning the only thing that stood still was time, as the film became more ridiculous and began featuring heavily on a stupid child. Still, Keanu Reaves was good as an alien, after all the part didn’t require showing any emotions or real acting.

After our busy day at the temples, we didn’t do much the following day except go to the local zoo. It was decent enough and most of the animals seemed to be well treated, though a couple looked like they could use more room. Afterwards, we went to Khao San road, as it’s well known for being the tourist area and as we hadn’t been. As you’d expect, there wasn’t much to it apart from a lot of tourists, tattoo parlours and many places to drink, each trying to sound as European as possible.

Our final day in Bangkok was again spent with Prim and her boyfriend. This time they took us to a ‘floating market’ an hour or two out of Bangkok. As the name would suggest it was simply a market being held next to a river, where most people selling goods would do so from a boat. As seemed to be the theme in Bangkok, the day was mostly filled with trying new (and slightly strange) food. We had some brightly coloured spaghetti-looking stuff, which was made from a flower, in coconut milk, muscles, squid’s egg, an unidentified fish (Helen’s favourite), local ice lollies, a sweet based around coconut milk and a whole fried fish, of which Helen ate some of the head.

As if their hospitality hadn’t been good enough already, Pao and Nui took us out again that evening for another meal, this time a kind of fried noodle in gravy. It probably wasn’t the best meal we’d had but it did the job.

We woke up earlier than usual the next day got all our things together and got back into Pao’s people carrier. We'd had a great time in Bangkok and it'd shown how the difference staying somewhere nice and having good guides can make, as we didn't like Bangkok at all on our first visit.

The next stop was to spend 2 days at their luxury resort. Would it be as good as we’d hoped…? You’ll just have to check the blog again soon to find out!!

P.S. While at the floating market we saw an advert being recorded, then today we saw it on the TV - how cool is that?

---