Advertisement
Published: March 21st 2010
Edit Blog Post
Saturday morning was an early start for us as Korn and his wife Noon were taking the 4 of us to a floating market. It was fabulous! The 6 of us drove there and it was about 20 minutes away. WE SAW TREES! We are located in a very busy, dirty and crammed area where the only greenery we see is the banana leaves used in the street stalls and the walls of Korns upstairs room.
The market was located on the outskirts og Bangkok where the greenery was lush, there were little streams/canals and rice paddies on both sides of the road. It was gorgeous.
We walked through and Korn led us to the canal where there were a few boats selling fruit and meals. Korn bought us a pack of about 16 rolls and we were told to break off pieces of the bread and throw it in the canal to feed the fish. This is a buddhist tradition where we give back to the animals. These fish went mad and they were huge. It was incredible. We then moved along where Korn gave us each a bucket with water and a baby fish in it which we needed
to throw back into the canal. We walked around some more and the food and items available to buy were incredible. It was around 9am and none of us had had breakfast so we sat down right next to one of the boats and Korn ordered for us. We were presented with these bowls of noodles, ginger and garlic, pork and chili paste with banana. For breakfast, this was a new experience for all of us and we all thoroughly enjoyed our meal. There was this jar of chili's in the middle of the table and Korn tried a couple and told us to try one. Tracey was first and bit off the tip, to which I said that she wouldn't taste anything as the flavour is in the seeds mostly (I don't know where I come up with these sometimes). I then was about to take a small bit when half the chili broke off into my mouth. Now, my mother told me not to be disrespectful and spit food out, so I grinned and chewed through this chili. WOW! Was I in for a surprise! It burnt like nothing has ever burnt in my mouth! I thought it
was going to burn a hole into my tongue. Tears were pouring down my face and nothing I ate (ice-cream, cabbage, sprouts) or drank (WATER!) helped at all! Of course everyone at the table thought this was hilarious, and so did I to be honest! After about 20 minutes, my mouth was back to normal and I could continue to eat my meal comfortably!
We got back to soi 19 around 10.30 and made ourselves comfortable at Korn's place and enjoyed some ice teas. Roy, a photographer who has taken our pics to submit to castings to allow us to make some extra money on the side. He informed us that there was a beach casting and we were to wear bikini's. Ha ha ha. Tracey decided she would go and asked us to come along for moral support! 2 other guys from our group joined us and off we went. We had forgotten that the red shirts were parading through the streets but we weren't going to be affected until our journey back home.
We arrived at this building in a very upmarket part of Bangkok and after much searching we eventually found the place. It was located in
this men's sports centre and the casting wasn't happeing on a beach as were all hoped! It was in a squash court!! It was hilarious, we were hot and all quite tired for the journey once again (us South African's seem to be taking a bit longer to adjust to the public transport system!). We realised very quickly that this wasn't our scene but I was also given an application form to fill out. After they showed me the very skimpy outfit that I was to wear I pulled out and said that I wouldn't be comfortable in that!!!! All that they were expecting us to do was play volleyball (by ourselves) or frisbee (by ourselves). Nothing that either of us were too good at! It all turned out to be a good experience and we were able to see a totally different side of Bangkok which was quite refreshing, we can now compare our area to a slum of sorts... ok maybe not that bad, but it is dirty!
Sunday we made our laundry day as we had been putting this task off since Friday. It actually proved to be much simpler than we thought it would be,
and we really enjoyed ourselves.
So here's to our second week in Bangkok, what an experience it has been so far!
Ciao Ciao Bye!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.095s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 5; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0661s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Dané Maritz
non-member comment
Fabulous!
All i can say is, wish i was there!! Everything sounds so out of the ordinary but exciting! Now i really wonder how hot that chilli was????