THONBURI RAILWAY STATION

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After all day in class preparing and tasting exotic Thai dishes I came straight home. I been trying to type the recipes right away and upload to my blog. But it tht is a hard task that requires a lot of dedication and self control. Our Chef instructor does not speak English and does not follow a recipe. He is very knowleadgeable and demonstrates to us how to make each dish and then we do it. But we have to build the recipe as he moves along by looking at the ingredients and estimating the amounts by measuring instruments and weight. It is their learning system. Very different. We have to remember ingreadients, the process, flavors and aromas. Surong (Tim) is our assistant instructor that speaks English but is hard to understand her. Every day I get better though and recognize what she is trying to say. If it wasn’t for Keith and Chloe my classmates I will be in the top of the clouds. Right now I am half way. Besides the language barrier and not having established recipes, we prepare ingredients for several dishes at the same time and we have to stay on top of the game to keep up with each dish and not get them confused. We make notes, take photos and review as much as we can. So the first thing that I try to do when I come home is straightening out my notes and type an actual recipe. And if I don’t get to select all the photos at least I organize them by dishes. So I can sort them later. I typed 4 out of the 6 dishes that we prepared today but I needed to air out. We finish school around 3 pm I get home around 4. Typed for about 1h or so then my head usually asks for a break at about 6 pm. Sunset is at 6:45. I grabbed my favorite map with all the places to visit including the lines for public trasnportation and looked for a place that I could get in 45 minutes and take a photo sunset walk and get back not to late to get my underwater equipment ready to shoot one of my classmates tomorrow. Inmedieately my finger pointed to the Chao Phraya River. Quickly I just selected randomly the Thonbury Railway Station. Grabbed my tripod my zoom and my wide angle and off I went. I wanted to exercise a little so I walked to the BTS instead of taking at motorbike ride. I always try to walk and burn some calories unless I am running late for school. The BTS takes me to Sathorn Taksin BTS station which exits to Central Pier/ Pier Sathorn where all the express boats go up and down the river taking people to the different temples and riverside restaurants and hotels. Now I know to take the orange line which is a local line non touristic and cheaper. For 15 THB each way I went straight to Thonburi Rail Station and back. When I first swathe Thonburi Rail Station I wasn’t blown away. I expected it to be prettier. The sun was setting and I wasn’t sure if there were any late boats to bring me back so I had to be sort of quick. I didn’t walk around the building to see if it had a different face. It was just a temple towards the water with a building behind it and a train to the side of it for decoration. I didn’t even care for photographing that. Instead, I chose the temple to photograph as its lights turned on. Set my tripod in front of it and shot for symmetrical composition. Then I saw the building behind it changing colors. That was very cool. All kids of colors, reds, blues, orange, yellow, pink…I tried to get the colors with slow shutter speed but that didn’t work out. I got some cool phantom shadows of people but not the real color lights of the building. I was stressing out because it was getting dark and less and less people were around. I decided to higher up my ISO to 4000 and try higher f-stop and speed and I nailed it. I got perfect colors of the lights behind the temple. I took shots of each color and I am including them here…so you guys can see thorugh my eyes. Same foreground. The colored lights were very brigtht.. So cool. When I was happy I got close to shoot a family praying and then I saw the reflection of the Buddha on the shiny floor. I was content with that. I got the shot of the night. Turned around passed to the gate. The ticket lady at the pier looked at me and said: “boat back 5 minutes pay on the boat”. It couldn’t have been easier. And the ticket lady inside the boat told me in perfect English were to get off and I was home typing this by 9pm. I think I could do a sunset boat run to different temples pretty often. Im happy!

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[D MJ Binkley]

Thailand.
Stunning