Bangkok Extravaganza

It's embarrassing to say, but we have been in this area for 3 full months and have seen very little of actual Bangkok proper. It just goes to show that we really aren't city people. In fact, we've kind of been avoiding it because it's just overwhelming to know where to start. Well, we made a resolution while on vacation that we would try to get out more during this second semester, and explore more than just the 10 km around our apartment.

This weekend, we saw a little more of Bangkok. On Saturday, the couple that hosts our small group offered to show us around downtown (As far as we understand it, there are actually 3 downtowns, but we got to see the shopping district, I guess you would call it). They have a car, so getting there was super simple compared to taking the various kinds of public transportation that we usually have to take. It was awesome to spend time with them, and crazy to see that way that upper-class Thai people live!

We walked along one of the main streets in Bangkok, through a string of immense malls. They all have at least 7 stories, all with movie theatres, some with aquariums... They make Park Meadows and Washington Square look like absolute babies!

We started at the original Central Mall (we mentioned our local Central in a previous blog). They were having there annual flower festival, so we took the escalators up and down to see the beautiful, extravagant exhibits.

This was on the kids' clothing level. That large yellow thing is a duck, and you can see the ears of a white rabbit behind.

The parking lot was turned into a gazebo and full-on rose garden!

Next was Central Mall. You may recognize this name because it was where the red shirts were camped out during the protests. It was awful to see all the damage that they caused. A huge department store on the front of the mall was completely burnt down, killing several people; there is no way to tell how many. The top level was also pretty damaged. You can kind of see the part of the burnt building behind the free way in this picture.

They have been rebuilding it since last summer, but in some places inside, it still smells like smoke. The store was owned by a Christian family. There are no a lot of signs in front of the building at the construction site. It was really a devastating thing for this country.

This is a nice restaurant with a pretty view where we stopped for a smoothie and to rest our feet. This is Jack and Wendy, a wonderful Canadian couple that lead our house group and have taken us under their wing.

We continued on to several other gigantic malls, and then had dinner at one of their favorite restaurants called Beirut. They had delicious Lebanese food: it's probably a good thing that we're not too close, otherwise we'd come here all the time. It was a wonderful meal, and we went home happy and tired.

We have decided that we are definitely not mall people, and that we may never understand why some people are happy to spend every weekend at the mall, but it was a good experience.

Today, Sunday, after church and a nice lunch with some people from our house group, we went back into Bangkok on our own to a huge market called Chatuchak market. The place is so big that you can buy detailed maps of all the stalls and still get lost. It was kind of overwhelming, even though we just scratched the surface. Here is a small sample of the book section:

And here is the human traffic.

It was very slow going, but a great place to people watch. We were proud of ourselves for walking out of there without emptying our wallets: it's a good thing we went Christmas shopping in Chiang Mai!!

Well, there you go, our weekend in Bangkok.

Prayer Request -- New Teachers at School

Hi everybody!

We can't believe that we have to start teaching again tomorrow, but it's true...

Just a short prayer request. There are three new teachers this semester that are replacing people who left, and we are really hoping that we will be able to become friends with at least some of them, or that they might even be Christians. It was a difficult work environment last semester because so many people in the office complained all day long, and it was so hard to stay positive. Well, only one of the initiator-complainers is left, so please pray that with these new teachers, we will be leaders in creating a more positive and affirming work environment.

Thanks!! We'll keep you posted!

Love you all!

J&D

Chiang Mai

Our last stop of the trip was Chiang Mai, our favorite place in Thailand. It felt so good to get back here to somewhere familiar, to suddenly know where we were and how to get where we wanted! We stayed in this awesome guest house called "Awanahouse," (perfect, I know). It is located right on the Taipae Gate, at the center of everything downtown.

We ate lots of yummy food, went back to some of the places that we discovered last time we were here. We did all of our Christmas shopping at the awesome markets throughout the week. We went to the Saturday walking street the day that we got in and found some great deals there. But the Sunday walking street is our favorite market in Chiang Mai. It is the one of the main roads of the old city: every Sunday, it becomes a pedestrian only street where hundreds of stands set up and seem to go on forever. Here are some pictures of the gate where the market starts. Although it looks big, this plaza is really only the tip of the iceberg to show how big this market really is. Here are some pictures of them setting up:

All around the old city is a moat. Here I am, munching on one of our favorite snacks: sticky rice with mango.

Another interesting market is the Night Bazaar. You can find anything there. Here is John, who is now obsessed with watches. Thailand is famous for its fake Rolexes and other watches. They are incredible replicas. John got a shopkeeper to admit that they get the watches in huge bags from Taiwan, mostly. The guy said that he pays $100 (about 3300 Baht) for 3 Kilos of watches, and we know that they sell each watch for anywhere between 1000-2500 Baht. It's serious business!!

And then, unfortunately, with 4 days left of vacation, I (Dana) got very ill. I had two days of a very high fever; we went to the doctor and he said it might be dengue or malaria, but that you can't tell until the third day. After 2 days, the fever went away, but then other things started, and we went back to the doctor and had tests done. I got some kind of bad bacterial infection, and I'm now on anti-biotics and feeling much better again. Thanks to all who have been praying. And a very special thanks to the Hoppes, for welcoming us into your home and giving us real, home-cooked meals for a few days.

Finally, after a wonderful vacation, we are home. And it feels good.

Chiang Dao

From Chiang Rai, we got on a bus to a city called Fang (great name for a town, isn't it?), and then onto another bus to our next destination, Chiang Dao.

We stayed in a place called Malee's Nature Lover's Bungalows. Sounds really nice and beautiful, doesn't it? In the end, it was more like a back room on an old concrete building with a bed harder than camping. We have no idea where they got the pictures that they put on the Internet, but it was very cheap, and the common room building for eating, sitting and reading was very beautiful.

They had tons of National Geographic magazines, and they were actually in English!! So that kept us happy for a long time. One of the most annoying things here is that Thai magazines all have covers in English. So you are lulled into thinking that you have found actual reading material, and then you open it up, and everything but the titles is in Thai. Awww!!!

Chiang Dao is known for its caves. We went and explored a little, which was fun. Typical Thailand, the space in the caves was used to put up a little shrine and some Buddha statues.

Oh!! And we found the door into Narnia:

Chiang Rai

Well, we are back in Muang Thong after a lovely break! We got the chance to explore some new places in Northern Thailand, and to go back to the places we love. So here goes:

We started our trip by flying up to Chiang Rai, one of Thailand's old capital cities. It's North of Chiang Mai, and older, but a much smaller, quieter city. We stayed in a quiet little guesthouse on the North side of town, and had three days to explore the area. We decided, since Chiang Rai is too small to have much public transport, that we would get around the way the locals do: so we rented a motorbike! We had a blast driving in circles around town, totally lost, and getting used to driving on the left side of the road.

We went to a famous restaurant called "Cabbages and Condoms," started by the government during a campaign to prevent the spread of AIDS. They give a condom to every customer who walks through their doors. The food was delicious, and in case any one was nervous, there was a sign above the door that stated "Our food guaranteed not to cause pregnancy"!

Here is a picture of the Chiang Rai clock tower. In the style of the Lanna Northern kingdom, it looks a lot like the temples of the region. It's also a popular attraction for the locals: at 8 o'clock every night, it lights up in different colors to music playing in the background. Every stands around and videos it on their phones...

On our second day, we took the motor bike out into the beautiful countryside around Chiang Rai. We drive on small, windy roads through the rice fields,

past the famous white temple,

and up into the mountains a bit to this beautiful waterfall.

Unfortunately, it started raining while we were hiking to the fall; we still ended up going swimming, but the ride home was long and miserably cold! I never thought I'd be wishing for a jacket in Thailand.... It's always so strange to see the locals riding their motorcycles while wearing black robber-style face coverings, big woolly jackets and winter gloves in the heat, but I guess on a day like that it would come in handy.

For our last day, we decided to head up to the Golden Triangle. We hired a guide, as that is really the only way to get there, and we had a fantastic day of sight-seeing. First, we drove up into the mountains to a Chinese village called Doi Mae Salong, where everyone in the village either grows, processes or sells oolong tea. We got to see the tea plantations

and sit down for a tea tasting or two. Sadly, John and I found a tea that we both dislike, but we found that it's nice when they mix it with ginseng.

The proper way to go about tea tastings is to pour some tea into the smaller, thin cup, then pour the tea our and fill it up again. Then you put the bigger cup upside down on the thin cup, and tip it over to hold the tea inside the inner cup (as shown). You then remove the small cup so that the tea flows into the bigger cup, and you are supposed to smell the small cup before taking a sip from the larger one. We never knew this about tea-tasting etiquette.

Oh! And I ate my first bug: a bamboo worm. They find them inside some parts of the bamboo, and pull them our and fry them. I found that it was flavorless and had the texture of a Cheeto.

Then, we drove on to Mae Sai, the northermost city in Thailand; it's basically a tourist trap now, but we went.

Next, was the Golden Triangle itself. For those of you who don't know what that is (like me just a couple of months ago), the Golden Triangle is the area where two rivers cross to form a triangle between Myanmar on the left (formally Burma), Laos on the right, and Thailand.

It is also an area that use to produce about 70% of the world's opium. After visiting the very touristy river side and taking some pictures, we went to the Opium Museum. We learned that Alexander the Great was the one who brought opium to this part of the world, that supposedly after smoking a while, the stone pillows that they used suddenly felt as soft as sleeping on clouds, and that since the outlawing of opium in this region, Afghanistan is now the world leader in opium production.

The drive home was absolutely gorgeous through the countryside.

It was so nice to get away from the city. Our guide was very good at pointing out what some of the unique plants were as we went. We saw pineapple plantations, and lichee trees, and rubber tree farms. It was great!!

One of the biggest surprises was running into a patch of evergreens. They aren't native to Thailand, but our guide said that the government had them imported and planted there; he couldn't tell us why. We miss our evergreens.

We finished our first term at Saint Francis Xavier and are now officially on vacation! We are heading up to Northern Thailand tomorrow night and will be up there almost two weeks. We'll write more when we get back...

Cooking Class

We had an awesome experience last night! One of the touristy things to do in Thailand is to take cooking classes and learn some typical Thai dishes. Since we love to cook, and we've tried our hand at Thai cuisine once or twice at home, we naturally wanted to do this. But since the classes tend to be really expensive, we put it on the back burner (no pun intended).

Well, out of the blue, one of our fellow English teachers at school said that she had met a lady at the market who was starting up a cooking school and wanted to take pictures of foreigners doing her class for marketing purposes. So she invited us to take the classes for free with a few of our fellow teachers!!

She had a beautiful couch with an outside kitchen on a large deck. She had a big garden where she grew most of the ingredients that we cooked with. We learned to make some of the Thai classics: fried egg rolls, tum yum kung soup (spicy soup with shrimp, really delicious), fish cakes, green curry (my favorite), and of course, phad thai.

Some spices that we used:

Dana cooking the egg roll ingredients:

The prep table. Everyone except the couple at the back is a teacher at our school.

John quickly established himself as the chef of the group and the chopping master. Our teacher told him to chop the green beans finely, so he started showing off a little. She looked at him, smiled, said, "You call that fine?!" and started chopping as well. :) So here is a picture of their competition. She was a fun, sweet lady.

Our green curry:

Although this looks like a block of cheese, it is actually coconut sugar, the secret ingredient in a lot of Thai dishes:

The class ended up taking 5 hours. We were very tired by the end of it, but we had a lot of fun, and a ton of food!!

Dinner on the River

Last weekend, we had a sudden craving for Italian food, and decided to try out a restaurant recommended by an Italian foreign teacher at our school. It wasn't too far from our house, so we just took the song thaew to where we thought it might be, and started walking around trying to find it. The problem was that when we hit the street that the map said it should be on, it seemed like we had hit the end of town, there were no lights or people. Also, because of a downpour that afternoon, that street was completely flooded, to the point where we could walk and explore.

Well, we finally asked a security guard if he knew where Mr. Enzo's was, and sure enough, he said to go along that street about 3 blocks. We proceeded with caution. A few blocks down, we found it! It looked very charming and elegant, but it was on the other side of the street! There was nothing to do but to roll up our pant legs and wade across the street! The water came up to the middle of our calves.

Their were still a few cars brave enough to come down the street, but the restaurant had set up a "dock" to allow the passengers out.

It was a delicious dinner, complete with a ice cream crepe with real chocolate sauce for dinner, and a lovely wade back across the street to get home. Maybe we will only go during the monsoon season; it makes a very romantic restaurant on the river.