(More than ) One night in Bangkok

We have only been in bangkok for a couple of days, and already I have had what I would call two moments.

The first of these was on our second night. Scene as follows:
Sitting down for dinner in a rooftop restaurant looking out over Bangkok, lit by candles on the tables and fairy lights snaking around the balustrade.
Being the only farangs in the joint, which always bodes well for the quality of food.
As the waiter bought out a couple of large beers, the music changed to Frank Bennett singing Black Hole Sun. It was phenomenal. The music then morphed into some Fun Loving Criminals from their lounge album, and then an assortment of other lounge classics a la Frank Bennett. As Marie said, it was like they looked at my Sunday morning wakeup music to see what genres I liked and switched a few of the songs around.
And then the food came out. Best Thai I have ever had- as at today :).
Marie had fried rice and mackerel, which was very tasty. We shared a hot and sour fish soup with meatballs which was good too. But the highlight for me was my Thai spicy beef salad, where all the flavours seemed to bond with each other perfectly. I really hope we get to make this salad at the cooking course in Chang Mai in a couple of days. This dinner (and the fact that its quality was wholly unexpected) is why I left a perfectly nice lifestyle.

The second moment occurred yesterday afternoon, after a day jousting with touts & tuk tuk drivers. Marie and I were wandering back to our guesthouse after going to see the Reclining Buddha and the Grand Palace. We wandered past a queue of Thais, who were jostling in front of an unassuming storefront. We looked at each other, and thought that if that many locals were queuing then whatever is coming out of that store must be good. So I went back and took my place in the queue, and eventually discovered that the storefront was a bakery doing an very swift trade. Among the type of breads on sale was a loaf which had sausages set into the top. Through a combination of gesticulation and pigeon English I asked the guy in the queue behind me the Thai for 'sausage bread'. He thought I was hilarious, but I eventually honed my pronunciation to the stage where he didn't laugh. When I finally got to the front of the queue I found out that the serving woman spoke English, haha. And yes, the sausage bread tasted great.

Other thoughts on Bangkok below the fold.
I think I like Bangkok, but it is definitely a culture shock. For one, Bangkok is quite smelly. When the durian vendor went past me I didn't smell the rotting flesh odour of the durian, the general city smell masked that. Rather, the durian smelt fragrant, which was quite odd.
If you manage to get to a market which is outside the tourist ebb and flow, you won't get hassled by touts and you will see things outside your comfort zone. We dropped some baggage (laptops, booze, heavy clothes) into storage on the other side of town, and went to the adjacent produce market. I saw rows upon rows of meat from every kind of animal you can think of.





At one stall there were live chickens in a cage under the counter, dead uncooked chickens on the counter, and cooked chicken skewers to one side for immediate consumption. The array of herbs is also quite phenomenal. We took a couple of photos of the meat and herbs, but got told off by the local police so couldn't get any pictures of the live chickens.
Khao San Road is carnie central. It is quite fun sitting on the kerb and trying to guess where people are originally from, and for how long they have been backpacking.

Tuk tuk rides are fun.
Tuk tuk drivers are shifty ripoff merchants.
And finally, a rude place name for my sister in law:


Off on the overnight train to Chang Mai tonight.