Thailand

Thailand

Sunday March 15 to Thursday March 19

 

Day 1

We docked in the port city of Laem Chabang, Thailand early on the morning of Sunday, March 15.  Unfortunately, the passport stamping and ship clearing process went very slowly and we weren’t able to get off the ship until noon.  After getting off, we immediately took the ship’s “shuttles” to Bangkok, which is about 2 hours from Laem Chabang.  I spent my time in Thailand with anywhere between 6 to 8 people, depending on the day.  Our group consisted primarily of our group of friends from around Chicago and Wisconsin.  Once we got to Bangkok, we checked into our hotel (The Vienthai), which turned out to be incredibly nice and relatively inexpensive (especially when you put 8 people in only 2 rooms).  Our hotel was located in the heart of Bangkok’s young, touristy, and backpacker’s district, one block away from the famous Khao San Road.  After getting situated, we ate our first Thai meal.  I had a delicious chicken satay, which was very reminiscent of the version of the dish we order at home, and an order of Panang curry with chicken, me and Alex’s favorite Thai dish that we order everywhere we go at home.  We learned that when it comes to Thai cooking, and more specifically Thai curries, besides the basic ingredients, there is no set or understood “recipe”; and every chef/cook will make his own version of the dish.  So, with that said, the Panang curry, and all the Thai food we ate, was very good, but it is difficult to compare it to what we eat at home every week.  However, while I definitely prefer the Thai food I ate in Bangkok, I think everything we eat at home would fit in very well if it was served in Thailand.  After lunch, we spent several hours walking around Khao San Road, a three or four block stretch of hundreds of small shops/stands, dozens of food carts, and lots of restaurants and bars.  We walked up and down the street, checking out the shops selling everything from tshirts, art, crafts, dvds, and every kind of knock-off item imaginable. 

Once we were done getting our first impression of the street, me and three of the guys we were with arranged to go to a Muay Thai fight.  Muay Thai is Thailand’s national sport and is a very intense version of boxing in which pretty much anything goes.  Fortunately, Sunday night turned out to have the biggest fights of the week, so the stadium was relatively crowded.  We spent the extra couple hundred Baht ($6-7) to be able to sit ringside, which was very, very cool.  We watched 7 fights (5 three minute rounds each), of which 2 of them ended in the first 30 seconds, with one of the guys having to be helped out of the ring.  The fighters were extremely strong and agile young Thai men, all weighing UNDER 110 pounds.  In one of the fights, a young American guy from San Francisco, who we learned had been training in Thailand for the past year, fought a Thai guy and ended up winning.  In the stadium, many of the local Thais were betting on the fights, like you’d see in a movie, with their hands and stacks of money waving in the air, yelling and shouting things arbitrarily.  We started out jokingly betting small amounts of baht amongst ourselves, just picking a fighter merely on the color of his shorts, red or blue.  Soon, two of the locals sitting next to us and watching us having fun betting small amounts, asked one of my friends who he wanted in the next fight.  After making sure he wasn’t getting into anything stupid and confirming several times they were only betting 200 baht (about $5), they bet on the next three rounds, again with my friend picking his fighters merely on the color of their shorts.  My friend, Tucker, ended up winning all three rounds that he bet on with the local and after each one they joked about it.  After the fight, we went back to meet the rest of our group on Khao San Road.  We hung out there for a while and then before heading back, we stopped at several of the street food stands/carts.  I had a few grilled skewers of chicken and beef, costing a total of 20 baht (less than 60 cents) and my friend Josh had pad thai, except after talking and joking with the “cook” behind the stand, he cooked the pad thai himself, mixing the noodles, egg, vegetables and seasonings in the hot wok by himself. 

 

Day 2

On our second day in Thailand, we spent the day doing a lot of Bangkok’s sight-seeing stuff.  We started by going to the Grand Palace, the incredibly enormous pavilion that served as the residential palace for the previous royal family.  The palace has dozens of buildings, some being very colorful and filled with intricate designs, while others were simply covered in gold.  Gold is one thing that you see everywhere in Bangkok.  The Grand Palace is also home to one of the three famous Buddhas in Bangkok.  In the center of the pavilion is the building housing the Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the most sacred Buddhist temple in Thailand.  Here, a large jade/emerald Buddha sculpture sits atop a golden pyramid-kind-of-thing.  It was very cool to see and it was the one part of the pavilion where we couldn’t take pictures.  After spending several hours at the Grand Palace, we had lunch at a small restaurant next to our hotel, where I had a great cashew chicken/stir-fry thing. 

For the rest of the day, we hired two took-tooks (very similar to the rickshaws in India) to take us to three of the other big spots in Bangkok.  We went to Wat Intharawihan, another of the three famous Buddha’s in Bangkok.  This one is an enormous, 32 meter tall and 10 meter wide, GOLD, standing Buddha.  Next, we went to a Buddhist temple on the top of a mountain, which required us to climb 300 steps.  It was a very small and relatively simple temple that was filled with monks, and overlooked a lot of Bangkok.  Afterwards, we went to a large outdoor pavilion with lots of Buddha statues and sculptures, as well as many shrines.

When we got back to the hotel, the six of us got Thai massages.  All of us laid down in beds alongside each other as small Thai women spent an hour bending, pulling, and twisting us in ways that bodies are not supposed to go, at times causing more pain than relaxation.  Afterwards, after paying our only $8 each, we went back to the hotel to get ready for our dinner at Sirocco, one of Bangkok’s nicest restaurants on the 64^th floor of a building.  We made a reservation the day before, immediately after checking into the hotel and still the earliest time was 9:45pm.  The restaurant had its own private elevators and once stepping out of them, we saw the restaurant, an incredibly modern setup, outside on the top floor of the skyscraper, overlooking all of downtown Bangkok.  It was incredibly unique and definitely the coolest restaurant I’ve ever been to.  We started with a drink at their color-changing bar at the edge of the building on an extended area overlooking the city.  For dinner, the eight of us sat at a candle and torch lit table in a raised part of the restaurant with, again with incredible views.  The other part of the dinner experience, the food, was awesome.  They served us basket after basket of a variety of breads, crackers, and breadstick-things with a terrific chive butter/spread.  I also had a terrific French onion soup.  Before bringing out our entrees, they brought us small sorbets to cleanse our palates and surprised us with a complimentary bottle of champagne.  For my entrée, I had the Australian beef tenderloin with a polenta thing and a bleu cheese potato gratin.  It was delicious.  We unfortunately didn’t make it to dessert, but I’m sure it would have been great.  Our remarkable and unique dinner was expectedly expensive (thanks Mom and Dad), but given that all my other meals in Thailand cost under $3, I think its okay.  We finished dinner after midnight and I went to bed, fully satisfied with after such a wonderful meal.

 

Day 3

On the third day, six of us did a day trip out of Bangkok we planned the day before at a tourism office in our hotel.  After waking up at 6:45, having breakfast at the hotel’s complimentary buffet (which had both American and Thai breakfast items), we began the 1.5 hour drive to the floating markets in the Taling Chan District of Thailand.  We then took a long, skinny motor boat to the actual floating market, a 1km long stretch of essentially small canals filled with tiny boats with guys rowing/paddling (very reminiscent of Venice).  In the canal, there were dozens of boats with people selling everything from all of the touristy stuff to food that they actually cook/grill/fry in the boat.  When you see something you like you just tell the “driver,” he’ll row over to the boat, grabbing on to it so you can see everything and talk to the merchant.  While on the boat, I got an order of spring rolls (the food item that I had the most of in Thailand), that ended up being the best I’d eat in Bangkok.  After the floating markets we went to an elephant village where me and my friend Jamie got to ride an elephant around, through a jungle kind of thing, and in and out of several feet deep streams.  At one point my water bottle fell out of my bag and the elephant picked it up with his trunk and handed it to our “driver.”  After the elephant village we went to a craft market and a gem factory, both of which unfortunately turned out to be nothing that cool.  We ended up getting back to the hotel at 5pm-ish, and all took naps until around 8pm.  After we had dinner at a small restaurant on Khao San road.  I had the Tom Ka Gai soup (spicy coconut broth with chicken) that I can definitely say was better than any other version of the soup that I’ve ever had.  We spent the rest of the night hanging out on and walking around Khao San.  We eventually found a very cool bar/club with a terrific Thai band that played lots of American covers, which was a lot of fun.

 

Day 4

We took our fourth day in Bangkok pretty easy.  We woke up around 11am, I called home and was able to talk to Alex for a while, and then had lunch at another small restaurant around our hotel.  I had a plate of fried noodles (the long and flat ones) with chicken.  Afterwards, we went to the third and final famous Buddha that we had yet to see, Wat Pho, or The Reclining Buddha.  We spent several hours at this large pavilion, whose focal item is a gigantic gold plated reclining Buddha that is 46 meters long and 15 meters high, inlaid with mother of pearl.  Afterwards, we all got massages again, however this time, instead of having to be pushed and pulled, I got a 30min foot massage and 30min back massage, again for only $8.  After our massages we did some shopping on Khao San for a while.  When we got back to the hotel, about ten of our friends that had gone to Phuket were there checking in for our last night in Thailand.  Soon after, we all went to dinner at another small restaurant around our hotel.  (All these “small restaurants” are little Thai restaurants holding maybe 20-30 people that line the streets, all with pretty similar menus, and prices of “entrees” at around 70-90 Baht (under $3)).  I had a terrific red curry with chicken and we shared several orders of chicken satay.  After dinner, we broke off into several groups and again hung out on and around Khao San, where lots and lots of SAS students ended up for their last night in Thailand. 

 

Day 5

On our last day in Thailand, I woke up at 9:30ish, called a few more people from the cheap overseas phone at the internet café, packed everything up, and then stopped in to say hello at the Chabad of Bangkok, which just happened to be literally right across the street from our hotel.  No wonder we kept running into Israelis on Khao San and why people tried to ask me to buy suits from them in Hebrew.  The Israeli rabbi/head of the Chabad was very interested in hearing about Semester at Sea and was kind enough to let me keep a couple “Chabad of Thailand” kippahs.  Afterwards, we had a quick lunch next to the hotel before having to take a cab back to downtown Bangkok to get on the SAS shuttle back to the ship in Laem Chabang which was leaving at 1pm.  Due to Bangkok’s such terrible traffic, at any time of the day, it took us almost 40 minutes to get there and barely made the last of 8 busses leaving for Laem Chabang.  We ended up getting back to the ship at around 3:30, where we had to wait in the longest line yet to get screened to get onto the ship since several hundred people arrived pretty much at once.  After about an hour we were on the ship and at around 8pm we were leaving Thailand, en-route to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

 

Overall, Thailand was absolutely amazing and definitely one of my favorite countries that we have visited so far (probably because of the food). 

 

 

We had two days at sea between Thailand and Vietnam, both filled with classes.  One of the nights was the Crew Talent Show, in which dozens of members of the ship’s crew performed many acts ranging from singing songs to flair bartending/juggling.  It was very cool seeing a lot of familiar crew members performing and doing funny things. The talent show served as a fundraiser for the ships’s Crew Welfare Fund, which provides money for various aspects of crew life, including recreation equipment, in-port activities, and better accommodations.

We are now done with Vietnam, on the ship, on the way to Hong Kong.  Vietnam was terrific and it was great being able to talk to everyone I did on the phone.  I hope to have the blog post up soon and hope everything is great at home!!!