Beer Garden and Spicy Food

We went to a beer garden the other night.  It served northeastern Thai food, which is especially spicy.  We decided to order a few spicy dishes, including spicy seafood soup, and deep fried frog spicy salad.  We also got a steamed sea bass (although it might have been some sort of lake fish) which was particularly tender and scrumptious.  And the spice - oh yes, we had some spice.  Wonderful.  It gave us a good excuse to try Beer Chang Draft, which was a very drinkable version of Chang - less sweet, and very fresh.

Thai beer gardens and spicy Northeastern Thai food - two thumbs up!

Derailed by a peanut

So we were all ready to go to Chiang Mai by train with our neighbors, and our friend Matt, who has a peanut allergy, had an allergic reaction right across from the train station.  We ditched the trip and took him to the ER.  We skipped the train - so you could say we were derailed by a peanut.  Fie on the, foul legume!  

Here's a picture of what we think was the offending restaurant.  I'm not saying don't ever go there to eat, but - don't ever go there to eat.  Peanut-servers.

Thankfully our friend made a full recovery, and he was able to make it up to Chiang Mai with his wife to see some elephants (he loves elephants).   We couldn't join them, but the most important thing is that he's all right.  

Oh, and never eat at the Hong Kong Noodle shop across from the Bangkok train station.

Our old neighbors stopped by to visit

But they had to travel a little further than they used to.  Matt and Michelle lived next door when we lived in Madison, and they were the best neighbors anyone could ever hope for.  We used to go out together for dinner once a month.

Here are our neighbors Matt and Michelle eating dinner with us their first day in Bangkok.  The little leaf top hats cover rice.

We've had a great time with them during their visit!

Special Thailand Edition

Got the new U2 CD the day it came out.  It said 'special Thailand edition', and I bought it at a legitimate store, legitimately packaged.  What's so special about the 'special Thailand edition'?  Well, for one thing, the price.  267 baht, which at current exchange rates works out to a bit under $7.50.  For Bangkok, that's a lot, because I'm sure for 100 baht or less I could have gotten an unofficial, illegitimate copy off the street.  But it's the right thing to do, and hey, it's still cheaper than in the States.  Doing the right thing is cheaper in Bangkok, apparently.

Hope it's good - I tend to buy U2 CDs without listening to them first, more out of habit and nostalgia than anything.  One of these days they've got to lose it, don't they?  Maybe this is the one?

I have fond memories of getting two new U2 CDs while in Taiwan, though, so it should be a good experience either way.

Fin.

Shark fin, that is.  If you haven't eaten it, then eat it once, and enjoy yourself, and then research how they harvest it, and don't eat it again.  But give thanks to the Cantonese for figuring out how to make such a relatively inedible part of a relatively inedible fish so darn tasty.  Because love or hate the environmentalist considerations around it - shark fin is really darn tasty.

Here are some shark fin joints (and shark fins) around Chinatown.  Note the prices for the big ones (3500 baht is about $100 USD) - there's a reason you pay - it's tasty, the big ones are rare, and it's hard to tell the real fins from the fake ones, so you pay for quality and for famous restaurants.  The ads for "300" or "500" baht shark fin soup - not only is that a fair bit for a meal in this town, but you're going to get a little tiny bit of shark fin for that amount.  Yup, when it comes to shark fin, you get what you paid for.

Oh, and go eat some shark fin.

Fin.

Putting the band back together

There's so much right with this picture I don't know where to start.  

Each day in Bangkok, even walking the same route to the same SkyTrain stop to the same office building, I see something new.  This isn't just because I'm more or less observant on different days, it's that this city of Bangkok is just that big and dynamic that there's always a new sight, a new sound, a new smell.  A week or two ago, I walked past a great group of street musicians, and they were drumming along to a guitar, and they were rockin', and I thought of taking a picture with my brand new camera on my brand new phone, and thought - no problem - they'll be here tomorrow.  I didn't stop to take the picture, I didn't stop to listen, because hey, I've got to get to work, and these folks aren't going anywhere.   Well, turns out they did go somewhere, because they haven't been back since.  

So imagine my joy as I walked out of a different BTS stop today and heard the same (?) band playing the same general groove.  I rushed over, and threw 20 baht in their dish, and took my picture, and gave thanks to the city of Bangkok for serving up a good thing twice.

A lot of Bangkok, even at the street level, does stay the same, by the way.  The places where beggars beg often stays the same, but the specific beggars sometimes rotate through (I assume begging gangs here as in so many parts of the world?).  Street vendors are often the same for place on the sidewalk and time of day, though you'll often see different vendors during different times of day or week.  But I'm definitely learning about this town - in the worlds of Mr. Rasczak in the greatest movie ever made - 'never let a good thing get away'.  If you see it, and it's good, then seize the opportunity, on the spot, don't wait.  Because this town is about change, rapid change, and you must work with that to be happy here.

What else is great?  Well, their groove was fabulous, but I can't post that here.  I don't even know what style of music they were playing, and I've heard an awful lot of music in my time.  I would say some of the rhythm was almost Indian, and the guitar most reminded me of ukulele, but there was something else going on that I can only assume was Thai.  And it was fabulous.

The dancing baby (and it did dance) in front of them, that is pretty Thai as well - fun for fun's sake.  The expression on their faces - well, they were having a great time, but were playing it cool - that's probably bands anywhere.  There was definitely a reaction to the baht I put in the dish, but it was brief and different than the buskers in the States.  The dude in the background, listening but pretending not to - that's pretty Asian, you it all around this part of the world.  It's sort of a 'oh, was there something mundane happening here, I didn't notice, for I'm quite somebody, you know [edging slowly closer, and looking out the corner of his eye].  A face thing, perhaps?

But it was spontaneous, and great to listen to, and a lively way to end the day.  

The bestest!

Somewhere, an English teacher is crying, and a kid is saying, why can't you say 'bestest'?

[and having formally studied linguistics, and having worked with non-native speakers for much of my life, I truly sympathize with how unruly English is.  It's one of the worst languages out there for 'rules, with exceptions'.  It's flexible in many ways, but it's also terribly difficult to learn.  'Bestest' actually follows the general rule in English better than 'Best'.  If you haven't taught English before, you don't know that when discussing such matters with a student, the eventual answer you must give is "that's just how it is".  Yeah, so it actually takes a Master's in English to learn that response??]

It should also be noted that non-native speakers are creating their own dialects of English in various parts of the world (e.g. India), and there's nothing to say that the Queen's English will win out in the end.  American English, for example, started as an upstart dialect in a colony in some mosquito infested part of the world that no proper gentleman would actually want to live.

Sidenote: around these parts, it's the Australian dialect that appears to predominate, which means I hear both "no worries" and "nice" a lot more than I'm used to.  And "mate", which is something that always gives me pause before I realize what they mean.