koh payam
yellow shirts are for the king
around the river, BKK
yam woon sen November 17, 2006
i’m obsessed with it.
1 small bundle glass noodles, (mung bean noodles, you can usually find them in small string-wrapped bundles), cooked and chilled
1 small cucomber peeled and thinly sliced, (the kind with less seeds is always better)
1 firm plum tomato sliced
1/2 small white onion thinly sliced OR 1 thinly sliced shallot
1/4 red pepper thinly sliced
2 thai chilis thinly sliced, 1 red and 1 green, (this will make it really spicy, if you don’t like spice use only one or maybe none)
1 small bunch cilantro
2 green onion chopped
1/4 cup chinese cabbage thinly sliced
1/4 cup shredded carrot
1/4 cup cashews roasted
toss noodles and vegetables and nuts with the juice from 2 limes. add a dash of soy sauce and/or a pinch of salt to taste
serves 2
the beach November 16, 2006
koh phayam is a small island in the andaman sea–off the thai/burma border. it’s basically dog town. the dogs run the show. there are all kinds of medium-sized dogs, black ones, yellow ones, black and yellow ones, and brown and white ones. there’s also a little pug–i have no idea where he came from, and there’s no evidence of him anywhere in the gene pool, who has it baaaaad for emerson. he’s always trying to snuffle around in his armpits and hump him all over the beach. emerson was a little disturbed by the attack. i thought it was hilarious.
the beach is beautiful. the sand is white and yellow and black in some places. it’s very fine sand, and it’s easy to find sand dollars and shells. the water is warm and clean, but there are too many jellyfish, and so it’s not so pleasant to go swimming. the stinging really freaks me out.
this island has cashew nut groves. it’s famous for the cashew nut and every harvest there is a big festival with all kinds of cashew nut delicacies, and a cashew nut parade, and a cashew nut queen, (and of course), cock fighting.
there are also lots of coconut trees and papaya trees. speaking of which–ripe papaya is really kind of poisonous tasting, isn’t it? i like green papaya–especially spicy green papaya salad with peanuts and chilis and lime. but ripe papaya tastes like something that should not be eaten. does anyone else have this reaction?
Koh Payam November 15, 2006
We are on Koh Payam, near the border with Myanmar. Payam is a quiet island where “the Cashew Nut is king”. Really, they do have the best cashews. Our Bungalow has electricity for only 3 hours in the evening and we walked 45 minutes to get to this internet cafe. Clean white beaches, though, and did I mention the cashews?
Bangkok review- mindless consumer edition November 13, 2006
Here are a few of what I consider to be the best places to blow your money in BKK:
Clothes:
-Chatachuk Weekend Market. We just went here for the first time last week and it is mindblowing. Utterly impossible to see everything, you’ll be exhausted after roaming through the clattering alleys of this huge flea market for just an hour. The Clothing stalls are mainly up front and I was surprised to find some really nice stuff here. In the stalls you can find handmade design t-shirts, dresses, hats, jackets etc. Every style imaginable is on display- punk, hippy, backpacker, mod, hip hop, L.A. sleazeball, hipster vintage kitch, eurotrash, anglophile, goth, whole stores are dedicated to look-alikes of imprints like Hysteric Glamour and BAPE (you’ll find a lot of japanese tourists prowling around there). We even found stalls catering to rarefied subgenres like Thai cowboy and West Coast Gangsta (I have to make a digression into the this one, because it was the best of all- all the kids there were Thai and dressed like L.A. vatos- XXXL white t’s with graphics that somebody drew in prison of Mexican girls with big hair crying, Khakis, fake Chuck Taylors, bandanas, etc. They were listening to The Chronicand invited us to their Lowrider bike party). Get there early (like 7am) and get out before noon, when it gets too hot and crowded.
Siam Square- This is the Harajuku to Bangkok’s low-rent Tokyo. It’s a mecca for upper middle-class Thai teenagers to come hang out, drink bubble tea and buy trendy clothes. What once were flea market stalls have become open-air (yet air-conditioned… confusing) boutique malls piled up upon one another in the block surrounding the MBK shopping mall and Siam Discovery Center. There are hundreds of little shops side by side running the gamut of every youth culture style of the past 30 years plus certain ones that seem to attempt to rip off the new styles of specific cities like New York or Paris. There is even a free magazine just for little Siam square consumers with the news on store openings and clothings, music reviews and Fruits-like street fashion shots. As for shopping here, it is a bit pricier than the Weekend Market but you can find some very random handmade T-shirts here, and they especially have nice stuff for girls. The skateboard-themed stores have funny stuff like knock-off I Path sneakers and even graphics that mimic the styles of Shepard Fairey, Bigfoot and Kaws. You can also find here (and a surprising number of other places in S.E. Asia) punk-rock flip flops with a picture of Wardy from The Exploited, which I consider to be the sweetest plum.
Sneakers:
At either of the above places or anywhere in Bangkok you can find a billion sneakers- very cheap knock-offs or authentic new sneakers for the same price or more as those back in the States in Europe.
But my secret spot for kicks in Bangkok is acctually hidden in plain sight: it’s on Khaosan Road, at the heart of backpacker territory. There is a dude who goes there every night and dumps out a bag full of used sneakers onto a mat and sells them for variable prices. These are vintage sneakers that he has shipped to him from all over Asia, he cleans and refurbishes them and sells them for around 200-500 baht. There is a lot of garbage but you can usual find jewels: while I was in BKK I picked up a pair of vintage Nike Cortez Velcros from the 80’s in Black and yellow for 10$ US. I could sell them on Ebay to Japanese kids for ten times that! Speaking of Japanese kids, look out for them, they will snake you and buy up everything good. Get there around 8 pm to get the jump on them. Dude sets up on the left side near the 7 11 on the end of Khaosan furthest from the Temple.
And while you are on Khaosan, check my other dearly held secret there, for…
Music:
The Best place for Bootleg CDs in Bangkok is also on Khaosan, but it’s more of a literal secret. It’s a hidden storeroom that doubles as a wholesale distributer to all the Bootleg CD stalls on Khaosan and in surrounding Bumglamphu. Since bootlegging CDs is technically illegal here, they don’t really want just anybody going in there. To gain entry you can go to one of the stalls nearest to the Temple and beg to see the store, or just walk in. Behind the first booth on the left there is an alley that leads to a bar that is always empty. Walk though the back door of the place, up two flights of stairs, down a corridor that smells like cat pee and through the unmarked door at the back of the hall. Smile and walk in like you own the place. There you will find an air-conditioned, well-ordered mecca to illegal music with a special focus on Hip-Hop, electronic and DJ mixtapes. The CDs are arranged by genre and label, and the label sections are completist- they order every release from labels like Big Dada, Quantuum and Ipecac. The CDs are bit more expensive, something like 100 baht a piece, but you get deals if you buy more than 10, which you should.
Food:
Bangkok is a giant restaurant and there is food everywhere, so I’ll only bother with one suggestion: The MBK Food Court. Bangkok’s biggest mall , near Siam Square, has a food court unlike any other. It’s like a huge collection of street vendors, but with hightened hygiene awareness and signs written in English as well as Thai. Now you can know what those random gizzards you’ve been eating in the soi are called in English! Each stall specializes in and serves only one dish in the Thai repertoire, or one specialized ethnic cuisine. It’s all very affordable and you can go a little crazy there with the funny-money tickets you have to buy at the gates. My special recommendation goes to the Vegetarian stall, which makes incredibly flavourful, spicy Thai specialties like Pad Woon-sen and Muslim Fish Curry out of homemade fake meat and achingly fresh vegetables. MBK has also just added another floor of food, this one very slick, modern and freezing-cold with the air-conditioning. It’s also pricier, apparently aimed at tourists and elitists. Here you get a little credit card at the door and have it scanned for what you want. Then a kid with a uniform like a back-up dancer in a Beyonce video carries your tray to a table. I’m not sure what the appeal of all this is, since the food is just as good and cheaper upstairs. I guess you can get pizza and steak or something here, which some might appreciate. I’ll stick to the 6th floor food court.
Afterwards you can head to the other side of the 6th floor where you can get cheap electronics, computer software and bootleg DVDs. You can get a copy of Ableton Live 6.0, the complete Studio Ghibli boxed set and a USB Flash Drive for the price of dinner at Red Lobster. Then, if you are still here in 6 months like me, we can commiserate and be desperately broke together over 10 baht pad thai!
burma November 13, 2006
we’re thinking about going to burma. i know that there is a travel boycott in effect, susan sarandon, amoung other, (mostly british), celebrities has vowed not to visit burma until the current despotic military regime is ousted–but i have a difficult time understanding how the boycott helps the people of burma, or for that matter, how visiting burma harms them further. i get that the government is horrible, and of course i don’t want to give them my “tourist dollars”, (meagar as they are). but at the same time–because burma is so cut off from the outside world–no one goes in, no one comes out–i can’t help but think it’s better to go and learn and experience–so that if nothing else, you can bring back personal stories, and a sense of the people. i mean, exposure is better than smug hollywood boycotts any day, isn’t it?
does anyone have an opinion on this subject? we were having breakfast this morning and two pocketfaces at a nearby table told us not to go there because there’s no tourist infrastructure. that to me is kind of a plus. i know not to listen to pocketfaces, especially not pocketfaces who are drinking beer at 11:00 in the morning and re-hashing the events of the previus evening in which one of them was bit by a snake he was carrying around–incidentally not the first time he’s been bit by a pissed off snake. not only that, these pocketfaces live in phuket–which by comparison makes cape cod look like it doesn’t have a tourist infrastructure. so their advice was useless.
we had this fantasy about travelling over land from thailand, through burma, into india. i’m pretty sure this is not possible, the government has to issue permits to go just about anywhere, but it’s a neat idea.
