sd’s world tour

February 18-22

So my site seeing activities in Chiang Mai were very light.  I checked out the main wats just as one is supposed to do, but wat fatigue had set in.  However, Chiang Mai is not just a place for sightseeing.  It is much smaller and calmer than Bangkok and seems even more civilized.  Cars actually stop at red lights.  Tuk tuk drivers start negotiating at a reasonable price.  In short, it is a great place to just be.  Which is probably why there are so many hippies hanging out there. 

It is also a base for a lot of great activities.  Cooking classes, elephant camps, trekking, tours of tribe villages, etc.  I did the first two activities.  The second two I was less interested in.  I learned well in Vietnam that I need to be in better shape before attempting even the lamest trek.  And I did my exploitative visits to the nomadic minorities already this trip.  Especially since the village visits you do on a 1 day trip tend to be the variety where you and your entire tour bus are all taking pictures of the same three elderly ladies.  I was intrigued, though because one of the tribes you see is one where women wear rings around their necks, extending their necks to dangerous links.  I support the ill tribes keeping hold of their own culture – militating against me going to visit their villages – but I also think that this particular practice reeks of misogyny and don’t, by my tourist presence, want to support such – also militating against my going.  So that was quite settled. 

As most of you know, mostly how I entertained myself was by taking 5 days of cooking classes at the Thai Cookery School.  Yes, I learned how to make a lot of yummy dishes and, yes, I promise I will make you something if I have fish sauce with me when I see you.  The classes were next door to the house of the school’s founder Sompon Nabnian.  It was about 15 minutes outside of Chiang Mai and every morning I was picked up at my hotel (the wonder Baan Orapin, if you are looking for a nice, quiet, not expensive b& b) and was driven to the school. 

Each morning we began with a cooking related activity: vegetable carving (I can make a mean tomato skin rose), making our own curry paste (way a lot of trouble), touring the market.  Then we would head to the little classroom to learn how to make the first meal.  About half of these demonstrations were by Sompon himself.  Watching him cook was like all the best parts of Food Network rolled up with a lovely Thai-accented English-speaking chef.  He would make little jokes, usually the same 7 over and over again.  Like: “A good amount of spiciness is 3 small chilies; I’m using 9.” Or: “Make sure you cut the mushrooms exactly like this because they taste better.”  The jokes were always charming, even on second or third hearing.  When he finished a dish, it was like a revelation, especially when he garnished the dish with some beautiful decoration.  His tomato lotus flower was especially nice.

The other dishes were demonstrated by twenty something apprentices who made up in good spirits what they lacked in gravitas.  There was often some hilarity involving an ingredient that was accidentally thrown away, or debate over the order ingredients went in the wok. 

So after the first demonstration, we would go to our little stations to make the dishes ourselves.  And it often happened very fast:  Coconut cream, curry paste, meat, coconut milk, vegetables, sauces, sweet basil, chilies, garnish, done.  Most of the ingredients were laid out for us, just waiting to be chopped, and I learned it is much easier to cook when you don’t have to do any shopping and the ingredients are all lined up.  Then we ate the first dish.  We repeated the process for the second dish, yum.  Then we prepped the third dish, followed by the fourth, and ate both together for lunch.  Then it was back to the class for the fifth dish and sixth dish, which were sometimes slipped because the latter was a desert of some sort that often required extra time.  It was a tremendous amount of food and I often was too full by lunch to eat much of anything in the afternoon.  In fact, each night I skipped dinner, sometimes just swallowing down a banana before bed. 

Here are some food highlights.  Note that the pictures don’t necessarily correspond to my favorite dishes, especially since I didn’t have my camera the first day.  Nor are the dishes always mine, the especially pretty ones are Sompon’s. 

Day 1 wins the award for best all round, and most closely resembles what I made back in NYC after the trip.  It is basically pork meatballs cooked in water with tofu and various greens, which are added at the last minute, giving the soup a fresh taste you wouldn’t expect to find in a pork soup.  [As with all the dishes, recipe available upon request].  The Spring Rolls were easier than I would have thought, especially since the staff did the deep frying.  [Though they were also easy enough at home . . . where, come to think of it, Maura did the frying]. 

The red duck curry was just as delicious as what we had at Baan Khanita in Bangkok.  And easy too.  But it would have been much harder to make had I had to prep my own curry paste and roast a duck.  When I remarked on the added difficulty inherent in cooking the duck, this very annoying Dutch woman said, “Oh, it’s just sliced very thin so it cooks fast.”  Yes, lady, after the bird is roasted for god knows how long.  She however, was one of the few people in the class during the week that I didn’t like, or rather the only person that I actively disliked. 

Note about my classmates.

Generally, people came for just a day, we chatted or not, and after 4 pm I never saw them again.  There was the nice, helpful British couple on the first day.  The couple who lived on the UWS with the chatty wife and the quiet husband (the reverse of what we normally encountered).  The well-traveled twenty-something girls from Utah.  The well-traveled and super peppy twenty-somethings fromSan Fran.  The Mexican-American couple from El Paso who were living in Korea.  A slew of Australians, Germans, Dutch, Swiss.  Lots of friends-for-a-day.  I actually ran into the Utahians one night in the market and we watched a very staged Thai dance performance together. 

There were also a few multi-dayers.  Patrick the Swede was a favorite.  Jerome the Swiss.  Alex the Spanish chef was nice enough.  As was Siimon, the Kiwi chef, though a bit arrogant if you ask me.  By way of example, one of the vegetable dishes we made had a heaping tablespoon of ketchup in it.  I voiced my skepticism about putting ketchup in any quality dish, save meatloaf.  Oh no, he told me, [I won’t attempt the accent], any real  chef knows that ketchup is a savior in the kitchen.  He uses it in everything, especially in his Bolognese to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.  Interesting, I said (Gross, I thought).  I use milk in my sauce, I suppose for the same purpose.  You would have thought I said I used the blood of virgin babies as salad dressing.  He had “nevah” heard of any Italian chef using milk.  I’m guessing though that most Italian nonnas aren’t reaching for Heinz in la cocina.  I know my Italian host mother never would have (except maybe in those pigs feet).  By the by, I thought the ketchuped vegetable dish was too sweet.  So there.

For dessert, sticky rice cooking in coconut with mango slices.  Delicious!  It even made me love mango!  As soon as I buy the appropriate steamer (read: when I have space to spare in my kitchen.  [read: never.]), I will make it non-stop. 

The next day was good too, with traditional Tom Yam Goong (Hot and Sour Prawn Soup), Pad Thai, Green Curry and the fish cakes that some of my MYC peeps got to try.  Really a greatest hits of Thai cuisine day.  The pad thai was just as we know and love. Though I didn’t put the little dried shrimp in cause that crap is nastay looking.  Who needs crunch from their shrimp?  The trick I loved was how to get the egg into the dish.  After cooking all the main ingredients, move them to the side of the wok.  Crack an egg in the empty space, break the yolk and move the egg around the wok until it is totally friend.  Then mix the egg with the rest of the ingredients and serve immediately.  Don’t forget to garnish with chives and peanuts! 

The only thing we made that I did not prefer was a dessert made with water chestnuts.  Yes, crispy but flavorless water chestnuts (problem 1).  First, you soak the water chestnuts in red food coloring (problem 2) and dredge them in tapioca flour.  Boil them for a few minutes until the flour dissolves.  The water chestnuts are now a bright magenta and have a gummy exterior and a crisp, still flavorless inside (problems 3, 4 and 5).  Serve with coconut milk, ice and simple syrup to taste.  It’s just as unremarkable as you would imagine. 

As evidenced by my pictures, to Thai chefs, food presentation is almost as important as taste.  Another Sompon deadpan was he added a jalapeno flower to curry: “Now you can charge more.” 

Of course we shopped.  Our attempts at shopping in Vietnam had been stymied, so we had gift lists to complete and baht burning holes in out money belts.  (Just kidding, we didn’t use money belts.  They’re lame.  Maura had one, but I wouldn’t let her use it.  Then there were our water filtration gadgets.  Maura’s never worked and mine was so big that it didn’t fit in my suitcase.  So the best laid plans . . . are usually a waste of time.)

Our first and favorite market was the Suan Lum Night Market.  I think it may be a relatively new market because it barely got a mention in out guidebooks, and only in one of them.  But it was the bomb.  It was a whole complex of one-storey buildings that we walked around and through, finding all sorts of treats.  Cute crafts, great décor, cute dress shops with Asian-chic clothes.  And pretty much everything was less than $10.  It’s hard to argue with that.  It also had open air bars and restaurants set up in the middle and I think we could have happily spent the night sipping German beer neath the giant light-up Suan Lum Market tower.  We loved it so much the first night, we went back for more the next night.  One of the main reasons for going back was because Maura had the opposite of buyer’s remorse for passing up some little soaps.  They had cost $2 each and Maura, comparing that cost to the cost of everything else thought it quite expensive.  We spent the better part of 45 minutes looking for those g-d soaps, trying to systematically go through each building, all of which looked the same, and find the place we had been the night before.  Of course, we were also spending money on other goodies along the way.  When we finally got there, the people said the price was 10 baht higher (30 cents) than the night before!  I think Maura was waivering on whether to pay this exorbitant new rate, but I told her she kinda had to.  We were not leaving that place without many, many soaps. 

The other, more famous, market was the Chatuchak Weekend Market.  This market is the Big Thing that all the guidebooks tell you to do.  But as far as I am concerned, it was a poor man’s version of our night market.  First, it was a good 20 degrees hotter.  Though I suppose that cannot be blamed on the market, since it was, after all, bright daylight.  More importantly, though, the crap to quality ratio here was much more skewed to crap.  Don’t worry, we still managed to find a few trinkets to buy.  In its favor, the Chatuchak Market makes up for its deficiencies with great people watching.  While there were loads of tourists there, it was also clearly a place that locals go there to do their weekend shopping.  I was quite happy sitting at a little bar stand in the shade watching the staff and watching shoppers go by. 

February 15

On day 2, we went right for the touristic heart of Bangkok, the Grand Palace and the Wat Phra Kaew, which is part of a giant complex on the river.  Both have been built and rebuilt over the last 250 years by the “Rama” kings, with each adding his own improvements to the complex.  We very wisely chose to do the audio guide.  At first, we did it just to make the most of our time, but who knew it would be the best audio guide ever.  It was the only one I have ever done where I haven’t been all, waaiit, what am I supposed to be looking at?  So, friends, life lesson, do audio guide at the Grand Palace.

The tour starts at the amazing Wat comlex, which is full a beautiful little chapels and relic-holding buildings and shiny statuary.  The big ticket item (or little, wee, tiny ticket item really) is the very sacred Emerald Buddha.  This little guy has been very well traveled over his life.  He lived in Chiang Mai for a few centuries, was stolen by the Laotians and lived there for 200 years until the Thai defeated them in some war or another, and then moved around to a few different wats in Bangkok before settling here.  It’s only about 50 cm tall and they have it waaay up on a tall pedestal in a huuuge building so that it looks eeeven tinier.  The best part about this guy (much like Carrie Bradshaw) are the outfits.  He has three outfits, one for each season, and the outfits can only be changed by the king.  So, three times a year, the king shimmies up the pedestal to redress the Buddha.  However, the current king gets a pass since he is, you know, 82, so the crown price has vestment duty. 

Another exciting part of the Wat experience was trying to take pictures without people.  Always a challenge, especially where there are throngs of people loafing around.  I tried not to be the guy (of which there were many) who stood thirty feet from their friend to take their picture and got mad when people got in the way.  It’s all about close ups and angles, people. 

Onto the Grand Palace, which was the royal residence until, I believe, the current king.  Our favorite tidbit: in one of the buildings behind the coronation throne room is the original king’s chambers.  Each king must spend his first night as king in the royal bed to show that he can perform “all his kingly duties.”  Ahem.

Brief interlude wherein we search for NY Times-approved street meats.

After the Grand Palace, our plan was to walk one of two “restaurants” that were in a recent NY Times article on Bangkok street eating scene.  It’s just what you do.  When in Bangkok, yo gotta go up to the road side carts and stalls and get some mystery meat.  Of course, me being me, I can only go to places that have been okayed by someone who has eaten there and not died.  Hey, I wouldn’t eat at a street vendor in NYC without such verification, so why would I do it in a country where people blow their nose on the street . . . I mean on the street.  (Okay, to be fair, there was much less snot rocketing than in Vietnam). 

Of course, this would be the day that I forgot the good map.  The NY Times only gave us an address and a vague map, so I had to triangulate the locations based on the mediocre map in the Rough Guide and the down right crappy map in Frommer’s.  Magically, we found both of them (1 point for my navigation skills), but they were both closed, one because it didn’t open until 4, which it clearly said in the NY Times article (minus 5 for not paying attention).

Another issue arising from my leaving the good map at home is that the guidebook maps have to fit in a book-sized frame and don’t really give you the sense that Bangkok is flappin’ huge.  I think our walk in toto was 10 blocks and it took us probably 45 minutes, much of it spent on sidewalkless roads with tuk tuks, trucks, and everything in between whizzing past.  Eep. 

Finally, after restaurant failure number 2, we decided to grab a cab or tuk tuk to an area with lots of restaurants that would be open.  At that point, I was still working on my tuk tuk negotiation skills, so I think I offered the first guy 10 baht.  Or about 30 cents.  Then this broke0down looking tuk tuk pulled up.  The driver was pretty broke down himself: he was barefoot, dirty and had some sort of blistering open sores on his lips.  He borrowed my pencil to write down that he would charge us 60 baht, but would be making a stop (for our benefit, of course) along the way.  No stops, we said.  Okay, 80 baht.  No that’s too much.  We would walk away and the offer would change.  50 baht with a stop.  No.  Finally, I got so fed up (and, let’s be honest, grossed out) that I just walked away.  Maura was much nicer and worked with him a little while longer, but I finally said I didn’t want to go anywhere with that guy and Maura did not disagree.  We ended up paying half again as much to a cab driver, but there were no stops and no open wounds.  I quickly Purelled my hands and my pencil.  Several hours later, I remembered the guy and his unfortunately interaction with my pencil and had to re-Purell.  I am still a little afraid he gave me the herp. 

After out lunch adventures, we went to the Jim Thompson House Museum.  So here is a bio-pic just begging to be made.  Jim Thompson was an NYC architect in the 40s who joined the military during WWII and was trained as a spy.  He was just about to be sent into Thailand to “help” the Thai rid themselves of the Japanese (though the Thai pretty much happily surrendered to the Japanese and were saved recriminations after the war allegedly because the Thai ambassador to the US forgot to deliver the declaration of war), when the war ended.  But he so fell in love with Thailand and its culture that he moved back after the war.  Or was he an OSS/CIA operative working to stop the domino effect who set up shop as a front?  At any rate, he became a huge fan of Thai textiles, especially Thai silk weaving, and helped get the West excited about it too.  It was silks he brought to the US that outfitted the cast of the King and I, which won an Oscar for best costumes.  Silk weaving was a dying art in Thailand, so he trained Thai women in the art and began a business exporting them around the world. 

He also constructed a must beautiful house from six different traditional Thai teakwood houses and filled them with amazing Thai, Burmese, Loatian, and Cambodia crafts and antiques.  8^th century stone Buddhas.  Burmese wedding tapestries.  17^th century Thai paintings on silk.  19^th century Chinese porcelain.  And, my personal favorite, antique Laotian drums he turned upside down and made into lamps.  CIA or no, you cannot tell me this man was not gay.  With such a such a fabulous house and such panache, he soon became the hub of expat activity in Bangkok.  He entertained most Americans of note who came to visit from Truman Capote to Ethel Merman (that is absolutely cribbed from Rough Guide).

So the screenplay is coming along nicely.  We have war and intrigue.  The American imperialist learning to love a different culture, even fostering lost arts.  Fabulous antiquing (just what every movie needs).  Cameos by quippy intellectuals and entertainers.  Then there is his mysterious death in his 61^st years, just as foretold by a Chinese astrologist years earlier. 

He was traveling in Malaysia when we went out for a walk one afternoon down a country road and never came back.  After extensive investigation, no one ever figured out what happened.  Theories abound.  Some think it was his alleged work for the CIA that did him in.  A more rational explanation is that he was the victim of a hit and run – that a truck or bus hit him, stashed his body in the bush and never reported it.  Then there is my theory that he went the way of Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain.  So we’ll see what Soderbergh can do with that.