The Adventures of Brian & Julia

9 am and 90 degrees. If you shut your eyes and held your fingers to your ears, you’d swear you were in a steamy bathroom after a long, hot shower. But then you’d smell the basil.

Bangkok was a shocking place to land after India, but it would be anyway. As we rode smoothly across a freshly paved overpass, shivering from the (incredibly strong) A/C, it felt like we had bought tickets to the future. Huge, ultramodern buildings cluster in every direction, and the roads are well populated with modern luxury-brand cars driven by appropriately wealthy looking professionals. After India, and an overnight flight, we were dazed to say the least.

We took the bus to Khao San Road, the (in)famous backpacker ghetto of Bangkok, and found our was through the melee to a hotel in the middle of things, which stood out because it was the same price as everywhere else but had a pool, so we dropped our bags and headed up to check it out. Up, because the pool (already exciting) was on the rooftop (excitement reaching dangerous levels!), and we had it all to ourselves (YESSS! We have ARRIVED!).

After a couple days, we found a neighborhood nearby that we liked better, so we left the pool behind, but the theme of living it up carried on for our entire week in Bangkok. You literally cannot walk 10 feet in this city without being offered a massage, a new wardrobe, and, most memorably, about a hundred thousand things to eat. I was beyond overwhelmed at the food in Bangkok. It seems like about half the population is either cooking or eating at any given time.

There is so much to eat here that the options are literally on top of one another. The streets are lined with restaurants of every sort, including several major American chains. On the sidewalks, in front of them, are informal “street stall” restaurants, which prepare a standard menu of popular thai dishes, and charge about 30 baht ($1) for most entrees. In front of the sidewalk, on the street itself, are the carts, selling anything and everything that isn’t available at the restaurants or stalls (roasted corn, pad thai, and anything deep fried or on a stick seems to be popular). Beyond that, people cook on the back of motorcycles (in traffic) and on steamer baskets balanced on their shoulders as they walk along in the road itself.

Despite the insane abundance of choices, we made a sincere attempt to eat everything Bangkok had to offer, and failed deliciously. We ate every color of curry, with and without rice, coconut soup, noodle soup, and stir fry galore. We had New Zealand Steak cooked on a Japanese hibachi grill, Chinese dumplings with ginger sauce, Belgian waffles filled with custard, and plain old Pizza Hut. We ate at least three different kinds of banana pancakes, (some with a generous slathering of nutella!), bacon and egg sandwiches, and regularly ordered shakes at breakfast (fruit shakes, made with fresh fruit and ice, are available everywhere here). Between meals, we sampled the street food: satay skewers, garlic sausage, and sweet corn roasted over coals. Did I mention there’s a 7-11 on every block that sells Thai Iced tea, fountain drink style, for about 40 cents? They stay open all night so you don’t have to do without.

I fell in love with the noodle soup from a particular stall, and ate it for breakfast about every other day, spiked with hot sauce and topped with roasted peanuts. Rich, gentle and fragrant, with celery leaves and flower cut carrots bobbing over top of tangled rice noodles, it tasted like the broth to cure anything that’s ever gone wrong in your life.

On a day trip to several of the mega-malls across town, we decided to take the sky train, a sleek new monorail line connecting the city. At one stop, Brian pointed out a cart squished between the ticket booth and a stall selling lingerie that offered freshly made waffles and suggested we check it out. It smelled like heaven. How could I say no? We ordered one with custard inside, and found ourselves passing it back and forth, talking around greedy mouthfuls about how this was, quite possibly, the best thing we had ever eaten.

Obviously, I could go on for days about everything we ate and how good it was, but I suspect you get the gist. If you are a person who enjoys food, even a little bit, you owe it to yourself to get to Bangkok sometime. When we arrived, bloated and happy at the bus station for our ride out of town, we were already glancing back at the city, not sure how the rest of the trip might measure up after this. And then we spotted a waffle cart
-Julia