Almost every night after returning from our day's adventures we visited Chiang Mai's night markets. Chiang Mai has a popular night bazaar which was not for us. It was full of stands all selling the same souvenirs like lighters, knives, elephant t-shirts, and crafts supposedly made by hill tribes. The bazaar had some food but it was mostly beer snacks like spring rolls or french fries. Eventually we discovered a market north of the bazaar called Warorot. Although our book claimed that it was mainly a morning market, it was still active at night. There, we found plenty of food stands and lots of clothing with poorly-translated English.
Day 1
Baan Thai Cooking School
Eric
Our class was comprised of a french couple with moderate English skills, a danish girl named Denise who spoke near perfect English, and a Spaniard named Diego who spoke very little English.
Then or course there was Lyndsay and I and our instructor, Boom. Boom means dimples in Thai. Boom was very nice and spoke English very well which gave us a chance to ask her about fruits and veggies we were curious about when we walked to the market to shop for ingredients. She also let us choose 2 sweets and 3 fruits from the market to try as a class. We decided on black sticky rice with egg custard, banana leaf packets of sweet rice and banana, mangosteen (no one but us had tried it yet!), dragon fruit, and jackfruit. She taught us about different veggies and herbs as well as noodles and rice.
When we returned to our classroom, we prepared a Thai welcome snack.
To make the snack, you take a leaf (something related to the black pepper plant) and fold it into a cone. Then you put a piece of shallot, a piece of ginger, a dried shrimp, some toasted coconut, ground peanut, and a piece of lime with the peel in. Then you top it with some sauce made of all the same ingredients minus the lime and plus plenty of palm sugar. Then you pop the whole thing in your mouth and enjoy. Very delicious.
We then got a chance to try some of the fruits and sweets.
Lyndsay and I were the only pair that ate our whole plate of snacks. They threw away so much tasty stuff! Thank god they saved the jackfruit for the whole meal. Dragon fruit was pretty good. It's a little like a kiwi, but not as tart and a little softer in texture. The texture was a little like a cantaloupe.
The first thing we cooked was chicken with fried cashews. We did all the preparation on the floor using tamarind wood chopping blocks and small cleavers.
The meat in the dishes was always prepared for us, so we just had to chop up the veggies. Lyndsay and I both agree that Thai garlic is really great. They are much smaller cloves than the garlic we get in America, but you can eat the peel because it's so thin so you don't have to peel them. This dish also included fresh jelly mushrooms and fresh baby corn, which were both delicious and both things I've never had fresh. The whole dish was really easy to prepare and was delicious.
After eating the cashew chicken we prepared ingredients for tom kha kai, a coconut milk soup and one of my favorite Thai dishes. We prepared yam woonsen (glass noodle salad) at the same time because it had many similar ingredients. The tom kha had fresh oyster mushrooms in it and the yam woonsen had more jelly mushrooms--this time uncooked.
After eating our second course (third if you count the snacks) we took a break to rest and digest. We took this time to chat with our classmates about Thailand. Poor Diego got left out a lot because he didn't really understand us most of the time.
Our next challenge was making namphrik gaeng phet--red curry paste. We divided up the ingredients among the classmates to be minced finely before being put in the mortar and pestle. Lyndsay chopped shallots and I chopped kra-chai, or wild ginger. The others chopped up lemon grass, garlic, galangal, coriander root, and kaffir lime peel. Boom dealt with the soaked dried chillies. Everyone took turns pounding our paste in the mortar and pestle.
We used the curry paste to make red curry with chicken and delicious fried fish cakes. We ate our curry over rice and a kind of noodle called khanom jinn which is made with slightly fermented sticky rice. The khanom jinn was my request.
We had some jackfruit for dessert and took of with Denise toward Wat Chedi Luang.
You can see some more pictures of our cooking class here.
Wat Chedi Luang was super cool. We went because a young monk had talked with us the night before after I offered him the rest of my fried grasshoppers.
They were good, but too oily. He told us monks weren't allowed to eat after noon, and then he just kept talking to us. He invited us to the wat because it had a program called Monk Chat, where monks like himself got an opportunity to practice English and you could ask them questions about Buddhism, Thailand, or whatever. He said it also had a beautiful chedi. He was right about that!
This chedi was unlike any other we had seen before in Thailand. It was built in the Lana style, which is older than Ayuthaya or Sukkothai and its most notable feature was the four naga staircases.
At the top of each staircase there was a Buddha sitting under a bodhi tree. We couldn't go up the stairs because the chedi was being restored. If you're planning on going to Chiang Mai, do not miss this wat.
Day 2
Royal Flora Ratchaphruek 2006
Eric
This exposition was organized by His Majesty the King. We were expecting it to be a collection of exotic and native plants that were exciting or rare. Like a lot of things in Thailand, there was a lot of flare, but not much in the way of content. Like other royal projects, for example the hall of opium we mention in the Chaing Saen entry, it was oddly well organized and almost out of place in Thailand. It was set up almost like an amusement park, with trams going from place to place, and fancy trashcans that looked like logs.
The garden design was really the highlight and we did learn about some pretty cool plants. Our favorite was a plant called miracle berry. When you eat one of its somewhat tasteless fruits, it numbs your sour taste buds for several hours so everything you eat tastes sweet! We did not get to try it because there were no fruits on the tree. There was a bonsai competition, a houseplant competition, a garden design competition, and various orchid competitions. There was also a rubber tree forest, a tropical greenhouse, a fruit exhibit, an insect exhibit and butterfly hall, and gardens representing around 20 different countries. There was a temperate greenhouse, which is something you don't often find in the US. There were tulips growing here and the Thais were all super excited about them. Everyone was practically lined up to take pictures.
At the rubber tree forest, we watched a guy making rubber balloons by hand and we got this one that looks like an apple.
At the entry there was a bronze bodhi tree for the king.
You could make a donation to buy a leaf to hang on it, and at the end of the event they melted down all the leaves to cast a Buddha in his honor. We saw clips of the casting on TV. There was also a spectacular palace at the center built for the king. The interior walls had murals depicting the king helping farmers and visiting remote villages.
This palace seemed to be the main attraction for the Thai visitors.
Overall the experience was good but we decided the place was a little weird.
Day 3
Doi Sutep
Lyndsay
To get to Wat Phra That Doi Sutep, a famous temple outside of Chiang Mai, we caught a songtow. The ride up the mountain was one of the best deals we have gotten from a songtow driver because it was scenic and mostly uphill. We went to see the three-hundred step naga (serpent) staircase. Later, we realized that the naga staircase is common among northern Thai wats.
One of the other unique things about the wat is its golden umbrellas. Eric walked around the golden chedi ringing the bells.
After visiting the temple, we explored the road around the mountain to see if we could find some hiking paths without having to pay the fee to enter the national park below. We failed but ended up enjoying young coconuts and feeding pieces of the coconut flesh to some chickens.
We also stumbled upon the orchid jade factory which had large touristy signs. They gave us glasses of cold tea, had us watch a video, took us on a quick tour, and then watched us as we examined all of the jade they had for sale. We had fun watching people sculpt the jade and learning about the different colors and qualities of the stone. There were plenty of food and souvenir vendors along the road, but after trying some very starchy grilled bananas we decided to give up on hiking and returned by songtow to Chiang Mai.
Day 4
Doi Inthanon
Lyndsay
Eric and I came to Thailand hoping to visit a few of the national parks, but we had not realized how difficult finding transportation to them can be. Because I didn't want to try to figure out how to get to Doi Inthanon, one of Thailand's most well-known, we booked a tour to the park. The best part of the trip may have been the people we met rather than what we saw. Our group included 5 Thais and 2 Australians. One of the Thai women had studied at Cal State Long Beach so she talked to me for a while about California and Thailand. The one Thai man in the group talked more than anyone I have ever seen. Our entire time in the van and all throught lunch he talked loudly and monotonously without any of his family seeming to respond. Once in a while we caught English words like Philipino, stem cell research, and samurai. The Australians were funny, both wearing shorts, tank tops, and silly sunglasses to one of the coldest places in Thailand. One of them asked the guide questions like "Why do people love the king so much?" and "Is this village very poor?" Our guide Tony tried hard to make jokes and to hold together the odd group.
Unfortunately we were unable to hike around the park. We stopped off to see a waterfall then to take a photo in front of a sign that said "highest spot in Thailand."
We then visited the two royal pagodas, one for the king and one for the queen.
They are surrounded by beautiful gardens filled with flowers rare in Thailand but common to us like pansies, snap dragons, fuscias, and California poppies.
The highlights of the day included a catapillar sighting and our lunch which included generous portions of tom kha (coconut milk soup), fried fish, stir-fried vegetables, omlettes, rice, and fresh fruit
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