Halloween in Thailand

Saturday, October 31

(3rd) First official blog entry. By that I mean, this is the first one I’m sitting down to write for the purpose of our travel blog. I’ve jotted notes down for earlier days, or sent anecdotes as emails, and those might get added to the blog, but with this entry, I’m starting with today, which is not necessarily (and not actually) the beginning.

First, the facts of food and activities (daytime).

Breakfast was the free one provided by the hotel again. No pancakes today, but instead they served a Chinese-style breakfast of rice with a white sauce, with vegetables and chicken or pork mixed in. I had some, Ryan didn’t. We both had omelets made, and juice, and coffee with toast.

No brunch, as we were working on scheduling the next week in our room during the brunch hours. We snacked on mint chocolate wafers from Trader Joe’s that Ryan’s mother packed while we worked.

For lunch, we headed back downtown to Pak Do, which has curries and other local dishes set out in pots in the front of the restaurant. We lifted the lids and picked out what we wanted. I had the egg and pumpkin dish combined with a very spicy fish curry. Ryan had a hot chili beef and some not very spicy chicken curry. Aloi means tasty in Thai. These dishes were definitely Aloi. (Pronounced ah-roy or ah-loy, with a brief pause between the words.)

Walking around snacks: En route to lunch, we had smoothies from Juice Box. I had Ryan’s mixture from yesterday: Dragonfruit and mango. Ryan mixed lemon with green apple. Both were very good. Aloi for this place.

After lunch, we went to the paper store and picked out handmade paper for ourselves, then we walked over to the Chiang Mai history and culture museum. Right outside the museum is a statue of thee Thai kings, set in the center of the city. The plaza around the statue was gearing up for the festival and many, many paper lanterns had already been strung about. We got ice cream for 10B from a street vendor in the plaza (the ice cream machine is mounted on wheels and pulled about). She was about the scoop the ice cream into a bowl when I saw some slices of sponge cake and asked about them. So we got our ice cream scoops in a plastic bag sandwiched between two slices of … bread. It turned out to be plain ol’ white bread, not cake at all. Other local people got some after us, so it must be a legitimate serving style, unless we just invented a hot new trend (I doubt that).

Immediately after the ice cream, we went to get Shaking Milk Jelly drinks (20-25B each). Ryan had green tea + black sesame, topped with a double helping of gummi bears, plus blue jelly slivers and red jelly slivers, and more black sesame seeds sprinkled on top. I had Shaking Milk Thai Ancient Coffee with Pipo Jelly. It’s basically an ice blended coffee (which, btw, is far better than those from the gas station outside the Kona airport, Alana), but then two jello-like fruit pods are added and pulse blended for about a half second, just to shred them to slivers. It’s an odd combination. The texture is fine, but towards the end of the drink when the jelly is in high concentration, the flavors really conflict with each other. Except for Ryan’s bizarre topping choices, his green tea and black sesame went together very well. I give this place an Aloi.

Ice Cream & Bread Sandwich

Green Tea and Black Sesame Shaking Milk Jelly

With our shaking milks still in hand, Ryan bought some pork satay (maybe chicken, but we guessed pork) from a street vendor (5B each). He got two skewers with meat, green bell pepper, tomato and pineapple (a single item of each per stick), brushed with very yellow butter (lard or margarine?) and dressed with a generous sprinkling of pepper (?) and chili sauce. They were very good. Aloi.

No sooner had we finished the satay than we bought some roast banana and coconut milk, too (10B). Our single order got us three bananas (short, squat ones, like apple bananas, and with a dense texture), stacked, squashed, and sliced wide and a scoop of thickened coconut milk. This was also very good. Aloi, again.

Activities:

HQ Paper Maker – Beautiful paper, not too expensive. Despite all the advertising for the place it didn’t feel terribly like a tourist trap. At least there was no sales pressure. I notice that the paper lanterns for the Loy Krathong festival are all made of similar textured, hand-made paper. I wonder if it’s provided/made by this place.

Historical & Cultural Museum of Chiang Mai (or whatever name – I just made that one up [Oh, it’s the Chiang Mai City Arts and Cultural Center]) – A lot of reading, exorbitant air conditioning in some, but not all, rooms. Some of the interactive displays were in Thai only. Others had an uninspired English narrator. The information was sometimes interesting, but also often got bogged down by names of places and people without enough context or familiarity to distinguish them. The life-size recreation of an old village on the upstairs level was pretty cool. The downstairs area made me sleepy, but we did learn some things about the history of the town.

Evening food & activities

Supper was at a vegetarian restaurant, Taste from Heaven. The dishes there were hit or miss, and overall I was disappointed. Best dish: My Thai chili stir fry. It was both beautiful and delicious, with sprigs of peppercorns, black and green; crisp beans; red bell peppers; and tofu (or textured soy protein – I don’t know the difference). Ryan’s main dish, Sour curry, was the most disappointing. I don’t like hot & sour soup, and this had a similar flavor to me. (Ryan says it’s not like hot & sour soup at all, so I don’t know what I’m talking about.) We both liked Ryan’s salad (which deserves a picture but we didn’t think of that in time) – I don’t recall the name, but it was a crispy salad with flash-fried morning glory (the flower? Or a coincidence of translation?) leaves in batter and a tasty sweet & sour dressing. The only flaw in the recipe was that there was a too much dressing. My summer rolls (called “fresh spring rolls” here) weren’t that great. The ingredients were fresh and tasty, but the rolls were too lean. I still like the ones in Hawai`i better. Maybe they’re a southern Thai dish? I haven’t seen them anywhere else in Chiang Mai yet. [Later I asked someone who's been living here for a couple years and she said they're Vietnamese, and called either Vietnamese spring rolls or fresh spring rolls.]


Thai Chili Stir Fry

We stopped briefly at the Tha Phae gate to launch a sky lantern and watch some wacky Germans tie too many fireworks to theirs, so that it was too heavy to get off the ground and carried a payload of fireworks into the crowd of people, who properly ran away. The lantern sat on its firecrackers while they exploded until the thing was light enough to get off the ground. The event was hilarious because no one got hurt, and pretty much killed our thoughts of tying firecrackers to a balloon. (Others did it much more successfully, and we might still have a go at it.)

Back to food: We wandered along the Saturday Walking Street (a Saturday evening street market) and bought some cheap desserts that caught our eye. They were glossy and colorful, shaped like little vegetables, the way marzipan creations can be. These weren’t marzipan, but instead they were sweet white bean paste surrounded with some sort of corn syrup-esque sheet that was shaped and dyed or painted to resemble the treats we saw. They were tasty, and worth the 1B apiece. We had two each.


Bean paste candies

We eyed all sorts of street food but were too full to buy any. Pad thai, satay, black jelly (yes, a big, quivering mound of black agar. The sign said it was made from vegetable – seaweed, I guess – and to be eaten with sugar, so I don’t know if it was sweetened yet or not), fruits, chocolate cakes and so on. We got a bottle (too big) of passion fruit juice for 40B. It was too much for us, but she was sold out of the small size. It also wasn’t 100% passion fruit juice, so we were chagrined when we found a fruit juice stand selling 100% juices, including passion fruit, in smaller quantities. Well, it was tasty anyhow. The bottle was gross to open, though: The foil was glued on with some sort of waxy paste, and I had to peel it off and then squeeze my hand around the waxy bottle cap to twist it open. I got paste all over my fingers.

More pictures of food in Chiang Mai