Travelynn: One Night in Bangkok: Food Coma

Last night I came home from a vegetarian festival and was greeted at the gate by a trio of wagging tales… it’s nice to have a canine welcome back in my life, but even better to have Bangkok street food.

Since I’ve arrived, I’ve been pretty lucky to have had lots of introductions and invitations out to do stuff. The ex-pat community here is strong and they welcome in the newbies with a someone-took-good-care-of-me-when-I-first-arrived-so-let’s-pass-it-on mentality. Between people from work, fellow consultants, mutual friends and random people I’ve met along the way, my social life has been full…. ironically though it’s been full of French restaurants, contemporary cuisine and American style burger joints. My fear? It seems like you can actually get sick of Thai food??!

China Town

So when my food-expert friend invited me to go to the vegetarian food festival in China Town I jumped at it. I’m told the festival originated during a drought in China. The farmers prayed for rain for their crops vowing to become vegetarian for one week each year if their prayers were answered. I guess the god/s took pity on them because now it’s an annual tradition.* With 30% of the population here being of Chinese descent their customs hold strong. Ironically though, the festival is also celebrated with a lot of self-mutilation; piercing cheeks with spears, peeling back skin and impaling various body parts. Go figure.

Fried Flowers

Anyway, I arrived as instructed with an empty stomach and comfy walking shoes, and immediately felt like I stepped into my own episode of Globe Trekker or Anthony Bourdain. Food stalls run the length of the street for about a mile or so and people are jammed into every crevice. Unlike street festivals at home, here they don’t actually shut down the street – so you’re at the mercy of the drivers not to hit you and the crowd to not shove you into the ceaseless abattoir of traffic. I kind of want a helmet.

Looking around, it’s a semi-organized chaos of propane tanks, generators, charcoal pits and wonky looking tents decorated by strings of yellow flags signifying vegetarian food. We wander past stall after stall of familiar (mushroom stir fry) and crazy (fried flowers – orchids, roses, banana blossoms) offerings. We watch strong-men pound peanuts in alternating blows like men pounding spikes on the transcontinental railroad. Their creation, a fudgy type treat in a filo type pastry. Yum!

Coconut milk dessert poured into egg cups

Lucky for me, my friend is familiar with most of the stuff and zeroes in on what to get. He hops from stall to stall ordering treats I must try. We eat things like coconut rice pudding bake in bamboo, dough balls in ginger syrup and eggy-milk dumplings topped with sweet spices whose names I will never recall.

After dessert we headed to dinner at a street side seafood restaurant further down the block. In an effort to try all the best dishes we ordered five entrees for the two of us; mussels in a garlic cilantro sauce, oysters with peanut, chive and chili toppings, a peanut shrimp curry and a baked sweet and sour sea bass, plus the classic shrimp tom yum. (My friend shared that in the local fisherman’s culture it’s considered unlucky to flip over the fish to access the underside. "If the fish tips over, so will the boat." Instead, when the meat from the top side is gone, you remove the layer of bones and keep on digging. As foreigners, we just flip it over and hope for the best.)

It was one of those meals where the food is so good it’s really hard to carry on a conversation… your attention is on your mouth and it would be a disservice to put it anywhere else. This is what I came for. This is what I’ll remember. So, sooo good….. I am one lucky girl.