noodle quest 2006

yesterday’s weekend market utterly blew my mind into tiny tiny shardy fragments. we woke up pretty early and then took a bus to the subway where we got off at the second to last stop to go to the weekend market. we stepped into it and i was just like oh my god i am so overwhelmed i don’t even know if this is appealing. i also wasn’t sure what i wanted which is a deinite no no in this market situation. i stopped another stunned farang (foreigner) and we looked at his map. HEAVENS TO BETSY i was only looking at one super small square in one very tiny section of just the section of the market that was devoted to clothes! there was also the door and window accesory section (mom try not to statr drooling), the home accesories market, the animal market, the used clothing market, the pots, pans and dishware market, the misc. market and probably a few more all in the same half circle grid that is known as the weekend market. oh yeah- of course there is also the food market.
wow. i decided to buy some fisherman panst to try and sell in nyc so i bargained around and got a good deal. then we walked around a bit, and ate some noodles.
after this it was getting unbelievably hot. dan bought us some ice pops. his tasted like extreme green apple and mine tasted like salt. ew it was gross.
then we decided to go to a movie because the heat was unbearable. we went to the movie theatre by his house and saw a thai movie called “nam phrik long rue” which was really silly. it was about this misfit team of ex navy men who were all crazy and one was a transvestitie an dthey had to go undercover into this transvestite party but then the transvestitite navy man got killed. it was really weird how normalized transvestitism was compared with some of the straight male characters reactions to homosexuality (i.e. vomitting when they by accident touched something that had touched another man’s genitals). it’s like this tolerance has to be paired with something like “it’s fine, but it’s not me.”
then we came back home and hung out for a while until i went to dinner with the chinese grandpas and danny went to his football game. oops, i mean soccer.
dinner was utterly fantastic. they were so excited to have me there we had a big round table in a priavte room. the gues list included the owner of teh restaurant (chinese grandpa #1), dr. rey (chinese grandpa #2) and a new friend mr. tao who works for the housing ministry in the thai government.
we started with a delicios soup with squid, shimps, mushrooms and fishballs. fishballs are really to my thing but teh soup was excellent. next came fried shrimp in a delicios tamarind dipping sauce. then a giant steamed fish with green vegetables and gingers was brought out which was also extremely delicios. we were also served thin noodles with shrimp and chinese kale in a delicious brown gravy, fried rice with pork, roast pork with preserved vegetables, kale with garlic and ginger and chicken, and mabe some other things i am forgetting. for desert they had probably the most delicious frit i ever had which they called star fruit but is different from what we call star fruit in the states. wow, what a great time. all of the men were so doting it was rediculous,. very literally one put ice in my drink, one poured and one stirred then one woul dstir again because it needed mroe stirring. so funny. they were such kind and generous hosts and begged me to come back and let them throw me an even bigger mroe delicious goodbye dinner celebration. i’m not sure if there will be time but it is so kind that they wanted to. they also forced me to accept money for the taxi ride there and had a driver drive me back to dan’s after dinner. thanks chinese grandpas and friends. chinese grandpa #, dr. rey is buying one of the biggest hotels in bangkok. i think he may be able to offer me some really fun and fantastic job where i get to travel a lot. too bad that doesn’t sound cool.
dan got to eat delish leftovers for post football dinner. luck him. now breakfast and then a different market before i com eback, pack and go to koh tao!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.