http://picasaweb.google.com/sambrummitt/Pretrip02
http://picasaweb.google.com/sambrummitt/Bangkok
http://picasaweb.google.com/sambrummitt/Food
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http://picasaweb.google.com/sambrummitt/Phuket#
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Monday, March 01, 2010
Spring Festival Trip to Thailand
After working extra hours in late January and early February for reasons such as two teachers who took time off to travel and a ten-day winter holiday class for kids during their school break, I was on vacation for nearly two weeks. I attended two banquets for the Chinese New Year (also known as Spring Festival) in Nanjing, both were put on by the school I work for - one with students and parents in a hotel ballroom and another for just the staff at a restaurant. Early in the morning on February 11th it snowed pretty heavily and during the day everything became slushy and wet. I was happy to get be able to get out of the city the next day and fly two hours south to Guangzhou. The weather wasn’t much better there – very cold and rainy – but I stayed only one night and took another flight to Bangkok on the 13th.
During the first two days of the trip I wore just enough to keep me warm – jeans, two pairs of socks, a short sleeve and a long sleeve shirt, a light jacket, and a thin rain jacket – as I went to the Nanjing airport, and then kept all that on during the next two days because it was in the 40s and raining in Guangzhou. When I got off the plane in Bangkok it was in the 80s and quite humid. It was only a short ride on an air-conditioned bus to get downtown, so I shed my jacket and waited until I got to my hostel before changing into shorts and flip flops.
I met a guy on the plane who is from Madagascar and works in China and since he didn't have a room reserved he came along and took the last empty room in my hostel. We ended up spending the next day and a half seeing Bangkok together.
Bangkok was a really vibrant city full of travelers from around the world. It was similar in some ways to China -- streets crowded with noisy and fast traffic, sidewalks full of pedestrians, many food vendors selling cheap drinks, snacks and whole meals out of carts, and tables of souvenirs, fake DVDs and designer goods. I ran into a number of Chinese people, both ethnic Chinese who live in Thailand and families who were travelling for the New Year holiday in Thailand. Traditional Chinese characters are always frequently used in signs in Thailand and English was widely spoken so it was easy for me to get around and do some shopping.
Some things were very different from China – there are few bicycles but many motorbikes. There were lots of pickup trucks and nearly all of the cars were Japanese brands. With the guy from Madagascar, I went to Chinatown on the 14th, the first day of the Chinese New Year, and saw some of the festivities with dragon costumes, fireworks, and Chinese snack foods. I also went by a number of Buddhist temples, the Golden Palace, rode a motorized three-wheeled tuk tuk, took the elevated commuter train, and did lots of shopping. Clothes and souvenirs were all really inexpensive. I have never eaten Thai food in China, where you can only find it a small number of upscale Thai restaurants in big cities, so I was happy to find fresh and cheap (and spicy!) Thai food everywhere. There was also lots of Indian food, which I had for dinner one night.
After spending three nights in Bangkok I got on another plane for a one-hour flight to Phuket. I spent just over five days there and experienced quite a bit of my mom's new life as an English teacher in Thailand (she's now known as teacher MJ). I also learned a lot about Phuket’s different social groups - the sunburnt tourists, the fat doms (dirty old men) who are there for the sex, the local Thais of all ages and income levels, the Burmese laborers, and the teachers and retirees from Western countries. I arrived just after 6 PM and by the time I got in a taxi with my mom to go home it was dark so I didn't see much of the island or her neighborhood at first but by the end of the week I was very familiar with Phuket. That night we ate dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant just a few minute walk from the house and it was the first of many excellent meals that week.
On Wednesday morning I joined Mom on her commute to school, we left at 7:15 AM. There was a morning assembly on the open-air ground floor of the school. While that was going on I met many teachers, both foreign and Thai. I went to three classes that morning where Mom and I co-taught a lesson on the volume of cuboids and the kids had fun chatting with their "guest teacher" who happened to be their math teacher’s son. In between those classes we snuck out to have breakfast in the café next to the school. We went back there later for lunch, too, and I met two parents that mom has befriended. By now she seems to know everyone.
In the afternoon, teacher MJ didn't have anything to do at school until 4 PM so we snuck home, dropped our stuff off, and then went out on the moped to see some beaches and a lookout point on the southwest corner of the island. It was extremely hot that day at well over 90 Fahrenheit. The shops were all doing a slow business because there were not many tourists. Everyone who was on the beach that day was relaxing under the shade of big umbrellas, sipping drinks on ice and fanning themselves. It was too hot for us to do much so we went home to go for a swim, only to find that the water in the pool was also pretty hot after baking in the sun all day.
We went back to school for Mom's last class during the final period of the day. That night we went to Phuket Town to eat at a multi-level open-air restaurant, called The Natural, which is full of trees, plants, and fish tanks. The restaurant was on a nondescript city street in a rundown part of town, but as soon as we stepped into the place it felt like we were in a rainforest. After sweating all day in the intense heat I sweated a lot more throughout the dinner because I ate a seafood soup that turned out to be extremely spicy. Several times during our meal large leaves fell onto our table from the trees around us. It was one of the coolest restaurants I’ve ever been to.
On Thursday teacher MJ and teacher Amy went off to school very early while I slept in and headed out mid-morning on the moped to visit different spots around the island. I saw a large pier on Rawai beach just down the street from Mom's house where boats depart for smaller nearby islands. There were long wooden fishing boats moored to the beach, which was scattered with coconuts and huge cages for catching seafood. I went up and over the mountains in the middle of the island to get to the west coast. There were a lot more tourists on that side, many of whom who stuck out because of their large waistlines and overly tan or sunburnt skin. There were lots of souvenirs and fake goods for sale and touristy things like massage tents on the beach, moped rentals, parasailing, and swarms of tuk tuk drivers looking for passengers.
That night two young Chinese women who teach at MJ and Amy's school came over for dinner. The five of us walked down the beach for a while and picked up a few crabs that were hanging out on the sand; the smallest ones were almost translucent. We also ran into a few local kids – a boy in his early teens was riding a moped with three little kids in the sidecar. For dinner we shared nearly ten dishes of Thai food at a roadside restaurant. Another cute little kid was their playing with his toy cars and guns and making us laugh. After eating we crossed the street to have massages from blind masseuses. All five of us were in one large room; we chatted in English and Chinese while the five masseuses conversed in Thai (probably about us) throughout the hour-long massage.
On Friday morning MJ and Amy left for school at 7:15 again and I went there on my own a bit later. I volunteered as a guest teacher again and this time I taught two Chinese classes – just very basic things like greetings and colors. We had lunch at the café next door, and then took off in the afternoon to Phuket Town where we went shopping and later saw some monkeys on a hill just outside of town.
After a brief stop at home, we rode the moped to the west side of the island where we sat on plastic stools at a folding table on the sidewalk and ate bowls of noodles cooked in a cart (the meal for the three of us was about $3). After finishing off the noodles we walked down the street and stopped again for dessert when we saw a place selling sticky rice with mango and sweetened condensed milk. The west side of the island is full of tourists and that Friday night was hopping. We walked down a bar street where people stand and gawk at dancers – and lady boys (male to female transsexuals). You could pose for a picture with either a lady boy or with a huge iguana that guys were offering up for a fee.
There was a party on the beach that weekend with a huge temporary bar and some big name DJs so the beach was packed, too. Spotlights at the concert illuminated the sky and every once in a while we would catch glimpse of bats flying through the beams of light. We bought a four-foot high paper lantern to light and launch from the beach. It was a very moving experience to stand on the beach, with the ambient sound of waves crashing into the shore and the thumping beats from the concert, and watch our lantern gently float up and out over the ocean, where it joined a dozen more lanterns that formed a constellation of flickering lights in the clear, starry night sky.
It was nearly midnight when we got back on our motorbikes to head back to the other side of the island. After a night of cheap Thai food, bars with dancing lady boys, and a DJ spinning beats on the beach (what a way to spend a Friday night with my mom) we went to a restaurant called Happy Days that serves some very authentic Western food. We had one of MJ and Amy’s favorite treats – apple crumble with custard (the British kind of hot custard, not Wisconsin frozen custard) and a couple of fruit smoothies. It was the perfect nightcap to a fun night out in Phuket.
That weekend we went to a national park on the north end of the island with three other teachers from MJ and Amy’s school to ride zip lines from platform to platform high up in the trees. Mom and I also rode an elephant up in the mountains. We spent part of one day on the beach and snorkeled, did some shopping and sampled local treats at a fair at a Buddhist temple (tiny bird eggs, taco-shaped things with cream and shaved egg yolk, and fried crickets and maggots), and had drinks and snacks at a hillside restaurant overlooking the western coast where we watched the sun set over the Andaman sea. That restaurant probably topped The Natural restaurant in Phuket Town as the coolest restaurant I’ve ever been to. We ended the weekend at the Happy Days restaurant where we had eaten apple crumble with custard earlier in the week. Amy had a vegetarian Thai dish and my mom and I both had a scrumptious Sunday roast, just like the British do, with generous servings of roasted vegetables, roasted potatoes and mashed potatoes, beef and chicken and pork, bread pudding and pumpkin soup.
Each day while I was there I sampled new food and drinks, indulging in both Thai food and western food (both of which are much better than what I can find in Nanjing). At home each afternoon we would go for a swim in the pool only 50 yards from their house. And every evening we’d sit on the porch, sipping mango smoothies and eating fresh coconuts while listening to all the wildlife around us (the crickets, birds, and bull frogs and who knows what else are really loud!). I met some of her neighbors (they seemed to all be European) and some of the local people who do the grounds keeping. Some of her other neighbors include a handful of cows, deer and swans.
Mom/Merb/MJ is doing really well in Thailand and enjoying every moment (as you can gather from reading her blog). She wants me to verify that she’s not exaggerating when she says she is extremely content in Thailand and to reassure to everyone back home not to worry or feel sorry for her – she is loving every minute of her life there. The honeymoon period when you move to a new place usually lasts only a month or two, but she seemed to have not yet come down from the initial euphoria of moving to Thailand (and it’s been over four months). She is still giddy about her good fortune to end up with a teaching job she likes, a house and a neighborhood that she loves, and an active and adventure-filled life on a tropical island. I phrase I heard from her many times was “I just love it!” That sums up my trip to Thailand, too. I loved it. The food is excellent (the local food is so spicy, fresh, and delicious, and there’s lots of good western food, too), Thai people are extremely friendly and open, each day was sunny and hot, the beaches and rainforests were gorgeous, and I had many unforgettable experiences serving as a guest teacher in my mom’s school, snorkeling at a small and quiet beach, riding a zip line in a tropical forest, swimming in the pool near the house each afternoon, riding an elephant, and feeding wild monkeys.
During the first two days of the trip I wore just enough to keep me warm – jeans, two pairs of socks, a short sleeve and a long sleeve shirt, a light jacket, and a thin rain jacket – as I went to the Nanjing airport, and then kept all that on during the next two days because it was in the 40s and raining in Guangzhou. When I got off the plane in Bangkok it was in the 80s and quite humid. It was only a short ride on an air-conditioned bus to get downtown, so I shed my jacket and waited until I got to my hostel before changing into shorts and flip flops.
I met a guy on the plane who is from Madagascar and works in China and since he didn't have a room reserved he came along and took the last empty room in my hostel. We ended up spending the next day and a half seeing Bangkok together.
Bangkok was a really vibrant city full of travelers from around the world. It was similar in some ways to China -- streets crowded with noisy and fast traffic, sidewalks full of pedestrians, many food vendors selling cheap drinks, snacks and whole meals out of carts, and tables of souvenirs, fake DVDs and designer goods. I ran into a number of Chinese people, both ethnic Chinese who live in Thailand and families who were travelling for the New Year holiday in Thailand. Traditional Chinese characters are always frequently used in signs in Thailand and English was widely spoken so it was easy for me to get around and do some shopping.
Some things were very different from China – there are few bicycles but many motorbikes. There were lots of pickup trucks and nearly all of the cars were Japanese brands. With the guy from Madagascar, I went to Chinatown on the 14th, the first day of the Chinese New Year, and saw some of the festivities with dragon costumes, fireworks, and Chinese snack foods. I also went by a number of Buddhist temples, the Golden Palace, rode a motorized three-wheeled tuk tuk, took the elevated commuter train, and did lots of shopping. Clothes and souvenirs were all really inexpensive. I have never eaten Thai food in China, where you can only find it a small number of upscale Thai restaurants in big cities, so I was happy to find fresh and cheap (and spicy!) Thai food everywhere. There was also lots of Indian food, which I had for dinner one night.
After spending three nights in Bangkok I got on another plane for a one-hour flight to Phuket. I spent just over five days there and experienced quite a bit of my mom's new life as an English teacher in Thailand (she's now known as teacher MJ). I also learned a lot about Phuket’s different social groups - the sunburnt tourists, the fat doms (dirty old men) who are there for the sex, the local Thais of all ages and income levels, the Burmese laborers, and the teachers and retirees from Western countries. I arrived just after 6 PM and by the time I got in a taxi with my mom to go home it was dark so I didn't see much of the island or her neighborhood at first but by the end of the week I was very familiar with Phuket. That night we ate dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant just a few minute walk from the house and it was the first of many excellent meals that week.
On Wednesday morning I joined Mom on her commute to school, we left at 7:15 AM. There was a morning assembly on the open-air ground floor of the school. While that was going on I met many teachers, both foreign and Thai. I went to three classes that morning where Mom and I co-taught a lesson on the volume of cuboids and the kids had fun chatting with their "guest teacher" who happened to be their math teacher’s son. In between those classes we snuck out to have breakfast in the café next to the school. We went back there later for lunch, too, and I met two parents that mom has befriended. By now she seems to know everyone.
In the afternoon, teacher MJ didn't have anything to do at school until 4 PM so we snuck home, dropped our stuff off, and then went out on the moped to see some beaches and a lookout point on the southwest corner of the island. It was extremely hot that day at well over 90 Fahrenheit. The shops were all doing a slow business because there were not many tourists. Everyone who was on the beach that day was relaxing under the shade of big umbrellas, sipping drinks on ice and fanning themselves. It was too hot for us to do much so we went home to go for a swim, only to find that the water in the pool was also pretty hot after baking in the sun all day.
We went back to school for Mom's last class during the final period of the day. That night we went to Phuket Town to eat at a multi-level open-air restaurant, called The Natural, which is full of trees, plants, and fish tanks. The restaurant was on a nondescript city street in a rundown part of town, but as soon as we stepped into the place it felt like we were in a rainforest. After sweating all day in the intense heat I sweated a lot more throughout the dinner because I ate a seafood soup that turned out to be extremely spicy. Several times during our meal large leaves fell onto our table from the trees around us. It was one of the coolest restaurants I’ve ever been to.
On Thursday teacher MJ and teacher Amy went off to school very early while I slept in and headed out mid-morning on the moped to visit different spots around the island. I saw a large pier on Rawai beach just down the street from Mom's house where boats depart for smaller nearby islands. There were long wooden fishing boats moored to the beach, which was scattered with coconuts and huge cages for catching seafood. I went up and over the mountains in the middle of the island to get to the west coast. There were a lot more tourists on that side, many of whom who stuck out because of their large waistlines and overly tan or sunburnt skin. There were lots of souvenirs and fake goods for sale and touristy things like massage tents on the beach, moped rentals, parasailing, and swarms of tuk tuk drivers looking for passengers.
That night two young Chinese women who teach at MJ and Amy's school came over for dinner. The five of us walked down the beach for a while and picked up a few crabs that were hanging out on the sand; the smallest ones were almost translucent. We also ran into a few local kids – a boy in his early teens was riding a moped with three little kids in the sidecar. For dinner we shared nearly ten dishes of Thai food at a roadside restaurant. Another cute little kid was their playing with his toy cars and guns and making us laugh. After eating we crossed the street to have massages from blind masseuses. All five of us were in one large room; we chatted in English and Chinese while the five masseuses conversed in Thai (probably about us) throughout the hour-long massage.
On Friday morning MJ and Amy left for school at 7:15 again and I went there on my own a bit later. I volunteered as a guest teacher again and this time I taught two Chinese classes – just very basic things like greetings and colors. We had lunch at the café next door, and then took off in the afternoon to Phuket Town where we went shopping and later saw some monkeys on a hill just outside of town.
After a brief stop at home, we rode the moped to the west side of the island where we sat on plastic stools at a folding table on the sidewalk and ate bowls of noodles cooked in a cart (the meal for the three of us was about $3). After finishing off the noodles we walked down the street and stopped again for dessert when we saw a place selling sticky rice with mango and sweetened condensed milk. The west side of the island is full of tourists and that Friday night was hopping. We walked down a bar street where people stand and gawk at dancers – and lady boys (male to female transsexuals). You could pose for a picture with either a lady boy or with a huge iguana that guys were offering up for a fee.
There was a party on the beach that weekend with a huge temporary bar and some big name DJs so the beach was packed, too. Spotlights at the concert illuminated the sky and every once in a while we would catch glimpse of bats flying through the beams of light. We bought a four-foot high paper lantern to light and launch from the beach. It was a very moving experience to stand on the beach, with the ambient sound of waves crashing into the shore and the thumping beats from the concert, and watch our lantern gently float up and out over the ocean, where it joined a dozen more lanterns that formed a constellation of flickering lights in the clear, starry night sky.
It was nearly midnight when we got back on our motorbikes to head back to the other side of the island. After a night of cheap Thai food, bars with dancing lady boys, and a DJ spinning beats on the beach (what a way to spend a Friday night with my mom) we went to a restaurant called Happy Days that serves some very authentic Western food. We had one of MJ and Amy’s favorite treats – apple crumble with custard (the British kind of hot custard, not Wisconsin frozen custard) and a couple of fruit smoothies. It was the perfect nightcap to a fun night out in Phuket.
That weekend we went to a national park on the north end of the island with three other teachers from MJ and Amy’s school to ride zip lines from platform to platform high up in the trees. Mom and I also rode an elephant up in the mountains. We spent part of one day on the beach and snorkeled, did some shopping and sampled local treats at a fair at a Buddhist temple (tiny bird eggs, taco-shaped things with cream and shaved egg yolk, and fried crickets and maggots), and had drinks and snacks at a hillside restaurant overlooking the western coast where we watched the sun set over the Andaman sea. That restaurant probably topped The Natural restaurant in Phuket Town as the coolest restaurant I’ve ever been to. We ended the weekend at the Happy Days restaurant where we had eaten apple crumble with custard earlier in the week. Amy had a vegetarian Thai dish and my mom and I both had a scrumptious Sunday roast, just like the British do, with generous servings of roasted vegetables, roasted potatoes and mashed potatoes, beef and chicken and pork, bread pudding and pumpkin soup.
Each day while I was there I sampled new food and drinks, indulging in both Thai food and western food (both of which are much better than what I can find in Nanjing). At home each afternoon we would go for a swim in the pool only 50 yards from their house. And every evening we’d sit on the porch, sipping mango smoothies and eating fresh coconuts while listening to all the wildlife around us (the crickets, birds, and bull frogs and who knows what else are really loud!). I met some of her neighbors (they seemed to all be European) and some of the local people who do the grounds keeping. Some of her other neighbors include a handful of cows, deer and swans.
Mom/Merb/MJ is doing really well in Thailand and enjoying every moment (as you can gather from reading her blog). She wants me to verify that she’s not exaggerating when she says she is extremely content in Thailand and to reassure to everyone back home not to worry or feel sorry for her – she is loving every minute of her life there. The honeymoon period when you move to a new place usually lasts only a month or two, but she seemed to have not yet come down from the initial euphoria of moving to Thailand (and it’s been over four months). She is still giddy about her good fortune to end up with a teaching job she likes, a house and a neighborhood that she loves, and an active and adventure-filled life on a tropical island. I phrase I heard from her many times was “I just love it!” That sums up my trip to Thailand, too. I loved it. The food is excellent (the local food is so spicy, fresh, and delicious, and there’s lots of good western food, too), Thai people are extremely friendly and open, each day was sunny and hot, the beaches and rainforests were gorgeous, and I had many unforgettable experiences serving as a guest teacher in my mom’s school, snorkeling at a small and quiet beach, riding a zip line in a tropical forest, swimming in the pool near the house each afternoon, riding an elephant, and feeding wild monkeys.
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