Tales From The Future

Today was our Thai cooking course. Before we arrived we booked a course with the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School. It was the first cooking school set up in Chiang Mai and has an outstanding reputation. By the end of the day, we agreed.

We met at the cooking school at 10 am. There were 16 people in our session. Thankfully the cooking school is set up to handle lots of students and we each had our own work station.

They divided us into two groups, and we were then shuttled off to the local market for our introduction to traditional Thai ingredient. Our teacher/guide took us around and showed us the different types of herbs, roots, and rice that are used in Thai cooking. Here are some shots of food Court took at the market.

After we got back from the market we went into the demonstration room where the teachers showed us how to make the dishes. Once she went through making the food we went back to our workstations and tried to make it ourselves then we’d sit down and eat. Then repeat the process for all 6 dishes.
The first dish we made was tom kha gai, or chicken in coconut milk soup. It tasted excellent and everyone was amazed at how easy it was make.

The second dish we made was raad nah muu , fried thick noodles with thick sauce and pork. There was a thick sauce on the noodles that tasted like a mixture of molasses and soy sauce. This was our favorite dish of the day.

The third and fourth dishes we made were ( Gaeng Phed Plaa , red curry and fish and, phad hed ruam khao pod om, fried mixed mushrooms with baby corn. We ate these two dishes together for lunch. Not that we were really hungry after the first two dishes, but they still tasted very nice.

The fifth dish we made was khanom kluay, steamed banana cake. It had to be steamed and it was dessert, so we ate it last. This was a very sweet dessert that was relatively easy to make. The consistency as similar to uncooked muffin batter, but still tasted great. It was also a good counter taste to the spice from earlier in the day.

While waiting for our banana cakes to steam, we prepared our sixth dish, som tam, or green papaya salad. For this dish you had to crush garlic and birds-eye chilies using a mortar and pestle. The more you crush the chili, the spicier your salad gets. I thought I wasn’t crushing the chili pepper too much but then when we got to eating, it turned out I crushed it too much. The salad was a lot spicier than it should have been. Oh well. Next time. It still tasted good. We also forgot to take a picture of this. Epic fail.

We finished up the cooking course around 3:15. And we all went on our way. There was an Australian family of three that are heading to Laos tomorrow, we are heading there on Monday, so we won’t be surprised if we see them there.

We had some sunlight left and a nice blue sky, it was time to go look at some more ats , temples. These wats are usually a whole temple complex not just the temple. Most of them have a main temple area, living quarters for the monks, chedis and other structures depending on the location.

There were a few in the old town area that we hadn’t seen yet and set out in that direction. We got to the first temple complex and I realized I was wearing shorts. It is extremely rude to wear shorts into a temple. I had to run back to the hotel and put on my pants then hustle back to meet up with Courtney. We went to three different wats this afternoon.

The first wat we went to was Wat Phan Tao.

The second wat we went to was Wat Chediluang Varaviharn. In this complex there was an enormous chedi that was slowly and painstakingly being rebuilt.

The last wat we went to was Wat Phra Singh. We didn’t stick around here too long. We had to go for our second fitting at the tailors and, more pressingly, find a bathroom for Courtney.

After this we made our way back to the tailor tried our clothes on again. They fit better this time. We also strolled through the night market and ate some Greek food for dinner. We were handed a flier for but decided to skip out on the Thai Ladyboy Beauty Contest tonight. Now we are back at the hotel getting ready for bed and another busy day tomorrow.

“How do the Thai women giving foot massages deal with gross travellers’ feet?”, Alex. Ping Pong. 200 dollars for me. I’ve spent the whole time in Chiang Mai wondering how the women giving foot massages all over the place deal with travellers’ feet. More specifically, I wondered what the grossest feet these women have ever seen were like. Fungus? Warts? Ingrown toenails? Horrible stench? Today I got my answer they wash your feet first, hopefully the washing gets rid of any stench and is time to screen people’s feet.

First thing this morning we went back to “Big Al’s”, actually called Art Café, for breakfast. This was the same place that had the greasy breakfast from yesterday. We went for something lighter and healthier.

This is when our weather luck wore out, it started to rain. We left “Big Al’s” and went in search of a tailor to make some pants for Courtney and shirts for me.

We had a couple places in mind before we set out. However we stopped at the second tailor we found, G.G. Armani Collection. Inside there was one man working. He started to talk to us about the materials they had and what we wanted to get made. At some point during this he called his brother, “the closer”, to come in and talk to us.
“The closer”, with his slicked back hair and his well refined sales pitch, could give any salesperson back home a run for their money. He spent an hour and a half with us, going over materials, designs and smooth talking us. We eventually settled on three pairs of pants for Court, two shirts and a suit for me. I eventually haggled him down to 10,000 baht (¥30,000 or CDN$350). We figured we could have gotten this stuff for cheaper if we went around to all the different tailors in Chiang Mai but we really didn’t want to spend the time doing that.

After the tailor, we went to confirm our cooking class for tomorrow. The rain was coming down even harder and we did the only sensible thing we could think to do; we got foot massages. This is where we learned that they wash your feet first (I’m going to avoid making the Jesus/Easter reference). They took us upstairs to a large open room with mats on the floor. We settled in, head on the provided pillows, and the ladies went to work. Court figured her feet were too tense to begin with, because the foot massage actually hurt her for the first part of it. It wasn’t until 30 minutes later when her feet actually felt relaxed. My feet still feel good now. We may have to do this again before we leave.

We left the massage parlor, got rained on again and proceeded into the restaurant next door for lunch. This was not a good idea, the restaurant left a lot to be desired. Hence no pictures of the food.
The next thing on our schedule was to go to the Museum of World Insects and Natural Wonders. It was a little out of town, which involved haggling with and retaining the services of a tuk-tuk driver. I haggled him down to a fair price and off we went.

This museum is a privately funded museum that holds a strange variety of displays, materials and paintings. The owner/operator of the museum, Manop Rattanarithikul, was there to greet us when we arrived. He welcomed us gave us a sheet with a self-guided tour of all the displays and off we went.

To give you an idea of the kind of man who runs this museum let me tell you a story. The first visitor that he had to the museum was an elephant. This elephant promptly left a present for him. Mr. Rattanarithikul took it as a sign of good luck and it is the first display you see in the museum.

Manop and his wife, Dr. Rattanarithikul, did a lot of research on mosquitoes and mosquito borne diseases, e.g. malaria, dengue fever. They actually identified about 22 new mosquito species.

Starting in the 1960s they did a lot of field research in areas that were suffering from malarial outbreaks. This research involved using themselves as bait and trapping the mosquitoes that were trying to bite them. They had a lot of signs up that were “written” by the mosquitoes of Thailand saying essentially, “We’re not trying to hurt you we just want to give you a special hug.” Needless to say they really like insects. The second floor of the museum had rows and rows of cataloged insects, beetles, and butterflies. I’m sure it would have taken years of work to catalog everything. Wow!

The museum also housed a display of rocks that he had taken from special locations all around the world: Notre Dame, London Bridge, and the Grand Canyon are just a few of the places he’s visited. Dr. Rattanarithikul completed her Ph. D at Kobe University in Japan, so Mr. Manop had lots of rocks from Sannomiya and other areas in Japan.

After the museum we meandered our way to a small shopping street. We actually missed in on our first pass and settled in at a coffee shop to warm ourselves up. We wandered through the upscale shopping area. Courtney bought a silver bracelet and then it was back to our hotel to do some laundry.

We did some laundry and watched a crappy Adam Sandler romantic comedy; it was the one about the remote control. For all you Food Network Canada lovers out there we also watched “Chef at Home” and “Sugar”. And for all you Larry King lovers out there, if there are any that read our blog, we watched Larry King with Jack Hanna and his animals. I’m sure Larry King couldn’t have been less interested in what was going on.

Then it was time for dinner: Mexican food! We made our way to the Chiang Mai Saloon and had a good meal of nachos, tacos, and burritos. Excellent food. While we were there we heard a lady who was playing pool announce to the person who asked that she was from Bathurst, New Brunswick. Of course we had to say something. We chatted with her for a while. She teaches at an international school in Bangkok and has been here for a few years. She’d also been in Japan, so we talked about eikaiwas for a while as well.

After dinner we had to meet the tailor again and get our first fitting done. Tomorrow we’ll do our second fitting. On our way back to our hotel we stopped to watch the show that was on at the big stage in the park as part of Chiang Mai’s winter festival. We watched for a little while when I noticed that the lady who is singing had much larger thighs than the other people up there dancing. Then she stopped singing and said something in her normal voice, which was close to one octave lower than her singing voice. Now we felt like we’d arrived in Thailand we’d seen a drag show. Yep, that’s a good way to end the day.