It’s the early morning of our second full day in Bangkok! Our first full day was full of delicious food. We were both thinking we’d lose a little weight here just because that’s what generally happens when people travel, but now we’re not so sure about that. The food is so cheap, and so so so good!
We both took short naps yesterday; we’re still adjusting to the time change. We also walked around the campus and neighborhood a little bit. There’s definitely a lot of hustle and bustle, and motorbikes are pretty loud, but there aren’t really people asking for money, or trying to get you to buy things all the time, which is very nice. I think on the other side of the river, and for sure in the more touristy areas, that will happen more.
This is where we are in Bangkok. On the east side of the river is the downtown area, and all the touristy stuff. We are in more of an actual Thai Bangkok neighborhood, which means we don’t see many tourists or white (or anything else besides Thai) people much. On the other side of the river I hear it’s pretty easy to get by with just English, because so many people there speak it, but not so much here. We’re working on learning Thai. So far we know numbers 1-10, hello, how are you, and thank you.
I think we met someone yesterday though who can help us out with that. Jack (his Thai name is Thanyawich) is the IT Director at the school and he picked us up from the airport. Our guess is he’s in his early thirties and he’s been at the school for 11 years. He’s finishing up his PhD this year. He has a strong accent but his English is pretty good. He took us to buy cell phones yesterday then we had dinner with him and our potential future Thai tutor. She goes by the English name “Apple” and she’s one of the Thai Language teachers at DSIL (the school where I’m working). She has a masters degree in Psychology and is currently working on a masters in teaching English as a foreign language. She’s a little shy and not very confident about her English, but it’s pretty good. She wants to work on her English, and we want to learn Thai so hopefully we can set up regular times each week to meet with her and work on that.
DSIL is on a university campus, and we ate breakfast and lunch at the cafeteria of one of the women’s dorms. Luckily one of the women serving the food spoke English otherwise we would have just pointed at things and probably ended up with something way too spicy for us. For breakfast, each plate starts with rice, then you can add as many sides as you want. The sides included chicken dishes, tofu dishes, vegetable dishes, and eggs a couple different ways. I asked for not spicy and ended up with one of the tofu sides and one of the vegetable sides. Jacob said a little spicy was okay (for those who don’t know, Thai food is known to be very very spicy), he likes spicy food but was being cautious with American-spicy versus Thai-spicy. He got a chicken side, a vegetable side, and an egg side. Adding a bottle of water and a coffee, our total came to the equivalent of a little over $2 USD. Lunch was similarly priced, we spent less than $5 USD for both breakfast and lunch (and drinks) for the 2 of us.
It’s the rainy season here and I was kind of expecting rain all day for the first two months. Turns out it’s more like, very intense rain, thunder and lightning for about an hour per day. Yesterday it happened during lunch. We had just started eating and it started pouring. We ended up hanging out there for a while since we didn’t have umbrellas or any rain gear. After a little bit, it changed to drizzle and we walked home, and shortly after that it was done. We’ll see how today goes!
We have phones now! Our phone numbers are 08-7595-1750 and 08-7595-1820 but we haven’t figured out how texting and calls work with the U.S. Since Jacob and I are on the same plan, it’s less than 1 baht for texts and calls between us (30 baht = $1 USD). As soon as we figure that out, I’ll let you all know. The outdoor market where we got the cellphones was very cool too; it had a ton of food stalls, fruit and vegetable stalls, then everything else you can think of – clothes, electronics, jewelry, etc. We got some grilled chicken skewers and sticky rice there, but brought them with us to dinner at a small outdoor restaurant/street food vendor right down the street from the school. At dinner we had a shrimp/mushroom/coconut milk soup (so good! my favorite at dinner), mango salad, papaya salad (spicy!), a ground pork dish, and sticky rice. It was all great. At the market, we also tried 2 new fruits at the market; we’ve never seen them or tried them before. One was a small light brown/olive green kind of hard shell circle but once you open it, it’s like a clear grape inside. The other was a spiky dark red/brown oval shaped thing. The inside was like a loquat. They’re both good and we brought a few home with us. There were a lot of other fruits and vegetables we had never seen or tried before so more updates on those later. And we’ll try to find the names of them too. There was also durian – we’ll see if we get brave enough to buy one of those someday!
Jack is supposed to take us apartment hunting today and we’d like to find a place ASAP so we can move in and get settled. We’ll let you know how that goes!
Below are some of the pictures that we took which should illustrate some of our adventures throughout the day. Since Cristal’s photo-blog is limited to one picture a day, and since we are new here and want to share a million (maybe more like 10-20) pictures a day with you, we’ll include the extra ones here. Cristal is going to keep doing her one pic-a-day blog though, too, so don’t forget to keep checking that out.
Our first meal in Bangkok:
Jacob walking near campus:
The school:
Pouring rain at lunch:
Our two new fruits from the outdoor market:
