TRIP DAY: Saturday, November 5th
POST DAY: Sunday, Nov. 6th, 2022 5:10 AM GMT+7/ Saturday, Nov. 5th 5:10 PM CST
Well everyone, I’m treating you all to a double feature today. Today was the 4th day of the trip, second day in Bangkok, and man was today loaded with a lot of funny moments. Let me see if I can reexplain the moments as I experienced them. But before I begin, let me preference by saying I am typing this blog in bed early Sunday morning all while knowing I have to be in the lobby by 6:30AM for our 9:00 AM plane flight to Chiang Mai. But enough of me exposing myself, to the blog!
EF GUIDE:
Travel outside of Bangkok to the Damnoen Saduak Floating Markets. It’s like a mall, but everything is floating and must be accessed by longboats. And you can find locally-crafted goods and fresh fruit. And the food vendors put your local food court to shame. Okay, so it’s not like a mall at all. It’s better.
We only did two excursions today: A coconut farm and the Damneon Sadual Floating Market. The coconut farm was the first thing this morning. The entire farm had
roads and roads of coconut trees in deep water canals. These coconut fields went for miles. When we arrived at the farm we were immediately greeted by monkeys, lizards, and roosters. I am unsure if the animals had a purpose of being collected or if they were truly there for the terrorist to see animals. The monkeys were really showing out for us today. One monkey was flipping and swinging around in the middle of the cage with one arm. The other monkey got up close and personal with another girl on the tour and grabbed her hair and tried to pull her through the gate. The lizard, like all lizards do, was being quite photogenic. Roosters walked around the farm freely as they were not caged and then there was a caged squirrel. Yes, you read that right, a caged squirrel. My biggest question was how did they get a squirrel to be in a caged. This looks like a normal squirrel and nothing extravagant.
The coconut farm itself had a lot of different areas from teaching people how to extract the coconut milk from coconuts to showing how they turn coconut milk into coconut wine, and several other things made from the entire ocean. The farm allowed you to try all the cooking activities and the food and drinks that were made from the coconut. One activity allowed you to sit on a stool and learned how to scrap out the coconut meat and drain it with your hands to remove the liquids from
the solids. The separation allowed them to then create multiple products. One of the products created from the liquid of the coconut that we also were able to try was coconut wine. The wine tasted a lot like sake. I am unsure if that taste came from how the coconut wine was made or the ingredients used to make the coconut wine. Another activity that I participated in was mixing boiling coconut liquid that was currently in progress of thickening into a brown caramel like substance. Turning this, was quite difficult as it required a lot of upper body strength, which I am currently lacking a little bit. After the mixing, I was allowed to try the caramel like coconut sugar. And it did taste like a soft caramel candy. Once I was done playing chef for the day, I was able to shop in the store and buy some small gifts. I was able to buy some coconut wine to drink on the bus on the way to the next destination (I haven't drunk any type of alcohol at this point on this trip, so the coconut wine was going to put me in a mood I wanted to be most of the trip, intoxicated. Once done with the coconut farm, we headed off to the floating market which was the main event for the day.
The floating market was beyond anything I have ever experienced. The floating market definitely requires a lot of awareness. For those of you that are visual learners, take, I don't know, let's say Madison Street on the West side of Chicago. Now when you are going down Madison, you have all the storefronts. They have different things that they are selling both inside and outside of the store. Now imagine a person in front of each stores bargaining and hackling you trying to sale you any and everything no matter the quality of that item is. This does happen down Madison but the only difference here is that you are on water. So as your boat driver is driving you down this river at a slow pace, you have the hecklers in their boats with their items with long sticks literally pulling you to their boat just to try to sell you an item. Now granted, the whole time all these items are marked up according to the price that they want to sell it at, always some absurd price. The object of the game here though is to bargain all the way down to the cheapest price possible. Let's just say this is a skill that I do not possess, and I did not participate in. But it was very much fun to watch ev
erybody else in my boat participate in the bargaining and heckling with the owners. Oh, and did I mention that everybody in my boat was black, so you could only imagine the funny events, conversations, jokes, and looks that went on during this entire process. Then you add us floating on dirty, river water on top of all of this, you can see how this was a hot mess. Just believe me when I say that. I think the funniest thing to this whole experience was that we were the last, I kid you not, the last boat to leave the pier, but how in the world were we the first boat to arrive back? We knew we could not be out bargained so really we were messing with the people to simply see if they can lower their price to lowest possible. Also, we just simply didn’t see anything we wanted. They had everything at this market though: souvenirs, clothes, fake purses, fake shoes, food, jewelry and oh did I mention snakes and small monkeys were for sale? Ok they were not for sale but rather on sale to take pictures with. Once you we were done with boat ride, we were dropped off to experience the market from landed. I only cared about food and found me some good Pad Thai to eat at a restaurant on land. This was Pad Thai dish number one today. After I ate, I walked around the market until it was time to go to see more people bargain and heckle.
We returned to the hotel around 3:30 PM. I walked around in the neighbor for a while before going into the mall to eat my second Pad Thai meal for the day. This one was my favorite so far. I then had to kill 5 hours as I had a message appointment scheduled with the spa located adjacent to our hotel. I had a Thai Massage. The base of this massage is through apply pressure to several different pressure points all over the body. This 5’4” Thai women had me all bent in different shapes. She was using her arms, fingers, knees and full body to massage me. It felt great to have the pressure in my body redistribute. At one point she also stepped all over my back. It was well needed as I had a lot of tension still in me from work, soreness
from the amount of walking we have been doing as a group and the long hour flights at the beginning of the trip. My massage was a full body and lasted 90 minutes for only 900 THB (the Thai money – I’ll have to do a post blog explaining the money here) which rounds out to $25. At the beginning of the massage, I was given some herbal tea (which I feel was a tea to make me sleepy) and at the end of the massage they provided me with mango stick rice and a cold tea. It was a great experience. Well worth it. I will be getting more messages in the other two cities we visit.
Well folks, I think I have talked with you all enough for today. Please enjoy your day and catch you next adventure!
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