Day 4: Iron Chefs

It's hard to believe, but we've already reached Day 4 of the trip. After our long day of hiking and waterfall swimming yesterday in Doi Inthanon National Park, we decided to have a chiller day today and hang out around town.

We signed up for a group Thai cooking class in the morning. Our guide, Gay (Gae? Gei? Ghei? Gheiiii?), met us and took us to the local market. She showed us all of the local Northern Thai ingredients, including lemongrass, various types of basil, ginger, limes, and spices, and the different noodles used in Thai cooking. She also immediately endeared herself to us both because of her use of the word "sexy" to describe everything and her relentless making fun of Silbs based on his inability to identify different vegetables.

After using the market as yet another opportunity to buy cheap Thai snacks and discovering the revelation that is pad thai spring rolls, we arrived at the cooking school, where we met our teacher, Noot. Our stations were prepped for us to make the first course of our five course eating marathon: pad thai.

Over the course of the morning, we cooked and ate such Thai delicacies as pad thai, pad see ew, cashew chicken, spring rolls, papaya salad, tom yum soup, and mango sticky rice (for each of the courses, each person had a choice of what to make). Everything was absolutely delicious, the best food we've had on the trip thus far, and it was fun to all prepare and cook our food together at one table. Noot also kept referring to fish sauce as "Bangkok smell," which was great.

But the highlight came when we made curry paste from scratch, grinding chilis, spices, shallots, ginger etc. into a fine paste using a mortar and pestle. We divided into two teams (red vs. green curry) and raced to make our paste--loser took a shot of chili water. Red curry may have lost the paste race, but our curry definitely tasted better.

We finished up our cooking class early in the afternoon and stumbled back to the hostel, our food comas setting in. We hung out for a couple hours and ran errands, then headed back out in the late afternoon.

We stopped by Wat Sri Suphan, a big temple just a couple minutes from the Oxotel. The coolest thing there was the silver sanctuary, an all silver temple with ornate metal work. The inside was very strange: paintings of UFOs and rockets, silver sculptures of demons and skulls. For some reason, there was a big sign outside saying that women could not enter the temple, and an angry Thai woman outside to enforce the policy.

In the evening, we walked into town to get massages. After ducking in to check out one place, it started pouring outside, so we were stuck. Our massages were great, but it was still thunder storming when we were done.

So we sprinted down the road to a 7-11 to buy ponchos and umbrellas, and then across the street to a restaurant a masseuse had recommended. The place was pretty cool: a covered second-floor terrace, where everyone sat on the floor. At our table, we sat on the floor, with our feet dangling through holes in the floor to the basement below.

That part was cool. The rest of the experience was not as smooth. Our waitress spoke literally no English, which was cool in the sense that we were at a non-touristy spot, but she also failed to bring 75% of the foods we ordered, which was less cool.

After dinner, we briefly headed out to a stretch of bars, which were horrible, so most of us headed back to catch up on sleep before our big day of elephants and tigers tomorrow.

- Justin