Its All About the Local Flavour (Part 1)

One thing I really love about travelling is the availability of cheap local yummies on the street. I absolutely love sampling the local fare...the old point and taste trip. This is a shot of some street vendors on Bangkok's Ko San Road, probably the only place in Thailand that you can find english (or even roman script) telling you what you're buying. You can get pretty good Pad Thai for 20 Bhat (about us$.50), but as the day gets hotter, the unrefridgerated shrimp get less appealling. And lets face it, as soon as the party crowd on Ko San wakes up (a little past noon) the area is just not enjoyable.

A little more Thai, and a little less farang (gringo in Thai) is the street food scene in bustling, yet quaint city of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. Now Chiang Mai gets more than its fair share of farang comming through (its all the rage to go on a trek and smoke opium with the hill tribes), but the citizens of Chiang Mai have not gone so far as to put every sign in english. The food here is different than in the south, and sticky rice (not even close to being like sushi rice) is the staple. It's what you get to go with the rice that makes eating in Chiang Mai so much fun. They gots eats.
These photos were taken on market Sunday. Now there is a huge street market everday, but Sunday is the best, as vendors from all over the region come in to sell their wares. Sunday is, in fact, the day that vendors come to sell to other vendors, who later (Monday through Saturday) sell these things to farang.
Great deals on multiple quantities of stuff can be found, and some vendors dub it the "wholesale market". This translates to even more yummy street food than normal as all those vendors from out of town require food. And most of these goodies cater not to farang, but to the Thai themselves....cuisine authentico.
Most of the snacks are a variation of meat on a stick, but some things are really tasty. The drinks are really sweet, and should be avoided by anyone with even a miniscule history of diabeties in their family.




For a sit down meal, there is a wide variety of reasonably inexpensive (read: really F@#$%^&& cheap) international fare type resturants, but the one must have meal in Chiang Mai is this local specialty curry cooked up in the citys' muslim quarter. In a dingy reasturant across from a mosque, advertised only in arabic and thai, there is a nameless restuarant that serves up a fabulous curry dish. And the experience of eating among so many traditionally dressed muslims in a predominantly buhddist country is a truely foriegn experience. And the problem of not speaking or reading arabic or thai?? Just show your white ass up, they know what you came for.