Food Porn

Bags from road side restaurant, turn into soup!

Dessert you ask? Banana and egg roti drizzled with condensed milk.

This is the reason I might be gaining weight.

The 4 S's of tourism

Sun, sea, sand and sex. I'm sure my Grade 9 Geography teacher would be so proud that one thing I learned in his class actually stuck.

Beach! Just on day 3 in Pattaya, whore city by the sea and heading to Chiang Mai tomorrow morning. You can tell prostitution seems to be the main industry here as most of the women's clothing on sale in the street side vendors and markets are geared towards prostitutes or drag queens. Speaking of, I saw the most heinous lady boy in training walking back from the beach yesterday afternoon. Chubby, no older than 17 or 18 wearing a short muumuu, platform shoes, full tranny makeup and had hairier legs than I do. I was "what the????".

Everyone knows how much I love my iPhone but it's turned into a total flop over here. Being on a prepaid plan the data & web was just burning through my prepaid cards and for some reason the battery was running out. I'd go to bed with a full charge and in the a.m. it would be dead. So much for being all technamilogical while I'm away, I had to go pick up a crappy $30 Nokia, texting on it is so old skool.

I met up with a cute young guy from Isaan 2 nights ago, god bless the internet. We wound up going out for dinner last night, his English is pretty good and the only thing I could find fault with is he's a fan of Avril Lavigne. Luckily I don't think my eyerolling translated and he was surprised to learn that she's actually Canadian. I should have kept my mouth shut about her provenance and let him believe she was American.

I'm on day 5 of eating local food and so far so good. Ordering involves finger pointing, smiling, and shrugging of shoulders, I can't identify half of the ingredients but I haven't had any unfortunate side effects. It is actually fairly cheap to live here, dinner out last night at a roadside restaurant with Isaan boy wound up costing 220bht (about $8) and we had 3 dishes, rice and didn't even finish what we ordered.

I have to say I'm looking forward to getting to Chiang Mai. I really want to get settled in, get an apartment and stop living out of a backpack. It will be nice to actually have enough space to unpack and have somewhere that feels like home. I've always had a limited tolerance for feeling uprooted and usually by day 5 of any vacation I just want my own bed and my own pillows.

These boots are made for walking....

I hoofed around town so much today even an hour long foot massage didn't help, mind you they only cost $10 so I have the feeling I'll just keep going back over and over again until my feet don't feel like stumps. I went over to Siam Square today which is quite the shopping mecca ranging from Paragon Mall all Gucci, Prada, Versace to MBK which is also all Gucci, Prada and Versace except for the fact the MBK stuff was more than likely made in some sweatshop and oddly enough costs 1000's of baht less. Hmmm.

The shopping is crazy assed over here, I'm continuing my dress shirt splurge. It's hard to feel guilty when when the selection is overwhelming and the prices ridiculous. So after 6 long hours I finally packed it in and shuffled back to Silom and indulged in said foot massage which also includes a neck, shoulder and leg massage. During the leg massage my cute, young 20 something masseur discretely tried to get a bit more friendly, the whole time with one of those shit eating grins the Thai's are so good at.

Ended the day with dinner at Balcony Pub with an acquaintance from Vancouver who's now living here. It's down on one of the gay soi's, cute eager young waiters who would be more than happy to go on a "date" with you if the price is right. If you saw some the overweight older farangs hanging around you'd know they weren't there for the food which was mediocre at best. Speaking of food that delicious bowl of soup your looking at was my lunch today. There are 2 or 3 items which I'm not exactly sure what animal they're from but it was tasty as hell and set me back a whopping $1.50

Packing up tonight as I'm heading out early tomorrow to hop the bus down tot he beach. Should be an interesting excursion navigating the skytrain over the bus station with my honking big, and now filled to the brim, backpack.