Dinner on the river

Last night, we walked down the street from our guest house to find some dinner. We stopped in at a pretty looking restaurant on a dock on the Chao Phraya river which flows through central Bangkok. I ordered up a shrimp dish of some sort, Christie tried a chicken dish and we split a spicy eggplant salad. The eggplant salad was a very pungent and ... interesting flavor. My shrimp were basically whole shrimp with the legs cut off, but the heads and tails were on. These were the biggest shrimp I have ever seen in my life, literally massive. I was a bit surprised to see them whole, and I had to dismantle the tail from the head myself. They were served with some cashews and rice and overall were pretty good, flavor-wise... But I was a bit squeamish about the heads for some reason. Here is a photo of the view:

From Thailand

After dinner we headed back to the guest house to crack a couple beers and talk about the next day. We had booked a domestic flight to Chiang Rai earlier in the day so we had to decide where we wanted to stay. Our kind guest house operator called for us and handed me the phone once she verified they spoke english. We booked a room and relaxed and read about our potential activities up north. After a couple hours Christie headed up to bed and I stayed to chat with Yao, the guest house attendant. She taught me some thai and we talked about some cultural differences. Example: Brittney Spears video came on TV with a bunch of Thai girls dancing in bikinis, and they were very white-skinned. Yao explained that Thai women prefer to be as light-skinned as possible, as that is considered more beautiful. I got a little peckish after a while so she cooked me up some fried rice, which was delicious. We exhanged some more phrases before I headed up to bed.

Stay tuned for Chiang Rai.... Hill Tribe treks and border hikes.