Bangkok: Giant Swing & Phra Sumen Fort
I got in touch with Kae and Kung, whom I had met in Chiang Mai, and we decided to meet up at night. I thought it would just be the two of them, but they brought another friend along. His name is Lek, and like Kung, he is Thai-Chinese.
Thai names are long and hard to pronounce, so everyone goes by one- or two-syllable nicknames. Well, rather than just shortening their names, they use short words with actual meanings—like calling someone "Dragon," "Flower," or "Horse" in our culture. I guess Korean names aren't that different since they usually mean things like "righteous person" or "kindest" when you translate the Chinese characters, but for some reason, Thai nicknames feel even simpler and leave me tilting my head a bit.
The four of us headed out for dinner, and on the way, they kept hyping it up:
"The best pad thai place in Thailand,"
"Pad thai you could never get in Korea."
They just kept bragging about it. I had a strong feeling about this...
'Are we going to Thip Samai by any chance?'
And before I could even ask, we arrived at Thip Samai.
Sure enough, after about a 10-minute wait, my friends ordered everything for us. When it was time to eat, they piled on a ton of bean sprouts, a sauce I hadn't used yesterday, and some weird flower. I wondered if that made it taste better, so I copied them, and it was actually way better than yesterday! If yesterday was the foreigner version, today felt like I was eating the true Thai version of Thip Samai pad thai. If you just eat the noodles, you start to get a little tired of it halfway through, but the bean sprouts added a nice crunch, and the sweet sauce brought out a different flavor as I ate. As for that weird flower... they said it was a banana flower, but it wasn't really my thing, so I stopped after two bites.
It reminded me of how some foreigners say samgyeopsal (Korean pork belly) is a bit hard to eat because they only eat the meat. But once you teach them how to wrap it in lettuce, they eat like they're going to clear out the restaurant's entire pork belly supply. You really do have to learn local food from the locals. After we finished eating, we went for a walk to digest. Well, it was less of a walk and more of a driving tour in Kung's car, where my Thai friends would take me to places they figured I hadn't been, we'd walk around a bit, and then hop back in the car. The first stop was the Giant Swing (Thai: เสาชิงช้า, Sao Ching Cha).
It seems like a swing they used to ride on commemorative days, much like how we ride swings on Dano (a traditional Korean holiday). Seeing things like this makes me realize how much Asian cultures have in common. Anyway, the story goes that they hung ropes from the top and swung from them... I'm really curious about who actually climbed up there to hang the swing. Plus, according to Wikipedia, the swinging was stopped because of accidents, which makes it even scarier...
The next place we drove to was Phra Sumen Fort. Reading the sign out front, it didn't seem like a huge deal, and apparently, it was recently rebuilt. However, the park surrounding the fort is really well-maintained, and it looks quite stunning illuminated at night.
