Our trip to Bangkok was primarily to visit another YA from Julia’s year. I had meet her as well in the Prague YA reunion a few years ago and it was good to reconnect. On our first full day with her she took us outside of Bangkok a little bit to the former capital city of Ayudhya. We stopped along the river for a lovely lunch!
Ayudhya was the center of the Ayutthaya Kingdom (who the Europeans called Siam). It was this kingdom that attacked Angkor Wat but most of Ayudhya was destroyed by the Burmese a few centuries later which caused the kingdom to shift further south to Bangkok. What we saw was the remaining temples in this area. The first temple was Wat Chai Watthana Ram and we needed to walk around with umbrellas because it was so hot and there wasn’t much shade. This was smaller than most of the Angkor Wat temples and built using brick vs stone. One interesting aspect of this one was that it was a place where local Thais were dressing up in traditional dress to take pictures here. There were even costume shops across the street where you could rent the clothing.
It kind of shows in this picture, but all the bricks at one point in time were covered in white cement/plaster. So the complex would have been fully white in it’s glory days.
Almost all the Buddhas in the complex were beheaded except for a few. One of the Buddhas with it’s head on was surrounded by bats!
We were starting to run out of time to tour the other complex in town so instead we drove around it. Though it had the same number of temples, it was on a much large property with more gardens. We also saw elephant ride tours around the complex.
On the way out of Ayudhya we stopped for a Thai desert called toti saimai. We got to try some right away, but she also got extra to bring for our dinner party with her family that night. It is basically like a crepe tortilla with almost a cotton candy type of filling but it was long and stringy sugar instead.
Dinner was a family affair with us meeting her sisters and her mom so that we could learn some Thai cooking! First step was to determine if you were on team spicy or team non-spicy. Even their family was split. I was unfortunately in neither team and needed to mix the two sides. Team spicy, with 30-40 chilies added per dish, was just a little bit too spicy for me.
Some of the dishes we helped make were:
- National Thai Dish – pad kraprao (anything with basil)
- Dessert – kiwy buchchi (bananas in coconut milk)
- Lab – (minced pork/chicken with Thai herbs)
- Gaeng Jued Teahu Hmu Sab Wun Sen (Clear Soup with Tofu and Minced Pork)
- Lam yai – Langan – a fruit
- Mangos with sticky rice
Such a nice family!
That Sunday we went to church in downtown Bangkok where another YA from Thailand but from a different year met us.
Downtown Bangkok is just too big to do in an afternoon, especially in the heat so we opted for the driving tour vs the walking tour. We tried to take pictures from the car but it is hard to get nice pictures. Here are a few that we did get of the Grand Palace which is the royal compound.
In addition to the new dishes we tried with the family, we also got to try few new ones at restaurants. We tried a number of savory dishes, but we also tried congee (boiled rice with ginger, offal and fried flowers) and stopped at this dessert shop where there were all sorts of things that you could add to a bowl and cover in langan syrup (chestnuts, lotus flowers, palm fruit, white mushrooms, barley, beans, etc).
We had a short but sweet visit in Bangkok and we enjoyed our time there.