Special Diets

Greetings from Bangkok! 

We're a bit behind in our posts, but here we are! Alive and almost-well and now finally fueled by wifi at home.

Day 1: 

• Finding our dorm at 1 am
• Very very hard
• No street signs, no one knows where "TropMed House is," but many think they do
• Nice taxi driver drove around in circles x 20mins, finally to find some students who knew where to go
• Slept for a few hours
• Big goals today: get thai sim cards, stay awake, and hunt down vegetarian food
• Walked at least 10 miles through the concrete jungle that is Bangkok.  Things are so congested and busy here there is the sidewalk and road, then the skywalk and skytrain, and then the highway above both of those.  Depending on the time of day, you can't really get through on anything beside the skytrain.
• Sites
• Victory Monument
• BTS Skytrain
• Malls
• European/Glitzy American-style malls are numerous. Every international brand known to humankind can be found here.  Eli's favorite part: toilets with Japanese seats ie: warmed seats that give you a nice toosh wash then toosh dry when you're done.
• Gourmet grocery store. Kind've like a whole foods in the basement of one of these monstrosities. We had a delicious carrot-passion fruit juice for $1. 
• MBK. Like an open-air market inside.  Each floor is dedicated to one thing, so we found the cell phone floor.  You've never seen so much cell phone.  Anything for your cell phone in any color/shape/size.  Crazy.  So for $3 each, we now have Thai cell phone numbers.  Thank goodness MBK has a food court floor with a vegetarian stall!!

• Meditation house. An amazingly cool and calming house in the middle of craziness.


• Bakery. Dave's first encounter with Asian bread.  Not entirely impressed right now, but hey, it's really not their specialty, right? Will continue the research. 
• Chatuchek (JJ) Weekend Market. Huge market with over 8000 stalls. We didn't buy anything (too overwhelmed perhaps), but if you want it, they have it - x100. 
• Reason for the post's title: meat is incredibly prevalent in Bangkok's food scene.  Like insanely prevalent.  Unless you specifically want to eat vegetarian food, you'll be eating meat.  This was surprising to us, and as far as we've gathered from speaking with the locals, this is only a change that's occurred within the past decade.  More to come.
• Oh, the real reason for post's title: Eli started off vomiting on the plane (yea for airplane food poisoning), then Dave kept the vomiting train going after eating some funky mushrooms in the hospital cafeteria (you know the kind :-). But we're both on the mend and finally enjoying some delicious Thai treats. 
• Bottom line for today: Bangkok, as other major cities (but in particular this one, even more so than Latin America), is a place of intense and unfair contrasts. On one side of the road, Bentleys and Porsches are roaring into Louis Vuitton and The Four Seasons, while on the other side of the road, people are scraping by on a small bowl of rice.

More posts to come! Cooking schools, hospitals and more Bangkok craziness...