A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand

chonburifc · Apr 18, 2018

At Big C pattaya south now. Blur leh, this morning was lelong at 49 baht. Friend came and take photo.

49 baht nia.

But when we get here.

No more 49 baht. Only 59 baht and 99 baht ones.

If 49 baht, can sell for 150 baht to 200 baht. Outside selling at 200 baht. Quite good margin.

Froggy · Apr 19, 2018

Supper went out alone for some porridge at https://maps.google.com/?q=23.041924,113.154785

Great stuff

Stir fry beef with spring onions and ginger

Clay pot 皮蛋瘦肉粥 this is damn solid

Porridge 15RMB, Beef 38RMB, 1RMB probably tissue paper very cheap

Along the way saw these

yinyang · Apr 19, 2018

Cheng Meng's not over? :cool:

New meaning of drive-in?

File photo
Chon Buri 'ghosts' treated to movies
Breaking News April 18, 2018 15:34 By The Nation

A Thai foundation screened three open-air movies at a graveyard in Chon Buri's Phan Thong district on Tuesday night for its dead residents.

Boonsom Silapachai, president of the Sawang Utthayan Phan Thong Foundation, said he hired an open-air movie operator to screen three movies at the Sawant Utthayan Phan Thong graveyard for the Songkran festival.

The movies were screened in a ghostly atmosphere with only a few staff from the foundation and neighbours coming to watch the movies.

Boonsom said it was the third time this year that he had hired movies to be screened for ghosts at the graveyard that has over 100 tombs.

He said he believed it would bring good luck for staff at the foundation and the ghosts would enjoy the movies.

Bonut · Apr 19, 2018

chonburifc said:
At Big C pattaya south now. Blur leh, this morning was lelong at 49 baht. Friend came and take photo.

49 baht nia.

But when we get here.

No more 49 baht. Only 59 baht and 99 baht ones.

If 49 baht, can sell for 150 baht to 200 baht. Outside selling at 200 baht. Quite good margin.

Wow...now you getting involved in "arms deal" also :rolleyes:

o_O

Seng Lee Cho Dua Liaoz. :rolleyes:

chonburifc · Apr 19, 2018

Bonut said:
Wow...now you getting involved in "arms deal" also o_O

Seng Lee Cho Dua Liaoz.

Seems that the “arms deal” we made is not exclusive at all leh. Kns, next door all also big arms dealers. Any somchai, somsak and somboon also selling the same thing. Even have same model with the same big c green plastic bags. Nabez, probably the same 59 baht arms supplier as us.

Think if can sell at 100 baht steal laugh liaoz. Anyway, Arms is our secondardy product. Main product still sausage.

Bonut · Apr 19, 2018

yinyang said:
Cheng Meng's not over? New meaning of drive-in?

File photo
Chon Buri 'ghosts' treated to movies
Breaking News April 18, 2018 15:34 By The Nation

A Thai foundation screened three open-air movies at a graveyard in Chon Buri's Phan Thong district on Tuesday night for its dead residents.

Boonsom Silapachai, president of the Sawang Utthayan Phan Thong Foundation, said he hired an open-air movie operator to screen three movies at the Sawant Utthayan Phan Thong graveyard for the Songkran festival.

The movies were screened in a ghostly atmosphere with only a few staff from the foundation and neighbours coming to watch the movies.

Boonsom said it was the third time this year that he had hired movies to be screened for ghosts at the graveyard that has over 100 tombs.

He said he believed it would bring good luck for staff at the foundation and the ghosts would enjoy the movies.

How come Thai tombs so similar to Chinese type ?

yinyang · Apr 19, 2018

Bonut said:
How come Thai tombs so similar to Chinese type ?

Ethnic chineseo_O

Bonut · Apr 20, 2018

Our "arms dealer" today very quiet. Last day of Songkran, kanna caught jialat jialat in some crossfire :p :biggrin:

yinyang · Apr 20, 2018

Damn BIG face :oops:

The trailers decorated with flowers carried the groom, his groom mates, families and friends.

Krabi wedding parade carries Bt2m dowry
Around Thailand April 19, 2018 19:24
https://thethaiger.com/news/krabi-wedding-parade-carries-2-million-baht-dowry

A parade of six trucks and trailers celebrating the wedding of a couple in Lamtab District, Krabi, drew a lot of attention from residents.

The bridegroom is Tharapong Srisuk, 32, a former sub-district chief, and the bride is 27-year-old Pitchaya Boonmuang. The trailers decorated with flowers carried the groom, his friends and family with the dowry, including Bt2 million in cash, 20 bars of gold and a diamond necklace worth about Bt500,000 towards the bride’s house in Pru Dinna Sub-District.

A relative of the groom explained that he chose to use the trailers because his career was to transport palm oil with these vehicles which provided him with his wealth so he used his own trailers as well the ones from his business friends for the wedding.

chonburifc · Apr 20, 2018

Bonut said:
Our "arms dealer" today very quiet. Last day of Songkran, kanna caught jialat jialat in some crossfire :p

First and last time do “arms dealer”. Kns, entire soi in Pattaya Park all also “arms dealer”. Have to give away the unsold “guns” at closing time.

Today not seller, just daily rated driver and lychee packer (behind Floating market). No fish prawn also good, Earn some beer money better than zho bo lan at home or go out spend money.

yinyang · Apr 20, 2018

Where to find Bangkok's best street food ...
...while you still can

Customers eat at a popular curry street restaurant near Chinatown. Photos © 2018 The New York Times

Bangkok Post Published: 20/04/2018 at 04:00 AM

It was a few minutes after 6pm, and Lim Lao Sa, a fishball noodle stand tucked into an alleyway near the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, had just opened. Rain was falling, hard. A series of deftly arranged tarps sheltered patrons sitting on red plastic stools at a handful of tables. Water drizzled off the tarp edges, down the concrete walls and past exposed wiring. Fluorescent bulbs cast harsh shadows. Lim Lao Sa's owners -- a brother and sister who had inherited the 60-year-old business from their father -- bickered vigorously.

My friend Win Luanchaison, a real-estate developer and fervent culinary explorer, and I tucked into our bowls. The quenelle-like fishballs were at once springy and creamy, the rice noodles supple, the broth clear and sure of purpose.

It was easy to understand why Lim Lao Sa cooked annually for HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. "She eats egg noodles served dry," said Pawita Boriboonchaisiri, the sister.

In fact, given all of this -- the setting, the food, the feeling that Lim Lao Sa could be washed away in an instant, by a bad mood or even worse weather -- I decided that Lim Lao Sa was the platonic ideal of street food. And it was precisely why I had come to Bangkok.

Last April, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority made international headlines when it announced that the city of more than 8 million would ban street food vendors -- often considered the world's best -- in order to make sidewalks more accessible. The BMA soon walked back its statement, saying street food would be preserved in Chinatown and the Khao San Road backpacker district, but elsewhere it would be eliminated, the vendors relocated from "vital walkways", as the Tourism Authority of Thailand put it, to "designated zones and nearby markets". This would happen by year's end. Eventually. Maybe. Sometime.

I wasn't going to take a chance. If Bangkok's ad hoc restaurants were threatened -- not only by clean-sidewalk-loving governments but, just as seriously, by gentrification and changing tastes -- I had to go before it was too late. In July, I flew to Bangkok for a week of eating nothing but street food. Pretty much immediately, I learned that street food was a term with many definitions.

"For me, street food is only a cart," said Duangporn Songvisava, who with her husband, Dylan Jones, runs the restaurants Bo.lan, which received a Michelin star in December, and Err, which serves rustic drinking food with a focus on quality ingredients. When she was young, Duangporn, now 37, remembered, as many as 20 carts would line up outside her school to sell snacks on sticks. "They have, like, the moo ping -- grilled pork on a stick, barbecue -- the sausage, the fishball. It just fills you up before you have dinner."

Some were pushcarts, others bicycle-based, but all were mobile and ephemeral.

That, she said, was the tail end of the golden age of Bangkok street food. "In the old days when someone wanted to open a cart or a stall, they know how to cook," she said. "The idea was, you're a good cook -- maybe you should make some food for other people, for a living."

Now, Duangporn said, profit margins rule. "They just buy everything from the factory, use industrial processed food," she said. "A lot of seasoning and MSG are involved to produce the food because people don't complain."

Duangporn was telling me this over beers at Talad Saphan Phut, a night market that she considered a sad remedy for Bangkok's street food woes. It was here, at a lonely, out-of-the-way parking lot, that the city had relocated vendors from the slated-for-destruction Flower Market, on the theory that loyal customers would follow.

We were joined by an intrepid eating crew, which included Jones; Chawadee Nualkhair, the blogger behind Bangkok Glutton; and writer Vincent Vichit-Vadakan, who had put me up for my stay and now edits the Michelin Guide's Bangkok site.

"This is like a good 5-10km from where the original was," Chawadee said. "So the people who used to eat these guys' food wouldn't come here on a regular basis with this special trip." Only a few vendors in all of Bangkok, she estimated, cooked well enough that people would follow them to new locations.

We decided to drown our concerns in the most apropos way: with street food. Along Thanon Chan, in a surprisingly quiet little neighbourhood, were sois, or small streets, full of food vendors who had been relocated off the main street. Our gang descended upon them, ordering bowls of noodles -- yen ta fo, pink rice noodles in broth with wontons and fishballs, and bamee moodaeng, ribbony egg noodles with roast pork -- and watery rice porridge studded with bits of duck or nuggets of coagulated blood, and sweet braised pig's foot, and bags of all kinds of fried things.

As we crowded around folding metal tables and accentuated our treasures with chillies in vinegar, or ground dried chillies, and cracked open Thai craft beers, it all felt deliciously normal -- the kind of Bangkok street-food life I'd always imagined. That picture grew more complex over the next few days. In the mornings, I'd leave Vincent's apartment in search of coffee -- and more often than not would return with a baggie of sticky rice and skewers of sweet, fatty grilled pork from the moo ping cart stationed outside his front door. (Vincent lives near a university, so there is a steady flow of hungry, frugal students.)

By lunchtime, I would hook up with a friend for exploratory eating. With Dwight Turner, an American who has blogged for years at BKKFatty.com, I went to the farther reaches of Sukhumvit Road, a central artery through Bangkok. Several BTS stops past the glistening condos and megamalls, the street-food crackdown didn't seem to matter, and Turner and I had to squeeze past countless vendors -- of curries, sausages, fruit, flowers, electronics -- occupying sidewalk space.

For Turner, street food was not necessarily defined by mobility. "The necessity," he said, "is that it's convenient, at a price that people are willing to pay."

His definition -- which will no doubt enrage certain corners of the internet -- opened up what I could consider street food to include Bangkok's shophouse restaurants: boxy, frill-free dining rooms where the cooking is done up front, in a kitchen that's often little more than an elaborate, sedentary cart. Such was the case at Sai Kaew, the duck noodle shop Turner brought me to.

"In the beginning, I worked full-time in an office like most Thais," said Sai Kaew's owner, Ruengchai Chartmongkoljaroen. Thirty years ago, however, he quit his job to push a cart. He set up 10 tables on sidewalk space he'd rented in front of a building, walked his cart in circles to attract attention, and of course worked on his recipes, developing the condiment that became his calling card: light, crunchy, slippery boiled duck intestines, or sai kaew (excellent with a slather of his vibrant green hot sauce, and a worthy foil for the sweetly rich duck). The price for a bowl in 1987: 10 baht.

"Day 1, we opened from 12pm-2am," he said. "We sold half a duck."

Business improved, but even so, he pushed the cart for 16 years before parking it at this shophouse, where, on a good day, he and his two daughters, who've learned the business from childhood, will go through "50 big ducks". Although his duck noodles are now well known, the price remains right. Lunch for two was 160 baht.

This trajectory was one I heard time and again as I ate everything from delicate pig's brain to incendiary papaya salad to rice noodles stir-fried on a charcoal-fired wok. There might be many reasons to open a cart but, eventually, almost everyone wants the security of bricks and mortar.

However endangered street food is, pursuing it remains an eye-opening way to discover a city like Bangkok. One morning, Rattama Pongponrat, an ebullient culinary consultant and former curator at Museum Siam, led me on a daylong binge, from a breakfast of toast with coconut jam to a sidewalk stand selling noodles with atypically thick slices of offal. There was fried chicken piled atop metal tables. There was glorious mango ice cream from a dinky corner shop.

And there was Rattama, overjoyed at it all. When the sun was high, we strode through the shaded alleyways of Chinatown, past tropical fruits pickled in chillies, batter-fried squid roe with a spicy-sweet sauce -- until, finally, we burst out onto a bridge where Rattama had hoped to find one particular vendor. Instead, the bridge had been entirely cleared.

"Oh, my God, it's all gone!" Rattama shouted. "I never knew it was a bridge. I've never seen this before in my life."

She began swearing, then looked up at a well-tended four-story building, yellow with green shutters, the crisp style at once Chinese and neoclassical. "What a beautiful building," she said in wonder. Then we plunged back into the fray to find another snack. © 2018 New York Times News Service

chonburifc · Apr 20, 2018

While waiting for first tour bus group to leave Floating Market, a vendor selling beauty and health supplements ask me can help do Thai - Cina translation for this product. Think should not be a problem with the translation. 555 this remind me of my friend advice to take cold press coconut oil. Almost forgot liaoz.

Froggy · Apr 20, 2018

Time to leave Guangzhou for Bangkok

Froggy · Apr 21, 2018

Great sinkie breakfast

https://maps.google.com/?q=13.691984,100.748337

yinyang · Apr 21, 2018

yinyang · Apr 21, 2018

Didn't know there are over 200 (cultivated) mango types . Yum

In praise of mangoes
There are over 200 mango cultivars but only a handful of them are known by regular consumers. We take a look at the rich variety and culinary applications of the golden-hued fruit

https://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/food-and-drinks/1449094/in-praise-of-mangoes

chonburifc · Apr 21, 2018

Pla Pao (bbq fish) very very popular with both locals and foreginers. The most common fish used for BBQ fish are Pla Nim and Pla Tabtim (Tilapia).

Just know one guy who has one BBQ fish stall in Bang Saray. Told me seng li so good until he have to stop doing deliveries due to not enough manpower. Its like BBQ fish non stop from 5 pm until 10 pm or until last fish sold.

Was thinking this bbq jit poon her can sell in Sinkieland?

Froggy · Apr 22, 2018

Breakfast

More photos in the Queenstown thread - https://www.sammyboy.com/threads/queenstown-today.110796/page-26#post-2713473

Bonut · Apr 22, 2018

Nabeh, got one Singaporean among them. Please own up :oops:o_O :wink:

Police in Pattaya raided a drug fuelled sex party at a hotel in the resort town on Saturday night.

Local police, immigration officers and Tourist Police carried out the raid after reports that the 30 room hotel located in the Nong Prue area was being used to host sex and swinging parties.

As many as 25 people were found to be taking party in the orgy including nationals from United States, Canada, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Thailand, Cambodia, India and Ukraine.

A search of the property also found sex drugs, toys and lubricants, while used condoms found in the trash were taken as evidence, Siamchon News reported.

Police revealed that the people 1,500 baht to attend the party, which was advertised online.

Police also arrested Mr. Sheng Liao Yang, 53, from China who said he was the owner of the hotel.

Mr Yang was charged with a number of offences related to hosting the sex parties and also operating a hotel without a valid license.

Details of the case has been sent to prosecutors.

Leongsam · Apr 22, 2018

Bonut said:
Nabeh, got one Singaporean among them. Please own up :oops:o_O

Police in Pattaya raided a drug fuelled sex party at a hotel in the resort town on Saturday night.

Local police, immigration officers and Tourist Police carried out the raid after reports that the 30 room hotel located in the Nong Prue area was being used to host sex and swinging parties.

As many as 25 people were found to be taking party in the orgy including nationals from United States, Canada, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Thailand, Cambodia, India and Ukraine.

A search of the property also found sex drugs, toys and lubricants, while used condoms found in the trash were taken as evidence, Siamchon News reported.

Police revealed that the people 1,500 baht to attend the party, which was advertised online.

Police also arrested Mr. Sheng Liao Yang, 53, from China who said he was the owner of the hotel.

Mr Yang was charged with a number of offences related to hosting the sex parties and also operating a hotel without a valid license.

Details of the case has been sent to prosecutors.

I guess the police chief was angry because he did not receive an invitation to attend for free.

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