Vomit Vomit Yum Yum Yum

Chinatown can be an interesting place no matter what city you’re in. But, when you take a Chinatown and drop in the dead center of a city that’s already as frenetic as Bangkok, you know you’re in for a good time. I didn’t realize exactly how interesting this time would be until I arrived there and got swept away in a sea of keychain merchants, noodle stands, and various fish entrails. Bangkok’s Chinatown is a big awesome steaming cup o’ crazy, and I liked it.

We started of the day a little slower, at the nearby Trimit Temple. This temple is very similar to the many other Wats we’ve stopped at in the last few weeks, so by now I had the drill figured out: remove shoes, don’t point your feet at the Buddha, take pictures only wear they tell you to, don’t lose your shoes once you take them off, and so forth. The aspect of Trimit Temple that makes it unique is the massive Buddha image that dominates the small bot. More impressive than the size though, is the fact that it dates from the Sukhothai period, about 1000 years ago. Oh yeah, it’s also made of solid gold.

This Buddha wound up in Bangkok purely by accident. When it was excavated in Sukothai (I’ll be heading there in a few weeks, should be interesting), it looked just like every other concrete Buddha image, which, in Medieval Thailand, were a baht a dozen. However, the less than competent riggers in charge of moving this thing managed to crack the concrete when the were pulling it around by a rope tied to its neck, only to reveal the solid gold, though slightly smaller, statue inside. I think the clearest way to picture this is to imagine cracking the candy shell on an enormous ancient Thai-style Buddha shaped M+M.

Following the religious candy metaphors, we moved on to Chinatown proper: Yaowarat Road. This road is allegedly the oldest in the city, or so the tour guide legends say. According to Aeng, it looks exactly like downtown Hong Kong, and I totally believe her. Wandering down the street, almost all the storefronts sell food, specifically shark-fin soup. This Chinese delicacy has decreased in availability in recent years due to overfishing, though it looked like the fisherman here hadn’t been having any problems. The fins were large and plentiful and intimidating, mostly because seeing them all led me to visualize the animals they came off of, which, I assume, were proportionally humongous.

We didn’t purchase any shark fin soup, mostly because of the sizeable financial investment involved. Plus, there’s always the ethical question of how the fins were obtained. Instead, we tried the other Chinese liquid delicacy: Bird’s Nest Soup. This stuff is still very pricy, but it comes in different grades, so you can get a bowl for as little as 100 baht, which is exactly what we did. Bird’s nest soup is, in fact, made of real nests, constructed and formerly occupied by small cave dwelling birds. These caves are hard to access, which is what causes the astronomical price (a box of 12-15 quality nests can be over $1000). These nests are not made of sticks or anything link that. No, they’re made up of layer upon layer of regurgitated stomach contents: that’s right, bird puke. When boiled, they fall apart and assume a cheap jell-o like consistency.
I have to say that a bowl of bird vomit did not taste bad. Actually, a lot like really runny scrambled eggs. Match it with a glass of cheap green tea, and you’ve got yourself a decent snack. Plus, it’s a great way to make the more uptight obnoxious “ugly Americans” among your group really grossed out.