Honeymooning: Bangkok, Thailand Part 3

One of my most favorite things that we did the entire trip, was take a cooking class at May Kaidee's. Seriously, this was so informative, fun, DELICIOUS, and made me so excited. May Kaidee's has two locations, one in Bangkok and one in Chiang Mai. Our class was made up of nine adults and two little kids (one was a baby, and the other kid was around 3-4 yrs old.) Half of the class was from Holland and half was from the U.S. We all donned our aprons and went through eight different dishes, taking time to eat and enjoy each one after cooking it. It was so great. We were each setup at a wok, sharing it with one other person (so, Nik and I were together,) and they would demonstrate the recipe first, and then we would make it ourselves. We would switch places at each dish, so that one person would be assisting with ingredients and reading the recipe, and the other would be in control of the wok. We made Tom Yam soup, veg stir fry, Pad Thai, Massaman Curry, Green Curry, Fresh spring rolls, Som Tam, and Mango with black sticky rice. So, all the favorites! The class lasts the whole morning (or afternoon, if you choose that time slot,) and fills you up! Everything was vegan, except you had the option to put an egg in your Pad Thai, if you were vegetarian. 

I've already made a few curries and some soup since I've been back and I looooove how confident the class made me feel in making some very basic dishes. Very much looking forward to expanding on Thai cooking this year...

I took some photos, but only with my phone, so excuse the blurriness in some of these!

Making Tom Yam Soup

Tom Yam Soup

Basic Stirfry

Pad Thai

Making Green Curry, my fave!

I could eat Green Curry for weeks.

Nik making Massaman Curry

Massaman curry. Loved the surprise addition of pineapple in this dish. 

Aww.

We made spring rolls with a peanut sauce on top. They had us "decorate" our own. This was mine...

...and this was Nik's. Hee!

Nik shredding the young Papaya to make Som Tam, or spicy papaya salad

Som Tam in the making.

Plated Som Tam

Mango with Black Sticky Rice. This was SO GOOD. SO GOOD! 

Honeymooning: Bangkok, Thailand Part 2

Nik and I arrived at the Grand Palace right when they opened, to beat the inevitable crowds and the scorching heat that gets worse as the day goes on. I thought I was super-prepared when it came to proper attire, but I definitely wasn't. I had on black jeggings, a short skirt over, and brought along a rather large scarf for my shoulders, but this was not enough and I ended up having to rent some clothes to be allowed to enter (you put a deposit down and it was returned to you in full at the end of your visit, so it wasn't the end of the world.) So! Don't wear "tight pants" and a scarf to cover your shoulders does not cut it if you are planning a visit here; they are super-strict!

We were lucky enough to have an overcast day, so the sun wasn't too much of a killer for us, but it was very crowded (I was pretty good at NOT including people in my photos.) Walking around with our mouths gaping open and taking in the old temples took most of the morning into the afternoon. There is so much detail in every single surface area here, but I found it pretty interesting that they regularly paint/refurbish every single thing. We came upon many workers painstakingly touching up old murals or applying stencils on ceilings and columns. Weird! I guess I thought everything would just be preserved as is...

Anyways, the Grand Palace lived up to it's hype and was one of my favorite sights that we saw on our trip! 

Loved these pointy roofs

Don't mess.

Bling Bling! Note tiny golden tiles that make up the entire thing...

So. Much. Detail.

Loved these murals, but I was the only that did apparently! There was never anyone checking them out and they were all over the place. The art history lover in my geeked out over them.

Detail

Small scale model of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia

Holy detail!

So much gold. 

Even on the ceilings! Insane!

Really pretty grounds outside the Grand Palace walls. 

After we finished walking around the Grand Palace, we moseyed over to Wat Pho, or the Reclining Buddha, which is pretty close by.  The giant Reclining Buddha was cool, I guess, but you spent the majority of the time fighting other tourists to stand in the few spots where you can get a good photo. So, a little annoying! But, I LOVED the rest of this site. Everyone pretty much comes to see the Reclining Buddha, and then books it outta there, but Nik and I wandered around for a long time and were pretty much on our own. And in a crowded city like Bangkok, that was pretty golden. I kinda loved how the grounds of this place were not as pristine as the Grand Palace, and had more of a run-down ancient feel to them. We enjoyed the silence and the little hidden corners and temples we kept stumbling upon. So glad we explored the rest of this area. 

Tummy!

Honeymooning: Bangkok, Thailand Part 1 can be found here

Honeymooning: Bangkok, Thailand Part 1

So that was a big blog break, yeah? I guess I needed it! Hope your new year is going swell so far; Mine has been BUSY!  I thought I would kick off the blog-silence by showing you some of my recent trip photos from Thailand. Yeah, Thailand! Nik and I finally took our much-awaited honeymoon this past November, and spent two weeks in the amazing/beautiful/overwhelming/smelly/hard-to-describe-but-easy-to-love country of Thailand. We flew into Bangkok (after a brief layover in Qatar), to kickstart the trip, and then moved onto Chiang Mai to join in the celebration of Loi Krathong and Yi Peng, and then relaxed on the island of Koh Lipe (though it rained almost the entire time...). I'm going to split these photos up into different posts, because I literally took about 500 photos while I was there, and it was a teensy bit hard to narrow it down to one post!

Anyways! Bangkok! We stayed off the beaten track a bit of the Khao San Rd. area (thankfully, as neither of us were really too fond of the super-touristy road.) We stayed at Nuevo City Hotel, which was AWESOME. Seriously, they were so nice and helpful, and it was just a really clean, modern hotel. It was pretty much required that we would get up early to go sight-see, before the heat became too unbearable, and then we would give up and come hang by the rooftop pool in the afternoon, before going out again at night. Excellent! 

Bangkok was hard to wrap our heads around at first. It's crowded and it's smelly and there was just SO MUCH, but I loved it and we definitely found our stride by the end of the trip. I'm glad we stayed closer to the Old City area, since traffic was pretty much impossible in this city, and the majority of the things that we wanted to see/do were centered around there. We went to the Grand Palace, took a cooking class at May Kaidee's (AMAZING, more on that later!), went to a few crazy malls (and by crazy, I definitely mean crazy), ate a lot of food, went into many many temples, walked pretty much all over, took a few exhausting cab rides, tried out tuk-tuk's, went to a creepy medical museum, and so much more. 

Here's a few photos that are kinda in the "random" folder, and I'll get into more specific places in the next few weeks. Thanks for reading! 

xoxo,

Michelle

Khao San Road during the day. It was mostly just annoying walking down this road. Dudes trying to sell Nik a suit every 5 steps we took...

View from Wat Saket, or The Golden Mountain.

Wat Saket from below. 

cuuuute!

Happy in the sunshine on the rooftop of our hotel, poolside.

Sketching by the pool. There was some crazy cloud and sun-ray action that was happening then.