Pescetarian – natalie b. compton

My experience in Bangkok has been a lot like my dinner the other night at Sun Moon Dumplings. It was a place I’d hyped up, a place completely out of my element where there would be abrasive servers, fluorescent lighting, and hopefully the food would live up to its reputation.

We got there and it was as harsh as predicted. Shortly after we sat down, the place filled up and a line began to form outside adding to the restaurant’s lore. We ordered some Singha beers and a handful of dishes to share.

The permanently annoyed server brought the plate of steaming shrimp dumplings to the table first. As a pescetarian, these shrimp dumplings were the only dumplings I could order on the menu. I bit into the soft doughy ball to find out it was 10% shrimp and 90% pork. Nothing like a mouth full of pork when your M.O. is avoiding pork. Chris, Etty, and Abhi continued on happily with those and the other pork-filled dumplings while I cleansed my palate with Thai lager.

We ordered some other food to fill my dumpling void. Eggplant Fries, Tomato Egg, and Sesame Balls sounded like good vegetarian options, but the place was out of Tomato Egg so we ordered another eggplant dish. The Eggplant Fries were coated in a sticky glaze and tasted like savory caramel sweet potato fries. They were good but you felt weird after eating a lot of them. A plate of pigs feet was put on our table by mistake before the second eggplant dish arrived. Hooray! More Eggplant Fries! I hadn’t looked at the photo in the menu closely enough and accidentally ordered the same thing twice. Also combining sweet and savory were the Sesame Balls that turned out to be fried balls of mashed taro.

I had envisioned being knee-deep in dumplings that night but ended up having a meal of weird dessert vegetables instead.

When I was moving to Bangkok, I expected it to be jarring, confusing, and overflowing with delicious food — and it is, but the experience is different than I thought. Now nearly five months of expat life under my belt, I have a completely new view of this city.

Everything is still so foreign that I find myself making stupid mistakes (like ordering the same Eggplant Fries twice) all the time. That being said, other glossy first impressions continue to get exposed, revealing less romantic realities. At Sun Moon Dumplings, a Chinese silk painting of eight horses had something written beautifully in the corner. I asked Etty what the text meant and it turned out to mundanely say “Eight horse picture.”

Every minute living in Thailand adjusts my image of the exotic Far East. Bangkok is a city with an Ikea and an Outback Steakhouse, a city where the locals’ go-to dumpling restaurant has a menu translated into English for Farang like me who feel like they’re the only foreigners to eat at the place. The real Bangkok is a mix of insane and unsexy normalcy.

Five months here has been a test of my willpower. Sometimes a warm memory will pop up in my head or I’ll scroll through Instagram and see something so homesickening that it feels like someone hit me in the chest. Those heart pangs are the real deal, and when that hurt/nostalgia wells up I tend to lose focus of what I’m doing here. Suddenly it’ll occur to me again how bizarre it is to be Bangkok.

I’m far away from so many things I love (Market Street, my family, burritos) and surrounded by a lot of things I don’t love (heavy pollution, bad pizza, monitor lizards). In the wake of a pang, I’ll open up Kayak.com and frantically look for an escape. Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Paris, Lithuania – I panic travel plan until I feel like I’m in control again. This wave of comfort washes over me when I remember I can buy a plane ticket out of this hot, tropical life at any time.

But things are good here, weird good like the Eggplant Fries. Every care and stress melts away when I hover over a plate of $1 Som Tam, which is excellent minus the rats in the gutter next to the table. It feels right to drink wine on the balcony at Small’s, even though the wine’s just mediocre and I’m sweating into the glass.

There are more days when I’m generally happy and not freaking out. My weeks are filled with rewarding challenges and fun times with people I like. I’m doing my best to live in the moment and stop seeing the months spent here as Girl Scout badges, something to collect for bragging rights. Each day here in Bangkok brings exciting opportunities to learn new things or find out non exciting things (like there are three Sizzlers here). Even when I head out and things don’t turn out the way I’d hoped, it’s still a pretty great feeling to know that I tried.

How is this real? I woke up a few times in the night, but made the official decision to stop sleeping at 9 am. I couldn’t believe that I was not only alone in a hotel in Thailand, but starting a life here. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!

I spent the morning scourging the Internet for apartments. There were a lot of great ones in my price range, but I decided it may be better to go to a real estate office in person. At noon, I hit the streets anxiously and thought I would try getting to the Re/Max real estate office on my own. I had looked up directions ahead of time, and headed for the BTS station to start the adventure. I proudly got off the train and at street level, I thought I would reward myself with lunch. I had green curry and shrimp, as that is one of the only things I know how to say.

After lunch, I went back to the street and walked toward my destination. Weird, that McDonald’s looks super familiar. Maybe they all look exactly the same? NOPE. I had made a loop back to my hotel’s street. Extremely flustered and without WiFi, I decided I needed someone to just take me to my destination. It took me a solid 10 minutes before I had the courage to approach a motorcycle taxi and ask for a ride. At the time, I didn’t know that Thai people only take motorcycle taxis for very short distances. They automatically charge more for idiot tourists who don’t know that, so I paid him a good 3x the going rate.

We got to the address and my heart sunk. It was massage parlor with giant lips on the sign that I was 100% sure was not Re/Max. I showed him the address again, and he motioned for me to call the phone number on the ad. He graciously waited as I called and sweat in the street. An American man told me that the office had moved. I wanted to crumple up and disappear.

The American gave me directions and I scribbled them down in my notebook. I told my driver where to go in broken Thai. He didn’t turn when I wanted him to, so I panicked and asked him to turn around and go back to “Lao Sai,” or turn left. He did, and we ended up going down another street I thought seemed wrong. Why the f am I giving anyone directions? I have no idea where I am! We came to a slow stop and we brokenly communicated. I didn’t want to waste his time, so I got off the motorcycle and tried to thank him and go it alone (or give up and cry). He asked a few people around him about the address, and urged me to call the Re/Max number again. On the phone with the agent, I realized that we were just a few buildings away! I almost leapt for joy and thanked the driver excessively.

Being one million degrees here, I was sweating pretty heavily when I walked into the Re/Max office. The agent, Siri, looked very concerned and asked me if I was okay. She power walked to get me some filtered water, and seemed genuinely worried as she turned up the air conditioning. I tried to laugh it off and vowed to get used to the tropical heat ASAP. We talked budget, location, other wish list items and made a plan to meet the next day to look at available condos.

After fulfilling my main task for the day, I realized I had nothing else planned to do. I had developed about 10 blisters from all of the walking I had done in the first 48 hours. As someone sans thigh gap, I was getting a pretty intense leg chafe and was cringing with each step. Despite not wanting to spend a lot of time walking around in pain, I chose to head to a cool neighborhood and walk around.

I had read that the neighborhood Ari was essentially the Brooklyn or Hayes Valley of Bangkok, so I got back on the BTS to explore. Almost immediately after I got off the train, it started pouring rain. I ducked under a plumeria tree until I decided to wait out the storm with a foot massage. Second massage in less than 48 hours… Only God can judge me!! The woman gave me some amazing shorts to change into that I may have worn backwards (unintentionally):

Coming from the California drought, I was blown away by the torrential downpour. You could have told me that this was a monsoon and I would have believed you. Post massage, the masseuse gave me hot tea and some dried fruit to snack on. I waited for the rain to stop and applied a thousand bandaids to my blistered feet. Two days of tromping through Bangkok had really ruined my barking dogs.

I walked into the drizzle and tried to find street food to eat. It’s a challenge to find street food as a pescetarian. Most of the stalls seem to serve pork and chicken. If a vendor does sell fish, it looks like it has been sitting out a while, and I have been so wildly paranoid about traveler’s diarrhea that I refuse to take that risk. Giving up on food, I kept walking around checking out the area. Ari had many similarities to the cool cities it was compared to online. There were a number of restaurants that could have been plucked out of San Francisco or New York that I’d love to visit for dinner (when I actually have friends here).

I got back on the BTS and headed home in case the rain started again. Like an idiot, I didn’t bring an umbrella out despite it being the rainy season. Back in my temporary neighborhood, I walked around looking for food. I turned down a busy street and found myself in the midst of many bustling bars. Signs advertised Buttery Nipple cocktails and I noticed that the white people were mainly single, white males. The bars were teeming with beautiful Thai women, and more lined the street. My chest tightened and I was instantly depressed when I realized that I was in some sort of red light area and that these were prostitutes. I kept walking down the street hoping to escape the sad reality and got out as quickly as possible. I know I will have to get used to seeing the sex tourism that goes on in Thailand, but it was hard to take in the first time around.

I ordered a Chang beer at a tourist-y pub called Bully and the bartender gave me some free popcorn. I happily gobbled up the popcorn, two beers and watched golf on mute for a good 30 minutes. After warily chatting with the two men in the airline business next to me, I beelined back to my hotel. I’m mandating a two beer limit whenever I’m alone to avoid the whole “lost drunk in a foreign country” thing. I cringed when I realized I had beer and popcorn for dinner. Americans, am I right?

Tomorrow marks a new day, hopefully one filled with apartment leasing and good food eating.

Tag: Pescetarian

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