Adventures in Patphong

Last night I went down Silom Road (where I'm staying) to a seafood place I went by earlier, to try a couple of the creatures they had sitting in tanks. The restaurant was mostly filled by foreigners, but was good overall. The first thing I tried was a sea mantis. I've never seen these anywhere else. From the following picture, you can see that they look totally freaky (the head is on the left).

My sea mantis was prepared by frying it with garlic. the taste was OK, but the meat was hard to separate from the shell, a possible reason these aren't more widespread in availability. Also, they aren't too cheap, at about US$10/sea mantis (with not that much meat in each one).

I also had a river prawn salad. Here are the river prawns (note the long blue claws).

The salad was excellent, with lots of flavor.

After dinner, I headed further down the road, to the patphong area, famous for its girlie shows. Also, there is a large night market (the shopping seems to attract more people than the sleaze) and a 24 hour supermarket. Walking through the area is annoying, as there are many touts trying to get you to go into one club or another. I peeked into a couple of the doors as I walked by; I could see many bored-looking Go Go girls mildly dancing on center stages. Here're a couple of photos of the district:

The following is an area that caters to the tastes of the Japanese:

I went into a small (normal, non-girlie show) bar and had a couple of drinks and watched people. At the end of the bar, a funny looking nervous British man with bad teeth was being seduced by a pair of prositutes (they didn't appear to be any of the famous "lady boys" that I saw elsewhere in the district plying their trade). Across the bar, a European couple were playing Connect Four, the game apparently supplied by the bar. As I was watching, the cocktail waitress asked if I wanted to play; I ended up beating her 3 games to 2, although she creamed me during the first 2 games (it took me a while to get back into my groove-I used to play all the time in Junior High during lunch). She seemed much more interested in Connect Four than customer service, since irritated customers kept having to come over to order drinks.

Today I went to what is billed as the largest weekend market in the world, a huge flea market full of clothes and food and miscellaneous bric-a-brac. It was huge.

I ate a couple of salads (amongst other foods): on the left is a papaya salad, and on the right is the infamous larb (in this case, larb moo, larb made with pork). And of course a Thai coffee at top and a container of sticky rice.

Now I'm headed off to Chinatown to hopefully get some more seafood. Tonight I need to get some sleep since I'm taking the train up to Ayutthaya tomorrow morning for a little day trip.