Bangkok's really developed over the last decade or two. The only thing which lets it down is the transport system. Although transport here is not as basic as some in Kanchanaburi ... :)
....the traffic jams can still be of biblical proportions, (not quite on the same scale as Jakarta), but big enough. They have a metro and a skytrain, the latter which is my preferred method of transport, but it doesn't serve the west which contains the backpacker district. They also have the usual tuk-tuks and motorbike couriers which are popular particularly at rush hour. Going on these motorbikes has been described in the lonely planet as something akin to an extreme sport :)...so i avoided using them...
One day, i hit the gym at the Marriot and returned to the backpacker area for dinner. I was ravenously hungry and was in the mood for a steak of some sort, so popped into this restaurant.
This is the view from the outside :
It had a menu item called 'dark pork steak with black pepper'. I had something similar in Kan, and it was delicious, so i ordered it. While i was eating it, one of the owners of the resto came over and started chatting to me. He said the steak was one of his customers' favourites. It was certainly very tasty and had hardly any fat. He said that a friend of his owned a pig farm and had been rearing 'black' pigs. The conversation went like this :
[Owner]: They have no cellulite (fat). Delicious...
[Me] : Yes, really tasty...
[Owner]: Black pig much lighter than the normal pig..normal weigh 100kilo, black pig 50kilo...
Really popular in Japan, my friend export to Japan.
He try lots of ways reduce cellulite and found if he keeps them in one place, they have no fat..
[Me]: Er, what sorry?
[Owner] Yes, he keeps them in place, they don't move, just all the time eat, eat, eat...
I stopped eating at this point. I know most restaurant food is intensively farmed, but being into animal welfare, hearing something like that really puts me off my food..unfortunately, Asia in general does not have a good record in farming animals under humane conditions..the only place i saw free range food in supermarkets was in Singapore...
The owner was a really nice guy, so i didn't want to take it up with him. I just didn't order the steak again after that day, blaming it on a delicate stomach.
I kept going to this resto and having a chat with the owners and the manageress Nicky. Here's the owner i chatted to about the black pigs, Nicky and myself :
The two owners were obviously fairly wealthy guys. Gambling's banned in Thailand (as the King disapproves of it, i was told). The guy above had been to Cambodia 7 times and Laos 3 times to gamble, just last year !! I watched them guzzle a whole bottle of whisky between them and puff away on cigarettes every night....Neither of them looked like they were vaguely interested in exercise either. I wasn't surprised to find out later that both of them suffered badly from gout..as the night wore on they'd fraternise with their good looking female customers and grin at me across the tables...they'd also insist on giving me free shots, sometimes even putting whisky in my beer !!...so i helped out in small ways by moving heavy tables for the waitresses and so on..
I booked a ticket to Chaing Mai (northern Thailand) on friday morning. Its a 12 hour journey and i'll be taking a VIP (AC) bus leaving at 6pm today and arriving 6 or 7 am sunday. The ticket cost me GBP 5.51 which is pretty cheap even for thailand...(whohoo !..just hope the bus wont break down on the way there ..)
So, on friday night i went back to the resto to say my good-bye's. The resto was really busy and one of the owners told me the tables were 95% full and he estimated (i think profits, not turnover) of 20,000 bhat..(about GBP 424). My bill for a meal and 4 beers plus a drink or two for some staff was about 12 GBP. The profits must have been pretty good as he looked happy, but then had to go home due to the pain in his leg from the gout....
Thais are just lovely, friendly people and i'll be very sad to leave this country...
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