Jason & April Ruggles

Indiana Jones and the Costumes of Chinatown

Posted on 15. May, 2009 by April in food, Thailand

Just when we felt like we were getting used to Bangkok, Friday came around and we realized that it will be a long process.

In preparation for the evening’s costume party youth outreach, our Thai friend, Natt, decided a morning trip to Chinatown was in order. Our adventure began with a 2 hour long bus ride through all kinds of traffic, to the center of Bangkok. While Natt was able to sleep, we had too much to look at to feel like sleeping! We had our first glimpses of the tall buildings and fancy temples.

Immediately once we got off the bus we knew things were different. Everything was red. All the storefronts, the carpeting inside the stores, even the sidewalk was red. In Chinese culture, red is considered lucky. All along the main street, there were stalls where all kinds of nuts, dried fruit, and other dry goods were stacked up for sale. Along shelves inside some of the buildings were jars containing more interesting things like snake skins, or dried seahorses. This was just the beginning.

Eventually we turned down a side street into a vast expanse of vendors selling everything under the sun, and in large quantities. The first thing we bought was umbrellas- which were well used that rainy morning. We walked down narrow pathways, only big enough to fit people, but motorbikes kept driving through anyway. Each side was lined with shops, each with a different specialty- toys, jewelry, cloth, umbrellas, costumes, plastic, and anything else you could imagine. Each shop was narrow and deep, filled with bulk items. For example, I saw a hairclip I liked, but I would’ve needed to buy a package of 15 or so.

As we walked, we passed other food vendors, selling things we didn’t recognize, and some we did but didn’t expect to see as food (like huge fried cockroaches on a stick!). We also stopped for some soup. Overall it wasn’t bad. But it had some pieces of things we didn’t recognize… some bread-like substance, maybe some kind of pork, as well as congealed blood (which isn’t as rare as you might think… we saw it on Bizarre Foods as a Korean food…).

After we sought out our costume pieces (a fedora for Jason, a halo for April, and a crown for Natt), we ventured back to a main road to find a tuk-tuk, a small three-wheeled open air taxi. That was a fun experience! We took the tuk-tuk to the river where we got in a river taxi. It’s a long, broad, shallow (and really loud) motorboat that runs up and down the various rivers and canals in Bangkok. The system works like a bus system. So we had to get off at one point and transfer to a different boat. Each side of the boat has a tarp attached to pulleys that can be raised if the water is splashing too much. No one wants the river water to touch them because it is so polluted. Natt even referred to it as “the black water”- and it does look pretty black! But, even with the risk of polluted water, it is still the faster way to travel. It took us 30 minutes to travel what took 2 hours on the bus! Another thing we liked about it was seeing all the houses, shanties, foliage, and buildings that lined the river.

We got home feeling like we had just traveled to and from a different country in one morning. What an adventure! Thanks, Natt!