Monks, Meals, and Markets

Disclaimer: For those of you who have seen my sister’s blog, my pictures are nothing like hers. I tried to pick ones that were in focus. Just pretend that they’re in focus. Thank you.

Today was an early morning. Cathy’s husband is from Thailand, so we’ve been meeting her in-laws (see previous post), and a distant relative (I think her sister-in-law’s nephew) was going into the Monkhood today.  Not permanently, just for about 2 weeks.  It’s a right of passage for young men to do this either when they are going to get married, make a big change/re-dedicate their lives, moving away for school, etc.  This particular man will be starting his MBA in England in the fall, and this was part of his reason.  Anyway, entering into the Monkhood is a very serious thing, and is begun with a ritual ceremony filled with celebration.  There is a part with the man thanking his parents for raising him, washing their feet, them washing him (along with grandparents and the monk leading the ceremony), changing into white clothing, walking around the temple 3 times with your family and friends, throwing coins wrapped in ribbons, then changing into the burnt orange garment (after vows are spoken), and then the family eats (which as you will see is an entirely different experience in itself).  It was really cool to be there and to watch, I’m going to have to start Googling stuff to figure out meanings and such. There are several rules that they must follow and the number of rules is shown by the color of their clothing, the darker orange means more rules. Two of them are 1) No touching or being touched by women and 2) only eating at 5am and Noon (he didn’t get to eat any of the food at the celebration afterwards, and actually wasn’t there except for a pass through to take pictures and say goodbye to his family). 

Washing his parents' feet.

Getting washed. This monk seemed to take joy and kept dumping more and more water on him. And it looked pretty cold.  

Walking around the temple

Throwing out the money

Family gifts for the monastery. No there isn't any significance in the gifts, they're always really practical. It's part of the celebration of having a son admitted into the Monkhood.

Making his vows

Side note: While the family walked around the temple, we walked over to the doors of the temple. And this is where we saw the cutest little boy. He was crouched down looking at this small caterpillar-ish bug. And all of a sudden he stood up and stomped on it.  And kept stomping on it. This furor of killing a bug seemed really ironic outside of a Buddhist temple.

A little less zen outside of the temple

The food after was quite the affair. I don’t think any of us anticipated this much food! Most of it was good, but not all, and we made sure to take pictures of everything.  A member of the Monk’s family insisted that this girl (probably in her mid to late 20s and her mom sit with us because the girl spoke English from attending the University of Michigan for her PhD in Engineering). They were great, even her mom spoke some English (I think more than she let on). She helped explain what everything was and how to eat it.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves: 

This is our table before we sat down. Notice the Sprite and Pepsi bottles.

We think we're almost done with the meal, so we thought we'd better get a picture. I think this was around the 4th or 5th course...

Our friends Tanawan and Kornsiri. They were great to sit with during the meal

Pre-appatizer? Puffed chips and peanuts (with chop sticks, which aren't supper common in Thailand).

Appatizer? Top right and clockwise: Thai hot dogs with ketchup, sliced ginger (pickled), pineapple, fake crab, Fermented eggs (direct translation: Horse urine eggs, also the ONLY think I didn't try), Center: pork/shrimp rapped in kanomgeep (flower of some sort). 

This was kind of like a coleslaw. Contents: mango, peanut, carrot, little crispy fish, pork sausage, lettuce, some sort of sauce.

Foreground: Duck, Background: Shark-fin soup (actually came out before the coleslaw stuff, and it was terrible!)

Shrimps, I even tried sucking the head (as I was directed, and I will never do that again)

Sea Bass, if fish always tasted like this, I could eat a ton of it. Apparently (and I've always suspected) fish tastes best when it's supper fresh and doesn't taste fishy (who knew :P). SO GOOD!

By this point you're probably thinking, we're done right? I'm mean that was 3 different types of protein. But you're wrong. Next came more soup (by this point we're on the 8th course). Those floating things are from a bamboo plant.  Couldn't actually get the name of it from anyone. 

Fruit that they brought especially for us.  The orange-ish things are salat, then grapes up in the top. the clear ones are longgong, apples and the red lynchee.

The obligatory fried rice with pork that has been dried and shredded on the top (surprisingly good).

Dessert which was sticky rice, sugar, dates and coypeck (yellow things that are supposed to give you a long life). When we were done and old man came up and started picking them out and eating them. It was really funny.

The newly admitted monk

After that Cathy’s brother-in-law took us to the weekend market (Chatuchank Market). It was crazy busy and really hot. We kept being warned about pick-pocketers and how it wasn’t safe, to be careful with our money, etc. We didn’t have any problems. We did get to see some crazy stuff though.  It was an extremely hot and humid day and it was really miserable to be out in the sun, and the parts that were covered were often just as bad because people were cooking food to sell so there was heat radiating from that too.  I’m not sure how they manage it.  I suppose if that’s all you’re used to.  We started wandering around the covered part, and ended up in the animal section. It started out with cute puppies, and then steadily when down hill. Thankfully it didn’t smell too badly, but booths after booths of caged animals got old really quickly. And we couldn’t find our way out.  They were selling everything: fish, dogs, bunnies, squirrels, rodents, etc. Some of the squires weren’t even caged, just leashed up. That was odd.  At one point we did find our way out, and decided that we needed to cool down; We found a place that was enclosed with air conditioning. It was a restaurant so we stopped to get drinks. I got mango juice, which is probably more detail than you care about, but it was really good mango juice. Mostly because it was cold, but it tasted really good also.  We shopped around for a while and bartered a bit. After only a few hours though, we were done. 

We took a Taxi over to another set of Cathy’s in-laws that wanted us to come for dinner. He seemed like a nice cab driver, and every once and a while you could hear him quietly singing along with the radio, which was fantastic!  He offered us water too, which seemed really nice at the time.  Later when we were at Cathy’s her in-laws were telling us about how lately there have been a lot of people being drugged with the drinks they buy and then being robbed. We probably would have been okay because the water was sealed, but none of us took any of it anyway.  But good to know for the future.

At that point, we’d just gotten out of the taxi, only been at the market for a few hours, and immediately prior to that had just finished eating a HUGE meal. Needless to say, no one was hungry.  They brought a few things out and I thought, “Okay, I can do this.” They made us sit down and totally tricked us! Hahaha. They just kept bringing out more and more food! It was so much!  It was all really good, but still, so full (even the morning after I'm still full)! They were really nice and kept teaching the Thai names for everything and it was really fun.  It also rained while we were there, and rained might be a bit of an understatement. It poured! For probably about a half hour, at that point it made sense why it was so muggy at the market. Words cannot describe how grateful I am that we didn’t get caught in that at the market. I think it would have given new meaning to the word miserable.