Si Saket... Heads are turning!

from May 10, 2009:

We are now in Si Saket which is a city in the Northeast bordering Cambodia and Laos. The city has 30,000 people in it and very few are foreigners. We are living in the “city center” which is near the daily outdoor food market, and weekly Sunday street market. Although we’re living in a hotel, the room is quite spacious and has great accommodations, including daily change of sheets and towels!! We can’t beat the price either, one month’s rent is about 1 night at a city hotel in the States.

We have done a lot of walking the streets of Si Saket and have been to the ‘grocery store’ almost everyday but yesterday we decided to explore a bit further. We took a bike taxi to a local park called ‘Si Nakarin Garden.’ It was the most relaxing and refreshing area in the entire city. It was off the beaten track down a few gravel roads, but most definitely worth the trek to get there. We wandered around the many tree-lined paths in the park (in the park there are 50,000 Lamduan trees) and watched families as they picnicked and enjoyed the serene setting. We did a little research before going to the park and found out there was a little zoo if you crossed one of the bridges in the park. We wandered around and stumbled upon the zoo (which if we wouldn’t have known better we wouldn’t have known it was there), we paid our 15 baht (less than 50 cents) each and entered the zoo.

(The park)

The zoo isn’t quite the equivalent of a zoo in the states, we are finding most things don’t really compare so one must just learn to say ‘Ciest Le Vie’ and accept things as they are. The zoo had quite a variety of animals including: a camel, ostriches, monkeys, hippos, bears, cows, peacocks, pigs and piglets, and lots and lots of deer and birds. Tyler and I’s favorite animal was the cow with the protruding lower lip and teeth. The animals were in their natural, or somewhat natural habitats, but we unfortunately noticed that one of the monkeys was missing his eye and other things I will not mention here. All in all, the zoo was a fun place to visit. *One other note about the zoo: we had a nice little videotaped interview from some local Thai teenagers who wanted to practice their English, which was pretty entertaining!

No matter where we go in the city, we stand out. Thais will blatantly stare and stop what they’re doing when we walk by.

In the evening we sat down to a nice meal on the bottom level of our hotel. We decided to go out and see what kind of night life Thailand has to offer. On a Saturday night there were very few people out but we stumbled upon a bar called ‘SugarPub’ where we sat and listened to some live music. The main singer in the band was an evident hippie from the states and played Bob Marley amongst other American songs. So we sat and were entertained while drinking ‘Leo’ the local beer which would be equivalent to Budweiser. We have found much better beers here, mostly lagers but the bars only seem to serve Leo and Heineken.

Today has been a very low key day. Yesterday I was just telling Tyler how blessed we have been to have everything fall into place perfectly and how blessed we have been that neither of us have been ill. I spoke too soon! I was violently ill from the food last night and spent most of the day in bed. By the evening I was feeling better so we walked outside of our hotel and low and behold a flooding of people in the streets.

Every Sunday there is a night market in the street right outside of our hotel. The street was blocked off and everyone brought their local goods, clothing or food to sell. There was everything from baskets to unidentifiable meat (which we tried) to endless sweets to hamburgers in a baggie and there was even popcorn! I needed my fill of corn (being from Iowa and all) so we picked up a bag of popcorn and I also tried a cup of corn with vanilla sauce on the top, an interesting combination. We also tried a sweet rolled up crepe with coconut and cream in it, delicious! Tyler was feeling ambitions so he tried some fried meat of some sort, I don’t think we will eat it again but it was edible. We even had some delicious chicken satay. The food that we have eaten from carts and in the streets seems to be the freshest and best tasting.

(Amye enjoying some time by the water in the park)