We were picked up at 5:45am by Chewy our floating market tour guide. He speaks excellent English and is totally gay…..Angie & I are long time faghag’s so we are thrilled at the prospect of spending our day with Chewy. (he may still be in the closet, however this wasn't immediately determined by the sharp albeit outdated Chrissy & Angie gaydar) We arrive by 7am and it’s nearly a ghost town...perfect! We eat rice balls filled with corn and green onion, deep fried apple bananas and sticky rice with mango. We walk along the canal chowing down on our goodies. By 8am the place is getting packed. Lots of locals enjoying breakfast from one of the many food packed boats. Gay boy takes us to a fruit stand, we sample, dragon fruit, mangosteen, mango, star fruit, jack fruit, longan and tamarind. Mangosteen makes me want to scream happy obscenities...it’s so fucking good (think of it as Mangosteen turrets.)! We continue walking along the canal and suddenly I trip on who the hell knows what… I go flying and my flailing arms swat a large unopened beer bottle into the crowd and onto the wooden floor ...SMASH! Beer and glass shards explode into the crowd. I leave as quickly as I can but within minutes am chased down by the beer stand owner (I'm sure she used my trail of blood to find me) and am asked to pay for the beer…WTF? My clumsiness costs me 80 baht! Chewy informs us that it’s time to take the boat portion of our floating market tour. Along the way, we grab some Thai noodle soup …..because we haven't met our one ton food quota for the day. The soup is great with the exception of the nasty piece of liver I don’t notice and eat first. Suddenly, I am torn from my bowl of soup because I hear a loud splash…..Angie's noodle soup has now contaminated with disgusting klong water! (the Thai waterways are called "Klongs" and they are about as clean as an average Thai toilet)Sadly, Angie is forced to toss the entire bowl of soup and our day is forever split into "pre-contamination" and post-contamination" This concludes the pre-contamination portion of our day.
Post-Contamination …..Unfortunately, the dumping of Angie’s soup has caused us to fall behind in our one ton food goal...we will make up for this loss later in the day. So we continue our boat tour which is pretty interesting; we move uncomfortably close to other boats in the market, it’s a klong traffic jam. We tour the "back side" of the market which is like a mini Venice (minus the lovely buildings and handsome gondoliers). We see people doing their laundry, cleaning their houses etc. It’s very interesting and I am grateful that the butt pirate took us to this rarely seen part of the market. Once our boat tour has ended we return to the docks where we are promptly assaulted by vendors selling Plates (of all things) with our photo on it (unbeknownst to us, they took our photos while we were climbing into the boat...because awkwardly climbing into boats always affords great photo opportunities right)?? Angie's plate is noteworthy as she looks totally FREAKED OUT...you would think she just saw a ping pong show…..oh wait, she did see that…nevermind. We finish our floating market tour and proceed to Samut Songkram Maeklong Station to watch a train run over random produce; rotten fish items and nearly kill hundreds of people. I might be exaggerating a little...but not really. We walk along the railroad tracks, the vendors are set up on both sides almost completely covering the tracks. They are selling everything “edible” and I use this term very loosely as I am referring to “food” items like snake, frog, eel and fish jerky. The vendors low awnings coupled with the railroad tracks make this trek a bit scary for me. Situations like this lend themselves to my penchant for tripping and wiping out on even the smallest portion of uneven ground. Normally I end up on the group or even better, knocking the shit outta someone or someone’s "stuff". While waiting for the train we drink Thai iced tea and eat fried rice. Finally the train arrives about 20 minutes late. It’s truly amazing how fast awnings, people and hideous food items move to barely allow the trains passage. Angie and I now munch on sesame honey candy, and sticky rice cooked in a bamboo shoot (we are quickly approaching our one ton goal). On the way back to Bangkok, man lovin’ Chewy tells us about a place with a $25 2 hour massage! We have him make us an appointment for later that day. We arrive at the massage parlor and its beautiful (no happy endings here). It looks like a NY city spa and we are excited (or at least I am in the beginning...I lost a Little excitement when I had to wear men's shoes b/c they had no women's shoes in my HUGE and UNHEARD of size 9). The mens shoes are too big and in order to keep them on I must hang my toes over the end of the shoe ...seriously, one of my all time worst pet peeves…toes hanging over the edge of shoes…..arghhhh!!!! Ang and I decide to have a "couples" style massage, so we can be right next to eachother. Our massage is broken down into 1 hour sessions. The first is traditional Thai massage and the second is an aromatherapy Swedish massage. Between the two massages, we are left alone and asked to strip down and put on some spa supplied mesh undies ….yes, I said “mesh” underwear. Apparently while I was busy trying to squeeze my ass into these one size fits all (all Asian women maybe) mesh undies Angie was summoned by the "Super Gods" her mission was clear and she was ready to roll .....Super Masseuse had arrived. The mesh undies on her head, cleverly using the leg holes as eye holes, she jumps up so the world can see Super Masseuse for the first time! Seriously, we couldn't stop laughing and I think we pissed off the massage ladies a bit but we didn't give a shit, we loved it! When the massage was over, I felt like someone had kicked my ass and my bad ankle was now the size of a soccer ball!! All was forgotten and life was beautiful again once we had our cup of stinky foot tea (don’t ask…). Ahhhhh, the joys of travel!
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