Thai Zumba Lessons and Dinner by the Chao Phraya River

A friend of mine is visiting from Nepal. After her undergraduate studies, she joined teaching at a college in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Since it is summer holidays in schools now, she is visiting us (my other friends from college and I) in BKK. Yesterday, we took her to the nearby Rama VIII Bridge, named after the King Rama VIII. The Bridge is 2.45 km long and spans the Chao Phraya River. On our way, we passed series of restaurants filled with local people. Since eating out is cheaper and less time consuming, everyone eats out here. We also passed a Indian restaurant run by Nepali people. One would think that these people from your homeland would be more helpful and nicer to you in a foreign country, but instead they started making sleazy passes and comments at us. Then we passed a vegetarian restaurant on our way, which had peculiar open hours. When my friend asked as old lady, who seemed like the owner, what time they would open, she replied 11. We were shocked, a vegetarian restaurant opening at 11 pm? But then she later clarified that she meant 11 am the next day.

After about 20 minutes of walk we finally came to the bridge. We saw a group of young boys playing football by the bridge. This reminded me of my football days in middle school, when I used to be on the school team and also my first year in college when I played varsity soccer. Although I was tempted to go join them for a while, I resisted. My three friends and I climbed the top layer of the bridge and that’s when I found men fishing with fishing rods that had really long strings attached to them and they were using binoculars to detect if they had caught any fish. Although the river was dirty, it looked beautiful from up there on the bridge. There were beautiful giant ships with lighted pink, yellow and blue colors, sailing on the river. A little further down, we saw a group of at least 30 women and men dancing to the tune of some Thai pop music. There was a tiny stage in front of them with a very fit looking instructor on it. It looked so much fun that I decided to join them myself. Dancing to the fun Thai music and facing the river was the best exercise experience of my life.

It was time for some food after the random exercise. We found rows of people, especially couples sitting on hand woven mats and cooking some kind of soup by the river. It seemed such a strange coincidence that everyone would be cooking the same thing. Then we found out that you could actually order those soup pots and pick which ingredients you wanted and cook them in the hot mud pot by yourself. So we called the lady who was taking orders. Since one of my friends is vegetarian she specified that we did not want any of the seafood, or meat or eggs. She looked confused so I asked her to go with the lady and personally supervise the ingredients for the soup. Apparently, the lady seemed very disappointed when my friend rejected all kinds of fish, lobsters, octopus, meat and eggs. Nevertheless, we ended up cooking yummy soup out of greens and vegetables. The river looked so beautiful with the reflection from houses on it and the air was refreshing. The evening was certainly one of those fairy tale romantic types.