street eats

When I'm visiting a foreign country I'm most fascinated by: grocery stores, toilets, pharmacies, and street food. Bangkok streets are lined with people selling food. The range is huge, from a lady with a few bags of fresh cut mango, to a makeshift restaurant set up on the street with a few workers, tables, etc. I'm usually not bold enough for the food stalls, but I'm always intrigued by small fried things and constantly on the look out for healthy snacks to keep me going while I wander.These fried banana fritter things were awesome. Crunchy on the outside, sweet, warm. These would make for a great winter street snack, of course it's hot and humid, like everyday, but still I think they'd be nice to warm you up a bit and make you happy. Twenty Baht (about 65 cents US) got me far more than I'd ever be able to eat.

Twenty Baht seems to be the going rate for most food on the street. It's like the magic number. Baht comes in 1, 2, 5 and 10baht coins. And then has 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 Baht bills. I work in increments of 3 because it's most easiest for conversion in my head. My logic goes like this. Thirty Baht = about one dollar. Anything that's 20 Baht = way cheap, so if it looks at all appealing, why not try it once?

I picked up something that looked like a stick of rice, once again for 20 Baht. I imagined it had a coconut flavor. Nope. No flavor at all. It was basically ddok, the Korean rice cake "dessert" with a few red beans thrown on top. I gave it a try because it wasn't fried and it looked like it might be nice. It was boring. I could have passed on this one.


In the department of healthy street eats there's a lot of fruit in Bangkok. Beautiful tropical fruit; mango, guava, dragon fruit, pineapple, coconut. I can't get enough. Dragon fruit may just replace avocado as world's sexiest fruit.


Pink and green on the outside, white with black seeds scattered throughout on the inside. Gorgeous!