Underneath the paper lanterns strewn across the streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown, I spent the afternoon at a festival celebrating the Chinese New Year.

Also known as the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year is celebrated around the world and is the most important Chinese holiday. The Celebration lasts for fifteen days and includes traditions of buying gifts, spring cleaning, decorating, feasting and fireworks. Not a bad way to start the New Year and probably a little bit saner than waking up on Jan. 1st with the worst hangover I’ll have all year.

Fortune Telling

After walking down the street and checking out a few of the different stalls setup along Yaowarat, the main street that gives BKK’s Chinatown it’s name, I came upon a group of fortune tellers. The fortune “pimp” spotted me eyeing the tables, caught me and sat me down in front of the only English speaking fortune teller while simultaneously gauging the price by charging me double the rate of non-foreigners.

The teller was a small elderly woman who had short black hair with grey wisps. She sat stooped halfway over the table and had small round glasses that she peered over while speaking to me. Her teeth were crooked and a few of them were made of silver and misshapen. She told me to grab the cards with both hands and while I sat fumbling with my cameras. I intended to take picture of my fortune but my battery was exhausted in my DSLR and the teller was getting impatient so I just stuffed my cameras back in my bag and got on with it.

She pried what little information she could out of me as I fumbled with my camera: what I do, how long I’ve been in Thailand etc. I split the deck. She reshuffled it. We repeated the process three times and she laid the cards out in a square on the table. The first card she had up her sleeve was asking me about a girl in my life. I repeatedly told her no and she moved switched up her tune and told me that although there isn’t one now there will be when I’m 25— for the record I didn’t need a future teller to guess that.

Anyways, it continued on like that for another 5 minutes of self indulgence and ego-inflating as she told me I was intelligent and strong and that I would be travelling to a different country within the next year (again not a hard guess being I’m a foreigner in Thailand).

And then came the bad news…

“Ohhhh but you must be careful. Muscle and bone. You like excite and you must be careful of your muscle and bones in high place. You like high place. You like excite but you must be careful of muscle and bone.”

Damn her. Everything up to that moment could easily have been written off, but not that. It’s not that I believed any of it, but by telling me to avoid something she created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only was she playing on my already established fear of heights (established to me, not her), now I have to act accordingly to avoid playing out the scenario that would have never happened had she not told my “fortune.”

*note to self: never visit fortune tellers

The quest for Chinese food





After the last encounter I began searching for one of the main points of attraction—the quest for authentic Chinese food. Mostly, I’d been eating Thai for the last month and was in the mood for something out of the ordinary.

Travelling through Yaowarat there are a few local delicacies, including the illustrious and morally dubious shark fin soup, but I’ll have to save that and the other local fare for a different journey.

After wandering down a few side alleys and narrow streets I came upon a small soup stand with an open seat. In my bastardized Thai I asked for Chinese food, whatever my waitress recommended. What I received was Quay Tiow Bplah, or in a much less appealing English translation fish and noodles.

While that may not sound appetizing to the uninitiated, it was actually rather savory. It had a wonderful combination of textures and flavors. Wide Chinese noodles served in a thicken stew-like broth topped with cilantro chunks of white fish and finished off with a healthy dab of pepper and dollop of orange-chili paste. The cilantro and chilies came together in a pleasant “friendly” spiciness that emboldened the dish rather than took it over. In addition, the difference in consistencies between the light, feathery fish, chewy noodles and tender black bean curd was delightful.

Markets and temples

After paying my tab, I began my adventure through the markets and small alleyways that make up the pulsating arteries of China town. Every street was arranged in a different color pattern based on the hanging paper lanterns. Sounds, sights and smells accosted me at every turn: smells of incense, fried food, exhaust, fish, sweat, spices, coffee, and antiques. Sounds of the gutteral throat singing of monks, the high-pitch squeals Chinese pop and the soothing melodies of traditional woodwind instruments permeated the air between people yelling in at least three given languages at any moment. Down every street was a temple nestled in between shops where observers would come to light incense, scrawl prayers on pieces of paper and light them on fire to give notice to the gods of their impending good fortune for the future year.

I crossed the paths of a disabled man (not in itself an unusual sight) leaning on his crutches in the narrow, shadowy alleys of one of the food markets. His knee perched up in the air, nothing hanging below it, his eyes hiding behind large aviators which in turn were hiding behind strands of greasy, unkempt hair. Adding to the violent desperations of sound and color he whispered “krapppp” in long drawn out bellows. I was unable to determine whether he was saying the words ‘thank you’ or ‘yes’ based on the context.

To say the alleys were packed is an understatement. Compared to the outside world, everything else was stale, just lifeless in comparison. I imagined the whole world eating, drinking, laughing, yelling, swearing, sweating, dreaming, playing, working, bargaining and celebrating in an endless spiral of chaos manifested from personal desires and motivations; each person a grain of sand tossed in the tide along a beach of a non-linear time.

Stopping for snacks





Looking for a reprieve from the alleys, I stopped for a snack of Kanom Jihn (Chinese sweets) back on Yaowarat. Not actually sweet at all, the snack was actually a kind of dumpling prepared with some mixture of shrimp/dough paste and covered with fried shallots and a brown sauce. While the dumplings themselves were fairly bland, the sauce delivered with a nice balance of sweetness and tartness. That, plus the fried shallots added a decent crunchiness made the snack decent, but overall I would say it looks better than it tasted.

Cutting in line





After eating I walked towards a large Thai temple I saw off in the distance. I had found the home of the world’s largest Golden Buddha and the Chinese Heritage Museum. I walked up the steps and into a building at the mid-level below the Buddha. It turned out to be the entrance to the museum so I took off my shoes and stepped inside to get a ticket. Then while waiting to pay a monk cut me in line providing the final proof I needed to give up on seeing monks as anything other than average people with shaved heads and orange robes.

Oh, then I saw the Golden Buddha, but from the outside looking in. For the sake of total honesty, I has just taken my off my shoes to traverse the Chinese Heritage Museum and wasn’t in the mood to take them off to see a 3 meter tall, 5.5 ton statue of Buddha carved in gold. Maybe I was jaded after the monk thing. I don’t know.

Afterwards, I took a survey for tourists and in return received a cheap wooden elephant charm probably made by the small, adept Chinese hands in a sweat shop I would never know the name of.