Our morning and afternoon are free today we have a Bangkok street food tour tonight. We caught the complimentary shuttle ferry over to the Sky Train and headed to the National Stadium stop to visit the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. The first four floors have little shops, cafes and exhibition spaces and a tribute to the ex Priminister Prem Tinsulanonda. The upper three floors are the main exhibition halls (only 2 were open).
The first hall was dedicated to art as therapy with the works being contributed by both patients and practitioners including prisoners. The second hall was a combined exhibition between Japan and Thailand in a style called Art Brut. Below is Wikipedia’s definition of Art Brut.
Description
Outsider art is art by self-taught or naïve art makers. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths.
The stories behind each of the works and the artists themselves is fascinating. Many of them had little or no formal education most finishing their education in the middle of high school, they were mentally ill, homeless or on prison.
From the gallery we explored a couple of more shopping centres – Bangkok has become like Tokyo, every building has the first 6 or so floors dedicated to retail and people all seem to hang out there. In the heat though it’s understandable as the shops are all very well air conditioned.
Our food tour started at 6:30 and we had to catch the sky train and the metro to get there. It was peak hour so it was interesting navigating our way around. We met our group (8 of us), our guide is Yiwah, and headed to our tuk tuks.I think this was my first Bangkok tuk tuk ride. Weaving in and out of traffic was an interesting experience.
Out first stop was a North-Eastern style restaurant where we shared a meal between 4 people. I was with the spicy group which was fine as I think our version of the food was nicer. i especially liked the pork larb.
Back in tuk tuks then off to have Pad See Ew. I had the scrambled egg version and Stu the steamed egg. I thought mine was nicer. Now we were off to the Flower Market and Wat Pho (we went to both of these yesterday) and they looked totally different at night. The flower market was very busy and the tiles at Wat Pho shimmered in the spotlights. We made offerings from lotus flowers and gave the offerings to one of the first 4 Ramas.
After this off to a Pad Thai (Michelin starred) – this was probably my least favourite as it was either shrimp or veggie so I had to have the veggie. The veggie option meant a lot of the flavours in the other’s Pad Thai wasn’t there. From here we finished with a drink on the river before being dropped off at our hotel about 11pm. Long day!
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