Fruit and flowers

cut fruit stall

A more relaxed day today - just half a day of meetings after an early morning of emails perched in bed and then some free time to play after crazy hours.

I arrived early for my first  meeting to find the street a buzz with vendors selling lunch-type fare. Stalls, with cut fruit, other stalls with lurid orange balls made of  a sweet pumpkin mix and glutenous rice, little mini bbq stalls with skewers of marinated chicken in coconut milk, like a chicken dish sold on the streets of north eastern Malaysia I once ate ...yum!

pineapple bubble bag

But when it is hot, the thing I most want to eat is fruit. The choice was wide and colourful -  watermelon, pineapple, chom poo, papaya, greenish-yellow mango...

I decided on a bubble bag of spirally cut pineapple -  deep yellow and fragrantly sticky and dipped it in the accompanying salty - chilli dip. 

Very sweet fruit with salt and chilli is a great combination and a little salt is a good top up after losing so much thru sweat.

mystery fruit

A little more stall stalking and I came across another interesting fruit that I had not had or seen before. Elongated spiky cases all clustered on a small branch. This spiky cover - a little like longan or lychee coverings - can be peeled back to reveal a yellow fruit with a large seed inside. 

Just delicious!  A bit like fruit salad plant  - a bit banana, a bit pineapple. I will find out what it is called and report back!

mystery fruit nibbled already

Over to the Jim Thompson House for lunch.  This is one of my favourite places to visit in Bangkok.  It is because it is an oasis of calm and quiet in  a busy dusty trafficed city. The website can describe it better than I can but the combination of traditional teak houses with superb decor  in a tropical garden is just perfection.







rose and jasmine bracelet

To add to the scene, a young  woman, decked out in Siamese finery who was demonstrating the art of making floral decorations for personal and temple adornment, gave me the a gorgeous cluster of jasmine and rose flowers that she had just made to wear around my wrist.