amazing thailand

tonight we are visiting the sunday night marketin chiang mai and right now we are at thapea gate and this is where the market starts runningone kilometer into the old city. so we're going to be wandering around, sampling somefood and showing you what it is like over here on a sunday.background music playing. so you can buy a lot of handicrafts here atthis market. for example, silk, scarves, wood carvings. you can get some paintings. theyhave ceramics. silverware. lots of jewelry. i mean you can browse here for hours on end.and trinkets galore. mmmmm. background music playing.when you get tired of walking around in the night market you can just head over here tosit down and relax and get a nice thai foot

massage. thirty minutes for two dollars right?probably. background music playing.actually it's 80 baht for the foot massage. you can get a cheaper one at the chiang maipark. background music playing.sizzling noises. crowd noises.one spring roll. yeah. one tempura. one of this. one of this? ah, yeah one.well you sure loaded up with some tasty treats. okay, so this is my second dinner. i havesome deep fried tempura eggplant with a sweet and sour sauce on top and fresh spring rollswith carrots and cilantro maybe and some noodles. okay, try one of them? and that would be?it tastes very healthy. hahaha! is it good?

mmmm, it's not as flavorful as i would havehoped. here, have a look. it's actually bean sprouts not noodles. i was wrong. bean spoutsand tofu and some carrots. and what is this over here? well, i must have been a monkeyin a past life because whenever i get a chance to try a banana i'm always in there. and thisis the deep fried version. so, it's already kind of smushed up here. awesome. does ithave some kind of special sauce over top? no, there is no special sauce it's just deep-friedand the banana is really mushy and moist in the inside.okay, this is my tempura eggplant. mmmm. okay, that tastes a lot better. it's almost likea french fry. can i say that? yep, it has a nice sweet and sour sauce over top and it'svery oily. um, but that means it is very flavorful.

french fry on a stick.background music playing. and that concludes our visit to the hecticchiang mai sunday night market. background music playing. today we're taking a fun little day trip outsideof chiang mai. we are visiting the elephant nature park, which is about sixty kilometersoutside of the city. this is an elephant rescue and rehabilitation center, so we're goingto be showing you around. this center is also a refuge for a numberof injured and abandoned animals such as dogs, cats, water buffalo and others. we have a bucket full of fresh fruit and ontoday's menu for the elephants are bananas

and watermelons. hi baby! there you go. no bananas. nope! that was my first time touching an elephantand there skin is surprisingly course and hairy. right now the rescue center is home to thirtyseven elephants. thirty two of them are female and five of them are male. these are asianelephants, which vary from the african elephant. the african elephant is actually a lot largerthan the asian elephant and they also have much bigger ears.

most of the elephants on the site have beenrescued from logging, tourism and begging industries. this is the happiest time of day! the elephantsare now being bathed. overall, the experience at the elephant nature park hasbeen phenomenal. we've really enjoyed having an opportunity to feed, bathe and interactwith all of the elephants. it is a great alternative to doing the trekking where you are just sittingon top of the elephant and they are working. this way you get to spend time with the elephantin its natural environment feeding it and just having a great time.

this morning we're venturing up to doi suthepand there is a temple atop the mountain overlooking chiang mai, so we're going to be taking ared songthaew to get there and hopefully the views of the city will be amazing. here is the songthaew crew! say hi! hi! we'regoing to doi suthep. woo hoo! we just got out of the vehicle and this isour first vantage point. unfortunately, it is still a bit hazy outside, so we don't havea great view at the moment. but the city is there somewhere. the long climb begins. i'm not entirely surehow many steps we have to go but i know it is going to be a long way. i think there isover three hundred.

ideally you should be able to see the viewsof chiang mai from up here but today it is just really hazy, so there is a cloud hangingover the city. we can't really see much, which is unfortunate. that concludes our visit to doi suthep. itis definitely different than what i expected. i was kind of expecting this quaint littletemple on top of a hill and instead it is an extremely popular tourist attraction. itis really crowded over here. i would say the exterior of doi suthep isquite similar to a lot of the other wats we have visited here in chiang mai. however,the highlight for me was actually going inside the temple because there is a courtyard witha golden stupa and you can walk around light

candles and there is incense burning, so thatwas a great experience. you know we love to eat, so today we've signedup for a cooking course where we're going to learn how to make some of our favoritethai dishes. right now we're at the local market, so we're just going to be walkingaround picking out some of the ingredients we'll need today for the class. let's havea look. judging from the amount of cooking videoswe make you'd probably think that we're constantly in the kitchen and that we always like tocook. that couldn't be further from the truth. most of the time when we're on the road weeat out, so this is actually kind of an excuse to get into the kitchen and cook and to actuallytry and make food because normally we don't

do that. we have now arrived at the thai farm cookingschool. we drove about seventeen kilometers outside of chiang mai and it is a completelydifferent world out here. we're just surrounded by nature and an organic farm. we're actuallygoing to be picking a lot of vegetables from here. we had a choice between doing the cookingcourse in the city or going out to the countryside and i think we've made the right decision. now clean rice already. please come inside. i would like you to pickby yourself the whole leaf basil.

i'm making my yellow curry paste. pound, pound,pound! harder! faster! stronger! so sam is lagging a little behind right? comeon. master chef here - look at that. perfection. no, i really am lagging behind, i better hustleup. i'm making a yellow curry today. this is mine.this is what i created and sam went for the green curry, so this is his. and i'd liketo point out i don't think he did a very good job. oh, that just fell in there. what isthis? whatever. total chunks. you get an f! alright, oh! it's boiling! it is not supposedto boil. we're making the tom yum soup. mine is goingto have shrimp and i've got my coconut milk here, so i'm going to be adding some ingredients- mushrooms, onions.

i'm ready to try fine creation. this is mytom yum with shrimp. let's see. i made mine really sweet. i think maybe i put in to muchsugar but it is kind of nice and creamy because i used coconut as a base. you need to addmore salt or fish sauce then. mine does need more salt. how is yours? you look like a farmer drinking soup. i'mkeeping this hat i swear. i'm quite happy with mine. i put quite a bit of salt in itand i also put fish sauce. i'm making my yellow curry now. i'm just stirringthe coconut milk. i put in the curry paste i made earlier. there is also some pumpkinand potatoes and i accidentally added some leaves that i wasn't supposed to but shhhh.....cheater!

not that we've chopped everything up we'regoing to be throwing this into the wok and making our stir fried rice. i was wrong about this dish. it is not a stirfried rice. it is just a vegetable stir-fry. it's really good. i made one with chickenand string beans and mushrooms and here is my yellow curry with potatoes and pumpkin.is it good? uh-huh. at this point in the day i'm getting completelystuffed. i actually wouldn't mind taking a siesta right now but we're going to be makingtwo more dishes. i'm going to be making a pad thai and then a mango sticky rice. soi'm suffering from what my family calls bulbous plumptitude.

i'm making pad thai. your favorite. here ismy pad thai which is probably one of the easier thai dishes you can make. we saved the very best for last. here we haveour favorite thai dessert - mango sticky rice - and it has some deep fried mung bean ontop. it is crispy. this is going to be good. alright, let's check out that first bite.it is nice and coconut-y and it is amazing. so overall that was a really cool experiencelearning how to cook thai food. i made five different dishes. i'm beyond full. like ifeel like i'm ready to hibernate now. so this was 1100 baht. it was like lunch anddinner and the thing i really liked about this particular school was that it was outin the countryside where we were able to get

outside of the city and away from the pollutionand whatnot and just have a really cool organic cooking experience. so it is saturday night in chiang mai andtoday we are heading to the saturday night market. well, we're still a few blocks away but iknow we're close. you know why? because i can smell the food. what do you got there? so i got myself a twistedpotato which is a lot like the tornado chips we used to have in korea. it looks like itis all seasoned? it's nice. barbecued flavored. you're going to be sharing that?

you are wasting the chips. yes, blueberry. that looks good. it's likeblueberry cheesecake with ice cream. it's going to be messy. snow ice cream with blueberry sauce drizzledover top. how articulate. mmmmmmm. live music playing from the streets. so what did you get? i've got some pan-frieddumplings that are very similar to the korean gun mandu that we often had when we were livingas teachers in korea. so let's see if these are as good? they look hot. yeah. pretty good. someone found his favorites here. so whatstarted as just a little snack out here at

the market has turned into a full on feast.i've got dim sum and fried spring rolls. looking good. i got this - german sausage. very good. and in case we didn't quite have enough toeat - a sweet little dessert treat. so that is a banana and egg roti with lots of chocolateand condensed milk drizzled over top. we came to this night market. we were supposedto go for a walk but guess what? we ended up having a massive feast and so instead ofexercise we were gorging the whole time but it was worth it. so today we are back at our favorite thairestaurant but we're going to be having a special meal. we have ordered a set for twopeople that focuses on northern thai dishes,

so we are going to get a sampling of differentcurries that come along with sticky rice. and this is what it might look like. our first dish has arrived and it is calledkhao soi and it is fried noodles on top of a hearty curry. that looks amazing. it does.let's dig into that baby. i'm going to try my first fried noodle. i'venever had anything like this. it's kind of nice and the curry is kind of spicy. how is that? it's a very flavorful spicy curry. i can tell itis made from coconut milk. it's not a very thick curry. it is more stew-likeand soup-y but it is really nice on a warm day like this. i'm enjoying it.

sticky rice inside. so a lot of the northern thai dishes havepork in them, so as you can see over here we have a pork sausage. we have somethingthat looks like ground pork with nice green herbs and this might also be pork if you askme. one of the characteristic elements of northernthai food is that you eat your side dishes with sticky rice. this is going to be tasty. so i'm not sure if i'm supposed to be usingmy hands or not but because this is sticky rice i am. we're going to dip it over hereand see how it tastes. spicy or sweet? this one is surprisingly sweet.

so i'm going to try one of these little puffsin another kind of dipping sauce. that looks like it could be spicy. yeah, it is spicy.burning your mouth? we also have a nice pumpkin stew over herewith tofu. spicy? not spicy. it's just really hot. okay, what is next? so next up in the dishesto try here would be the ground pork. it looks like it has been marinated in a nice littlesauce. very strong flavor with the sauce. it looks like soy sauce but that is hard goingdown. very tasty though. so it is only our first week in chiang maiin northern thailand but we are quite quickly discovering that this part of the countryhas a lot to offer in the cooking department.

normally, when you think thai food you thinkof pad thai, green curries but really there is so much variety here. today we had dishesthat we had never even heard of before and they were so tasty. we still don't even knowexactly what they are. we don't know the n ames. i'm sure we will learn them over thecourse of our time here but for now what we can tell you is that northern thai food isreally tasty. so just when we thought the meal was finallyover and we are so stuffed they bring dessert out for us and it is amazing. so here youcan see bananas. those are just slices of bananas in a sweet, thick coconut cream andit is amazing really. oh yeah, you need to try it.

i want to see your face when you bite intothat. wow! it almost has a bit of a rum caramel typeflavor which really accentuates the coconut milk. that was seriously the feast of feasts.we paid 300 baht in total for that which is roughly ten us dollars and it was worth everypenny or should i say every baht. it's a lovely day here in chiang mai and we'regoing to give you a tour of our neighborhood. so we live in a very residential neighborhoodand in this area you're going to a see a lot of traditional homes, as well as luxury mansions,so let's have a look. hi, puppy. you're cute. do i smell nice? hi puppies. how are you? hello. you're cute.look at you.

barking. hello puppy. so we've encountered lots of friendly dogsthis morning. one of my favorite things about this neighborhoodis that we live right by chiang mai gate and it is a great place to get lots of reallytasty street food at night and the best part is that it is so cheap. so you can get mangoshakes and mango sticky rice, noodle soups. there is just so much good stuff to eat there. and what is your favorite part about our neighborhood?i like just how peaceful and quiet it is. chiang mai can be a really hectic and chaoticcity in certain sections but where we live it's just tranquil.

and one of the perks of living in our neighborhood- we live right beside a silver temple. so that is an example here of one of the moortraditional style thai homes. and right across from it you have a super modern mansion i'dsay. so that concludes our tour of the neighborhoodand we'll show you a different part of the city next time.