Weird Night Adventures

What should have been an average night out to get dinner quickly turned into one of the most interesting nights me and Kaitlin have had so far in Thailand. I’m honestly laughing to myself thinking about it right now, which is why I wanted to write a blog post about it.

To start, we don’t have a proper kitchen in our house, so it’s generally expected that we go out for most of our meals. By the way, we might spend 50-150 baht depending on how much food we order (that’s about $1.50-$4.50). If we got something off the street it would be even cheaper. So far, we’ve always taken a right at the end of our street, which takes us across the main road and into the city. But this time we turned left to go down the road to a restaurant I found on google.

Around 7:00 pm, we ventured off down the street for what should have been a simple 20-minute walk. We noticed that the further we got, the less people there were on the street, and the area seemed more residential and much quieter. We had 5 minutes to go when all of a sudden a dog ran out from someone’s yard and started barking at us. We thought it would stop, but it started coming closer to us and continued barking. We had been warned of stray dogs sometimes chasing people, so Kaitlin and I quickly turned around and started walking back, but the dog followed us. We were holding onto each others arms hoping it wouldn’t bite us. We knew that if we ran it would 100% chase us, but it was getting so close to our legs it was hard not to freak out. So we casually strolled back down the street clutching each other and swearing under our breaths and thinking “holy shit this dog is going to bite us and we didn’t get a rabies shot we are so screwed.” Luckily, the dog finally stopped and turned around after we had walked far enough away.

Laughing, we kept walking but we were still hungry and didn’t want to walk 15 minutes back home without food, so we hailed down a motorbike taxi and asked him to bring us to the restaurant. He must have thought we were stupid since it was literally right down the street. So we both squeezed onto the back of this poor mans motorbike, our first time on one by the way. We were pretty sure we were going to fall off.

A minute later, we walk into the restaurant and its totally empty except the 3 people working there, and I think “crap did we just go through all that for this restaurant to be closed?” But it was open, so we sat down and admired the décor. It was the cutest restaurant I’ve ever been in. But of course, our luck, the menu was totally in Thai and the workers didn’t speak any English. We just wanted some fried rice with shrimp, but had to use google translate, downloaded the Thai keyboard on my phone, and showed them pictures. We didn’t think they had fried rice because they showed us a picture of a shrimp appetizer, then suggested tom yum goong (a typical spicy Thai soup with prawns). We said yes, as we just wanted something to eat at this point.

We got the shrimp appetizer, then realized that the workers had whipped out a professional camera and started snapping pictures of us at the table. We couldn’t stop laughing because it was so weird and awkward. We smiled for a picture, and then they continued to have their own photo-shoot around the restaurant. I said to Kaitlin that those pictures were definitely going to show up on Facebook. And of course...they did.

Then to our surprise, they brought out fried rice and shrimp. That’s when we realized that we accidentally ordered a 3 course shrimp meal. They also arranged the cucumbers and shrimp into heart shapes because apparently Kaitlin and I were on a date. Then came the soup, which we asked not to be spicy, but since you can never underestimate Thai food, it was still extremely hot. We decided to ask to take it home rather than suffer through trying to eat it.

As we were waiting for the check, a guy came in and started talking to us in English. His name was Jain and he asked where we were from and where we lived, which led to us explaining the dog situation. Kaitlin and I had already devised a plan to take the long way back in order to avoid the dog, but luckily, he offered to drive us home! We had only met him a couple minutes earlier and we were so surprised by his generosity. In the car he told us he’s from Chiang Main and he’s in a band that plays at a local bar/restaurant on the weekends. We exchanged numbers on Line (the Asian equivalent to WhatsApp) and thanked him for the ride.

The night was honestly so weird but really enjoyable! The people at the restaurant were so kind even though we couldn’t speak the same language. They were total champs and went along with our ridiculous attempts to order fried rice. In the end, we found a new place to eat and made some Thai friends along the way! Just goes to show you that anything can happen in Thailand.

Oh, I’m also now considering a rabies shot.

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