1. Whitening cream
While fake tans and brown skin is all the rage with the ladies back home, here it's all about looking white. Corrective eye surgery I'd heard about, but there were several ads on the train today for whitening cream, to make your skin look paler. Seems the grass is always whiter on the other side.2. Coconut
You can get coconut in many different forms here in Thailand. Coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut cream, coconut paste, fresh coconut, green coconut milk still in the coconut served with a straw...The one thing I haven't been able to find is dessicated coconut. From as far back as I can remember, we have always had a packet of dessicated coconut in the cupboard. How else do you make slices, biscuits, cakes, etc? Sadly, the little kiddies of Bangkok may never know the joy of coconut ice.
3. Bananas
Bananas are very cheap here - you can buy them from a lot of street vendors either chopped up, roasted over coals, cooked into pancakes, or served with sticky rice. But when you buy them from the super market, they not only come like Laura Palmer - wrapped in plastic - but they also come like Lady Gaga - wrapped in tape.
4. Mr Broomy
Every kid in Australia knows about Mr Whippy or the ice cream man - a dude who cruises around the streets on hot afternoons or weekends ringing a bell or playing Green sleeves (or some other song he doesn't have to pay royalties for) and all the kiddies come running out clutching their pocket money or dragging the parents in tow, to get an ice cream.In Bangkok they have Mr Broomy. A dude riding something that's part bicycle, part shopping trolley filled with brooms, brushes, dust pans, and other manual sweeping implements. He cruised the streets around my soi on a hot Bangkok morning, honking a little bike horn with a tyre pump attached to it, to let everyone know Mr Broomy was there.
I didn't see any kids chasing him down the soi, but maybe they were all still finding their pocket money.
5. Coffee
Many things labelled "coffee", and even "best coffee in Bangkok" don't necessarily taste like coffee, and may in fact taste like "worst coffee in world".D.
Have you seen Mr Ladder? There was a dude that used to ride around our streets with a whole lot of ladders strapped to his bike.... I often used to wonder who hears his bell and thinks "yes, just what I need, a new ladder!"... until one day I needed to change a light bulb and he was no where in sight!
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