Topi (finally finally finally) arrived in Bangkok when he was approximately 33.99726 years old.
I wanted to celebrate this (as well as the more commonly celebrated 34.0 years of age, the day after he arrived) in the best way.
The Cake
Most importantly, this meant finding a satisfactory pastel de tres leches in Chiang Mai, and then transporting it to Bangkok to have when he arrived. There are way more Mexican restaurants (or, rather, “Mexican” restaurants) here than I expected, but none of them had this cake on their menu. Silly, considering it beats the pants off all other desserts.
Finally I found one at a very cute little bakery hidden off on a side street, called Love at First Bite. Yay!
I expected the search to be the difficult part – after that, just the safe-keeping of it for a few hours, what could go wrong? The answer is, a lot. A lot could go wrong.
What Went Wrong:
- I didn’t take a picture of how pretty the cake was when I first got it, because I honestly didn’t think anything would go wrong.
- I was told that I certainly should definitely not even think about attempting to take this cake on an 11-hour bus ride without a cooler and ice to keep it fresh. (Spoiler alert: I should have taken it without the cooler and ice.)
- So I spent some of my last precious money (lost debit card == limited funds until Husband arrives with new card) on a styrofoam cooler and two bags of ice. I did not trust the bags of ice, so I did my best to double bag them, and the cake as well. Nice idea. Didn’t work.
- Fast forward a few hours. I’m on the bus to Bangkok. The ice is melting. The cooler is leaking from the overhead bin, and causing it to rain on me and the seats in front of me. I sneak the cooler out onto the floor in front of me before they can discover that the white girl is at fault.
- I spent a good 20 minutes in the bus bathroom trying to get rid of the water and salvage the at-this-point-basically-saturated cardboard box holding my precious pastry. I was too sad and scared about the cake’s current state, so I didn’t open the box. Just wrapped it in my sweatshirt for the remainder of the journey. (No sweatshirt == very very cold bus ride.)
- Me and my cake make it to Bangkok, to the airport to meet Topi (!!!), and to our Airbnb. Once jetlag claimed its victim, I inspected the damage. Yep. The cake is squished. Fortunately tres leches cake is pre-soggied (deliciously so), so if any water did get to it, it wasn’t noticable. But it was totally smushed and no longer even a little bit pretty.
In the end… it still tasted ok, it looked pitiful, but at least I know a place that makes tres leches cake in Chiang Mai. 1 point for “it’s the thought that counts”.
The Temple
In Thailand, it is tradition to go to a temple on your birthday and make a donation of money and/or food, and get blessings from a monk. As it was Topi’s first ever experience in Thailand too, I definitely wanted to find a good temple to take him to for this.
We ended up walking from our Airbnb to Wat Yannawa, the boat temple. After my essay about the cake, pictures will suffice for this part of the day.
The Bike Ride
As I was searching for birthday activities, the idea of doing a bike tour around Bangkok sounded really fun. Topi loves biking (ok, he loves crazy 47-mile bike rides or terrifying bike rides up and down mountains, but still) and Bangkok has a lot of options for this type of tour. I particularly liked the sound of Bangkok By Bike, who say they “will not concentrate on the famous attractions, but discoveries of places and phenomenon ordinary tourists rarely will come close to.” I haven’t been a huge fan of Bangkok, but I was really hoping to see a side of it that I would like.
It definitely delivered. We biked tiny pathways along canals and houses, to a community that makes polished-stone bowls, to a quiet and beautiful temple, an outdoor market, a local restaurant for lunch, and finally a boat that took us and our bikes back to the start.
Topi, the expert, took lots of selfies on his bike. I, the less-expert, drove my bike into a ditch.
The Dinner
A few years ago, I went to Opaque, a restaurant in San Francisco where you eat your meal in absolute darkness. It was a very cool experience, one that I was sure Topi would love too. I was pretty sure that he’d tried to go to Opaque once, but unfortunately it had closed. So that was high on my list when I saw there is a Dine in the Dark restaurant in Bangkok.
They close on Sundays and Mondays, so we paused his birthday on Monday evening and resumed Tuesday evening for his birthday dinner. We had to check out of our Airbnb Tuesday morning, so we brought our bags over to the area where the restaurant is. It’s in a fancy-pants hotel, and they were nice enough to store our bags for the day so we could go wandering until our reservation at night.
We went just across the street to Terminal 21 mall, basically Vegas-in-mall-form, in that each floor is themed like a location (e.g. Paris, Rome, Tokyo, etc.) We wandered, ate hot pot, saw a movie, and explored each floor until it was time for dinner.
And here’s a photo from dinner! Or maybe I just googled “black square”. Quién sabe.
