Bangkok Kitchen

Some hours after waxing poetically about living in Ho Chi Minh City we were looking at the earliest possible flights to Bangkok. My beloved Krung Thep has not been calling, but screaming since we left it almost two months before. It just made plain sense to go back.

We barely set foot in Bangkok when a roller coaster ride of interviews, shopping for decent clothes and house hunting began. It was a nerve wrecking couple of days, but after just over a week both of us had work, a couple of ties and we found the perfect little apartment.

As much as I love traveling, I need to nest, and so finding a place seemed almost more of a priority than finding work. We looked at numerous apartments in various parts of town and finally found two we really liked. We had just finished looking at the second one of the two and were standing outside trying to make up our minds. One of the agent's, in a strong move to win us over, told us that he, as an agent, can give us some advice on picking the right place. He said that when you walk into an apartment and you feel like it is home, you should take it. And so we bid him farewell and called the agent for the apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 11.

Our place is newly built, and came furnished with a bed, lounge set, built in cupboards and after some bargaining, a television. It did not come, however, with a kitchen. As buying food on the street here is such a culinary delight and so easy and inexpensive it makes sense that people would opt to rather just pick up a meal than slave away in front of a stove in the tropical city heat.

But we enjoy cooking in all kinds of climes and places and figured that arranging a kitchen would be an exciting challenge.

The layout of the apartment is such that a kitchen would have to go onto one of the tiny balconies where there is a kitchen sink. The surface area is not enormous and after adding a camp gas stove there is very little work space left. I took some measurements and scoured the home ware departments of some stores until I found a cutting board that would be large enough to fit over part of the sink so we can use it as a work surface.


This made working outside easier, but we still had to extend the kitchen somewhat into the living room/ den area of the apartment, creating a pantry.


Through our browsing around cute little coffee shops such as Vanilla Industry, well stocked grocery stores like Tops, and overwhelming centers like Central we picked up enough utensils, crockery, cutlery and seasonings to get our extended kitchen going. We decided to use the extended shelve in the aforementioned room as storage space for all these items.


And so our kitchen happened.