Thai Cooking Class & Muay Thai Boxing

It’s Friday and we wanted to do something fun so we took a Thai cooking class. It ended up being about 4 hours long but it was worth every minute.

Our chef, April, was amazing and walked us through creating four dishes but first we started our journey at a hidden grocery shop in the heart of Bangkok.

After shopping at the produce market, we took a wild ride on a tuk tuk to the cooking class.

Our Thai chef instructor had us make many of the ingredients from scratch. Below is an image of coconut shavings being mixed and squeezed with warm water to make coconut milk and then a filtering processes makes it into a thicker coconut cream.

Below is the final product of spicy basil chicken after putting all the elements together and cooking in a hot wok.

Papaya Salad

Red chicken curry

Sweet Sticky Rice and Mango

Muay Thai Boxing

After our Thai cooking class we headed out for a classic Thai boxing at Rajdamnern Stadium.

We managed to get ring side seats and be up and close to the action through the hotel concierge. We were seated by the stairs into and out of the ring so we high fived the boxers as they got out of the ring after their match. The seats cost 5000 baht total or about $150 for two seats.

The arena looked fairly high tech and modern. The arena has a dome and there are projections on the ceiling that look amazing. During the intermission, they played a video of the history of Muay Thai boxing and it’s origins and how it fits into Thai culture. There were two large TV screens playing the action in the ring as well.

There were seven matches total but only two ended in knockouts and the rest were judges decision.

Above last match, below first match.

There were a total of seven matches with plenty of entertainment in between. The arena offers typical arena food, beer and other snacks. The service was good and several rounds of cleaning took place in between matches to keep floors and trash out of the way.

An observation we’ve made about Thai culture is the attention to detail and pride in keeping areas clean. There are many parts of the city that have trash given the size and population but in general, concerted efforts seem to be made to deal with unsightliness as often and quickly as possible.