In the Noodle

In the street infront of our guest house, there is a street vendor who makes a fantastic noodle soup with won tons, noodles, pork two ways, greens and crab garnish for 30 baht. He's a little old Thai man with few teeth but lots of character and we enjoyed his noodles so much, that last night we thought we'd buy him some beer.





Well, we ended up buying him 4 and collectively we proceeded to make a pretty good dent in the seven eleven's beer supply with about five people getting stuck into it around the table. When noodle man finished work we invited him over to sit and drink with us and he brought over his bottle of Thai rice whisky, and as we bought him beers he wanted to return the favour.



Now for some reason, no one else at the table wanted to have any of noodle man's whisky... so I took it upon myself to drink their collective share.


The last thing I remember is taking my shoes off to show noodle man my blister (to which he very kindly applied some ointment), which I am told was about half way through the night's antics. I woke up the next morning in the guest house in bed, and with half my belongings strewn across the room, half undressed and with no idea what had happened.

Ignorance is bliss. Tim filled me in on what happened later...

For starters, I drank a lot. I only remember drinking about 100ml of noodle man's whisky, but apparently I helped him polish off 3/4 of the bottle. Usually when I get really drunk and loose consciousness (not that often, Mum & Dad!), I would stop drinking. This did not happen.

So, I kept drinking until a the little safety switch in my head finally went off and I suddenly just walked off without my shoes or my bag. At least I walked out of there... one of the other backpackers had to be carried off (by Tim, bless him).

Poor noodle man was apparently so drunk he had real trouble packing up all his tables, chairs, condiments and cooking gear into the back of his ute and was in such a state that he slept in his car and didn't go home. I wonder what Mrs Noodle Man had to say about that!?

I won't bore you all with the details, but apparently when I was woken up by Tim once he arrived back at the guest house (after retrieving all my gear) I went completely mental. The poor people in the room next to us had to endure me yelling and throwing random things out of my backpack at the wall and generally being a complete nutter.

As we spoke very little Thai and noodle man spoke very little English, conversation was a bit stunted - but everyone knows the international signal of "you're shirking your drinking responsibilities". I guess peer pressure knows no language barriers.

Mae pen lai!! :)