Day 256: First 7/11 haul back in Bangkok
I stayed away for a few days, I really did, but this evening midnight had come & gone and my tummy was a-rumbling.
My legs took me there almost on autopilot. It’s not hard to do this in Thailand it really isn’t. The 7-Eleven is the national corner shop here. In Germany, you have your Kiosks everywhere but in Thailand its the 7-Eleven store. It’s the same company that is also all over America.
There is a joke in Thailand that involves giving directions to a friend and goes something along the lines of:
“Go out the door, turn right at the 7/11 then head straight down until you pass a 7/11. Keep on until you see the 7/11, then turn round the corner, go down there until you get to the 7/11 and it’s just there.”
It’s almost a joke but not really, because you could actually follow these instructions in most areas of Bangkok that I’ve been to.
Last time I surprised and intrigued my Facebook friends with a steady stream of photos of the 7/11 treats. There was a smorgasbord of new cakes just waiting for me to delve into. It became an addiction. I would find myself stopping off most evenings to quickly grab something sweet after my evening meal.
The problem with this habit was that instead of limiting what I bought to a sensible calorie count, I actually ended up buying them by the total cost. The fact that everything is so cheap in there meant I would often end up with multiple products from each category. A few packs of biscuits, a few types of cakes, a few selections from the fruit and nut, maybe a beer, maybe a milkshake. It was bad. For the belly, not the wallet.
So this time around I mentally distanced myself from that habit.
Now some may say, Matthew, you are only on day 4 and I would say back to them… yes, that seems like an accurate count of the days. But in my defence, I at least tried to get some of the healthier options from the shelves this time.
Here is the haul:
Let’s have a chat about these.
Obviously, on the far left, we have normal plain water. The tap water is not potable here, which means you can’t drink out of the tap. It’s ok to brush your teeth but you shouldn’t be gulping it down. Most hostels let you have some but my bottle got scooped up today so I needed a new container.
The green packet at the bottom middle are sunflower seeds. Most of the nuts that you can get here have been interfered with. They are roasted with sweeteners or salt or some other kind of coating. Getting plain food is tricky. I thought I had found some in this case. I thought wrong. My first mouthful instantly told me this. Looking back at the packet now you can see in the top right what looks like some coconut shells. That is exactly what they are, the list on the back reads spices, then sweeteners, then coconut for its top 3 ingredients. They were tasty, and 190 calories in total if I had eaten the whole bag.
To the right, we have what I think is cuttlefish, dried, put on skewers and then undried a little bit by being coated in a sticky sweet flavouring. The flavouring did little to mask the very impressive simulation of what it would be like to eat cardboard dipped in ketchup.
In the middle, the thing that looks like an apple is, in fact, dehydrated guava. I was about to grab the mango in the shop which I love but remembered to keep pushing myself to try new things and grabbed this instead. This hasn’t been eaten yet so I have no report for it yet.
Above that at the top is chocolate biscuits filled with matcha green tea cream. I bought them to have them over the next few days. They may have been more than nibbled at this evening though.
The milkshake looking thing is a bit of a mystery to me. It comes in pink and yellow varieties and has a kind of sour taste to it. I don’t know what it is but its kind of nice. The price of this little bottle is so insanely cheap I don’t know why they bother even charging for it. 7THB. That’s 16p in pounds sterling. It hardly seems worth the bother of ringing it up.
The Japanese cheesecake is not what people from England would taste and say “oh that’s a nice cheesecake”. No, they would take a bite of this and go “oh, that’s a nice almost plain sponge”.
And that leaves us with the strange looking triangle thing in the middle. What is it? It is Onigiri. Its white rice, wrapped in seaweed with some tastiness in the middle. Some might say this sounds like sushi, but for technical reasons, no it is not. This one came with teriyaki salmon in the middle and it was very tasty.
In truth, I should have walked in there, grabbed the onigiri, the water and then paid and left. I let my belly do the buying with only a minor consultation from my brain. Oh what a terrible waste of money, and now most of this is sat there in a bag next to my bed.
But how much do you think the entire bag of goodies came to? Well if you walked in there with 130bt tucked into your pockets you would have left with 9 spare. So 121bt total, that comes out at just under £3.
It’s amazing the kind of haul you can get for such tiny prices, and you can probably now see why I vowed to steer clear of this place. Just imagine what damage you could do if you turned this kind of spree shopping into a daily cake and biscuits adventure!