thai food festival @centralworld

By this time next week, I shall be eating myself into a coma in Korea. Seoul apparently has a vibrant street food culture and I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into something I've never tried before. Live octopus, maybe?

In the meantime, I'll have to be content with reminiscing about the street food fair that I visited in Bangkok last month.

This is what a food festival should look like!

Actually, we found it by accident. We were supposed to have dinner at Zense that evening. While waiting for my friends, we did a bit of window shopping at the incredibly ginormous CentralWorld, the sixth largest shopping complex in the world. After half an hour, we were overwhelmed and had to go outdoors to get our bearings. And there it was.

The Thai Food Festival: Easy Tasty Street Food, held from 13 to 16 June 2013, is literally all the Thai dishes you can think of under one roof.

The som tam (papaya salad) lady. Check out the pickled crabs in the jars. 

The ubiquitous pork leg stew. The anise perfumed the air around the stall.

The khai jiao (Thai-style omelet) family was doing brisk business.

The pad thai lady and her protegé. Each serving was cooked to order.

There were some items which were unfamiliar to me.

At first, I thought that she was making takoyaki.

Spicy pork something. Looked hot enough to explode.

I had never seen blue rice before.

Assorted nasty bits. What was he going to do with them, I wonder?

I would have liked to taste some of the dishes, but I didn't want to spoil my dinner.

I don't know what she was frying up in that wok, but it sure looked good.

Deep-fried starchy things. How can anyone resist?

Bite-sized snacks. I was attracted to the colors.

If this festival is a yearly event, I might just go back to Thailand in 2014.