Bangkok street food: A spotters guide.

Create a standard bingo card using various items from the list below. Fly to Bangkok. Arrive any time, day or night. Walk one block in any direction, crossing off items as you spot them. I guarantee you that someone will have won before you even get halfway to the scary mob at the bus stop.

Things on a stick:

• Fish balls – Pale, rubbery, fish balls.
  
• Deep Fried Meat dumplings - in a crispy wrapper with sweet chili sauce
  
• Whole Squid - Roasted over an open fire. Variation: dried squid. On a a stick
  
• Sausage – Just what it sounds like, but squishier
  
• Chicken satay – watch out for the big old chunks of fat that are this item’s profit margin.
  
• Whole half chicken – Boned, flattened between two sticks of bamboo, and held over an open fire
  
• Giant fish – Looks like a fish popsicle. Don’t eat the fins. Or the fish.
  
• Corn on a stick – I’m not really sure why this has become a mainstay of Thai street food.

Things in a bag

• Soft drinks – A seller pours the drink on the little bag filled with ice and give you a plastic straw to drink it with, thereby negating the point of his keeping the bottle to recycle it. Useful as a water balloon in an emergency
  
• Fresh orange juice – Salt added. Made from tiny little oranges. You will never drink that garbage from Tropicana again
  
• Roasted peanuts with sesame seeds – Usually sold out of large baskets balanced on yolks carried over the shoulders by tiny little men
  
• Deep fried banana chips – Light and crispy, or covered with salt and sugar
  
• Muffin and cream roll-ups – Exactly what they sound like
  
• Chili sauce- Careful of unwrapping, or beware the spicy rubber band of doom
  
• Broad beans- They're better in the shell, not too bad without. Fried in oil and salty.
  
• Tempura sweet potato – Tasty, but sits in your tummy forever
  
• Little round honey cookies -Yep
  
• Fresh doughnuts in sugar, in peanut oil - Greasier than you're used to
  
• Bread crusts- For the catfish, not for you

• Deep fried potatoes – Look out for the huge metal shield being used as a frying pan
  
• Pad thai omelet – A noodle omelet. Really good. Surprisingly. Add sugar and chilies, and maybe some lime and peanuts
  
• Noodle soup – Clear broth with fragrant green leafy veg, nice thick noodles, and sliced pork. Add sugar and chilies, and fish sauce.
  
• Different kind of noodle soup – Sweet broth over fish balls, plasticy fungi, (see ‘things on a stick’)
  
• Beef broth thick noodles - Or thin. who's keeping track.
  
• Rice and duck - Or chicken. Or pork.

• Bamboo sticky rice - I really don't have a clue how this is made, except they crack the bamboo open with a hatchet
  
• Sticky Rice with mango in banana leaf - Apparently they teach how to origami these things in home-economics classes here
  
• Sticky rice with custard in banana leaf - Also
  
• Coconut - Chill it in a bucket of water.Hack off the top. stick in a straw.
  
• Deep-fried Sticky rice - Yes, in a banana leaf
  
• Rice pancake - With coconut and fructose. Don't just use sugar or all the other pancakes will laugh at you
  
• Mini pancake - With bean paste, hot dog, or custard
  
• Banana crepes - See above. Bigger, with a banana

Things on Ice

• Tasteless gelatin deals - with red beans and coconut milk
  
• Fruit - sliced, served with a skewer
  
• Sweet coffee - sweet coffee. condensed milk not optional

• Scorpions - Deep fried and battered
  
• Cicadas - Likewise
  
• Grasshoppers - Stir fried with chilies.