How Discover Thainess 2015 Made Me Learn So Much of Thai Culture In My Own Way

Inside UP Los Banos

I have never been this super serious in joining a travel contest until Discover Thainess 2015 came along.  Before I was bitten by the travel bug, I am a heritage buff by the way. I love learning the culture of other countries even when I just started this blog. That is why when I learned about this, I have to give it a FULL try and see where is this going to lead us. 

I never thought that aside from literally joining this contest is the fun and the learning I and my brother have experienced.  We have to produce videos and boy I have never ever done this!  Well it is just very easy to turn on our cameras to record a video for us but it is the editing that was literally a pain in the ass.  We did not know what software to use, no time and does not know how to do the editing part. All these we painstakingly conquered and we are proud of ourselves.

Eating the 3 Thai dishes we ordered

As part of our quest to win this which is to film ourselves cooking a Thai dish, it is nearly impossible to find a restaurant offering Thai food in Metro Manila that can help us. We are nobody. We don't have much to shell out from our own pockets. I don't know how to cook Thai and I don't know a Thai friend.  

So what I did I went on a 2-hour bus trip to  Laguna to visit my brother and a sister studying in UP Los Banos to take chances. I don't know much of this place and nor my siblings have much knowledge of Thai-related things we can incorporate in our videos.  Though we are tight in everything, as much as possible I really wanted to come up with entries that show a lot of "Thai" touch. Our Thai dancing has been done at the Thai Pavillion inside the campus To watch our video dancing the Thai way please click here. We even found a way to make our own Thai fingernails in an instant! 

Now let's go back to how we shot our Thai cuisine cooking. While walking without knowing where our feet going to lead us, I and my brother saw a Thai restaurant called Baan Thai. We quickly came and asked if we can do our stuff. We were told to approach the woman sitting in front whom I learned the wife and one of the owners.  It did not took us long to convince her of what exactly what we wanted.

I was thinking all along that she is a Filipina who worked in Thailand for many years  then learned a lot then came back in Philippines to setup her own Thai restaurant.  Until she answered my questions. She is actually a full-blooded Thai woman who came here in 1981 because of love. She married a Filipino guy and lived her ever since. She speaks Tagalog very fluent and she even looked pretty much like us.

She was really accommodating. She was with us during our stay and entertaining our questions. She first instructed her staff to cook the Thai meals for us and after eating, she let us cook Pad Thai noodles and we really appreciated that she never charged us for that. I insisted to pay since we took her time, staff's assistance, ingredients of the dish et cetera but she gladly said no.

I will make a separate review of what are the 3 dishes we ordered and of course our video showing us how to cook Paid Thai is here. 

Another part of the competition is to produce a video on how to create a Thai flower garland.  I swear I watched a lot of Youtube videos on how to make these but I really lacked creativity. I am very thankful my brother Vincent inherited my mom's artistic side so we were able to nail it. We started 10pm and finished past 1am! We used  8 different kinds of flowers and I am just thankful that 6 of these flowers we just hand-picked inside the campus. What I only bought are the jasmine or sampaguita flowers. We had to wait in the streets for a particular time where the kids are selling these flowers because it is not all the time they are there. Imagine how much we need to sacrifice just to finish all these!

Here's the finish product courtesy of my brother Vincent.  He was the one who designed everything from how the order and colors of flowers should be in the garland. 

Me trying to help him tie the knot and stick every pieces of the flowers.

Excuse me for the groggy face.  Yes it is already 1am... we just finished, wohooo!

In the morning, after sleeping for 5 hours I am glad that it still looked great so I had to snap a photo of this we poured so much of our time and efforts amid our busy schedule.  By 9am it is starting to wither but I just cant throw it away, I decided to bring this to the chapel, say a little prayer (that hope we win) and offer it there which is also a suggestion by my brother.

To view our official video on how to create a Thai flower garland  please click here.