Seeing familiar sodas and drinks in Thailand in Thai is comforting and quirky at the same time. It's probably safe to assume that Coke is labeled in 90% of the languages of the world, but it still catches me off-guard each time. Here are two examples - a can that was served to me in a pizza chain restaurant and bottles at a rural roadside eatery.
The Lipton iced tea was close to the original, also. Canned tea isn't my favorite, but the familiar taste was a comfort one hot afternoon.
Bottled sodas are still fairly common in Thailand, and as you can see by the well-worn bottles that they're recycled far past the point they would be many other places. It's interesting to see the wide variety of types not quite as popular any more in my regular neck of the US, such as Sprite, Mello and things like whatever that blue Fanta is. Blueberry? Bubble gum?
Bottled sodas are poured into a plastic bag of shaved ice with a straw for you when you purchase them at a sidewalk or roadside place, rather than have the bottles leave the stand. I have photos of this that I'll post when I find them.Sometimes it's completely foreign, like Calpico, a yogurt-flavored soda that sounded pretty awful to begin with but ended up becoming something I looked for again afterward. It's also made in a non-carbonated form that I haven't tried.
those scratched recycled glass bottles take me back to my childhood.. I remember the refrigerated coke cases.. where you had to slide the caps on the bottle tops between the steel bars to get them into the space where you could pull them out. That time seems so long ago..
ReplyDeleteBecause it was quite a while ago! LOL
ReplyDeleteI remember it as the metal supporting sidebars in the chest coolers being under the raised glass lip of the bottles, myself - and the thrill of every so often finding that one would pull out WITHOUT putting in a dime due to a malfunction of the mechanism! Ah, the simple joys of youth.
Thanks for the comment!
you're right about the bottle's glass ridges sliding on the metal dividers.. and how the coin mechanism would malfunction and give out a freebie every now and then.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the freebies were petty pilferage, but I'll worry about that later...
ReplyDelete