Hanging Out on Sukhumvit

Sukhumvit is a long street that runs east from the center of Bangkok and is crossed by numbered streets.  The BTS also runs along Sukhumvit, so usually if you're talking about a location on Sukhumvit, you'll say soi (street) whatever number, and probably what BTS stop it's closest to.  The fun fact that I learned this weekend is that the even sois are on the south side of Sukhumvit and the odd sois are on the north side of Sukhumvit, but the numbers don't actually line up.  For example, we went to a party at the apartment of some friends who live on Soi 24, near the Phrom Phong BTS stop, but if you go the other way from the BTS you're on Soi 39.

Our friends are leaving this summer, and so they decided to have some people over to help them finish up their alcohol, which they don't want to ship.  Since we're good friends, we agreed to come and help them out.  I knew we wouldn't be driving back to Nichada afterwards, so I tried to find a hotel close to where they live.  We decided to try the Sheraton Grande which is one stop down, at Asok, and is across the street from Terminal 21, the fun mall with floors themed like different cities.

The very nice lady who checked us in understood my need for views, and put us on the top floor, 33.

The best part about the hotel is that it has its own connection to the sky walk.  The sky walk is a pedestrian walkway that runs underneath the BTS.  The sad part is that it doesn't run the whole length of the BTS, so you can be enjoying your sky walk, and then have to go back down to the ground with everyone else for while before you can find a place to pick it up again.  Luckily for us, we could get pretty much everywhere we wanted to go on the sky walk.  Our first stop was at a restaurant called Hemingway's.  It's in a house that used to be the French ambassador's residence.

They have beautiful outdoor seating on the balconies and a courtyard, but it's still a little too hot for that, so we sat inside with air conditioning this time.  We'll be going back when it's cooler though.  One of our favorite parts was the menu, which had some fun names and descriptions.  Jeff had to try Hemingway's Hot and Salty Nuts,

and, after reading the description, I felt I needed to try the Singapore Sling.

The food was really good too, so it was a great start to our evening.

After dinner, I took Jeff exploring at Terminal 21.

By Bangkok standards, it's actually a pretty small mall, but we still managed to find some interesting stuff.

We eventually made our way to our friends' apartment, and had fun exploring a bit more along the way.  The host is quite a mixologist, so they had a menu of drinks to choose from.  My favorite for the evening was a Thai colada.  We also played cards, and I learned a couple new games.  My new favorite is Midnight Baseball.  We stayed until after midnight, which is when the BTS closes, so we caught a taxi back to our hotel.

The Sheraton has some of the best restaurants in the city, but they're very expensive, so we had decided not to have breakfast there.  Instead, I had read about a place that's supposed to have the best hot chocolate in Bangkok.  It's called Chu Chocolate Bar and Cafe, and we could get there without leaving the sky walk, so that's where we went for breakfast.  The hot chocolate did not disappoint.  They actually had a whole section of the menu devoted to chocolate.

Silly Jeff got coffee, but I got a creamy and delicious hot chocolate.  His may have looked fancier than mine, but mine tasted better.

After a delicious breakfast, we ambled back along the sky walk to our hotel, and then made our way home to the girls who greeted us with hugs and kisses.  Elena cried out "Mama! Dada!" when she saw us, and Vivi gave Jeff a running leap hug.  Young said they were both very good, and it sounds like they had fun without us, but we're all enjoying having a lazy family Sunday after our night apart.

Cooking with Poo

I went to a cooking class run by a woman whose nickname is Poo.  This nickname is a shortening of the word for the color pink in Thai and comes from the word for rose apple, a sweet fruit.  It's kind of like calling someone honey or pumpkin, but the translation is unfortunate.  Poo has a sense of humor about it though, and has decided to use it to her advantage.  She explains all this at the beginning of the cooking class.

While you're cooking, you get to wear an apron that says, "I cooked with Poo, and I liked it!"  You can buy the apron as well.  The classes run Monday through Saturday, and each day has a different menu.  The poster for the classes keeps the joke going.

You have to have a sense of humor to do this class, and you can't be easily grossed out.  They weed out the weak with a trip to a huge market before the class.  I went with two friends and we were part of a total group of twelve people.  They broke us into two smaller groups of six and each group got a guide to take us through and explain everything to us.

It was fascinating, and I learned important stuff like how to tell the difference between a pink dragon fruit and a white dragon fruit from the outside skin (the pink is bumpier).

But they didn't start us off with the fruits and veggies, oh no.  We walked into the area with birds in cages and fish writhing around in shallow water which they splashed towards us.

I stepped away from them to the other side where there were frogs in mesh bags.

It took me a second to realize they were still alive.  I'm not going to lie, I was a bit freaked out, but I pressed on, only to be confronted by the bug section.

Luckily, we got through it, and then we were had flora rather than fauna to look at.  

We learned that you can buy your soup seasonings pre-bundled.

As soon as we relaxed though, they took us over to the seafood section.

Our guides understood that we were a bit shaken, so they ended the tour by showing us different kinds of whiskey.

Then we all piled back in the van and headed to the school.  Poo greeted us warmly.  She told us her story which was inspiring, and then she got right down to the cooking.  She really broke it down and made it simple.  We started with pad see ew with chicken.  We got a plate with most of our ingredients.

We chopped and stirred stuff in, and Poo and her helpers brought us the sauces and chicken as we needed them.

I was quite proud of my end product :-)

It was yummy too.  I ate it all up.  Next we made beef with cashews.

I saved most of that for Jeff.  The last dish to cook was green curry, but Poo didn't want us to use the paste you can buy in the stores.  She wanted us to make it from scratch with the mortar and pestle.  She gave us a really pretty one to use though.

I mixed it in with coconut milk, chicken, sliced Thai eggplant, a kaffir lime leaf, and basil leaves.

The end product was yummy, but spicy, so I saved most of that for Jeff too.

I was glad I saved space though when I saw what was for dessert.

Poo gave us directions on the order in which to eat the fruits, since they were arranged from least sweet to sweetest, with the mango and sticky rice as the grande finale.  I discovered a new fruit that I liked, rambutan.  It looks like it came from an alien planet,

but it tastes delicious.  They're in season for the next couple months, so I'll eat as many as I can while I'm here.  My friends and I were wiped out on the ride home, but we all agreed that it had been a great adventure.

Ocean World and a Memorial Day Staycation

Since Jeff has Monday off for Memorial Day, we decided that this weekend should be a combination of family fun and grown ups only fun.  Saturday was just a lazy stay at home kind of a day.  We did do a family trip to Villa in the golf cart, but that was about it.  Elena loves riding in the golf cart.  The other day, Jeff went somewhere without her, and she cried and screamed when the golf cart pulled away and she wasn't on it.  Elena also gets so excited about car rides that, unlike most babies, she doesn't usually fall asleep in the car because she's busy looking out the window.  Knowing this, we planned our Sunday downtown trip for the afternoon to make sure she got a good nap at home in the morning.

Jeff and I had a room booked at the Centara Grand at Central World.  The mall is my favorite mall and the Red Sky is my favorite roof top bar, so staying there seemed like something we should do.  For extra fun, I got a deal on a club room through Agoda, and wow, the club part totally made the experience.  Our plan was to drop off the car at the hotel, go to Ocean World at Siam Paragon, come back to Central World for some shopping, and then check into the hotel and put Young and the girls in a taxi to go back home,

The best way to get from Central World to Siam Paragon is on the sky walk, but getting from the hotel, to the mall, to the sky walk, is a bit of a challenge.  The hotel only connects to the mall on floors 3,5, and 7, and in all three cases you have to walk through the parking garage to get from one to the other.  To make it extra fun and interesting, the sky walk is on the 2nd floor.  It's a very typical Thailand set up.  We're used to this way of doing things by now though, so we just took it in stride and maneuvered to where we wanted to be.  We had Elena in the stroller, but it was the quick collapse umbrella one, so we could easily hop on escalators when necessary.

We enjoyed the sky walk and when we got to Ocean World it was busy, but not so crowded that you couldn't get to what you wanted to see.

Vivian is always up for a fun a photo pose.

(Those crabs really are pretty freaky!)

The extra fun part this time though, was Elena being old enough to really get into what we were doing.  She still hasn't caught on to actually posing for the camera, but that's okay.  She and Vivi had a lot of fun with this little tunnel.

Elena was having so much fun, in fact, that she didn't want to get out, but there were other kids waiting for a turn, so out she had to come.  She got upset with us pretty much every time we took her away from an exhibit, but then she recovered as soon as she saw the next one.

There's even a little play ground inside, very conveniently located next to the bathrooms, so it was perfect for a pit stop.

Then it was into the underwater tunnel for a spectacular finish.

This one shark area is especially cool.

You'd think we would have maxed out on fun by then, but we couldn't resist going back to Central World for pretzels, ice cream, and a quick stop at our favorite book store.

Each girl got a new book, and then it was time to put them in a taxi with Young and send them home.  Elena had hit her limit, so she pitched a bit of a fit on the walk to the taxi.  Luckily, we had brought her back up car seat, and once she was strapped in she calmed down.  We waved good bye, and Young told us later that both girls fell asleep in the taxi.

Jeff and I freshened up and headed to Red Sky for happy hour.

We figured we would play dinner by ear, but we also wanted to check out the cocktails and canapes in the club lounge on the 51st floor.  The view was great,

the alcohol was complimentary, and there were lots of fairly substantial food choices, so we decided to just stay there.  There were only a few other people in the lounge, and there were several staff people there who very helpfully brought us more wine whenever our glasses got low.  We may have gotten a bit tipsy.

After an hour of that fun, we decided we should explore the mall, which was still hopping well into the night.  I took Jeff to the Jim Thompson store, and we found a perfect tie, which I made the executive decision to buy for him.  We definitely got turned around and lost a bit in the mall, but it was a fun adventure, and we eventually found our way back to the hotel.

In the morning we went back to the club lounge for a delicious breakfast, and then got home with minimal traffic.  It was a great outing, and the club option paid for itself and added some extra indulgence to the staycation.  

Safari World Trip Two

We have a crazy summer schedule ahead of us where we're going to be apart from Jeff for over a month, so we're trying to cram in as much family fun as possible while we're all still here together.  Given Elena's new interest in animals, a family trip to Safari World seemed like the perfect fit.  We invited some friends to come along and rented a van for the day.

The last time we went, we didn't do the drive through part, so we were determined to do it this time.  The morning started off rainy, but we figured it would clear, and that, ultimately, it would make for a slightly less hot day.  Given the weather, it made sense to do the driving part first, so we went through double chain linked fences into the park.  The first part you drive through is what you see from the giraffe feeding station, so there were lots of herbivores going about their business.

Some of them came right up to the van to check us out.

The birds on the lake were also really cool, especially in flight, but the flying was too hard to capture in pictures.

Elena was intrigued, but, because of the weather, both her window and Jeff's camera lens started to fog up.  Jeff took fewer pictures, and I passed Elena up to Young in the front since she was sitting up with the driver and had the best view.  Luckily, I did it right before we went through another set of gates into the tiger enclosure.  Elena was up there roaring with all her little might.

There were lots of tigers lounging, but some of them (cubs I think) were chasing each other around and playing, so that was fun to watch.

After the tigers, we went into a bear area.

We were hoping for some lions, so that we could have lions and tigers and bears, but the weather is really not good for lions here, so there aren't any out in the park.

By the time we drove back around to the main entrance, the rain had pretty much let up.  We went into the park at the same time as a bunch of tour groups.  They went left, so we went right.We had a good time walking around, pointing, and making animal sounds.  Just as we were getting really hot, we got to Egg World, our air conditioned pit stop.  There are some benches inside right in front of an air conditioning unit, so we set up there for a while.  The other family who was with us also have a toddler, almost exactly the same age as Elena, so the little people were toddling around and all the kids got some snacks.  It was a nice break before walking to everyone's favorite part, the giraffe feeding area.

Vivian is an old pro at this point.

Elena, on the other hand, was as intrigued as we had hoped she would be.

And really, who can blame her?  When a giraffe comes right up to you and sticks out its big purple tongue, it's pretty cool.

Both girls had fun feeding the giraffes, and so did the friends who came with us.  It was their first time at Safari World.  At the end of the day, we decided it was a tough call between which part was the most fun, the drive through the park or feeding the giraffes.  Either way, we started and ended on high notes.