Gastro Bistro Awesomeness

There were two Thai holidays and one American holiday in May, all of which fell near a weekend.  Because of Jeff's work schedule this month though, we really couldn't plan a family trip.  We could, however, plan an awesome Memorial Day staycation for the two of us.

Before we left to go downtown, we got to experience some fun parenting moments.  Vivian gets up at 6:00am, whether it's a weekday or a weekend.  Luckily, at this point she's self-sufficient enough to get her own breakfast and play or watch some TV.  Elena slept in until an incredible 7:30, so when I finally brought her down, we found Vivian towards the end of The Force Awakens.  She was very excited to see Elena and explain the movie to her.

I don't think Elena understood most of it, but she got that this was important to Vivian, so she settled in to see what it was all about.  

It was so cute, I just wanted to hug them both, but I figured I shouldn't disturb them. Vivian has decided that she will be Rey for Halloween and Elena will be BB8.  She explained this to Elena who nodded sagely.  We'll see how she feels about it when Halloween comes around.  So far, she has not been a big fan of costumes.

Before we left to go downtown, Jeff took Vivian to Panipa's for hair cuts.  Vivian also got some fun braids.

After that, we gave the girls hugs, left them with Young, and headed downtown.  One of our favorite staycation places has been the Oriental Residence.  It's right next to the main embassy building.  This is the view out one of the windows of our room.

That's the embassy.  We spent an extra $10 and got a corner room, so we also had a view of the city out our balcony.

It was just lovely.  My other favorite thing about the Oriental Residence is that they give you complimentary macaroons in the afternoon.  Jeff caught me looking at my watch at one point, and he asked me what I was waiting for.  My macaroons, obviously!  He shook his head like I was crazy, but sure enough, they showed up fifteen minutes later.

I put them in Irish flag order ;-)

Coconut, coffee, and orange, yum!  We also took advantage of being child free and having a comfy TV set up to watch Game of Thrones, which we can't easily do at home.

As if that wasn't enough decadence, our plan for the evening was to meet up with friends who live downtown and try out the Gastro Bistro all you can eat/drink experience.  On the same street as the Oriental Residence is the Plaza Athenee.  They have a French restaurant called Reflexions.  Some friends of ours had recommended it to us saying the food was excellent and they had really good deals.  The Gastro Bistro deal was one of them.  For about $70 per person we spent almost four hours eating, drinking, and listening to live piano music.

The food was fantastic!  The piano player had some quirks which led us to believe he was probably on the autism spectrum, but he was also a brilliant piano player, and he clearly loved the music.  He came to the table to ask for requests, and we made sure to clap enthusiastically when he paused for feedback.  It was a lot of fun.  Of course the main part of the fun was trying all the different dishes.  With four people and a wealth of food choices, we did try to vary our orders a bit, but if there was something really good, then we got more than one.  For example, everyone ordered the scallops.  I'm not ashamed to say that we took pictures of pretty much everything before we ate it.  For the sake of the memory, I'm going to include pictures of a few of our favorites.  The pate with onions was probably the favorite in the appetizers.

In the main courses, we loved the steak with straw fries and the risotto.

There was also the fish with potatoes and vegetables that tasted like garlic.

It was heavenly.  Jeff says we should definitely go back again, but I told him I may need to wait a year before I'm ready to climb that food mountain again.

Hanging Out Near Nana BTS

There is SO much to do on Sukhumvit, and even though it's taken two years, we are making progress with exploring all there is to see, do, and eat along this crazy road.  We've done a lot of things near the Asok BTS, but this week we found ourselves in the Nana BTS area.  I've been down there several times before with friends, but Jeff has never explored the area.  I managed to lure him there with Raja's, one of the best tailors in Bangkok.  We know lots of people who have gotten tailored suits there.  Jeff doesn't really need a new suit, but he can always use some new dress shirts, and he needs a sport coat.  I may regret introducing him to tailored clothes.  Only time will tell.

The first step to going to Raja's was making sure that when Jeff came from work, he and I met at the same Raja's.  There are two at the Nana BTS.  Since the original Raja's is so popular, another shop with the same name and a bigger sign has opened across the street.  To get to the original Raja's you have to go to the Soi 8 side of Sukhumvit and find it under the Nana BTS stop.  If you don't know it's there, you could easily walk right by it.  If you do find it and go in, the employees are quick to welcome you and offer you a drink, and they do mean drink.  Jeff got a beer, and I got a gin and tonic.

Drinks in hand, we surveyed the wall of shirt fabric.

We got a piece of chalk, and they told us to mark the ones we wanted with the letter J.  The wall stretches a bit farther back than this picture shows.  It took a while to process it all, but we picked some materials that we both liked.  Then it was on to the suit fabrics.

Some are more for pants, others more for jackets.  We picked one we liked for a sports coat, but that was far from the end of the process.  Next came picking collars, buttons, jacket linings, and other details you normally take for granted.  When they pulled open a drawer of little cups full of buttons it felt a lot like being in a candy store.

After all those decisions, we needed a snack.  We went down Soi 8 to my friend's favorite restaurant, Monsoon.  She loves the cosmopolitans there, and I have to say, she has good taste in cosmos.  We had a few rounds of those balanced by some yummy nachos.  But that was just the start of our evening.  

Next we walked to other side of Sukhumvit and Soi 11 for a drink at Cheap Charlie's, a highly eclectic bar that "opens" by taking the tarp off the outdoor bar and setting up some wooden tables and stools inside a yellow chain laid on the ground.  This is a picture of it before official opening hours.

You can walk down Soi 11 during the day, and all the great restaurants and bars are there.  Many of them are even open, but there's something quintessentially Bangkok about Soi 11 at night.

We may need to go back with Jeff's fancy camera, since I think he could capture it better than me and my cell phone.  

It was a bit of a walk to Firehouse which is where we were headed for The Baconist burger.  Along the way, we saw some intriguing street food options.  There were the usual noodles and meat on a stick, but there was also a really impressive seafood one.  You can pick your seafood, pick your sauce, and pick your veggies.

We were on a mission for bacon burgers though, so we kept walking.  Luckily, my friend has a driver, so once we were done stuffing our faces, we just collapsed into the car for the ride home.

The girls were pretty good sports about us going out on a week night, which we don't usually do.  We made sure to get in some good play time with them the next day.  We admired Vivian's paper bag village,

and Jeff tried to build things with Elena.  She's becoming really good at building with blocks.

When she builds with Jeff though, she starts out pretending to be helpful, and then she knocks everything down.

We had to go back to the Nana area again on Friday for Jeff's first fitting at Raja's.  It was also the start of a long weekend, so he was able to get out of work a little early and meet me for lunch before his fitting.  I took an orange taxi downtown, so I made it in record time.  We have determined that the only color of taxi that is consistently sane is the yellow top, green bottom one.  Usually the solid green is okay too, but you get any of the other colors (pink, orange, red, blue) and you are generally in for a wild ride.

I had scoped out some of the fun places on Soi 11, and there's a beer place there called Brew which serves over 200 different kinds of beer, plus lots of ciders.  We decided to try it out before lunch.  For our first round, I got the cider on tap, Magner's, and Jeff got Bitburger.

You may be wondering why Jeff chose this beer out of all the choices available.  It's because characters in X-Men First Class drink it and says it's "gut."  For his second round he picked a more Jeff like beer.  Product placement, it really works.

They had a full range of girly options available too, which I appreciated.

I stuck with Magner's because it was the cider on tap.  They had ten different brews on tap.

A friend came to meet us and ordered a fruity cider.  You know it's basically a soda when they serve it with ice.

She liked it.  I thought it tasted like carbonated cough syrup.  I now know to proceed down the cider menu with caution.  Jeff felt that he should try one more beer, so he went British.

The bar was open to the street, with fans for cooling off.  It was great for people watching.  I got a real kick out of the fact that there was a gecko crawling around on the wall by the pictures of beer brewing monks.

It was a great way to summarize a beer bar in Thailand.  Unfortunately, they didn't have any real food.

So we moved along to our next stop, Tapas Cafe.  We had a great time with the menu, even though we had a little confusion with three people throwing orders at the waitress as we noticed things.  She was great though and managed to keep everything straight.  There were so many things to try!

We ended up doing multiple orders of the shrimp with garlic and the asparagus.

We didn't have time for the full paella, since it takes 45 minutes, so we got the next best thing, fideua.  It had little vermicelli noodles instead of rice, and it was delicious.  It was like an addictively delicious cousin of Rice-A-Roni.  The servings weren't very big, so we ordered two and devoured them both without taking a picture.  We washed down all the food goodness with a pitcher of yummy sangria.  Poor Jeff had to leave the foodfest early to go to his fitting.  I eventually went to meet him, and we caught a ride home with a friend.  That night we got a massage to recover from all the walking and eating.  Our life here is ridiculously awesome.

Lazy Long Weekend

This Friday was a holiday, so we had a long weekend, but Jeff had to travel for work this past week, so he really just wanted to be at home.  That's fine for everyone except for miss social butterfly Vivian.  Luckily, plenty of her friends were in town, so we were able to schedule a play date a day in addition to her usual neighborhood wanderings.

Jeff's flight actually arrived on Friday morning around 4:00am, so he wasn't up for much that day.  I had been waiting on him to watch the new episode of Game of Thrones, and once we got Vivian off to her play date and Elena down for a nap, we were able to watch the new episode.  Game of Thrones is not a show I would have thought I would like, but I'm completely addicted, and this new season has been great so far.  I told Jeff that it was a sign of my love that I waited for him, but I also confessed that the one time I didn't wait for him, a major character got his eyes gouged out and his head crushed.  I was traumatized and alone, so I'm now a bit afraid to watch Game of Thrones without Jeff.  This new episode featured several traumatic deaths as well, but at least some of them were people we wanted to see die.  As I'm thinking about it, this show is so incredibly violent, I really don't know why I like it.  I just know I do.  Weird but true.

Saturday was a much more peaceful day.  I gave Jeff the morning off, and the girls and I went downtown with some friends to the Funarium.  Vivian has been a couple times for birthdays, but this was Elena's first trip.  No surprise, she loved it, especially the ball area, where there's a vacuum and the balls get sucked up the tube.

We got there pretty close to opening time, so it wasn't too crowded.  Elena contentedly put balls up the tube undisturbed for at least half an hour.  She eventually figured out that when the vacuuming sound stops, that means all the balls are going to fall from the big container on the ceiling.  She took this in stride, pushed the button to start the vacuum again, and kept cleaning up the balls.  Love my little OCD baby.

She tried the super big slide, but was a bit traumatized by it, so I transferred her over to the toddler section.  Everything was softer and smaller there.  She even found big blocks like the ones at Legoland.

There was a Funarium employee in charge of the area who was infatuated with Elena and wanted to play with her and squeeze her cheeks.  Elena tolerated the attention when she realized that this admirer would also bring her more blocks and help her stack them really high.  They had fun playing until the woman's shift was over.  It seemed like a good time to break for lunch.

Not unexpectedly, Elena wanted to have whatever Vivian was having for lunch, so they each got a juice box and chicken nuggets.  Elena rejected the french fries, which she usually likes.  I don't know if she just didn't like these ones or if she's realized that Vivian doesn't like french fries and has therefore decided they are an unacceptable food.

One of the best parts about the food area is that it had a direct sight line to the toddler play area, so we could do lunch and the kids could come and go as they pleased.  

Elena's favorite part of the play area was the little obstacle course.

I understood that, but I could not understand her fascination with the rolling pads.  She went back and forth through them over and over.

I kept waiting for her to face plant, but she's got skills and got out cleanly every time.  When she got worn out, she watched her friend be silly in the ball pit.

After a few hours, the grown ups were getting tired, even if the kids weren't.  The timing was good though, because there were a couple kids (not ours) who threw up right about then, and we were able to convince the big kids that this meant we should leave.  As far as we can tell we dodged the vomit bug bullet, which is a relief.

Both the girls had excellent appetites for our Sunday brunch excursion to Waft Me, the waffle place I went to earlier in the week.

We had to go about a mile out of our way, because we could only get to it by making a u-turn, but it still took less than ten minutes.  The girls liked the set up with a sofa right next to a window wall.

Vivian got a plain waffle with vanilla ice cream, honey, strawberries, and peaches.

We didn't order anything for Elena, but since this is Thailand and she's a cute kid, they brought her a free waffle.

It's good that they did, because it turned out that she loved it.  She also enjoyed sharing my bananas coated in raspberry sauce (that's what's on the corner of her mouth).  The only person who was less than thrilled with the meal was Jeff who insisted on ordering eggs.  We pointed out that he should have ordered a waffle.  He argued that waffles with ice cream was not breakfast or brunch.  Vivian decided we should call it bressert, and we all agreed, so Waft Me is now our official bressert spot.

It's been a great family weekend, and we're happy to have Jeff at home with us.