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.
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