Having Fun Finishing Up Second Grade

Whenever the end of the school year gets near I start to feel this weird combination of excitement and anxiety.  Even when I'm not teaching, the sense of imminent freedom is exciting, but the end of the school year means the end of predictable routines, and, in an expat community, it means saying good bye to friends who are finishing their tour and moving on.  It's a crazy time of year, so the best way to deal with it is to have as much fun as possible.

The next to last week was all about wrapping things up.  Vivian had her final swim lesson, and they got to play lots of games.

She also had her class music share.  Last year she was a little scared to stand in front of everyone and sing.  This year, she got a friend to sing along with her, and she wrote an original song for them.  Jeff made a point of coming to see the performance.  We're proud of her and can't wait to see where this musical path will take her next.

That was also the week Jeff had to go back to Raja's to finalize the fitting on his jacket.

He wanted my opinion on it.  I had come downtown that morning with friends.  They had to go back to Nichada, and Jeff had to work right up until his fitting time.  I had no problem having lunch alone though.  My kindle and I went back to the tapas place.  This time I got a picture of the fideua.

Tough life, I know ;-)

The weekend started with more fun stuff for me, even though it was a sort of bittersweet.  One of my best friends is leaving this summer.  She and I and another friend all have young kids, so a special treat for us was an uninterrupted night away and leisurely morning.  I picked the Anantara Riverside Resort for us.  It's still "Bangkok", but on the other side of the river with a huge, beautiful piece of property.  I definitely need to go back with Jeff for a staycation. Even though our mom training didn't allow any of us to sleep past 7:30, that was still better than our usual wake up time, and we spent over an hour at breakfast enjoying the river views and going back to the huge buffet.

Since I ditched my family for the first part of the weekend, we finished the weekend with a family trip to Kidzoona.  Jeff hadn't been to Kidzoon before, but he quickly got into the swing of things.

It was definitely a special treat to have Daddy there.  The best part about Kidzoona though, is that there's plenty for the kids to entertain themselves with, without an adult having to participate.

After all that fun, we were ready for the last week of school.  The whole second grade has been working on projects about endangered animals.  For the final presentations, the parents were invited to the classrooms and a grade-wide pot luck lunch.  Vivian chose to research the slow loris, a fascinating creature I had never heard of before this.  The most memorable detail about them is that they are the only poisonous mammal.  They secrete a toxin from their underarm area, which they lick and put on their teeth before biting.  Yikes!  Vivian was part of a group that decided to do a newscast about the slow loris.  Of course, she was the main newscaster with her own little microphone.

She did a great job.  As a treat for doing so well in second grade, I took her and a friend of hers who is leaving out for super waffles.

It's tough saying goodbye.  One of Elena's super buddies is also leaving.

The last day of school was a half day, and that afternoon we went to a big pool party for two families that are leaving and that we are friends with.  I know the summer will bring new adventures and new friends, but every so often I have to be sad about the friends who are going.

Still, I'm a focus on the positive kind of person.  In order to avoid too much gloom and doom, I made sure we had something to look forward to, a beach trip! Beach blog coming soon :-)

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.