Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
I arranged for my cousin’s company to stay at the Dusit Thani Hotel at the end of Beach Road, and the level of service was excellent.
We stayed in a spacy family room on the 8th floor and were very pleased with the renovations the hotel has completed.
Actually on Soi Rambuttri.
We walked by after dinner, Taro knew the owner and the band. He unslung his travel guitar and immediately hopped in. Music ensued. I posted a much longer vid as a livestream on FB: T jamming at Kalanbatu on Khao San Road
I can tell you I’m in Thailand without telling you I’m in Thailand.
Either Taro or my cousin knew about an awesome Japanese street restaurant in Bangkok that serves raw beef liver – a dish once very popular in Japan that is now very hard to get (where it is available, single portions are apparently given out to customers in a sealed plastic container with origin/tracking information). Everything was excellent, but the liver, served traditionally with rock salt and sesame oil, was outstanding. Taro and I ate too much.
The sashimi was also pretty good:
It was very hot that night, but we had a blast:
I cannot bear to use the actual spelling of the bar’s name, it just bothers me. There’s no denying they have one of the best views of Wat Arun at night, though. This is in the neighborhood of Wat Po, the famous massage school temple, just across the river.
We just came back from a back-to-back four day trip to Pattaya and 8 day trip to Japan. I will try and document some of it here. The Pattaya trip was a 40-person corporate trip for my cousin’s company in Japan that Nam and I organized; it turned out well. It all started out with a double-decker bus we chartered to pick up the group at BKK. It was a pretty awesome setup and the driver, Noi, was very cool.
A student told me it was hot like the hell the other day, and I’m not inclined to disagree. The temp is reaching 43°C (109.4°F) pretty much all week, and we just hide from the sun all day, be it at home or at the nearby mall, or somewhere with good AC. I still walk every day at dusk, and I long for even slightly cooler days.
These were taken back in November of last year. This is actually a flooded parking lot (the water was about a foot deep) that has been completely dry for the past few months. It is extremely dry this year, and hotter than usual. The only saving grace is a strong breeze that kicks up for hours at a time, which has an effect like a convection oven during the hot afternoons, but it’s better than that clingy hot and humid feeling like Japanese summers.
Saw this girl being transported to school a while back
I still see something new every day up here.
Mina and I saw this place from the mall across the street and wanted to go thrifting. After talking about it in the mall for a couple hours, she looked it up and it turned out to be a bar, which was pretty disappointing. In retrospect, the RED HOT POLE DANCE STRIPPER advertised in the window may have been a clue.