BootsnAll Travel Network



What I Do By Myself All Day In Bangkok

After the wedding in Hong Kong, I flew to Bangkok on Oct 17. Stayed in the Dvaree Bali Serviced Apartments down an alley off Sukhumvit 22 where I’ve stayed several times before and can hang out with the guys (expats) at the Parrot Cafe up the street on 22.

Bob, my husband, left his Mia Noi for a few days to spend time with me in Bangkok. Took me to an Italian basement kitchen where they were having a half-price promotion on the food for the month of October. We shared a meal. Osso Bucco with lots of marrow. I absolutely love bone marrow. When Josh was Sous Chef in Manhattan we would go out at 2am where many of the chefs would go after work…the Blue Ribbon. The place specialized in 10 inch long beef bone boiled in herbed broth and then roasted and standing on end on the plate. They served it with long ice tea spoons. With toast and marmalade. OMG my mouth is watering.

Anyway, appetizer was Foie Gras and toureen of something with various sauces spilled on the plate. Salad was lobster something or other, pasta was homemade ravioli stuffed with cheese and Foie Gras and then the Osso Bucco resting on a bed of rissoto. Too full for dessert.

Last night I went again and took a Brit lawyer friend who has been advising me on my son’s divorce from his Thai wife. (Fed up with being Mr. ATM and then she got pg…wasn’t his) Each meal was $50U.S. Would have been $200U.S. in NY.

In 2005, Bob and I sublet an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from one of Josh’s friends for a month. Took Josh out to various restaurants so he could sample the competition. Spent a fortune. He was working at a well known French restaurant and quit soon after. Said he’d never work for the French again. The restaurant got sued soon after by the servers. Cool restaurant though. Service was incredible. Josh took me into the kitchen. They had cameras in the kitchen focused on each table and when a patron was finished with the meal out would go the next course.

Josh got tired of the NY scene and worked in Beijing for 2 years. Living and working on the mainland was difficult so he’s been Exec Chef of the American Club in Hong Kong for the last 8 years. With no U.S. taxes and hardly any Chinese taxes. Think he’s paid off his school loans already. My doctor son, Greg, still has over $400,000 of school loans and he’s nearly 50. Almost 50% taxes has turned him into a Libertarian. Bob finished paying off his medical school loans just before he retired in 2002. Well, that’s another subject.

Bob went back to Pattaya. Anyway, now it’s back to Thai street food. Ummm. And meeting up with a few other friends…one a Thai Yellow Shirt raised in Hong Kong. He was one of the guards and was arrested when the Yellow Shirts shut down the airport a few years ago. Couple teachers…one an American woman (Suzanne) and the other a guy from New Zealand I met in Chiang Mai couple years ago. And my Thai friend…a professor of fisheries at Kasetsart University. You would think, until Trump came along, that any red-blooded egalitarian American would be sympathetic with the poor Red Shirts in the north vs. the Bangkok political elite. But she is quite happy with the results of the Coup. She considers the Red Shirts to be Thailand’s uneducated and naive “deplorables.” Where have we heard that before?!

Now the king is dead and there is all sorts of political maneuvering we will never know about. The prince and heir to the thrown is a hated deadbeat supported by the corrupt and exiled Taksin.

The Thailand Foreign Correspondent’s Club will probably be having the American election returns on TV. Will be fun to kibitz with the others at the bar.



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