Some pictures for orientation

Dick's Books on the shelves in the re-opened Central World shopping center


Dick writing in his most recent office

We celebrated my birthday dinner at the Banana Leaf Restaurant on Silom. This was where we had had lunch of Tom Yam Kung. A wonderfully hot and sour soup that is as satisfying as anything you could eat and will produce small fountains of perspiration on the top of your head only adding to the exotic nature of the experience.

Curried crab. The only Thai dish that uses an Indian style curry powder

Deep fried morning glory vines with a lime fish sauce and palm-sugar dressing with ground pork, chilies, shallots and white pepper

"Mayonnaise Chicken" as it's called on the menu. Probably not from King Mongkut's era but recommended by a Thai friend of ours and truly good. A sure way to an early grave. Perfectly fried chicken with a sweet mayonnaise with chunks of lime rind in it. It is the sour limey rind that makes this more than just something you might get if you were lucky at Coney island. YUM

My birthday cake boasted being ganache but it must have been the spirit of ganache inhabiting the cake. Dicks Flare for cake decorating has me reconsidering reopening a small patisserie on Suan Plu.

This woman seemed peeved with me for taking her picture so I bought some of her goodies. Steamed corn in the husk. More notable were the bamboo sticks which were stuffed with sticky rice, a little coconut and a touch of sugar. Some of the bamboo had been stripped away so that you could break the remaining container open. Inside was a distinctly rubbery treat. The bamboo left a skin much like a sausage casing would. The long rice snack was wonderfully strange and tasty




My 52nd birthday breakfast; Pineapple roulades and a fresh jasmine and marigold garland



Views from our balcony




Some pictures of our rented condo

Some pictures of our rented condo

Our Building at 435 Suan Plu Soi 8

The neighborhood

Soup in a bag

My desk looks out across a small terrace to the greenery of the Baptist seminary, and beyond that the apartment and business towers on Sathorne Road. Many of the apartment balconies are overflowing with voluptuous plants, a common practice among people whose history as agricultural villagers is still in their DNA. The office tower we call the keyhole building because of a three-story all-the-way-through hole near the top of it has a small jungle sprouting from its upper reaches. The lower buildings, where the less affluent live, have, in addition to plantings, laundry drying on the apartment railings.

Down below our seventh-floor pad, on Suan Plu, Soi 8, an array of food vendors have thrown up stalls to feed the workers at a condo tower going up down the soi. I love the aromas that drift up while I’m working. (For now, we have to use our condo’s AC only at night.) One day somebody was roasting chilis and I had a coughing fit. Joe said he could hear me from the other room and knew exactly what had happened. I once clipped an AP story from The Boston Globe about an entire London neighborhood that had had to be evacuated because of the chili pepper fumes from a Thai restaurant.

Our end of the quarter-mile-long Soi 8 is residential, but the end closest to Suan Plu, a main business street, is a vibrant hodge-podge of fruit stalls and eateries of every description. Some are actual restaurants in buildings with open-air fronts. Others are portable operations; the proprietors arrive every morning with their amazing wagons. There’s a line in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where the first locomotive arrives in a rural Columbian town, and a stunned resident remarks that it looks like a kitchen dragging a house. Thai food wagons aren’t steam driven, but they are just as impressive to behold. And along with the cooking paraphernalia come the red or blue folding metal tables and the little plastic stools for the customers to squat on. These portable operations take up all the sidewalk space---there’s an elaborate procedure involving the municipality and the police for acquiring these culinary fiefdoms---and pedestrians walk about not on the sidewalks but in the narrow soi along with the cars, trucks, motor bikes and sputtering three-wheeled tuk-tuks.

We’re trying out the vendors one by one. A favorite we’ve gone back to for the perfect red curry and stewed morning glory vines we call simply “the place where we had lunch on the first day.” Since we don’t read any Thai script, we don’t know what any of these places is named. Another favorite is just “the som tam lady” (spicy green papaya salad), and “the pork soup place next to the one-armed man selling lottery tickets.” We’re learning how to order, although yesterday I blundered when I asked that my pork soup be “pet.” I meant spicy, which is “bet,” with a sound that’s between a “p” and a “b.” Pet means duck, and the proprietess couldn’t understand why I wanted duck in my pork soup.

One of the best noodle places is a popular dive I think of as Winetka. That’s because one of the overhead ceiling fans is broken and as it turns it makes a noise like Slam Stewart’s bass solo on Big Noise from Winetka.

The one English sign on the soi is for a place called Uncle John. It has Western, Thai and Indian items on its menu, including beef Stroganoff. We thought it might be a tourist trap, but our friend Dick Sandler, an American who has lived in Thailand for 40 years, assured us it isn’t. It’s run by the banquet chef at the Sukhotoi, a five-star hotel, apparently as a satisfying hobby. We ate there last night---Caesar salad, club sandwich, Pad Thai---and it was superb. It set us back six dollars each instead of the usual $1.50 but it was a nice change of pace in a city where good Thai food is everywhere but decent Western food hard to come by. Uncle John even provides actual paper napkins instead of a roll of toilet paper in a plastic dispenser. It was odd, though, eating this food on a stool in the street where you have to be careful a motorbike doesn’t run over one of your feet.

One Western institution we visited yesterday morning was the Au Bon Pan on Silom Road, the major commercial artery about a 40 minute walk from our condo. We had coffee waiting for a nearby shop to open, and we remembered the last time we’d been there. Strategically situated at a main intersection where many of the army-police-Red Shirt confrontations took place last April and May, Au Bon Pan had become a hangout for the Western press---delusionally we believed that included us. At some level, the reporters no doubt saw this place as a kind of American protectorate. It must have come as a shock when---soon after we left---the Reds smashed all the sandwich shop’s windows and fired grenades into the façade of the five-star Dusit Thani Hotel next door. The Dusit is where many of the Thai upper crust hold their weddings and monk novitiate dinners, so when it came under siege you had to know that for the impudent Red Shirts the end was near.

Political calm seems to be holding. The status-quo-oriented Yellow Shirts are now mad at the government because it has not been tough enough with Cambodia in a border dispute that’s been going on for many years. The yellows have been holding an ongoing rally---the som tam vendors love it---outside Government House. Last year four soldiers were killed in a clash, two Thai, two Cambodian. That situation was defused when the two opposing commanding generals engaged in---I’m not making this up---an arm-wrestling match. There are Thai “patriot” groups that want war with Cambodia over borders that have gone back and forth for centuries, but today the situation looks not as fraught, mainly because the noisy but impecunious Cambodian communist government seems to have backed down. PM Abhisit says the Thai government may call for elections in April. We hope it’s while we’re still here.

Soup in a bag: or, more precisely, four plastic bags bound by tiny rubber bands.
Bag 1. Rice noodles, sliced pork, scallions
Bag 2. Clear pork broth
Bag 3. White vinegar with chili peppers
Bag 4. Chili powder, palm sugar
Mix at home, maybe add a little fish sauce.
Cost 30 baht---a dollar. Heavenly.

We pipe up

We've been slow getting the blog up and running, mainly because after the long slog over here---left home on a Tuesday morning, arrived in Bangkok on Friday night---inertia has been just too nice not to give into. We have no complaints overall about the journey. Tuesday night, just before the big snowstorm hit, the Delta terminal at JFK looked like a scene from the partition of India. But we'd been forewarned and had booked two nights at a nearby Holiday Inn Express, and we flew out Thursday without having to endure more than the usual annoyances and indignities of air travel today. We're still jet-lagged, but we've been dealing with it by sleeping standing on our heads and by popping some pills Charles Wohl prescribed for us---can’t remember the name---Amblusia, or Zizzmulch, or Sevastapollen?

Bangkok is real. For so much of the year it exists only in our happy imaginations, and it is so wonderful to discover again that when we are not here it apparently is blasé in the way it goes on without us.
For the first few days the weather was cool for Bangkok---82 and breezy, more Key West than Southeast Asia. Thais we know were remarking on the chill and bundling up. Now it's a more seasonable 90 and reassuringly muggy. Yesterday we walked through Lumpini Park and the air was heavy and sweet. Lots of frangipani and orchids, and the monitor lizards grinned up at us welcomingly from the lakeshore, or so it seemed to us.

We're about to have a home. We're renting a condo in the building where our friends Simon and Poe have one. It's on Suan Plu, Soi 8, a neighborhood not far from the Pinnacle Hotel, our usual digs, and we are very eager to settle in. We looked at another place that would have been okay---some of you will know what I mean when I call it Peace Corps mid-range---but the one we got is only a little more expensive, $800 a month, and bordering on posh. It's on the seventh floor and overlooks the pretty trees and gardens of the Baptist Seminary (what's that doing here?) and the showy ultramodern Bangkok skyline beyond. The idea is, we'll use all this space (two bedrooms) for Joe and Poe to work on their pocket guide to Bangkok street food and for me to finish Strachey-12, which I should have finished before we left home but did not do.

Joe won't have to go far for street food research; our soi (little street) is a cornucopia of this magnificent stuff. There’s a big fresh market nearby with vendors who show up every morning with their limes and dragon fruit and pig snouts. We are very eager to get moved in and start poking around the neighborhood. It’s the first time in our five years of coming to Thailand that we’ll have a place of our own. We feel as if we are crossing a threshold, and we like it.

We will miss the Pinnacle Hotel. At the breakfast buffet, the bacon is great, and where else on earth anymore can you enjoy a meal while listening to Patti Page sing The Tennessee Waltz followed by It’s an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini? And these are people who disapprove of The King and I?

We’ve been preoccupied with practical matters, but not so preoccupied that we haven’t noticed that the political atmosphere is still tense. Not explosive like last year, but uncertain. Our room at the Pinnacle looks down on the blackened hulk of a branch bank firebombed in April by the Red Shirts. A 7-Eleven around the corner was also gutted. The Central World Mall that got torched is partly re-built and open, though the adjoining office tower is still scorched and empty. The Red Shirts are planning a rally outside Central World this Sunday. “What?” you might ask. Our curiosity is great, though we’ll be moving into the condo on Sunday and so might not be able to attend this peculiar event.

The violence last year has, we think, damaged Thailand’s idea of itself, but probably not permanently. The country has gotten by these spasms before. Poe emailed us in May, at the height of the violence, “I think we Thais do not love our country anymore.” But the despair of those desperate weeks when over a hundred people died in street fighting is gone now,
And while the underlying conflicts are still there, there’s a sense that nobody on any side wants to push Thai society to the brink again anytime soon.

Lunch today: Khao Soi. That’s a Northern Thai chicken broth with a light curry, crunchy deep fried wheat noodles, sliced fresh cabbage, pickled cabbage, bean sprouts, a small chicken drumstick, chili powder, spicy vinegar, palm sugar and fish sauce. As usual here, it was the best meal we ever ate.