Looking down from the 3rd floor window of our room(s) i the ELEGANCE SUITES HOTEL one can view your typical backstreet Bangkok Soi scenes as well as what could only be called a moldy Paris feel in the buildings directly across the street ... shut my eyes and I'm the less-touristy back alleys of Le Marais.
But this is Bangkok, just around the corner from the Thaksin Bridge just off Sathorn Rd . . . a block or so from the last Skytrain station ~ attempting to cross the steet to the station is a fearful TiT adventure ~ and 2 quick stops from the sex stuff at Saladaeng.
Not that many farangs hang out in this small corner of town, the clientele at The Elegance is moth-eaten aging English hippies and slim Thai businessguy wannabes in well-polished shoes . . . but the hotel itself (a Best Western member!) is a great deal: 2 big rooms (living room and bedroom) with a kitchen, big refrigerator, large hong nam with western-style bathtub (lovely sweeping low backrest for a nice lie-down after a hot day in Bangkok), expensive-looking deco stel & copper taps and shower and ~ my favourite sex toy ~ a high pressure asshole-hose. All for 1400 baht a nght.
The front desk staff are all especially nice (the Thai Manager speaks perfect English) ... in fact every single employee I came into contact with was helpful in the extreme, yet not fussy or over the top: This was without question the most polite and decent group of folks I've ever met in a Thai hotel (and very few have been poor, I should add).
Bedroom is a very large one (this hotel by the way is small ... only 7 floors high but ALL the rooms are 2-room suites, no singles available) with a great comfy bed, windows on 2 sides, huge closets, and a room safe (shown in the photo) is a model of simplicity ~ very different from some of the nasty behemoths I've dealt with in the past.
A nice styling touch were the frosted glass sliding doors between the bedroom and the living room ... especially when the Beloved is watching his favourite Thai soap opera.
The comfy living room was well-used (the fireplace wasn't ... though it was rather sweetly idiosyncratic, as you can see), and one particulary well-played football game had the sofa sorely tested as my guy became quite agitated, jumping up and down on it and screaming loudly (me thinking: 'goddamn, not another yaba addict!??') TV rather old, but had enough channels to please me.
Ahhhh ... the cool pool on a hot and muggy Bangkok afternoon around 4:00pm, arriving back after an exhausting day at Siam Paragon wandering mezmerised through the 4 acres of ladies perfumes, skin treatments and designer bras, finally asking directions to the TV's and Audio stuff (3 acres) and the nearest hong nam (1/2 acre) or Starbucks (4 square meters).
This baby was cool, and has a nice shady & breezy reading gazebo beside it, and a lovely view over the crazed Bangkok rushhour below. It wasn't deep enough for my liking ('No Diving ... Not Hurt Head Please') and some of the guests seemed to think they could only come up for a swim while I was there (I like my pools lonely!), but the ever-attentive staff will have a cold Singha at yer elbow in seconds flat, and that always calms a soul aching for some solitude.
And looking south rom the pool roof one can reach out and grab a seat on the Skytrain ... for free.
UNEXPECTED FIND OF THE HOLIDAY:
Just around the corner from the hotel can be found the Grong Soi Restaurant / 23 Soi Charoenwing, Charat Wiang Rd, Bangkok. Totally Thai, at first it looks like just another hole in the wall one walks past a thousand times a day in Thai towns & cities. But we stopped here for dinner on the last night (before I was off to Canada the next morning), and Suphot lead me by the hand (I was a droopy & pathetic puppy at this sad moment) into this little place. The lighting was much different than most garishly an flourescently-lit Thai soup kitchens . . . this one was all soft orange tones with little colored lights hung in strategic spots.
The food was absolutely delicious (that from The Masters lips, not mine, though I could certainly not disagree) . . . one of those little ubiquitous businesses where the Mama holds court in the kitchen telling all her kids and employees what the hell's going on from the unseen working area. He had "sum soup" (what else is`new?) and I had my usual fried pork/chicken with mixed vegetables and a back-hoe of rice.
All around Thai folks were doing their social thing in the 8PM cool breeze (the place was open-air on 2 sides), and after a beer, a comfortable chair, a stretched-leg "relax", a handsome man I love across the table, I was just thinking that this is where I want to be.
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The Beloved introduced me to the joyeous evenings to be had in Isaan Music dance bars many years ago, and now not a trip goes by without us going back to old haunts or finding new ones. Some of the staff in a huge raucous place out on Petchburi Road recognize me now (for instance 'Eff', that lovely waitress, who sat down with us near the end of an evening there in early April and downed over a quarter of the bottle of whiskey Suphot won that night in their nightly draw), as they do in Charm Esarn in Pattaya.
So this time I wanted to pay him back by taking him to some places classically thought of as "western" in the eyes of those who think in those terms . . . so after some investigation, off we went into the darkening ~ and cool! ~ Bangkok evening to an Italian Restaurant, and after that to an American-style blues & jazz bar.
LA BUCA ITALIAN RESTAURANT
This place is a nice little find on Sukhumvit Soi 1 (PLoen Chit Skytrain Station) and was on the list of those which appeared in a thread I started back in March asking for recommendations on Italian Restaurants in Bangkok.
Well, thanks to all those who gave recommendations, but you can't try everything, but in this case we chose well: LA BUCA is small couple of rooms, with a quite authentic "italian" feel in the middle of Bangkok. The owner greets you at the door and leads you to either smoking section (upstairs) or non-smoking (the main room, downstairs). He's an ex-pat from Italy and speaks Italian, Thai, and English fluently . . . Suphot was impressed with his Thai and they had a long conversation together before we ordered.
Menu is loaded with great stuff . . . he had some fish thing with a lemony-mustardy sauce (pronounced "very good taste" not long into the meal, and giving a sincere "want to come back" verdict at the ending). He had red wine with . . . one of the very few I've seen him have and was glad to see an order of a second after the first was downed with Italian bread & tomato salad waiting for the main course to arrive.
I had a pizza (3 weeks without one is simply too long) and it was delish ... Italian style with thin crust and Good Stuff on top, but not loaded to the ceiling as in some of the gooey crap one sometimes gets here at home: extremely tasty and just about right for my stomach that night, as I knew already we were heading for a bar afterwards.
LA BUCA's prices are quite affordable: my pizza was only 250 baht, the fish thing was about 400. With wine, beer, dessert came to (trying to recall now) I think around 1200-1500 baht this place won't dent your wallet in any way and is a nice little oasis away from Thai food (which I love) for a change. The owner/cook is a really nice guy who goes out of his way to make your evening incredibly relaxed & easy going, and for me, most of all he went out of his way to make his Thai customers comfortable. Very nice to watch this.
Highly recommended for a pleasant meal.
You can walk there easily from the Skytrain station . . . just turn up Soi 1 from Sukhumvit Road and walk until you get to the restaurant on the right hand side of the Soi.
Off to TOKYO JOE'S BLUES BAR (Click) on Sukhumvit Rd Soi 24 (Sivaporn Plaza between Sukhumvit Rd and Rama 4. See the MAP on the website) . . . a sweet lttle bar sitting happily in a less-than-sweet little concrete and concrete mini-mall a good size par 5 taxi ride off Sukhumvit Rd.
Set up to emulate funky San Francisco or New Orleans jazz bars (and does a good job except for the brighter-than-necessary lighting) we sat in this crowded , smoky place for a couple of hours during a Sunday evening jam . . . and what great musicians they had. Pony-tailed, dirty-shirted Americans puffing away on saxaphones and long-haired Thai guys going nuts on the drums and one SMOKIN' Thai lead guitar player whom I'd suicidely motoci-taxi 20 miles through rush hour Bangkok traffic to listen to any old time.
Suphot chugged on one of the better lime Margaritas I've tasted in Thailand (150 baht) and I sucked booringly on their over-priced Singhas (small/120 baht) and he enjoyed this place enormously (another "we should come back" moment ... 100% success rate for this evening!). I liked almost as much, but it was VERY smoky and I could feel my clothes sucking that shit up . . . could have stayed another few hours if the joint had more than a fan as a smoke eater.
But the boys were in the groove that evening and the music trumped my whining about the bad air. There was a short little Thai guy (looked about 12) running around the place for an hour and I was wondering what the hell he as doing in a bar this well-filled up with drug-ridden weirdos (i.e. the musicians!) . . . unil he took at his rightful place .. at the drums!! And then he rocked our socks off with heavy metal Cream-style white blues drumming worthy of Ginger Baker in his best years. The kid was quite an amazing drummer, and after watching him for awhile it appeared that his father (or perhaps boyfriend of his mother) was a British musician who had been teaching his son to great success.
But over the course of the evening jam it was obvious that some of the best blues musicians play at Tokyo Joes all the time, and if you enjoy this kind of music (i.e. also jazz interspersed with good old rock & roll) go there and have a great night of (free) entertainment.
Cheers ....
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