The ones that got away

Even with a relatively long vacation, I couldn’t see and do everything I wanted. Bangkok is not a beast that can be easily tamed. Here are some of the ones that got away:

Most crushing disappointment was a near miss with the Mustang Nero, an instragram extravaganza of an airbnb with rooms named after individual animals (The Flamingo, The Wolf, The Octopus’s Garden) and fitted out with outrageous taxidermy ( a full sized giraffe, the interlocked skeletons of two deer fighting) and luxuriant tropical foliage. My boyfriend, who was staying an extra night, managed to secure the last available booking while I missed out, so I only have other peoples’ pictures to post… Also:

WAON Piano & Scotch: an “acoustic karaoke” bar on a Sukhumvit side street where an elderly Japanese gentleman plays requests on the piano while you sing along.

Chooseless: An artfully mixed-up bi-level multi-brand boutique/cafe in Ekkamai.

12 x 12: For African music (see above)

A new “underwear only” gay gym where hunky Caucasian intructors teach you how to “wrestle” (which I declined for obvious reasons).

The newly opened-to-the-public Bang Khun Phrom palace

A ‘secret” dive bar serving brewksies inside the city’s US intelligence headquarters (!)

And finally the interesting architecture of the 1971 Thailand Islamic Center, which has been on my hit-list for ages. I’ll make it one day :

Sounds of a city

It impossible to separate a city from your subjective experience of it. Fifteen years ago on my first European tour I arrived in Barcelona depressed and as a result, I found the city cold and unwelcoming. I’ve never warmed to it since. So for me, Bangkok will always now be intertwined with “Despacito” (I was slow to catch on to that one), memories of Games of Thrones watched on computer screens on hotel beds, and the strange discovery of a youtube channel full of deep house remixes with Japanese animation montage video clips – the soundtrack to morning jogs and Nice Palace days.

Chinatown

After a few weeks at the trusty Nice Palace, my boyfriend arrived in town and we decided to relocate to Chinatown for a different Bangkok flavor. We had chosen an airbnb above a tapas bar (!) in a hundred-year-old Chinese shophouse on Soi Nana, the newly hip and happening core of ‘cool’ Chinatown, where old buildings have been turned into cocktail bars ( Tep, Teens of Thailand) and art spaces (Cho Why) and a sprinkling of flat-white-serving Melbourne inspired cafes had opened. I was worried – was Chinatown about to be gentrified? Wasn’t “hipsterfication,” afterall, essentially homogenization? Didn’t all these “cool” cafes look pretty much…the same? Chinatown already character and soul. It didn’t need a new one.

As it turns out though, my worries were premature. On long, loping nocturnal wanderings it quickly became clear that this cool and farang-friendly “new” Chinatown was confined to almost a single block, while the old untamed Chinatown stretched on for miles – miles of tangled alleyways and sleeping cats, chillis drying in the sun, motorbikes roaring through tiny lanes, dusty shops fragrant with herbs, Monkey King shrines, bubbling woks and vendors selling camphor wood and sea slugs, monkfruits, spices and herbs I couldn’t identify, with shoppers haggling in Teochew.

And street food. Visiting Chinatown with a Chinese person was a new experience: my boyfriend knew exactly what he wanted to eat. We had beef and duck noodles by day and at night, along a brightly lit Yaowarat thronged with festival-like crowds, grazed on chestnuts and pineapples, whole coconuts which has somehow had their husks removed to leave only a juicy white orb, and in the decayed foyer of a porno movie theatre, slurped on pigs tongue noodles.

This was the Chinatown we had come for.

Chatuchak surprise

In a corner of Chatuchak Park, this monument recognises two hundred years of friendship between Thailand and Mexico, Chile and Colombia. Below, another surprise (of a very different kind).  Look what I almost tripped over while jogging.

Teutonic flair

Nothing speaks more to Bangkok’s open-mindeness than its latest culinary crush, haute German cuisine diner, Suhring. Yes, you read that right. In a city home to one of the world’s finest, and fieriest, cuisines, German food is the latest “in” thing. And franky, the restaurant does not disappoint. The meal we ate there was perhaps the best we had in the city: surprising, hearty yet delicate and recognisably German dishes served up with an interesting wine selection in a sprawling Sathorn villa surrounded by tropical greenery.

Greetings from Planet Bangkok

  

Bread and heartache

Holey is a stylish-looking artisanal bakery on Sukhumvit Soi 33. I had passed it earlier in the week, and waking up craving crusty European bread, I decided to make my way back. While googling for directions though, I turned up more than I had expected. First of all I was surprised to read that the hipster haven was an import from Bangladesh. In fact, the business is a refugee of sorts – having originally started in Dhaka it opened in Bangkok following a harrowing terrorist attack in 2016. ISIS-inspired militants had burst in, killing 20 customers (after torturing those who could not recite a passage from the Koran, including seven Japanese aid workers). I read this munching on my baguette in the cafe’s stylish and friendly Bangkok space, pondering what would have happened had I been in Dhaka that day. Why had a bread shop been a target? Was it simply a place where foreigners congregated, or was it more an scathing comment on the life of leisure enjoyed by expats in a country where few could afford 100 baht (or the equivalent) for a just-baked bread loaf?  The Bangkok bakery that day was certainly full of the fair and the moneyed, Phrom Phong beautiful people, Australian and European expats. And was I then “the enemy” too? Lots to chew over as I enjoyed my bread and butter.

Day 7 Bangkok Art & Culture Centre 12:00am

A chilled day today, lingering over breakfast and then taking in a small exhibition by Mozambiquan artist Dino Jetha of “psikhelekedana” or wooden miniatures of everyday life.

Day 7 The Rome restaurant 6pm

After a relaxing day I was ready to head out again and explore, this time to the far Southwest corner of the city where besides a freeway and opposite a very Thai rural-style street market sits “The Rome” -a Thai/Italian restaurant complete with its own semi-Colloseum.

 

Day 4 7pm Goethe Institute

While waiting for the “Blissfully Blind” performance to start at the nearby CityCity gallery, I stopped by the beautiful Goethe Institute. An important institution that is very active on the city’s cultural scene, it is also located in a lovely oasis-like campus centred around an old mansion in lush gardens with a swimming pool –  and bats.

The Institute was promoting an upcoming concert by the albino classical pianist Chanakan Gam:

Day 2 9pm Bangkok Screening Room

The Bangkok Screening Room is a chic new pint-sized arthouse cinema, perched above a gallery space a stone’s throw from the sweaty scrum of Sala Daeng. Its one of two spaces – along with the Friese-Green Club on Sukhumvit – offering curated non-mainstream fare in the city on a (semi) big screen in a private club or bar-like environment. I saw Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 Senegalese film, “Black Girl”.

There was also an exhibition by a Thai photographer of Cuba next door (and a splashy corporate party for L’oreal in progress when I arrived.)

 

Day 3 3pm Chocolate Ville

A suburban restaurant-themepark seemingly aimed at Malaysian tourists who want to make believe they are in a charming amalgam of Connneticut and the Netherlands  – rather than Lad Phrao.

   

Food food food

This weekend I tried some interesting new dishes: fatty and delicious pork cooked in spicy Hunanese sauce and served in fresh, doughy bread from Cafe Hunan, a fermented squid paste in a Japanese restaurant (it was called “pirate” on the menu) and this astonishing vegetarian Hainan “chicken” rice at one of my favourite places, Veggie SF. It looked and tasted delicious!

Worlds collide

I must have walked past this a million times without noticing, the shuttered and now sadly gone store of a mysterious Malagasy trading company. What was the Madagascar-Hong Kong connection, I wonder? Rosewood? Dinosaur teeth? Spices? Who knows…. It is in the dingy arcade of the former Central Market, an old art deco building which has been left as a gaping open sore in Hong Kong’s centre for the last six or seven years as a legal battle rages over its prime real estate.

A Hong Kong state of mind

 

Tokyo house heroes Mondo Grosso with their new video, a virtual paeon to Hong Kong fimed in Quarry Bay and on Temple Street.

Outer island hipsters

 

Peng Chau is one of the most pleasant of Hong Kong’s outer islands to visit. Its main town has a huge and typically ugly government services building and supermarket at the ferry dock, but beyond that quickly returns to its roots as a sleepy town of narrow streets, some genuine old buildings and cicadas and birdsong ringing loudly through the languid air. Its main shopping drag, Hing Wing Street, is lined with traditional local stores selling colourful fruits and vegetables, little restaurants, and local residents lounging in sitting rooms that open directly on to the street. At the end of the town is the imposing concrete hulk of its (sadly) derelict former cinema.

  

But Peng Chau also has a small and charming hipster scene: I was there for a “coffee and book fair” held at a new event space in a renovated village house called Wut Tung Sat, held in conjunction with the island’s charming Japanese vintage knickknack shop Sun Sat store. The French-run wine and cheese bar I visited last time on the island had closed, but a new store called Sherry’s had opened with a “secret garden” full of bizarrely jumbled furniture and statuary and a range of objects from all over the world – I left with a hefty African wood carving for 150 HKD!

  

A Brazilian Summer (in Hong Kong)

More MPB from Mallu Magalhaes (above), Barbara Eugenia and Silva featuring the beautiful voice of old favourite Fernanda Takai.

Buddha is my punk

Tokyo secrets

I recently stumbled on to a list of Tokyo attractions which included some surprising, and hitherto-unknown, sightseeing options, such as:

House of the Insect Poet (10 minute walk from Sendago subway station in Bunkyo Ward) is an insect museum inspired by a Japanese translation of famous poem about insects by the French poet Jean-Henri Fabre. Opened in 2006 in a building designed to resemble a cocoon, it houses specimens of insects and butterflies from around the world. Most of the specimens belong to a scholar of French literature who began collecting insects in the fourth grade and has since collected 100,000 specimens.

And who knew there was an ancient Egyptian museum in Shibuya?

Another surprise was the discovery of this very instagram-chic guide to the outer suburb of Fussa, by a very visual-savvy Hong Kong-based food stylist and “social media content provider.” My memories of Fussa are of a down-at-heel, but interesting, dormitory suburb on the Western fringes of Tokyo. I used to pass through every morning on my way to work at a small and shabby “English school” in Ozaku, almost the last gasp of metropolitan Tokyo before suburban sprawl hits the beautiful hills, cedar forests and lakes of the Oku-tama ranges. Fussa stood out for its vast US military base and the streets immmediately surrounding it, which featured Filipino and Thai bars (and bargirls) and family-run Latino restaurants (I was once called a gringo at the local station).  With its white and (more often) brown and black faces, American fast food and slightly raffish, red light air, it actually does provide quite a unique, and interesting, perspective on the metropolis – but not one I would have expected to see style-blogged. Until, that is, I realised that it was a paid promotion for a campaign to highlight more “regional” parts of Tokyo prefecture. Still, certainly worth a look.

All around the world

African beats from Johannesubrg’s Batuk, and a Southern Sudanese-themed video.

The return of Thai pop star, Palmy.

And below, Japan’s Wednesday Campanella on the Mongolian steppes for “Melos”

Food centre funk

Japanese band Wednesday Campanella, and their frontwoman KOM_I, try the hawker stores in Singapore.