All the old familiar places: Connection, Coyote & Country Road

Normally I only go out in the evenings once or twice a week; other nights I simply stay home and work or maybe write a blog or watch TV. What can I say, I’m a simple guy.

But this week I’ve been out somewhere nearly every night.

It started last Saturday when Jason came to town.  We went to Connection Bar and the outdoor bars at Asok.

Sunday night I was working… I had a business meeting that lasted until 10 p.m.  with a Korean guy.  At the end of the meeting he said, “Let me buy you a drink”. Okay.  We were near Soi Cowboy, so we went to Country Road.  We ordered a pitcher of beer.

He had said “a drink” so I figured that when the pitcher was empty that we were done, especially since I knew he had to be at work early on Monday morning.  But instead of paying the bill, he ordered a second pitcher.  The pitchers of beer kept coming until the lights were turned on and the band put their instruments away.  At a guess I’d say it was about ten pitchers.

Monday and Tuesday nights I stayed home.

On Wednesday Jason and I headed out again.  We met at Country Road for one pitcher of beer, then took the train to Ratchada to visit Resort.  It was a fairly short visit.  Then we walked up the street to Poseidon Massage to have a look.   It was getting late — not the best time to visit a soapy — and the selection of girls in the fishbowl was minimal… perhaps 10 or 12 girls.

We went up the the third floor models lounge and sat in the comfortable surroundings enjoying a couple of cold Heinekens.  We took a table right next to the long sofa where the girls sit and enjoyed the view, but in the end we didn’t choose any girls.  When our beer was finished we paid the tab and left.

We hopped in a taxi and made a dash to Coyote Restaurant on Sukhumvit Road, arriving a few minutes before the midnight closing time.   One of the great things about Coyote is their 10 pm to midnight two-for-one happy hour.

Walking in, I spotted a good friend (Thai girl) sitting at a table.  There were three other girls with her.  I knew two of them, but one was a stranger.

The stranger was beautiful.

She was a small girl — probably 150 cm tall and 40 kilos — and she had an angelic face.  Jason and I sat at the table with the girls, and I ended up sitting next to the angel.

I chatted her up a bit.  She spoke minimal English, so I was execising my Thai language skills.  None of the girls at the table were P4P — they were all 20-something year olds with normal jobs.  The angel turned out to be 23 years old and a shop assistant at a retail store near Victory Monument.

I talked to her as much as I could, then got her phone number.  By around 12:30 she and her friends were all heading home.  Jason and I said goodnight to them, then headed west on Suk Road, thinking about Soi Cowboy.

But there is a new little beer bar that just opened about a week earlier on the corner of Soi 22.   I think the name of the place is the Rain Hut 2, but I’m not sure.  It has about ten stools and half a dozen girls.  We decided to see if it held anything interesting.

It turned out that it did.  The interesting thing was in the form of a customer — a girl who was fairly cute wearing a white top.  She was friends with the girls working in the bar, and pretty soon Jason and I were chatting with her.  Unlike the girls we’d been with at Coyote, this girl definitely IS a Pay-for-Play girl, and she made sure we knew it by producing a banana from somewhere, peeling it and giving it a mock-blow job.

The demonstration was pretty appealing.  She looked like she knew her way around bananas and other similarly shaped things.

Pretty soon she was standing between Jason’s knees and they were getting to know each other.

The bar closed it’s doors around 1:30, but the girls told us we were welcome to stay and drink.  Around 2 am Jason invited banana girl back to his hotel room.  She was happy to go with him, she said, but she was on her period, so she’d only be able to eat his banana for him.

This didn’t work for Jason, so we payed the bill and took off.

I went home.  I guess Jason did the same.

On Thursday night I stayed home .

On Friday work took me well outside of Bangkok and I had to come back in the Friday night traffic.  I was on the phone with a couple of friends discussing options, and finally ended up meeting my pal Ash at the Sports Bar in Washington Square (in the space that used to be the Mambo Cabaret).
He was there with two friends of his… a Thai guy, plus a 40-something guy from America who was in Bangkok for the first time ever — in fact, he was still a first-day newbie when I met him.

They’d been shooting pool for a couple of hours when I arrived, so they were ready to go.  They settled the bill, and we took the short walk across the parking lot to the Dubliner.

The Dubliner is known for it’s great food and generous portions, but it can be a bit expensive by Bangkok standards.  The last time I had visited the bar I had ordered an appetizer.  It was listed on the menu as barbecued ribs at a price of 190 baht.

Thai cuisine includes pork ribs that are cut into really small pieces, and barbecued in a spicy sauce.  At the low price what I expected was a small plate of these Thai-style ribs.

What I got was a half rack of American style beef ribs.

I had told Ash about it, and we were going back to the Dubliner to see if my experience was the norm.  He and I each ordered the barbecued rib appetizer plate, while his American pal got a burger.

The ribs showed up as expected and we dived in.  Hot and delicious, just like last time.  Ash actually struggled to finish his, and I can definitely report that if you want some really good beef ribs at a good price, the Dubliner is the place to go.

By the way, the Dubliner does a great job of hiring great looking waitresses.  They are almost uniformly tall and slender with beautiful Thai faces — brown-skinned and full-lipped.  One of the joys of eating there is watching the beautiful crew glide through the room as they serve the customers.

(Talking about beautiful girls in restaurants — I’ll have to acknowledge again that the most beautiful crew of bartenders in Bangkok is at Coyote Restaurant.  They have four female bartenders there, and one of the reasons the 2-for-1 happy hours there are a great deal is that you can sit at the bar and stare at three or four of these beautiful smiling lasses as you enjoy your beer or margarita).

Anyway, when Ash and I and his pal had finished our meal we wanted to go somewhere.  Because Ash reads the blog, the Connection Bar had been a topic of conversation at dinner, and we decided that his pal — on his first full day in Bangkok — should get thrown in at the deep end.

We went to Connection Bar.

I’ll spare you the gory details.  The fact is that it was Friday night, the bar was packed with girls and customers, and all was right with the world.

We spent just under two hours at this small soi 22 bar, then headed out.  I was expecting Ash to go off to a night club, and I offered to take his pal to Country Road, thinking he might enjoy the atmosphere.  This seemed like a good idea, so the two of us walked to Soi Cowboy and grabbed a table near the band stand.

A few minutes later Ash walked in.  His plans with another friend seemed to have collapsed, so he decided to join us.

A pitcher of beer for me and the newbie while Ash got a Jack Coke.  And so it started.

There was a lot going on in the bar… a Singaporean couple were celebrating their 25th anniversary, a farang woman and her husband were at the table next to ours dancing and having fun, and an Australian expat who lives in Bangers was entertaining six friends — including three Aussie women.  So the atmosphere was lively.

I suggested to the newbie that his first day Bangkok experience would be fuller if he had  a shot of the worst whiskey in the world, and we all went outside to have a 10-baht shot of the horrid Thai whiskey.

(Earlier on the walk over to Cowboy we’d seen a bug cart.  Following my suggestion, the newbie was ready to buy a bag of bugs and eat them, but I suggested he wait till later.  I really liked this guy … he was ready for anything).

We drank and danced and sang until closing time.

Ash, who is more of an RCA nightclub kind of guy sent me an SMS on Saturday saying that he had been surprised to find that he had fun at Country Road.  He also said that his buddy was a little worse for the wear and tear but had also had fun.

I planned to stay in for a quiet evening on Saturday.  On my way to work Saturday morning I ran into Penfold on the subway.  He trains one of his  clients in Ratchada on Saturday, and so we arranged to get together when we were both finished.

So it was that around 1:30 in the afternoon we went to a little outdoor moo yang & gai yang restaurant where we ordered grilled chicken and somtam.  We sat for an hour or so and enjoyed good food in a nice atmosphere.

We had planned to walk back to Sukhumvit for  a bit of exercise, but the sky was clouding up so we decided to take the train.  Penfold had plans with friends in the evening, but he suggested grabbing some happy hour beverages at Coyote Restaurant.  We met there at four o’clock and spent three hours the bar chatting, drinking, and flirting with the beautiful bartenders.

I had sent an SMS to the snuggler around ten in the morning saying that I would be at home for a quiet evening if she wanted to come watch TV.  I’d had no reply all day, but at 7 p.m., just as happy hour was ending, she called saying that she was at Asok station and walking to my house.  I apologized to Penfold, drank down my remaining two bottles of beer in about 45 seconds, then teetered out the door and home.

The snuggler was waiting for me downstairs.  We went up to my room, I walked in the door and crashed on my bed.

She seemed to take it well.  I woke up around 4 a.m. and she was asleep in one of my tee shirts and I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on at Coyote.

I’d had a full night’s sleep, so I grabbed my laptop and started writing a blog.