Tai Yang Restaurant

You may never believe this, but I am putting in a recommendation for a restaurant where you should go if you get to Bangkok. It is a place called Tai Yang located near the Ibis Siam Bangkok Hotel on Ratchapralop Road.

Why am I recommending a restaurant? Well, the food is really good--A Roi is the word for delicious here-- but the main reason is that I prefer restaurants where I know the people. In Hyde Park, Pizza Capri and Cedars are the two places that I love. I know the owners, and it is so much like the past when people were less anonymous. Well, Tai Yang is a restaurant where I have been going every evening, and the owner, Pornphet Saekow, each day teaches me a new Thai phrase. The tables are marble slabs placed over Singer sewing machines with foot pedals. I remember when my mother had one of these Singer machines.. Eventually the sewing machine companies in Thailand advanced beyond the foot pedaled machines, and the old ones here were recycled as restaurant tables.

The place is simple and airy. I first became friends with the people there when there was a torrential downpour. There are books about Buddhism placed around the restaurant, and when I asked about Buddhism, Pornphet told me about the Buddhist way of life. As she described it, it was a way of life where people slow down and become less obsessed with time and possessions. With the crowding that I see in Bangkok and the huge tourist trade I can see how one can try to avoid this kind of life.

Yesterday, I met Lika who is an editor of textbooks in Thailand. It is fun trying to communicate with someone when both people have just a simple understanding of the other person's language. I know maybe ten Thai phrases, and although Lika knows much more English, it was really a puzzle how to say things. So I got out my flute and my tennis balls. There were not many people there so I showed them how to juggle. ha ha. Then I played two pieces that Danny and I composed. Music is a universal language like math, and it is so much easier than memorizing long lists of vocabulary.

It is interesting to see how people manage in places like India where the average student has three languages to master. Apparently people learn how to pickup phrases that are needed. English is definitely the universal language that is emerging, but this seems like such a ridiculous choice with the many problems that exist in our language.

Got to go.