Aarau's Top Five - Thai House

Aah Aarau, how I will (do) miss thee.

On Thursday as a reward for all the ridiculous rash-inducing cleaning, we went out for lunch at the Thai House, which has a lunchtime buffet thing for a mere 25 CHF (a snip, all things considered, and a real novelty given the general dearth of Asian food in this country). We scoffed mountains of mysterious curries and stir fries and then I had a really excellent plate of mysterious tropical fruits (some of which I didn't even recognise, which was exciting) and some absolutely excellent banana icecream, and then Reto almost fell asleep in his chair. For some odd reason this was only the second time that I had been to the Thai House, and the first time I had actually eaten there. The other time I went was in February or so when Reto and I decided to have a drink at the bar there, and that occasion definitely makes it onto my list of Top 5 Memorable Aarau Moments.

The bar looks bizarrely colonial, all heavily-stuffed leather couches and dark brown wood and pictures of royalty (Thai royalty, but still). The night we went there the entertainment was a man with a keyboard, a shiny, spangly outfit, a microphone (totally unnecessary given that the entire bar was even smaller than our flat, ie. very very small) and a wide repertoire of cheesy songs that he would sing in an entertaining mixture of english, german and mumble (at one point he made a short and slightly discomfiting speech about how he wanted to dedicate the next song to the queen of Thailand, and he respectfully indicated a portrait on the wall, and then he launched into "Sex Bomb", which was great). Anyway, he was quite the entertainer, and encouraged the clearly awkward audience (about 10 of us, who filled the bar to capacity) to join in, to dance, to request songs and to generally stop being so shy. As it turned out, the drinks Reto and I ordered were more successful at achieving this than the keyboard man was, and not as a consequence of their high alcohol content or anything like that. No, our drinks were entertaining because they posed a significant risk to everyone's safety.

We had ordered liqueur coffees. Not controversial at all, you would imagine, but then the waitress came out with a tray full of bottles and jugs and glasses and things, plonked it all down in front of us and then proceeded to set things on fire all over the place (really only sugary boozy liquid that she was caramelising in some gigantic glasses, but the way she twirled things around made it look like the whole place was ablaze). Everyone stopped looking at the singing man and started looking at our fireball drinks, and the whole thing went on for such a long time and was such a production that we were all totally awestruck and gave her a round of applause when she was finished. It seemed a shame to have to drink them in the end, but drink them we did and by that stage everyone had such a sense of camaraderie that there was much more singing and dancing and chatting and applauding and requesting of songs going on. Aah, the Thai House.