Twenty-four hours on the soi, from the shutters to the last baht bus
Soi Diana wakes late. At ten in the morning it is shutters, a dog, a motorbike taxi rank at the Second Road end, and the smell of somebody's laundry. The guesthouses that line it, which are most of what it is by day, have people on the balconies with a coffee. Lee's Diner is open for breakfast, which its regulars eat at noon. The Las Vegas sign is off and the gate is shut, and the hall behind it is a dark steel shed that nobody who saw it at eleven at night would recognise.
By four the bars at the Second Road end have their shutters up and the first stools out. Buttercups has the afternoon match on. Gatsby is polishing glasses for a crowd that comes at seven. The Oasis Cocktail Lounge has its door open and its cold escaping. At six the Las Vegas sign comes on, the gate opens, and the temperature two metres in front of it drops; this is the moment the soi becomes what it is at night, and the first people through the gate are the ones who know the stage-side tables are ours and want them.
From eight the soi is the walk between the hall and everything else: to LK Metro across the road for the reggae, to Soi Buakhao beyond it for the beer bars and Tree Town, back to the hall for the band. It is lit, busy, and safe until one, when the band stops and the bars at the Second Road end are still open. The last baht bus is not a thing; they run all night along Second Road, and the rank at the end of the soi has motorbikes until four.
What the soi is, in one paragraph, and then the rest
Soi Diana is a short street in Central Pattaya running east from Second Road, lined with guesthouses and a dozen bars, with the ten-bar hall of Las Vegas Beer Garden on its south side and the end of LK Metro opposite. It is not a bar street in the way Soi Buakhao is. It is a street with a hall on it, and the hall is why anyone types the name into a map.
The rest: the soi has one cocktail lounge that is properly one, Gatsby, and a second, the Oasis Cocktail Lounge, that is a cold room with a good list. It has a sports bar, Buttercups, with the regulars who know the fixtures. It has a go-go, the Las Vegas Agogo, which shares a name with the hall and nothing else and which the hall's reviews mention only to say they are not the same place. It has Lee's Diner and Craft Cottage, which cook for us and bring plates to the tables at the back. And it has the Palace Bar, which is inside the hall and is bar one of ten, the first on the left through the gate.
We are bar ten of ten, the last on the right, beside the stage. The soi's Google listing count at the top of this page is what Google returned for the street, with the rule stated, and the hall's ten bars are listed as one entry because that is how Google lists them. The four walks at the bottom of the page get you to the gate from Second Road, from the lane, and from your phone; the plan inside the gate gets you from the gate to our counter, which is ninety metres and four minutes on a Saturday.
