Chiang Mai and Sukhothai

So I've hit my first couple spots in Thailand. Chiang Mai was pretty cool. After a while, I was getting templed out, but the markets were interesting and there was a really good cooking school that I took a couple of classes as. I also took a long day tour of the Golden Triangle area where Thailand, Lao, and Myanmar all meet. During the tour we stopped at a couple ethnic villages, although that was pretty commercialized. It's obvious that these villages now see tourism as their primary way of living instead of agriculture. A bunch of the villagers were dressed up in their traditional dress as if it was Halloween and when you took a photo of them they'd come up to you and say "5 baht, money, 5 baht". A bunch of the kids came begging for money, too. And of course there were little shops and stands selling tourist trinkets everywhere. This included not just things made in the village, but a lot of items purchased in the Chiang Rai market for re-sell. I'm glad I was able to see some more genuine small ethnic villages in Laos where tourism has not played such a corrupting influence on the daily lives of people there.

Other than that, Chiang Mai is about what you'd expect for Thailand. Lots of prostitues. Lots of massage parlors. I've found it's pretty hard to distinguish between the legit places and the spots where you get what I call the massage-plus treatment. I walked by a place on my second day there that was inside a big fancy high-rise hotel that marketed itself as a spa and also provided facials and body wraps and such, and also charged about double what most places do. So I figured that's a place where you can just get a really good massage (a massage-minus). So I go in, and about two thirds of the way through I'm being asked "Do you want extra special massage?". Hhhhmmmn, let me think about it.

More disturbingly, there are lots of she-males here. On a couple of occasions I'd be thinking to myself "Hey, that's a nice piece of....WHOA HOLD ON A SECOND THAT'S A DUDE!". I’d then go home and take a shower to symbolically cleanse myself of my thought crime.

I ended up getting some bespoke-tailored clothing in Chiang Mai. I was a little leery of custom tailoring after my experience in Hoi An. I was cruising around temples with some ex investment banker from NY I met (this was the 3rd newly unemployed investment banker that is now traveling the world for an extended period that I met on this trip), and we started a conversation with this guy from Singapore. He had flown in with his wife to visit this one particular tailor, which he said he does every 6 months or so. According to this dude, Chiang Mai has supplanted Bangkok as the custom-tailoring capital of Asia. He was the second guy that day that told me to go there, we figured we might as well check it out. We go, and it seems like they really know what they are talking about, so I order up a sport coat. The next day I go back in for my first fitting, and he's got the base of the jacket laid out with no arms and unfinished lapels, and aside from needing just a tad more space in the arm holes it feels perfect. I come back in on day 2 and the thing fits like a glove, and looks great. So I ended up having him put together an overcoat for me, too. I'm pretty happy with how both turned out. I do regret my choice in fabric on the sport coat a little, though. I was hoping I would get something that would be good for both work and casual, but I think it's not going to be that versatile. It will still be a nice item to have, though. I think that's probably the one limitation of the whole process, is that you have to pick your own fabrics and they have pretty standard suit materials on-hand that don’t work as well for casual clothing. If you want just basic stuff, that's fine, but if you want something more fashion-forward I think you'll need to show up with your own cloth.

Sukhothai was pretty nice. The historic park was really interesting. I rented a bike and tooled around for about 4 hours, in which I was able to cover about everything worth seeing. It worked out well as I was able to get an early start, get back to the hotel and clean up, and catch a long bus ride to Bangkok, which I'm on right now (and being subjected to a painfully bad Thai movie, by the way). This will give me just shy of 5 full days in Bangkok before I have to catch my flight home on Saturday night. This is probably 1 more than I need, but I suppose it will give me ample time to explore the night life and give me some incentive to hook up with some other travelers I can party with.

The food has been good here in Thailand, but it hasn't blown my mind. I've actually preferred much of the Thai food that I've had at home. Maybe that means I'm used to more Americanized stuff. Some of the stuff has been a bit hard on my stomach, too. It's not been uncommon for me to have a mild stomach ache after eating at nice restaurants. I think that it's just the ingredients, not the fact that the food has made me ill. Don't get me wrong, that's happened too. I've spent another few days crapping my guts out and I'm on my second Z-pack and box of immodium for this trip. It's the cost of doing business, as far as I'm concerned. As with Vietnam and Laos, all the best stuff I've had has been street food. To skip out on street food would defeat the point of coming here. Sukhothai has a really vibrant night market, so I hit that last night. I got some unidenfitied pork thing with sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves and some stir-fried frog with garlic and pepper. Alas, the frog was not as tasty as the ribbit dished I had in Cambodia, but the pork was pretty good. And dessert was off the hook. I went to this little Thai-style crepe stand where they were making sweet crepes with condensed milk drizzled all over it. Killer.

However, there are definitely some things I won't touch. Since I didn't see the deep-fried hairy spiders that are supposedly so common in Cambodia, Thailand appears to be the winner for wierdest food I've seen. Check out the photo of all the deep-fried worms for sale. Eewww.