HEY GUYS sorry it took so long to update - erik left me for a lady boy so I've needed a few weeks to recover. just kiddinngggg. So Chiang Mai was awesome - super friendly locals and amazing thai food. With its inner "old" town still encircled by a mote and remaining segments of the town's ancient walls, Chiang Mai is considered one of the remaining strong holds of Thai culture. We stayed at Ginny Place with my Uncle Ian and Aunt Tee in the old section of town - and man were we glad that we took them up on their offer to let us stay with them. We could not have had better hosts. Free housing, open access to their water/beer fridge (yeah baby), endless knowledge about chiang mai and surrounding areas, and fun outings every single night. Plus, we got to meet and hang out with Tee's 8 year old son, Audi - who she calls her "baby" :)
Ian took us around town and we posted up for a few Singha's at the local backpacker/hippie joint - thoughtfully named THC. We also brought our buddy, Justin (from Vermont), who we met earlier that day at Chiang Mai airport. Please note that my Uncle and I are making the exact same face...!! Must be in the Taylor genes....
Afterward we met up with Tee at another bar called Heaven Beach to play pool and listen to the live band do covers of everything from Gwen Stefani to Bob Marley to the Chili Peppers. Tee knocked them pool balls around like a pro - even on a wooden table top with ripped felt and sagging pockets, placed on sand.
Ian and Tee took us out to different restaurants in Chiang Mai practically every night. Erik and I had a hankering one night for some Mexican food - so Pee Ian walked us over to Miguel's, a Mexican joint just outside of the wall. HUGE plate of nachos, triple combos, and pitchers of margaritas. YES.
My dad had suggested that I take a cooking class, but I decided to wait until Thailand to take one since Thai food is my FAVE. Tee recommended Siam Rice Cooking School. Because Erik's cooking skills range from placing waffles in the toaster to boiling up macaroni and stirring in plastic cheese sauce, he decided that he really didn't need his own cooking station and decided to just play sous chef (and help me eat the massive quantities of delicious Thai food that we whipped up). Our Vermont buddy Justin tagged along as well as a couple from Seattle (David and Claudia) who happen to know my dad through work and were also in Chiang Mai at the time.
Erik working the mortar and pestle like a pro - pounding our panang curry paste. Apparently, Thai wisdom states that you can tell if a woman will make a good wife by how handy she is with her mortar and pestle...
Making Panang curry...
The next day we went to an authentic Muy Thai boxing match, located near the night bazarre past the gangs of gawking lady boys. Ringside seats baby!
This is us kicking it with Tee and another Ginny Place guest (Jonathon from England). Look at the smiling faces, then look at Tee. I think she was trying to practice her goofy faces because we all told her that they needed some work. She was a pro by the end of the week.
We also visited Doi Suthep, one of Chiang Mai's most well known temples. It is located at the top of a hill, up a flight of 300+ stairs.
We had seen a million temples before, but this time it was really special because Pee Ian gave us instructions for different ways that you could actually take part in temple activities....
There is a different buddha image for each day of the week. If you can track down which day of the week you were born, then you can "feed" your personal buddha by adding a ladel of oil around its candle. Here's erik feeding his Tuesday buddha (known as the reclining or "lazy" buddha - the same as my Uncle!) I had the Saturday buddha seated with protective naga serpents raised around him. There's 1 extra buddha at the end for anyone who doesn't know what day of they week they were born...
1 night, a big group of us loaded into a songthaw (big open-backed pick up trucky thing) and went out for dinner at this amazing rooftop restaurant. Giant chicken, beef, pork skewers, tempura prawns, tom yum gai soup...yum yum. We were so full that Ian actually got kind of mad when I poked him in the belly. OOF! Check our audi in the front stuffing his face....
We decided we should give Ian and Tee a little break from being host for a bit, so we hopped into a minivan and headed to Pai to tap into our inner hippie. In Pai, you actually feel out of place if you DON'T have dreads, abnormally large piercings, and billowing colorful hippie pants. We stayed at a cluster of bungalows called Family Guesthouse. The only family we saw was a group of hippies (or as Danny Sheed would call them "granolas") who literally did not move from their hammocks the entire time we were there. I'm serious, one morning we left at 9am to go rent bicycles and explore the area and returned at 9pm to find that they hadn't moved. Their activities ranged from passing blunts to picking bugs out of their dreads to strumming their acoustic guitars and whining about how difficult life is. Their determination to do nothing with their lives was almost impressive. I wanted to get Tee a souvenir t-shirt that said "Hippies Smell", but thought that it wouldn't be good for business.
Making Panang curry...
The next day we went to an authentic Muy Thai boxing match, located near the night bazarre past the gangs of gawking lady boys. Ringside seats baby!
This is us kicking it with Tee and another Ginny Place guest (Jonathon from England). Look at the smiling faces, then look at Tee. I think she was trying to practice her goofy faces because we all told her that they needed some work. She was a pro by the end of the week.
We walked a good 45 minutes just past the city walls to a temple called Suan Doc to check out one of their well-known "Monk Chat" sessions. 30 or so robed monks attend the session 2 times a week. All people of different faiths are invited to talk to them openly about buddhism or even just their lives in general. Erik and I sat down at one of the tables with 2 monks in their late 20's who were actually from Vietnam and Cambodia but had migrated to Chiang Mai to further their studies. We asked them questions like...
...how has Buddhism changed your life? for the Cambodian monk, it redirected him from a criminal path. They also responded that studying Buddhism gave them access to better standards of education.
...what do they do with the bad monks (who don't follow their tenants)? One monk who was caught canoodling with a lady was asked to disrobe (no, not that kind of disrobe) and leave the Monkhood.
...do you do martial arts? (hah erik). In the past, yes, but now life is more peaceful so they just do routine exercise (such as pushups) to stay healthy.
As much as we wanted to take pictures with the monks, we felt it would have been inappropriate and may have detracted from the personal feeling of the experience....but we do have a few pics of the temple (Suan Doc) where we met with them:
We also visited Doi Suthep, one of Chiang Mai's most well known temples. It is located at the top of a hill, up a flight of 300+ stairs.
We had seen a million temples before, but this time it was really special because Pee Ian gave us instructions for different ways that you could actually take part in temple activities....
There is a different buddha image for each day of the week. If you can track down which day of the week you were born, then you can "feed" your personal buddha by adding a ladel of oil around its candle. Here's erik feeding his Tuesday buddha (known as the reclining or "lazy" buddha - the same as my Uncle!) I had the Saturday buddha seated with protective naga serpents raised around him. There's 1 extra buddha at the end for anyone who doesn't know what day of they week they were born...
Erik was starting to look like some sort of cross between ashton kutcher and a young paul mccartney - definitely time for a haircut. We could have paid like $2 to have it trimmed up, but we decided making it a group effort with Ian's clippers and a couple bottles of Tiger would be more fun...
1 night, a big group of us loaded into a songthaw (big open-backed pick up trucky thing) and went out for dinner at this amazing rooftop restaurant. Giant chicken, beef, pork skewers, tempura prawns, tom yum gai soup...yum yum. We were so full that Ian actually got kind of mad when I poked him in the belly. OOF! Check our audi in the front stuffing his face....We decided we should give Ian and Tee a little break from being host for a bit, so we hopped into a minivan and headed to Pai to tap into our inner hippie. In Pai, you actually feel out of place if you DON'T have dreads, abnormally large piercings, and billowing colorful hippie pants. We stayed at a cluster of bungalows called Family Guesthouse. The only family we saw was a group of hippies (or as Danny Sheed would call them "granolas") who literally did not move from their hammocks the entire time we were there. I'm serious, one morning we left at 9am to go rent bicycles and explore the area and returned at 9pm to find that they hadn't moved. Their activities ranged from passing blunts to picking bugs out of their dreads to strumming their acoustic guitars and whining about how difficult life is. Their determination to do nothing with their lives was almost impressive. I wanted to get Tee a souvenir t-shirt that said "Hippies Smell", but thought that it wouldn't be good for business.Here's a view of the river that we stayed on:
Pai is a really small, sweet town with a lot of cool places to check out a few kilometers off. All of the other backpacker hippies were zipping around on motorbikes - but we decided to be hardcore and do it on bicycles. Even though it seemed that every other person owned a nice mountain bike, it was impossible to find a proper one to rent. Luckily we eventually one for me - it was pretty crap - but still, at least it was a mountain bike. Erik, on the other hand, ended up with a little newspaper boy bike decked out with a basket on the front and a little ding bell. Oh, and it only had one gear. But we were determined. Tour de Pai. So we set off to go visit this one waterfall that was a good 12 km off. Not so bad. 6 kilometers in, it's 2pm, absolutely blazing sun, erik is dripping sweat, standing up over his seat and pumping his legs for dear life to try and get up over this monstrous hill. It was just ridiculous. There was no way we were going to make it, and we had a lot of other destinations we wanted to see that day. So we peddled our way back to town and agreed we needed something with a motor on it. The manual motorbikes looked pretty intimidating so even though it looked kind of gay, we decided to go for the honda automatic stop-go scooters. SO FUN. and 5 minutes later, we were at the waterfall:
In the late afternoon, we zipped over to Pai's famed hotsprings. The hotsprings are actually so hot that they have had to redirect a river to run through them. The coolest hot spring felt like a hot tub and the hottest was actually boiling. There was actually a sign outside of the boiling hot spring that said "No boil egg, please".
After Pai, we returned to Chiang Mai for a few more raucaus days with Ian and Tee. Tee said our late nights going out to dinner, playing pool at the bars, and blending margaritas at Ginny Place made Ian young again. We tuckered that guy out so much he probably spent the next week snoozing with his kitty in his "man cave". Such great times at Ginny Place, THANK YOU!!!
Pai is a really small, sweet town with a lot of cool places to check out a few kilometers off. All of the other backpacker hippies were zipping around on motorbikes - but we decided to be hardcore and do it on bicycles. Even though it seemed that every other person owned a nice mountain bike, it was impossible to find a proper one to rent. Luckily we eventually one for me - it was pretty crap - but still, at least it was a mountain bike. Erik, on the other hand, ended up with a little newspaper boy bike decked out with a basket on the front and a little ding bell. Oh, and it only had one gear. But we were determined. Tour de Pai. So we set off to go visit this one waterfall that was a good 12 km off. Not so bad. 6 kilometers in, it's 2pm, absolutely blazing sun, erik is dripping sweat, standing up over his seat and pumping his legs for dear life to try and get up over this monstrous hill. It was just ridiculous. There was no way we were going to make it, and we had a lot of other destinations we wanted to see that day. So we peddled our way back to town and agreed we needed something with a motor on it. The manual motorbikes looked pretty intimidating so even though it looked kind of gay, we decided to go for the honda automatic stop-go scooters. SO FUN. and 5 minutes later, we were at the waterfall:
In the late afternoon, we zipped over to Pai's famed hotsprings. The hotsprings are actually so hot that they have had to redirect a river to run through them. The coolest hot spring felt like a hot tub and the hottest was actually boiling. There was actually a sign outside of the boiling hot spring that said "No boil egg, please".
After Pai, we returned to Chiang Mai for a few more raucaus days with Ian and Tee. Tee said our late nights going out to dinner, playing pool at the bars, and blending margaritas at Ginny Place made Ian young again. We tuckered that guy out so much he probably spent the next week snoozing with his kitty in his "man cave". Such great times at Ginny Place, THANK YOU!!!
Aiight guys, thanks for reading!
hope you like the stories and the pics
phad thai kisses
love,
megan and erik
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