Party in The Plaza!
Trip Start
Feb 2005
1
5
6
Trip End
Mar 2005
Chaing Mai,
Thailand
Thursday, January 20, 2005
"Enjoy a walk along the glittering Night Bazaar, experience the presence of seven centuries and a charming cultural show. Enjoy the selection of wondrous gems of Thai handicraft, visit a Hill Tribe village and ride an elephant's back. Discover Chiang Mai's treasures on your own....."
I am so glad to be away from Chiang Rai that even the air in Chiang Mai feels better. There's a lot of activity around the city, as we drive in from the countryside. There are signs of industry and prosperity, and people I see in the streets are crawling with people, motorcycles, cars, buses, tuk-tuks, and rickshaws.
One thing is immediately obvious here : shopping is a sport in Chiang Mai.
Our bus rolls past silk factories, furniture makers, billboards that advertise cooking classes, endless shipping companies, celadon makers and an umbrella 'village' that displays large silk umbrellas in bright colors, hand-painted with scenes of Thai life, flowers, birds, and butterflies
Shopper's Heaven
. Then we come to the flower markets, jammed and over-flowing with blossoms that spill into the street.It's the middle of the afternoon when we arrive at our new hotel. In the front courtyard is a spirit house that is big enough for two adults to sleep in, and it's surrounded with sculpted elephants that are strung with red and yellow flowers.
After check-in, Hubby, Lips and I walk down the street to have lunch at a beautiful restaurant on stilts, built entirely of teakwood. We take off our shoes and climb worn steps to sit on the veranda. Under large, shady trees, we eat eggplant with ginger and mint, fresh spring rolls, samosas and sweet and sour prawns that are served in half a coconut.
Satiated, I hit the streets of Chiang Mai.
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We spend six days and nights in this teeming city, shopping, eating, walking around the old walled city beside the river, visiting with Westerners who have settled there, making small talk with the locals. The food in Chiang Mai is the best I've had in Thailand, and there are so many good restaurants that it's hard to chose one each night.
Great Umbrellas
The streets come alive in the late afternoon, with people pushing their carts to the night market, setting up stalls, talking, laughing, playing music, letting their kids run around them while they cook and eat on the sidewalks beside their shops, carrying the babies with them for the night's action. The whole family is there, and every night is a party.Every night, I walk through the glittering Bazaar and it's side streets, finding something new, something fun, something to make me think about my life and why I am here. Unlike Chiang Rai, with it's soulless energy, Chiang Mai seems to be rushing in every direction with life-affirming joy, charging out to grab me by the collar and shake me, to show me how good life can be. I find it invigorating. While the Golden Triangle houses the souls of the dead, seeking a resting place, Chiang Mai offers the smells, colors and sounds of Thailand's joy for life, and it's hopes for the future. It's city of positive energy, filled with people who are happy to be there.
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One morning, Pat drives us up a mountain pass to a compound in the clouds, Temple Doi Suthep. A long, steep staircase with dragons on each side leads a quarter mile up side of the hill to the temple; it's chilly once we get up there, and the temple grounds are damp from clouds, rain, and mist
Chaing Mai
. Bright pink bougainvilla, so big and old that it spreads like a chestnut tree, covers pathways and shades gazebos. Temple gongs lead the way to carvings and statues, strewn with flowers and smoking with incense. The marble walkways are slippery under the feet of thousands who come up the mountain each day to mediatate, pray, or just appreciate the long views of Chiang Mai at the foot of the mountain.
After a few hours, we leave this peaceful and serene temple, and climb into the back of two pickup trucks for a drive over another mountain pass. These are open-air pickup trucks, and it's an interesting ride - it's flying termite season, and they're everywhere, leaving transparent wings behind as we bat them away. The temperature drops even more as we head to another hill tribe village. We know we're getting close when we see - a Pizza Hut?
The Hut turns into houses and low cement block buildings. We turn off the road and park at the bottom of a narrow curving street, lined with shops - we know this drill and are prepared for the seige of young women wearing cigarette trays full of embroidered bags and folk dolls. This village turns out to have the heaviest onslaught of all - they don't get many tourists up here in the clouds, and it looks like we're it for the day.
Rain is beginning to fall, and wisps of clouds are filling in gaps between tree branches and thatched huts. A horde of children surrounds the trucks, and the only phrase I catch rising above their little heads is "one hundred baht!"
By now, all of us are finding it easy to say "no" to even the cutest little kid, and I just keep saying "no" every ten feet or so as I climb the hill of shops, waiting for them to end, for something to appear - some reason for our being here
My Spirit House
.Modern greed has certainly taken hold in this little village. Once again, I wonder where all this stuff comes from - does a truck make deliveries up the mountain every week, carrying leftovers from a sister store in Bangkok? Do the vendors order it online, and does a UPS truck bring it us the slopes?
I'm really cold now, having dressed for ninety-five degree heat at the bottom of the mountain. I spot a black cotton jacket with silver beads and red embroidery on the sleeves hanging in a shop. Three hundred baht later, I'm warming up. I walk back down the hill in the rain, feeling like fresh meat: I made a purchase, so they know I have money.
At the bottom of the hill, I find a grocery store with five women sitting at a table in the middle of the shelves, slurping noodles. Like most Thai grocers, this one is also a restaurant. I order an espresso from the shop owner - there's a Braun Espresso machine proudly displayed on a small table - and the shopkeeper plugs it in, waits for it to heat up, and brings me a paper cup of foamy dark liquid. Then she returns to her stove and a mortar and pestle. She throws in a handful of herbs and spices, and begins pounding them into submission. When they are just right, she tosses them into a hot wok, adds veggies and chicken, and the air inside the store begins to heat up with the smell of chili peppers
The Professor and MaryAnn
. From my seat in the grocer's small store, I watch my fellow tourists filter down, arms loaded with bags and packages. Some of the ladies have posed for pictures at the top of the hill, right past a hut that's been playing a John Wayne movie on a DVD player in the backroom. There, in a token opium poppy patch, they were dressed in the traditional folk garments of this tribe, all headgear and silver threads, and the resulting pictures that they proudly carry make them look like Julie Andrews in an opium dream.
I leave when my coffee is gone, walking past a teenager wearing green camouflage pants and shirt, sporting an orange and black Mohawk hairdo.
On the way back to Chiang Mai, while I swat away the flying termites that keep trying to get in my mouth, I listen as The Professor, a very learned man, with several degrees in microbiology, and The Nice Guy, a born-again Christian from Alabama, talk about the theory of evolution.
The Nice Guy, who has been explaining loaves and fishes to various monks in temples along the way, really doesn't have much to say. The Professor is doing most of the talking, and he trots out study after study, book after book, only to have this southern gentleman shake his head and say " I don't believe that." Their discussion ends on the topic of gills in human embryos, and someone else in the truck throws out that his cousin was born with gills. The conversational focus shifts into freaks of nature and birth abnormalities. While The Professor stews in frustration, we talk about six-toed cousins, and a condition called "prune belly."
At the hotel, Mary Anne and I eat noodle soup for lunch, then take a walk along the moat that hugs the wall of the old city
Shopping, what else?
. Kids are swinging on tires over the water, laughing and jumping in to cool off from the heat.We find a bookstore with a small English language section, but all the books are shrink wrapped. It doesn't seem to matter much, because most of the selection is romance or thrillers. I'm out of reading material, so I buy three paperbacks before we head across town to search for a handmade paper shop that Mary Anne has read about.
The shop, when we find it, is barely air-conditioned, and it's hot and tiny. But it is filled with exquisite papers and framed custom matting. We spend an hour looking at individual sheets of paper, pressed with rosemary branches or pine needles, some with green leaves, red poppies, or purple irises. The young woman who runs the shop is very sweet, and brings us cold water as we sweat and look at her papers, before selecting quite a few pieces, which she happily rolls into cardboard tubes for us.
A tuk-tuk seems like a good idea, so when we leave the shop, we flag one down to drive us over to Chinatown - a maze of twisted and narrow arteries that funnel us past housewares, clothing, TV's, washers and dryers, bright red shops hung deep with gold chains, and the religious stores - places that look like Party City to me.
Religious stores in Thailand exist primarily to supply Buddhist monks with the tools of their trade. They also are the suppliers of religious materials for your average Thai guy or gal on the street, looking for something to decorate the spirit house, or perhaps string on a Buddha at the local temple. These stores are hung with paper flower leis or longs garlands of shiny tinsel, to hang around Buddha's neck. The shop aisles are four and five feet deep with gold plates, chalices and incense bowls, set against wall displays of saffron sheeting to make robes
Chow
. There are bowls for the monks to hold as they make their daily pilgrimage for food, walking through the streets, accepting donations. Buddhist monks are not allowed to buy their own food, and depend the people of Thailand to sustain them. Placing food in a monk's bowl is very good karma, indeed, and people are honored to do so. The religious stores also sell the gold leaf that people press onto the many golden statues of Lord Buddha that decorate the land. You'll see folks in the temples, slapping a tiny square - small, medium, or large - of gold leaf on a twenty-foot long arm. ( Now I realize why all of the Golden Buddhas that I have seen are all in pretty good shape - this is a very practical maintenance program: pay your respects ( literally ) and earn some good karma. Everybody is happy: Buddha, the King, and your neighbors. The temple looks good, the neighborhood has face, and the government doesn't have to fund the upkeep of a public shrine. The synergy of the society seems to work pretty well. )
I've been looking for these little gold squares; in the lobby of our hotel is an alcoved ceiling painted in dark burgundy, with little gold squares, clustered on the edges, then floating into the wine-dark sky. I'm thinking this will look pretty good in a skylight back home, so I buy twenty five hundred of the little suckers, in all three sizes.
Mary Anne and I walk some more, stopping at the "My Friend Bar" for bottles of cold water, and while we drink, I put eye drops in my burning eyes, which are fighting against the pollution from forty thousand deisel tuk-tuks. It's so hot outside that my eye drops are warm.
We signal to another tuk-tuk driver, and this one is a young guy who went to the Rhode Island School of Design. His name is Beetle. Like many twenty-two year olds in this world, Beetle is back home, driving his tuk-tuk, trying to figure out what he wants to do next. He's a smart kid, verbal and entertaining, and we have a nice conversation, until
Mary Anne begins to question him on various aspects of Thai life - she's got an English speaker here - but she asks him so many stupid questions that even Beetle starts to get cheesed off, and his smile fades away by the time he drops us at our hotel.
While Mary Anne heads up to her room for a nap, I join The Party Couple in the lobby lounge. As we sip our drinks, Fingers walks in the front door. I realize out loud that I have not actually seen Fingers for at least a week, and they both crack up, then fill me in: Fingers is in Thailand for one reason, and one reason only: the women. On this, his fourth trip ( sans wife - she's back in Santa Barbara ) he has his daily schedule perfected: Morning: breakfast, shower, two hour foot massage; afternoon : short walk, lunch, two hour full body massage, nap; evening : pre-dinner cocktail, two hour full body massage, and dinner, followed by the choice of a companion for the evening. Sleep, and repeat the following day.
When I ask The Couple how they know all this, they tell me it's not really a secret - you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Every evening, as The Couple is closing the lounge in the lobby, Fingers enters the hotel with his companion. Each afternoon, they enjoy a cocktail with him, hear about his day, and see him off for the evening's activities. And in the morning, after breakfast, they watch as Fingers, refreshed, heads out for his morning activities. ( Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone can stand that much rubbing in this much heat and humidity, but I guess that's what air-conditioning is for. It occurs to me that this may be one of the reasons I am single.)
Sure enough, that night, after my walk through the Bazaar, I take a seat in the lobby bar with The Couple and watch as Fingers, a man in his mid-sixties, crosses the hotel lobby with a lovely twenty-year-old on his arm.
American men and Thai women would seem to be the perfect combination: you take a man who likes to use women, objectify them and tell them what to do, and put him with a woman who looks like a porcelain doll, has been raised in a Buddhist home, ( so she smiles in the face of adversity or anger ), never loses her temper or shows displeasure, expresses few opinions, and has been raised in a patriarchal society, so she aims to please any man.
A lot of American women that I know have arrived at a place in their lives where they speak their minds, express their opinions and are striving for more independence, not less. An American woman wants to please her man, and will be his eye candy, but not all the time: she likes and wears stupid shoes, but she also has a pair of sneakers in her closet. American women are not like Thai women: I knew this the moment I saw the shoe selection at the department store in Bangkok.
How different we must be for the man returning from Thailand, where intimite relationships, erotic shows, and "relaxation for men" are advertised in every newspaper, magazine and tourist pamphlet, not to mention billboards!
On this tour, I have observed American and Canadian men in restaurants, in bars, at temples, and on the street. I have watched their behavior in markets and in parks, and I wonder why the Western man does not seem to be able to distinguish between a mother, wife, or school girl and an escort, masseuse, or hooker. I have been seated across the table from a man ( married for thirty years ), with his wife beside him, and listened while he makes lurid sexual comments about an eighteen year old hostess that is seating people in the restaurant. I have watched fifteen year old folk dancers sexually rated by men old enough to be their grandfathers, and have listened while these men spoke about mothers, with babies still on their backs, as though they were up for hire.
What really surprises me that I have not seen or heard a Thai man react to this behavior; they really don't seem to react when their sisters and mothers are demeaned by tourists.
Thai law carries heavy penalties for insults to the Buddhist religion, Buddha icons, or for verbal insults to the King and Queen. In a country that cares mightily about my bare heels at a temple, I am surprised at the attitude displayed towards the women in this country.
Perhaps Thai men are not so different from American men.
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The next day is a day devoted to the Black Belt Shopper in many of us: we are going to Sankampaeng Road.
Under the auspices of learning more about 'Thai culture' we will visit a silk factory
( and shop ), a wood carving factory ( that sells furniture, statuary, spirit houses and tableaux ), a lacquer ware factory ( boutique with boxes and many decorative accessories, including near life-sized lacquered elephants ), and an umbrella factory ( selling and shipping all sizes of hand-made and painted silk umbrellas and fans. ) There is a jade factory, a gem cutter, a paper factory, a cotton factory; we will visit another tailor, a celadon factory that makes and sells lovely dishes and serving pieces, a leather factory with many items of clothing, and a winery. The array of goods is staggering.
Gathering early, we eat a hearty breakfast, do some stretching exercises, take our pulses, load up on water, check our credit cards, and hit the street.
We are tireless, and we are shopping pros: if not before this trip, we have learned along the way, and we do our collective best for the economy of Thailand.
Even Fingers and The Phantom show up for this part of the tour: the getting is too good to pass up, even for them. (I don't know what Fingers is shopping for, but I see The Phantom picking out some nice jade.)
On Sankampaeng Road, you don't have to carry a thing: if you are not carrying your purchase out the door, it can be delivered to your hotel, or shipped to your home in Palm Springs. If you really shop a lot, all you have to do is take your invoices to a shipper, whose office is on the street. The shipper will pick up your purchases, pack them, and send them to you in the States, or wherever.
Barely breaking a sweat, I find a silver evening bag, a honey jade necklace for my daughter, two spirit houses, a half dozen silk nightgowns and four silk handbags, two silk shirts, a variety of cotton pants and shirts, eight hand-painted silk fans, a pair of ruby earrings, a lacquered vase and two lacquer ware boxes, three hand-woven wall hangings and a pair of teak foo dogs.
This is before lunch. After a meal ( energy is important when you are Power Shopping ) I hire a tuk-tuk for a few repeat visits, and pick my shipping company.
It wasn't that I didn't want to buy all that crap along the way; I just needed a better selection of merchandise.
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Dinner that night is a quiet affair for myself and three couples. We sit in the gardens of The Antique House, a wonderful restaurant with entertainment : two folk singers who alternate on the stage, and give us songs we can sing along to - Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Bob Dylan.
While the rest of the group shares sweet and sour pork over white rice, I crunch on whole spicy peppers, Chiang Mai Sausage with Ginger and Peanuts, then Baked Prawn with Spicy Bean Thread.
Somehow, a "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" works with Thai food.
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Our last day in Chiang Mai is a good one : we're going to an elephant camp. We stop for a short hike in a bamboo forest ( with the tallest bamboo I have ever seen - easily one hundred feet tall,) watch Inspector Clousseau as he drops his camera in a river and falls off some rocks, then head to the camp.
We cross a river on a wooden bridge, many elephants below us, playing with their mahouts and splashing in the water. They're like puppies, begging for food as we hang over the edge of the bridge and feed the squishy trunks that keep reaching up to us for more.
The Maesa Elephant Camp is a refuge for some of Thailand's remaining four thousand elephants. Approximately two thousand of these magnificent creatures run wild, while the other half live in camps like this one, nurtured and protected. They also perform.
We watch as elephants play soccer, dance, paint pictures, lift heavy objects, and give massages. ( I'm bummed out when the mahout gets the massage: I was hoping to
volunteer. )
After the show, we walk over to a high platform above massive elephant heads, and climb aboard for a walk through the jungle; we go up and down hills, walk along the river, where the elephants drink and play some more, then we cross fields and visit the nursery, where baby elephants play and crawl around on bales of hay.
These are gorgeous creatures, intelligent, gentle, and powerful. They are playful and cooperative, and I hope their lives at the Mae Sae Elephant Camp are as good as they were presented to be.
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Our last night in Chiang Mai is spent at a perfectly horrid restaurant/bar/disco combination, located in an open air warehouse on the Ping River.. The house band is playing as we walk in, badly covering an Aerosmith song. As we are seated at our table, a guy in a suit takes the stage and speaks into the mike, informing us that we have a special treat tonight, a performance by a group visiting from Japan : it's a high school drumming band.
After twenty minutes of ear-pounding, non-stop drumming by twenty geeky teenagers, I leave the bad food, the bad table and the illuminating social commentary on our waitresses to go and sit in the outside bar, away from everything. In the sixties, before I was forced to listen to a twenty minute drum solo, someone handed me a joint first.
Seated at the bar, I observe yet another poorly stocked Thai bar : bad scotch, bad whiskey, a bottle of Coco Loco, and one bottle of Gordon's Gin. There is no flashy display of fifteen designer vodkas, no offering of tequila or wine flights, no ostentatious display of twenty-seven liqueurs that are never poured: it's Singha beer, white wine - Thai, French or California - and a guy behind the bar eating a plate of papaya. Right now, I could use a little ostentation, and a bartender who could make a decent martini, with some Maytag-stuffed olives.
Listening to the really annoying band - still drumming - and watching the crowd under orange lights that are the size of beach balls, I sip my unidentified white wine and think : it's time to go home.
And so, I do.
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In the morning, after a forty-five minute foot massage at the airport gate, we board our flight back to Bangkok. Wat is there to greet us, and shepherds us back to the Century Park Hotel, where I go to the tailor and try on my black Armani knock-off and my Egyptian cotton white shirts. They are perfect: I order two more suits on the spot. ( This is complete Impulse Shopping: I don't wear suits very much any more: they look funny with flip-flops. )
Our group is leaving for Bangkok International at three thirty in the morning, and the tailor offers to meet me in the lobby at three AM with my new suits. I thank him for the offer, but ask that they be shipped home, so that I am not re-packing my suitcase on the lobby floor like a chump before I get on the bus. He looks disappointed at the lack of a challenge. When I receive my suits, ten days later, they are perfect. I still have not worn them.
Once more, I go into the hot and crowded Bangkok streets, walk past the sleeping dogs and the dining office workers, peer into the dark and murky canals, snack on plastic bags of fried food, listen to the music coming from the neighborhood karaoke bar. I go to bed early.
Twenty-one hours later, I am still in Japan, looking at The Magic Kingdom outside my hotel room window.
In the afternoon, as our flight approached the runway at Narita, high winds blew the plane landing in front of us into a light tower, where it lost a wing. The airport closed immediately, and we were re-routed back to Nagoya, where we sat on the tarmac for six hours before returning to Tokyo.
By the time we retrieved our luggage, went through Japanese Customs, and stood in a very long line for new flights out the next day, all of the hotel rooms in the vicinity had been booked. The closest available rooms were at Tokyo Disneyland, one hour away. We are bussed to Disneyland.
Once again, it's three in the morning, and I've just checked into a new hotel. I can't figure out how to flush the toilet in this room - it's electronic, and has a console with five buttons on the side, and none of them seem to do the trick. All of the written instructions are in Japanese.
At least the seat is heated.
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When I began writing this book, I made a list of the places I had been, then noted what was happening in my life at that time. The connection seemed obvious to me : I jump on an airplane when something is bugging me.
It's been a year since my divorce, and I'm still lonely, still trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong.
People take tours for different reasons: some know that they will not have to think, that everything will be planned for them, and that their life will be easy. Some know that they will get their asses kissed, and that's what they need. Some know that the tour price includes an opportunity to speak their minds freely, and express whatever opinions they may have, with no repercussions. ( When you are living with strangers, you really don't have to take responsibility for your actions. Who cares what they think? )
I needed some company, which I got, but at a price. Normally choosing my own destinations, setting my own schedule, I have more freedom than I got on this trip. The food also pretty much sucked, but that's not so bad: it's just food, another meal in a lifetime of meals.
What impressed me the most about my tour of Thailand was, of course, it's people. In a place that is - at least according to Western standards - stressed, there is no anger, no road rage, no bitterness, no rude behavior to strangers. The Thai people seem to be incredibly committed to a successful and honorable future for their country. They work together, focused on that goal. They seem to live their lives on a different level - I can't say if it's a higher level, or just different - and they talk a lot about striving for the good in everything. With the exception of the role of women in their society, I'd say it's working well. In spite of the fact that I am a raging feminist, I can't say that's wrong either; sometimes I wonder about the changes that feminism has made in the fabric of American society. As women have taken on roles of more responsibility and independence, American men have responded by getting weaker, more child-like, and less responsible. We aren't asking them to be responsible for everything any more, and they're not. I'm not so sure I like that, but it's what we asked for, us hippie women of the sixties. Answered prayers?
I don't know if Buddhism has shaped the needs and wants of
Thailand, or if it's the other way around: did the country find and shape it's religion?
There is a high bar for personal responsibility in Thailand. There is respect for one's fellow man, in spite of a life filled with daily occurrences that would have the average American throwing fits and picking fights. Extreme heat and humidity, a high concentration of people, an old and crumbling infrastructure, natural disasters - Thailand faces all of these occurrences are a daily presence in their lives, and they face them with dignity, calm and acceptance. Where we Americans tear down an old city, the Thais building around it - they revere their past.
The people of Thailand are highly educated, and are constantly striving for more knowledge. They consider their spiritual lives to be as important - if not more so - than their present physical lives. Discomfort is ignored, dismissed as unimportant, and when confronted with anger, they consider it to be an opportunity to better themselves through restraint. When confronted with unpleasant behavior - they smile.
Thailand offered me a complex lesson : a suggestion to re-examine my honesty, my spirituality, and my goals. And to realize that while companionship is important, personal integrity is the core of any relationship.
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Two weeks after I returned from Thailand, I ran into a male neighbor at the mailboxes down the street. He asked me where I had been this time, and when I said "Thailand" he responded:
" Thailand - where the men are different and the women are available."
