Wat's up?

Okay, cheesy title but irresistible.

Last week I made a pilgrimage to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple overlooking Chiang Mai. This particular wat was built in the 1300s and is one of Thailand's most sacred pilgrimage destinations. You can see the temple's chedi from the city on a clear day, glinting gold in a sea of green tropical forest. Here is a close-up photo of the chedi:


The morning began trying to catch a songthaow...a red bus/taxi that costs almost nothing and takes you wherever you want to go. The only catch is that a songthaow picks up as many people as possible, so it can take quite a while to arrive at your destination. Luckily virtually everyone taking songthaow up the mountain wants to see the wat, so it was not hard to find transposition straight to the temple.

After a stomach-churning ride up the mountain, I disembarked and walked up the 297 steps to the temple. I was expecting many foreigners, but most of the people at the wat were Thai. The temple itself is nothing particularly special, but the views from the temple's observation deck were stunning:

After the wat, we continued our drive up the mountain to a small Hmong village called Doi Pui. This was by far my least favorite part of the day; the village was full of beautiful stuff for sale, but there were almost no tourists. The whole place was very sad, poor, and the vendors, although they wanted us to buy things, were not very excited about tourists tromping through their village. On the positive side I did find a very interesting article for sale:

I'm 99% sure this is in fact the name of an herb (seems like tiger private parts might be hard to come by) but I was not motivated to buy the bag so I guess I'll never know. Maybe one of my blog readers can enlighten me?

More adventure stories to come asap, including my white water rafting trip this past weekend.

Cooking School

Tuesday was Iron Chef day. I signed up for a cooking class set about 17 km outside of Chiang Mai on an organic farm, hoping to bring back some knowledge of how to create Thai culinary goodness back in the United States. On the menu for the day was a meal fit for a king: sticky rice, plain rice, red curry, cashew stir fry, papaya salad, pad thai, and mango with sticky rice. Yummy!

My cooking classmates were from all over - Australia, Holland, and San Francisco. We first visited a local market where we learned how to buy coconut milk and coconut cream, fish sauce, tofu, and rice. In Thailand you can buy anything from bugs to bananas to prepared sweets at the markets. Some of the best and cheapest food is found in markets, and as long as I keep a sense of culinary adventure (many things are wrapped in banana leaves, so I'm never sure exactly what I'm getting) I eat well. Here is a picture of an ingenious device many of the market stalls use to keep away flies. As far as I can tell, it is a ceiling fan with plastic bags instead of blades:


After our trip to the market, we drove into the countryside where, for the first time in weeks, the sound of cars and motorbikes was gone. We walked around the farm and learned about what all the ingredients for our dishes look like: long beans are VERY long, miniature eggplant (also called beetlenut) is very small, and peppers come in various sizes, the smaller the spicier.

The owner of the operation, Sawat, came to talk to us about the difficulties of farming organic in Thailand. Most farmers choose not to participate in organic farming because it is not economically feasible -- growing large quantities of the same crop increases that crop's susceptibility to disease, making pesticides desirable. If an organic farmer chooses to participate in mixed agriculture, disease resistance goes up but so do the labor costs of growing the food. Thus organic is best suited for farmers who are growing only small amounts of food (i.e. for the family only, not commercially).

Then the cooking commenced. First we learned about rice. Sticky rice is steamed, while "plain rice" (jasmine rice) is cooked in a rice cooker. Next we ground our own red curry. Red curry is red because it is prepared using dried red peppers, which are less spicy ("pet" in Thai) than the fresh green peppers used in green curry. Most Thai people buy already-prepared curries from the market, but hand-made curry is created by mashing ingredients together with mortar and pestle. Hard work!

The rest of the morning was spent preparing the curry dish, the cashew dish, and my very favorite Thai dish so far: green papaya salad (som tom). The setup made me feel as if I were on a commercial TV cooking show - I had my own cooking space, with all the ingredients laid out before me, ready to go into the dishes with only minimal chopping. After preparing all this food, we ate and ate and ate, and even with great effort could not finish our food. After lunch we prepared pad thai and mango with sticky rice. And yes, I now have a recipe book so I can wow everyone back at home with my attempts at creating Thai food.

Biking biking biking

This weekend was my first in Chiang Mai. On Saturday I took my rental bike and spent the entire day checking out the city from tip to tail. Besides the inner city, which is surrounded by a moat and wall, there is a huge sprawl of surrounding businesses, restaurants, and a big university (CMU - Chiang Mai University). At one point I spent about 1/2 hour learning Thai from a friendly-seeming Thai man on the street, who then proceeded to ask me for money for a bus ride to his hometown. The people here are funny - they are genuinely kind, but also want to take advantage of the farang (foreigners) whenever possible.

Saturday night we (the hostel owners and a few guests) closed up the hostel early and went out to Mexican food, which didn't taste particularly Mexican despite the fact that the ingredients were all correct - corn tortillas, beans, rice, salsa, and cheese. Afterwards we went to a farang hangout "The Rooftop Bar" which was quite trippy, decorated in rainbow colors and literally on the roof of a building, open to the air.

Sunday my friend Casey and I took a mountain biking trip through the nearby national park, Doi Suthep. Huge gorgeous rain forest, with all the plants we think of as invasive in Hawaii (bamboo, albizia, melastoma) native here. The forest is riddled with trails, small coffee plantations, and even a few hilltribe villages. It reminded me very much of Southern Costa Rica, both because of the weather (cool and humid) and the landscape. You could see the entire spread of Chiang Mai below. The gear we had to wear felt like a football costume, complete with plastic torso armor, knee and elbow pads, and leg guards. Very silly!



This week I am taking a break from massage and instead taking a Thai cooking class with some friends. We learn how to grow and shop for the food, so it should be a fun experience!

Pictures - Week 1

Last Friday Scott and I walked around Bangkok, taking in the wats (Thai Buddhist temples), the food, and the thousands of Thai people in yellow shirts celebrating the King's 60th anniversary. The wats were amazing - golden and intricate. Here is an example of one of the spirals in the Grand Palace:

After checking out the wats, we wandered down to the river to see the dress rehearsal for the anniversary celebration. Fifty-two royal barges floated in front of our eyes, each intricately carved and royal outfitted. We watched the spectacle with many Thai people, who were hanging out of windows and balconies for a better view:



After riding the bus north to Chiang Mai, I found a room in the "Happy House" for a month. The two Thai sisters who own the guest house are sweet, and I've eaten dinner with them for the last three nights. They love that I eat spicy food! Thailand in the evening and morning is most beautiful. Here is the view from the guest house patio at night:


Massage classes are fabulous. I feel like mush after being massaged all week, but I'm certainly not complaining! I will take at least three more weeks of Thai massage at ITM, and maybe more at another school afterward. Here is our class on the last day of the first week of "school":


After passing our practical exams yesterday, my friend Phillipa, plus some boys from Texas staying at our hostel, went out to watch Muay Thai boxing. Muay Thai is basically violent kickboxing with some punches thrown in. During the evening we found some bugs to eat, and chowed down on crickets (mmm...crunchy), maggots (squishy and nasty), and even a cockroach (I couldn't stomach that one). The other girl in the picture is our waitress:

Thai Massage - Day One

The question of the day: Where does this energy line start?

Yes, I learned about energy lines - sen - today. Apparently we all have six sen running from our feet to our hips. And it feels damn good when these lines are massaged!

Class is fun. The head teacher is named Chongkol Setthakorn ("John") and learned massage in the mid-eighties at Thailand's premier massage school in Bangkok. We begin each day with a chant and about 1/2 hour of yoga exercises (we even go upside-down for shoulder stand). Afterwards the lessons start - instruction and then practice with a partner. Thank goodness the girl I am practicing on is patient. We laugh a lot.

The class is about 80% female -- all very interesting people who decide to enroll in massage school in Thailand, from places as diverse as Holland, India, Taiwan, and Canada. A few plan to stay for the whole month, as I do.

In other news I now have a both place to stay and clothes to wear!

First the place to stay: The "Happy House" guesthouse in the old city for less than $4 per night. Wow. What a steal. Not a luxury hotel, but I have a fan, hot water, and the hardest bed I've ever slept on. I might as well be on a board with sheets. I suppose this is good for my back? The people running the place are very sweet - two sisters who must talk about every decision, including whether to let a clueless white girl from Montana stay at their place for a month. Luckily they concurred, and I can stay.

Next the clothes: Last night was the once a week night market where everything you can imagine, as long as it is beautiful and costs almost nothing, is sold. So I bought two pairs of comfy pants (and yes they are comfy - and stylish - definitely the majority of farag (foreigners) here have a pair on at any given time), a cool long red shirt that I will probably not wear 'till I get back to the US, and a tank. At about 8 pm everyone at the night market stopped what they were doing and stood to listen to the national anthem. It was amazing to see an entire commercial market go quiet with love for a king/country!

Chiang Mai by Bus

Last night I departed from Bangkok via bus, headed for Chiang Mai. Only $5 for a 12 hour bus ride! A good deal all in all, especially since the trains aren't working due to flooding in the north of the country. Chiang Mai is pleasant - surrounded by lush green mountains, comprised of an inner city surrounded by a moat surrounded by an outer city.

I'm all signed up for two weeks of Thai massage at the International Training Massage School and am booked at a hostel for tonight at least. My hope is to find a discount on a long-term place in the old city, but am too beat today to go asking. This evening I will go shopping at the night market to buy clothes (since I have no clean ones to speak of at this point).

Today a friend and I rented bicycles from a kind girl whose name is "Gift" translated to English, and slowly peddled around the city goggling at the many wats, tuk tuks, fruit stands, and tourist traps. I may buy a bike if I stay here for a long time, since commuting to the massage school via foot will be quite a trek every day.

Off to find some food!

Bangkok

Yellow. All I see is yellow. The King's 60th birthday celebration is this weekend, and to support him everyone in Bangkok is wearing yellow shirts. Scott (who has been in Australia for five months and arrived in Thailand two days ago) and I joined in on the fun and bought ourselves yellow shirts too, complete with the kingly symbol, for only 450 baht.

We then wandered all over Bangkok, goggling at the golden temples (wats), eating random street food, and practicing our terrible thai language skills on unsuspecting Thai people. Finally we found our way to the river, where everyone in yellow tshirts had gathered to watch the rehearsal for Monday's birthday celebration: 52 barges (boats) rowed by military men floating down the river. The men were rowing in time to the chanting of men standing at the bow of each boat. Each boat (during the actual ceremony) would house a special government person: a minister, one of the Thai royal family, or even the king!

I must go now to check out of Shanti lodge and meet Scott for my much-anticipated first Thai massage, and then catch the bus to Chiang Mai.

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