Tales From The Future

“Cut your self some slack, in a hundred years, different people.” That’s what the sign nailed to the tree told me at the temple we went to this afternoon. Another sign also told me, “The water that makes a ship float also makes a ship shink[sic]” Shink? Shink? Is that a Buddhist term? It was a deep enough message until I came across this word. Then I realized that it was a typo. ”The water that makes a ship float also makes a ship sink” makes a whole lot more sense.
First thing this lovely snow-less Christmas morning required us to get a nice hearty, calorie-filled American style breakfast. The Big Bowl Breakfast at the Art Café. Hash browns, tomatoes, sausage, bacon, mushrooms, and scrambled eggs, all covered with cheese. Just the way to get the grease flowing through your veins. Very Smittys on a Sunday.

We were moving slower after this meal. Oh, the stuff we didn’t eat was given to us to take back to our room. We have a snack for tonight if we want.
Instead of porting a full doggie-bag around Chiang Mai we had to stop back at our hotel. Both of us felt like taking a nap but powered on. We went to the coffee shop up the street to post the blog and make the first of a couple Christmas calls home.

Then it was on the Chiang Mai Arts and Cultural Centre.
The Chiang Mai Arts and Cultural Centre is a museum that is done right. When this former government building was converted into the museum in 1997 they didn’t spare any expense. But they also did it right. The layout of the building is good, the English signage is 98% correct, and the displays are extremely well done. They also had audio tracks in each of the rooms which could be played in Thai, English, German, French, Chinese and Japan (one of these things is not like the other…) . We learned a lot about the history of Chiang Mai, from prehistory through to present day.
This was one of the few incorrect English signs. It was on the computer screen where you can scroll from one page to the next.

These are some pictures of the displays.

We were walking through recreations of various scenes of village life, complete with life-size human mannequins. They were disturbing, and I kept expecting one to lunge out of its display and attack me, or at least follow me around. Very “knight-in-a-haunted-castle”-esque. As we were walking into the final room of this exhibit, this cat jumped out of a basket in the display. Needless to say, we were sufficiently startled.

By this time it was lunch time and the grease had passed through our systems. We had to locate the next feeding spot. Seeing it was Christmas we settled on Jerusalem Falafel. Actually, I think Court just wanted Middle Eastern food. We did some shopping on our way to the restaurant, without getting lost on the trip. We settled down to our own little table facing the street and flipped through the book of the menu.
Courtney was blown away by the selection. Pita, falafels, Greek salad, baba ghanouj, and more: basically everything she’s been craving for months. She was stuck, unsure what she wanted the most. We eventually settled on the meze set: pita bread with six different dips. We thought we may need more food, so Court ordered an extra plate of feta cheese and two extra pitas. It turns out we didn’t need the extra pitas. I powered through my two but Court wisely stopped after one pita. We again didn’t finish all of our food and were presented with another doggie bag to fill our fridge.

This meal required us to stop at the hotel for a post feast nap. 45 minutes later I was back on my feet and ready to go. We decided to head out to Umon temple which is located about 3 clicks outside of Chiang Mai. This involved bartering with a tuk-tuk driver. The first guy we stopped, or more accurately he stopped to see if we needed a ride, wouldn’t go lower than 200 Baht round trip. We walked. Not to the temple but away from that tuk-tuk. 200 was too much to pay. We rounded the corner and found another tuk-tuk driver. I eventually haggled him down to 200 Baht and decided we didn’t want to waste any more time looking for a ride. He was happy because he spent the whole time trying to get us to go somewhere with him tomorrow. We declined any tours with him tomorrow.
We arrived at the Umon temple, located out in the woods, and started to wander.

Monks built this temple in the 14th century and was abandoned for a while until the 1940’s. The monks were holding a service when we arrived; we wandered the grounds. Unfortunately we couldn’t go into the assembly hall because of the service. We still went up to see the chedi, the spire, which is built in a clearing in the forest.

The monks converted some caves into a worshipping areas complete with little shrines. Most monks are a little shorter than me, so the tunnels were kind of on the small side of comfortable for walking upright.

Our tuk-tuk driver brought us back to our hotel just in time for Christmas dinner. Yesterday we found an Irish pub that was offering Christmas dinner. We had a full feast: ham, turkey, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, mince pie, Christmas pudding, bread, and, those perennial holiday favourites, watermelon and pineapple. .

What a feast. Not as good as a home-cooked meal, but we’ll take what we can get. We still felt the traditional tiredness post meal. Mmm turkey coma.

There were two sittings, one at 6:30 and one at 9:30, and we were there for the early one. There were approximately 40 people at our sitting and 10 people at our table. There were three recent engineering grads from Australia, who are travelling around before they start work, and another Aussie who is teaching in Bangkok and wanted to escape Bangkok for Christmas, as well as two other couples. It was a lovely meal, not as good as spending It with family but nice to spend it with pleasant people.
Now we are the café again making more Christmas calls. Here are some other shots of a temple down the street from our hotel, and other sites in Chiang Mai.

Before I forget, to everyone who is reading this, we wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas.

Our first day in a new city usually involves wandering; setting out with a destination and trying to get there. This ALWAYS entails us getting lost. Some times are more disorienting and confusing than others. Sometimes we just take a wrong turn and quickly correct ourselves. This is the case more often than not. Sometimes we have absolutely no idea where we are. No matter how lost we are we always feel a sense of relief when we recognize landmarks or places we’ve been and can navigate without a map. We eventually reached this point, but let’s start at the beginning.

This morning we slept in. It’s the first day of vacation after a long travel day. There’s no reason to get up early yet. Last night we quickly and sloppily unpacked our bags. Meaning this morning we had to fix that and straighten up before we headed out. While Court was showering I went to use the computer downstairs but one of the staff members was on it chatting with some friends. That was obviously more important than a paying customer. They were nice enough to tell me where I could find another Internet café. What they didn’t tell me was that the place wasn’t open yet. Had to go there myself to be privy to that information. Oh well.

In my travels to find an Internet café I discovered a quaint Thai restaurant which served breakfast. We chose a table in the back garden and settled in for our spring rolls, phad thai and phad see-eu. We remembered from our last vacation to always get the local breakfast.

We had some things we needed to pick up. Because we didn’t check any bags, it meant we couldn’t bring certain things with us. Like razors and any liquids exceeding 100ml in volume. That’s the downside of not checking luggage. I also needed to get a new pair of sandals. For some reason the Crocs store in Nishinomiya Gardens didn’t have them in stock. I never stopped to think that perhaps the reason for this is because it’s winter in Japan. Before breakfast I did get on the Internet to find us a store in a shopping mall that had the Crocs I wanted. Map in hand, we headed out.

This is where the ‘getting lost’ thing came into play. Not all the streets on our map are labeled. Not that it really matters, as most of the streets we were walking past weren’t labeled either. In addition, the English translation of the same street can differ from sign to sign. At certain intersections, streets also change names. ON one side of the intersection, it has one name, and across the intersection it becomes another street. I suppose this can happen in an 800 year old city. I studied the map at breakfast and saw the easiest route to get us to where we wanted to go.

Be warned that if you have the map turned around before you even go anywhere, you are in trouble, even with a map and an easy route laid out. That’s what happened to us. Instead of turning left out of the restaurant, we turned right. We walked for a good 30 minutes and started to think something was right. We tried to get ourselves out of the way and had a little map reading pow-wow (aside: Andrew wouldn’t let me see the map for a little while, even after I asked if I could see the map. I take no responsibility for the results. I have mad nav skills. ~CW). We checked our map and found some landmarks which got us re-orientated and heading back the other way. About 45 minutes later we looked at the map again and figured out where we were. But we had no idea how we got there. We thought we walked in a straight line north, but somehow ended up northwest of where we were. This was disconcerting but ok. We were headed in the right direction.

Another 30 minutes and some harrowing street crossings later we found the shopping mall we wanted. As we went in Court stopped at a pharmacy and I went to find a bathroom. Instead of locating the bathroom I stumbled upon the store selling the Crocs. I quickly found and bought my correct size before meeting up with Court again.
Next we needed a Starbucks break; we were worried we were working too hard on vacation. Then went back into the department store. This is where Courtney actually found a pair of shoes! She’s had an impossible time finding shoes in Japan. They don’t have the size she needs. But not Thailand: they’ve got what she needs. This made her day or possibly her vacation.

After the exciting shoe purchase, we did our obligatory supermarket shopping trip. The really different things we found this time were the ostrich meat.

And the mixed vegetables and Swede. We hope that swede is some sort of food product we’re unfamiliar with, and not actual Swede.

Now that we were laden with all these purchases we had to head back to the hotel to unload. Not surprisingly, we got lost on our way back. WE had plotted our route on the map; putting it into practice was a little more complex. We were distracted by something and missed the road for our hotel. Five or ten minutes after we missed our road we knew something was wrong. We were getting a little frustrated and did what you should always do in this situation. We got some food.

We went to Kafé 1985, a restaurant with free Internet access and a recommendation from our guide book. We ate a good portion of wontons, more spring rolls, and salted cashews. It was a delightful mid-afternoon snack. Feeling less frustrated we made it successfully back to our hotel to unload.

In Chiang Mai there have been a lot of wats (or temples) built over the years. One of the first was Wat Chiang Man. Construction started when the city was first being built. This seemed like a good place to start visiting the temples.

There were many structures within the confines of the wat walls. The first building we went into was the vihara. There were golden pictures stencilled on all the walls depicting the construction of the temple (we think). They were fascinating pictures to look at.

In the modern vihara there were colored paintings all over the walls. Each section was its own little mural , depicting some event. Even though I don’t know enough about Buddhism to guess at what was going on in these scenes, I enjoyed looking at them.

Like any good tourist this cat was taking a siesta in the heat.

Courtney in the meantime was putting her knew found photography knowledge to work. The modern vihara also houses two little Buddha statues, a marble one 20 cm high which came from Sri Lanka about 2000 years ago and a smaller jade one (~10 cm) which came from Laos.

The chedi at the back had a gold roof and lots of elephant sculptures on the bottom level.

After our visit to the wat we strolled to the night bazaar. Having been lost two or three times already, we actually started to recognize places and remember which direction we wanted to head in. Meaning we didn’t get lost on the way to the market. We scoped out the market and didn’t see anything that really interested us, except for Mike’s Burger Restaurant which supposedly makes the best burgers in Chiang Mai. I’d been craving a burger for a while and had to stop. Courtney opted out on the burger and stopped for a nice thin crust pizza on the way back to the hotel.

Now we’ve arrived back at the hotel and are going to see if there is a Christmas movie for us to watch on TV. Here are some other pictures from around Chiang Mai.

The closest thing we could find to a Christmas movie was a Flintstones Christmas Carol. It was festive enough.