Wat is that?!

Today was my first full day in Chiang Mai, and it was full indeed. I must have walked a good 10 miles - probably an exaggeration, but it sure felt like a lot. After I realized that my guesthouse was not where I thought it was on the map (I am map-challenged), I actually got to where I was hoping to go, which almost never happens, at least not on my first day in a new place. Along the way, though, I happened upon an enormous market that seemed to go on forever. It was definitely not a tourist market as there were few foreigners in sight. It was pretty amazing, an endless maze of stalls selling everything from clothes to spices to dried fruit to meat and seafood and flowers. Because of my utter lack of Thai I was at a loss for what some of the things were, but it seems like if you can dry or pickle something, the Thais will do it. There were glass jars and plastic bags full of all kinds of exotic looking things. I got as daring as a bag of unknown baked goods, which ended up tasting more or less like angel food cake. Yum.

After getting sidetracked for a while at this market, I ended up on one of the main shopping streets where many of the stores sell hill tribe goods. Interesting, but nothing I would buy, and certainly nothing I could see selling in the U.S. Toward the end of the day, I made my way to the Saturday night street market, which was huge. There's another similar market on a different street tomorrow, which I think is basically the same vendors.

In between all of this shopping and walking, I managed to squeeze in a banana lassi, a cornflake cookie, two curry soups, and a Thai iced tea. I'm surprised at how hard it is to find this drink, actually. It's so highly addicting, at least for me and I would suspect other tourists, that I really think the Thais should be capitalizing on this and have a tea stand at least every couple blocks. But as I've mentioned before, they seem to be rather lackadaisical here about selling. Today I actually saw three vendors asleep on the job, literally - pillow under the head, newspaper over the head, you name it. The Thais are really chill, apparently.

So Chiang Mai is a good-sized city, but still small enough and the tourist areas concentrated enough that I've run into some of the folks on my plane a few times. And at the end of the day today as I was making my way back to my guesthouse, I noticed a tourist taking a picture of a wat (temple). As I think I've mentioned, after India and now Thailand I'm kind of over temples. You can't spit a watermelon seed here without hitting one, kind of like churches in my hometown. In any case, I glanced over and decided, grudgingly, that I should get my camera out and take some pictures because this one was actually kind of unique and beautiful. So I crossed the street to get a closer view and as I was snapping away I heard, "Melanie Hansen!" Turns out my friends from Delhi were at this very same temple with their family, including a former French student of mine. Wild. I knew they were here, and we were probably going to get together at some point, but what are the chances of running into each other like that? Pretty funny. It's a small world indeed.


Roses still packed tight from shipping.


Here fishy, fishy... oh wait, you're dried and cured to a crisp and on a stick. There seems to be a lot of that here, fish on a stick, either in full form or compressed into a ball. Interesting.


One vendor's colorful display.