Cooking courses and grenades

I'm lying in my room trying to get deal with an extreme case of overeating coupled with mass consumption of chili. Today I did a Thai cooking course which was really cool. But me and Dan, an American friend, were inclined to egg each other on with the chili, both being massive chili lovers. We never made anything too hot for us to eat, but eating so many meals in about 5 hours, coupled with the fact that most of them were moving towards the upper limit of my chili tolerance means I'm feeling slightly worse for wear right now. But I'm improving fairly rapidly again. Should be all good by the time we head to the jazz club :-).

So I went out to the reggae club again and danced the night away AGAIN with those same people. But this time I only had 2 little beers over the entire course of the night, and they were mostly just to keep my energy levels up so I didn't fall asleep. I've fallen in with a really cool posse (There are some photo's on Facebook of these nights out for those of you care to look). They all love a good time, but also aren't really into getting destroyed. Some of them don't drink at all, some do a little, and some do a lot, but it makes it easy to just do your own thing. We have a lot of banter and laughter which is really really great fun. The other night when we went out again, we went with some foreign guys who are living locally and studying. The night started off well, but then got strange. We ended up accidentally splitting up a bit, I ended up with the 2 girls Ara and Aurelie (Scandy and frog), and these 2 guys who were living there. Long story short these guys got really really drunk, were driving really fast, snorting coke, arguing with their girlfriends very loudly whilst each trying to crack onto Ara and Aurelie. Very strange, so the 3 of us just ditched and walked home. It was quite odd. But still a fun night. Except that I really can't be bothered with normal clubs, the music is so bad!! This reggae club and the Jazz club are both great, and I love Psi when I can find it (which is never over here), but the music going in normal clubs makes me want to saw my ears off. It was such a stark change going from the reggae club with a live band to these other clubs playing the same set of songs as each other with the same monotonous beat. God it drives me insane!!!

So.... Some bombs went off in Chaing Mai on Sunday. One was less than 1km from where I was at the time. It was a little hand made one, the other was a hand grenade into the parking lot of a courthouse. Bangkok has really been heating up too, there have been hand grenade and rocket propelled grenade attacks, and home made bombs going off. For the most part they've gone off in places where nobody is around, but I believe recently that one did kill at least 1 person. It's a little surreal. Chiang Mai is almost a ghost town at the moment, even a week before those bombs went off, foreigners are leaving in droves, and even locals are leaving, although mostly to go and join the protesting I believe. But life goes on.

And with that little 'bombshell' (hahaha, get it? Not funny really) I'll be off.

Love to everybody,

Frankie J.

P.S. No pictures this time, although I've got some, adding them in here is not super easy so I'll do them another time.

Programming, markets, and longs necks

Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote. So here I am. I’m still in the same little room as before in Chiang Mai, and for the most part I’ve done absolutely nothing touristy whatsoever. After a little while I started realising that there’s absolutely nothing I have to do, no parties I simply must be at, no dinners I can’t miss without offending someone, nobody depending on me for anything, nothing at all. It was a wonderful realisation! So then I spent about 5 days straight programming for 12 hours a day. Living here is perfect for being productive, you walk out your front door and eat something super tasty when you’re hungry, you sleep when you’re tired, and you can do it all for under $10 a day. I went a bit crazy though and started shifting my sleeping patterns into crazy hours so I’ve had a few days break now which was good. And I think that was actually really good for me. Being a hermit for a while makes me much more conscious of how I am when I’m around people, and makes me really look forward to being social again. It’s seems a bit strange, but makes sense in my mind. And I keep reminding myself that I’m here for so long that I don’t have to go and do every touristy thing that other people do. So long as I’m enjoying myself it just doesn’t matter.

The other night I went out and got outrageously drunk, and I’m not sure why. I hadn’t meant to do that anymore. I had a great night, drank 7 long necks I think, and I’m still dealing with the results 36 hours later. The people I went with were lots of fun, a Pome boy and girl, a French girl, and a Scandinavian girl. We went and tore up the dance floor at this reggae club, and later at this horrible trashy normal club. A debaucherous night to be sure, and one I don’t intend to repeat. I’m really not sure what came over me, 1314 Baht down my diary tells me, that’s about 3-4 days of normal living.

We had some storms here about a week ago and they were beautiful. They’re different to home, we rarely get that bright purple, almost red lightning in Melbourne, but here it’s the norm. I was hanging out with some people upstairs in their hotel when a bolt hit so close that the whole room lit up bright red and shook like we were having an earth quake. It was amazing. The rain we had cleared the air a whole lot and we can now see the mountains around the city and the sun is more than just a pale red disk.

I wonder about the physical and hormonal changes that happen when you travel. I’ve only really been to S.E. Asia, so maybe people who have been elsewhere can help me out here. But I notice things all the time. Like my finger nails grow insanely fast over here, several times faster than normal at least and other people here have noticed it also. I think I’ve got more testosterone in my body based on changes in my smell, although I seem to smell much less over here, and I generally feel pretty fantastic. I’ve known other guys say that they also feel really healthy over here, but I’ve known girls who say they feel much less healthy so I wonder whether there’s something I’m getting over here that’s good for boys but lacking in western diet. But then the girls who have felt less healthy are generally vegetarian or vegan back home so maybe they’re just healthier than me on average and less so over here due to lack of control of their diet, or maybe the diet over here is much more designed to be complimented by meat. But then it’s difficult to find a restaurant here in Chiang Mai without at least an entire page devoted to vegetarian meals, many are completely vegetarian, probably a much higher proportion than Melbourne, so I’m not sure about that. One thing I do know is that chilli is a gift from the gods!! I can’t get enough of it here, I must have doubled my tolerance since landing and I wasn’t shy of hot food before. I always end up buying red curries, or loading anything else up with spoonfuls of the fresh chilli’s in oil they have everywhere here. I’m surprised that I want it so much in this heat, but my body just continually craves it.

Well, anyway, that seems pretty long already so I’ll sign off there and try and do more regular updates. I hope you’re all well.

Frankie.

P.S. Here are some photos:

This first one is a spirit house in a restaurant here. The Thai’s have a mix of Buddhism and ancestor or spirit worship. They believe that the spirits of their ancestors live with them, so they build these tiny little ornate houses to encourage their ancestors to live apart from the family. As can be seen there are often offerings of food, incense and drink to make them happy. Even in the biggest cities you’ll find these things taking up real estate. They’re very cute.

This next one is a photo of the Moat around the old city. It’s quite nice, although you wouldn’t want to swim in the water, I’m not sure how the fish manage.

SPIRAL CHIP!!! Made out of one whole potato!!! This one had so much MSG that I got a headache from it. Over here MSG is a natural product, not bad for you at all, it comes from potatoes. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise.

Still at the Sunday market, you can eat BUGS!!! Lots and lots of bugs!!! I haven’t yet, seems crazy to me. I need somebody to egg me on.

Here is an example of their handiwork. The colours they make over here are out of this world. These vests were so amazing that I had to take a photo of them.

Same shop, such amazing clothes. Though I wear predominantly girls clothes already, I unfortunately haven’t made the jump to skirts yet. But these ones are cool!!

Some more market with a temple behind. The statues are Singha lions I believe, I’m not sure what they signify. Northern Thailand is actually culturally very different from the south in culture, food, architecture, and even language. Well, they’re all still Thai’s I guess, but the north has had much more influence from the surrounding countries over the ages.

I’m not sure why I included this one. One of the few photos I have of myself and it happened to be the one night I drink an outrageous amount of beer at a reggae bar. I have no idea who that black guy is, but he was probably a really great guy.

And in stark contrast, a particularly photogenic flower I found pushing out through the bars of a fence.

Hill Tribes and Sunday Markets

So, I’ve moved rooms again, just across the courtyard to 2A which is a single room for 150B ($5.10) per night. The only real difference is that the bed is a single. But it’s a fairly big single anyway.

I bought a camera today. I really really want an Olympus Tough 3000, this brand new camera they’ve just brought out which is monsoon proof (in fact takes photos up to 3m under water), shockproof to 1.5m, freeze proof to -10 degrees, and charges by USB (so great when you’re travelling and have a laptop). Unfortunately none of the shops have got it over here yet. So I settled on a Kodak M341, which only cost me just over $150. It’s little and light, takes decent photos, does image stitching on board, charges by USB, and doesn’t really matter if I kill it since I didn’t break the bank on it. So get ready for full colour photos of every stupid little thing I think is funny people :-).

Yesterday (Sunday) I went to the Sunday Market with my crew of Americans (some of Lenore’s people have showed up). It was HUGE! It was centred around the Tha Phae Gate in the eastern old city wall, but extended far into the old city. Each intersection I reached I could see the market lights stretch on as far as I could see! These people are industrious! There were all kinds of crafts, amazing amounts of food, from fried pork and rice sausages to papaya chilli salad, sweet jellies, fried rice and noodles, wholesale fruit, homemade ice cream, fruit smoothies, steamed dumplings, spiral hot chips on a stick carved from a single potato!!! Amazing! Incredible amounts of fabric were on show, from their famous silk scarves, rough cotton shirts, entire bed sheets of hand embroidery, beautiful teak Buddhas and figurines, the most amazing bowls and plates made from mango wood which looks like they were carved from deep dark chocolate swirled together with caramel and set rock hard. There were wooden instruments and tops, the list goes on and on. And every few meters there were buskers, from a child playing a local kind of fiddle with a bow, an old woman dancing to the music of her husband plucking on a lute, to western circus performers who spoke less Thai than me. It was an amazing experience. I can’t believe how big it was and that they do it EVERY SUNDAY!! They truly do know how to have fun. That night the 3 Kings Monument (a statue in a courtyard with a museum behind) had an exhibition showing which seemed to be about an ancient saffron robed monk. I wonder whether he had perhaps died recently. There were hundreds of photographs, some of what looked like a pyre, and movies showing some large congregation of people, and images of this monk were everywhere. It was quite amazing. Unfortunately I was insanely tired that night, and by the time I was stumbling through the exhibition I’d been walking around for hours, had lost my posse and could barely see straight; so I hightailed it home and lay in bed for a while listening to the end of my audio book of Eldest (The Eragon guy).

The day before that I went to an exhibition inside the museum at the 3 Kings Monument which was showcasing Hilltribe artefacts, clothing, and culture. It was quite amazing, put together by a woman who has been living amongst the different hill tribes for years, recording what she can learn. I believe this was the first exhibition of her studies, with kind lending of some of the artefacts (instruments, weapons, clothes, tools etc.) from the hill tribes themselves. It was very interesting, and actually far more real than the “hill tribe” trek I did last time I was here which left me with a dirty taste in my mouth. Despite being indoors at a museum, this was informative and respectful, and very beautiful. Outside what’s more they had some of the hill tribe people showing their crafts outside. I think most of the people there probably lived in the city or surrounding towns, but the one we talked to the most (through the aid of a beautiful older Thai woman who had studied western music in America in her younger days) had at least lived amongst her tribe when she was younger. She was weaving on a back strap loom and was happy to talk to us about her time then and now, how they make their traditional dyes (she buys some of the colours now) etc. That too was very interesting. An old man played a crazy tune on a pipe made from a gourd, bamboo, and beeswax, and showed us how to weave mats out of thin strips of bamboo.

Here is an image of my humble abode (made using my new camera’s image stitching function):

Here is a photo of my golden booty (6 mangoes cost me $1):

And here is a photo of my toilet. Notice the lack of toilet paper, and the squirt gun. Once again I say: the way of the future it is. The shower is just to the left so the toilet is self cleaning. Notice also that it’s waterproof floor to walls, so the whole place can just be sprayed down by the shower. The showers over here are always those little hand held showers, so they always reach the toilet fine. These guys know bathrooms; I really don’t understand how Australians can be so blindly non-functional in this area.

Musings on the West

I frequently have little moments in Thailand where I ponder the difference between here and home. I feel like the west has so many problems in so many areas: weight problems, anxiety and depression are so commonplace that most people just think it’s how things are, I did. We rush everywhere, drive too close to people, jump on our horns at the slightest provocation. We’re almost exclusively governed by little boys in old man bodies. We idolise some of the most damaged human beings on the earth, people so insecure in their own bodies that they spend their whole lives “fixing” themselves until they physically or mentally fall apart and we move on to the next round of fresh stars. We’re so removed from the natural that most of us don’t even know which fruits are in season right now and consequently end up being fed big, bright, shiny, and tasteless fruit and vegies which have been picked too early and kept for months on ice so we can have them the year around. We’re from the richest countries in the world, and yet in the end there’s no link whatsoever between money and a nations happiness. And ultimately we’re ruled by our money in the form of lobby groups and “studies” which push big monies agenda and globalisation onto our governments so that they can import Alaskan salmon to Tasmania where it’s caught locally anyway.

Why do we not idolise healthy and balanced human beings? People with wisdom and humility, non-violent world views, acceptance, and charisma which has nothing to do with their comeliness. Why don’t we hold these traits in high esteem? Why don’t we respect the wisdom of our elders? Why are we stuck with dogmatic religions which teach blind faith and indoctrinated principles instead of those which teach us to ask questions, train our minds, and consciously explore our world? Why don’t we notice when food isn’t satisfying and ask why? Why don’t we notice that we don’t notice things? And perhaps most importantly: why don’t we practice happiness and joy for life?

I’m certainly not preaching, I’m as guilty of most of these things as the next person, I’m just contemplating.

Some interesting things fuelling my mind:

Random interviews with Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama (who often seems to have his own section in the book shops here).

“Paramount to the Thai philosophy of life is sànùk (fun)” – Lonely Plant: Southeast Asia

“gin lên, literally ‘eat for fun’.” – Lonely Plant: Southeast Asia

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it... unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.” – Buddha

Wow, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this whole blog thing :-P. It’s like a diary except that I get the vain gratification of knowing that other people will read it.

Moving Home

I have moved house from the S.E corner of Chiang Mai to the N.E. corner. I am now living in room B3 of Kham Kaew House at 29 Moon muang Soi 9, and the psychological difference is profound already.

My old house was a dirty little room with a horrible bed, a dirty floor, shared bathrooms and squat toilets with no squirt guns. My feet would get black walking from the shower to my room. My new house has a beautiful wooden double bed (which looks to have been reinforced in some suspect areas, much boom-boom methinks), a chair (it’s wonderful to be able to sit in a chair while on my laptop), a locking cabinet, a bathroom nearly as big as my old room with a mirror, a sink (with plug no less!!!), a toilet and squirt gun, and lovely shower with hot water :-D. The matronly lady who runs it is such a dear and the place just feels like home, it’s quiet, and in a less red-light part of town. It’s costing me 200B per night ($6.75) as opposed to 120B, but it is SO worth it, and hopefully one of the 150B rooms here will open up soon.

I feel so much happier about being here now that I’m happy with my living arrangements, before this I was feeling quite transitory.

I’ve been having a pretty lazy time here in Chiang Mai. I’ve been hanging out with people I’ve met randomly, but apart from that not a lot (as it should be). I saw Lenore again last night (the beautiful girl from Bangkok who happens to be in Chaing Mai too). We were both pretty flat; I think the heat combined with shitty sleeping at my old place was starting to get to me. But we hung out in the only park we could find in Chiang Mai and watched the locals play insanely skilled games with little bamboo balls, and talked about life and stuff and things. She’s one of those cool people who is enough like me that I want to listen to her, but has enough of her own different experiences to be able to challenge me. The best kind of person.

Chiang Mai is under the pallor of smoke at the moment. On top of the usual smog from the dirty vehicles they drive here, they’re also apparently “slashing and burning” their fields which is contributing greatly to the pollution. The sun was invisible for most of yesterday, and it was an orange disk when you could see it, so dim that you could look straight at it without squinting. And the surrounding mountains were lost in the haze. Going for much of a walk during the day is liable to give you smokers cough.

I believe I have discovered coffee. Once again, the food here blows me away. I had a little plunger full of what they called “hill tribe” coffee, and Oh My God!! Still very bitter, but so smooth and tasty!!! Like the difference in taste between a VB and a hand crafted beer, I forewent the sugar in spite of the fact that I often have 2, and I’m not feeling jittery after 2 cups!!! I shall have to be careful of this fabulous liquid. I’ve had coffee before which people tell me is great and I’ve certainly noticed “good” and “bad” coffee in Melbourne, but this stuff is in a whole different league. I just hope "hill tribe" isn't code for "abused and under paid children". The concept of fair trade does seem to be fairly widely understood in this city though I think. I should investigate.

Landing in Bangkok and Chiang Mai

For those of you who got the first email I sent out, don't bother reading this, it's the same as that. But now you can get these updates over RSS or whatever you like, and I don't have to remember who to send things to :-)

Here I am in Chiang Mai sitting in Dada Kafe which is a little vegetarian restaurant on the east side of the old city. Chiang Mai is the biggest city in northern Thailand and is a sweet sweet place. The "old city" is the part inside an ancient wall built to protect the inhabitants from raids by the Burmese back when Chiang Mai was part of the Lanna empire. Or so Wikipedia tells me. Anyway, it's a nice city, much slower than Bangkok, more like a uni town. There are a fair number of little vegetarian cafe's and restaurants around here, and a multitude of markets. Sunday markets, Saturday markets, night markets, along with markets which are just generally open for business all the time. It just generally has a really nice and laid back atmosphere.

Maybe I should start from the start rather than going backwards. So the plane trip was just a plane trip. Except that I flew with Quantas this time and was surprised by the fact that they give you meals and booz for FREE!!! Now you're all probably laughing at me because you all maybe know this, but I'm used to flying the most poverty stricken airlines I can possibly find, so this seemed pretty sweet to me. So, while I restrained myself to 1 beer (Ben: a small can of James Squire golden), I did systematically devour as much food as was offered to me, and it wasn't even that bad. So the plane took around 9 hours, slightly more perhaps, and then there I was in Suvarnabhumi, Bangkoks main airport. I wandered around for a while in that kind of airport trance which hits you when you land in a foreign place having sat on a plane for a day without moving before I finally realised I'd missed the last airport bus into the city, which put me at the mercy of the local taxis. Those of you who know Bangkok can probably skip a lot of this email because I'm trying to describe it for those who haven't. In Bangkok nearly everybody who has anything to do with tourists is probably trying to rip you of in the happiest way possible. None of them ever mean any harm and will almost always help you with directions even if you don't buy anything from them, but they'll happily take as much of your money as they can get from you. Which is all cool, it's just not how we're used to operating over in Oz, so it takes some getting used to. So there I was feeling pretty fragile about the whole taxi situation, and hoping I could find some people to share with because the drive is actually quite long. That's when I hooked up with a bunch of other random boys: 1x American, 1x Japanese, and 2x Something Spanish, who were also going where I was going. So all 5 of us piled into a taxi and ended up getting to Khaosan road only about $4 lighter. Which is pretty good. Once again, for those who haven't been there, Khaosan road is not a place I think I can adequately describe in words. Circus and collective insanity come to mind, but don't really do it justice. The thing is that the rules are just different over here, so you just don't get anything like it in Oz. Just imagine a street on a festival day completely full of people at any hour of the day so you can't drive down it. Neon lights everywhere, load music blaring, and a million different outfits and accents from across the globe. Walking 10 meters down it you're guaranteed to be offered 100 kinds of booze, sex, massages, hand tailored silk suites, fried cockroaches and scorpions as long as your middle finger, clothes, etc. It's an experience. But I'd seen it before, and I was kind of expecting it, so while part of me was still in culture shock it was also quite welcome and familiar because it hadn't really changed from the debauchery I encountered last time.

Over the next few days I stayed in a different place each night for various reasons within a street or so of Khaosan road, once with those guys, and twice by myself, each night only costing between $3.40 and $5.40. I was supposed to meet a friend there who was flying out a few days after I flew in, but he was pretty scarce and we didn't end up seeing each other. So I ended up hanging out with the random boys for a day or two, along with a few Spanish girls they found along the way. That was pretty fun, but in the end I was into slightly different things to them and so I didn't go with them when they jumped on a train to Chiang Mai, even though I was going only a day later anyway.

So on Friday night after they'd all left I went for a wander and wondered what to amuse myself with alone that night. I ended up finding a park by the river with a big white fort and a little temple. There they were playing open air jazz into the night, local kids were break dancing which was really cool, and some travelers were juggling and spinning poi. It felt like a little piece of Brunswick or St. Kilda beach transported to Bangkok. Regretting that I'd left my devil sticks in my pack, I sat down next to a stunning American girl who had likewise just walked in and sat down to appreciate it all. She ended up being an extremely cool person and we had a lot of common interests so we hung out for a long time that night before going our respective ways.

The next day I got up and basically just mooched the whole day, organising things I'd forgotten to do before I left etc. Then went and jumped on the 1pm train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. That train sucked. My last experiences with the trains here were good, but this one was late leaving and about 4 hours late arriving in Chiang Mai making for about 16 hours all up. This strange temporal phenomenon is generally known as Thai Time and afflicts all things with a duration or deadline. Luckily I brought some fruit which (only just) kept me going until then. Once there I randomly jumped in the back of a ute to go into town because I didn't want to stay in the hotel they were showing me at the station. Far too expensive, I assume the major hotels maybe pay the Thai mafia for a day to monopolise the train station as there was only 1 hotel being advertised at the "tourist information center", and it was a different one last time. But regardless, after chatting to my ute buddies I found that one of them was going to a place with single rooms for only 120B per night ($4), so I ended up there with her and I'm still there. It's pretty dingy, 2 shared showers and 2 shared squat toilets with no squirt guns (toilets here have a water gun and you spray your bum clean with that, it's the way of the future people, it's only a matter of time). So I usually end up going to find cafe's which do have squirt guns.

So anyway, basically that gets me up until now. I'm here in this cafe with another random American girl who I met last night, along with a German girl who's now left and moved on after I shaved her head with my clippers. Now she looks like a crazy German Buddhist nun :-).

2 things: I now have a lot more time for Americans. The 3 I've met here have been absolutely fantastic. Extremely chatty (Extremely, I think I could say nothing for the whole time and they wouldn't notice), and fairly intense at times, but altogether a great deal of fun and super friendly. The second: The fruit here is so amazingly good, I remembered from last time, but I still get blown away by how good it is. Banana's are so creamy and almost taste like they come with cinnamon pre-sprinkled. Mango's are small but equally amazing, basically everything just seems to taste how I imagine it should but didn't realise while eating Australian fruit. And scarily, many of the western travelers I've known in Australia say that Oz fruit is better than in their home country. What are we doing wrong? How can so many people just fail to notice the gradual decline of anything resembling taste in any major fruit grocer?

Anyway, there you have it. My travelling life to date, all 5 days or so. I imagine these emails will shorten down as time goes on never fear.

Oh, one other thing: I can't get used to the use of water here. It's not that it gets wasted, but it's certainly used unlike we have in Australia for years and years. I went to a public park the other day and it was practically under water from the sprinklers and gardeners. This cafe has pipes strung up outside with fine mist constantly falling on you (and your electronic equipment). Not a problem I guess because they don't have a water shortage. But you get so used to noticing things like this that they jump out when you get here.

That's all.

Love to you all,

Frankie.

New Blog

So after some prodding by some people, and my own misgivings about emailing out enormous emails to people, I've created a blog to record my travels.

I never thought I'd see the day I'd start one of these (I've considered them a very narcissistic pursuit for such a long time).

So now you can all just check this every now and again for updates :-)