Sima and Chiang Mai

So then I was back to Chiang Mai, and here I’ve been every since, though my current 2 month visa runs out again around the 14^th. But I have a final 2 monther lined up; I just need to do a border run.

A few days after I got into Chiang Mai my dear English friend Sima Cutting arrived from Oz on her way back home. After some discussion we decided to get a flat in Chiang Mai. I’d considered this myself previously but had just never committed. But this time I was planning to be in Chiang Mai for the 2 months I had, and Sima was happy to have a base camp, so we got a little room in S.U.P. Court inside the old city. It’s a pretty basic room with a double bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, a cold shower, and a toilet. But it costs 1700B per month, which is around $60 :-D. I slightly lament the lack of food prep area, but when I think about it, many Thais don’t have a food prep area either and they still manage. You often see familial groups of 5 or more all sitting around on the floor eating rice and curry, or barbequing chicken over buckets of coals. Plus the street and restaurant food here is so cheap and SO amazing and inspirational that I’m perfectly happy eating out.

Anyway, there we were feeling very grown up with our own flat and all. Sima kept us very busy. She was on a totally different time scale from me so she really wanted to cram activities in, which was fine by me, and a great change to my current pace of life. So we hired a scooter and hammered around to other little town up to about 150km away from Chiang Mai. This was great, I freaking LOVE riding! We found caves and waterfalls, cute little towns (Pai, great place, if a little cliché), markets, etc. So much fun. The roads up to Pai were pretty crazy, very windy and mountainous, I was in my element having grown up in the hills. I get bored riding on straight road, but that riding was really fun!! But poor Sima was petrified. She doesn’t deal with hills. She also doesn’t deal with curves. And this was hours of some of the steepest and most windy road I’ve ever driven on. But she managed.

We also visited a fair bunch of the lovely markets up here, and I bought a few of the lovely things I’ve been telling some of you about and admiring for a while. It’s good to have someone else around when you’re buying these things in case it’s a bad idea. For instance the “Will I wear this anywhere in the real world?” test is a must for any item of clothing. But I’m really happy with the things I’ve bought. An Asian styled dress up jacket (because I have a bit of a thing for jackets), a crazy little waistcoat which will be great for looking silly in, and some embroidered things for decorating a room. Sima bought a beautiful green embroidered dress which I’d been perving on for weeks but didn’t have anyone to buy it for. I’m so glad that it fit her, it’s truly spectacular :-).

Then I went south with her as far as Sukhothai where there are some amazing old ruins of an old Thai empire (The Sukhothai empire in fact, it was the capital city). Unfortunately the modern day Thais had done a little reconstruction. Nothing big, just fixing an arch here and a wall there, but they did it in such a shoddy way that it really started to get to me once I started noticing it. It was SO different from the original, and felt a little disrespectful and tacky. But it was still a beautiful place. It’s amazing to see the scale on which they built their temples. In its heyday the temple district would have taken up several kilometres, and some of Buddha statues were absolutely mammoth.

Then we parted ways and she headed south to the islands (against my suggestion I might add, and was I right Sima? Yes I was :-P ) and I went north back to Chiang Mai. She has put some photos up on Facebook of our good times together, the album can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=442469&id=761960523&l=34d648eaaa Thanks Sima :-).

Since then life has gone back to normal for me over here. I’m listening to a lot of Harry Potter audio books which are most enjoyable, though I’m having trouble finding number 6. Gee they start getting a bit dark towards the end though don’t they? I hear they just get darker from here, can’t say I’m complaining though. I’ve also started Kung Fu classes because I decided I needed some more exercise than the spot of yoga I was doing in my room. The classes have been really good; it’s not the super flashy variety (not that I would have minded actually, I just might have felt a bit silly); and it’s great to get a sweat up and gives me something to practice in my room when I get cramped up over my laptop or something. I actually wanted to try Tai Chi, but this place I checked wasn’t running it now due to lack of students, so I chose the Kung Fu instead. The downside is that it’s about doubling my living expenses (it’s about $36 per week for 3 lessons), but that’s alright, I’m doing pretty well on the money front anyway.

I also went to the hospital while Sima was around to find out once and for all whether I had a stomach ulcer or not. It had been playing on my mind, and it annoyed me that every non-medical person I mentioned it to always scoffed and told me flat that I certainly didn’t have a stomach ulcer with lines like “Just look at you!” But unfortunately the hospital didn’t do the conclusive tests I wanted, the doctor asked me some questions, listened to my stomach, and then just handed over some antibiotics to get rid of it. So I still don’t know, but I took the drugs and now I don’t really get the pain there anymore, so that’s a good sign.

The other thing was, at about the same time, that I change my eating habits. I’ve written before about the fact that I basically have an eating disorder where I eat way too much and that I find it really difficult to change the habit. It’s exacerbated by the fact that nobody ever believes me (once again the “Just look at you!” call) and I then feel the need to prove that I’m not anorexic or bulimic or something. But I was in a permanent state of exhaustion where I found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and the flights of stairs up and down from the flat were a serious obstacle. And Sima was worried too which gave me some added conviction. So when I decided to go to the hospital I also decided that I should put some effort in on the eating front as well. So I went off refined fats and sugars (bye bye sweet roti, I haven’t had one since :’-( ), coffee, alcohol, and most of the chilli I was eating. All things I love unfortunately, though I’m not being anal about avoiding these things I’m just making a concerted effort to avoid them as much as possible. Luckily I’ve been able to replace the roti addiction I had with mango sticky rice which never makes me feel crap afterwards. I also really tried to avoid eating too much, and failed a few times, but with Sima as my conscience I started to get a grip on that too. Which was great because now I rarely overeat, though I frequently still have the urge. And lo and behold, my energy came back in leaps, bounds, and lunges. I was a bit blown away by the difference I have to admit, I couldn’t believe that food could have that much affect on me. I knew eating too much made me stupid, but to make me that exhausted was pretty crazy! But I believe it now as I haven’t had an exhausted day since I changed my eating habits, and the alternative isn’t really an option. I think it’s probably exacerbated by the heat here. A lot of people say they go off food entirely when they come to Thailand because of the heat, and it makes sense because your body doesn’t need to burn energy to warm itself up, but it DOES need to eat salt and electrolytes because you sweat nearly constantly. Hence they add salt to EVERYTHING, including the ubiquitous fruit shakes and mango sticky rice (don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it, they’re WAY more refreshing with). My diet at the moment involves about one meal of fruit, one vege curry or other rice dish, and one of bread. The bread part surprises the hell out of me because I’ve actually been anti bread for a while as I’m not sure that modern wheat strains are very nutritious. But I’ve become a bit addicted to it since finding an Irish pub which bakes loaves of fresh bread every day. They have some really dark rye’s which I can just eat plain when they’re still hot out of the oven, and they’re SO SO SO tasty, and my body seems to love the stuff so I’m not about to argue with it.

Well anyway, that’s probably enough for now. Let’s hope I haven’t doubled up on anything, I guess I can check the blog next time I get online, but I doubt I’ll be bothered making changes :-P.

I hope you’re all kicking goals in whatever games you’re playing. Don’t feel shy about writing me with news about whatever you feel like. Speaking of news... how ‘bout K-Rudd? That was a bit of a surprise to me. I knew he’d basically turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, but I guess I’ve been out of the mainstream Oz news for too long because I hadn’t expected THAT!!!

But anyway, bye bye!!!!
Love, Frankie

Isan (Apologies for the slight duplication)

Hi folks. I’m sorry for the long absentia, no idea why it’s been so long really. I just haven’t really felt like writing. I guess I’m just getting used to lots of alone time.

I don’t even remember what I wrote last... Lets guess that I was in Nong Kai, which I left for Khon Kaen in the heart of the Isan region. On that bus trip I had my first experience with slightly dodgy Thais. First up one of the ticket inspectors bustled me onto the bus roughly and sat me down and then asked for a bunch more money than the bus ride was worth. Which is a fairly common one, and luckily I’d bought my ticket the day before. Then one of the bus guys jumped under the bus and into the luggage compartment during one of the quick stops we made to drop people off. This isn’t such an uncommon occurrence either and doesn’t necessarily mean he’s doing anything dodge. But I just had bad feeling about this crew of bus operators, and there are enough stories of things going missing in this manner. I’d sat myself over the luggage door to keep an eye out for this anyway, and luckily I was getting off at the next stop. And sure enough when one of the guys opened the luggage compartment door at the next stop he did a quick peer over to make sure everything was in order. I checked my bag right there before I took it off, and it hadn’t been tampered with so that was lucky. Maybe I was just being paranoid. The majority of my bus rides are great and the bus crew never do anything wrong, but it doesn’t hurt to be aware of these things.

Then I stayed at a place called First Choice in Khon Kaen, run by an old white guy and an old Thai woman who were married and seemed to hate each other. It seems like they were once a good couple though, much of an age and both relatively normal people, unlike a lot of the expats over here. But I had a good time there, and watched a lot of news because it was always on. The BP oil spill had just happened, and Israel had just dropped commandos from a helicopter onto a boat load of peace activists, resulting in 10 deaths. I did lots of programming there, and it turned out that the old geezer who ran the place was actually a pretty techy guy. I forget now what he’d worked on, but he was extremely high up in some American tech firm, and currently trying to disentangle himself from it and retire. We had some pretty fascinating conversations about esoteric programming languages, Steve Jobs, and electronic products, during which I realised that he was also fantastically rich and unhappy.

Actually, I realised something very important while at that guest house. My room was up on the third floor and consisted of 2 coconut fibre filled mattresses, a desk, and a chair. The first night I slept on those incredibly hard mattresses I awoke with a sore lower back. This worried me as generally lower back pain is a bad thing. The next night I slept with a pillow under my knees to try and rotate my hips a little while I slept. Luckily I’d long since taught myself to sleep on my back or I would have been in trouble. By the fourth night I’d lost the second pillow again as my back was feeling great. It felt like it was getting stronger, and I noticed that it felt better than normal during the day as well. I was a little blown away by all of this to be honest. Beds are one of those things which you don’t really get to test enough. You just have one, and you don’t know how good it is because you really need to sleep on another one by yourself for a week to see how it measures up. And most people have pretty similar beds so even when I’ve slept over at other people’s houses it’s usually on another soft Western mattress. Westerners in Thailand all agree that the beds here are universally very hard, but these coconut filled beds were yet another order of magnitude of hardness again on normal Thai beds. And yet they were freaking AWESOME once I got used to them. Which makes sense when I think about it, because we didn’t evolve with beds, they’re really a very recent invention on the scale of human evolution. We were designed to sleep on the ground, or maybe on furs. But not on 30cm of squishy foam, no matter how many scientists have endorsed it. SO I think I’m going to have to ditch my mattress when I get home and try a sleeping on a futon or something. When I got back to Chaing Mai from Khon Kaen and took a room I found the bed far too soft on the first night, though it was one of the firm 5cm Thai mattresses. My back hurt again the next day :-(. So for the next couple of nights I slept on the tile floor on a folded up wool blanket. But then I kept waking up around 4 every morning with sore hip bones and had to climb into bed anyway. So it seem I need a really firm bed which doesn’t mould itself to my back or let my hips rotate, but which is still soft enough that it does’t bruise my hip bones.