Bye Bye Chiang Mai

In a few hours, we will leave the city of Chiang Mai. This city is home to about a hundred huge wats (temple complexes) so almost every direction you look, you see the peak of one temple. Gregg spent the day yesterday roaming the streets of the old city, getting lost periodically and taking pictures of the old temples. The old city is confined by a canal that forms a kind of moat. An old wall runs alongside it. It made me feel like I should be living in a medieval castle and running from dragons.

While Gregg was getting asked directions to gay bars by strange Asians on the street, I was taking a Thai cooking class with Orn, a Thai lady who survived the tsunami down south. My fellow aspiring cooks were an English couple ten and half months into a year long world tour. The guy seriously looked like David Letterman's skinny British cousin. I ground curry paste by hand, made some spring rolls, coconut soup, and other delicacies. We'll see how I do when I try to make them at home. The chicken cooking technique I learned was "Thai Massage" - instead of flipping the chicken around, massage it with your spatula to keep it tender. We ate a lot, and had naps, and drank a lot of water. It was an interesting day.

When Gregg was exploring alone, he met a weird Asian man who knows Frank Callaghan of the Callaghan Inn in Medicine Hat. Gregg had trouble understanding him, but apparently Frank gets suits sent to him from here. Small world.

At the guesthouse, a pushy lady named Boo Boo runs the show. She's helped us out a lot, but somehow I feel she's ripping us off. But the main reason we are excited to get out of there is her brother, a limp looking Thai man with no muscles. He calls me "Jennifer Lopez" and then tells me I don't look beautiful. He seems to enjoy freaking Gregg out. In my absence, he asked Gregg if he loved him. Later, he called me his "sister-in-law" because Gregg was his boyfriend. Gregg would like to punch him out, but we're afraid that his family would gang beat us if anything happened. Hopefully, we won't see him today.

Last night, we walked to the Chiang Mai night bazaar and saw lots of lady-boys on the way. The bazaar sells a lot of the same tourist stuff as the rest of Thailand - knock-off Diesel, Von Dutch, beach clothes, jewelry, tribal trinkets. Since we're going to be on the road for several more weeks, we don't want to buy a bunch of stuff and then cart it around. But it's pretty tempting when you see the cheap deals in the little booths and tables that line the streets.

After breaking down and buying a few things, we started walking to the Kawila Boxing Area for a night of watching Muay Thai - Thai Kick Boxing. I stupidly made us walk too far so we were late, but it didn't matter because the evening started late. The arena was an old dingy building full of vendors. We sat on plastic chairs a couple rows from the ring in the midst of other crazy backpackers and tourists. The drums started beating and out came two tiny guys - 42 KG weight class. I think we were watching ten year olds beat each other. They climbed into the ring, did a series of bowing and stretching rituals, and then the five round fight began. The little guys were interesting, but they played pretty clean. As the night wore on, it got more interesting. Match five was my favorite - a super muscly guy against a fiesty guy. They had some good kicks and jabs going. There were two special matches - one Thai vs. French (the French guy lost fast) and one Thai vs. American (the American won easily in the first round because he was way bigger than the Thai guy.) It wasn't as gruesome as we thought it would be, but it was super cool. Of the eight fights, there were about four knockouts. By the time we left, I was tired of the drums pounding in my ears.

Today, we're taking a mini-bus to Chiang Khong and the border of Laos and Thailand. This is a couple hours away from the infamous Golden triangle where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet and most of the world's opium is grown. Thailand has stamped out most of the production on this side of the border. There's not much to do at the border but sleep, and in the morning, we'll cross into Laos, and get on a bus or a boat to either Luang Nam Pha or Luang Prabang. We'll update you again whenever we get where we're going.