I didn't expect to be terrified in Chiang Mai.
Thumbing through Lonely Planet on my beloved kindle, waiting for a turkey burger at Burgermeister in SF the day we left for Thailand, I tried to project myself into a world of monks and massage and vegetarian food.
I didn't expect to be terrified.
Every day, at least once a day for 10 minutes or more, I put on a silly bucket helmet with red flowers, clung to E for dear life, closed my eyes, and prayed to my guardian angel as we hurtled through erratically surging traffic on our 125 cc scooter.
When we finally got to our destination, I would hop off and repress an urge to sock E in the jaw. He would invariably catch my look and ask me how I was feeling.
Terrified! And angry because I didn't want to be terrified! Grrrr!
But really, there's no choice. Scooters are so integral to Chiang Mai culture, it's hard to lead anything approaching a regular day-to-day life without riding one.
The traffic in Chiang Mai is constantly buzzing. First off, you should know that Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand. At the heart of the modern city is the old city, ringed by a wall and moat. It's actually not a ring, but a square, about 1 mile to each side.
There are roads running in opposite directions along the inside and outside of the moat. Inside, the traffic flows counter-clockwise. Outside, it flows clockwise.
There is never no traffic on these roads. It varies from plenty to lots, depending on time of day. Since we were staying inside the old city, I told E that it felt like being inside a bee hive with the scooters buzz-buzz-buzzing on the outside.
Well anyway, that's me. Old scaredy-pants. Do you suppose Thais are terrified by scooters? Of course not!
Let me show you some scooter-riders...
Transporting 99 luftballons across town? No problem. Take the scooter.
Got a thing for parrots? No problem. Scooter handlebars fit at least four birds.
Kid's hungry and you're late? No problem. Hand 'im a skewer and hit the road.
Mailing a package? Put on your pink helmet and hang on to that box.
Wearing a mini skirt? Sit side-saddle, of course. You've got great scooter-balance so don't bother hanging on.
Besides, would any other vehicle look this cool with your Ray-Bans?
Actually, I never saw a monk on a scooter. This surprises me because I did see six monks in one tuk-tuk. For those of you who've never seen a tuk-tuk, this is sort of like a Chiang Mai SUV (except, of course, that there are also SUVs in Chiang Mai).
Your standard tuk-tuk comes complete with drink holders. Well, newspaper storage anyway.
Can you feel it yet? I'm trying to show you the particular style of laid back that's the signature of this city.
One thing that really takes adjusting to in Thailand for us low-context-culture folks...is the answer "yes." The answer is "yes," even when the meaning is no or I-have-no-idea-what-you're-talking-about.
I bring this up because I feel like it's this culture of "yes" that explains the preponderance of tuk tuks, rather than some more street-worthy vehicle. In a culture of "yes," people make things work with whatever is on hand. It's like an entire society of MacGyvers...
Only you have to imagine MacGyver doing his thing without ever looking uncool or raising his blood pressure at all. In my eyes, that's the Chiang Mai way. Or the Thai way or something.
Perhaps this explains the "Chiang Mai plastic bag"?
Sompon Nabnian, Master Chef at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, made me laugh when he instructed us to put "one Chiang Mai plastic bag" on our hands before mixing up noodles and soy sauce. Just one of many sly jokes like answering "How much fish sauce?" with "Too much...not good. Not enough...also not good." ;-)
Back to the plastic bags. They are everywhere. Street food, which is far from a fragment of local cuisine, is all served up in plastic bags.
Fresh fruit? Plastic bag.
Banana cake? Plastic bag.
Lunch of deep-fried pork fat, green chili paste, and sticky rice with a side of watermelon? Plastic bag, bag, bag, bag.
I have to say, I don't love this. Laid back is nice, but swathing everything you eat in petroleum product is viscerally...ick. Even in Beijing, that glorious Beijing pancake I ate many mornings for breakfast came loosely wrapped in paper. The marvelous crispy-tender texture would have been totally different if the pancake had steamed itself up in a plastic bag first.
E rarely got as far as the plastic bags. For him, seating was a great frustration. He is at war with plastic stools, which effectively means being at odds with all of Asia. Asian plastic stools are not built for big bodies, as this funny photo I Googled up demonstrates...
Plastic stools are at the heart of the Chiang Mai street food scene. Street carts drive up, plastic bags at the ready. Folding tables unfold. Plastic stools beckon. Scooters roll up and exhaust fumes flow. Ahhhh!
Incidentally, if you do sit down on a plastic stool, you will actually get your khao soi (Burmese-inspired local curry noodle dish) in a plastic bowl, which is certainly more sturdy than a plastic bag.
You might also luck out on occasion and find yourself slurping soup off a concrete picnic table like this one behind the street vendors at Doi Suthep...
Street food is often ridiculously yummy, but the best Thai food we had in Chiang Mai wasn't from carts. It was at a very comfortable little restaurant called Udommit on the 2nd floor of the Nim City Daily shopping center southeast of the old city.
To start off with, they make deeelicious lychee and green mango shakes.
...tangy-meaty sausage salad and intensely herbal, hot prawn salad... Yum!
Then stir-fried wide rice noodles with crispy something and chili sauce, followed by crunchy fresh veggies and omelet served with an earthy, intense shrimp paste-chili dip. I think this is called nam prik khapi. Dips and pastes are a whole category of dish I'd never heard of that exist in Northern Thai cuisine. Also, do you see that there are raw eggplants on this plate? They were sweet and crisp. Not at all pithy. Amazing.
There were lots of other dishes (we went there a few times).
We also really enjoyed Wera Laab Ped (alt. Veera Laab Ped), recommended by a local Chowhounder. If you don't read Thai, go to the corner of Nimman Soi 7 and Sirimankalajarn and ask someone to point you in the right direction. Well, that's what we did.
Anyhoo, laab ped is a spicy duck salad flavored with mint, shallots, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, spring onions, fish sauce, you name it. Yummy.
The other dishes I liked a lot were the moo nam tok, or grilled pork salad ("moo" means pork in Thai), and tangy bamboo curry.
Also, we had the pleasure of dining at Wera a second time with my friend Dale and her husband Jeff, in town from Hong Kong. It was so much fun to see them! They arrived in HK the same time we did, but have traveled much more widely in Asia, in particular, all over China...from Yunnan to Fujian to Shanghai, Beijing, and Harbin (multiple times, I think). Dale writes a great blog about their travels here.
At the end of the day, I confess that I cannot educate you further about Northern Thai food. For the most part, that's not what we ate in Chiang Mai. Us! We eat everything (at least I do). Somehow we found ourselves bouncing from Italian to French to Spanish to Israeli restaurants. Even...I'm embarrassed to say...American spots.
Part of the appeal for me was that the expats running these places were making comfort foods from scratch. Check this out...
At Piccola Roma there was handmade tagliatelle, locally sourced mushrooms, and wild board sausage (supposedly flown in from Italy).
At La Terrasse, there was homemade bread with crunchy crust and excellent patés (the rabbit one was particularly tasty).
At Jerusalem Falafel there was homemade yogurt (hooray!), which made for delicious tzatziki and a respectable mezze platter. The owner also makes her own haloumi and feta.
At Duke's there were real smoked pork ribs and hand-cut fries (best I've had in a long time -- they tasted like potatoes). The pastrami sandwiches weren't bad, either.
You can probably surmise from all of this international eating that there are a fair number of foreigners in Chiang Mai. That's an understatement. Walking around the old city, I invariably encountered more farangs ("blond hair, big nose, eats toast in the morning") than Thais.
In my Thai foot massage course (yes, I did!), the entire spectrum of romance languages was represented. From top left to lower right you have France -- Brittany, USA (me), Ireland, France again, Portugal, Japan, France -- Paris, then Thailand (x2), Italy, and Argentina (x2). Interesting, eh?
It's a different kind of tourist that comes to Chiang Mai. They're not here for Disneyland or getting wasted on the beach. Although I'm stuffed to the gills with tourist experiences, I dutifully made the rounds of all the top activities and sites.
There was the market tour and cooking class. However, I cannot recommend since my Chinese stir-frying sensibilities were thoroughly offended by their starting with cold oil in cold woks (not to mention adding wet vegetables to a noodle stir-fry!).
There was the much lauded Elephant Nature Park where I learned some disturbing things about elephants.
Elephants are expensive to keep since they eat 200+ kg of food a day and can live to 100 years old. The men who use them in Burma for logging frequently do terrible things to them, such as giving them speed or sling-shotting them in the eye to make them work. Two of the elephants at the Nature Park had killed their mahouts, while others had damaged limbs from land mines in the Burmese forest.
While the other Park guests were enthusiastic and borderline aggressive about washing the elephants, I just wanted to go home. It was clear to me that elephants are not interested in people beyond the necessity of being fed by them now that their grazing habit is gone.
Then there was the Mae Klang waterfall, so refreshing on a hot day...until we fell in, iPhones, camera, and all ;-)
There is the beautiful Doi Suthep temple, where I saw people circling the golden chedi, carrying flowers and praying. I also got a clear view of Chiang Mai from above, although "clear" is a little misleading. Despite all of the good kharma engendered by the thousands of monks in the city (there are supposedly 700+ wats), Chiang Mai air quality is not so good.
There were many other wats with beautiful wall paintings, colorful flags, hidden tunnels with meditation sanctuaries...
But ultimately, if I'm honest, what I'll remember about Chiang Mai is being inside. A lot. Head down in the computer planning our June-Oct travel. This much movement around the globe, to totally distinct cultures (right now we're in Melbourne), takes a lot of research. Up 'til three o-clock in the morning many nights calling people in Europe. Plus studying French (on the computer -- grr) using Rosetta Stone.
So Chiang Mai came to me through the window...monks chanting in the ancient Wat Chiang Man next door, an expat guy practicing violin in the courtyard, Indian-sounding music and monster truck voices announcing Muay Thai matches, "I will survive..." disco tunes pumping from the next guest house over. Birds.
Plus the incredibly gracious women who ran the serviced apartments where we stayed -- Frangipani Serviced Residences. Khun Luxami ("Khun" is like "Mr." or "Ms.") was beyond gracious, making trips to the visa office for us before we arrived, driving us to the airport, even bringing us a beautiful box of Thai sweets on New Year's Eve. They made us feel at home, in a new city, on a long journey.
