Chiang Mai Pt. 2

So what rounds out a day in Thailand where your wife tried to kill you via elephant and you masseuse tried to impale you on her fist? A night market of course. In getting there, I used my navigational “skills” to take us on an unguided tour of the city by foot. While on this “tour”, Laura had time to contemplate her life and decided her true calling was not the important work of educating America’s youth, but instead moving to Chiang Mai and writing an unfunded thesis with the current working title of: “Paws for Pad Thai: An insight into the social structure of stray dogs in Chiang Mai”. However, until Chaing Mai gains international notoriety for its stray dogs, its night market remains a draw to the city. This is a market where local tradespeople come to sell their wares. Everything from hand-spun silk scarves and hand carved wood statues to made-in-China trinkets...and food. Lots and lots of food. After witnessing two full block filled with food carts, Laura and I realized that everyone eats street food and as Portlanders we found ourselves right at home and quickly joined in.

At any time of day in Thailand a variety of food is available from foodcarts. Most carts specialized in one of type of food and there seemed to be about six specific foods that were always available. Common choices included: Rotti, a fried crepe filled with some sort of sweet concoction, fruit cut into bite-sized pieces, pad thai, Thai iced tea or Thai Coffee, a range of curries and green papaya salad. We noticed a trend where a family would specialize in one type of food and the parents would work side by side or they would have two carts strategically placed. Being good tourists, we attempted to sample at least one item from each food cart, but with our stomachs groaning, we gave up after about dozen carts. In this venture, we discovered a few truisms about Thai food. Thai people like food either extremely sweet or extremely spicy. At one cart we witnessed Thai Coffee being made with equal parts water and sugar. In regard to the spiciness, the food cart purveyors, quickly taking stock of our whiteness, took pity on us and reduced the heat to accommodate a farang (Thai for foreigner) palate. Also, apparently Pad Thai is a legitimately authentic dish. I had always assumed it was bastardized Thai food but everywhere we went, it was served and eaten by the locals.

After walking through the market and picking up a few gifts (who wants en elephant dung notebook!? It comes with a fancy smell, too!), we decide to continue our evening, and on multiple recommendations, we headed out to the Rooftop Bar. After ascending through three stories of shaky, claustrophobic stairs, being forced to surrender our shoes, and weaving our way past a number of glowing neon THC propaganda murals, we found ourselves perched on a rickety "world famous" balcony overlooking... a two lane surface street. Suitably un-awed by the view, we downed our drink and headed out in search a scene more to our liking. A tuk-tuk ride later, we found ourselves walking into a half full bar, only to be immediately accosted by a number of drunk cricket aficionados.  The very friendly and intoxicated Australians (hope that isn't too redundant) adopted us and upon hearing that we had never seen a cricket match, insisted that we join them for the amateur tournament starting the following day. They also involved us in informal karaoke, by which I mean they started yelling out the words to whatever song happened to be playing and pretending their beer bottle was a microphone.  Unfortunately during this session, Living on a Prayer came on and I was outed for not knowing my 80s classics, when I belted out "Whoa, Liiivvving ooon a Plaaane!".  Despite disrespecting mid-80's rock, we were given shots, schooled at pool, and our company was (still) demanded at the following day’s cricket tournament. 

We kept our promise and met our newfound Austrailian friends the next day. They explained the game of cricket to us which I’ll generously summarize as baseball for people who are too lazy to play baseball.