Ted (Thailand) - Around Chiang Mai

It's hard to find anything good on the radio here. All the radio stations seem to play whiney, slow songs. On Saturday I went to a huge dance club that had concert quality Thai bands and must have had at least 400 people. I mean, none of the songs were amazingly creative or anything, with one where 70% of the song was the word "gimme," with the rest in Thai. All the back-up dancers did "the monkey" a lot too. Very catchy though. It's weird how a lot of songs are mostly in thai, but then have random english words thrown in. Besides the main line "drink, drink" in one song, and the words "happy" and "sleep" in another, it was too loud for me to really pick up and translate anything from thai. Anyway, that bad pop music is all I'm looking for, but all I find are slow songs and American country.

I've wandered around most of the temples in Chiang Mai, some that are currently undergoing facial reconstruction surgery. Some of them date all the way back to 1296 when Chiang Mai was founded as the new capital of the Lanna Kingdom, which at one time occupied current northern Thailand and some of Burma and Laos. The most visited one is Duoy Suthep, which is on top of a mountain right out of the city, but it was too shiney and full of white people. I prefer the run-down looking ones that haven't been altered. Sadly though, mostly everything has been rebuilt here including the surrounding walls of the old city and the moat (both several times).

Speaking of the moat, its currently in varying forms of decay and reconstruction. I had the unfortunate idea to run around it for exercise. They've recently rebuilt most of the east and south sides of the square moat, but the west side looks like it was mugged and left for dead, consisting mostly of sand and random rocks. Around the Northwest it turns into the old moat, which is crumbling and full of potholes. So half the moat is full of water and fancy fountains/sprinklers, and the other half is empty, muddy, and entertains drunk people for some reason. I've also seen a lot of rats around the moat.

The language is coming to me slowly although I annoy everyone by saying "put iik tii" (say it again) over and over again. I've really never felt so dumb, the tones still allude me.

A really cool thing about the language is how they make new words. Here are some examples...

kaang (sturdy) + raang (to do something with force) = kaangraang (strong)

Gung (shrimp) + mangkahn (dragon) = gungmangkahn (lobster)

dtuen (to wake up) + dten (to dance) = dtuendten (excited)

fai (fire) + faa (sky) = faifaa (electricity)

All this coolness aside, they do annoying things to English words like turning "strawberry" into "satahberry" and "blueberry" into "booberry." WHY?! They also have an official transliteration system that mostly uses the english alphabet, but makes k's sound like g's, t's sound like dt's and also uses upside-down e's and some other squiggles.

I've been eating some good food like tuna pizza at a handicapped run Italian restaurant, and banana crepes served up by street vendors. And enjoying Thai beers, politely turning away hill tribe vendors that wander from table to table, and playing with kids that are supposed to be selling flowers, but would rather goof around. This weekend there is a huge annual flower fair, parade, competition, super market. Supposedly there will be floats made almost entirely of flowers, and people from all over the north will be selling all kinds of crazy things for dirt cheap since they need to sell everything in two days.

Two more weeks of level 1 and then onto level 2, where I hear there is more homework and more confusion. :( Enjoying reading all of your updates and hope everyone is meeting booze quotas,

-ted