Day 12: A great day in Chiang Mai

Day 12

Today I'm in: Chiang Mai, Thailand

Sorry for the delay on this entry... I went out pretty hard last night and had either a raging hangover or a mild case of food poisoning today.  I'm pretty sure it was the latter - I was hydrating all day and it wasn't making any difference - but in any event, I'm on the mend now. 

Chiang Mai is pretty amazing, but first you're going to have to bear with a little bit of airplane dorkdom.  I flew up here from Bangkok on Thai Airways, on one of their few remaining Airbus A300s.  This is the first aircraft designed and built by Airbus back in the early 1970s, and was the first twin-engine widebodied plane.  They built them right up through the early 1990s (Thai's fleet is from this era) but in the last decade airlines have been retiring them at a furious pace.  I was starting to worry I wouldn't get to fly one before all the major carriers retired them from service - after that, the only way to fly one would be with some sort of scary African or Iranian fly-by-night operation.  So I was pretty happy to get to fly one of Thai's.  The multicolored interior aside, it was a nice flight, although I had some tense moments at the airport when Thai made me repurchase my tickets, since I had booked the old ones with my now-deactivated old credit card.  They refunded me for the old tickets, but it was stressful. 

And Chiang Mai is pretty much perfect.  Bangkok is a fascinating city, but it's huge, smoggy, choked with traffic and sprawls for miles.  Chiang Mai is the complete opposite - small, compact, charming and never feels busier than a small provincial town.  I got settled at my guesthouse (where a few classmates from Ross had stayed earlier in the week and left me a nice note) and went to the Heun Phen restaurant next door for my first khao soi, a spicy/sour noodle-and-chicken soup that's the unofficial "official dish" of Chiang Mai. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the relatively small city center, which measures about a mile square on each side and is enclosed by a moat and the remnants of the old city wall.  There are more than 30 temples inside the old city and I popped into quite a few of them.  The old city streets are a jumble of shops, restaurants, food stalls, and houses.  It's not quite as atmospheric as the old quarter in Hanoi but it's far more laid back, and although it was still sweltering outside, it's a few (noticeable) degrees cooler than anywhere else I've gone so far.  I spent about half an hour sitting in the Wat Phra Singh listening to the monks chanting, and all of my stress from flying and traveling seemed to melt right away.  

That night I stumbled upon a huge festival underway at Wat Chedi Luang, one of the city's best-known temple complexes.  There were tons of stalls set up selling every kind of street food imaginable.  Despite the risks from eating street food, I decided it was too much to pass up and spent the next hour trying all sorts of noodle dishes, sausages (Chiang Mai is known for its chicken and pork sausages), fruits, vegetables, and desserts.

I did give the booth selling bugs a miss, however.

The festival - which honors the "city pillar," a relic from the 13th century when Chiang Mai was founded - also featured tons of Buddhist traditions.  A rope and pulley system had been rigged up at the top of the temple, and worshippers could send offerings of water to the top of the structure to wash it and help maintain it.  There were dancers, a Thai orchestra, performances by monks in training, and even a small carnival area with games and rides.  The whole city seemed to be there, and it was an awesome introduction to Chiang Mai.  

After I left the festival, I headed over to a clutch of bars and nightclubs to meet a group of Ross classmates who were heading there after a muay thai boxing match.  I've only been away from Ann Arbor for about two weeks, but I think I've lost some of my ability to drink that hard.  I'm still trying to figure out if it was the night of drinking or the street food that knocked me out today - more on that in the next entry.