Today was a big day for us, we got to go out to Mae Rim where our friends are building a new home and restaurant.  We met Tee and Ian several years ago at their business in the city – a small guest house and a restaurant that we have been returning to for breakfast / lunch / dinner about once a day while we are in Chiang Mai.  In the last couple of years they have started in on a new project about 30 minutes north of the city near the village where Tee’s family lives.

The project when finished will be a new house for them, a restaurant for tourists and the locals in the surrounding area, and a few small bungalows for rentals.  So far the main house is about 3/4 complete, and the restaurant and kitchen was recently finished.  The local monk told them that Friday morning would be a good time to ‘open’ the business and so a blessing ceremony was held, and we were invited out to the ‘soft opening’ in the afternoon to try out some of the menu items, hang out with friends, and get a chance to see how the construction has progressed over the last year.

It was great to see the work that is being done first hand – I have had the chance to see it evolve via pictures, but being able to stand there is so much better!  The main house was just some string lines and stakes in the ground last year, and now the main construction is basically complete, and they are diligently working on the finishing work – installing windows and doors, tiling, painting etc.  It gives me a great chance to see up close the Thai construction methods as almost everything here is done with bricks and concrete, but they are masters at what they can do with those materials.  The patience that they have in being able to makes things from concrete and finish surfaces with great detail is quite impressive, and while I can build a fair number of things back home, I could never master the masonry techniques used here.

Of course the highlight of the day was the opening of the restaurant, and after we had a chance to tour the new house and bungalow it was time to sit down to some serious eating.  The day was mostly a soft opening and a chance for the kitchen to get it’s rhythm and test out some of the dishes.  This is all good news for us as we get to sit around for the afternoon in the tranquil surroundings and nibble away at a fairly constant stream of food from the kitchen over some cold refreshments.

For us it is always a privilege to have the chance to be part of these sorts of events because they don’t happen often, and are typically for close friends and family, so a special treat for us to be part of the ‘in’ crowd. A warm thank you to our hosts Tee and Ian for another great day in paradise!  We look forward to returning again many times in the future.

The other night I went out with Ian, Richie, and Landon, so Mrs. Columbus decided to go back to the hotel and get to sleep early.  No big deal really as this often happens but it means that when I come back to the room later in the evening I usually have to tap lightly on the door and wake herself up to be let in – sometimes this is met with a bit of a scowl, so I typically don’t make a habit of it!

Anyway, it is approaching the wee hours as I tap lightly on the door, and am surprised when Mrs. Columbus throws the door open because every light in the place is on, and the Mrs. has her sleeping mask on? I am about to ask why she just did not turn the lights out instead of using her mask, when she leaps into a story of her evening.

According to her rendition of the story, she has not yet had any sleep, and she is not at all prepared to shut the lights out because when she returned to the room earlier and went into the loo, she saw a giant cockroach running around on the wash basin.  By her description it was a big as a dog, and should have had a collar and a leash!

After trying unsuccessfully to trap the dangerous beast with a glass she decided to close the door and leave all the lights on as a warning to the rascal to keep his distance.  The downside of course was that with all the lights on she would not be able to sleep, so the solution to that problem was the face mask – sadly that did not work and no real sleep was had….

So on my arrival I was ushered to the dunny to try and hunt the creature down, but he must have been sufficiently scared by Mrs. Columbus that he had retreated to some dark corner and I was able to negotiate turning off all of the room lights as long as we left the bathroom lights on to create a dangerous photon barrier to those within.  Of course the simple solution would have been to just go to the reception desk and let them know, but it took another night of trying to sleep in a semi-lit room for the creature to re-appear and for us to engage ‘the big guns’.

The big guns it turns out are a couple of equally squeamish girls from housekeeping but armed with some sort of spray (labeled in Thai) that does in fact – kill bugs dead!! After a thorough fogging of the bathroom Mr. cockroach flips himself over on his back and gives up – oddly somehow in the intervening time he has shrunk from the dog sized villain that Mrs. Columbus originally saw to a still reasonably sized bug the size of a small thumb, but not nearly quite as threatening, especially now as he gets swept up by the housekeepers and carted away.  As a warning to some of his friends, the maids gas the room quite well, and when we return later in the afternoon, it looks like remains of a shootout in a drug den as the floor in the bath is now littered with the carcases of a handful of dead comrades.

All is well that ends well though as Mrs. Columbus has now once again strengthened her resolve, and upon seeing the 2nd round of casualties was not even startled, she just brought the maid over to deal with the aftermath and we went on about our business, so kudos to her for being a good trooper!  (We are however still sleeping with a light on 🙁  )

Having been to Chiang Mai and blogged about it a number of times I often wonder if I should write something new or not.  On one hand it seems like deja-vu and I am just writing similar things over, but on the other hand I really write for myself (so that one day when I am old I can regale myself with my own stories – that will seem all new again) and for the people who want to read along I guess they can skip things if they like 😉

The trip over from Seattle was mostly uneventful in terms of the flights themselves – everything was on time and we were quite happy with the JAL service.  The leg from Vancouver to Tokyo was on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner which was a new experience for me.  We know a fair number of people who work for Boeing back home, so it was cool to experience the ‘new’ plane we have heard so much about.  Overall I will say it is quite a nice plane, there is a fair amount of room in the cabin so you don’t feel quite as jammed in, and everything is new and modern.  I thought that the electronically dim-able cabin windows were quite cool – no window shades, just a button that makes the glass ‘magically’ change tint from clear to dark to block the outside light.

I did become a little concerned as we waited for our connection to Bangkok as the waiting lounge started to fill fairly rapidly with Russian tourists – who I think are in a heated competition with the Chinese to see who can be the more obnoxious travelers – I cringed to see what seemed like dozens of completely un-managed children running around the airport, running into people, tripping over other people’s stuff, etc. with the parents just letting them run the place like if 12yr olds ruled the world I guess.  At any rate I certainly give this round of the competition to the Russians.  Fortunately for me I have two things working in my favor: 1) it turns out the flight is only about 1/2 full, and our seats are well away from the antics of the Russian circus, and 2) the Russians all go to the beach in Pattaya or Phuket, so they are not going to the north where we are! [FWIW I know they are not all obnoxious, but for any Russian or Chinese readers, you should know that some of your comrades are not creating a great impression 😉 ]

Our routing includes a short overnight stop in Bangkok, and after a few hours of sleep it is back to the airport to catch the short flight up to Chiang Mai in the morning.  This is where we encounter our first travel hiccup.  After arriving at the airport in plenty of time to check in for our flight we are informed that the flight has been canceled 🙁  The check in agent assures us that they had sent us email over a week ago with this information, but as I run my own mail server I am quite able to ascertain that to be false but it is tough to win a ‘he said, she said’ when you don;t have a lot of options.  The only thing they can do is book us on the next flight and offer us each a meal voucher for 300 baht (about $10US) to compensate for the inconvenience.  The new flight means that we now have an extra 2 1/2 hours of sitting around the airport so it is a bit of a grumpy start to the day for me.

One would think it would be fairly hard to spend $20 on two meals in Thailand given that an order of Phad Thai or similar is typically less then $3, but we are in the airport so I know things are going to be inflated.  Given my indigence over the flight change I am completely focused on spending every baht of my voucher to punish the airline, and so off to the food court we go.  In the end, in order to spend all of our money we had to resort to (gasp) American food, and so it was with a lot of reluctance that Mrs. Columbus stepped up to the McDonalds order window!  Even then we each had to order a full meal – double Big Mac, fries, drink and dessert to extract our victory over the airline!  Sadly I think it was again them who won in the end as the meal seemed to sit like brick with us for the rest of the day.  I did feel victorious for about an hour tho, so maybe it was worth it.

We have now been in Chiang Mai for a few days, and are settling into our normal routine for here – take in some sights, relax, and do as little as possible.  On our first day back, we spent a few hours in the afternoon wandering around and then headed straight off to see our friends Tee, Ian, Richie (#2), and Landon at Ginny Cafe.   We had a great first night, catching up with what everyone was doing, having a few beers, and some great food – Khao Soi Gai FTW!!

Laurie peaked a little early and so around 9pm decided to go back to the room, and Ian, Richie, Landon and I decided to wander out on the town for a night cap.  A short tuk-tuk ride later we ended up back at the Crazy German so it was shades of last summer all over again aside from Thomas not being here 😉  After the coup earlier in June the military put in a curfew that had everyone going home by 10pm, later relaxed to midnight, and finally lifted completely a couple of weeks ago, but one of the lingering effects was that the legal closing time for bars of 1pm is now strictly enforced (you used to be able to hop from one place to another right thru to the morning if you liked) so at 1pm sharp the doors at the German start to close and it is time to call it a night – I must say it was quite different walking back to the hotel without some of the usual night-life going on.

On our 2nd day here our friends Bruce and Jackie from Australia arrive in the evening just in time to go for dinner and a cold refreshment.  We met them in Laos 2 summers back during a long bus ride and a few days in Vang Vieng, and have stayed in touch since then.  Some fortunate scheduling allowed for us to meet up with them for a week or so, and show them around our home away from home in the north.  We of course took them over to meet the rest of our local friends at Ian and Tee’s where we had a chance to catch up on things over a good meal and rough out some plans for our next few days here.

Tomorrow we will be going out to ‘the farm’ for the soft opening of the new restaurant that Ian and Tee have been building in Mae Rim.  It was basically just some marking on the ground last year when we were here, so it will be exciting to see now in a finished state.

As we get ready for our typical escape to SE Asia and talk about it with friends and family it seems like lately the conversation usually goes like this:

Them: You’re going where?

Me: Thailand

Them: Are you sure? There was a coup there.

Me: Yes, it is no big deal.

Them: The news says there is violence in the streets and the people are protesting against the junta government.

Me: The western media is sensationalizing it like usual, it is not at all like the news portrays.

Them: Weeell ok, be careful…..

It is hard to explain what is really happening in Thailand without understanding decades of Thai politics (which even seems like a maze of twisty passages to me and I have tried to do a fair bit of reading on the subject) but the simple version is that politically the country is divided almost perfectly in half and whatever party is in power the other half is unhappy.

Unhappiness in Thailand usually means almost nothing that you can see – the people all go to work, and everything is business as usual. Occasionally as an important date or an election year approaches the political chatter moves from quite corners and table conversation to something more visible – large protests usually financed by the party wishing to make some noise. Sometimes it even escalates to some isolated incidents of violence – and that is what makes the news.  99% of the time you can likely find more violence in South Seattle than in the streets of Bangkok, but we are so used to it here that no-one talks about it.

In talking to some of our friends who live there about what is going on, they chuckle and tell us that we are probably taking a bigger risk with the surly flight attendant on the way over, or the in-flight meal than we are in walking down the street in Thailand 😀

In fact I am likely in more danger from the raccoon that often walks through the yard and sometimes sits right at the back door:

The reality is that it is much closer to the photo below – the western news media’s version on the top, and the local Thai people’s version on the bottom:

We certainly plan to be doing much of what the people on the bottom are doing 😉

At any rate, we appreciate people looking out for us and we definitely feel safe where we are going, and would quickly change our plans if we thought there was any risk.  We always travel with a backup plan to go quickly to a different area or neighboring country if we ever feel at all in a risky situation – so far we have never had to resort to plan B.

My biggest concern at the moment is how soon I will be able to find a decent massage after arrival….