PRAY AND LOVE EAT

Since my last post, I’ve been half lounge lizard and half nomad wandering around ChiangMai and, of course, I have more pictures of temples.  Here are my favorite shots….

I haven't seen this guy with the elephant nose before, and I don't know who he is.  I think he must be Indian.

Some pretty fancy windows.

The guard dog/dragon.

I liked this setting and the relative modesty of this temple compared to others.

I thought I was going into a guest house when I opened the door to this.

This was outside an architectural school.

I’ll probably bother you with a few more photos of temples because I’m visiting a famous one on a tour I’m taking, and I wouldn’t want to withhold.

I went to another cooking school this week.  The instruction was different from the one last week.  They demonstrated the prep and cooking for all the dishes that were selected by the class before we cooked them .  So we got to taste a lot of dishes.  They also did some of the prep for us—at the other school, we did all our own prep.  The recipes were different, too.  These had fewer ingredients, so there wasn’t as much flavor layering.  I liked the ones from last week better.   Here are the dishes I made this week…

A sweet and sour creamy prawn soup

Chicken satay…my favorite of the day..and now you can see my Marilyn Monroe blond hair.  Glam, eh?

A yellow curry with chicken on the right….I asked for additional ingredients on this one to duplicate one of my favorite curries---gang garee, which has chicken, potato, carrot, and onion in a yellow curry sauce.  

And pad thai on the left, which I’ve always wanted to make at home….they gave us tofu, but no chicken or shrimp, but it was still pretty good.

I also made a delicious banana pancake for dessert, but forgot to take a picture—you make pancake batter with coconut cream and put sliced bananas and shredded coconut on top before you flip it, then garnish with a drizzle of honey or evaporated milk.  I was wishing for some warm maple syrup, which would have been perfect.

I had lunch yesterday at a restaurant called Butter is Better.  A couple I met at last week’s cooking school recommended it to me, and I was attracted to the name.  I heartily agree with the statement (although a good Italian olive oil is also equally supported).  I’ve been really hungry for some good Western food, and the key word here is good.  You can get Western food, but so far, I haven’t found any that tastes the same.  I had a pastrami Rueben sandwich, and it tasted funny.  I guess I’ll have to keep looking.   There were three American men around my age sitting at the next table, and I couldn’t help but hear their conversation because the tables were very close together.  They were talking about their young Thai girlfriends, and I thought it was pretty funny that this was the topic that dominated their entire conversation....not sports or business or politics.

I went to the Saturday Night Walking Market.  They have markets galore here—the Night Market, which is open every night, I think, the Saturday Walking Market, and the Sunday Walking Market.  At the Saturday Walking Market, there were vendors lining one of the main streets for about a kilometer.  And the crowd was significant.  Every so often there would be a street entertainer working for donations.  That I’m not much of a shopper is a real disadvantage here.  It seems to be a major pastime of Thai people. 

I didn’t see any restaurants in the area where the market was, so I went in search of.  I was looking at the menu of this small Indian restaurant when a Brit who was sitting at one of the two outside tables offered an unequivocal recommendation.  That doesn’t happen often, so I decided to try it.  The food was delicious—the best samosas I’ve ever had and a really excellent butter chicken curry with warm chapati.   The Brit was a regular at the restaurant and joined me for a beer.   The restaurant owner, Lek, was hilarious—he would stop by the table every so often and tell a really corny joke.  My favorite was "I went to see one of the hill tribes yesterday--they had only one left ear."  I was puzzled when I saw him going to the restaurant next door and leaving it with an open beer.  The Brit, Phil, explained to me that many of the small restaurants borrow from each other because they can’t afford to stock everything.  

Today I went on a river cruise…..the name of the river is Ping and it flows from here to Bangkok.  The river was very dirty, but when we got out of the city, there was some pretty scenery.

You can easily find the luxurious next door to squalor here in Thailand.  This home belongs to a rich guy who owns some hotels and restaurants.

And this is his next door neighbor.  These pictures are a little deceiving on size--this one is much smaller than the one above.

There were several people fishing with a simple pole, but this fellow was really serious about it with all his fish traps.

There are billboards of the King and Queen of Thailand all over the place, including the riverside.

I think our guide said that this was a home belonging to one of the royal princesses.  There was a field of sunflowers on the bank in front.

I really love these elegant canopy trees.

Our end point was a Thai farm, which was definitely not a typical farm.  It was a tourist attraction designed to show us the variety of plants and animals on farms in Thailand.

Here's a rice paddy.

And some snoozing boars

There were also bunnies and chickens and all different kinds of fruits, vegetables and herbs.

After the tour, I went to a restaurant that had been recommended by my travel agent and also had really good reviews on Trip Advisor.  It was an Indian/Thai restaurant in a very beautiful setting. 

I had this absolutely delicious steamed seafood curry.  I took out a big spoonful before I took this picture so you could see how the curry “stands up”.  It was steamed in a bowl made of banana leaves and garnished with spiky carrot flowers.

I’ve never had a steamed curry.  I was told it was made with red curry paste and that the dish was partially cooked before it was steamed.  There’s a whole egg in it, which is why it doesn’t have the usual reddish color.  The texture was something like a wet soufflé.  There were shrimp, calamari, sea bass, and mussels in it, and I ate every bite.

For dessert, I had bananas cooked in a syrup of orange and lime juice, sugar and cinnamon, topped with vanilla ice cream….yummy.  

With a bottle of water, this lunch was a whopping 477 baht.  It’s the first time I’ve been charged a 10% service fee and a 7% VAT.   That made it a $16 lunch, but it was worth every baht.  

WHIRLWIND TOUR OF NORTHERN THAILAND

Yesterday I took a whirlwind tour of northern Thailand, which consisted of about 8 hours of bouncing around in the rear seat of a van that was in serious need of a new suspension system—struts or shock absorbers or something—and about 4 hours of being whisked around the several sites we visited.  I won’t do this again.  Today, my back is an aching reminder.  Time for a Thai massage!

Anyway, the highlight of the tour was The White Temple.  Yes, sorry, one more temple, but this one was very atypical of what I’ve seen so far.  It’s a very comtemporary temple, the construction of which began in 1996 and is ongoing.  

The temple is the project of this visual artist, Chalermchai Kositpipat, and this visual image of him greets you at the entrance.

The temple grounds are chock full of sculpture and visual imagery depicting Buddhist teachings about the need to let go of human passions and desires in order to reach nirvana.

The pools in front of the temple are full of these colorful fish. 

The temple itself and the surrounding grounds are beautiful. 

This is the most glamorous outhouse I’ve ever seen.

A warning message about one of the evils in the world than needs to be resisted. 

There are lots of images of demons and skeletons everywhere, and this ocean of hands reaching up from hell is eerie.  

We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, so I borrowed a few photos to show you some of what I saw.  The murals inside were a unique blending of classic Buddhist and contemporary images. 

You wouldn’t expect to see images the collapse of the Twin Towers, Michael Jackson, rocket ships or cartoon characters like Spiderman and Superman in a Buddhist temple.

In one eye of the demon face on this wall is an image of Osama BinLaden and in the other eye an image of George Bush.   

In the “altar area” of the temple was the classic giant Buddha.  There was also a very realistic figure of a monk sitting in the lotus position in front of the Buddha facing the door.  It was so realistic that it took me a few moments to realize it wasn’t a real person.

This mixture of classic and contemporary imagery is very controversial in Thailand.  But the artist is very committed to completing his project and has made provisions for the work to continue after his death.  There’s an art museum on site, filled with his work. 

I was disappointed with how little time we were allowed to explore this very unusual temple.  I had to borrow a number of photos to capture the highlights of the story of this temple, and I had to almost run through the museum to catch a glimpse of the artist’s paintings.

Our next stop was the Golden Triangle—the point where the Ruak River flows into the MeKong, forming a natural boundary between three countries—Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), and Laos.  

 Thailand is in the foreground, the triangle of land is Myanmar, and across the river is Laos.

This, as many of you probably know, is where a great deal of drug trafficking occurred, as well as trading in other black market commodities, like precious gems and gold.  There is still drug activity here, evidenced by the number of police checkpoints we passed as we traveled into and out of this area of northern Thailand.

Here we took a ride up and down the Mekong River on a boat like this one.

This is a casino on the Laos side of the river, aptly named, for those of you who love gambling (and you know who you are), Paradise.

The surrounding mountainous landscape was really beautiful.

And we have Buddha on a boat.

We crossed the river and debarked in Laos to roam around a market there. 

Southeast Asian wares are very colorful.

And I never saw so many purses in one place.  There were probably 20 or so vendors with this many purses on display.

Most unusual were the bottles of whiskey.  Laotians put all kinds of reptiles in whiskey, believing that it gives them benefits like long life, virility, power, etc., depending on the reptile.

This whiskey shared its glass tank with a giant cobra.

A turtle in this one….other tanks had a gecko, an armadillo, and one had the penis of a tiger (guess we know what the imbiber of that one was after).  Beats a worm in a bottle of tequila, I'd say.

There were bottles of it for sale at several vendor sites.  The choices here were various types of snakes.

On we go (I warned you that this was a LONG day).  The next stop was for lunch—very average, but a chance to taste food representative of the Golden Triangle countries.  Then we went on to Mae Sai, which is the northernmost point in Thailand. 

It was another shopping stop, and I ordinarily don’t like these, but I actually bought something here. 

My closest friends know I’m a sucker for rings.  Here’s my latest addition.  It's a dragon, which is a symbol for good luck here in Thailand.  I was told these are rubies, but for $25, I kinda doubt it.  

Our last stop was the village of the Ahka hill tribe, the most downtrodden and impoverished of the hill tribes of northern Thailand.  This tribe came to Thailand from Burma in the early 20^th century to escape persecution. 

The entrance to their village is marked by this wood portal with the wooden statue of a woman on one side...

And a man on the other side…their nakedness is somehow symbolic of fertility.

This village elder greeted us and wanted to sell us bracelets. 

Another woman was selling these very colorful puppets.

And this elderly man was dressed in traditional costume, offering his photo for money.

One of the other highlights of the day was meeting an Italian in Thailand!

This is Fabio next to our tour guide May when she was explaining the reptiles in the whiskey (that's the armadillo).  Fabio is from Verona and works in Human Resources for the Barilla Company (the pasta people), so we had a lot to talk about.  He has been dating a Thai woman who lives in Bangkok for almost three years and travels here three times a year to spend time with her.  He’s trying to get her a visa for Italy, and I can appreciate his frustration with how difficult it is to accomplish that!  (I suggested marriage, but I guess he’s not ready for that.)  I got a lot of good information about his area of northern Italy, as well as his business card and an invitation to call on him when I’m in his neighborhood.  Meeting him almost makes up for my sore back!