Chiang Mai, Cooking Class and generally just enjoying being here

Hello again!

I'm back in Chiang Mai after a rather eventful week that involved a 6-hour bus trip each way, purchasing a tripod and meeting a really cool monk (and taking his picture!).

Chiang Mai is a really nice city. Very Thai, with the crazy traffic, millions of massage houses (I won't call them massage parlours), 7-Elevens on every street corner and lots of tour offices. And of course, an even higher temple-to-population ratio than Kyoto! (I should look that up, it might even be true) When I first arrived, it was the last day of a 6-day festival at Wat Chedi Luang, one of the principal wats in town and quite close to my guest house, so when I wandered by it was chock-full of people all making offerings, burning stuff, throwing cups of water over the Buddha statues and doing the one-coin-in-each-bucket thing down the length of the wat. There was music and live dancing which was all very exciting.
There were lots of street food stalls as well, I tried some strange mini/pancake biscuit things with coconut puffy cream and sprinkles of dried mango. I gotta say, once you start eating what the locals eat, it gets pretty exciting! i stumbled upon a local market the other day and ended up eating green jelly-worm type things that tasted like pandan, with coconut cream on it. Was actually really nice and only 5B :)


When I got back from Daeng's motorbike tour I did a one-day Thai cooking class. That was heaps of fun; we learned to make 6 dishes (pad thai, papaya salad, tom yum, red curry paste, Chiang Mai noodle and mango sticky rice) plus we got to eat it all which meant by the end of the day we all had food comas haha!! But feeling extremely satisfied with out cooking skills and full bellies. I made friends with a few people on the course and we hit the markets afterwards, then stopped somewhere for a few beers and a game of pool.

Look at my awesome hat! Eating papaya salad

Chiang Mai Noodle - basically red/penang curry noodle soup with fried noodles on top.
My favourite!

Tom Yum Goong - spicy & sour soup with prawns

I spent the next couple of days happily walking around town and exploring Chiang Mai's back alleys. The old town isn't very big, it's laid out like a square with a moat around it. There used to be a city wall but most of it's gone now, a few of the corners still remain and the large gates are also still there, quite well-preserved. The Tha Phae gate, on the Eastern side, is closest to me (and the tourist area) and on Sundays the pedestrian square around it it turns into a MASSIVE street market of epic proportions, which carries on all the way down Ratchadamnoen street. It's a lot of fun, there are buskers and food stalls and any type of souvenir you could possibly want. All the temples along this street open up their grounds and food stalls set up inside, average price for dinner 25-30B (50 - 75cents). The atmosphere is really buzzing, it's not just tourists but locals enjoy it too. Down the far end it gets less touristy and it's where locals buy clothes and other things.



It was at this market that i had my first bout of inspiration. The photography was becoming a bit of a chore - just going through the motions - but a few vendors were selling the most amazing collections of Chiang Mai-themed photos which I found really beautiful. I snuck a photo ;)

The next day I took my 50mm out for a spin and focused on shooting creatively. I shot a collection I call "Yellow" at a local wat, here are some of the highlights:

I met this monk "Ben" at Wat Bupparam, he spoke really good English and was happy to chat with me for a while and tell me all about Buddhism and being a monk. He's been a monk for 18 years.

I stumbled across a little gallery on my second day of wandering, the guy there was a painter/photographer and I spent a fair bit of time admiring his work and talking to him about photography in Thailand. It's things like this that keep you inspired to shoot; it does get hard to stay motivated, markets and temples all start to look the same after a while. He showed me some photos he'd taken of giant Buddha statues at Sukothai, the ancient capital of Thailand. It's about a 5-6 hour bus ride South of here. He put the idea in my head, which was consolidated later that night, to pack an overnight back and get my ass on a bus to Sukothai in the morning. So I did. More about that in the next post!

But let me just say that I am loving being on the road, loving independent travel, loving not having a fixed schedule! The freedom is going to my head, I think, but I really enjoyed the spontaneity of just getting on a bus and spending a night in a random town.

Ciao for now, hope everyone back home is doing well and it isn't too cold in NZ!

Love,
May Lee