Discovering Chiang Mai, Blessing Its Cockroaches and Our Jutebeutel Friends

The writing on the walls

Lovely squat toilet

I arrived in Chiang Mai at 4:00 am, walking down its streets as the fog lifted and the sun rose. Hookers and drunk farangs still lingered outside bars. Kids and old men were already fishing in the moats that surround the city.

Ali came from Koh Tao a few days later. We explored the city stumbling upon a working temple, monks chanting, sweeping the gutters, hanging their laundry. We longed to befriend one...

We took a tuk tuk to a movie theater to catch a little Thai cinema.

The movie was called Ter Khao Rao Phee ( Threesome ). About a stagehand who was so good looking, guys and girls alike fell for him. His girlfriend took this very hard, until she fell in love with a ghost that lived in their apartment building. 

It was complete with ladyboys, monks with neck beards and many, many bad acted crying scenes. 

After the previews the national ayathem was played. Everyone stood up as a collage of the king played. 

Finding our way out of the closed mall, we walked the 45 minutes back to the city. Stumbling on a night market, squeezed around a glowing 7/11.

5 bhat pork buns, 10 bhat Burma samosas and 30 Bhats for the most beautiful bowl of red curry with egg noodles. Two happy clams, on our plastic stools, on the dirty street corner. 

Walking home we passed a huge cockroach on the street, who looked in bad shape, a broken wing, a little squished? Instead of getting grossed out, we tried on a Buddhist mentality, and blessed the cockroach. Kneeling beside it, "We love you, you're beautiful, live a long healthy life." 

After that we started passing more cockroaches, and rats. Critters and creepy crawlers we'd never noticed before. Maybe blessing the cockroach was too much? We got more than we asked for. We didn't really want to befriend these guys! 

The next day breakfast was muesli, yogurt, beautiful fresh fruit, mixed berry pancakes and "Song lattes kor."

There's is a mountainous national park just outside of Chiang Mai. Deep jungle, temples and dancing waterfalls. We set our sights on Monthathan falls. A tuk tuk took us to the entrance of the park, not really knowing where our destination was, we started to walk. 

Remember how I said it was mountainous? 

Yeah, more like it IS a mountain! We walked for 2 hours straight uphill on the side of the road. People waved and cheered us on as they sped passed. 

We ended up walking 15 miles and finding the beautiful trickling falls! On our way back down, as I'm in mid sentence "Man and its such a small world that..." 

A motorbike yells "Gabbi?!" 

And what a small world it is. 

Two cutie pies from Germany, I'd met in a train station days before. 500 miles away, we'd talked for 10 minutes before my train left and I figured I'd never see them again. 

That night the four of us sat on the roof with a bottle of Thai whiskey. 

They told us how bugs in Germany go *broom broom instead of buzz, so their bug spray was called Antibroom. 

And hipsters carry Jutebeutels (cloth tote bags with hipster art screen printed on). 

I got the most jolly round of Happy Birthday at the clock hit 12:00!! 

For my birthday Ali and I headed off for a cooking class. The class started at a street market, learning about spices and vegetables. Smelling, tasting and touching. Curry pastes, oyster sauce, palm sugar, basils, limes, Thai ginger and an array of flavors that make up the unmistakeable Thai bite. 

In the kitchen, we made spring rolls, coconut soup, hot and sour soup, cashew chicken, pad thai, pounded our own curry paste and made it into soup. Finishing with mango and sticky rice. 

It was amazing to see how simple these complex flavor were to create.

The curry paste was pounded in a mortar and pestle, with fast, beating motions, think Shake Weight. Chet, our teacher said "A man walks by a house looking for a wife if he hear her pounding the curry paste slow, he know she no good wife. If he walk by and hear her boom boom boom, pound fast, he know she good cook, good wife and maybe good at other thing too." 

The rest of the time he walked around looking at our curry, saying "Ahh better wife, keep going."

The thing was we got to eat all the food we cooked. It seemed like a great idea, but the more we cooked, the more we ate and the more we cooked... By the end of the day, button were popped and naps were seen in the near future. 

That night after some Comatose Human time of cooking class recovery, we realized that we had no idea where our German friends were staying or how to find them. We had made plans the night before for birthday celebrations, but now we had no idea where to look for them. 

We decided we would make them a sign and hang it on the street they were sure to walk down. 

Well one "Dear Jutebeutels Friends, meet us at Roof Top!! love Origen and Cali!" sign turned into...6 or 7. We plastered the whole ally with signs of hand drawn arrows and tote bags. 

We had just finished hanging the last one, when they walk up behind us! Oops... Creepy, overkill? 

Nah they loved it. 

The four of us went on a grand adventure. Taking Polaroids, buckets of Sangsom, piggy back rides down empty streets, being strangers who get to pretend that we've been friends forever, because all you have is the moment.

If the first day of "no longer being a kiddo" shed any light onto how my new adult life will be. I say BRING IT! It just might be the bees knees...