The Surface

Chiang Mai has a foot work all its own. If you should choose not to study, most of it will dance right by. You'd never even know it. This is the surface. A comfortable enough place to live. After all it's prepared for just this reason, in just this way, so that you will stay on it and ask no questions. If you walk the Night Baazaar you are sure to find whatever materials please you and at a price you will feel is fair. But a few more blocks to Chinatown and you'll feel every bit like chum in a shark tank, doing the stuffed wallet saunter through the valley of money wolves, all dressed neatly in their varying gimmics. Pants, three dollars, shirts often one and a little of the special spice just under a twentieth of the state side price. Meal's at three quarters, beer's at the same and women not much more then a steak dinner and thirty USD, this is reality in Lanna. If this is not your speed, you can walk a hundred Wats and pick up antique Buddhas from one inch to six feet all day long. Jade beads, crystal, silver and gold all slung on the market. It's easy to find yourself full on relics, no hands left to carry and ghost towns for pockets. Want a blessing, drop twenty baht in the bucket and this no problem. Good luck is plentiful at small prices in Thailand.

But there is more to Chiang Mai then gimmics and relics. More than the tourist hungry trecks, rock climbing and soaring over jungles. Look down and there are depths little imaginable, and above are dizzying heights. There are good men and bad, both controlling and partaking in the underbelly landscape making up the meet of this northern palace. I have come across both. It's been all to easy to lay back and forget that I am barely more than handfuls of red bills to the people I have met. They like me. But then, why wouldn't they... I pay them a fair price. Often much more then fair. Buy a few rounds and you'll be called friends, come back with friends for dinner and a few more, they'll call you family. Rather to believe them or not depends on what you came here to feel. It feels good when people are welcoming. When they are just as welcoming to the fat, half bald, greasy, pony-tailed chester negotiating sex at the other end of the bar, you may feel differently about your affections. But this attitude may not be so negative. If you treat them well, they will do the same almost without question. Where in the US, my mother wont watch a movie starring Tom Cruise because she doesn't like the way is in the tabloids. Here, you pay your bill and act like a good Falang, nobody cares what you do. You go to the right bar and you will safely find what ever you are looking for. But, it must be the right bar, taking care of the right people, taking care of you. It pays to observe here, if you watch close you will find the real price on everything. The truth here, is not far from the surface, should you choose to scratch. But, be careful, you may really enjoy what you find...

Somwhere in Time

It's morning. Sweet fuck all its come on me quick. After pounding as many beer Chang's as possible in pursuit of some form of sleep my stomach is left bent, and my head nearly broken. There is a special kind of dirt caked in every corner of this of this train car named uncomfortable. Perhapse the morning meal will help to settle this dispute between my body and the now rotten lager infecting my system. On a positive note, one day in Thailand and I haven't caught the travelers "Shit your pants". This fact is enough to perk me up a bit, along with constant shit can swaggery-jig our boxcar is doing. Our train and its tracks, like confused tango partners on the second days lesson, just can't seem to figure it out. I stand up in an attempt to hit the bathroom, a lovely squatter toilet between somewhere and forever. A place I can never seem to find when my brain has packed all it's shit and leaves in search of something better. At every stop, street vendors board the train hustleing everything from sun dried stink to deep fried whatever. With every inch we creep away from Bangkok I grow fonder of Thailand. We have now been on this train for nearly ten hours and there is no end in site. Passing village after unnamed village, nothing on the map to help us catch our bearings. Fires burn up and down the tracks so close that my hand catches a quick singe. I whip it back screaming out, everyone on the train turning to see what the Falang is on about now. Shack after rickety shack drifts by my open window until peices of something brilliant begin creeping out of the jungleSeveral hours pass and we roll into Lampoon Lampong. The first place resembling real civilization as well as the first city on our map. With any luck, we'll be in Chiang Mai sometime between never and now, give or take an hour...

Border town fuck around

Bangkok... A mad jumble of bright lights, slick fashion and dim futures. This place thrives only on the hustle, the worlds greatest college for con men. Six minutes in this city takes six hours to wash off and I feel as though just being here has changed my core. Brings me back to dark days and bare knuckles in Carson City, as this is the only place that compares to the brute trickery of Thailand's evil empire. Lucky enough, I'll only remain in hell for a few long hours... or as it turns out, a few more then anticipated. Not one hour into Thailand and we've fallen victim to our first scheming fuck off. Two first class sleeper car tickets on one late night train to the northern Kingdom of Chaing Mai. Simple enough. It is explained to us we must show up at twenty minutes to nine o'clock, once again, simple enough. "Now is very popular time Chaing Mai, all hotel sold out. This ok, I get you nice room, come me." Barks the 4' 9" teenage hustler selling us these tickets, I can taste the fuck around in the air. "No thanks" otherwise translated, Fuck you. With this we're off screaming into the Siam night like two fat Falang
(Literal translation "French", but they call everyone this and somehow don't think we can tell they are talking about us) wallets just waiting to be plucked, fried and stuffed in the mouth of this leering hungry metropolis. Weather its the Bang or the Kok I don't know. We return a half hour early, just in case, only to find our tickets were for the seven o'clock train. We are kindly informed that we will recieve no refund and the only available seats for the nine o'clock train are third class. I puke in my mouth and come just shy of spitting it in this assholes smug fuck face I'm so angry. First thoughts, Fuck Thailand, get me to Cambodia... So we wait, and board a rickity shack on wheels headed for something better. A hard jolt begins our fifteen hour journey in filthy seats and hanging stink. Leaving behind the mad meth fueled banter of what must be the border town on the lake of fire. What lies ahead in Chaing Mai? If only I could have imagined...