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| Chiang Mai, Thailand |
“Afternoon haaaa” from Chiang Mai. This is how Thai women speak. When talking to foreigners, they’ll use just about any English word, followed by “haaaa”. Thai words get the haaaa appended to them as well. This is my second time to Chiang Mai, and much is the same as before. Same great medium-sized city feel, lots of shops at the night market, and many possible excursions to the hills surrounding it.
We arrived in Chiang Mai on the last day of a big Thai holiday (you know, that one). Like the Indians, they celebrate by lighting off fireworks, some of them producing wartime blasts (and the next day’s paper had a story about a kid who blew off his hand and killed his friend standing next to him). Unlike the Indians, they light mini hot air balloons into the sky. A huge cylindrical wick is soaked in something flammable, which is attached by string to a large closed paper tube. The contraption is held steady until enough hot air fills the tube that it begins to float; then it is set free. The sky was covered in distant floating lights, many of which reach heights you’d expect of air balloons. Some of the wicks are wired through time delay to fireworks, which drop out of the sky and explode once the contraption is treetop-high. I have some great pictures of all this, and will post them when I get home (had to archive them in a pinch to free up memory).
We saw a wat. They are called “wats” because that’s what you say when you leave them: “what?” Not that impressive (both the wat and my pun-based joke). It looked like our gompa from Tushita, only the Buddha inside was as high as the ceiling. I mean it would be a great place to meditate, but I’m not sure it deserved a dedicated sightseeing visit. There’s one wat complex in Bangkok we’ll see that I remember being much larger and more impressive.
Today, Kelly and I went to the Maesa Elephant Camp. I’ve never before seen so many elephants in one place. The visit centered around an hour-long elephant show, which was amazing. The elephants paraded around, with mahouts (trainers) on their backs, doing all sorts of tricks and performing many human-esque gestures. They kicked soccer balls (while another elephant tended goal), stacked logs, and flung their trunks around in a huge circle. After this, each was presented an easel and paint brushes, which they used to paint pictures. I wouldn’t have believed it without seeing it; I would have thought the mahouts guide their trunks or something. But sure enough, all by himself, the elephant closest to us drew a picture of a tree with flowers on it. His trunk was as precise as an artist’s hand (though he painted in broad strokes). While the painting was indeed impressive, the most impressive thing I witnessed all day was an excited elephant showing off what in this case can be referred to without hyperbole as his “third leg”.
The elephants we saw today were treated very well, a marked contrast from my previous Chiang Mai elephant visit. At Maesa, the elephants are trained from age 5, and throughout the compound are elephants being fed, bathed, and led around different parts of the camp. Due to the good training, the commands used to control the elephants are spoken or tapped out gently with baton thingees. Of course, there’s still a faint smell of exploitation, but no more than you’d find at any zoo or ranch. We enjoyed the elephants guilt free.
We return home in four days. It feels like so long ago that we were in Greece, or anywhere else we’ve been for that matter. Seemingly odd is that while these early destinations feel like forever ago, home still seems close. Unless my expectations are incorrect (never happens), I’ll snap right back into home life like I was never gone. But put me back in Greece, and I would…okay, well, it would be the same there too…HAPPY?
Back when it was 11 days to go, I reminisced a lot. Now that we have four days left, reminiscing has slowed, and I feel I am hurtling at light speed toward our flight home, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. The days remaining are impossibly miniscule compared to the time we’ve been gone. I am experiencing a slightly surreal feeling at how fast the end has snuck up. When you’ve been gone for as long as we have, it’s hard to fathom that it will just end all of a sudden at a single moment.
That being said, I am really looking forward to home. In that sense, I haven’t changed all that much – I’m still looking forward to the next place, and this time that place is home. But enticing me further are friends, family, and all the comforts and extravagances of home. Without a doubt, the cherry on top of the icing on the cake (which is in a completely separate hemisphere from the straw that broke the camel’s back) is that I need not rush back to work, but can continue to be a total slacker, just domestically. It makes coming home just as fun as leaving. See most of you real soon!
