The Journey Pen: Trip to Chiang Mai

January is winter in Thailand. Finally mornings are a nice and cool 20̊C. One morning my job was to welcome the kids to school. To my surprise the students showed up freezing. Many of them were actually shaking they were shivering so violently. One adult told me he was so cold the night before he’d slept under his three warmest blankets and still couldn’t get much sleep. I told him I’d had a similar problem the night before. I couldn’t sleep because I was too hot so I’d turned the air conditioner on.

Some of you may be unfamiliar with the ladyboy part of Thai culture. Ladyboys are males that take estrogen tablets to make them more feminine. The pills cause various lasting changes that make them appear and act like girls. Many of the guys in school do it to get attention. The more feminine they are the more attention they get. I thought I was used to this aspect of Thai culture until I went to Chiang Mai where some North Americans have become ladyboys. I was at one place where a 60 year old white man wearing a dress started hitting on me. This apparently was too much for my insides and I had to leave really fast to avoid throwing up.

Chiang Mai is a city in Northern Thailand that is full of tourists. I knew I was in a tourist city for a couple reasons. First, nobody stopped what they were doing to stare at me, which was a nice change and secondly lemon flavoured ice cream was yellow again! Thais don’t seem to understand that lemons and limes have two different flavours so everything lemon flavoured in Tak is green.

Finding a guest house in Chiang Mai was a lot more difficult than expected. Heather and I booked a guest house but when we arrived it didn’t have two rooms so we figured it would be easy to find another and went looking. Ten full guest houses later we went to an internet café to phone about vacancies. It was a brilliant move we made a reservation at the nearby Gusto House no problem. On google maps it was literally right beside the 7th century guest house. We found 7th Century but Gusto wasn’t there. We asked the owner of 7th Century where Gusto was but he had never heard of it. Heather and I had tripled checked its location on google maps so we knew we’d arrived at the right place. The owner phoned Gusto for us and found that is was on the other side of town, so he gave us new directions. It was almost 11 PM when Heather and I set off following his directions. This time we ended up at Mountain View guest house. We asked this new guest house if they’d ever heard of Gusto, they hadn’t. Exhausted, we asked if they still had rooms available. They did; so we slept there, unaware that our stay would radically alter our Chiang Mai experience.

In the morning, Heather and I found out that we coincidentally were staying at a Christian run guest house. We also bumped into a group of Canadians that were on a mission’s trip from Steinbach Bible College in Manitoba. They invited us to join them on a trip to an orphanage, so we spent the day with them and had a great time.