Scenes from Chiang Mai

All in all, we spent 18 days in Chiang Mai, between taking care of business, Sean’s trip to the hospital, and Christmas.  On what turned out to be our actual last day in Chiang Mai (as opposed to the days we thought were our last days before we got waylaid), Sean twisted his ankle so bad we contemplated going back to Chiang Mai Ram Hospital.  At that point, we were starting to think it was a sign that we should just move in somewhere.  Luckily, Sean’s ankle was okay after some ice so we got out before something else happened.  But not before taking tons of pictures…

I can't really think of anything else one might need. Yep, Chiang Mai clearly has been "discovered."

Khao soy - red curry, coconut milk, meat and veggies, egg noodles, and fried egg noodles. A delicious northern specialty.

The river in Chiang Mai, as taken as we walked off our khao soy to make room for cheesecake.

Mango cheesecake at Love at First Bite, a bakery owned by a Thai couple who learned how to bake in the United States. Love at first bite, indeed.

Mango and sticky rice. Delicious, whether on the street or all fancy-like. I'm sensing a mango theme to this post.

Iced mocha at Akha Amma coffee cafe. The cafe is a bit out of the way but that's all the more reason to go. Akha Amma is leading the way for fair trade and organic coffee in Thailand. We would have loved to check out their coffee plantation in Chiang Rai, but the dates didn't coincide with our visit to Northern Thailand.

Another reason to check out Akha Amma - gorgeous flowers in their outdoor garden.

My favorite smoothie at Dada Cafe, aptly named "My Favorite Smoothie." Mango, passion fruit, pineapple, and homemade yogurt. I can't tell you how many of these I consumed during our time in Chiang Mai.

The market by the Chiang Mai gate, where we ate dinner on the cheap many a night. Hmmm...this post is turning out to be all about food.

Pad thai from the street vendor on the other side of town.

Nimmanhaemin road - the best place to get away from the tourists and frog ladies. The neighborhood, which is not too far from the university, is filled with trendy shops, restaurants, and clubs.

Speaking of Nimmanhaemin Road, it is where we ended up spending Christmas. The cafe where we ate Christmas dinner was full of locals NOT eating Christmas dinner. Despite this, we thought this balloon popping contest was a Christmas celebration, given that it was next to a Christmas tree, but it turns out it was to celebrate the cafe's anniversary. This is me, kicking butt. I popped three balloons with one dart to win a stuffed puppy.

After dinner, we took our new travel companion out for some dessert. Turns out Puppy likes cheesecake.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, all of the tourists can be found at the Sunday Night Market. But so can lots of locals. The streets are stuffed to the gills during the Sunday Market, but the energy gives you a buzz, the street food is cheap and tasty, and some of the stuff for sale might actually be things you actually want. (I broke months of no jewelery purchases to buy a really nice stone handcrafted necklace that could easily go for 4 to 5 times as much at home).

You didn't think we'd leave Chiang Mai without taking a cooking class, did you? It's practically mandatory but also super fun. Here's Chef Sean, grinding up some curry.

Chiang Mai: The End.

12 reasons to love Bangkok and counting…

I love Bangkok. I know some people hate it. They say it is crowded, noisy, and smoggy. Maybe this is so, but coming off a month in India, Bangkok seemed positively calm, orderly and clean. Bangkok reminded me of an Asian New York City – no matter how many times you go, you can always find somewhere new to explore and something new to do. It being our first time in Bangkok, we barely scratched the surface in our week in the city, but coming up with reasons to love Bangkok was not hard. Bangkok, we’ll be back.

1. Bangkok is where you can get things DONE. We had a big to-do list in Bangkok and accomplished everything with ease. As compared to say, India, where it took us four days just to buy a train ticket out of Delhi. In a matter of days, we finished Christmas shopping for our families; shipped said presents home; bought Christmas cards featuring a monk with sunglasses and who-knows-what sort of message in Thai; bought new shorts for Sean and a new dress for me; got Sean’s hairs cut; replenished our toiletries; bought guidebooks (at a discount, of course) for our southeast Asian travels; and got my camera cleaned at an official Canon center in the MBK mall for a fraction of what it would cost at home.

2. Bangkok is modern. Although other cities in southeast Asia can fool you into thinking they are modernized and sleek, eventually something crazy happens to make you remember that you are in the middle of an area that operates with inefficiencies, corruptions, crazy rigged vehicles and squat toilets. Not that this description couldn’t be applied to Thailand, but for the most part, Bangkok can hold its own better than its regional neighbors against other world-class international metropolises. There’s something comforting about knowing that no matter where you are in southeast Asia, as long as you get back to Bangkok you can accomplish tasks (see number one), experience modern conveniences you can’t find elsewhere, and obtain healthcare if needed on par with what you would receive at home.

3. Bangkok has movies galore. Nothing erases homesickness quite like watching a Hollywood film in the theater. Although we’ve tried to catch good movies on the road before, our timing was never quite right. In Bangkok, however, we had our choice of films from a plethora of theaters, prompting us to go twice in one week. (We saw Eat, Pray, Love and the Pittsburgh-based Next Three Days, if you are wondering. We also caught the Social Network for $2 the following week in Chiang Mai). Just like home, movies in Thailand come complete with giant popcorns and Cokes. Quite unlike home, movies are cheap (about $4), seats are assigned, and everyone gives a standing ovation to the King before the movie starts.

4. Bangkok has cheap, tasty street food… From our favorite pad thai in Thailand for under a dollar, to stir-fries galore, to fresh fruit stands, to fried pancakes with bananas and Skippy peanut butter, to mango and sticky rice, Bangkok is yummy.

5. …and Bangkok has street laundry. We paid way too much at our guesthouse for our first load of laundry before we discovered the coin washing machines randomly stuck outside shops and homes. Awesome.

6. Bangkok has fabulous, cheap massages. $4 neck-and-shoulder massages. Need I say more?

7. Bangkok is shiny and pretty. Whether illuminated by sunshine or street lamps, the wats in Bangkok positively shimmer.

8. Bangkok has a BIG Buddha. I’ve decided that I like my Buddhas big. The bigger, the better, and Bangkok has one of the biggest in Thailand. The reclining Buddha at Wat Pho is HUGE. I was memorized by his giant marble-inlay feet, relaxed posture, and melodic pings of coins hitting metal as Buddhist devotees circled the room.

9. Bangkok has nooks and crannies. While dodging the zany traffic on Bangkok’s main streets and street vendors on the sidewalks can drive you bonkers, the sois (side streets) are quiet and peaceful. You’ll find families living in their shops, children playing in the streets, budding guitarists, tropical flowers, tailless kitties, and you-never-know-what-else in the sois.

10. Bangkok has shopping. From everything under the sun at the enormous Saturday market, to cheap knock-offs on the street, to fancy stores at the malls on Silom Road, to up and coming designers in Little Siam, you can shop until you drop in Bangkok.

11. Bangkok has waterways. I loved discovering random canals lined with tropical greenery tucked between streets, and loved even more that Thais put their rivers to good use by running water taxis up and down to avoid the congested streets.

12. Bangkok has flowers. If there is one thing that makes me happy, it’s colorful flowers, and Bangkok’s nightly market, Pak Khlong Talat, has them in abundance. Strolling through the market, surrounded by tropical flowers on all sides, made me feel like I was in a kaleidescope. The market was hands down my favorite part of Bangkok.  I loved Pak Khlong Talat so much, I’m saving my photos from the market for its own post.

Silom Road at night

A Bangkok canal

Shiny wat

The fancy mall, Siam Paragon

Little Siam

A random soi in our 'hood

Now that's a big Buddha.

Medium sized Buddhas, but bonus points for having a bunch of them.

Street food!

View from Roof View Place during the King's Birthday celebrations

Thailand is Awesome: Day One

To say we were eager to get to Thailand would be an understatement.  Finally, a country where our champagne tastes matches our beer budget.  It is, without question, the mecca for budget travelers.  I have never seen a round-the-world itinerary that didn’t include Thailand.  When I’d read about Thailand in other people’s travel blogs, I was sure it had to be too good to be true.  There had to be embellishment to the stories of cheap prices.  The rooms really couldn’t be that nice.  The street food had to be sketchy.  The people couldn’t be that friendly.  The sun couldn’t shine that much.  It didn’t take long for us to realize that everything we had heard was true.  There’s a reason Thailand is on everyone’s list and it is because it is awesome.

I knew it was going to be awesome right from the start. Our day started with watching the most amazing sunrise over Thailand on our overnight flight. Although I couldn’t accurately capture the colors of the sunrise in a picture, I will always remember the way the sun created bands of light in order of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. I stared at the colors until they were out of sight.

When we landed in Bangkok, the sun was shining and everything looked clean, bright, and modern. Our taxi driver took us straight to our chosen hotel (Roof View Place) without any detours or trouble. We spent some time just marveling at how clean and bright our room was. While this particular room at $26 was the most expensive we’d have in Thailand (not counting Santa’s upgrade on Christmas), it had anything we could want – free wifi, a big, filling free breakfast, free water, and free information about travelling around. As we’d come to learn, you get a lot for your money in Thailand. Nice rooms can be had even for less than $10, and spending just another $5 or $10 can really up the ante.

By the end of our first day in Thailand, we’d discovered our favorite hole in the wall pad thai place serving the tastiest pad thai we’ve had to date for under a dollar (yes, it is true – dinner for under a dollar!), ate fresh tropical fruit, also under a dollar (cut right before you under sanitary conditions!), and had a neck and shoulder massage for $4 each. Yep, Thailand had us at day one, and still has us. We exhausted our 30 day visa and plan to return later in our trip – we suspect as good as it was so far, the best may be to come.  There’s still beaches to sit on, after all. The only knock on Thailand is that it can lull you into a routine* and you have to share the country with all those other tourists and ex-pats who love it too.

*(I know, I know.  Isn’t that what we wanted after India?  During our travels, it seems when things are uncomfortable, they are usually more exciting.  When things are comfortable, boredom can creep up – albeit a different type of boredom from the work/eat/sleep/lather/rinse/repeat routine at home.  Just goes to show – no place is perfect, whether you are home or away, and you have to enjoy and appreciate the good parts no matter where you are.  Luckily, in Thailand, there are a lot of good parts.)

Relaxing in our room at Roof View Place, basking in the clean sheets and sunshine

Despite eating it multiple times, I didn't get a great photo of our favorite pad thai. Don't worry, if our travels route us through Bangkok again as I suspect they will, we'll be back. This is a similar glass noodle version by the same lady.

Not us, but you get the point: cheap massages are everywhere. We preferred to not get ours right in public though.

Welcome to God’s Country

We’d heard time and time again that southern India is much more laid back than northern India. As we landed in the southern Indian state of Kerala, we were hesitant. Having just left the blissful Andaman Islands, we weren’t really in the mood to dive back into the madness we had experienced in the north.

We can’t speak for all of southern India, but take it from us, Kerala is definitely not the north. On the way to our guesthouse from the airport, we were very confused. Why was the cars driving in their own lanes? Why weren’t they cutting off other cars? And most importantly, why is no one honking?

The state of Kerala is actually the world’s only democratically elected communist government and is one of India’s most progressive states. We hear that its not all rosy in Kerala – many breadwinners have to live abroad in the UAE and send money home to their families in order to make ends meet – but Kerala has made great strides in things like improving health care, raising literacy rates, and reducing litter. Keralans are proud of their state and have deemed it to be “God’s Own Country.”

A higher power certainly has bestowed beauty and lush tropical greenness upon Kerala. Our first introduction to Kerala was in the town of Fort Cochin, which is in the running with Kolkata to be my favorite city in India. (Not counting the fabulous Andaman Islands, of course). Like Kolkata, you can tell that the British once made their presence known in Fort Cochin. The Dutch and Portuguese also made their mark. Fort Cochin has a big Christian presence, and it was there that I saw an Indian nun for the first (and only) time.

Once we eliminated the small problem of ants trying to take up residence in our backpacks, we kept adding days onto our stay in Fort Cochin. We kept finding reasons to dawdle: an adorable little teahouse with Indian teas and a respectable death by chocolate cake; movie shoots to try to work our way into as extras; tropical flowers to photograph; fresh Keralean pineapple; waterside boardwalks with headbutting goats, Chinese fishing nets, ancient sprawling trees, and 1 rupee scales that tell you about your weight loss; Sean’s new Indian friends George and Justin at the old-school internet cafe; a cooking class to learn more about Keralean cuisine; an aryvuedic massage (which actually turned out to be NOT a good idea, but more on that later); dinner at a trendy, modern cafe cooked by local women; simultaneous pickup cricket and soccer games to watch; fantastic, delicious prawns from the seafood market, cooked with ginger and garlic; rickshaws decorated like Ferraris; real chicken briyani, finally; and tours by a guide named Magic Johnson. (And yes, I know there’s a lot of food on that list – we had some of our best meals in India in Fort Cochin).

Catholic school girls at Santa Cruz Basilica.

Teapots at, well, Teapot, where it is always tea time.

Cricket and soccer at once. Because it is India, and one game wouldn't be enough.

Headbutting goats (which surprisingly, was a common sight).

Old school Chinese fishing nets.

Curious bystanders at the movie shoot (which turned out not to be a Bollywood flick).

Dinner at our Kerelean cooking class.

Sean and Magic Johnson.

Fort Cochin was enchanting, and we could have stayed longer, but the backwaters and beaches in God’s country were calling…

Savoring India’s Cocktails

We ended up in Kolkata by accident. With the trains booked up in the towns popular with tourists in the north due to locals traveling home for Diwali, we discovered flying to Kolkata was the fastest way towards our next destination, the Andaman Islands. And so we found ourselves spending Diwali in Kolkata.

It seems in the wake of every town formerly ruled by the British is a town with a confused identity. People say Calcutta, but when the name is written, the official name, Kolkata, is used. Just like when we were in Derry/Londonderry, I never really knew what to call it, because use of either term can be laden with political allegiances.

Setting aside any politics of colonialism, we discovered – and later confirmed in Fort Cochin – there’s some alluring about adding a splash of European to the India straight up we previously had been experiencing. It’s a mix that blends well – Kolkata felt exotic, but refined.

It is a testament to just how charming we found Kolkata to be that its charms were evident right away as we raced through its streets in a cab from the airport. We watched tall, leafy trees and stately buildings fly by in a blur. We whipped through one neighborhood, with alleyways draped in flowers, lights and shrines, so fast it was almost as if we dreamed it. We tried to locate the neighborhood on our own but could never figure out where it was.

In other cities, the only thing that assuaged my safety fears in traffic was that the roads were always too crowded to gain much speed. Not Kolkata. There, the wide, tree-lined boulevards – a leftover from the British – are raceways. Barreling down the street, our taxi driver didn’t slow down for pedestrians or stopped traffic. When traffic got in his way, he floored it into the oncoming lane. When pedestrians walked into the street, he didn’t slow down, but merely laid on the horn until they scurried away a second before impact.

We spent the next day becoming smitten with Kolkata. We loved Kolkata for any number of reasons. We loved strolling down Kolkata’s wide, broad boulevards and the stately, leafy trees that lined them. We loved the colonial architecture and the beautiful flowers decorating Kolkata’s classiest and biggest monument, the Victoria Memorial. We loved the tangy Bengali food and will always remember Kolkata as the place where we first tasted India’s sweet baby bananas. We loved the book stores with piles of English books and magazines, which allowed us to stock up on beach reads. We loved the shrines on the side of the roads, ranging from impromptu to elaborate. We loved the way we were mostly invisible as tourists, even though it meant cab and rickshaw drivers drove away if they couldn’t figure out where we wanted to go. We loved that you can find oasis in Kolkata and the city’s relative calmness after Delhi, Agra and Varanasi.

But mostly, I think we fell in love in Kolkata because of the city’s retro yellow British cabs. There’s thousands of them all over the city, zooming up and down Kolkata’s wide boulevards. All of the things above created a fantastic atmosphere, but the cabs really pulled it all together. I felt like we were transported back sixty years into a totally different India than the India we previously had been experiencing.

Our exhilarating arrival and our long day drinking in Kolkata’s atmosphere added up to a rather heady experience during our quick visit. The cheapest flights to the Andaman Islands, our next desintation, was either two days or ten days after we arrived. We would have loved to explore Kolkata further, but sometimes it is just best to savor just one cocktail at a time and not ruin a good thing by getting smashed, lest the honeymoon period be over and you wake up hung over. Maybe someday, we’ll try Kolkata’s cocktail again.

A couple relaxing in one of Kolkata's green spaces.

Pretty flowers at the Victoria Memorial.

The Victoria Memorial, built for Queen Victoria.

Colonial buildings and tropical trees.

Tiles at one of the Jain temples in town.

A tea wallah hands out chai in clay cups. When you're finished, you smash the cup on the street and return the clay to the earth.

One of the colorful shrines dotting the city.

Kolkata by night, with lights for Diwali.

Diwali celebrations mostly take place in the home, but we did see crackers go off and flowers and candles placed outside homes and businesses.