Moving to Chiang Mai

Doing the tourist thing at Chiang Mai's biggest temple,
 Wat Chedi Luang.  It means, 'Big Chedi Temple'

OK, time for a different sort of adventure, I am not sure this counts as travelling, although I am certainly going to be a long way from England, just not really moving much - I guess, I want to keep the blog updated, and I'm not going to start a new 'not travels with Timmy'!  Anyway, the plan is to spend six months in the same place, honestly I am still a bit tired of the whole moving about thing, so, I wanted somewhere warm, and somewhere I knew I would like, so out of the various places I have been over the last few years I picked Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Obviously a big advantage here is that it is a pretty cheap place to live, I should be able to rent a flat to live in, and also I can sign up for a language class - I really enjoyed doing that in Tenerife, but could only afford a few weeks of lessons there, whereas in Thailand I can study for the whole six months.

The Three Kings Monument at the heart of the city.
The building behind is the City Arts and Cultural Centre.

In fact, if I'm going to be in Thailand for that long a time, studying the language is a good idea as it makes it easier to get a visa.  With a bit of googling I find a school, who promise to deal with the immigration department for me, they email me a somewhat dubious looking form that seems to have originally been entirely in Thai, but has then had English translations jammed in resulting in a mess of a format.  Still I fill it in, send them various scanned images, and also a bank transfer of around £500, which apparently will cover the whole six months of lessons.  I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of scam, will I see anything for my money?  Still, a large wad of documents, covered in various stamps, arrives by Fedex a couple of weeks later, and on taking this to the Thai embassy in London they happily give me a visa - much easier than the process I went through with the Americans I must say.

By the massive communal pool at my new home.

Largely for price reasons, I fly out to Thailand on New Year's Eve, it turns out to be quite a fun way to spend the day, not least because for much of the way I'm on the top deck of a rather awesome Airbus A380 - I think my seat is economy class, but it seems more luxurious that what you would get in business class on some smaller planes.  Nice not to have any hassle regarding a return flight too - I was hoping to be able to show my visa at checkin and so avoid this, but if need be I was prepared to buy a full price return ticket, with a view to then cancelling it.  But in fact nobody mentions any such requirement, hmmm.  The A380 takes me as far as Doha, with much food provided on the way, pretty good for airline food too, and then after a brief stop a second flight goes straight to Chiang Mai, good not to have to go via Bangkok.

Ceremonial bell at Wat Phan Thao.

I have a few days booked in a hotel, I am expecting to have to extend this a little to give me time to sort out somewhere more permanent - in fact, the only delay in moving into a rented condo comes from the time taken to transfer the deposit from my UK bank, if I'd wanted to pay in cash I could have moved in pretty much at once.  Condo suggests something luxurious, in fact it is basically a one bed flat, not much bigger than my hotel room - on the other hand the communal facilities are excellent, lots of comfy, shaded seating areas complete with wifi, a gym, and a truly vast pool.  There is a rather awesome shopping mall next door, in addition to many hi-so (as they say here) shops and restaurants there is an iMax cinema and even an ice rink!  Only real downside is I am a couple of miles out from the centre of town, but I make a virtue of this by buying a bicycle - from a Decathlon no less, this is for sure a properly civilised place.  I look forward to riding out into the country on my days off from school.

Back to school!

Speaking of which, the school turns out to genuinely exist, and indeed seems very professional - they actually have their own series of textbooks, some eighteen in all, written in house.  I'm in a small group of four to five people, who all seem nice, as does our teacher who is very patient with our intial attempts to speak Thai, which seems to be something of a paradoxical language, really hard to grasp in some respects but absurdly simple in others.  I will write more about the language in the future I am sure, but I can tell pretty much from the start that I am going to struggle with the tone thing - there are five different tones, flat, high, low, falling and rising, and thus far I'm not really able to remember which tone the words should have, let alone correctly pronounce them.  Still, all good fun so far, I think I am going to enjoy it here...

Photos to go with this post can be found here