Chiang Mai : Retrospective

Silver working - well, probably aluminium actually - at the Silver Temple.

Seems I rather let the blogging from Thailand peter out a bit, and now I am back in the UK, I should really bring the story of my time in the Land of Smiles to some sort of conclusion.  I guess, after being in the same place for five months or so, it became a bit tricky to think of much new to say - I don't know if the internet needed any more of me complaining about how ridiculous the Thai language is, and while there were an awful lot of places to go and see in the area around Chiang Mai, by the end of my time there I was going back to locations I'd already seen and indeed written about here.

Company!

Indeed - for a week or so in June, my friend Chris visited from the UK, and so I spent the time trying to pack in the highlights of the region for him and generally act as a tour guide, which was fun, but again obviously stuff I'd seen before in the main.  We did get to Doi Inthanon, Chris hoping to see some birds, however this is the rainy season... actually generally speaking the rain hasn't been too bad, just the odd heavy shower.  But during our trip to Thailand's highest mountain it rains fairly solidly, which apparently leads the birds to stay out of sight.  Never mind, I do also take advantage of his presence to do a few things I wouldn't normally, such as an excellent evening cookery course, a night of 'Kantoke Dancing' which is good fun, each of the local hill tribes taking time to do their thing, and even the city's famous ladyboy cabaret - it is in fact quite tasteful, and you can see that the performers are having a good time.

Not a bad Panaeng, though I say so myself.

But anyway - pluses and minuses of my stay here.  Really, there are going to be a lot more pluses here, I already miss the place, it was just such a pleasant city and indeed country to live in.  Fantastic, cheap food, beautiful surroundings, friendly people and really I got to live quite a luxurious lifestyle on my meagre budget.  Probably the best thing about Chiang Mai was going to school, crazy though the language itself is.  All my teachers and fellow students were fun to spend time with and while I may have struggled with Thai, learning such a different language, or trying to, certainly gave me a new perspective on linguistics, and had me wondering why English has some features and Thai has others.

Minuses - well I guess a minor annoyance was the way I started getting regular fines from the traffic police for not having a Thai driving license - but this was actually sorted pretty easily, I didn't even need to do any sort of test, just show my English license.  But really the major downside of being here really is the language.  Seriously I was one of the best students at the school, but progress was agonisingly slow, and when study is the only 'productive' thing I'm doing this gets a bit depressing after a while.  The way that even after six months, I could try talking to Thai people and just get a blank look, was really a little bit sad.  A consequence there of course that it was really quite hard to have any sort of conversation with anybody, and while I am generally pretty self reliant I actually did start to miss talking to people - it was good that Chris came when he did.

So... the question is now, should I try going back and continuing to bang my head against learning Thai, or just give it up as a bad job?  There are other places to go after all.  Still, not going to worry about that just now, rather, let me get back to where this blog started, namely long walks in the UK.  And pubs.

The ladyboy cabaret.

Photos to go with this post can be found here