A day at the market

Another update, another caveat about the blog. I'll try to update frequently but if you are reading this you know I'm extremely perezoso, so I guarantee at least one post a week. As is I'm facing a major update deficit as every other day features a mind blowing, perspective changing, beautiful life experience. Currently, for example, my host mother is driving us to an elephant park. They play soccer, paint, and give rides.
But I'll write about what has happened, as I'm much clearer about that than the future. So for starters, on wednesday there was a school trip to the Chiang Mai art and cultural center and the got luang, the huge ass chinese/thai market in the middle of town. Five floors in two buildings crammed with stalls back to back are the epicenter of the market but it stretches multiple blocks, god only knows how many.
The Art and Cultural center was a little underwhelming, or perhaps just overshadowed by the market. I'd already visited briefly on my first day in Chiang Mai, but this time we were sent out on a scavenger hunt for things written in Thai. We can't read thai yet but we've been taught to ask what is this/what is this called. So Andrew (my co-scavenger) and I set out. Andrews a fun musician who rocks just a little harder than my fat indie-ass.
What can I say about the market? Having been conned in the grand bazaar of Istanbul I'd think I at least would be a little blase about these things, but it's unlike any place I've ever been. For one thing, it's a carnival of smells, not all of them pleasant. One of the enormous buildings is primarily a food market and of that food primarily aquatic, formerly living food. Mostly formerly living at least (seeing hundreds of eels squirming in buckets makes me wish more of the food was dead). While the reek from the stalls is objectionable, the place is a feast for the eyes. I saw more species of squid for sale in an hour than I've seen in my life. Dried out, inflated puffer fished hanging from stalls looked really cool. We weren't required to buy fish though, so we only stopped to ask directions to our next goal. Beyond the sea of dead fish is the flower market (market is Da-lat in thai, by the way). The flower market is outside of the shelter of the warehouses, so a motley of different tarps and canopies do there best to keep out the elements. Water drips down unpredictably everywhere, but the flowers and flower arrangements are beautiful. I'll  have to go back for pictures. After being pointed a dozen different ways we get  single , beautiful petal of some strange flower. Kelsey thinks it looks like a four pointed ionic column head but I think it looks more art deco.  I digress. Other things purchased at the market: strange, dubious sausage; fried mealworms which taste mainly of salt; skirt like things for changing clothes in the jungle; delicious rambutan fruit (a beautiful red bodied ovoid that fits in your hand and has green hairs all over, the locals call it gnok); and perhaps a few more that are more mundane. There's all sorts of things in the market though, like multiple firework stands selling munitions grade bottle rockets. Everything is so cheap that I can't tell if I'm being screwed or not because the screw the foreigner price is about half the cost of the item in America. God I love the exchange rate.
Another post to follow, concerning fish farms and dancing shrimp

Thailand Ho!

Alright, I meant to post something sooner but the five page entry I wrote seemed trite and dull. I typically find blogs to be an exercise in ego and I doubt I'll buck that trend but it seems there's some demand so here we go.

A week ago I took 25-ish hours of flights from Boston to LA, LA to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Chiang Mai, the ancient capitol of the Lanna kingdom and the second city of Thailand. Over the course of several days of insomnia and late night bathroom trips my body got used to being here. The program I'm here with, ISDSI, has put me with a host family in the heart of old Chiang Mai, possibly because of the dozens of references I made to loving history in my application. If so, kudos to you ISDSI.

My host family is incredibly nice, to the point of threatening my already dubious health. You see, in Thailand it's a sign of the ability of a mother that her children are fat. A good mother can make her children fat by virtue of her cooking. This is the opposite of what I'd been hoping for, but the food is too good to gripe about. The ladies of our group were understandably scandalized when our program director told us that we should expect to be weighed at some point soon. The mothers take their jobs seriously.

That's a decent first post, more to come soon about a trip to the Da-lat.