last night in chiang mai

oh my god i will never need to eat ever again.
i just got back from my first day of cooking school and it's going to be one
energetic tapeworm that gets me back to my pre-thailand weight. (luckily or not
there have been no inklings of intestinal distress, so i will just have to go
back to california my usual, if slightly plumper, self.)
the cooking school is a pretty impressive operation; it's (according to itself)
the original of the many cooking schools in Chiang Mai, and apart from a half hour
at the beginning of faffing around getting everyone's name checked off lists etc
it was an astonishingly slick set-up. we started off piling into trucks to go to
the local market, where we had a little tour of ingredients and spices and how
to pick out good vegetables and what everything was, which was fun (and there were
lots of things that i have actually seen at asian markets before but not bought
because i had no clue what they were and how to use them, but now i have enough
of an inkling about a lot more of the mystery veggies than i did that i will be
braver, i think, when cooking at home. i am pleased because i also found some palm
sugar in solid dollops, which is hard to find in santa rosa, for anyone who cares...
after the trip to the market we piled into trucks again and went to the cooking
school itself, which is a semi-outdoor complex set amidst beautiful gardens. we had
a set menu of six dishes which we were learning to do today, and for each one we would start out in the gleaming demo classroom, where we would watch the teacher make the dish. everyone got a bite of his version to see what we were aiming for,
and then we would head out to the student workspace, where, on our own individual
section of countertop, all our ingredients were pre-prepped and laid out for us;
you cook on your own individual little wok on your own individual stove, and the teacher walks around saying "you add shrimp now! time for garlic! go go go! look good yum!" and then when you've made the dish you go and sit down in the outdoor eating area and eat it (and indeed everything was good yum). by the time you're done eating,
the demo classroom has been cleaned and set up for the next dish with all the teacher's ingredients prepped, and by the time you've watched him make his version of dish number two, your little work area has been magically cleaned up and your next set of ingredients is there waiting for you, and by the time you go back to the eating area to eat dish number two, all the dirty plates from dish number one have been whisked away by the cooking school elves, so it's all quite the well-oiled machine, and everything was immaculately clean. the main guy who runs the school is a thai chef who is married to an englishwoman, and his accent is the most hilarious combination of thai and birmingham i have ever heard. also, i have a massive crush on a french couple who are in my class. they are both in the film industry in strasbourg, and she is plump and about thirty and has dimples and a little brunette pixie haircut and sunglasses on top of her head, and he is tall and lumbering and has shaggy dark hair and a scruffy beard and his english is sweetly wonky and hers is total rockstar but with a strong accent and they call each other and say buf, il fait chaud, hein? and i wanted to take them both home with me. so cute.
anyway. i can't remember where i was with talking about the jungle trip and i can't be bothered to go back and look - first day four hour hike into dense green lush wet bird/frog/cricket filled hilly hot humid vines everywhere teak trees banana trees purplyblue hills in the distance towards the burmese border very pretty. butterflies absolutely everywhere, landing on your backpack, skin, hair, they don't seem to care, and (at night) bohemoth moths (bohe-moths?) the size of small bats flapping around. oh that's right, i remember where i finished last entry, complaining about george's snoring. yes, so i ended up the group trip officially Not A Fan of the two Americans
on the trip - passive aggressive psycho neurotic Minnesotan girl and fat slob snoring boring drunken obnoxious overgrown fratboy new yorker/taiwanese boy. boo on them. they were both tedious tedious people and we do not need to spend any more blogspace talking about _them_.
much more fun were the aussies (not a lot in the way of IQ points to share between them, but they were always game and in a good mood) and the greek-canadian guy, jacob, about whose creative facial hair i complained in a previous entry, who turned out to be actually something of a sweetie, very outgoing, very cheerful, very inclusive of everyone, very sunny personality. i liked him. (he also gets points for a) speaking/reading/writing fluent greek - cool, no? and b) having majored in byzantine history in his just completed undergraduate degree, although i suspect
the employment options in that field have got to be a bit thin on the ground at the moment. but i digress.
day two we woke up, swim in river, and trek to elephant camp (i have started doing the thai thing of leaving off all definite articles and not conjugating any verbs properly. hee.) picnic lunch of top ramen noodles and vegetables while simultaneously being ambushed by scary hill tribe ladies with baskets of handicrafts that they were very, very, very persistent that we should look at and buy. it was the first time that i had encountered the really aggressive sales thing here, and it was a little disheartening - i remember in india we just got to the point (or at least i did) of not wanting to talk to people, or even make eye contact, because it seemed that everyone wanted into your wallet and it was just exhausting. i want to buy
stuff because i do believe in supporting cottage industries, especially women's industries in the developing world, etc., but i hate reinforcing the aggressive sales pitch thing. i need to learn how to say in thai, if you back off and just let me look at your bracelets/bags/mangoes/whatever, i promise i will buy something, but if you continue to shove the basket in my face and shake the bracelets/bags/mangoes under my nose while grabbing my sleeve and saying see very pretty delicious cheap cheap cheap how much you pay you want two three four? i will definitely NOT buy anything. to be fair, this does not seem to be typical of thai markets.
after lunch/handicraft assault, we went for an ELEPHANT RIDE! so fun. a gang of scruffy teenage boys brought the elephants from the bit of jungle where they hang out, giving them a bath in the river on the way, and then we climbed up onto a kind of platform thing, and the elephants dock next to the platform thing and you climb on (stepping on their head! crazy!! but they don't even seem to notice, let alone mind, so i suppose it's OK). you sit on a kind of wooden chair howdah business, and the elephant driver jumps on (he gets to sit on the elephant's head, with his legs just behind its ears) and off you go. i took my shoes off so i could rub the elephant's neck with my bare feet, and their skin feels really papery and dry and bristly, which was unexpected. (i have distinct memories of being taken for an elephant ride at London Zoo by my godfather when i was about ??three?? (any parental corroboration
on that one?) and it was fun to repeat the experience. we crashed around through greenery and back and forth across the river several times, and sploshed through the mud alongside the river, and every so often the elephant in front would let loose a basketball sized turd or develop a gigantic, but gigantic, boner, and it was all a great big thrill.
we stayed that night at another little hilltribe village (the Lahu tribe), and this one was fun because the kids, who normally are all at boarding school during the week, all arrived back home for the weekend via bamboo raft down the river. our guide had suggested bringing treats for the kids, and i just could not bring myself to buy sweets (sugar that will make them fat and corrupt their normal diet and ruin their teeth, plus plastic wrappers that will end up as litter in the jungle) and then i had remembered how much fun it had been drawing at pont neuf in france with all those kids, so i bought little cheapy paper notebooks and pencils for them (all biodegradable, please notice :)). it didn't go quite as well as i'd hoped - i sat on a log with my sketchbook and started to draw a picture of the river, since most kids will at least come over and see what you are doing, and i thought maybe i could interest them in trying to draw as well, but i think they have gotten used to the thing of foreigners arriving with treats for them, so as soon as i gave the first few notebooks and pencils out, a whole horde arrived and started tearing into my bag wanting more. then you're in a hard position - i don't want to reinforce the bad behavior of taking other people's stuff without asking, but of course i do want them to have the notebooks, and communicating all that without a common language (so far my thai is limited to hello, thank you, my name is jessica, yes, no, good, and the numbers 1-10, which isn't really adequate for subtleties of effective discipline in school-aged children). anyway. most of them buggered off with their notebooks, and some notebooks met a soggy dirty fate in the river depressingly quickly, but there was a hard-core coterie of about four kids who did seem genuinely interested and so we sat and drew together for about an hour. common elements: suns, elephants, and motorbikes. i took my camera out to take pictures of some of them with their drawings, and then they wanted to play with the camera; one of them in particular was really into the camera, and it was eerie how quickly she picked up how to switch from camera mode to display mode, how to delete a picture she didn't like, how to zoom,
etc. (she can't have been more than four). i have a lot of fuzzy pictures of pebbles on the riverbank on the camera card now...
we had a similarly aggressive experience with the women of that village selling their handicraft bits and bobs, and I succumbed to the very persistent offer of a Thai massage from one of the women, since i didn't really want to buy anything. it was, again, quite surreal- her approximately one year old baby came with her to do it, and all three of us piled onto my sleeping pad under the faded pink patched-with-duct-tape mosquito net, and the baby crawled around and tried to help her mother and at one point decided that she didn't want to be wearing any clothes, so was crawling over my mattress starkers (me all the while thinking, you are deliciously sweet,
little baby, but i really hope you don't pee right now, because this is where i am sleeping tonight.) we had kind of a fun half conversation with her limited english and my very limited thai - how old are you, do you have children, how many, are you married, etc. and she was clearly as curious about me as i was about her, but it was again an uncomfortable financial transaction; we had agreed on a price of 200
baht (about six dollars) for an hour massage, which is the going rate here, and she stopped after half an hour and said, okay, all done! and i didn't know how best to manage it, because really, six dollars for a halfhour massage- who's exploiting whom? i don't know. i think i would rather pay more but have everyone stick to the terms of the agreement, but fuck, she's so poor she's doing massages for six bucks an hour and can't afford a watch, so ??? i don't know. i gave her the 200 baht and said thank you, but i can't help but feel there must be a better way to manage it.
night two we had a campfire (fun) and then another night of listening to george snore (he kept, i am not kidding, the entire village awake - after the first night, he was put in a separate little hut on the other side of the village and his snores still reached the rest of us in the far end of the village. i would be sympathetic (people can't help snoring etc etc) except for he had fourth and fifth helpings at every meal and was constantly eating -> therefore overweight -> therefore snores, and besides, i was quite sleep deprived and cranky at that point, after two nights of listening to him. but i promised no more about obnoxious george.
day three was river rafting day - we (and by we, i really mean the jungle guide, anan) strappedtogether twenty foot lengths of bamboo to make rafts, hung everyone's backpacks on poles on the rafts so they didn't get wet, and off we went. it totally felt like joseph conrad heart of darkness type stuff - there's something immensely satisfying about using a means of transport that is all materials easily to hand, minimal technology, in use for aeons. you stand on the raft with a massive long bamboo pole in your hand to punt with, and with everyone's weight on it, the raft actually sinks to about an inch below the water level, so it is quite a wet enterprise (extra wet when you go through rapids, since the best way of keeping
your balance is to crouch down and hang on to the bamboo slats with your toes). we all ended up soaked from the waist down, but it was actually luxurious to be in the water and out of the heat. at the end of the river rafting trip, the rafts get send on down the river to a bamboo furniture making place, so everything gets used, which was quite brilliant, i thought. then into the truck back to chiang mai for everyone else to get packed up and get on the overnight train to bangkok, goodbye nice aussies, goodbye nice jacob, goodbye horrible terra and george, goodbye anan and max (guides). i had a rest and a shower in my room, and then headed out to get dinner
at a really really nice place (i think called huen phen) that i read about in the guidebook, and see the famous Chiang Mai saturday night market, which was lots of fun and i impressed myself by staying out past eleven o'clock! riotous living. it was great. then back to bed for cooking school today, which you have already heard about, and now, for my next trick, i am going to go out for sunday night adventures. wish me luck...
love to all...