Feb 23, 2002: Saturday. No school, no work. Sounds just like a normal weekend. Well, my "normal" weekends have been spent wandering "aimfully" around Chiang Mai. Today no exception, except I walked a total of about 14Km — it worked out to 7.8 miles. In 90 heat. What a crazy farang! But I was fun. Got up to (but didn't go in) the Chiang Mai Zoo, saw the Chiang Mai University campus, failed to find some streets I was looking for. And so on. I was out for 5 hours, in the middle of the day.
Meat on
a stick. Something recognizable, at least! Ten baht / 25c.
Barbequed over charcoal at the "point of sale".
Monk's laundry
day (note the orange saffron robes out to dry)
This is
Wat Chet Yot. It looks like a huge Thai gingerbread house.
It was started in 1453. The inside is lovely but I didn't photograph
it (there wasn't anybody around, but I wasn't dressed for a
temple)
This is
the "Superhighway". See, everything is relative,
and you don't need to be an Einstein to realize it. Sorry.
Egg delivery.
How they don't end up scrambled is beyond me, but I think it
says something about egg engineering.
Eggs are not refrigerated in CM, which means they age quickly — but they're probably a lot fresher to begin with — they certainly taste it.
OK why the title? When I get back to the condo, I was sweating a great deal. The Receptionist had my newspaper ready; she thinks that she committed a egregious crime by not having a paper for me the afternoon when I returned home last week, even though my request had in fact been to restart the following day. She's been making up for it ever since. Anyway, she asked why I was so hot and sweaty. I told here that I'd walked to the zoo. She was amazed at this, but the zoo's less than a mile away. After I showed here where I'd walked (on my map) her eyes went wide. "Thai people never walk that far". Especially in the heat. She followed this observation with "You must be super man" (I don't know whether this meant "a" super man, or "the" Superman). I said no, but then offered that I did have "suay" calves (this word you may remember applies to things of beauty, and men are not generally in that category). It got a smile.
Superfarang. I like the sound of that.