warm up club/bar/venue celebrated their 11th birthday a few days ago. they had a spread of free food and booze out front, plus entertainment.
thai band:
some ladies manning the free booze tables:
free food and crafts:
dancing girl, so cute!
fire dancer:
mask dancers:
that’s my friend fon on stage beside the lady boy. she entered in a tattoo contest at some place… she totally won first place! awesome! me and our friend eddy were the only foreigners and i was definitely the oldest person in the joint. all these young thais kept taking pictures with me, which was hilarious and confusing.
i really miss velveeta shells n cheese. i haven’t been able to find it anywhere here!
google doesn’t have any street views of thailand yet, but mapjack.com does!
you can check out chiang mai:
http://www.mapjack.com/?VmbyUZhcacxC: north gate jazz co-op
http://www.mapjack.com/?oTbyUWmcaccB: the soi i live on
http://www.mapjack.com/?mhbyUV6VacNF: warm up, bar/venue/club
http://www.mapjack.com/?GMayUskdacmA: zoe in yellow/reggae soi
http://www.mapjack.com/?K3ayUQbaacmD: (what is now) bird’s nest cafe
and pai:
http://www.mapjack.com/?4He3UDbgXcGA: the soi where edible jazz is located
http://www.mapjack.com/?oTbyUWmcaccB: bamboo bar
warm up bar had some sort of party a couple of nights ago. there was free stuff and some people were dressed up in funny costumes. the band that played was pretty decent. at some point one of the singers started bleeding from his head, i have no idea what happened and it was kind of freaky:
the female singer had a really good, really sweet voice:
autograph!
there was a pretty spectacular lightning storm last night. this is the view from my balcony:
it’s going to be rainy season soon. i’m glad, i’ve really missed the rain.
lizard napping at thc rooftop bar, across from thapae gate.
this little guy was hanging out with me when i ate lunch at miguel’s mexican restaurant near the east gate the other day.
went back to pai again with some friends, fun times!
a bunch of shots of the road to/from and surrounding mountains:
it’s still suuuuuper dry here, and the mountains are still on fire! i saw this same sight last time i came to pai, which means they’ve been on fire for a couple of weeks now. crazy!
we stayed at a friend’s super cute house a couple of minutes from downtown pai:
the friends i came with are in a jazz band called “alukomarai“, which is kind of a play on words – in thai, “alaiomaruk” (i think) means “i don’t know”. here’s them playing at this really awesome place called edible jazz:
edible jazz is a really cool little bar/cafe/venue situated on temple grounds. they serve excellent vegetarian food, i highly recommend checking it out! plus, you can rent some really cute bungalows that surround it. the view from edible jazz looking out from the inside during the daytime (you can see one of the bungalows on the right and part of the temple in the background):
we also went to this really great hot spring that wasn’t really well known, probably on account of being at the end of this long rough and winding road. here’s my friend navigating down a particularly steep and dusty section (you can get an idea about how incredibly dry it is here right now from how brown the foreground is, verses the green of the background where there’s a mountain stream):
here’s (another really shaky) video of some of the road to the hot spring:
the hot spring itself:
the water was amazingly clear, and the hot spring bed was made up of all these tiny smooth pebbles so even after swimming around it didn’t stir up any sediment. so nice!
taylor swimming in a river:
a spirit house surrounded by wheat grass at a cafe in pai (unfortunately i can’t remember the name of the cafe – the food there is delicious! lots of teas and fresh foods):
view from a temple on one of the mountains looking down onto the city:
a police officer playing guitar on the street:
the moon rise over pai:
sunset on the way back to chiang mai:
a couple of nights ago a friend of a good friend found herself in a really, really scary situation. she’s a falang (foreigner) and hasn’t been in chiang mai very long and so doesn’t really know her way around, and she wanted to go by a 7-11 from a bar she was at to get something or another. she got a little turned around and as she was walking by a very young and “innocent looking” thai guy on his motorbike, he offered to help her out with a ride… at first she refused, but he was persistent (i’ve lived here long enough to grow a thick skin when it comes to people trying to pressure you into things here – between the taxis and the merchants it can get pretty ridiculous) so unfortunately she conceded and got on the bike with him. when he drove her past a 7-11, she tried to get him to stop the motorbike but he kept saying that he wanted to show her something. eventually he pulled into some empty parking lot or something and jumped on her, trying to wrestle her clothing off. she kept punching him in the face until he got off then she ran as fast as she could back the way they came, and about an hour later somehow made it back to the bar to where my good friend was. another friend of mine said that this isn’t an uncommon occurrence, that some thais think that they can rape tourists and get away with it (and do get away with it) since it’s pretty much impossible to track down the perpetrator when you’re only in town for a few days and it’s a completely foreign land.
the moral of the story – don’t accept rides from strangers, obviously. i can understand how easy it is to forget that there are really bad people even here in chiang mai, since the place is so friendly as a whole. luckily i was brought up to be totally paranoid and suspicious of pretty much everyone, especially strangers, and i’ve lived in a few bad neighborhoods in the city and have learned to have no problems offending people by refusing rides or refusing to stop and chat. especially after dark! kids, don’t trust strangers.