Today is day 19 of my travels, and to be honest, I feel a cold or allergies coming on today. Sneezing and nose dripping, so stayed in this morning while MJ did her morning rituals.
It snowed in Iowa and I found myself missing home. All kinds of feelings about why am I doing this? Is this really something I enjoy? Did I bite off more than I can chew?
Yeah, Ya’ll know I am famous for that. Excessive chewing or not biting at all. I have no middle ground.
So here I am, in the middle of SE Asia with no plane ticket home until Easter.
Everyone has days that are not up to par.
leave the past behind, you cannot change it.
Leave the future where it is. It will come when it comes.
Live in the now.
Right now I am missing home and comfortable me. I am wondering if anyone notices I am gone or if they are so consumed with their daily lives, they are too busy to acknowledge the absence. Communications from home are certainly a rarity. When my friend is getting daily love from all over the world, I sit checking facebook ads since that is what fills my feed. I should not check facebook. It is depressing.
So, I got creepy, even by my standards.
We recently built a new house, and I expended a lot of effort to wire it up with a lot of security cameras.
My intent was to have a way to watch the dogs, and see who might be at the door. The usual reasons people put in cameras, but today, I logged on just to look around.
No one was home, or at least in view. Not surprising as they would be asleep or out plowing snow given the hour, which means the dogs were in their caves or in the bed. All out of view.
The lights were off, so the view not great, but I did see the trucks were out and the drive had been plowed. The front sidewalks were not done yet, but they would be done later.
Sigh.
This moment, in the thousands of moments between the beginning and the end, was hard. Travel can be lonely, especially on days when not feeling the best.
Do not fret. All is well. I turned my focus to writing for a while to clear my head and my attitude, and that helped.
I realized I miss talking to people. Not that I did much of that before, but when I need a mental break now, I find myself turning to facebook and have already said how depressing that is. Probably why the upcoming generations are so messed up in the head.
So, MJ returned and we went to Wororot market again. Told you we would go back.
Since I was missing home, I stocked up on purchases for the kids. I won’t say what I bought, even though I know they are not reading this, but I was mood shopping and that usually goes very well for others. Not my wallet, but for others in general.
We stopped by the Pung Thao Kong Shrine again, and this time explored a little more. That is the Chinese temple next to Wororot.
We walked by a store that sold film. Real, in the box, SLR camera film. And all the days of going to Louis Camera or University Camera and buying film out of the refrigerated case when I was young came jumping back into my mind.
My dad saying “Every time you push the button, it costs $1.25 to develop, so make sure of your shot!”
The price went up as time went on, but you get the idea. Now kids are out there who don’t know what film is, and the concept of having to wait a few days to a week to see if your pictures came out or you wasted your money leaves them dumbfounded.
But here it was. A film store. That ironically took digital passport photos. I cannot imagine who their customer base is.
We found a coffee shop to sit in for a while, which is almost impossible to avoid in this town. There are more coffee shops than people, or that is my belief.
Today we tried a chain store called Wawee Coffee. MJ does not like to frequent the chain stores, or the American stores, and I do understand why, but the concept of frappe, which most here would call blended, is a hit and miss experience. It was hot, I wanted cold, and we were right next to this shop, so today we had Wawee. Eh, it was okay.
We did sit overlooking the Ping river, and I noted a vacant lot next door to Wawee, which MJ explained was probably abandoned or awaiting reconstruction from the floods in October.
So, for those like me who are absorbed in our own little worlds and don’t follow international news, Thailand flooded in October 2024.
Given it was only 4 months ago, things looked pretty darn good.
Water on the Ping river at the Nawarat bridge in Chiang Mai reaced 5.25 meters, which was the highest level in the past 50 years. It submerged the downtown more than once during the floods.
The Chang Kran Road, which is famous for the Night Bazaar was under a meter of floodwater. The Arkhet bus terminal was deep in water with the busses unable to leave. The train tracks were flooded and trains unable to move because of strong currents.
And the rain continued. The city was under and the rivers continued to swell because of the rain continuing to the north.
They were worried about the dams breaking because of the pressure, so had to release more water which caused more flooding.
Sound familiar to anyone in Iowa? We’ve lived through it more than once. Given this event was so big and so recent, the only reason it came to my attention was because of an abandoned lot next to a coffee shop.
Of course, I did not know the area before, but it sure appeared to be situation normal.
As we waited to take our purchases back to the hotel, I found 2 phone booths.
Yes, that is right kids. The above picture is what public phone booths used to look like. Or at least some of them. They were more metal and glass in the 70’s in Iowa, but I had to take a picture so the kids would know.
Because I gotta learn the kids up in how things used to be and how they will never understand, or I would be a neglectful parent.
We took our purchases back to the hotel and decided dinner was in order. I wanted to do American things because of my mood, and we did to an extent.
We went to Hard Rock Café. I might or might not have purchased something. We did not eat there.
We went to McDonalds because I had seen one earlier that day and I thought that would be easy and familiar.
MJ said the Ronald statues here are all praying, which is odd for Americans because that is religion and taboo. Here, putting hands together is respect, so we took pictures with the Ronald praying statue and moved on. She did tell me they serve different things at McDonalds, like fried chicken. We did not partake.
One thing I wanted to do was find a brewery to drop in on and put the John’s magnet in weird places next to beer stuff.
MJ found a club called the “Grumpy old Men club,” which appeared from description to name the perfect place for many of our male friends from our high school class. And it was near where we were.
It was a biker bar, with grumpy old men sitting around. One of those bars that if we would have walked in, the music would have scratched to a halt and everyone would turn to examine the foreigners.
We took a couple of pictures of the sign. We did not go in.
So, on the list of things to do in Chiang Mai is something called the Mae Kha Canal. It was nearby, so we walked over to find dinner.
Mae Kha River or Mae Kha Canal is a natural waterway that runs through Chiang Mai. Its source lies the Suthep-Pui National Park, and it eventually joins the Ping river at various points along about 30 kilometers.
The Mae Kha flows from the north straight into the city city moat at “Sri Phum” corner on the east of the city.
Due to rampant urbanization the canal narrowed and could not flow properly. More waste was dumped into the canal and essentially it turned into a sewer.
In 2018, the government and private sectors came together with academics and started the canal revitalization project. A central wastewater treatment was developed along both sides of the canal and relandscaping were completed in 2022.
Now, it is a place where street vendors are lining the area and business is returning to support the people.
Having said that, we got there late and a lot of things were closing up or closed. The canal is very pretty, with lit up fish floating above the canal and the banks lined with flowers. There is a bustling (or at least active) crowd in the area which supports the revitalization concept.
But we did not get dinner.
So we ended up back in the street vendors. I had a coke. I don’t drink soda anymore, but today I wanted a soda. So here it is.
Today was good, simply wistful and lonely. A day of wanting things I once hand and have no idea how I lost along the way.
It is hard to differentiate between nostalgia and need. It is also very hard to break out of a funk when you don’t know for sure what you need to break out of it.
But that is life. Tomorrow will be a new day.
Leave a Reply