Chiang Mai: Day One

Perhaps there was turbulence during our flight to Chiang Mai, but given that it took off at six in the morning I slept like a baby the whole way. We landed about nine, checked blearily into Chiang Mai Thai House at ten, then promptly fell asleep till two. Not the most intrepid start to the holiday then, but hey, h-o-l-i-d-a-y.

Recharged at two, we sallied forth into the Old City (a five minute walk from our guesthouse) and headed for Wat Phra Singh, figuring that since it was at the other end we’d get to see lots on the way. People were setting up their stalls for the weekend market to be held later that evening – hence the photo in my earlier placeholder post.

Wat Phra Singh seems to have a fairly large population of young boyish monks relaxing picturesquely around its compound, which added to its already considerable aesthetic appeal.

 

Life-size monk statues covered in gold leaf sit in permanent meditation beside the main altar. Each is obviously modelled after a real person, presumably an elder monk who has passed away. Being more accustomed to the somewhat more monumental style of European church memorial statuary, I found the tender realism of these quite moving.

 

Here’s a view of the altar just to put the monk statues into context. There are about five but it was hard to capture all of them.

 

Candles in front of the chedi outside, which is in pretty good shape for something built in 1345.

 

Next to the chedi, each tree bears its own signboard with a characteristically Buddhist exhortation. We came across these in other wats during our trip, but Wat Phra Singh’s trees were the only bilingual ones.

 

This was just a nice moment I happened to glimpse between a young monk and his friend. The dogs you can just about see in the top right are only a few of the numerous dogs in the temple compound. At 5 pm (I think), temple gongs were sounded and in response the entire pack of dogs howled for about 30 seconds.

 

The walls of the viharn are covered with murals. I loved the light streaming through the sides of the door but assumed my camera wouldn’t be able to capture it, only to be proved wrong. Yay Canon Ixus.

 

Some detail of the murals on the walls. The woman in the middle with the cigar somehow made me think of Frida Kahlo, despite having two distinct brows.

 

More mural detail. I love the depiction of the waves.

 

Some detail of the door. While I was composing the photo the monks I photographed at the start of this post got up and started heading into the temple. Based on how damn slow I always am at sightseeing, they must have been chatting a long time.

 

We finally finished seeing Wat Phra Singh and walked around a little more in the roads around it. I love Chiang Mai’s profusion of wats, and how each wat we visited always felt like a distinct and active faith community. Kids were playing basketball next to this one. I don’t know its name or whether it has any historical significance, we just wandered round a corner and found it.

 

Aroon Rai looked like a good choice for dinner since it seems to have widespread guidebook and Internet forum acclaim for cheap authentic Northern Thai cuisine, but unfortunately we were rather disappointed with it. We ordered pork with ginger, chilli and tomato paste, which was supposed to be a Northern specialty but tasted a lot like a dish my Eurasian mum’s been cooking all her life. It was tasty, but not spectacular. Our second dish of stir-fried kale with crispy pork had no crispy pork whatsoever. Our third dish was so forgettable I don’t even know what it was any more. And, while I admit our taste buds have perhaps become too spice-dependent for their own good, all the dishes seemed quite bland – which is about the last thing you expect from the average Thai meal. I don’t know why this place is acclaimed, it was pretty much the sort of meal you can get from a decent economy rice stall in any Singaporean hawker centre. It was cheap and filled the belly, but nothing more than that.

After dinner we headed for the weekend night market, now in full swing. I’ll write about that in the next post since this one’s already rather long.

Chiang Mai: Placeholder

Yeah, as you might have guessed I haven’t quite got my act together yet for blogging about our trip to Chiang Mai and Chiang Dao. And with Russ arriving this Saturday and our, er, “happy” threesome trip to Siem Reap the Friday after that (heh, the boys are gonna have soooo much fun!), and the wedding planning hamsterwheel we’re constantly on, I’m afraid I can’t pretend I’m suddenly going to be the world’s best time-manager.

But in the meantime, here’s a display of bare flesh to make up for my dearth of content! Don’t say I never put it all out there for my readers.

Eep

In preparation for next week’s trip to Chiang Mai and Chiang Dao, I went to a money-changer in Parkway Parade. I asked for 5000 baht and was quoted about S$215. Since I didn’t have that much cash on me, I handed my bank card over to pay and waited to key in my PIN.

I have to admit I don’t always bother to check the amount on the screen before keying in my PIN. No reason, just carelessness. For some reason though, tonight I did.

The screen said “$51,386.73”.

I’m still wondering what might have happened if I hadn’t checked.

Popcorn

You know how when half-asleep and half-awake you can get lost in thoughts that are almost like Dadaist films? And if someone happens to come wake you up in the middle of this you start babbling incoherently, like “No, I’m not going to work today because I need to stay and wait for the clothespeg inspector,” and it’s really embarrassing while you sleepily try to explain why the clothespegs need to be inspected (so that your kindergarten teacher can use them in her home renovations, naturellement) and somewhere along the way it slowly begins to dawn on you that no clothespeg inspections will be necessary, you haven’t seen your kindergarten teacher in twenty years, and the other person is laughing their ass off?

(Please God, don’t let this just be me.)

So anyway, this has happened to me a fair number of times while sleeping normally in my bed, but Friday was the first time it was prompted by the particular music I was listening to. Deep in my usual commuting drowse on the bus to work with Hood’s Cold House on the iPod, somewhere around the last 50 seconds of I Can’t Find My Brittle Youth I became convinced that the popcorn machine on the bus was overheated and about to explode. Why was everyone so calm? Maybe I needed to raise the alarm and alert everyone to the danger so we could escape from the bus! Maybe it was too late and we should just all hit the floor to avoid being skewered by flying shards of hot buttered metal!

I jerked awake in shock and stared bug-eyed around the bus for a good five to ten seconds before I realized that springing into either course of action would be a very very bad idea.

Iran Don’t Walk

A little heads-up for any Singaporean readers who’re into graphic novels: if you borrow 4 books from the Orchard library, you can use your loan receipt to enter their contest to win a collector’s edition box set of Persepolis 1 and 2. Just look for the box in front of the main counter. (I don’t remember how much longer the contest is on though, so if you’re keen, drop by soon.) And if you win, please email me so I can curse at you.

Matthew Herbert: Plat Du Jour

I haven’t been enjoying Matthew Herbert’s Scale anywhere as much as I liked Plat Du Jour, which was one of my top albums of 2005. Scale’s nice and catchy for when you’re riding in a convertible and drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in them but I don’t find it as musically interesting as Plat Du Jour, and after a while all the breezy flirtiness of the music feels a bit vapid to me.

Since it appears (from the Metacritic stats, anyway) that the bulk of music writers don’t agree with me, I thought I’d dig up my old unpublished, unpolished review of Plat Du Jour and give it the props I should have last year:

Plat Du Jour took 2 years to research and 6 months to record. It was born out of Matthew Herbert’s growing distaste for the workings of the international food chain and the songs themselves are crafted using, amongst other sounds, eggs as percussion, melodies made from blowing over the top of a Pepsi Max bottle, and field recordings of slimfast breakfast drinks tied to a bike and ridden round the yard.

So there’s a fair amount of gimmickry on Plat Du Jour and a couple of ways to react to it. One, you can explore the site as you listen to the album, marvel at the lengths he went to in making this, and actually learn something about what we should all perhaps think harder about before ingesting. Two, you can dismiss it as wank and simply see if the album holds up on its own musical merits first without having to bother about The Message.

I chose option two, plus a large order of fries to go. But thankfully, the music impressed me enough to make me want to find out more about The Message, which I think is quite possibly the best outcome a musician could hope for.

Plat Du Jour makes you bop ya head considerably more often than you would expect from an album which bases one of its songs (The Final Meal Of Stacey Lawton) on the jar of pickles a condemned man ate for his last meal. The song featuring various field recordings of chickens (The Truncated Life Of A Modern Industrialised Chicken) is, well, quite funky. These Branded Waters gets great wind instrument tones from the mouths of San Pellegrino bottles and segues halfway into a jazzy bit where I somehow keep feeling they’re going to break into the Super Mario theme. I can’t exactly pinpoint the amazing bass on An Empire Of Coffee from the recording details on the site but I think it’s probably 2 Sara Lee instant croissant tins tied together with a piece of garden string and plucked. Celebrity has Dani Siciliano on vocals, is made entirely from food endorsed by celebrities and features a chorus of “Go Gordon! Go Ramsay! Go Beyonce! Go Beyonce!” Hidden Sugars backfires a bit insofar as it gives me yet another reason to love cans of Coke – which all its melodies, chords and basslines are made from.

Making a concept album is often a sure-fire way to garner criticism from people who just don’t buy into it, but I do think you can enjoy this album purely for its music regardless of whether you buy its message. My only criticism, and it’s tongue-in-cheek at that, is that the great music Matthew Herbert’s made from junk food only validates my abiding love of it. I bet this album wouldn’t be half as fun if it were only made from organic produce.

Ten Book Meme

Yish tagged me to do this. In other news, go buy Yish’s book, y’all! If you can get your hands on a copy, that is – I understand the bookstores carrying it are sold out.

1. One book you have read more than once
Which one to choose, anyone who loves reading and procrastination has read multiple books multiple times. I guess I’d single out Jane Eyre, which I first read at 8 and reread at 23. On second reading I suddenly realized that the first reading seemed to have moulded so much of my attitudes and personality, without me even knowing it.

2. One book you would want on a desert island
The Bible. Sorry, not the coolest of choices but it’s hella thick so I’d have lots to read, and if I can think of one good time to reconnect with my faith, being stuck on a desert island would be it.

3. One book that made you laugh
Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is funny most of the way through, but there’s a scene near the beginning which is just spectacular. The enjoyment’s all in the reading so I won’t bother summarizing it, but for those of you who have read the book I’m talking about the scene in the ER when Lionel’s Tourette’s syndrome is making him erupt with fragments of the lame joke he was telling his dying mentor in the car.

4. One book that made you cry
No book has ever made me cry, but Dan Rhodes’ Timoleon Vieta Come Home once came close. If I’d been reading it in a different context I’d probably have been fine, but I was in a train on the way to see a friend whose mother had suddenly passed away, so I guess I was feeling emotional to begin with.

5. One book you wish you had written
The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene). It showcases everything I love about Graham Greene, who showcases everything I love in a writer. If I could only write with such frugal elegance, such precise insight, and such deep compassion, I might come a little closer to displaying those traits as a human being. Oh, and it actually has a plot. I’d never write a book with no freaking plot.

6. One book you wish had never been written
Can I have a series, please? All ten million volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time saga (I quit around volume 6 and am stupefied as to why I stuck around that long). Ye gods, there are more likable characters in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than in these books.

7. One book you are currently reading
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is probably the one most worth mentioning since Kafka On The Beach is an utter pile of poo so far. It’s a damn hard book to explain though – go read the Amazon synopses.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
A hilarious cab ride with Olive, Erik and their incompatible reading tastes reminded me that despite meaning to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for the past eight years and borrowing it from my local library about five separate times, I’ve never started on it. Olive’s view: Lucky escape, hon. Erik’s view: READ IT! IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! Which brings us neatly to…

9. One book that changed your life
I’m sorry but in all honesty I can’t come up with one. I mean, it’s like asking me to name one food that changed my life. No one food changes my life but obviously I can’t imagine life without food. (Man, I’m deep this evening.)

10. Now tag five people:
Remarkable Things [done!]
Shoopscoop [done!]
Solitary Fish [done!]
Atarashi [done!]
London Calling [done!]

Incidentals

Three things that caught my eye on the walk between our hotel and Siam Square on the one Bangkok day I did bother to stop for photos.

Components of a street stall. Some assembly required.

 

Check out what I think is the only anti-Singapore graffiti I’ve ever seen in my life. [Backstory]

 

You’re A Shopfront, Charlie Brown!

 

Hips Don’t Lie

In a small Siam Square boutique selling office wear, I noticed that the friendly sales assistant serving me had a prominent Adam’s apple, low husky voice, and gargantuan feet spilling out of her strappy heels.

I picked out a top I wanted to try on. “This one, got my size?”

She approached me with a tape measure, encircled my shoulder blades with it dramatically, and measured my bust. “Okay,” she nodded.

I picked out a skirt I wanted to try on. “This one, also got my size?”

She approached me with a tape measure, encircled my butt with it dramatically, and measured my hips. “OOOOO!” she giggled, covering her mouth as her mascara’d eyelashes fluttered in alternate shock and glee.

“Sorry ma’am, this one don’t have large size.”

Magrittest T-Shirt Ever

Recently at Threadless, this hilarious tee. I won’t be buying it because I’ve been a little too extravagant lately, but if you also happen to like surrealist art and Super Mario and fancy one for yourself, I’d really appreciate you buying it through the above link.

[By the way, as I said once before I don’t do the whole referrer link thing unless I’ve already used and enjoyed using the shop in question.]