chiang mai - night markets and hungover

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Friday night was our last night in Koh Samui, so we decided to go back to Chaweng Beach to celebrate in style. We started the night off with $4 cocktails, moved on to $8 gin and tonics and ended the night in $22 vodka and red bull buckets. Yes, you read that right, BUCKETS of alcohol. In Sydney there's a big fad of serving alcohol in teapots (hello, is there nothing classier than a trashy girl in the X with smeared black mascara running down her face and skirt hitched so high you can see her arse, drinking out of the spout of a white porcelain teapot???); well in Thailand they like to serve you alcohol in bucket-loads. You get about 6 shots of alcohol in each bucket but they really aren't the greatest ideas I've had at 3 in the morning. Especially when we had to get up at 6:30am to catch two flights to Chiang Mai.

We're now in Chiang Mai, in the far north of Thailand, and very very hungover. We've left the sunny south full of ritzy resorts, hassling hawkers and rude tourists, flying to Bangkok first then on to Chiang Mai, the whole trip taking about 5 hours. The weather is milder here, the locals have fairer skin and look more like southern Chinese people, there are an interesting mix of Thais, Burmese and Laotians living together (due to the geographic location of Chiang Mai, and it being the second largest city in Thailand) and things are a lot cheaper.

The city is famous for it's temples, massage schools, Thai cooking classes and of course the night markets. Aaron and I walked around the Warorot and Ansoran markets for about 5 hours last night, perusing stalls full of local handicrafts, jewellery, clothing, lamps, char-grilled food (Thais love their 'gai yang' or grilled chicken), bags, soaps (cut beautifully in the shape of national Thai flowers), souvenirs and tacky T-shirt designs. Just to name a few. And they have the cheapest massages around town. For half an hour (Jen you'll appreciate this) they did my head, neck, shoulders, back and arms for a mere $3.50. I usually pay more than 10 times that amount in Australia, for a lesser service!! And for a mere $4 more you could get a 1 hour traditional Thai massage, which involves the masseuse using his/her arms and legs to stretch out all of your arms and legs, before they delicately step on your back to knead out the knots with their feet.

We had a drink around a couple of the bars near the night bazaar, which happened to be gay-friendly, and had a long chat with a Burmese bartender called Aan who migrated from Myanmar to Chiang Mai a couple of years ago. He hasn't seen his family since (he has 11 other brothers and sisters) and can never go back or else the Burmese government will not let him out again. I'm not quite 100% on the politics but from what I know and what we could understand from Aan, the oppressive military junta that has been the 'government' of Burma from the late 1980's has an incredibly harsh grip on its citizens, disallowing any freedom of speech, having an anti-democratic attitude (Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader of a pro-democracy party in Burma has been under house arrest for almost 2 decades for her role in trying to change governance in Burma) and is accused of numerous human rights violations including genocide, child slavery, recruitment of child soldiers and murder and rape of hill tribes in the east.

Aan earns a measly THB5000 or $AUD210 a month from his job. From his wages, 1500 baht goes into rent and 3000 on food. So he has 500 baht per month to play with. That's $21 dollars. Sure, the standard of living here is much lower than in Australia, but 500 baht really cannot buy you any standard of living. And the look in his eyes when we told him we were travelling around the world for 4 months and going to all these different countries...and him telling us that the only places he'd ever been to in his entire life were in his hometown in Myanmar and his new home in Chiang Mai...was very crushing. For Aan to save enough money to get just a plane ticket to Australia it would take him 7.5 years working his 7-day week. With that in mind, we tipped him a day's wage, which would have been about 10 minutes of my wage at home.

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Comments

[Emma]

Aww that was nice of you to tip him. So sad to read that. Love the buckets of alcohol! We need that here :p

[Matt]

Buckets :)
I have heard from a few people who have been fortunate enough to drink from buckets. It makes me excited for when I do the travel adventure.

[herewego]

oh matthew if you were here you'd be drinking bucketloads and then using the buckets to pag into!!!