Happy Feet 2

Late Saturday morning we grab lunch at a sidewalk noodle joint near the motor-bike repair shop. We have an hour to kill until Lian's crunched Honda is ready. Over bowls of steaming duck soup we review our what-to-do options. Lian suggests I try a fish spa just around the corner.

Feeding Nemo.

"I work there many time, maybe I get you Thai-people discount," she says, speed-dialing the shop. (Once again, a place where white folks pay extra, possibly because we are all such terrible guests in this country.) The girl snags me a half-off deal, bless her. Five minutes later we are ascending the stairs to Fish Actually, Chiang Mai's biggest and best fish spa.

Here's how it works: you sit on a wooden bench and dangle your bare feet in a recessed aquarium full of little sucker fish, which delight in nibbling away your dead skin. The sensation of all those little sucker-mouths hoovering away so voraciously -- and I mean they're getting in there between the toes, along the nails, everywhere -- is just about electric. And definitely not for the ticklish.

Watching this feeding frenzy taking place on your own body, you can't not flash on the word "piranha." And then I recall reading in an anatomy book last week at the dreaded Mr. Tong's shop that the human epidermis consists entirely of dead skin; the living tissue lies immediately below.

Thirty minutes later I withdraw my legs to observe great patches where dead skin is flaking away like paint peeling off a weathering house -- patches that were smooth skin going in. Much longer in that soup and the little suckers might have stripped me down to living dermis, and then ...??!!

But on the positive side, it feels pretty cool.

A taste of home? It'll cost ya!

For the white-guy staples of life -- whole-bean coffee, laundry soap, decent wine, just-passable baked goods -- western-style Rimping Supermarket is the only option within walking distance.

It really is like stepping magically back into America, and any Thai people you see at Rimping either work there or have a Caucasian mate. Its multiple stores in Chiang Mai do a fine job of satisfying just about every farang appetite ... for a price.

Jonesing for a big stack of flapjacks with your morning coffee? You'll shell out the equivalent of just under $6.25 not for a gourmet buttermilk pancake mix but your basic box of Krusteaz.

Newman's Own balsamic vinaigrette rings up just shy of $8.25 a bottle -- a little over a dollar more than what I spent last week for 2.2 pounds of tiger prawns.

Luckily Rimping hasn't caught on that it could triple its price of fresh-ground coffee and I'd still buy the stuff. Because some things you just cannot live without.

---

Meet my friend Meow-Meow, named for how she and I greet each other:

Me: "Meow, meow, meow."

Her: "Meow, meow, meow."

Whenever my terrible Internet connection is acting up, which is mostly always, I walk out front to work beside the fence bordering the hotel next door (I have their wi-fi password). Meow-Meow tags along for company, meowing all the while. We must drive the neighbors nuts.

---

I don't know why the American healthcare system is broken, or who broke it, or why we can't unbreak it. All I know is this:

Wednesday afternoon I decide to have my blood pressure checked -- I've been lazy about my meds for months now, damned fool that I am -- so I drop in on a nearby medical clinic. The place is very busy but clean and organized-looking. The receptionist hands me a card to fill out asking for name, age, occupation and address. That's it. I complete the card and 30 minutes later I'm ushered into an exam room where a nurse takes my vitals. Good news: even without meds my BP is only slightly elevated. (Thank you, clean living!) The English-speaking doctor comes in, does a quick exam and writes me a one-month prescription for fresh meds. Minutes later I am settling up for a grand total of 280 baht -- about $9.34 American.

No one asks about insurance or requires a signature on a stack of forms. And I get the impression that there are not many behind-the-scenes third parties involved. It's all about quality of service and patient outcomes.

---

Riding on the back of Lian's motor-bike always used to terrify me, but I am over that now.

Thursday morning we are tooling along on back roads to the railway station to buy train tickets for a trip south in two weeks. About halfway there we come to a narrow spot in the road where a car in the oncoming lane is parked and another vehicle is inching around it. Lian has two choices:

   a) Stop the motorbike and wait.
   b) Veer into the rough.

She chooses unfortunately.

Blammity-blam-blam!! go the tires bouncing madly over treaded concrete drainage ditch covers. Lian tries to maneuver this bucking bronco back onto the pavement but her front wheel lodges in a perpendicular tread and the motor-bike drops to its side violently. I sail over the top and land across the downed bike, my reading glasses skidding in front of me on the street.

We are lucky: Lian is unhurt, I walk away with a sprained finger, sore toe and one hell of a bruise on my right leg. But the motor-bike takes the worst of it, a nasty crunch to the handlebar panel.

"Tell you what," I say. "If it's OK with you, I'll walk the rest of the way there. And then home again. And maybe everyplace else we ever go again, forever."

The cruel hands of Mr. Tong

Tong the Merciless

For the last couple of years I’ve had this damned sciatica that just kills my right leg when I sit for any length of time. Driving to Eugene a few weeks ago I had to stop at every single rest area to get out and stretch – brutal. Ibuprofen doesn’t help.

“You go see my friend Tong,” Lian recommends. “He very good massage therapist, can cure you.” I start to reply that “cure” is a very strong word and that maybe I should talk to a real doctor abou— but she is already on the phone booking an appointment for me.

Nine the next morning we arrive on Lian’s motor-bike at a nondescript storefront up a dirt side street. Suwat Tong’s shop is no rattan-and-lotus-blossom pleasure palace – just two thin mattresses on a tile floor, a couple of anatomical posters pinned to an otherwise bare wall, and that’s about it. Tong himself is dressed for heavy lifting and sets right to work: he asks me a few medical-history questions while running his fingers over my right leg, squeezing here and there.  “Does this hurt?” he asks, clamping down.  “No,” I reply, even though it sure as hell does.

Tong produces a loose-fitting tunic and tie-shut pants. “Put these on and lie down on back,” he says, stepping outside for a smoke while I change. A few minutes later the meat tenderizing begins.

Over the next two hours Tong rolls relentlessly over every inch of soft tissue, mashing down with elbows, knuckles, knees, heels, or whatever else he can use to pluck unruly tendons like banjo strings. As Tong and Lian chatter away in Thai, I desperately summon Lamaze breathing techniques learned thirty-odd years earlier: “Hee-hee-hee PAHH, hee-hee-hee PAHH …”

But you know what? The moment it’s over, I feel great! I’ve sat working for hours this afternoon without so much as a twinge. My left shoulder no longer pops when I roll it. Everything feels a bit more limber. Old Tong apparently knows his stuff. Later over lunch, Lian tells me that he used to be a staff physical therapist at a Chiang Mai hospital before opening his own shop, and he is always busy.

Me, I love a nice oil massage as much as the next hedonist, but next week I’ll be back to Tong for another two-hour pummeling. “People don’t come here for relax,” he smiles. “They come to feel better.”

Oh yeah, the price: about $17, including tip.

Everybody is a big faker

We are riding cross-town Saturday afternoon in the back of a Red Car, one of the fleet of covered pickup trucks that pass for mass transit in Chiang Mai. The driver pulls over and in hops another passenger, a slight 30-ish man. He's carrying a crutch but certainly has no problem climbing aboard. In Chinatown the Red Car stops and the man hops out, hands the driver a 20 baht note and continues down the street at a pretty good clip.

"You remember him?" Lian asks me. Come to think of it, he does look vaguely familiar.

"On Loi Kroh, near Night Bazaar," she reminds me. "He beggar."

Sure, now I place him: most evenings this fellow parks himself along the dusty lane in full view of farang passers-by, legs splayed at horrible angles, crutch before him, one cupped palm pointed upward. And the eyes, oh the eyes, so pleading. He's really got his character dialed in.

But Grownup Tiny Tim has nothing on his competition two blocks up the street, a ragamuffin woman with her prop-baby cradled in her lap. Every evening around 5:30 she clocks in, occupying a narrow point on the sidewalk opposite upscale Hotel Centara so that pedestrians cannot simply ignore her -- they have to step off the curb and into the street to get around.

To the woman's credit, the kid looks pretty well-fed and happy, but little wonder when you consider the economics of her gig: all she needs is a half-dozen softies to part with a 100-baht note and she can pocket more in a few hours than Lian earns on a decent workday in high season.

Which I guess explains her poisonous disdain for beggars.

---

We are gone for just a few hours, so I leave my laptop in the care of Lian's 13-year-old son, Dao, who is visiting for the weekend. Might be a good opportunity for the boy to practice his computer skills, I figure.

Later that evening, while Dao is watching Tom & Jerry cartoons and Lian is tidying up after dinner, I happen to check my computer's browsing history. The boy was busy: Spider-man movie searches, online games, video torrent downloads, and porn porn porn porn porn. And what amazes me is how many pornos he consumed in that brief time we were gone.

The next day, after Dao returns to his father's house, I show Lian how productive her boy was.

"Ohhhhhh," she says, reading down the list of smut sites, then is silent. Finally she turns to me: "He is normal for boy, you think?"

Happy feet

Wednesday night, my last American meal in the old neighborhood.  See you in 11 weeks, Ladd's Addition!

A slice, soda water and salad at Hot Lips on Hawthorne.

---

Late Friday evening and 30 hours removed from the Beaverton Transit Center, I share a cab from Chiang Mai International Airport into town with a dapper old American gent -- probably the only holiday traveler to arrive dressed in a suit and tie. Longish silver hair, mildly gregarious manner, maybe a retired English teacher. He wields the standard set of helpful Thai phrases comically, thanking the cabbie with a broad "cop coon crap." (It should be more of a rapid-fire, monotone khap-kuhn-khrep.) So I peg him as a Thailand newbie.

"Actually, this is my third trip to Thailand, but my first to Chiang Mai," he tells me on the way in. So I ask where else he's been.

"Besides Bangkok? Phuket and Pattaya," he replies.

Ah. Understood. Say no more.

Destinations reveal a little something about the traveler. Now if he had said Koh Samui and Krabi, I'd know that he's a splash-in-the-surf kind of guy. If he had said Ayutthaya and Chiang Rai, he'd be into history and culture. But an older single guy whose first two choices were to partake of Thailand's reputed Sodom and Gomorrah?

The cabbie drops him at his hotel -- smack dab in the Loi Kroh bar scene near the moat -- and we make some vague promise to grab a beer if we happen to cross paths. But I doubt that we'll be hanging out in the same places.

A hofbrau, a BK, and just out of frame are a Belgian beer joint, McD's and an Irish pub.  Why do some people even bother leaving home?

---

Today in Panthip Plaza I see these Buddhist monks shopping for sunglasses. I guess monks need protective eye wear as much as the next ascetic, but how hard can you rock a pair of Ray-Bans in a saffron robe?

---

It was one year ago that I wandered into Nina Lanna Spa for a pedicure and met one Charita Methacharatphon, better known by her nickname: Lian. Only much later did I learn that my feet, which had lived in the same dilapidated travel shoes and socks day after day after day, were ... let's say memorable. (Would that be called "meeting cute-icle"?) But I guess the experience was not totally off-putting, as we've had an adventure or two together in the 12 months since then.

Then ...

So we mark the occasion by re-creating the moment ... this time with better foot hygiene.

... and now.

New fun begins June 21

Back to Thailand for the summer -- just in time for the rainy season, oh boy!

Incheon my way home

"Lian, pull over!" I shout.

"What?" she calls back over her shoulder. "I am not understand."

"Pull over! You know, Pull over! I mean, stop ... motor-bike! I don't have my reading glasses!"

I see the Night Bazaar through new eyes now. It's still tacky.

Finally she veers off the road and parks. It is early evening on the main drag along the hated Night Bazaar, tourists and tuk-tuks everywhere. I rifle my backpack, my pockets -- no readers. Damn, I must have left them in the locker room at the gym. Lian waits with the bike as I rush back to Centara Hotel's fitness club three blocks away. No luck. But on my way back, on the corner where I hopped on Lian's bike, there they are ... or what's left of them. No frames, just two chewed-up lenses, dead in the street.

And so my next and final day in Chiang Mai is spent on an emergency quest for an eyeglasses shop that can turn around a decent pair of prescription readers in a pinch. While we wait for my new specs, we pop over to a nearby spa run by a friend of Lian's for Thai massage -- a nice little final-day splurge for all of seventeen dollars for two people, including overly generous tip.

Sunday evening I bid adieu once more to Lian and walk down the lane to catch my prearranged Red Car to the airport. Valuable travel tip: when flying to or from Thailand, avoid Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport if you can and instead aim for the much more laid-back Chiang Mai International Airport. Customs and security take five minutes, tops, and you don't feel like you're walking for miles to get in or out.

Now I'm midway through a 13-hour layover at Incheon-Seoul Airport in South Korea ... and loving it. As it happens, there's a gorgeous transit hotel in the airport, just a five-minute walk to my gate: modern and comfortable room, shower, TV, business center with all-important Internet -- perfect! I'll need all the R and R comfort I can get: I'm assigned a middle seat on the long leg back to the states, and it's a full flight. (I already checked.) Probably stuck between Haystack Calhoun and Refrigerator Perry. Wish me luck.