Flub Med

Rewind to three days ago. We are cruising the apparel vendors deep inside labyrinthine Warorot Market in search of white tie-shut pajama pants and matching shirt for me – the mandatory dress code for our three-day meditation retreat at a Buddhist temple outside the city this weekend. I know, don’t ask.

At the entrance to Wat Ram Poeng.

I am always loath to purchase new clothes, let alone something I might wear once. And in this land of tiny people, I am, you might say, difficult to buy for. Finally the clerk reaches shoulder-deep into a stack of whites and produces a monstrosity that resembles David Byrne’s Big Suit. It fits me perfectly. Crap.

Lian approves. “Is good. Buy two.”

“Wait, what? It’s just for a weekend, why do I need--”

“One shirt three days?” she replies, holding her nose.

Wending our way out of the crowded street market with my two new ensembles (for all of thirty bucks), I’m still not clear on how this whole meditation retreat works. But Lian has gone many times and insists that we just show up, make our voluntary donation and then live a monkish existence for 72 hours as the enlightenment washes over us.

“I think foreigner need to bring passport,” she remembers. Men and women are strictly segregated, and no computers, telephones, video games, books or other diversions that might defile our minds on the path to Nirvana. But I want to get pictures, dammit, so I slip my iPhone into my bag.

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Slow-walking the grounds of the meditation center at Wat Ram Poeng.

At 0-dark-thirty on Saturday morning, both of us dressed like Kwai Chang friggin’ Caine, we meet our Red Car driver for the 35-minute ride to Wat Ram Poeng. This Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Chiang Mai is in near-continuous Meditation Retreat mode. Saffron-robed monks are busily sweeping the walkways with broad straw brooms when we arrive at the registration center.

Turns out that there are some gaps in Lian’s understanding of the retreat … or at least my part in it:

·          *   Yes, they want my passport and visa. Also required: two passport photographs, a photocopy of pertinent passport pages, a working alarm clock (which I guess could be my smuggled iPhone), 11 white lotus flowers, 11 yellow or orange candles, and 11 incense sticks. Luckily they have a gift shop for those last 33 items.

·          *   Yes, Thai people can "just show up." But farangs need to make reservations, and today there is no more room at the inn – all full up. Although I cannot attend meditation sessions, take meals or lay my head on a pallet at night, the check-in monk suggests that I might find a secluded place on the grounds to sit alone and try to attain self-enlightenment. I ask him: “What if I go blind?” But he blinks and does not understand.

So I shuffle aimlessly around the grounds looking like a deposed African dictator, with no good reason to remain among the spiritual strivers. Soon I catch up with Lian, who looks crestfallen and wants to go back to town. Girl Troubles.

“Not good for meditation,” she says.

Nothin' but a heartache

Tempting though it might be to spend my entire stay at Eurana Boutique Hotel – it’d run about $1,440 for a whole month, buffet breakfast included – I decide to conserve funds and move downscale.

The Kim Guest House turns out to be maybe too downscale.

Set way back from the street in a tangled little grotto, the Kim’s outdoor sitting area offers a scruffily pleasant place to work, and the wi-fi signal is sensational. Shuffling about is the venerable Mr. Kim himself, cadaverous and leathery, eyeing visitors from under a shock of white hair. If I didn’t eventually have to go indoors to sleep, the Kim might be a comfy stay.

But, oh, that room …

Clearly Mr. Kim is as casual about cleanliness as he is about gardening. And the residual funk is only made worse by the bathtub-ring effect on the walls and doors left from Chiang Mai’s recent floods.  But, hey!  Just fifteen bucks, including toast and coffee for breakfast!

The only thing Lian likes about this new place is my pet name for it: The ke maa guest house. Ke maa is Thai for “dog shit.”

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I really need to be better about taking, or even ordering, my blood pressure meds. I brought none with me and my body is letting me know what an idiot I am during a walk after breakfast.

“Chest hurts why?” Lian demands, staring at me. So I start to explain that it’s nothing really, and--

“We go to hospital now!” And that ends the discussion.

Here is my experience with the Thai health care system: we check in at the non-emergency desk of Rajavej Chiang Mai Hospital and within moments a nurse is cuffing my left arm. Shortly after that, I meet with a physician who sends me around the corner for an EKG and blood work. Everything checks out normally and it’s back to the physician to receive a stern talking-to and a prescription. I will return in two weeks for a follow-up exam.

Meanwhile as she waits for me, Lian requests and immediately receives her own periodic physical, most of which is covered under the Thai public health insurance system.

My final tab for all of the above – the hospital visit, the physician, the EKG and blood work, the prescription, even throwing in Lian’s exam – comes in at just over a hundred bucks. And a big chunk of that amount was for the American-made pharmaceuticals.

The American health care system must be working fine for somebody, I just don’t know who. No such question here in Thailand.

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Who says you need a kitchen to be a great cook? Today’s lunch: ground pork with homemade curry (using lime leaves picked from the tree out front) and a broccoli-chicken stir-fry. Imagine if this girl had an actual stove, countertop and serving table.

Happy Chinese New Year!

I am injecting bile into my TripAdvisor review of the depressing hostel Le Merde. But then my original destination, Eurana Boutique Hotel, comes through with an upgraded room overlooking the (so-so) pool, still at my Lian-arranged discount price.  Yea!  All is forgiven.

My window view, where I enjoy watching the two old folks.

I manage a few tortured hours of sleep in the afternoon -- tortured because my video script for Intel is due today and I've barely started it, because I have childish work habits.  Luckily, my Monday is 15 hours ahead of my client's Monday.  So there's still lots of time!

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In the evening we amble over to Chiang Mai's Chinatown, an easy 10-minute walk from the Eurana tourist zone, and are swallowed into the crush of Chinese New Year celebrants. Permanently scarred by my pickpocketing near-tragedy of two years ago, I press forward with one hand on my zippered wallet pocket, alert for crafty fingers.

Chinese New Year in Chiang Mai Chinatown

On the community stage, a procession of young ladies in traditional Chinese attire warble through one folk song after another.  Street food vendors are stirring cauldrons of steaming soups and stews, and hawking whole grilled ducks and chickens.  Every so often fireworks shoot into the sky with a tiny pop-pop-pop.  Delirious!

We graze among the vendors for our takeaway meal: a good-size grilled fish that I hope did not come out of the Mae Ping River, warm sticky rice, a salad of Romaine lettuce and Thai basil, and a double dose of searing nam jim dipping sauce that keeps me up, and distressed, for most of the night.

Local scarf dancers, meh. I prefer Balinese.

The upside is, the nam jim pyroclastic flow keeps me alert and focused long enough to complete the video script for client review by mid-afternoon, west coast time.  Once again I manage to cheat the devil, damn me.

Friends in Thai places

It is an early January morning in Chiang Mai and the locals are bundled like Inuits in sweaters and scarves and parkas and gloves. Sidewalk vendors stamp their feet and turn up jacket lapels to ward off the chill from temperatures that plunged overnight into the low 60s. Fortunately most will survive until the midmorning thaw and the return of 80-degree weather.

Meanwhile, clueless westerners stroll around in cutoffs and t-shirts and flip-flops, carrying on as if it was the summer solstice. Don't these crazy farang know that it's freezing out here??!?

A chilly January morning in Chiang Mai.

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In high season Chiang Mai is packed with vacationing foreigners, which makes dropping in on hotels and guest houses without reservations much more of a crap shoot. Also, high season means higher prices, and I am a cheap so-and-so.

Luckily, I have an inside connection at the well-regarded Eurana boutique hotel: Lian works in the hotel spa and has booked a room for me, with a low-season discount even.  That's the good news.  The bad news is, after a 26-hour, four-plane journey halfway around the planet, I arrive frazzled and jet-lagged to learn that Reception mistakenly recorded the booking for February, not January.  And they're full for the night.  Whoopsie!

Their solution is to put me up next door at a former youth hostel called La Mer. La Merde is more like it: a large but barren room that reeks of Pine-Sol, a toy bathroom closed off by a vinyl accordion-fold door, and the bathroom sink out in the bedroom.  But, what the hell, after two days without sleep that bed looks spectacular, and clean.  Sold!

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Western eating habits might be making evil incursions into some Thai eateries, at least in the tourist zone. We catch a late lunch at a sidewalk cafe that caters to white visitors from the nearby guest houses. Lian's order of spicy red-chile chicken arrives and it is so enormous that the accompanying rice needs its own separate dish. She promptly sends it back for resizing and in moments her lunch returns on a single plate, 50% smaller.

I kind of like her solution.  An American in the same situation might gamely dive right in and perhaps haul the rest home (or consume the whole thing and leave stuffed). Instead, she rejects the whole concept and demands the sanity of a Thai portion size.

Although I really, really wanted to dig into that chicken ...

Today, a more sensible lunch: seafood tom yum soup and kapow chicken.

New adventures begin Jan. 22