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.