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.