Happy Loi Krathong!

I should get some sleep this afternoon because I sure won't get much tonight -- not if yesterday's pre-festival partying is any indication.

It's Tuesday just before midnight and Loi Krathong isn't until tomorrow, but the sidewalks along the river are already jammed with revelers and vendors selling floral candle floats, fire lanterns and all manner of street chow. Live musical performances bleed into one another as we walk, punctuated by the bam-bam-bam of firecrackers and the occasional ka-BOOM of M-80s, which set off car alarms up and down the road. The night sky is dotted with constellations of soft orange light as fire lanterns float in unison silently southward.

Lian and I fight our way through this crush to reach the Buddhist temple across Narawat Bridge. We are toting bagfuls of nonperishable donation food for the monks, who are lined up along the sidewalk with their beggar's bowls ready to receive. (Is there a holiday in this country that doesn't  involve these moochers getting their taste?) Lian transfers the contents of our plastic Rimping Market bags into her decorative metal donation bowl -- "is polite more" -- slips off her sandals and kneels in reverence before approaching the dole line. I hang back and guard the footwear.

Nothing gets in but sound, and every torrential downpour.

At home, long into the night we hear the muffled thump-thump from the music stage across the river ... and the not-muffled yips and coos of the young lady upstairs entertaining her gentleman caller. I should mention, the back windows in our apartment building have no glass, only bug screens and cyclone fencing for security. Do we know our neighbors? Like you wouldn't care to imagine!

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There is a growing body of evidence that I might be a spoiled brat:




She is muttering: "You take photo MAID, la kaa?  Am maid you, chai-mai, MISTER William?"

In my own defense, I did buy her the best mop in the store.

How (and where) the other half lives

Surrounding funky, grungy old Chiang Mai roughly 5 to 10 kilometers outside the moat is an asteroid belt of modern residential construction: shiny new single-family homes clumped into pristine gated communities. Prices start around US$89K.

Because I encounter mostly service-industry folks, I sometimes forget that not everyone in this town drives a tuk-tuk or pushes a som tam cart. CM in fact has a healthy middle class of professionals who work in banks and law offices, academics at the universities, doctors, engineers, etc.  And as Lian puts it, "People who have money live outside."

"The Classic" -- 3 bed, 3 bath. Anyone want to come visit?

Our sub-studio nook down a tiny soi by the river is ... let's call it "cozy." But for those 3 a.m. client conferences on Skype, I need a better privacy option than the bathroom floor. So one afternoon we flag down a Red Car and go exploring in suburban Chiang Mai. Our first stop: The Luxury Home gated community.

Three basic house styles, all of them a bit sterile in their variations on a theme of beige. But impressive: rock-solid construction, literally, no stick framework around here, and thoughtful use of space. This being Thailand, some floor plans even include a "Buddha room," i.e., an alcove for the candles, flowers, graven images, etc. The middle-of-the-road option with the amenities we like totals 3.2 million baht, just north of one hundred grand, American.

Maybe we can rent for a little while longer?


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Flash back to May 2010 when I am living for a month in a studio apartment in a gated community outside Bangkok, where I am studying for my English teaching certificate. My old friend and former Brookings newspaper colleague, Frann, herself now an English teacher, connects me with a delightful young Thai woman, Pan, whom she met while earning her Master's at PSU. Pan is by her own admission upper middle class Thai: her family operates an English school in Bangkok, her father is a commercial airline pilot, and she balances teaching with various business ventures. A Bangkok native, she grew up in northern California around Chico and speaks English with a flawless American accent. Pan is a work-hard, play-harder kind of girl; we hit it off well and have stayed in touch -- in fact, it is Pan who connected me with her old Chico chum Nick here in Chiang Mai, the dude who got his head bashed in a year ago in a bar fight.

Fast-forward to last week and Pan is in town to stage some software sales event or other at the hotel where I belong to its fitness center. She reminds me on Facebook that I owe her a beer. So I meet up with Pan and a friend of hers, John from Australia, and we kill the better part of the afternoon at the new Bus Bar -- literally a bar in an old red bus parked by the river. Three quarts (each) later Pan runs off to catch her flight back to Bangkok and I lumber home to explain to Lian how I missed the lunch she cooked for me because I am busy drinking with a 29-year-old Thai lady. Domestic hilarity ensues.

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Launching fire balloon from the bridge.

Loi Krathong is still two days away and the party has already begun with a bang. And a ka-BOOM! And a krackety-POW-POW-POW-POW-POW! long into the night.

Candles for Loi Krathong

The apartment manager warns everyone that he will be shutting the entrance gate at nightfall to keep out the firecracker tossers and other riff-raff. Roadside stands have popped up to sell banana-leaf candle boats to honor the water spirits and fire balloons to illuminate the night skies like airborne jack-o-lanterns. All the stores sell these yellow candles that at first I thought were lemon tarts but in fact are used to send the fire balloons aloft.

Throngs of young people have already begun to jam the sidewalks of the Iron Bridge, and the open spaces by the river are lined with food vendors. Music is everywhere. Monday night is our reconnaissance mission to check out where all the good stuff will be -- and we're just an easy five-minute walk from all the action. So maybe there ARE some advantages to living in town.

Heffay Hears a Ho'

Tourists are pouring into Chiang Mai in advance of Loi Krathong, the big Thai festival that occurs on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the Thai lunar calendar -- this year, November 28. More about Loi Krathong later.

Lian is super-busy and a call to work can happen at any moment. So when we're out and about, we travel separately -- she on her motor-bike, I on foot -- in case she needs to leave in a hurry.  Which is exactly what happens after a late supper at Sunday Walking Market. So I hoof it home via my shortest route, running the bar-girl gauntlet at the seedy end of Loi Kroh Road. It is 9:30, way after dark, and the carnivores are lurking in the doorways of the go-go bars, waiting for farang man-meat to come stumbling along.

"Hello, meester! Want massage?" they sing-song. One porcine creature in a too-tight cocktail dress even takes me by the waist and tries to pull me inside, but I slip away with a polite "mai ao, khrep" (no, thanks) and continue on. The idea is to stride purposefully, smile confidently and make only fleeting eye contact -- acknowledging without engaging.

And truth be told, I wish these ladies good hunting. Life in Thailand offers them few opportunities and so they're making the best of their one god-given asset while they've still got it. If a hard-working bar girl can pluck a few thousand baht (or much more) off some drunken white whoremonger who can afford to fly here for the express purpose of diving snout-first into debauchery ... well, who am I to question divine justice?

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When Thai property owners say "keep out," they mean it. Where in America do you ever see a barbed-wire fence flush up against a pedestrian walkway?

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Most days around mid-morning, the local police set up a traffic checkpoint in the exact same place on Thapae Road at the east end of the Narawat Bridge. Motor-bike riders who are not wearing helmets are stopped and ticketed. This is not a sporadic enforcement; whenever I walk that way to Warorot Market, eight times out of ten I will see the helmet patrol in action. Half of Chiang Mai knows that the police will be there, and yet amazingly they catch a great number of repeat offenders, usually women who are willing to risk getting busted (or brained against a curb) because -- well, let's ask one:

"Lady have a hair make beautiful, don't want helmet," explains Lian. I ask her how many 400 baht tickets she has accrued at that one checkpoint, which every local knows about. She holds up three fingers.

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Do I really want to spend the equivalent of $1.32 (plus the cost of milk and butter) for this little taste of home? I'm thinking no.

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Lian and I have a lazy, free afternoon.  I want to work a crossword and goof around online. This is what she wants to do. Wants to do. We are vastly different people.

Toggling between two realities

Monday night in Chiang Mai, some 30 hours after fleeing Portland, I arrive back on Lian's doorstep. I knock. Behind the curtained window, the lights go out and a soft orange glow illuminates the room from floor level. Then the door opens.

"Sawat dii kaa! Happy birthday!" Lian greets me with a hug, ushering me in to ooh and ahh at the wonderful western-style cake and nine candles waiting for me. (The number nine is considered good luck here.) Fun fact: Thai people sing the "Happy Birthday" song, in English, and I am duly serenaded.

I had sort of hoped that Lian's homemade fried rice would be my first meal back in Thailand, but hey -- birthday cake does just fine. And the fried rice, when it comes along a few days later, is spectacular.

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It figures that the minute I touch down in Chiang Mai, a slew of new work comes crashing in, including a Skype interview with a promising new prospect, which is set for Thursday afternoon, east coast time ... Friday 2 a.m., my time. So as not to disturb anyone's sleep, I set up my workspace on the floor of the bathroom.

Once we connect, I learn that my prospects want it to be a video conference, and the two co-owners of this agency are attending. So I quickly pull on whatever rumpled shirt is within reach and adjust the video cam so there's not a commode in the background. Even so, the tile walls are a giveaway, and eventually someone asks: "Uh, Jeff, where exactly ARE you?"

Busted. So I pick up the laptop and give them a video tour of an actual Thai bathroom: the toidy, the shower, the sink, the--

"Wait a minute," the agency president interrupts. "Did you say Thailand?" Apparently his marketing director, who knew where I was, neglected to mention it to the others. "What time is it there?" By now it is close to 3. "Oh for pete's sake!" he says. "Go back to sleep." So the meeting wraps up pretty quickly and I have not heard from them since.

Maybe work will come of it, maybe not. OK, probably not. But at least it makes for a memorable interview and anyway I've got lots of other stuff happening, work-wise.

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If you had to bet on how soon I would return to Wat Rampoeng, the Buddhist monastery of meditation retreat infamy, the smart money would be on "never." But Lian wants to attend Donation Day, where local worshipers come to "make merit" in the eyes of their gods by forking over hard-earned baht to the vagrants-- er, the monks. But there is music and dancing, and lots of free food, and I am one of the few farang among hundreds of Thai people.



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Wednesday morning I am hard-wired into the presidential election returns: a streaming NBC news feed, multiple live-blogging sites, the NY Times and HuffPo front pages with wildly inconsistent electoral maps, and even Thai TV, which tracks the returns much more closely than I would ever have imagined.

Only after Barack has it in the bag can I bear to turn on Fox News, where Megyn Kelly soothingly tries to explain reality to a weeping, jabbering, totally-in-denial Karl Rove. Delicious!