12 Hours Off

There is alot to say, I really don't know where to begin -- so I guess I'll give the beginning a shot:

long plane ride -- everything that could go wrong did; no matter, made it to Bangkok eventually.

Being in Bangkok felt like I had never left the airplane. Instead of the whitewash din of 747 engines, the city has a constant, monotonous gray shriek about it: on account of the traffic. It is large and dirty, sweaty and chaotic. The only refuge is Lumphini park, which is something like Central Park in its size and purpose. Here I watched Kimono dragons(or what looked like them) slip in and out of green lagoons and watched the crowd of joggers traipsing through.
While reading in the much desired shade of a tree, by the banks of the lagoon, a Thai man sat down next to me and we proceeded to talk for about an hour. Here's the thing -- Alone in the park, unfamiliar and infamously seedy city, foreigner who doesn't know how to say "I need an adult -- all the signs set my paranoid neruosis into swing. But Thailand is 12 hours different from America in so many ways (titular sentence!) . It's just AM and PM -- the apperance is the same, the essence is way off. This guy was just friendly. He turned out to be a professor at the University in Bangkok: a professor of linguistics, of all things. We talked about symantics and language and whatnot and life and all that stuff: basically it was a welcome friend in a hostile place.

Off to Chiang Mai.

Boarded a train at 7:40pm arrived in CM at 11:30am. It was running a bit slow.

Made friends with Swiss girls who were sitting nearby. A few Singha beers and we were close as toast. We , coincedentally, ended up staying at the same guesthouse in Chiang Mai -- a place called Julie. It is some kind of bizarre hippie bohemian retreat run by a Swiss guy (there's a lot of 'em out here ... why not, I say). There is a large "chill out" area with a gigantic pool table that has tiny little pool balls and skinny little sticks -- it's like some kind of torture playing on that thing.
There's quite a bit of chilling out in CM. It is really pale-face town -- we're called Fawrangs around here -- so I've dubbed the place Fawrang Mai... beacuse I'm VERY FUNNY. It looks like the Volkswaggon Van broke down here twenty years ago and the hippies extended their prodding new agey fingers out and took the place over one yoga studio at a time. I even saw a restaurant advertising "Authentic Thai Food" -- I can't imagine anything more authentically Thai, then a restaurant in fucking Thailand for God's sake!
But this was all really just a first impression and it mostly had to do with the area i'm staying in. For every restaurant that advertises American breakfast, another offers a menu that is unreadable and unedible. There is a bizarre harmony here between Western influence and Thai fortitude. In a way it's like the Tucson of Thailand -- artificial culture is only a distraction from the genuine funkiness.