So, as I mentioned, I'm settling into my new neighbourhood, which is in the outskirts of Chiang Mai, near the office where I'll be spending a fair amount of time, but outside the old city where a lot of the restaurants, night spots, &c. are. I am, nevertheless, rather liking it so far. I'm right off the highway, so my street is pretty quiet, but the main road where I do all my shopping and so on feels a bit like I'm strolling alongside the New Jersey Turnpike (but a LOT cleaner). The advantages, besides being within a ten-minute walk of the office, are the many, MANY delicious noodle soup carts nearby, the big shopping centre across the highway (for household essentials), the market that's just past the office (for many, many kinds of delicious street food, fruit, and desserts), and the general sense of safety, especially at night. You can actually return a stranger's greeting on the street in Chiang Mai - yes, even at night - and that will be that. At most, they might ask if you want to come into their restaurant, or want a taxi. Compare that to my neighbourhood in London, where three people might hiss obscene things in your ear from shadowed doorways on your walk home, and you didn't dare so much as look around, because it would be taken as "encouragement" *shudder*.
I'm in a one-room flat in a new development. Now, my image of VSO living conditions was very much shaped by my friend Malcolm's stories of his experience in Malawi - pump your own water, no hot showers, trek into town every couple of weeks to check your email. Obviously, Thailand is an emerging economy, so I knew it wasn't going to be like that, so I was expecting something along the lines of:
- Pretty much constant electricity
- Internet cafe down the road
- Shower attachment on the toilet wall, with cold water
- No fridge
- Gas ring for cooking
- Need for mosquito net at night
- Possibility of buying a fan for really hot nights
- Bucket to do laundry
- 24/7 electricity
- FREE HIGH-SPEED WIFI IN MY HOUSE
- Shower attachment on the toilet wall, with HOT water
- Mini-fridge
- No cooking apparatus whatsoever (a lot of Thais buy all their meals hot on the street, or eat pots of ramen)
- Air conditioning
- Brand-new washing machines at one end of the block of flats
There are also three beautiful gold-and-white spirit houses, with their own little moat, set near the gate. And I have very nice neighbours who only laughed at me a little when I was driving wobbly circles around the parking lot out front during my first motorbike lesson. :)
Tonight I had what one of my fellow volunteers calls a Yellow Song Tao Adventure! Song Taos are big, open-backed trucks; the yellow ones run the route from my house to Warorot Market, just outside the old city, so I grabbed one and rode down to explore. Given my shaky grasp of both Thai and geography, it kind of was an adventure. Especially since it was full, so I was hanging onto the back. :) (Not as dangerous as it sounds; there's a little platform.) I took a wander around the eastern part of the old city, snapping pictures of the various wats, locating two brilliant English-language bookshops, eavesdropping on a tourist cooking class that was taking a tour of one of the markets (which was a lot more expensive than my local market, </smug>), embarrassing the local dogs by cooing over them, and resisting the temptation to eat EVERYTHING (seriously, this living on street food would be brilliant if my self-control were better :)). Then I met up with a couple of other VSO volunteers for dinner at a gorgeous little vegetarian restaurant and bookshop, where I fell in love with the Burmese-influenced dish khao soi (egg noodles and spring onions with meat or tofu in a delicious coconut curry sauce, served - at least in this case - with crunchy noodles on top). I totally failed to find the right song tao route on the way back, so eventually I flagged down an empty one headed in my direction, and we negotiated that he'd take me as far as the superhighway (where he was going anyway) for the normal fare. Little things like that leave me ridiculously pleased with myself when I'm in a foreign country. :)
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