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Hi,

The weather cooperated and we had a perfect day for traveling.  It’s hotter in Chiang Mai, which is a nice change.

The ‘Zany Day’ song came out in 1969.  Several readers got it pretty quickly.  Here’s the rest of the story.

“She said she’d always been a dancer, she worked at 15 clubs a day.  And though she thought I knew the answer, well I knew what I could not say.  And so I quit the police department, and got myself a steady job.  And though she tried her best to help me, she could steal but she could not rob.  Didn’t anybody tell her?…..”  Hint:  A strange relationship?  I guess the title has to do with how they met.  Hmm.

Our drive to Chiang Mai was very smooth.  The traffic was light and the driving was a breeze.  We stopped about an hour into the trip and had coffee and pie at the Gardens.  Along the way we kept noticing how things were changing.  Villages were becoming towns, small towns were getting bigger.  The forest hillsides are getting very brown this time of year, especially since there has been so little rain.  

We’re staying at a new, for us, hotel in a different part of town.  The rooms are very nice and it’s clean.  After checking in we walked down  Soi 17 looking for a snack.  We found a little spot called ‘Art and Food Space’.  It’s part of a collective, with a gallery and a workshop.  The food was healthy, with creative and attractive combinations of things.  I had wheat toast with peanut butter, banana, and cranberries.  As I looked over toward the kitchen I couldn’t help noticing something above the window.  It was a row of old phones on the wall.  Our photo for the day.

The motel has a driver they use when you ask for a taxi.  He took us to the Consulate office and waited.  After some time, we got all our business taken care of and returned to the motel for a much needed nap.  

Dinner was an experience for us.  We went to a place called ‘Duke’s’ at a mall that has a Rimping Market.  We know the food at Duke’s, and Rimping is a chain that has lots of things we can’t find in Chiang Rai.  Duke’s was full of non-Thais.  It was like being somewhere other than Thailand.  Quite a few of them knew each other so it must have been a group thing.  

We will never complain about the traffic in Chiang Rai again.  We don’t have any ’traffic' after spending time on the streets of Chiang Mai.  In some places it was due to road construction, in others it was bad sequencing of traffic lights.  Then there were the roads that just had too many cars.  An SUV slowly started moving over on our taxi and our driver honked and said he must be from Bangkok, he moved so slow.  In Bangkok the traffic sits still for very longs periods of time.  From above, it looks like an ocean of cars.  Motorcycle taxi drivers often drive up on the side walk to bypass the mess.  We felt so local, understanding an ‘inside’ joke like that.

 

We return to Chiang Rai tomorrow, after visiting Dr. Perry for adjustments.  The nights are going to start getting very cold again, so this little warm break hit the spot.

Have a Thrilling Thursday.

                   Peace,

                             Danny

“When you start being good to yourself,

you start feeling good about yourself.”

~Unknown