weewee at wawee

gentle reader,
you may think that it takes a few moments in an air-conditioned café, sipping from a fresh coconut to update matacodotcom, your favorite travel blog. alas, this is not the case. this morning’s “adventure” in interweb technology has turned into a test of patience, will and loyalty to you, our adoring public. let’s just say that after several failed attempts, we have found a solution. the apple g5 imac at the wawee coffee shop. when i saw the gleaming white square of magicalness, i just about peed my pants. thank you imac. you’re the best invention of life.

now onto the first of a series of general observations:
* thai dogs wear t-shirts. not the tiny show dog in a burberry sweater style. big fat shop guard dogs in old t-shirts, knotted at the waist. we assume this emphasizes their non-stray status.
* you can ride a motorbike in the street here as soon as you’re old enough to handle it. kids go to school, three on a bike. why, oh why, were we not allowed to do so? think about how much cooler we’d all be.
* according to our source, gai, all school costs money. no public school. you gotta pay to learn.
* according to the conversation overheard through the thin walls of our guest house, thai prostiutes in chiang mai will cost you about $6 us. and they giggle a lot too.
* cool kids are cool kids around the world. we continue to hang out with b-boys and bmx riders, punks and artists. also, rebels are rebels. see photo of our friend gai, below.
* the same word spelling can have 5 different meanings, depending on the tone. we knew this before, but it can be a challenge when the word can mean “beautiful” and “bad luck curse”. fun with language.
* beef blood soup with tripe is not so much for us.
* old guys playing music on the street is generally good and entertaining.
* buddhist shrines are everywhere.
* if you look closely, you'll find an opportunity to mope around a graveyard and listen to the cure.
* it takes about two seconds for us to turn our clean hotel rooms into vortexes of chaos.

now, let us elaborate on a few key points.
point one: eccentric collector geniuses are universally cool.
evidence: dr. manop rattanarithikul, founder of the museum of world insects in chiang mai. this man researches and collects the coolest bugs, nests, rocks, fossils, shells and stories from the globe. he’s also a painter. we love him. when you come to chiang mai, you must visit him for hours, as we did. you won’t regret it. he’ll tell you all about ‘the manager’ (the brain). he also identified the bug that was in our toilet in petchaburi.


point two: food is good. especially if you know how to cook it.
evidence: the chiang mai cookery school. we learned to make our own fresh curry paste, penang curry, chili sauce for fish, glass noodle salad with pork, black sticky rice pudding, sweet and sour veggies, and chiang mai chicken curry. we also ate all of it. we got the itis. corey had to take a nap. one of our teachers is called princess. why do you call her princess? “because she is gorgeous.” please admire the food the we made ourselves. if you send us the right comments, we might make you some when we get back.

point three: try to avoid eating in restaurants with walls. three, maximum.
evidence: 9 times out of 10, when we eat somewhere that has more than three walls, it's just ok. the closer you get to no walls at all, the closer you get to delicious. for example: kao kiam pah moa. mung bean flour filled with roasted peanuts and spices, swimming in coconut milk with cilantro on top. made before your eyes at a food stall with no walls. right next to the vietnamese pancke stall. best food ever.

point three: friends are where it’s at.
evidence: if not for our thai friends, we would be stuck bar-hopping, trekking with other farang to visit “authentic thai hilltribe culture” villages, or hiding in our guesthouse doing arts and crafts, like we were in new york. it’s hard to see the thai side of things from a tourbus. so we end up hanging out with pok the designer and bmx rider, gai, the motorcyle mechanic and general rock star, nid, aimee, prom, and new, the most talented and fun masssage therapists in chiang mai. we love them. look at them and love them too.

and now, dear readers, we close. we’ve been staring at one malfunctioning computer after another and, even though corey wants to be close to this imac for as long as possible, we have things to do. like go to the dentist for laser teeth cleaning.

exhaustingly yours,
corey + lucy + mari + tara
xoxooxoxo

p.s. -thai kids rule

p.p.s. - you can drink beer in class here:

al gore + ch II = banana splits

first of all, let us all praise the interweb. al gore's greatest invention. when we arrived in bangkok, we had to take the first place we could find with an available bed. that turned out to be the charming CH II guesthouse (there is a prize for whoever figures out what the CH stands for. we were thinking it's 'crappy hotel'). we slept in these beds for one night and did our laundry. we stayed up late drinking beer and typing the last blog entry (hence the slightly drunken ranting about the monkey) so we wouldn't have to sleep there for very long. but lucy saved the day with one brilliant suggestion: priceline. and that's how we ended up in the fancy-schmancy holiday inn the very next day. they accepted our bid of $40 per room. we ordered banana splits. we had robes and a pool. it was fabulous. thus were we able to enjoy our stay in bangkok. thank you al gore.

the chatuchak weekend market is famous for it's size, (it's a real life maze of stalls) and for the number of things one can purchase. go ahead, think of something. anything. you can get it there. a whole city block of tough thai rocker boys selling levi's, new, vintage and beyond filthy. old men hawking pets like squirrels and snakes. used sneakers, new sneakers, plants, electronics, bathmats in any shape, ashtrays in the shape of an erect penis, king of thailand clocks, so much delicious food, cosmetics, souvenirs, herbal hair oil (sold by the barry white of thailand, looks just like him) and more. haggling for good prices and sometimes overwhelmed, we got happily lost many times. it's a miracle we ever found our way out. we don't have a lot of pictures, cause it was a
challenge to get through the crowds and take a camera out. mad pickpockets too. oh well. just look at that holiday inn picture again. you know it's funny.

after a quick 'lay-by-the-pool-and-drink-tea-and-read-the-paper', we headed to chinatown for some peking duck. yup. a whole duck. lucy taught us how to do it. she's our food coach. she gently urges us on when we can't stuff any more into our stomachs. reminds us that we don't need to know exactly what it is before we eat it. says thing like, "it's okay if you need to take a break, just breathe and there'll be more room in a minute." she's very supportive. she's the one who got mari and corey to eat a traditional indian betel leaf. for corey, it was a lesson in gracious spitting.

bangkok chinatown is, well, a lot like new york chinatown, only a little bit more intense. on most streets in thailand, the motorbikes park on the sidewalk, pedestrians walk in and out of traffic. it creates a school-of-fish-type fluidity that looks sketchy at first, but someone's always paying attention (so far). chinatown is no different. except there's ten times more motorbikes and food stalls on the sidewalks and ten times for traffic in the street: taxis, cars, tuk-tuks, songthaew (the thai version of a bus), bikes, scooters, you name it. it was pretty impressive. and in case you need some snake venom sacks or bear gall bladders, you can get them there. delicious.

from bangkok, we got on the bus (yay! another bus!) to sukhothai, the former capital of the former siam. we took a songthaew to the 'new city' to check into our guesthouse. the lovely lotus village. how beautiful is the lotus village? how inexpensive was our whole teak house on stilts above a lotus pond filled with fish and flowers? how close is the massage spa across the path? how delicious is the breakfast? very very very. very on all counts. we stayed for three arts + craft-filled nights. lucy and corey stayed up into the wee hours rocking the color pencils and gluestick. mmmhmm.

the 'old city' is a historic park, filled with a million ruined wats, buddha statues and tourists on bicycles. look, here are some examples: we rode around all day, ate some food we hadn't had before, including that bug that tara ate. she said it was like a puff of air, no big deal. still. it's a bug. there was a parade that day, honoring the ancient king of siam, but we didn't hang out because we saw how badly treated the parade elephants were. it was bad. if i were an elephant, and a tiny man hit me in the face with a hammer, i might kill him. death before hammers in the face. we split that scene and got a massage back at our guesthouse.

despite the elephant incident, sukhothai was cool, we recommend it. but that didn't stop us from getting on another bus and heading north to chiang mai, the famous cultural province of thailand. there are many tribal groups concentrated in this area, which has served as a trading hub for centuries. lots of crafts like weaving,
leatherwork, ceramics and metalwork. the traffic is fierce, the air quality is, well, dusty. we might rock the facemask (it's all the rage). the first place we stayed (last night) is located on a very busy street that echoes the chinatown pedestrian plight. but let's talk for a moment about our luck with housing, shall we? chiang mai is in the throes of a giant flower festival that sees thousands of visitors from all over thailand and the world. word had it from all the farong, and indeed every place we tried to check into confirmed, there's no room available. anywhere. but we have the ju-ju. we found two cheap, clean rooms on a tiny lane, away from all the madness, but close enough to the most delicious papaya salad stall of life. so good. aroy mak (that means real delicious).

tara and mari found some cool stuff at the night bazaar in chiang mai. local artists selling beautiful screenprints and boxes. lucy and corey ate some dried fruit, some salty strawberries, saw a pig on a stake in a plastic bag and headed for the sake bar.
that's right. if there's a sake bar in thailand, we'll find it. and now, we're off to the insect musem to see some prehistoric bugs. then we might go fishing. who knows.

ever your servants on the interweb, corey + lucy for matacodotcom

p.s.- this is the toughest scooter ever. a school teacher was driving it.

monkey see monkey doo doo

first of all, when a monkey pees on you, that's good luck for, like, a decade. according to lucy. corey was not so enthused when it actually happened to her, but she could use some good luck, so hey. pee away, monkey.

we left khaolak in a blaze of sadness, cause we made such good friends there and it was so beautiful. the bus to petchaburi (pronounced petburi) was ten hours of fun. the buses in thailand have stewardesses and the bustops feature good thai food and clean bathrooms. what? mari and tara slept, lucy and corey shared headphones and danced in our spacious seats to juice newton and kenny rodgers. yes. the gambler. it was very appropriate. then we took some codiene and fell asleep for about ten minutes before the stewardesses woke us up and ordered us off the bus. no time to pack up, just get off and stand on this dark, abandoned highway. in petchanburi, thailand. okay!

two motorbike taxis came to our rescue and took us to the wong-something hotel, a favorite with chinese salesmen (according to lonely planet). we were greeted by grumpy teenagers at the front desk and a giant gajillipede insect-type-animal in our squat toilet. for all we know, it could have been 20 feet long. we couldn't tell. it was fascinating. we flushed it promptly.

we were all unsure what petchaburi would bring. it brought linda. linda (her thai name is sasiphorn) found us reading a map, taking pictures of cats.
maybe you didn't notice, but we like cats and puppies. turns out linda is an english 'cru' (thai for teacher) and had lived in maine!!!!!!! corey peed her pants when she found out. luckily there are many cheap tailors in thailand. also, it was linda's birthday. what? how does this happen to us? we go to THAILAND. we meet someone on the street in a totally un-touristy town (people in khaolak asked us why on earth we were going there) and she's lived in MAINE. and it's her BIRTHDAY. okay.

linda took us to the pet store. we bought dog food, which we took to wat yai (big temple) to feed the giant large catfish in the pond. then she taught us how to pay respect to the buddha in the temple and how to make a wish.

then linda took us to lunch. this was not just any lunch. this was the best food in thailand. for real (according to tara and corey. lucy liked the dinner we had later better. mari's asleep right now, so she can't talk). we ate koay teow. that means noodles in a delicious broth of spices and pork (in this case, it can vary). we also had koay teow hang, which is the dry version of this dish. it was sooooooo good. help us. we are ruined for other food.

after lunch, we trekked on over to khao luong or 'loyal mountain'. this is a gigantic cave that has been used as a buddhist temple for over 300 years. it also sheltered thousands of thai people during the wars with burma. it was a challenge to get to the actual cave due to the monkeys. a word about thai monkeys: we don't know what kind of monkeys you have been hanging out with, but these ones are scary. they look like little cute macaques? but they are ready to steal your bag for food. like smart squirrels with personality. tara had a big stick to fend them off. our guide at the temple said he shoots them with a slingshot all the time. he was pretty psyched about it. khao luang has examples of thai, chinese and indian buddhas. it was cool and creepy in there. our legs felt weird. there were stalagtites AND stalagmites.

then we walked through a market and felt the loss of our friends meaw, nong and sit. we had to resort to super-remedial thai and sign language while we tried to communicate with a tattooed old-timer who sold us coconuts. we had a rest at our gorgeous hotel and headed to linda's learning center. she runs an afterschool english program for children and teenagers. we were the special guests from new york. they are the coolest kids.
all aspiring to become engineers, docters, nurses and pilots. one likes to meditate for fun. so different from american kids who all want to be beyonce and jay-z when they grow up. thay asked us questions. we asked them questions. they taught us how to dance thai traditional dance. it was fun.

dinner with linda featured the special fish soup of petchaburi and many delicious salads. we declared ourselves full, then went to a market and got dessert. actually, four different types of dessert. the signature petchaburi dessert is a flan-like custard that melts in your mouth. we also enjoyed the sticky rice with coconut and this bean-custard thing in a banana leaf. dessert rules. yum. after a million mosquito bites, we went back to our hotel, watched some really good thai television (fat kids dancing with long fingernails) and crashed.

the next day was 'children's day' in thailand. we woke up to live teen rock bands playing that song by the cranberries. it's the most popular song in thailand. venturing out, we hiked up the mountain in the town to visit the palace and temples of king rama v of siam. three peaks of beautiful, handcrafted wats and colonial palace architecture connected through winding brick paths. on the way up, we were asked to speak to the children in thailand in english. there were tv cameras. it was hilarious. we explored, hiked around and took the old trolley down the mountain. found some cute kids that made themselves their own tuk-tuk out of a bmx bike and a cardboard box.

walking through the park back to our hotel, we encountered some of the bands that were rocking our world. thai teenagers have the best haircuts and are the toughest. just look at the photos. amazing. our favorite band was "nying baht" (that means one baht, or "one dollar"). they were maybe 13 years old.

lucy loves thailand. can't you tell?

a short busride later, we arrived in bangkok, land of crusty hippie farong, having their hair braided and buying those stupid wooden frogs that you can buy in new york or probably even witchita, kansas. we are staying in the gross gross hotel. but we booked a fancy place on priceline for tomorrow night. yeah. we need a real bath.

tomorrow we check out the famous bangkok weekend market and a muy thai match. we'll let you know. it might take a week, but we'll let you know. still lovin you. corey and lucy for matacodotcom.