Wat's That?! A Day Exploring Old City

Catch Up...so Olivia still won't let me order the mystery meat on a stick at the street vendors.   It all worked out in the end though, because for Friday night's dinner we got these very tasty Rotis!  It's kinda like a Thai-style crêpe.  The cute lady making them takes these balls of dough, and flings 'em around super fast, and phwaps 'em on the top of her cart.  She then plops the now thinly-stretched dough onto a hot pan (very much like a crêpe pan), and globs a bit of oil and a pad of butter for good measure.  While the dough is sizzling away, the speedy roti cooker chops a banana with an expertise that I would not be able to manage with a lifetime of practice.  Anyway, the roti was taken off of the pan, chopped into lumpy bits and pieces (I don't think the street vendors are concerned with presentation) plopped into a styrofoam dish, and topped with condensed milk.  Mmmm....c'est delicious!

 But enough reminiscing!  Let's move on to the adventures of yesterday! Olivia and I did quite a bit.  We woke up at the usual crack-of-dawn thanks to the mysteriously semi-naked roosters across the street.  My theory is they are occasionally plucked for some reason I have yet to deduce.  Olivia, as usual, spent an hour and a half looking at maps and trying to figure out the best course of action.  In the end, we did exactly as I suggested in the beginning....just start walking! Which is exactly what we did. We walked. And walked. And walked, and walked, and walked, and walked.  I bet we covered 10 miles! Which is no small feat in the Thai heat, let me tell you!  That's the funny thing about Thai people.  They don't walk anywhere! They think that 5 blocks is "a very long way".  As a consequence, people would stop us every few minutes asking if we needed a ride anywhere.  They always seemed perplexed when we told them that we liked walking.  Well the first place of note was the Warorot Market.  It's located near the Mae Ping River.  The flowers were beautiful! No ordinary carnations for the Thais! There were bouquets of orchids in almost every color imaginable! And cool spiky pods, and folded flowers and leaves that floated atop buckets of water.  Another personal favorite were the buckets of eels.  They wiggled around a lot, and often escaped onto the street (much to the dismay of a rather large American woman passing by).  Olivia and I then tried to find this restaurant mentioned in our Lonely Planet travel book.  So we walked and walked and walked some more.  Only to find that the place had closed.  We ended up going to a very tasty place called Ratana's Kitchen.  I had a Northern-style pork curry with ginger. Very tasty.  My lame twin had Thai fried rice.  But I have to admit...it was very good. And for dessert we had a heaping plate of mangoes with sticky rice! The mangoes were so sweet and juicy and were the perfect compliment to the coconutty, creamy rice. Yum! Then we walked into the Old Town of Chiang Mai through the Thapae Gate, which is one of the original gates to the city. The Old Town is the original part of Chiang Mai (over 700 years old!), and it is still surrounded by a brick wall.  We saw a buncha wats, or temples.  There are so many (over 300 throughout the city)! Olivia came up with a good theory as to why there are so many:  Since every male in Thailand is expected to be a monk at least for a short time in his life, there must be plenty of wats to accomodate all of them. That, and religion is just a central part of Thai culture as well.  Hmmm...I'm getting very tired, so I'll save the dinner description for tomorrow.  But, in case you were wondering, Olivia and I didn't walk back.  We caught a sang tiao (which are the little bus-like things that drive people around) back to the apartment.  Phew. What a day! Oh, also, I apologize for the awful formatting, but everything on the computer in written in Thai, so I'm just getting by by clicking random buttons....