Andi’s Weblog

“Dear passendschas, we will shohtly be arriving in Bangkok International Airport, please put your seats …”, said the Captain. These were the words which made me feel like our holidays had finally started. Even though Beijing was new to me, I was used to Chinese culture and Chinese cities before. I knew basically what to eat how pronounce the English words for people to understand them and therefore didn’t feel entirely foreign there. I felt at home in Hong Kong and was looking forward to feeling foreign to Thailand. I was looking forward to experiencing something completely new.

So here we were, at the centerpoint of old-new fusion, where daily relaxation was supposed to meet strong business ambitions. We tried to get an impression of every side of Bangkok. We stayed close to the business disctrict (if there is such thing as ONE business district in Bangkok), tried out the fairly new sky train, took a boat tour on the river (the canals: no snake farm, no orchid farm) went to the Grand Palace, saw the Reclining Buddha (read: Recycling Buddha) and tried good Thai curries, spicy soups, etc. (of course Flo had to eat with chop sticks as well). All in all Bangkok was an interesting place that I would not want to live in (not even for a few months) in the years to come. Therefore it was probably the last (very interesting) time that I spent some part of my holidays in Bangkok in this decade.

After we had some trouble to move further north from Bangkok (due to the public holiday during the Songkran festival), we booked a flight to Chiang Mai and arrived there at the zenith of the Songkran (aka Water Festival). We had to make our way through the water spitting masses. Literally the whole city was on their feet spitting water at each other exactly on this one street that we had to pass to reach our hostel. People were respectful and left our backpacks as dry as possible while they made sure every single spot of our bodies/clothes was entirely wet. The other days in Chiang Mai were extremely relaxed because the 300 temples are all located around the centre and you’d never walk more than one km from one to the other. We decided to take a trip to some hill tribe village and stay there over night. The trip was exhausting, especially because of the incredible heat. But the guitar music at the fire (played by some seriously drunk inhabitants of the village) on top of mountains, where we could finally breath fresh air again, could more than compensate for that. In Summary, our stay in and around Chiang Mai was a good holiday with some interesting insights into Thai culture.

Again, pictures for this post will follow as the opportunity arises.