Magic and the Muse by Annie Crawford

The holy tree (really!) shading Pun Pun

Today we eat breakfast at Nick’s and Pam’s favorite restaurant, Pun Pun. The owners of this vegetarian restaurant are really committed to the quality and purity of the food they serve: they grow it on their own organic farm! It’s an outdoor restaurant, but the table we choose is shaded by an enormous old tree, so it’s not too hot. The food is seriously the best yet. Even better than The Riverside, and, needless to say, much cheaper. I think the whole breakfast costs about ten dollars for all of us. The others order green papaya salad, but I choose a wonderful banana flower salad (made with actual banana flowers) that has a lemony tartness to it, layered with complex flavors of cilantro and mint.

Wonderful banana flower salad

This is followed by a couple of green and red curries. All the food is light and fresh-tasting and beautifully plated. Nick orders us a forbidding-looking dark green drink made from some sort of leafy plant that grows wild. He tells us it’s called “it makes you a better person.” I don’t know if it will make me a better person, but it’s quite tasty. Pam, who cooks and bakes the most amazing delicacies, sells her baked goods at this restaurant, so of course I have to buy out their current stock of her granola bars.

Pamcita’s granola bars

After breakfast, we do a little shopping at the “lo-so” (low society) mall—as opposed to the “hi-so” mall, which is apparently quite a bit more elegant. It seems very nice to us, though, mainly because it’s air-conditioned. When we’re done looking through the shops, we visit a temple complex. I think I’m going to have to devote another whole post to this visit, since I have so many fabulous pictures of the various temples that make up the complex. Suffice here to say that we’re very impressed with the largest of the temples. It was built in 1325, and is every bit as grand, opulent and drenched in gold as any of the Catholic churches I’ve seen in Italy or Mexico.

Magnificent.

It’s a little strange to look down the massive nave and see a giant golden seated Buddha instead of a crucifix with a dying Jesus on it, especially since I was under the impression that Buddha is not meant to be revered as a god. Nick says that’s true, of course, but that here in northern Thailand, he is revered as a god. I’m including just one photo of this magnificent temple here, but I’ll show more in the next post.

After visiting all the temples (except the one with the sign out front that says “Woman, No Entry”—I didn’t want to go into that one anyway, thank you very much!), we’re worn out. It’s about a hundred fifty degrees by now and all we can think about is how to escape the sun.

Nothing misogynistic about this. . .

We hop in the car and drive downtown for a massage. Linda decides on the two-hour Thai massage, and the rest of us ask for the one-hour one. Ellie decides to get a pedicure in her remaining hour, and I decide I want a facial. There are several facials on the menu. I tell them I’ll have the “Pimple Take-out” with everything on it—lettuce, tomato, mayo, and please hold the raw onion. They smile politely, but I don’t think they understand. Which is just as well.

Our hour-long massage leaves us limp and languorous, and costs the princely sum of five dollars.Then comes my facial, which lasts another hour and includes a head and neck massage which feels like heaven. We feel like we’ve had a spa day—for fifteen dollars.

Aahh. . .

After this we shop a little more (today’s our shopping-for-presents day, can you tell?), this time in some lovely little ethnic shops. There’s one shop in particular that sells textiles made by the hill tribes of northern Thailand. There are elegantly designed tapestries, rugs, table runners, place mats, clothing, all breathtakingly beautiful, in rich, deep, opulent colors—deep purples, greens, rusty oranges, midnight blues, etc.—with silver and gold threads running through them, finished with beautiful silky fringe in contrasting colors. Everything is hand-sewn with tiny, painstaking stitches. Pieces that must have taken months to make sell for eighty or a hundred dollars. It feels criminal to pay so little for such beautiful things.

We finish off our long day at an international gourmet supermarket, designed for foreigners. We’re going to spend the next couple of days visiting Nick’s friends Marco and Nok at their organic farm outside Chiang Mai—you’ll hear all about it!—and Pam wants to make a cheesecake to take along. We also buy some bottles of wine we’re hoping will be good. I can’t believe this store has western-style cheeses, wine, Pepperidge Farm cookies, Lays potato chips, and all sorts of snacks, not just from the U.S., but also from Europe. Chiang Mai is truly an international city!

I know I’ve already tried your patience, dear readers, with my non-stop descriptions of food, but please bear with me just a little longer. I have to describe two brilliant dishes Nick orders for us at the Vietnamese restaurant where we go for dinner. The first is a build-your-own spring roll: the waiter brings a large platter with pork sausage, a pile of chopped green mango, chopped green bananas—peel and all!—chopped chilies, mint leaves, cilantro, and a dish of yummy peanut sauce. We take a thin round of rice paper and soak it in a small dish of water, then lay it atop a lettuce leaf. Then we pile the above ingredients on it, roll it up, and it’s to die for. I can’t believe I’m eating green banana peel, but somehow it all works. The other noteworthy dish is delicious, crunchy deep-fried pork nuggets. These are very good, but the most amazing thing about them is that they’re skewered on spears of fresh sugar cane. So when you bite into the nugget of meat, you crunch the sugar cane as well, and the juices run together in your mouth, and it’s altogether an incredibly delicious combination. We finish up with a bowl of the best pho I’ve ever had. Pam prepares it for us, adding in the additional ingredients, whisking it all up in her efficient manner, and serving us. I’m getting lazy, and it worries me a bit—what if I get back to the U.S. and find that I’m unable to prepare and serve my own food? : {

In Search of the Big Golden Buddha

Our seedy little hotel has an interesting feature, a slot next to the door where you insert a plastic card to turn on the electricity. When you leave the room, since the card is attached to the room key, you’re forced to take it out of the slot, which turns off the electricity. It’s a pretty nifty way for the hotel to save money. It’s obvious they’ve seen us coming, wasteful American tourists with our energy-guzzling habits like leaving the AC on all day so the room will be cool when we return. There will be none of that here!

I guess even monks need 7-11.

I’m in the hallway outside my room, waiting for the more slothful members of our party to make their appearance. It’s actually more like a large landing, with heavy wooden chairs arranged around a coffee table. Several doors, adorned like mine with beautiful bare-breasted Thai maidens, open off this landing, and all of them have shoes, mostly sandals, arranged neatly outside them. People here take their shoes off before entering houses. Curiously, we have the same custom in Washington, though it’s a lot more complicated there, since it’s rarely warm enough to wear flip-flops as almost everyone here does. At home it requires tedious unlacing and unbuckling.

But I digress. My companions have finally emerged from their rooms, blinking like moles in the morning light, and we set out in search of breakfast, which we eat, naturally, al fresco, at a stand with plastic tables set up around it.

So good!

It’s almost lunchtime, and most of the tables are occupied by giggling schoolgirls dressed in little white blouses, knee-length plaid pleated skirts, ankle socks and black and white Oxfords. I figure there must be one giant school-uniform company, centrally located in Siberia maybe, that supplies schools all over the world. It’s the only reasonable explanation for why school uniforms are the same everywhere.

The food, a spicy soup, is delicious. We’re already sweating, since it’s about a hundred degrees, and the humidity feels like a hot wet blanket draped over us. The soup makes us sweat even more. Then my sister Linda’s flimsy chair buckles and she falls over backwards onto the cement, causing a minor sensation among the schoolgirls since she’s over six feet tall and blonde. She gamely picks herself up and dusts herself off, and we set off, full, hot and happy.

We take a boat ride down the broad, brown Chao Phraya river that curves lazily through central Bangkok.

East meets west

A nice breeze affords some respite from the crushing heat. The city’s a mix of middle-class neighborhoods, crowded shantytowns, opulent, gilded temples that sparkle in the sunlight, and elegant high-rise hotels.

After a while we get off the boat and walk through a touristy area with lots of stands selling souvenirs. Linda, Ellie and I are itching to buy some of the beautiful fabrics and carved wood, but Nick shakes his head and tells us we’ll find these same things for half the price in Chiang Mai, the northern city he’s been living in for the past year and a half.

Now it’s mid-afternoon and we’re hot, sweaty and tired, but Ellie drives us on unmercifully in search of a huge golden Buddha she saw when she visited Bangkok the year before. Traffic, consisting of cars, tuk-tuks and more motorcycles than I’ve ever seen at one time before, swirls around us as we wander the sunstruck streets looking for the phantom Buddha.

We visit a couple of temple complexes, little oases of green and quiet surrounded by gilded Oriental structures.

I think it needs a little more gold. . .

Signs caution us not to touch the monks or be taken in by false tour guides. There are lily ponds patrolled by frighteningly large koi, and tiny, emaciated cats lounging everywhere. Nick tells us that people who want to divest themselves of their kitties (meanies!) drop them off at the temples. The poor little things look dazed. I hope they’re alert enough not to fall into the lily ponds, where they’d scarcely make a mouthful for one of those monster fish.

We finally convince Ellie to abandon the search for the big golden Buddha—we’ll buy a postcard instead. And now, one of the delights of Asia is beckoning to us: the legendary fish spa! Little Thai women industriously scrub our hot, aching feet and calves, and then we experience the bliss of lowering them into tanks of deliciously cool water with hundreds of tiny fish in it. The fish gather around and begin to nibble at our feet. It’s the strangest sensation, as if they had tiny teeth, but very pleasant.

Yummy! I get the red part!

I take a closer look at them, and realize they’re those tiny sucker fish that diligently work their way up and down the glass walls of aquariums eating the algae. Hmm. I’m thinking, I could buy a huge aquarium at home, stock it with these fish and stick my feet into it every night. . .

Feeding the fish

This only sets us back three dollars, so, feeling reckless, we follow it up with a wonderful hour-long massage for six dollars. Linda’s masseur goes all out. He stands on her rear end, kneading it with his feet, then yanks her arms behind her and shoves his feet into her back.

Ouch!

But, hey, it feels wonderful! We’re lying on mattresses in a cool, dim upper room. Our masseuses chatter back and forth in a soft sing-song that lulls me into a stupor. As I drift off I’m thinking, I could get used to this. . .