Chiang Mai

I have been negligent about updating. This was mostly due to Facebook not allowing me to upload the ton of pictures I have since Windows is lame. It's been two weekends since the last entry and they've both been pretty busy. I'll be giving a presentation on my research Saturday morning (10 am, first presentation) here at CRI about gold nanoparticles used as a detector for some kinds of small molecules. Since the last presentation a lot has happened and the project has sort of shifted since new things started to work.

Fun Fact: Despite having an entire rainy season every year where it rains each day, people in Bangkok drive like Florida people when it snows. This leads to an hour in traffic on the bus on top of skytrain and even more transportation.

So two weekends ago, on the 24th, we went up by bus to Chiang Mai. That weekend was a four-day weekend since it was the start of Buddhist Lent.

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Friday night, after our second round of presentations on the progress of our projects, we took an overnight VIP bus to Chiang Mai. The accommodations on board were amazing. They had massage chairs built into the seats and the food was much better than airline food. It takes something like eight hours to get there from Bangkok by bus.

We arrived around eight on Saturday morning and checked into the hotel. Our tour guide took us to an orchid farm first. It is a large greenhouse where they grow a wide variety of orchids - it's a pretty simple idea but it looks very nice.

From there we went to an elephant camp. In Thailand elephants used to be used for all sorts of labor and for war (the king volunteered a few of them during World War II). There was elephant painting, rides, food, and at the end we took rafts down the river.

In the movie American Gangster with Denzel Washington, one of the scenes in Thailand takes place here but was filmed at a river near Bangkok (the northern region by Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai is where opium was/is grown):

After the elephant camp trip we went back to the city to wander the area. Our hotel was in the new part of the city. Chiang Mai was originally built within a moat. It was conquered by the Burmese long ago and then taken back later. A lot of the architecture reflects this. Where we were staying was rather touristy. The place has a much slower pace than Bangkok. There aren't any skyscrapers or massive buildings surrounding you. However a lot of the area gets pretty sketchy at night since the combination bars/brothels open on the street late a night get rather lively. There's a night market right across the street from our hotel but I never had much of a chance to get to hang out there for long.

The next day (Sunday) we went around to see some temples. The first was Wat Chedi Luang, which was built a long time ago and has partially collapsed since then. We would be returning to this temple Monday night for part of the Buddhist holiday ceremonies that go on here.

Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep has twice as many steps as the previous temple-on-top-of-a-mountain in Kanchanaburi - something like 300. It is pretty exhausting to get all the way up there. But at the top the view is very interesting. Until you get to the edge the entire sky is whited out. It looks like the universe just ends right there. Once you get to the edge of the mountain you can look down through the cloud cover and see parts of the city.

There's quite a bit of things to see at the temple. There are many statues and small buildings. People play music and perform dances in traditional clothes.

Sunday night is the night of Chiang Mai's Walking Street Market. It is a must-see for anyone staying in Chiang Mai. They close down several roads in the old city and open them to hundreds of vendors selling handicrafts along with things you might find elsewhere. There's a lot to see here and you can find nearly anything you might be looking for. It's probably smaller than Chatuchak Market but a lot nicer.

On Monday we went to the Chiang Mai Zoo. It's a fairly large zoo with plenty of interesting animals. There was an orangutan who could open and drink from bottles, even using a straw. A few of the park visitors had thrown them in there which probably wasn't a good idea.

Monday night we returned to Wat Chedi Luang temple to see the candlelight procession for the holiday. They light candles out front and walk around the structure three times. There are bells lined up so people can ring them and a large number of monks gather in the front of the temple. I took a lot of pictures here because the sky was a very nice color.

It is very late right now. I will post about Tuesday and about last weekend in tomorrow's entry.

Last Weekend: Trip to Kanchanaburi

Last weekend we went west to Thailand's Kanchanaburi province! To explain how Thailand is divided up, here's a map.

Depending on how you count it, Thailand has four or six regions. This map shows the six region system as follows:

Orange - Western (Kanchanaburi is here, noted as #1)
Green (upper) - Northern (Chiang Mai is here)
Yellow - Central (Bangkok and Ayutthaya are here)
Red (right) - Northeastern
Green (lower) - Eastern (next weekend we'll go here for the beaches)
Red (lower) - Southern (Phuket is here)

Each of these regions feature different climates and they've all developed different cultural traits. Early on in the cultural class during the second week, we saw different dances and traditional clothing styles from the main regions of the country.

By the end of the trip, I'll have been to the Western, Northern, Central, and Eastern parts of Thailand. Initially I wanted to see Phuket and its beaches to the south but they're rather touristy (it's not the tourist season right now, however).

Picture Collections (Facebook):

Album 1

Album 2

Our first stop early on Saturday was Wat Tum Seu. This area is pretty mountainous with some wide stretches of farmland where they grow things like rice. The temple was built at the top of a small mountain and displayed a very large golden Buddha along with very ornate buildings. To get to the top, you have to climb a ton of stairs (something like 150 steps, each one is sloped downward slightly):

If you  think taking these steep stairs is too safe, then you can try what I like to call the Death-coaster. It's apparently a tram that's been converted into something like an escalator.

At the top is the massive Buddha. In front of it is a small alter and some automated conveyor belt. You can put coins in the little cups on the belt and it drops them into a collection jar.

The architecture around the statute is also pretty impressive:

Since it was high noon and we were up on top of a hill the heat quickly became unbearable. From here, we left to go to the Don-Rak World War II memorial cemetery. This is a cemetery for POWs during WW2 who were forced to work on the construction of railways in Burma from 1942 to 1945. (Click picture to zoom in)

There are rows and rows of stones in this hedged off part of the city.

Picture of me, Nun (right), Amm (middle), and Joy (left) in the entrance to the cemetery:

From here we went to the bridge on the River Kwai which was the name of an American movie that I haven't seen before. The JEATH War Museum is here, but its kind of spread out across the area. JEATH is Japan, England, Australia, Thailand, and Holland which were involved in WW2 in this area. Prisoners of war were used to construct the infamous bridge on the River Kwai as part of the death railway into Burma to aid the Japanese at the Burmese front of the war in that area. More info on a lot of the sites can be found here: site (we went to the War Museum at the Bridge).

Here is the bridge, which is black and spans the width of the river. Apparently the curved pieces on the sides are still the original metal.

Camera does panoramic shots (this was shrunken down but made from eight separate pictures):

There was also an exhibit near the river to advertise a local zoo:

From the river we went to board the raft house we'd be sleeping overnight in. These rafts are large rectangular things which hook up to one another like train cars and get towed around by a small boat. I never got far enough to take a picture of our own boat but this is one that passed us:

There's another raft house in front and they're hooked up to a pair of tow boats. After dinner on the boat we docked at an island where they had some showers we could use. There were many other raft houses docked here and the island has its own sets of houses which are probably for rent.

One half of the raft house had something like a bed room on the second floor:

While the front half was the entertainment deck and dining hall. They had a DJ on one side of this deck and they played music until midnight and there was dancing. The main attraction here was that you could request karaoke songs. They had a lot of older stuff and a lot of Thai stuff but everyone had a lot of fun that night. Without any A/C, it was hard to sleep and sleeping on the floor didn't help much.

On Sunday we went to the Erawan National Park where there are seven tiers of waterfalls that you can swim at. I only went as high as the fifth one because it was going to rain and I'd have to go up and down two more trails to get to the top.

They had more of those fish that eat dead skin at the fifth level in a pool below the waterfalls. These ones were much bigger and held on when you tried to move away.

On the way up, we saw monkeys in the trees overhead. There were a bunch of them and they looked like they'd be up to no good if we watched them for too long.

After the waterfalls, we went back to CRI and stopped at a marketplace to have dinner.

Today, after we give our presentations on the current status of our summer research, we will be leaving for Chiang Mai via an overnight bus. There is a four-day weekend this week so we won't be getting back until Tuesday. I don't know what we have planned but one day will be at an elephant park.

Ayutthaya Ruins and Bai Pai Cooking Class

Fun Fact: Instead of "lol", a lot of people in Thailand use "555" instead. Five is pronounced "ha" in Thai.

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This Saturday we had an outing to a series of ruins at Ayutthaya which was the old capital of Thailand around 1350. There are a lot of temples and shrines out this way today and it's not too far from Bangkok to go see it in a day. More on the history of Ayutthaya.

Many of the structures still standing are very impressive. Even though 'tourist season' doesn't start until our winter, there are plenty of visitors.

This particular trip was planned by ThaiREU students and not by the grad students. It went very well and we were able to keep on schedule and get back at a reasonable time.

You can find a lot of Buddha statues in this area:

There's also a lot of monks at all these sites. At one place they took pictures with some of the REU students. A group of Thai students stopped to take pictures with all of us hanging out at the ruins.

In some areas of Ayutthaya, raiders from long ago cut off the heads of some of these statues. Later in the day we found one place which had rows of these statues all along the main wall. They were missing heads and limbs or were even completely cut in half.

People who go to these sites will often leave little statues which have also had their heads broken off. There area also a lot of warning signs that tell people to not climb on the statues.

Some of these places were hit or miss as far as being interesting. The last stop of the day was probably the best. We got to climb this giant set of stairs up to a very narrow and high up landing within one of the stone ruins. Just inside the entryway were tons of bats up above.

It's neat to see how long these places have lasted. It was a very good day for sight-seeing and the next day it ended up raining a lot. As the sun started to go down the last place we visited looked pretty cool:

Along the way, I bought two coconut drinks which were all good. I bought a couple snack food items but they weren't really that tasty to me. The markets that develop around these religious sites are pretty diverse. You'll see all sorts of cool stuff and there's tons of food. However some of the food is only suited to people with particular tastes.

Outside one of the temple places I bought a pretty sweet sword. It was half the price of the ones at Chatuchak and has pretty solid construction. It can just barely fit in my luggage. The table I bought it at also had a wide assortment of really sharp things. I've always wanted to get a sword so I bought it and it was pretty cheap.

So that was pretty much Saturday's trip. The pics are publicly up on Facebook here (part 1) and here (part 2). At one place, there were tons of bells outside the temple (which had a huge golden Buddha) and I was able to get some video of them ringing:


On Sunday we woke up early to go the Bai Pai Thai Cooking School in order to learn how to prepare several dishes. This was a lot of fun and we got to make things like pad thai, soup, and everything for a full course dinner. The instructors were very interesting and they had their presentation down.

The lessons alternated between watching the instructors prepare the dish first, getting to sample it, and then making it for ourselves. Overall, we were able to make everything edible. While still in Thailand we could certainly make these dishes again but in the US it might be rather difficult to find all the right ingredients. There is usually a more common substitute, however. Aside from making pad thai, the fish cakes were my favorite. The lessons were 1800 baht, but the ThaiREU program is going to refund us.

Pad Thai I made:

Pad thai is simple to make but it has a lot of ingredients and throwing them all together in the right order and at the right time can be a bit overwhelming.

All in all, this weekend was pretty sweet. Next weekend is a graduate student planned trip on the river. We'll be sleeping on rafts I hear.

Picture of our motley crew:

View from climbing to the top of one of the ruins (click to enhance):