Dear Morning Fog,
Our trip has taken a twist towards northern Thailand with my Chiang Mai chick. Yes, I've finally met up with her. She's now our tour guide for "as long as you desire," she said in her Thai-glish accent.
Bamboo Flower is her name. A highly-trained business woman, she used to work in Bangkok but got moved over to this part of the country after Yingluck Shinawatra fled the country. Of course, she has nothing to do with Yingluck or any of the polarized powers. But Yingluck's escape has been a date many keep deep inside as a certain date: the date that Yingluck fled Thailand.
I don't keep that inside me, so I don't know what that date is.
Her company needed to expand their business to this area and she was the key person to heighten the company's connection to the locals. She grew up here. Chiang Mai is her birth place, but she left it for some years before coming back just recently. College and all of her business training had been in Bangkok and in Europe. She's never been to America, nor even to Loei Province where you are. She doesn't know about Ban Vinai. That's because, as a Thai citizen of mixed Chinese-Yao-Hmong descent, she didn't ever join the refugees in that part of the provinces.
I know. I know. She never came to understand the harsh fleeing life Steaming Bell, you and I had gone through across the river yonder. (Ta E says he does. Not sure.) But her struggles from the farmy, slow, technologicall
y backward hills of Chiang Mai to the more modern, technologicall
y advanced, fast-paced Krungthep has been "quite an adventure," according to her.
She works hard to sustain her livelihood and then send some bahts back to her grandmother in Chiang Mai. Both of her parents have left this world. No, not to America or Europe or Africa for that matter. You know, passed on. I mean, just gone, okay? And her paternal grandpa, too. And the maternals as well. So, she has had to take care of her widow paternal grandma, too.
Yesterday, Bamboo Flower showed us around--both night and day and far and near as well. Here are some pictures.
Phitsanulok. A night open-air restaurant frequented by many lonely souls. Yes, lonely because only one soul is here each night. We happened to come as a group of four yesterday evening, because we aren't subject to the local lonely tradition. The man on the right has been drinking Singhas for about two hours. Here, the laws do not restrict bartenders from serving patrons to whatever limit. We didn't join him. But he later came to introduce himself to us. "You don't look like around here," he said.Chiang Mai. Half a way up a hill just north of the actual city sits this Hmong village. The phone booth behind this man is shared by all those villagers who do not have cell phones. When someone calls, whoever picks it up runs around the village to fetch the recipient. Little boys and little girls have been bossed around as messengers on these excursions when a call comes in. No, that's not child labor. It's community service as service is known to the locals.Bamboo Flower loves the oceans and beaches. So, she took us there to have some views and feels with her. This was at Phitsanulok sand land.See how excited she is?