Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [57]
Vithi asks us about our other plans in Thailand. “After three nights here, we go to Bangkok for almost a week,” Bill says. “We had a great time there on a honeymoon visit twenty years ago. After that, it’s Phuket for four nights before we fly on to India. In all, we’re spending more time in Thailand than in any other country on our three-month trip.”
“Good luck,” Vithi says, “in finding real Thai food in Bangkok and Phuket,” a comment that sounds unduly pessimistic at the time but becomes apropos.
After lunch, we wander down a nearby street to visit several craft galleries. Much of the work comes from hill-tribe artisans who live in the highlands of northern Thailand. Women in a number of the tribes weave beautiful textiles, sometimes with elaborate embroidery, while many of the men fashion functional and ornamental items out of wood, bamboo, rattan, and metal. The hand-crafted tribal fabrics and silver jewelry in particular appeal to us, but we’re content to see rather than shop.
While admiring the goods, we’re startled when a woman calls out “Cheryl?” Looking up, we find ourselves face-to-face with Jackie Imamura, whom Cheryl worked with four years ago at the Santa Fe Farmers Market. She’d told us back then she was moving to Thailand because her husband took a faculty position somewhere in the country, which turns out to be at Chiang Mai University. After the ladies catch up and part warmly, Cheryl tells Vithi, “The small-world experiences on this trip are getting eerie. Not only this stunning reunion with Jackie, but of the dozen or so Americans we’ve met so far, three of the couples live at least part of the year in New Mexico within sixty miles of us.”
Back in the car, Vithi suggests we check out other area crafts, which sounds good to us. In one compound, artisans produce bamboo lacquerware, coiling strips of the plant into a variety of decorative forms before glazing the pieces in bright colors. In a woodcarving neighborhood, small shops lining the street brim with work of all kinds. “Many of the craftsmen started out carving gables and temple ornamentation,” Vithi says, “but discovered that tourists pay big bucks for trophies of their visit.”
“What’s hot in that department?” Bill asks. Vithi points to a pair of wood elephants, displayed with the prominence and pomp of the royal guards outside Buckingham Palace.
He drives slowly down the street, to give us a lingering gaze at the pieces and also to exercise his own sharp eyes. He stops suddenly at one shop, where he spots, among hundreds of items, an antique carving that he wants for an exhibition he is organizing on craft traditions. He makes the purchase, assuring us he got a bargain, and then notices some handsome old spirit houses, which Thais place outside of homes and other buildings to shelter and appease animist spirits, who can be terribly mischievous if not coddled. Vithi says, “Flat Stanley”—the two met an hour before—“needs a photo beside a spirit house, a perfect-sized home for him.” The idea seems slightly sacrilegious on the surface, but the shop owner agrees cheerfully and Cheryl snaps a shot.
This sets up poor Pheng for a similar fate. A friend of Vithi’s, the eighteen-year-old Laotian novice monk arrived in town earlier today to get the professor’s help in securing a student visa to attend college in Chiang Mai. Vithi makes a short detour to pick him up before heading out of town to the mountaintop Wat Phra That, the most significant of the city’s three-hundred-plus Buddhist temples. We make quite a striking group: the dignified Thai teacher, a pair of rumpled Americans, a two-dimensional storybook child, and a saffron-robed monk with a shaved head and a bright-blue alms bag. Stanley fascinates Pheng and so Cheryl asks, with Vithi translating, “Would you like a photo with him? I can e-mail you a copy later.” Pheng agrees and Cheryl