I saw an elephant today! It was ambling along a strip of stores as we drove past. I thought they'd been banned from the city limits so I felt really happy to see one today.
When we first moved here, we'd see elephants all the time, lumbering down the roads, a blinking light on their tails for visibility. They were a tourist gimmick, mostly. The mahouts would sell bunches of bananas and sugar cane to the tourists and the tourists would feed the elephant. Good deal for the mahout and the elephant! I remember distinctly one day, driving with my mom down San Kang Peng road, and seeing an elephant and suddenly realizing how ODD that should seem to me. And how it really wasn't odd at all! It was a strange moment of, I am a foreigner, but I'm not a foreigner.
Seeing that elephant made me think about how Thailand holds so many contrasts. Chiang Mai is in a flat valley surrounded by mountains. Right now, you can see them in the distance because the rain clears up the smog. During the dry seasons the mountains are hidden from sight. In the rainy season the weather can change in an instant, and you can look at the bowl of the sky and see the line of the clouds and their shadows on the mountains. Sometimes it will rain on one side of your house and the sun will shine on the other.
There are more sobering contrasts too, of course. There are mansions next to corrugated metal shanties. What is cheap to the farangs is expensive to the people who actually live here. Children beg from the patrons of the Sky Train in Bangkok. These are the contrasts that contribute to Thailand's fragile political situation, and sometimes they are easy to miss when Thailand's beauty is so overwhelming.
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ReplyDeleteGah blogspot went weird with my comment. Trying again!
ReplyDelete"The Protector" made me want a pet elephant so bad. That, and the Simpsons episode "Bart's Elephant." But "The Protector" strangely was the more realistic of the two, at least as far as elephant ownership is concerned. But then, anytime I see a pet in a movie, so long as it's not like a snake or something, I want it. That's really cool you got to see an elephant.
I think a lot of places have contrasts like that, sadly. I mean, just look at DC. Some of the richest people in the country live or at least work there, and yet it's got one of the highest homeless populations. A lot of Los Angeles is a ghetto, but LA is where we think of all the Hollywood stars living. It's just one of the sadder facts of life, I think.
You make the surrounds of Chiang-mai sound so beautiful (as I'm sure they are). Pictures? (if you can. I'd be terrible at capturing something like that, so I understand).