Living in the Rose of the North

 Chiang Mai is sometimes called "The Rose of the North". For us, life in Chiang Mai was not all language study and going to and from villages. We also had a home life. What did we do? A lot of reading and letter writing to be sure, but other things as well. All in all, it was pretty rosy.

Marcia at home with Somjit in our Chiang
Mai kitchen

To keep up with news, there was the Bangkok Post. It is an English language newspaper that we would read regularly.  The Thai government keeps an eye on how Thai news is reported but I always felt the Bangkok Post did a pretty good job of reporting international news including what was happening in the US. There is a second English language newspaper in Thailand called The Nation but for some reason, we generally preferred the Bangkok Post. Both the Post and The Nation have online editions now-a-days and we’ll still occasionally tune in to read up on Thai related events.

While we were in the mission house in Chiang Mai the street had limited traffic and intersected with some other even more quiet streets. The streets made a nice square maybe half a mile around with a rice field in the middle. Three sides of the square bordered schools and was a popular jogging route for students and others. I joined in on the jogging to get in shape for walking in the mountains. Chiang Mai was also home to a lot of “sahm laws” (three wheeled pedal powered taxis, since replaced by motorized tuk tuks). They didn’t go very fast, but I considered it a jogging victory if I could pass one. So I worked especially hard if one was within sight until I could jog around it. While passing I would pretend I wasn’t breathing hard though I doubt anyone was impressed. I’m sure who ever was pedaling the sahm law had indestructible legs honed by years of pedaling and would only chuckle at my wheezing, knocked kneed attempt at jogging. Marcia also used the square for exercise but would usually walk and she has never mentioned any compulsion to pass sahm laws.

Part of the filed we would jog around . Today
the field is full of sports facilities and the roads
surrounding it are full of traffic.

One of the schools forming a side of the square was part of Payap University so there were some
students and faculty that played basketball and volleyball. They let me join in so I was a pretty regular participant. Between the jogging and playing sports I became aware that as I ran by some of the Thai boys would say “farang, khee nok”, which translates to “foreigner, bird poo”. Since bird droppings are largely white in color, it seems that’s the nickname for us white people. They would assume I didn’t understand Thai but if I did say something in Thai to them, they’d get flustered and embarrassed. I thought it was rather humorous.

Next door, across the driveway was the Facchini family. They were great neighbors and did a lot introduce us to Chiang Mai. They also invited us over often to play board games or card games or just to talk. We appreciated them and their kids were great as well.

Us with the Facchini Family

At the time, we were aware of no English language TV options and we were no good at understanding Thai TV. I suppose videos were coming on but they hadn’t hit Thailand yet in either Thai or English. So we had no TV of any kind during our whole first term in Thailand whether in Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I don’t think we missed it. No one we knew had a TV so it just didn’t seem to be an option.

We could keep up to a fair degree with at least the major movies in English. There was a movie theatre in downtown Chiang Mai that had a “sound room”. It was a separate room at the back of the theatre closed in with clear glass so we could watch the movie and they would pipe in the original English soundtrack. So in the sound room we heard English while the rest of the people heard dubbed in Thai. It was not uncommon for the English audience to laugh at something in the movie while the Thai audience was quiet. At other times, the Thai audience would laugh and the English audience was quiet. Cultural differences must be real as are differences in what people see as funny. I also suspect a lot of translations aren’t very good.

Marcia and Somjit doing laundry in 1983

English reading materials were fairly available so we also did quite a lot of reading both of an
educational and instructional nature and just for pleasure. We visited as many book stores as we could find. There was also a branch of the US Information Service in Chiang Mai. At one time it looked like our families in the US were going to disperse so there would be no real “home base” for us to return to. So, we used the materials to think about where we’d like to go since all of America was open to us. We picked North Carolina, but in the end, our family mostly stayed put so we went back to Ohio. Little did we know, we’d eventually wind up in North Carolina, but not until 2017!

It was a good and fulfilling life. We were certainly busy and certainly motivated to learn what we needed to learn and to be “worthy of our calling” whether working or at home.