Email 5 Thailand March 20, 2000

Hello all!

We thought we would write and tell you about our living situation. We think you’ll enjoy it.

We live near Chiang Mai University, actually, we can walk there, and it is a nice part of the city. We eat near there often because the food is cheap since there are so many students.

The building we live in is named Viangping Mansion and Condotel. It is a 14 story building and we are on the 14^th floor. Floors 2 and 3 is a hotel, and the rest is apartments.

Most apartments do not have kitchens. People either eat out, or go to the market, or to one of thousands of small stands on the street and they buy ready made food to take home and eat. Why? It is expensive to cook because of the high cost of gas, and to cook you need an extra room – a kitchen and that increases the rent. It is much cheaper to eat by buying take out or going to a restaurant.

Our building is a very interesting place. The people who work here are very nice and like us, and we like them. There is a swimming pool which we use mostly on weekends after we return from one of our jaunts and before dinner. It is there that we met some of the colorful characters who live here: Lolly is a gay 53 year old retired teacher from Australia. He is looking for a job here and lives on some sort of a disability, (he got it because it was so stressful for him to teach). He does not want to return to Australia. As you may know it is a pretty racist place. For gays, Thailand is a good place because it is so tolerant. Lolly never stops talking about any subject that enters his mind. He even talks more than Peter, so you can imagine. He introduced us to the “English boys”. The English boys are about 30, gay and have shaved heads and tatoos. They have rings in their ears and noses, in their nipples, and in their navels. We do not know where else they have rings, but their bathing suits are pretty small, so we don’t think they have them anyplace else, but we’ll never find out. The English boys own a gay bar in the part of town where all of the tourists hang out. It is hard to understand any of these 3 guys because of their strong British and Australian accents.

Tom also lives in our building. He is from LA, a teacher, and looks like he is in his 50’s. He gives private English lessons to Thai’s. Tom told us he never eats Thai food, knows less Thai than we do, and comes to the hotel café early in the morning to drink coke and watch HBO. It seems that he does this most all day on Saturday on Sunday.

Our building also houses the Relax Club and the Feeling Good Club. (The Feeling Good Club is closed – we don’t know why). By the way, this is the safest building in Chiang Mai. We think it is run by the Mafia!

On the first floor there is a café which advertises it is open for breakfast, but it is closed until night when many pretty Thai women come and are hostesses to Thai men and “farangs” – foriegners – who come to drink, listen to music and …. The girls are young, and we say hello to them each night when we return.

The Relax Club is open. It is on the 13^th floor. We haven’t been there because it is a disco-karaoke place where women (prostitutes) go to meet men and then go to a hotel or wherever. We also understand that it the Relax Club doesn’t attract the nicest people in town.

On the 2^nd floor there is the Claissic Corner – a small restaurant where we often eat breakfast, and next door to it is the Snooker Club where young people play pool. The waitress at the Cozy Corner is a young woman of 20 – 22 who goes to business school at night. She is very cute and teaches Peter Thai, as do some of the other young women at the hotel.

Her name is Aoy, pronounced oy, and there are 2 more Aoy’s in the hotel. Thus: oy oy oy, like the Yiddish oy oy oy. We continue to have a good laugh about oy oy oy.

We are lucky to have a TV with 2 English stations: CNN and HBO. The cable is controlled by the owner of the hotel and so if he feels like changing from HBO to a soccer game, he does, and the result is that anyone in the building who is watching an exciting movie on HBO, all of a sudden without warning is now watching a soccer game until the owner decides to change it again.

Taking a shower sometimes takes two people to accomplish the job. One takes a shower, and the other one stands by to flip the circuit breaker back on after it flips off because the water heater overloads the circuit. Another thing about showers in this country is that the entire bathroom is the shower. In other words there usually isn’t a shower curtain, and the water goes all over the place, so you have to make sure to close the toilet, and keep the toilet paper out of reach of the water which is spraying all over the place. Most of the bathrooms have a step down so that water doesn’t go into the next room which also means that until you get used to the step you stub your toe and trip!

While we don’t have a kitchen, we do have a small refrigerator. We use a hot pot to heat water for coffee, and wash spoons, cups, etc. in the bathroom sink.

It is very cheap to have our clothes washed, and everything is ironed when we get it back including our underwear! Sometimes we pay by the kilo, and sometimes by the piece. At the hotel, we pay 400 baht for 80 pieces – about $9 US.

We eat breakfast frequently at a small place a block from our hotel. It is an outside restaurant with a few tables under the trees. The food is cooked on outside stoves. It is very cheap, very clean, and very good. We can have rice, eggs, pork chop, coffee, and a donut all for about $1.85. And, the owner, her husband, and her helper are very nice.

They call the man who repairs things in the hotel “the electrician which may help to explain why the toilet is still leaking.

Hope this gives you a sense of what it’s like living at the Viangping Mansion and Condotel in Chiang Mai. We love it!

Peter and Hinda