There is always that one sleep that completely kills a sickness. I had both the few remaining symptoms from my sinus infection and the twenty-four hours of explosive diarrhea kicked out of my system in the same night. I was feeling better, finally.
After a little research, we decided on getting breakfast at Simple Thai Cafe—the name left nothing to wonder. The café was built with bamboo and had a hipster/Seattle vibe inside. We ordered two iced lattes to combat the humidity, an appetizer, and two cashew nut chicken dishes. Our meal came out to be ten dollars.
We spent the rest of the afternoon roaming the streets in the bottom-right quadrant of the city, popping in and out of stores. We had to be home around 5:00 p.m., as some of Ash’s friends from college who were teaching English in Chiang Mai were coming over to go out to dinner with us. After all, it was Saturday night.
We made it home and cleaned up the house for our guests. We haven’t done this in a while, I thought. Aarin, Becky, and Chelsea arrived on their mopeds at 6:30 p.m. They were all teachers at a primary school around the corner from us. Aarin and Becky had gone to App State with us, and Chelsea was a friend of theirs from the school who was also from the US. We drank tallboy Chang beers, the local Thai beer, and caught up on each other’s lives.
We ate dinner at a place they had nicknamed the Treehouse. The best part about Thailand so far wasn’t the cheap massages; it was the fact that you could buy handles of whiskey at a restaurant and order the mixers separately.
After dinner, we jumped on the backs of the girls’ mopeds and ventured to the northeast corner of the city and to the North Gate Jazz Co-Op. I didn’t really know what to expect from a jazz club in Chiang Mai. The venue looked like a living room, with couches and tables facing a stage area in the corner. There was a one-person bar where everyone seemed to be buying soft drinks and handles of SamgSom whiskey to mix at their tables.
During a break in the open mic sets, I went to the bathroom, and similar to most American dive bars, there was writing all over the stalls. However, unlike in American dive bars, all the writing and quotes were encouraging. There was not a single negative thing written on the stall walls. It was refreshing to see such positivity.
We finished up our last drinks. The bar closed at midnight, earlier than we would have thought. Someone had been shot in Chiang Mai last month, so the government was cracking down on bars’ hours. We took our fresh bottle of whiskey and headed to the girls’ favorite late-night food spot, Tacos Bell. No, there is no typo there.
Tacos Bell was a food stand on wheels that a man had been operating for years. There were three options: taco, burrito, or quesadilla. We each grabbed two items and chatted with some other drunken people who had walked over from the jazz club. We took our food to go and headed back to our house.
I had a moment when I woke up from how much I had had to drink, and realized I was sitting on the back of a moped, flying through Thailand with a fifth of liquor in one hand and a bag of tacos in the other. The vibe might have been different in Asia, but in the nighttime hours, all nightlife seemed similar.
We had a good ol’-fashioned after party at our house with only five people. We blasted music and played college-style drinking games, getting far drunker than we had anticipated, and laughing until we were crying. It was an incredible night, and Chiang Mai had already blown away our expectations. Although it was the farthest away we had traveled yet, Chiang Mai felt like home.