The scariest province in Thailand

Another funny thing about Thailand is that they are incredibly superstitious. My students ask me alllll the time, “Teacher, glua pii mai?” Teacher, are you scared of ghosts? I usually tell them I’m terrified of ghosts, which is not true, but I like to hear their stories. I told a group of students that I’ve never met a ghost in Thailand before, to which they responded, “well of course not! Ghosts can’t speak English!” That explains so much. Apparently ghosts are afraid of me.

So when I told my students I was going to Phrae (pronounced preah) province for a weekend, they said “Teacher, jangwat arai naaglua ti sut?” What is the scariest province in Thailand? The answer was “PHRAE” said is a scary grumble with your tongue sticking out to the side and your eyes crossed like your dead, because it sounds kind of like “pii”, which means ghost. I realize now that writing this out, the joke isn’t that funny anymore, but I repeated it to everyone I met all weekend. This is how to become popular in Thailand…repeat bad jokes you learned from your students.

But in reality, Phrae is a lovely, unscary place. Its north of Sawankhalok, along the dangerous, narrow, cliffy, really-should-not-have-any-cars-or-over-sized-tour-buses-like-ours-on-it road on the way to Chiang Rai. Makes for a beautiful mountain ride.  I went with a teacher I have gotten to know well this semester: Kru Gai. She teaches music, is in her late 30’s, and loves speaking English. So she took Bryan, P'Tara and I to her family’s home in the main city in Phrae. We arrived on Saturday around lunch time. Her brother picked us up and took us to this beautiful restaurant on a lake. All the tables gave their own little picnic area with a roof, benches, and food brought to you by bicycles. Each table has its own spot on the bank of the lake, and if you bring your own fishing pole, you can catch your own lunch! We didn’t have fishing poles, or the time to fish, so we went with a standard fish off the menu…and live shrimp! They served us a covered bowl with little jumping shrimp inside. P’At, Kru Gai’s brother, mixed together a spicy, limey sauce, poured it over the jumpy shrimp, and mashed up the ones that hadn’t already jumped out of the bowl. What an exciting and delicious lunch!
 

After stuffing ourselves too full, we went to one of Phrae’s biggest attractions, “The Grand Canyon of Thailand”, but we called it the Medium Canyon. In Phrae Muang Pii, there is a canyon like rock formation where there used to be a river that eroded away a lot of the limestone rock. I guess it could resemble the Grand Canyon, if you’ve never seen the Grand Canyon before and know nothing about geology. It was definitely interesting, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in Thailand. There is a ghost story behind it that is interesting too- when the Medium Canyon used to be a river bed, a woman who was following the river got lost in the woods. She stumbled upon a stash of gold. So she scooped it up and put it in her bags and continued on. She got more and more lost in the woods, and she thought it was because there were ghosts in the forest that were trying to protect the gold that she had stolen. So she dropped her bags, and then was able to find her way home. When she told the villagers her story, they entered the woods to look for the gold. They found the bags she left behind, empty, and followed the footsteps from her bags. At the end of the footsteps, they found a coffin. And no gold. And so this Medium Canyon attraction has been named “Phrae Muang Phii”- City of Ghosts, Phrae. I guess Phrae really is the scariest province in Thailand.

Me, P'Tara, P'Gai and Bryan

  

But the rest of our trip was ghostless. You can thank us foreigners for that. They’re scared of us. Our next stop was a gorgeous quiet temple that is either mimicking or is a sister temple to Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai. I think it’s mimicking it. It was basically a replica of Doi Suthep, but smaller, less taken care of, and not on top of a mountain. Oh, and no white people. That’s always nice =) We did the routine candle and incense lighting and prayer before continuing on to buy matching Phrae shirts!!!

 

I think after those three places, we had seen all Phrae had to offer! So we went to a cute indoor vegetable and meat market to get food for dinner, and headed back to P’At’s humble apartment over the video rental shop he owns. They prepared an adorable hot pot setup with a charcoal heated clay pot, and we sat on the floor of his video store for dinner. We spent a few hours hanging out, eating over the slow cooking fire, and having a few beers. Apparently his video store was open, but there were only three people that came in for the duration of his open hours. Two came in to drink some whisky with him, and the last one came because she was waiting to go out drinking with us. So I’m really wondering how he makes any money, especially because he just gave us copies of some of the movies he has for free. But apparently he’s really popular, and now so am I, because all his friends that came in asked for my number. (And I didn’t even tell them any bad jokes!) I now have a collection of contacts saved as "crazy guy from phrae" in my phone so I know when to not answer my phone...

Three hours after opening his store, P’At closed the store up and took us to an awesome night club, and also paid for all our drinks (it’s funny- he was so nice to us and treated us great..but never actually said a word to us. All his communication was head nods yes or no, or a mini-smile. He didn’t even seem to talk to his sister. Interesting guy) The club was surprisingly awesome for a small city like Phrae. There was a live band, with several males and oddly masculine females singers (each one that came out, P’Tara, Bryan and I looked at each other and said puying? puchai?? Girl or boy?? But P’Gai assured us that all the ones that were dressed like women were indeed women... I don’t believe her though). I think I liked this bar so much because it was all Thai people and of a huge age range, there was plenty of room to dance, and they played great songs. Clubs in Bangkok have none of those characteristics.

small bird laab

In the morning, before we headed home to Sawankhalok, we made a pit stop at P’Gai’s parents farm outside the city. We had fresh kanon kroc- Phrae’s trademark snack, and a northern style breakfast her mother had prepared for us: wild sticky rice, laab, pickled something, and some soup thing I can’t really describe but it had a lot of yummy vegetables. Everything was really salty, and we spent the entire breakfast debating what kind of meat was in the laab. Turns out it was “small bird”. Apparently I'm not so crazy about rural northern food. I think it was all the saltiness. Or maybe it was the minor hangover. After breakfast, we walked around her village for a bit, but it was hard to tell what land was hers and what was her neighbors’. So much farmland out there! But I guess that is a lot of Thailand- rice fields forever….

After the English Study Tour, the wedding/weekend in Chiang Mai, then the trip to Phrae, I had to spend the next weekend teaching at an English camp at a school in Sri Satchanalai. It had been over a month since I had a relaxing weekend at home in Sawnakhalok, and I was starting to get burnt out. I have also been training some of my students to compete in an ASEAN competition (Association of Southeast Asian Nations- Asia’s version of the European Union, which is going into effect in 2015), and it has been occupying every lunch period and free time after school to train these students. (I now know more about ASEAN than American history and can tell you all about “Economic trends for Thais in ASEAN in 2015”-the ridiculous speech topic given to the high school students that still can’t speak about themselves in English for five full minutes). On Friday, the competition day finally came, and my amazing students that I trained for the English quiz were ecstatic. They had an outrageous opening ceremony that was filled with ASEAN music, costumes and confetti, (I taught my students the words corny, and cheesy) all because they had a famous guest speaker attending- Andrew Biggs. He’s like the third most famous farang in Thailand (yes I have a ranking) and I got to see him in real life. He’s a famous English teacher that is on all learning-English advertisements all over the country and has written a ton of books, in English about learning Thai, and in Thai about learning English. When I found out he was going to be there (granted I also just found out WHO he was the day before…) my new goal for the competition was to shake his hand, not for my students to win. Well, I didn’t get to shake his hand, but my students won 4^th place for the English quiz and they got to shake his hand! And I took a picture. So I’ll count it as a success. Anyway, the whole thing was exhausting and was not what I wanted to focus on on top of all the work I’m currently wrapped up with in my classes. So when my friend invited me to teach a camp in Uttaradit that weekend, the day after the ASEAN competition, I was looking for any legitimate excuse to tell him no. Luckily I had run into Kru Phet, the gym teacher I was good friends with last year who moved back to Sukhothai to work on his parents’ farm, and he invited me to hang out with his family whom I love very dearly. So I quickly jumped on the opportunity and put any English teaching responsibilities behind. P’Tara, P’Be and I spent a night with his wonderful family, drove around his hundreds of rai of rice fields, watched the sunset over Phu Kao Luang- the mountain in Pitsanulok, and played poker (by play, I mean watch) until the wee hours of the night. It was glorious- exactly the break I needed after some really stressful weeks. (who knew the sabai sabai life in Thailand could get so tiring!) The next morning, I got to try my luck at cards and challenge the big boys to rummy. There rules are a little different to how my dad has shown me how to play Thai rummy, but I caught on quick, and kicked their butts! Then Kru Phet borrowed all the money I won to play poker, and lost it all again. Oh well, at least they’ll let me play with them now.

Kru Phet's nieces and nephews that I'm kidnapping from Sukhothai

Finally, last weekend, I got to stay home and relax! My plans to sleep in all weekend got interrupted by a wakeup call on Saturday morning to get coffee at my favorite coffee shop with P'Buddy, a really goofy old man that "teaches" English, but only talks to me in Thai, and an early visit to the temple on Sunday morning. I had visited the temple in Sawankhalok on Friday with Ton Nahm, the visiting French student, (his name is Antoine, but his Thai nickname is easier to pronounce) for meditation, but there was no meditation that day. So we sat down with my favorite monk, the head of the temple who gave me the amulet on my birthday, and he asked me how Ton Nahm was doing (he loves Ton Nahm!), so I had be the translator. I was so excited to talk with my favorite monk, since I haven't been able to talk to him since my birthday, and my Thai has gotten much better since then and now I can actually talk to him. He told me that many people my age like to wear make-up to make themselves beautiful, but I don't need to wear make-up because I smile when I speak. What a cool thing to say! So anyway, he asked us to come on Sunday morning because it is a Buddhist holiday. We were supposed to go at 6:30 AM for the start of the ceremony, to which Ton Nahm instantly said no. I had to wait for it to stop pouring rain to make the bike ride across town, so by the time I got there, the ceremony was half way over and I was soaking wet anyway. I felt like an idiot because at first I walked into a funeral, thinking it was the Buddhist holiday ceremony, then quickly ran up the stairs to where the other monks were, totally embarrassed. Out of breath, I sat down in the back and looked around at the sea of people all dressed in white, then looked at myself, dressed in black pants and a blue tee shirt. Everyone also had a bowl of cooked food and a basket for the monks, and I had a plastic bag of dried ramen to donate. This is the last time I’m going to a temple to tambun without BaNee. But all my worries and mishaps melted away with the remainder of the ceremony. I listened to the echo of my favorite monk chanting in the second floor of the huge, open air temple. I don’t think I can explain how beautiful it was, seeing the row of monks meditating in their okra robes, and the wall behind them covered with beautiful blues and touches of red and orange that displayed the story of the Buddha, and just above the mural were open windows, with only thin bars obstructing the view of the light rain falling in the green forest behind the temple. Love this temple. The ceremony lasted only another 45 minutes, and I frantically rushed to the front of the temple to give my favorite monk my pathetic donation of ramen noodles. I bowed to him three times, and apologized for not knowing what was appropriate to bring. He gratefully accepted my food, and blessed me despite my faux paus. For the second time that weekend, I couldn’t stop smiling, The first time being when at the temple on Friday. Even though the monks love Ton Nahm more than me, and don’t remember my name but always ask about Ton Nahm and ask him to go on trips with them that I can't go on cause I have to teach, I love that temple so much!! and just feel so happy when I am there. Part of the magic of Sawankhalok.