Nov 2007 Chiangmai - first impressions etc

Rom Yen House

Bev using Skype to see Emma and talk to kids

Honeymoon suite :-)

It has been a VERY busy week for us. We arrived Sunday the 4th of Nov after a 13 hr marathon taxi ride to catch a midnight flight to Bangkok. We arrived at the Delhi airport at 11pm and thought for sure we had missed our flight, but the chaos of India saved us as the flight took off almost an hour late.
We then caught a flight directly to Chiangmai skipping a stopover in Bangkok and arrived at about 1pm. We were met by our friend Rachanee and the owner of the guest house where we were going to stay. The owner Khun Nit is a childhood friend of Rachanee, who was the wife of Bev's boss at the AIT libraray; he died about 2 years ago.

Ron Witsky, our contact at Kids Ark and friend, met us for dinner Sunday night. He gave us some leads on possible apartments, gave us a good map and left the next morning for some R&R and work for 10 days.

So even though Khun Nit was nice and the guest house was quiet we wanted to get settled, so Monday morning we headed out to find a place to stay for the duration. We started calling potential renters and visiting some apartments. We visited everything from small 4-5 room Thai style guest houses to HUGE condo-complexes with 15+ stories and lobbies like a hotel. Nothing struck our fancy and by afternoon we were beginning to get a little discouraged. This is the high season in the north because it is cooler and a popular tourist destination at this time of year. Our desire to rent for 4 months was either too long for hotel type places or too short for houses and some apartments. Anyway we decided to just start wandering through the area we thought was a possibility and kept looking for guest houses and condos. One of the hotels we stopped at did not rent out places for as long as we wanted, but recommended us to look at the place we are now.

We lucked out! Rom Yen House is a smallish apartment complex with about 45 units in a quiet area about a 12 minute walk from a big street and there are many other small shops in the neighborhood. It is a fairly new complex with a mixture of Thais and a few foreigners, and is very quiet. It seems to be the center of the laundry businesses. The good news is we just walk to the end of our short street and have our laundry washed and ironed for about $1 / 2.2 lbs same day service.

We have a two room apartment on the second floor with a bed room and a living room where we have a fridge, TV with a 2 English cable channels, free wireless Internet, a desk, and some wooden chairs and a table. We are paying about $ 275/ month. Each room is about 15 X 20 ft with a small balcony and bathroom. Typically of a Thai house/room there is only hot water in the shower using a small electric heater on demand. This technology has improved considerably as it is now able to maintain a somewhat constant temperature. In the early days it went from cold to scalding during most showers! Other things that are different is that we use the water for brushing our teeth but buy filtered water for drinking. In the "old" days people would boil water even though it was piped as there were leaky pipes and a possibility of water-borne illnesses. The latest innovation in Thailand is water filter vending machines that use reverse-osmosis to purify the water quite inexpensively.

Of course in the 30 some years since we lived here there have been many changes and I will try to post some of our observations. There are many good things and many bad things, primarily coming from our so called developed world. For example, the 7-11 stores are full of processed foods and plastic packaging that we are finally trying to reduce in the West. You can see the Thais getting much taller, but there are more fat Thais than before, but not as fat as we see in America.