Charming Buddha

Yep, just a sprain. And I spent the morning at the Chiang Mai hospital to figure that out. However it was quite the cultural experience. This place was so incredibly organized and efficient, and best of all cheap! I spent 900 baht to see a doctor, get a prescription anti-inflammatory/pain meds, and bandages. That comes out to about $30 which I could never do in the states. It took about an hour to go through the whole system. First you go to a registration station, then they send you to specialty department, in my case orthopedics. Each specialty had their own set of exam rooms and nurses. Everyone spoke English and were dressed in the nicest scrubs I have ever seen. Then you pay at the cashier and by the time you sign the receipt your prescription is ready and paid for. It was such a smooth system, I was done in about an hour.

From there Mae and I went to meet up with the rest of the group. I had missed visiting one temple but we caught them at the second. I would have rather just met them at lunch as we're getting really sick of random temples. I'm not Buddhist, if it's not pretty or historic I don't care. But at least lunch was good, a buffet at a really nice Chiang Mai hotel. We found "western food" or bread, pasta and potatoes at one station and all gravitated there. I ate bits of other foods like sushi but spent most of my time on potatoes. No surprise there.

At this point about half of the group bailed and just wanted to go nap at the hotel. But the best and one of the most famous temples in Chiang Mai was up next, so I stayed on even though it was still really painful to walk around. I'm glad I did since the tour guide there helped us figure out our Buddha and we got fortunes and blessings. Apparently the day of the week you're born corresponds with a certain kind of Buddha. Mine is Monday, the charming Buddha. My color that day is yellow (I'm not making this up, it was in a book) which also means charming and lovely, and my year's animal is the horse symbolizing good business sense.

After this we were encouraged to go try the fortune sticks. It's a jar full of numbered sticks that you pray over, then shake until one stick falls out. You can pray questions or just pray for a fortune in general. The number that fell out for me was 23, and the 23rd fortune/prediction answered everything I had been asking. It was absolutely uncanny, or at least the English summary was. I then asked our tour guide to read the Thai portion, which turned out to be a poem that went into greater detail. Thankfully mine was very positive--my luck should be turning around soon, and apparently I should go into business?--but a few got really grim ones about impending bad luck. I'm going to see if Mae can write down the translation for me so I can remember it, like when you keep a good fortune from a fortune cookie.

On our way back to the hotel we stopped by silk and jade factories to do some shopping. Silk doesn't thrill me, especially knowing that they kill the poor worms. But I did find a few jade bracelets. Apparently jade brings luck, happiness, and health and after the last few months let's hope that's true. The shopping continued with something called Chiang Mai's Walking Street, which is apparently a gigantic street market every Sunday. It's right outside our hotel so we all spent the rest of the night eating Thai street food (really good phad see ew this time) and wandering from stand to stand. The place was packed, especially with foreigners. I was really surprised how many French tourists were there, everywhere I went I heard French. Next most might be British.

To wrap it up I didn't buy anything and we've spent the rest of the evening packing for the next few days. Tomorrow we leave for a 2 day trek to visit some of the remote hill tribes. It's going to  be a 5+ hour hike up a mountain, ending at a rustic lodge for the night. The next day we hike back down and on our way to white water rafting (yay!). Finally the day after that we're seeing and bathing elephants at a elephant nature park. It should be a pretty epic few days. No Internet however so expect a long detailed post with our return to Chiang Mai on Wednesday.