Chiang Mai, Thailand

More of Jeff's photos of Chiang Mai

What is beauty? Footbinding for dainty feet? Eating disorders for slender supermodels? Among the Karen Tribe, it means having an elongated neck. In fact, locals refer to them as the long-neck ladies. They begin extending girls' necks at birth, adding gold rings at intervals throughout life. To our American eyes, it was like visiting a circus freak show as the women resembled giraffes with whiplash. We didn't understand the leg bands just below the knees, but it seemed to impair the use of that joint as well. It was difficult to walk through the village, suspending judgment and not running crazed along the dirt paths removing rings from the baby girls' necks.

Elephants as work animals is another unusual concept for our culture, but one must ride elephants in the north of Thailand. Find a good hand hold, rest a foot on the massive neck below you, engage those core muscles and with each rocking step you have a fighting chance of staying aloft. How do royalty in Thailand and India maintain their dignity atop these grand beasts? We don't exactly know, but it was a lot of fun trying.

Meeting Peppe Stokes was the highlight of our time in the north of Thailand. She's an amazing Thai woman who runs an outstanding B & B, cooks delicious meals and supports a local orphanage (see Maya's blog about serving dinner there). She named her hotel Golden Cupids, not to attract honeymooners, but because she thinks love is the most important thing in the world. We enjoyed her hospitality for a week and she personally delivered us to the airport. We will dream of Peppe's banana pancakes for a long time. If she read this, she would say, "Oh, dahling, you make my head too big." Read below for Maya's account of her cooking class with Peppe.

Thai Cooking Class with Peppe
By Maya
So today my dad and I took a Thai cooking class with Peppe, one of the owners of the hotel. First we decided what we were going to make. I made sweet and sour veggies and spring rolls. My dad made Phad Thai and green curry. We then went to a local Thai market. There we bought all the stuff we would need plus some things for the hotel and snack food, (not for us!) such as dried crickets and fried frogs. (I'm not kidding; the other guy who cooked with us tasted them and said that the cricket tasted better than the silk worm.) We chopped all the stuff into certain shapes; to make the spring rolls we had to cook all the stuff and then wrap the cooked veggies in a crepe like pastry and seal it with egg before deep frying it in a wok with LOTS of cooking oil. For the sweet and sour veggies, we chopped and then cooked them with ketchup and chili sauce and sugar and vinegar. After five hours of shopping, cutting and cooking, we ate and the four of us couldn't eat half of it. So we ate it for dinner too.