Well. My first night in Mae Sot did not go exactly as planned. I went to get dinner at an Italian restaurant nearby that came well recommended by Lonely Planet and the other guests at the guest house. The ravioli and garlic bread were both very good, and I think I'll be heading back there, because the restaurant sells watercolor paintings and colored pencil drawings done by refugee children and teens, and some of them were actually very good. There's one that I really liked, and I'd rather buy something where the profit goes back to the artist.
I digress. So I got back to the hotel, spent some time in the lobby area chatting with my new friends, Nell from England and Liz from America. They invited me to go out drinking with them, but I declined, knowing I would want to get up early today. So I trotted off to bed, not realizing that when I got to my room, it would already be occupied by about a million ants and possibly a few lice! EWWWWWWW! My bed was completely covered in ants. I didn't see them before because I had just dropped my stuff on the table and immediately headed out for dinner. Gross. So I hiked back up to the front office, where thank god, the caretaker guy hadn't gone to bed yet, and asked for a room change. He put me in the room next door to mine, which I wasn't particularly happy about, but upon careful inspection, it did seem bug-free. Then he told me to wait outside "15 minutes" while he emptied a can of bug spray into my new room. Anything that didn't kill must be nuclear, because even when I walked in 15 minutes later, it still reeked of bug spray. So I did another, more careful bug check, and slightly satisfied, went to bed. 10 minutes later I heard caretaker guy coming up the steps (I was the only person in this house--each one has two rooms, and obviously I knew the other was empty), so I turned on the lights and went to see what he wanted. Well, he hadn't opened the windows in my room, and apparently couldn't rest easy until they were open. If I hadn't been so upset and grossed out by my recent encounter with a thousand bugs, I would have been grateful that he was trying to be so accommodating. He was about 80 years old, possibly more.
I woke up a lot last night, convinced there were bugs crawling on me, but I never found one, so that was probably the good 'ol paranoia setting in. Got up around 7:30 and headed out to get some breakfast and see the town this morning. Different from Chiang Mai: I was the only Westerner in sight. The whole time. I didn't see a single other tourist. Consequently, I was the only object of interest, so everyone stared at me. I stopped first at the pharmacy to pick up some bug spray and soap, both of which I didn't pack, but was low on anyway at home, so I didn't feel bad about buying them. Then I tried to make a stop at the ATM, but about 7 Thai women got there just ahead of me, and they took so long that I gave up. Some sights this morning on the main road:
Two guys perched on top of 10 feet of merchandise stacked on a pickup truck,
Street vendors cleaning their booths and opening their doors,
Those crazy Thai women mobbing the ATM,
Several young girls with face paint in the pharmacy,
The morning market,
2 guys on a scooter--the one on the back holding an umbrella over the one driving.
That was probably the funniest thing--the umbrella on a scooter. The morning market was pretty good, too, though. Since I was there so early I got to see the street vendors buying their daily food supply, and this market had some different delicacies than I'd seen in Chiang Mai. For example, a bucket of live eels. I thought they were snakes at first and seriously freaked out. Once I backed out of the booth I had jumped into, however, I saw that they were eels, sitting next to a bucket of fish (one of whom made a desperate bid for freedom and jumped). At this market, you could either take your fish fresh or have the vendor cook them on the spot on the grill next to the buckets. I wanted to take a picture, but I lost my nerve. Maybe I'll go back tomorrow. I was on the hunt for a mango, because that's what I was really craving for breakfast, but I couldn't find any that weren't too ripe to rotting or so green they were hard, so I settled for some mangosteen instead (not really a great loss, because they're pretty awesome as well). I also found this woman who was cooking crepes and these intriguing little pancake type things as well. This shows you how adventurous I've become in my eating, because I bought one of those little pancakes even though I didn't have the slightest idea what was in them and they looked kind of weird.
I'm glad I did get one, because it was delicious and it was only 5 baht (roughly 15 cents). It ended up having black sesame seeds and coconut, and some other things I couldn't tell what they were. Oh yeah, I made one more stop, to buy a poncho at one of the stalls. It's raining. You might have guessed that from the umbrella on the scooter comment. So now I'm at the internet place (obvi) and I'm heading home to take a shower and then get ready to go to the Burmese border with Nell and Liz. We're biking because it's only 6km, but now that it's raining, I'm not sure. On another note, I think it might be the end for these sandals I'm wearing. They've been with me through a lot, and they're by far my favorite pair (BareTraps), but they're in bad, bad shape. I'll send them off in style.
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