What do we do when we are here? Hang out and enjoy the city mostly! And today is no different. We have no specific plans, just wandering. We start off this morning with a different walk – we’re walking to Warorot! This used to be our almost daily walk from Twin Peaks – we’d buy most of our vegetables and fruit here daily, but now we are a little too far for a daily walk, so we’ll make the trek this morning to see what we find and have anything we buy for the rest of our time here.

On the way, of course we stop for a cappuccino! How could we not? The only place we find is a chain called Amazon Cafe, which we’d prefer not to visit, but turns out they aren’t that bad of a chain. They do a lot (supposedly) to help preserve the rainforest, etc. So, ok, we’ll sort of ignore the chain thing. And the coffee is really good and reasonably priced.

Caffeinated and ready to continue, we head over to Warorot, stopping in the Thai pants store (ok, it’s a clothing store, but it is where we always buy our Thai pants for 100 baht). They still have all the pants you’d ever want – and they are still 100 baht! Cool! Unfortunately there isn’t anything really new in terms of fabric design, we’ve got 6 pairs already, so we walk out empty handed and a tad bit disappointed. Ah well, what can you do? Meandering down the street, we are pleased to see that most stores have survived the shut down and are still here and thriving. My jackfruit lady is not on her usual corner (darn it!) but all else is the same; the jewelry, the clothes, the fruit vendors, chocolate vendors, fried pork skin vendors. Same, same, no different.

We end up not buying a single thing though. We don’t need fruit (the bananas from Micky and the apples are enough for more than the rest of our trip!) and we aren’t really cooking so much here, so no meat or anything. We do end up buying some spices to refill what we’ve been using for, gasp, about 10 years now! But that’s about it.

Walking home we decide to take a long detour down Chareon Prathat to really get a good look at what is happening at the Riverside Market restaurant. We still can’t figure it out! Guess we’ll just have to wait and see – if we come back, or find some news article. Just bizarre.

On the way back to the house, we stop at the “real” 20 baht store – this place is just addicting! It is like the dollar store on steroids. You name it, they’ve got it – and it is huge! We buy a little flashlight for our evening wanderings around here – but particularly for Bali where our villa is on a dark sidewalk with stairs. Hey – it’s 20 baht. That’s 58 cents US!

Then it is back to the house for the day, organizing, blogging and just hanging out.

Tonight we hit the street food market at the Chiang Mae gate again, our local market! Tonight it is crippy fish! Yay! So good and so fresh and meaty. Complimented by fresh fried chicken sticks from the chicken lady and gyozas from the gyoza guy. You can’t beat this. All for less than $4USD.

We cap off the night with big beers at the no name bar, while listening to a really good guitar player/singer.

Then it is a lovely evening on the balcony upstairs watching the clouds kiss the moon. A perfect Chiang Mai day.