Hi Gram,
The past couple of days have been a bit more active. Every morning, I get up and go for a walk before it gets too warm outside. I’m always enamored with the street art that covers so many of the walls, electrical boxes, and doors along the walk. This morning, I walked past one of the tour operators as they were preparing for the day and saw their line of vans and busses stretching down the street.

The urban setting, with graffiti, boarded up buildings, and crowded streets bisected by the waterways with their crafted bridges, the scents wafting from the street vendors and construction zones, the revving and honking from traffic and the music piping out of restaurants trying to draw in hungry diners all my senses engaged.

In the afternoon, we braved the heat again to go see another museum. The hotel where we’re staying is an average hotel, but it’s in a great location close to museums, markets, and restaurants. We headed over to the Lanna museum a few blocks away to learn more about history and heritage of the local lanna people and their blending into Thailand as the country grew together.

If you would have told me thirty or forty years ago that I’d enjoy just walking through museums and reading placards, marveling at the intricate artwork and history, I would have laughed at the suggestion. In reality, 50-year old me just loves this stuff. I don’t even remember the details of what I’ve read or seen, but the memory of how I felt as I learned and observed is a warm and happy one. We saw the intricate lanterns that were crafted, the baskets that they wove, some for beauty but most for utility such as gathering, preparing, steaming, and serving food.

There were carvings of buddha and other meaningful tokens of their society, from the simplest wood carvings to those etched out of precious stones and metals trying to win favor and good fortune. We saw tapestries, book bindings, musical instruments, and toys that were formed to get through life back then but have been preserved and become art in modern days.

One of the placards that I had the forethought to get a picture of tells us about a dance:

“The Nail Dance is a Lanna specialty, usually performed at the head – khrua than – of a city procession. Its full name is the fon muang or fon hae khrua than. Different numbers of dancers perform take part, their costumes consisting of a cylinder sleeved blouse which has buttons running down the middle, a breast cloth worn over the blouse, a long striped sarong, (no shoes), and eight long brass nails are put on eight fingers except the thumbs. The hair is worn up and the chignon
is decorated with golden orchids. The accompanying music is provided
by the tueng nong drum band, the instruments of which are the tueng-nong (or aew) drum, the talot pot drum, nae-luang pipe, nae-noi pipe, khong mong, khong hui and cymbals. Traditional nail dance postures
the ‘row-a-boat’, ‘blooming-lotus twist’, and the loose postures.
PrinCess Dara Ratsami brought in more postures and adapted Slanese court selodies, and in this way the local dancing styles and those of the Siamese Court were amalgamated.”

After the museum, we wandered around the city a little more, enjoying the street art and even stopping for a little softserve ice cream. In America, we’re given the option of vanilla, chocolate, or swirl. Here, the options were green tea, milk, or swirl. We both got green tea and enjoyed our treat as we cooled down from the blazing sun outside. The ice cream shop was cute, decorated in a retro Americana style, but more of a loose interpretation of what they thought it might have been.

We finished the night with dinner at a local restaurant, Nattiya waiting patiently for me as I stopped to get pictures of the wall art tucked into alleyways along our walk.