I like this part of Chaing Mai that I’ve been staying in.  Of course, I probably like this area because it’s a more expensive place to live so with nicer condos comes nicer restaurants, shops, etc.  I’d rather be staying in a hotel than an condo, but it’s a real nice condo.

I found a language school near the condo.  The shortest class they offered was 20 hours.  I don’t have that much time.  My brain would explode if I tried to do that many hours over a few days anyway.  I went in and talked to them anyway and asked if I could do private lessons.  I signed up for 3 hours Friday and 3 hours yesterday.  My teacher was a wonderful, cute, young, energetic lady.  She taught me basic sentence structure and gave me good worksheets I can refer to later.  That is good because I have forgotten just about everything she taught me.  She basically gave me everything I would have learned in the 20 hour class.  My brain did not explode, but it was touch and go for a while there.  Not much stuck.  I think it will come back as I study the worksheets later.  We went to lunch together the first day and then the second day I offered to buy her a coffee on break.  She took me to her favorite coffee shop and made me order in Thai.  Now, I just have to put in the time to practice.

I worked on some stuff for my engineering company.  It wasn’t much, but every little bit of income helps.  I spent way more on vacation than I made.  I hung out in the pool.  I hung out in the condo and watched bad American and Thai tv.  Thai soap operas are horrible.  Their game shows are hysterical.  For American tv they had bad cop shows, Grim, a firefighter show, A Minute to Win It, the ScyFi channel and a movie channel.

I got massage almost every day.  My fingers hurt.  I wonder what’s going on with them.  I wonder if I’m getting arthritis, but assume it’s something else.  My shoulders are very tight.  It feels like my muscles are burning, like a chemical burn, when they work on them.  My hamstrings and IT bands are pretty flexible though which has never been something I could say.  I got a body scrub one day instead of a massage.  Unlike the one in Vietnam, it didn’t hurt.  At no time did I think I might be bleeding or might need a trip to the hospital.  After, she put on oil.  It didn’t feel like massage oil or lotion.  It felt like she was turning my skin into silk.  Oh, I wish I had asked what she used because it was a marvellous feeling.  Now my knee caps are peeling.  With all the sun I got over the past two months, no part of my body has peeled except my knee caps.  So weird and fascinating.

I went on a few google maps adventures.  Some of the restaurants I asked it to lead me to didn’t exist.  Some of the routes were impossible.  Still, how did we ever do anything before google?

I had a session with my teacher.  He thought the hurting fingers might be a diet thing – too much starch.  That might explain the burning muscles too.  That or I have a rare horrible burning muscle disease.  It’s probably diet. Nothing monumental happened in the session, but that’s not unusual for me.  It did come out that I’m just not in a place where I have a bunch of emotional processing to do.  I’ve worked through so much of that.  It seems that now I’m down to Muscle Zero, that what I need to do is rebuild muscle while rebuilding my center.  So, how do I rebuild?  DSE exercises!  In the past I did these exercises regularly and they usually put me into process, helping me work through the stuff that came up.  I’m excited to see what the exercises will do now as I try to rebuild my body and energy system.  So, I’m ready to go home with a new resolve of doing this conscious movement, finding a way to work out/lift weights, and seeing if I can eat better.  The eating better will be hard as I can hear ice cream taunting me from somewhere off in the distance as I write this.

Strange food experiences of the week!  I think this will be a regular feature of my blog.  I went out for ice cream one afternoon.  I found a place that advertised snow ice.  It could be ice cream.  I couldn’t tell from the pictures.  I’m more adventurous with dessert than other foods so let’s see.  I ordered the watermelon snow ice.  It was gigantic.  I couldn’t eat it all, but I tried real hard.  The best I could tell is that it was like a snow cone except they used sweetened condensed milk instead of ice.  Then they put water melon balls and ice cream on top.  And they gave you a red syrup on the side to put on the snow ice.  It was a bit much, but I’ll probably forget that in the future and do it again.  The other food adventure was one morning I went to get breakfast. I found a couple coffee shops that had coffee and cake.  I didn’t want cake for breakfast.  I found a place that had bread.  By now, I was starving and decided garlic bread for breakfast would have to do.  They put syrup on the garlic bread.  How on earth is that a good idea?  Why can’t there just be food that is savory without having to be sweet too?  Not every food has to have every flavour in it.  It was edible, but I wouldn’t rush out and try to re-create this food concept.  This I won’t forget, but I suspect it will happen again not by choice.

On a similar note I had a weird restaurant experience.  I saw a restaurant near my condo and went in.  They didn’t have a menu out front so I asked to see a menu.  They asked if I wanted whiskey or beer.  The place was called a café.  I wanted a menu.  They gave me a menu and then seven of them stood by my table and watched me look through the menu.  This has happened often before where the waiter or waitress stands by the table waiting to take your order while you look through the menu.  But it was seven women.  I felt like an animal at the zoo.  “What will it do next”?  I’m not sure what was going on, but I decided I didn’t want to eat there.

I tried Tinder.  It’s a dating app, but less intensive than most websites.  It’s a weird concept to me.  It shows you a picture of someone nearby and you either “like” them or not.  If you hit the X or swipe to the left they go away forever.  If you hit the heart or swipe right they go into your likes category.  You don’t get to see the next picture until you’ve decided on the first.  If you like them and they like you then you can send messages.  There can be few photos and a short description you can look at.  It tells you their age too.  It only shows people that are physically nearby you.  You decide what radius to look at.  I messaged two guys, but didn’t meet up with anyone.  I don’t think I like this app, but I am extremely curious to what comes up in the app when I get to Sam Ngao.  And it might be a good way to meet people to have dinner with in the future when I go to other places for the weekend.  We’ll see.

I’m feeling drawn to write a book based on my blog.  I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t know if I need to get my blog out to more people first or if I just write the book.  I don’t know how to go about getting a book published.  Maybe it’s just a matter of advertising on my blog and getting it out to more people to make money, but it feels more like a book to me than a money making blog.  If any of you out there have ideas of how to make this happen, please let me know.  You can email me at rrainefiore@gmail.com.  I might try putting hashtags in my old blogs so they can be found easier by people I don’t know that may be interested in reading.  If you haven’t subscribed to my blog, but are following it regularly, please do so as I assume the number of followers I have will be useful in marketing to a publisher.  If you are not interested in subscribing to my blog, that’s fine too.  I don’t want to pressure anyone.  I know how annoying it can be to receive emails you don’t want.  I may try advertising on my blog too.  If I do and you find it takes away from the blog, let me know as I’m still figuring all this blog stuff out.  I don’t mind advertising that’s off to the side, but if it highjacks my blog or gets in the way of readers enjoying my blogs, then it’s not worth it.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore