The Shangri-La Had a Happy Hour but the Chedi Has an Aesthetic

(The pictures are in reverse order of what I meant. Still figuring out the blog program.)

The fancy hotel in Chiang Mai is the Mandarin Oriental Dhari Devi, outside town a few miles, a Disney meets Thailand type operation where, at $1500 a throw, guests can “sip their evening cocktails while watching farmers work the rice paddies with buffaloes.” Since we are much too cool, not to mention well short of rich enough, for such things, we stayed in town at the Chedi which shows just how cool we are. There was even a bathtub right in the room that looked nothing like the bathtub that would have been in the tenement kitchen my father grew up in if he had actually grown up in a tenement, which, so far as I know, he didn’t. Enjoy the pix.
……
Chiang Mai did not go well. We spent much of one day at a cooking class, which was fun if not very helpful in the event we ever try to cook Thai food at home. (One of the pictures of spring rolls shows what I did. The other shows what the instructor did. It won’t be hard to tell them apart.) We spent most of another day driving around—automatic transmissions, but driving on the left—and escaped with only a minor accident. The mirror I smashed—bad judgment about how close I was to the curb—generated something approaching an adventure: I got to ride around with the guy from the rental company to a couple of repair shops, winding up at a Toyota service center where the repair bill was all of $41, or less than Toyota would charge to say good morning to me in the US. I also got sick one night and felt as bad as I have ever felt other than one awful night with a kidney stone. I didn’t think I was going to die but I wanted to for a couple of hours.
….
But the real disappointment in Chiang Mai was Chiang Mai itself. We were expecting an old city, something along the lines of the old quarter in Barcelona or Bruges or some Tuscan town. Chiang Mai is old, several hundred years older than Bangkok. But whatever was there is all gone except for a crumbling city wall and a few Wats, which are pretty much self-contained. There are no winding streets, no cobblestones but plenty of concrete, tons of tourists, lots of traffic and dozens of ugly high rise hotels.
Several years ago when Fran and Jerry were getting ready to go off to China for the year, Fran got annoyed with me a couple of times because I said a couple of times too many that I thought China wasn’t charming. Since I’ve never been in China, except for a couple of days in Hong Kong, which hardly counts, I openly accept Fran’s counterclaim, in gentler language, that I was full of shit. But I have been in Chiang Mai and Chiang Mai is not charming. That I’m sure of. The hard part is trying to figure out what I mean.
I would be happy with some ideas about the social construction of charm. I would be equally happy with some ideas about the Platonic essence of charm. I do have some rough idea that we think of old as more charming than new but only so long as old doesn’t become run down. I also have some rough idea that we think of small as more charming than big, but that’s hardly enough or we would be thinking of Northampton as more charming than Rome, which we don’t or, at least, I don’t and can’t imagine that anyone else would. Even the dictionary definition I just found online—“the power or quality of pleasing or delighting”—seems to me ludicrously underspecified. The definition would apply to a good steak, a hot shower, or having a kidney stone removed, none of which are remotely what we mean by charming. So, if anybody has any ideas, let me know.
We are, by the way, now in Laos, in Luang Prabang, which is charming, but more about that later.
…
And, if anybody would like to hear from Naomi on this blog or is just getting tired of my tone, send in letters and postcards and let her know.