Chiang Mai God I Can't Wait To Leave

Shane here with another update on the frontlines of tourism.
So...the story continues...

While Jess continued to gain strength from her well-rounded diet of Azithromyacin, water, and mundane literature I was over-come with a minor bout of depression and low self-confidence. The impending lack of lodging past Thursday was striking in my head like an anvil of doom. Was I man or mouse...was I an artist or a wallflower or all of the above? The only thing I really knew was that I was damn hungry.
So to ease the pain and contemplate on what to do next I invited myself to a lunch buffet at the hotel's resteraunt. Luckily the food was so excellent, I found myself forgetting all about Jess's predicament, until I had the soup course. Then the black clouds closed in once again. I knew at the moment she couldn't even hold down soup and here I was enjoying six kinds of asian dishes, a variety of dipping sauces and a bevy of desserts from fresh fruit cobblers to homemade pies.
The guilt got to me and I did what I could to convince her to order room service. She'd only agree to the pineapple juice. Since I couldn't get any room accomodations done without her input I decided to head down to the pool area with my gouache set. Hidden away under a grove of palms I knocked out a little still life, a lucky first shot, but enough to change my mood.

When Jess was feeling better the next day we made 20 more calls to downtown Chaing Mai. There were no rooms available. I was really leaning on bagging this whole trip. I thought you know, my time would be much better spent doing something like organizing my comic collection or arranging my National Geographics by year. I kept asking myself, maybe we'd changed as travelers... or maybe we're too soft. Regardless we propped each other up to go do what had to be done.

We hoofed it.

We grabbed a tuk-tuk downtown and went to a convenient starting point, the Galare Guesthose. And as I suspected, many of the places we had called actually had rooms but were so freaked out about talking english or dealing with our broken Thai that they just said, "sorry we full".
Our luck took a positive turn as we found a beautiful place down a narrow side street at Mandalay guest house. It's been open only two months so most guide books don't even know about it. Unfortunately they didn't have anything until Sunday...so...50 yards down another side street fortune shined down on us again. We found Thana Hotel, a little cheaper place with a very stylish and upbeat vibe for Friday and Saturday. With that demon off our backs it was time to celebrate back at the lush Amari Rincome, poolside. Woohoo!

Of course my luck only lasts so long, and even after three tries I still couldn't come up with a decent painting of The Jessie. But at least I knew we were staying put for awhile to see what all this Chiang Mai business was about.

=s=