They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace upgrading something with the electrical utilities in the area, street by street, and this morning was the turn of the street the hostel is on, so we had no power between 0900 & 1200. Phai the manager/owner put up notices ahead of time, so folks knew, and there were a bunch of us watching as the bucket lift folks pulled the pole mounted switches & everything went dark.
Not that dark; It was daylight, obviously, and the hostel isn’t so deep that it was anything other than ‘a bit dim’ at the back of the lobby. Pitch-black in the toilets though, and while the showers would still work, the hot water wouldn’t.
I headed out to get breakfast from somewhere else, because nowhere on the street was able to do much without power, so ended up at an Old City cafe I went to yesterday.
Once the power was back on I booked another week in the current hostel; I could get all but one night, so I need to find somewhere for that one, though Phi the owner/manager is expecting that there will be cancellations, and will slot me in if that happens. So the other booking needs to be cancelable or cheap.
I like this place. It has a nice feeling to it, and I’m relaxing here.
Did some wandering around in the afternoon. I’d set out with the intention of walking around the other two sides of the Old City, but that didn’t happen.
What did happen is that I tripped & fell into a Mexican restaurant & had a surprisingly good meal. Wasn’t 100% on what to expect from a Mexican place in Chiang Mai, but they were genuinely good. Got a bit confused when I saw people with luggage piling out of a taxi to go into a Mexican Restaurant, but it turns out there’s also a hotel in the building.
Continuing the walk, I found a much more intact gate, and also one end of the Sunday Night Market, which stretches halfway across the Old City.
I’d been given advice by Donna at the hostel (one of the guests who’s stayed there a bunch of times) that the night market gets packed quickly, and the time to get there is while they’re still setting up. By pure chance I did that, though it got steadily more crowded & slow moving as I went along.
The basic structure seems to be people selling stuff on the streets, and people selling food in the various temple grounds, though that wasn’t a strict rule; More of a general tendency.
There were a couple of fried insect vendors, and I saw someone going through his coins to see whether he had enough to get something. Didn’t stick around to see whether he’d eat it.
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