!WARNING! – This is a Blog Post

As I sit in the Plearn Cafe, sipping my cappucino and listening to Love Me Like You Do by Ellie Goulding, chatting with my associate, Ben, about the ridiculously cheap price of Wi-Fi in Thailand and the unfortunate state of traffic in Bangkok, scratching the robust collection of mosquito bites I’ve obtained and hoping I do not contract dengue fever, I list all of the things I’m currently doing in the prefacing clause of this sentence and leave nothing to conclude it with.

This blog is going to be retroactively detailing the events of yesterday, Friday, May 27, 2017 (2560 in The Buddhist Calendar), which was the final day of our second trip to Mae Chan. After confirming support and enthusiasm of our project ideas from the Mae Chan community, we were feeling quite good about our work so far. This day was a relaxing day, a reflective day, and a day to simply enjoy the company our travelling companions and be proud of all that we had done. We had only a few business items to close.

The first thing we did was go to our favorite breakfast spot, Mae Chan Coffee. Something I particularly like is how the owner of the restaurant serves hard boiled eggs. She does in a manner that was completely unknown to me until I traveled to Mae Chan.  A picture is shown below and the process detailed after:

The eccentricity of the spoon and the egg are similar which aids in the extraction of the cooked proteins from its calcium carbonate shell.

First, she holds the egg in the palm of her hand and uses the knife pictured on the cutting board to cut into the side of the egg with one quick swing. She then smoothly pushes through the remaining width of the egg. To remove the shell, the utilizes a soup spoon like the one pictured above. The two halves of the egg are perfectly removed with nothing left in the shell and no shell pieces on your plate. It’s amazing.

After that, we went to the canal that runs through the downtown in order to reconfirm some measurements we took the day before. There, we decided to interview someone known as “Uncle Reed” to see what he had to say about flooding in the Mae Chan Region. He had been friendly to us before and let us use his bathroom. This is what he told us: He is a mechanic, and he’s lived in Mae Chan for fifty years. His house/garage is one of the first places to flood during a heavy rain. The Mae Chan river use to be deep, wide, and clean, and you could swim in it. The city never used to flood until around 20-25 years, when it started to develop and more concrete roads and highways were build. The river then became narrow and started to flood. He told that if more water could be diverted into other channels instead of just flowing into the Chaiyaburi canal, then the floods would be significantly mitigated. Below is a diagram he drew of the vicinity:

The central circle is the where the grate the blocks garbage is placed, and the two vertical, parallel lines are channel that are connected to it. Most of the water goes down the left channel but he says it should diverted down the right.

After going to rice field to fix one of OASYS Lab’s data transmitters, we skededdled to Choui Fong tea plantation for a fun excursion.

This is me holding some grains of rice in a rice field. Please take a moment to appreciate that this grain literally feeds the world and that some of rice you’ve eaten probably came from this country!

(In this paragraph, everything in quotations is from their website). “For half a century, Choui Fong Tea has been well-known for the highest quality traditional teas cultivated in its own gardens in Chiang Rai – the agricultural center in the kingdom of Thailand.” There was a whole lotta tea there “such as Assum, Green, Oolong and Black Tea in the highlands at an altitude of around 1,200 meters above sea level and in a plantation area of over 1,000 rai.” When I was there I got to taste of their oolong “tea” which I found to be quite delicious. One could even say it was “rich in taste and aroma, and which [had] a pleasant lasting aftertaste.” Below are some pictures:

Acres and acres of hills lined with tea, stretch as far as the eye can see, brewed into hot drinks they will be.

be boring

As you can see there was a lot of tea. More tea than I had ever seen growing in one location. So much tea, in fact, that it started to feel like there was nothing beyond the tea. And me and two others on this trip were just tired, dehydrated, and imaginative enough to conceive of a world where tea was the only reality and the only purpose of life was to harvest tea. We proceeded to walk through the fields of tea and develop this idea into a five part series akin to the Hunger Games which included a Katniss Everdeen-like female lead and a slow uprising that culminated in a revolution, that would be extremely popular in the 13-18 age group and even have the fifth movie adaptation split into two parts: a Part I and a Part II.

Anyways, I feel as if this post is dragging on a bit, so I will expedite the part of the day where most of the fun I referenced at the beginning of the post occurred After visiting this beautiful tea plantation, we went a restaurant that had a mini zoo featuring exotic birds and that sold the best pie in Chiang Rai province. I ordered a pineapple merengue and it was delicious. Upon reaching Chiang Mai, we watched The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was my first time seeing it and I thought it was fantastic. We finished the evening by playing some good old-fashioned Uno and a game of BS.

It was a good day.