8/8/10 (chiang mai)

Chiang Mai

In the morning Jon continued editing the New Zealand video with hopes he can, as he calls it, “give birth” to it before we leave Chiang Mai. The last few days before the sending it out to the world is always stressful but Jon was hanging in there. While I waited on the sidelines I continued to update our daily details page.

As the afternoon rolled around we set out to find a place for Jon to record his voice over. Mr. Sak gave us a few suggestions but Jon had a place in mind. We drove to the Night Safari park where he had seen a temple perched high in the mountain. When we arrived at the temple we were pleasantly surprised to see a huge Buddha statue perched on the mountaintop. It was the biggest one we had seen so far. The temple overlooked the entire city. There were a lot of gongs in the temple for people to ring as they said their prayers so needless to say it wasn’t the quietest place to be.

On our way down from the temple Jon found a deserted parking lot that would make do for him to record his voice over. He spent the next twenty minutes recording his recap of New Zealand. It wasn’t the perfect setting but it was as close as we were going to get. After the recording we went back to one of our favorite temples, Wat Suan Dok, to record my recap of Thailand. We arrived just as the sun was setting so it was the perfect light to do the recording. But it was also really hot and humid and facing the sun was not an ideal setting for me. I was wiping my sweaty face with a tissue in between takes and ended up with tiny white tissue remnants all over my face. Now I know why actors have stand-ins for certain situations. I’m hoping Jon can do some Photoshop magic on my face in postproduction.

After the interview we headed to the Sunday walking street in search of a gift for Mr. Sak. He has been extremely generous with us and we wanted to find a way to express our gratitude. We saw a dress shirt we thought would look nice on him. It is common practice, if not expected, that you bargain when buying anything on the street except for food. I started to bargain with the lady and usually it goes back and forth a few times before a price is agreed upon. The lady only lowered her price once and refused to go any further. There was a Thai man buying a similar shirt and I waited to see how much he paid for it. I think the lady knew what I was doing and refused to bargain with me anymore. The shirt wasn't that expensive but out of principle I walked away.

As we continued along the street, we could sense the rain coming but we were determined in our pursuit. Within seconds of a few raindrops it started to pour. We were left in the open with no umbrella. We took our chances and made a run for the car, which was much much farther than we remembered. Half way to the car we bought an umbrella but by then we were both soaking wet. We had been very lucky not to be caught outside in the middle of the rain but I guess it’s not really rainy season if you are not soaked at least once in Asia. We had gone through the initiation process. With our clothes soaking wet we headed home to dry off.