Today was marked by time spent with my new Thai friends! After classes (which were much easier to find today) I ended up hanging out with my new friend Bitoey! She took me around the residential part of Chiang Mai and eating a strange (but surprisingly good) lunch of raisin-and-corn-and-tomatoes-and-cucumber rice with a sunny-side up egg on top. It was nice to meet and talk to a native! It makes me feel a lot more at home to know that I have friends that aren't in the program!
After hanging out with Bitoey, I rushed to get ready so that I could go to a big dinner with the rest of USAC and our Thai buddies! The restaurant we went to, Kantoke Palace, specialized in northern Thai food and also gave us a showcase of dance from all around Thailand! When we first got there, we sat down to a meal of northern Thai dishes:
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| container of sticky rice |
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| chicken, cucumbers, rice with red curry, cabbage, soup, and pork |
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| Anette and Kanokwan with the platter of our food (served family style) |
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| Noi and Man teaching me some dance moves! |
After our meal and some socializing, the show began! The performance started with a processional of candles and drums, then led into the Fawn Lebs, where the women danced with candles.
Following that, there was Fawn-Darb, which is basically sword dancing. The guy doing the sword balancing was super impressive, but it was just as fun to watch the band, who were obviously making jokes and egging the sword-guy on.
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| sorry these pictures are so low-quality, my camera was about to die. Also, you can't tell, but the one with the grass-cymbals is really attractive. |
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| He's balancing swords on his arms |
After the swords dancing, there was (okay, so I just lost the paper that explained all of the dances so I'm just gonna wing it and I'll fix these later if I find it, okay?) another kind of dance- they said that this one was a mixture of Thai and Myanmar-type dances.
After that dance, there was one with a "butterfly" and a goat-type-dragon-thing. The goat-thing came down into the audience and pretended to nibble at our food, which was kind of a shame as it detracted from the "butterfly dance" which was the most technically impressive dance of the night (from a dancer's standpoint).
After that was a war dance (with the really attractive band-cymbals-guy being the one dancing).
Following that was an umbrella dance (no picture, sorry! I'm slowly getting worse at blogging) then an example of some hill tribe dancing.
From there, we got distracted from the dancing and instead took lots of pictures with each other. Also, I was invited to come dance on stage (by the cute drummer guy) and I did, but I have yet to recover pictures of it-I'll post them here when I get them!
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| Noi, Man, Me, Ashley, and Kanokwan |
Overall, it was a really fun night with great food and our wonderful Thai buddies! I'm so glad that I have them to help me navigate through the sometimes-murky waters of Thailand and to teach me awesome things like dance!
-Haley
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