You won't starve in Thailand that's for sure. For a cheap meal you only have to seek out your nearest hawker market. There was one only a couple of minutes walk from my hotel.
My first dinner in Chiang Mai this trip was noodles with pork balls for only 40B. I ordered by pointing to selections on a laminated menu at the stall. Portions are smaller but this means you can sample more dishes.
At another market I stopped for a drink of coconut water infused with butterfly pea flower. I realised that this was the flower that was used to colour rice blue in Malaysian kuih.
Another night I had this simple dinner of rice and squid fried with morning glory. This is another vegetable I remember from Malaysia, where it's called kangkong.
Yet another evening I had this dish of roast pork on rice. It's very similar to the Cantonese siu yuk fan.
For street desserts, you will see mango with sticky rice everywhere. This was taken on a foodie walking tour, which will be in another post. I can't say I like this much, but apparently it's something that every visitor to Chiang Mai is supposed to try once.
I like fruit for dessert and I was intrigued by these orange sized pineapples. Note that the vendor has removed the eyes by cutting a spiral pattern, to minimise waste of edible flesh. They were bite sized and sweet enough.
Another one of my objectives for this trip was to experience Thai dental service. Many visitors to Thailand get dental work done which would cost much more in their home countries. A whole class of tourism has sprung up, medical tourism, of which dental tourism is a subset.
The issue is complex. When things go right, you can receive service just as good as in your home country. The practitioners can be just as qualified as those at home because they studied in a first-world country, and are quality certified. When things go wrong however, the consequences in botched care and cost of remediation could be severe. This is not something that can be settled by reading one article. You should do your own research into the pros and cons, and also the qualifications of the facility you intend to patronise. I do not recommend any particular course of action.
Fortunately I only needed to get a filling done on an upper incisor, not major surgery. I figured that there was little risk in getting this done by someone other than my usual excellent dentist. It's the sort of thing you would do on a holiday if your filling breaks.
There was only one dental clinic in the Central Airport Plaza shopping centre. I walked up to the front desk and asked to have a session with a dentist. The receptionist didn't speak much English, but she understood and got me to fill in a particulars form.
About 5 minutes later I was ushered into one of the rooms where a young dentist asked me what I needed done. She understood top incisor and hole, and proceeded with the work. There were two other young women in the room, assistants no doubt. Usually only one is needed, so perhaps the second assistant had no other duties at the moment. It was quite intriguing, they chatted away happily in Thai during the procedure. The relationship between the dentist and the assistants seemed to be collegial, rather than superior-inferiors. Perhaps it was part of the general Thai good-nature.
The filling done, the dentist tested the fit with carbon paper. She understood the phrase too big, and ground it down to get a good fit on biting. I found it quite satisfactory on leaving. For this I paid 800B, less than half what it would cost me at home.
This was only a small procedure. I cannot come to a conclusion on whether a large dental procedure would be safe to undertake. For sure I would want a large facility and better communication. Fortunately there are no such procedures that I need on the horizon.
One of my goals was to see if I could get an older unused Android smartphone repaired in Chiang Mai. I figured that the labour cost would be lower there. I decided to look for a repair shop or kiosk in Central Airport Plaza, a popular shopping mall near the airport, hence its name.
There certainly was no shortage of mobile stores in this plaza. I approached a friendly looking one and showed the problems: screen popped out of the frame, flash and speaker not working. The man glanced at it and said the problems were due to the battery bloating and pushing the screen out and at the same time breaking the contacts to the flash LED and speaker. That sounded right. But in answer to the obvious question: do you have a spare battery for it, he shook his head. The popular brands in Thailand, judging from the names seen at the stores, are: Apple, Samsung, LG, Huawei, Oppo, and one I hadn't heard of before, Vivo. It seems that Moto has a centre in Bangkok but not in Chiang Mai.
Oh well, I'll have to get it repaired somewhere else, sigh.
CNX is a regional airport but receives international flights. The international and domestic terminals are colinear in one building. I suspect traffic has grown as more visitors come from China. I saw more signs with Chinese characters than my last visit in 2013.
One quirk of CNX is that baggage is screened on entry to the terminal, then again before the boarding gate. So if on departure you have bottles of water, you'll need to consume them before entry. Empty bottles are ok.
Taxi fare to the old city is around 150B. You don't need to go outside to hunt for bargains, there are counters where you can put in an order for a taxi. I had the Grab app but didn't use it as 150B is about the going rate for that distance.
In the arrival lounge you'll also find kiosks for buying SIMs. I got an 8 day unlimited 4G (but speed limited, which didn't affect me) SIM with 50B call credit (which I never used) for 249B. Present your passport and kiosk will do the necessary set up for you. You won't find the cheaper SIM offers like a 88B data only SIM at the airport kiosks, not surprising. For those you have to go to a shop in the city if you can wait.
WiFi is free in most shopping centres but it's handy to have access to maps in the open. It's a good idea to cache a map of Chiang Mai just in case you are somewhere with no reception.
My first dinner in Chiang Mai this trip was noodles with pork balls for only 40B. I ordered by pointing to selections on a laminated menu at the stall. Portions are smaller but this means you can sample more dishes.
At another market I stopped for a drink of coconut water infused with butterfly pea flower. I realised that this was the flower that was used to colour rice blue in Malaysian kuih.
Another night I had this simple dinner of rice and squid fried with morning glory. This is another vegetable I remember from Malaysia, where it's called kangkong.
Yet another evening I had this dish of roast pork on rice. It's very similar to the Cantonese siu yuk fan.
For street desserts, you will see mango with sticky rice everywhere. This was taken on a foodie walking tour, which will be in another post. I can't say I like this much, but apparently it's something that every visitor to Chiang Mai is supposed to try once.
I like fruit for dessert and I was intrigued by these orange sized pineapples. Note that the vendor has removed the eyes by cutting a spiral pattern, to minimise waste of edible flesh. They were bite sized and sweet enough.
