This comes to you courtesy of an altercation in my otherwise happy homeland – but maybe I opted to walk home from dinner out, through the wartorn streets of Portland, in the dead of the night, only for this slice of time for weird Dara stuff >< Why were we in this town? It was between Thailand touristy areas and Laos? It’s one of the few parts of Thailand where you can get the famed northern Thai dish khao soi? I don’t know – what I do know is that it was pretty much my favorite place we went to in Thailand – Bangkok was great but intense. Chiang Mai, hailed as a tourist resort town?, was not relaxing or especially intriguing but worst of all, a bit identity-less. Chiang Rai was a legitimately smaller city with a legitimately hearty identifiable community – I was immediately charmed. So, on Saturdays, you go to the Saturday Market, and so on Saturday, we went to the Saturday market. We visited so many markets, so many wats (i.e., temples), I got a little immune to them, but this market was lively, authentic (i.e, locals as well as tourists). And then we landed in what Portland would call the food cart pod area and it got real interesting. We had collected various food items along the way – located the beer cart – and settled in at a table to gorge amongst a giant array of tables in front of a very large very professional stage. Very strange things began to happen. There were maybe two to three people on stage – a woman in a tight outfit singing? An MC? Frankly, they weren’t the show. The audience was the show. In swift order, a bizarre and giant circle of line dancers formed. It was like line dancing mixed with waltz. This was not some lark for the townspeople. There were clubs/gangs, demarcated by their matching outfits – it was clear they spent time outside of the Saturday Market practicing their coordinated dancing. It was very much like something you’d see out of that movie I don’t like, Grease. And, amusingly, some farangs joined in, admirably with serious faces (farang: “Thai term for foreigners, specifically Westerners, with origins tracing back to the ancient Franks” (AI)) I have mixed feelings on line dancing on so many levels. 1. It’s cheesy. But who am I to make any declarations? Just a non-dancing girl who has no right to judge the dancers. 2. Does line dancing align with my politics? But who doesn’t support community feeling and belonging? 3. Isn’t it more admirable to express yourself individually rather than in groupthink? I guess but I think there’s a lot of joy in coordinated movement – the best wedding I’ve ever been to was Jewish and I loved the forced coordinated dancing. Overall, these observations are more a reflection of my own unpleasantness as a person haha. In other wonderous parts of this evening, there were bats circling overhead. In a continuation of my unpleasantness as a person, this event amused and pleased me but made me miss American music with a passion, especially when the male singer did something that reminded me of the ska pick-up chuck.
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