My Chiang Mai

[Betti]

once I started a photo blog with this title, and I was posting pictures every day, just to fight the feeling that I don't belong here, to rediscover why I am here, why I liked it in the first place when I first came here in 2001. very soon the blog got swallowed up somewhere in the belly of Paknamweb's servers, I couldn't even retrieve it, and I gave up on the project.

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maybe this is a good time and place to share photos of my home city, Chiang Mai. I hardly take photos anymore, unless there is a special event, which is actually a shame because everyday life is interesting as well. but then, I don't really have an everyday life either that involves going out much. however, I have lots of "old" photos to go back to, so I will start in November 2005 and I'll see how long it takes to go through the most interesting photos in my folders.... maybe a year?
hope you will enjoy the trip. also, if you have photos of Chiang Mai that you especially like, why don't you post them as well?

[Norb]

Sounds good, Betti. I might throw in a few - if I remember. Mine go back starting in 2002 through 2005 and again 2007.

[Khun Don]

Good idea-sadly my earliest photos are 1996-and only 2 of those have survived. How I wish I had taken more-and taken a camera with me when I first visited Chiang Mai in 1982-it has changed so very much.

[Susana]

How I wish I had a digital camera back in 1973 when I first visited. I really enjoyed that trip. It would be good to compare then and now.

I look forward to seeing more photos from everyone.

[Betti]

any paper prints that can be scanned? - I wish I could go back in time just for a day.

[Khun Don]

This is the only daylight pic I have of Chiang Mai from 1996=loads for elsewhere!
Note how relatively traffic free it is!


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[Susana]

any paper prints that can be scanned? - I wish I could go back in time just for a day.

I can't find them. I think I gave them to my daughter.

[Betti]

I lived in downtown Chiang Mai for three years - across this temple

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and took lots of pictures like this spirit house next door. I constantly get told off by friends for not taking similar pics anymore.

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[4500]

i've been posting quite a lot of BKK and CM to my Flickr recently. I kinda like to post my faves first and then revisit photos a good few months along... you kinda get a different feeling for them i feel.

Looks like we are visiting Thailand for a month next March. I'll be armed with a better camera and lenses next time... and i'll also know what to expect and how i want to shoot things. I was so overwhelmed first visit.

[Norb]

Before returning to the US after living in Chiang Mai for 3 years, my wife and I wanted to take back a Buddha painting. We saw really nice ones at the night market (inside the building) but none really appealed to us. So we started a search for a Buddha statue that somehow touched us. We read somewhere that Chiang Mai had more temples relative to its size than any other place in Thailand. We visited many of them and finally found the statue we were looking for. It's called the "Buddha with the sharp Shins" significant for what is called the UThong or Khmer style. We researched it and found a reference to this particular statue in a bookstore on Thanon Thapae. (Buddhist sculpture of Northern Thailand By Carol Stratton - you can find it on Google}

it "was cast at Wat Pa Tan near Chiang Mai in 1483... the king brought out of his relic chamber about 500 relics together with images made of gems and of pure and natural gold and deposited it in the head of the great bronze Buddha image." It was removed to Wat Si Koet, Chiang Mai, in 1799.

We took photos of it and had a young artist paint it for us. We asked him to change the color. The painting is 1 meter tall and the first thing you see when you enter our house. We recently had it remounted on a professional frame. The one it was on was badly warped, probably because the wood, coming from a humid climate, had dried out.