Nightlife in Chiang Mai

I had been utterly nocturnal since going freelance, reading until dawn and then waking up at dusk for the past three weeks. When I found out that I was to fly off to dear ol’ Chiang Mai for a travel story, I imagined that my tourist schedule might force me to go back to being diurnal for at least a day. Well, that’s what I thought.

Upon arriving at the second-largest and culturally most-fascinating city in Thailand, I was invited to join the morning party for the Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi’s sixth year anniversary. I woke up at 6:30am and went to their gorgeous palatial main entrance, all graceful Lanna-style spires, and sat with the hotel staff repeating a call-response chant in Thai with 99 monks. That’s some merit-making ceremony, because for the next week I woke up at ridiculously auspicious hours. And did yoga at 7am. You couldn’t drag me to a farking gym for evening yoga in HK, but hey, here I’m inhaling fresh mountain air and overlooking rice paddies when I do my cobra pose.

I’m typing out this column in my second-storey sala overlooking said rice paddies, with occasional white egrets flying across, plus a cute freckly albino buffalo meandering in the mud: that’s Tong, the living mascot of Four Seasons Chiang Mai (Although I like to think their that mascot is Nicola Chilton, the PR for FS Thailand, and as all you bitchy journos who secretly love/hate to read me know, she was once stationed at FS HK, and is still sorely missed).

That doesn’t mean I didn’t still squeeze in a bit of hot mess with The Chilton. We went to NAP (Nimmanhaemin Art & Design Promenade), an annual street fair for designers, with high-level doses of kawaii that rival Tokyo, Seoul or Taipei. Then we went to check out the infamous Warm Up. I love that venue’s hot mess hodgepodge of randomly defined areas, a “lounge” which played thumping funky house, a massive clubbing space where they played top 40, a vast outdoor area where people listened to a young band play ridiculously good covers of indie rock hits—except for a crap rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.” Leave that song to the sistas, mista.

Packed with uni students, Warm Up reminded me of Minnesota and Nicola of Leeds, except that everyone’s shorter than you. And when they bump into you, they APOLOGIZE. What an astonishing social phenomenon! When we made the rounds from one side of the club to the other (it’s as packed as a weekend night at Drop/Hyde/Dragon-i) I realized that I was wearing Fitflops but not once was I stepped on. Laudable!

Nicola and I weren’t going to go on a bender and then show up at Chiang Mai market the next day completely drunk at 7am, so we paced ourselves with ridiculously cheap and tantalizing drinks, but still ended up “Partying like a White Girl” when they played that stupid song. Well—she did, anyway.