Since we’re not on holiday, we can’t go see spectacular things everyday. Some days we have to stay around our hotel room and concentrate on work. And today was just such a day. Grace was busy trading, and I was busy remotely sorting out some servers that needed upgrading.

I also had a very interesting conversation with the English owner of the boutique hotel we are staying at. Apart from hearing how lovely the Thai people are, here are some of the more interesting bits of information I gleaned:

Chiang Mai’s sewer system is around 700 years old! Who would’ve thought that? While Europeans were busy crusading and burning heretics, not to mention throwing their sewage in the streets, the Lanna people of Thailand had built an advanced sewer system in the walled city of Chiang Mai! Of course they’ve updated and repaired it since then, but it seems that houses in the old city still get a smell in their bathrooms from the 700 years of rot underneath!

A surviving portion of the city wall, to the right behind the trees is the moat.

In case you’re wondering, our hotel is in the old city which is still surrounded by the 700-year-old moat and parts of the wall that have survived. All this came out when I asked the owner about the strong smell in the bathroom He said he’s looking at how to get the pipes to block the smell from rising and he’s tried a few things that hadn’t quite fixed it yet and that all the Thai plumbers he’s brought in say they don’t smell a thing!

Foreigners can only take out 50,000 baht (US$1,568) from the country. So let’s see if I invest millions to build up a company I can only take US$1,568 out? Doesn’t really encourage investors does it? This might have worked in China where investors can always put money into that huge growing economy, but in Thailand these protectionist measures are already causing investors to leave or use the black market for foreign exchange.

Laws regarding immigration change all the time. So you’ve got your work papers sorted out, and you go down to immigration to present them. You’d probably at least expect the person to have a look at the papers you spent all of yesterday filling out. But right now in Thailand they may just tell you all the forms and requirements have changed since you filled them out, and you have to fill out new forms. Just hope the law doesn’t change again while you’re filling out those new forms!

Tomorrow we’re off to another hotel outside the city to see what it’s like to stay near the rice paddies. If you haven’t already, subscribe by email to our RSS feed and you might win a Sony Photo Printer!

As we’re discovering while living this lifestyle, many times the first “half” of the day is like holiday, and the later half is intensive work.

The first half of today started at 8:30am when we were picked up at our hotel and driven to an elephant camp where we got to ride a magnificent 17 year old male elephant named Song Chai through the jungle and across a river.

After that we were off to see some the Hmong and Karen hill tribes which are originally from Burma but have now settled in Thailand. Most of them make a living from small rice or vegetable farms and they keep chickens and pigs as well.

And then we rode an ingeniously crafted raft made of bamboo poles down a white water river.

At around 9pm the second part of our day started, that part having to do with work. Grace as always had to keep track of the markets while I had to work on some IT related stuff and a business call to the US at about midnight.

Now it’s nearly 2am and I’m just getting around to writing a post here. But that’s ok, tomorrow we can sleep in, and we might even head down to a spa in the leisure “half” of our day.

Apart from cooking, another great way to get a feel of the local culture is to see the local arts and crafts, so today we headed off to see what they make here in Chiang Mai. Our first stop was an umbrella “factory” where they hand make decorative wooden and paper umbrellas.

After that we were off to a local silversmith where we saw that they need 3 different molds to make the silver.

The first mold is a rubber mold and they fill it with hot wax, then they use the newly made wax mold to make a plaster mold and melt the wax out of it. After that they pour silver into the plaster mold and when it cools they break the mold to remove the silver. Below you can see how they make the wax mold in the rubber mold:

The thing that all of these places had in common was their need for cheap manual labor. And in Thailand that isn’t a problem. Salaries for office workers start at 8000 Baht (US$250) a month, and people in the countryside can make a lot less than that!

Today Grace recorded a video blog about the financial markets which you can see at www.gracecheng.com. The setting for this video was the courtyard of the boutique hotel we are staying in that has some nice water features and is a great relaxing place to work.

And after the “hard work” we went and pampered ourselves with a 2 hour spa, and then we were off to the Sunday market.

The Sunday market takes place on a bunch of streets that are cordoned off to traffic and stalls are setup on the road itself. In this market we saw everything from street artists and wood carvers to clothes and food stalls.

Thai food is usually known for its excellent Tom Yam soup and Curries, but at the night market you can find some more exotic delicacies. Fancy some deep-fried roaches with grubs? After all, it’s a local delicacy. Grace got so grossed out she couldn’t even look at them!