Boring day today with not a lot to report. We had a simple hotel breakfast and then showered and got packed up. We took a taxi to the airport and got through checkin, passport control, and security in about 15 minutes. We were crazy early as always and killed two hours waiting for our flight.

The flight was on a small-ish plane—not my favorite—but only an hour long and smooth sailing.

The flight snack was a chocolate croissant. I’m anti-colonialism but the croissants here are on point.

We landed and took another short taxi to our Airbnb in Chiang Mai. Finally, an Airbnb! We exclusively stayed in hotels in Laos and it is so nice to be writing this post at 8PM instead of waiting for Millie to fall asleep in a bed beside me. She feels differently and begged me to cancel the booking and to get us to reserve a hotel. No girl.

We went out for an early dinner of… pizza. An offering dinner for Millie before probably a week straight of spicy Thai food and food tours. After dinner we went to the grocery store to get basics for breakfasts at “home”.

Millie begged to swim in the apartment pool which was on the roof and I brought her up there. She took this cute photo before deciding she didn’t want to get in. She saw people in the workout room and got very mad when I wouldn’t let her use the equipment. The flip side of all her maturity recently has been that she gets mad when she isn’t allowed to do adult things. We went back down to the apartment and got ready for an early bedtime. She was grumpy and a bit whiny all day, which I think is the result of a few late nights in a row.

We’ve only spent a few hours in Chiang Mai so far but my main takeaway is: holy cow, there are a lot of expats and western tourists. Only about every other person we saw this afternoon was Thai. It is a weird mix of people. I remember when we visited Bangkok many years ago I was shocked by how common the old white man / young Thai woman duo was, and it seems to be the same here. (I’ve heard these men be referred to as “sexpats” which is so gross yet funny). We also saw plenty of young, possibly drugged up white women. Nick saw a white girl with dreads and elephant-print parachute pants staring at the menu of the pizza place for the entire time we were there. There is a “massage parlor for men” on the corner that is clearly a rub and tug joint. Do I sound like a conservative boomer or what?

I have one piece of me that knows everyone has free will and I shouldn’t judge anyone. Yet I wonder what locals think of the influx of digital nomads, sexpats, and hippies. Is it good for the economy? Does it price them out? How has it changed the city? Is it like this everywhere or are we in the part of town where it’s especially concentrated?

We have 6 days here so I look forward to getting a less rudimentary understanding of the city in coming days.