Moat

Possibly the one word I get my chops busted the most for because of my Minnesotan accent: Moat. The moat and Doi Suthep are the two things that have given me my geographical bearings in Chiang Mai since I arrived here. You can see Doi Suthep mountain from just about anywhere in the city, and it helps me know where West is. The moat circles, or squares rather, the old city. It has four walls, making a nice square mile of a city. There are five gates around the moat. The gates tend to be great meeting places, or good locations to use for taxi destinations. Each gate is in it's own distinct neighborhood, and usually has a market nearby. The moat itself is really quite beautiful. Especially at night. During the day, the water is pretty murky brown, but all the trees around make up for that. A note about the trees: someone has stapled little orchid plants to just about every tree surrounding the moat, and they all seem to be surviving just fine. It's always nice to be walking along and have orchids staring back at you at eye-level. Inside the moat are endless guest houses, temples, restaurants, bars, shops, etc. All jam packed with little soi's (alleys connected to a main road).

The moat is interesting because of the way traffic works around it. There is a road on the outer moat and a road on the inner moat; both of these roads are one way traffic. There are no stoplights. The outer moat traffic runs clockwise, and the inner moat runs counterclockwise. There are only a handful of places where you can bridge between the inner and outer moat, including the five gates. So depending where you are, you might have to drive around a corner of the moat away from your destination just to be able to turn around and go in your desired direction. I'd love to see it from a birds eye view, but you can probably imagine how traffic runs like a river. It seems to work quite nicely, except when you want to cross the street.

The moat is going to be a key reason why Songkran will be such a riot in April. Songkran is the water festival, celebrating the coming of the hot season. Basically it's a week-long water fight. People splash each other with buckets of water, people get splashed. Kids on the back of motorbikes spray waterguns at other traffic or pedestrians. Chiang Mai is the perfect place for this festival because of the moat. Other places you have to find a source of water, but here, people literally jump in to get their ammo. Can't wait to see that.

I have a little moat that I get to enjoy right outside my apartment. The thing I love most about it is that the chubby girl statue actually has water shooting out of her rear end. Not sure what that's about, but it makes me smile when they have the fountain running, that's for sure.