The Thais have a very spir­itual say­ing which they use at every pos­sible occa­sion. I‘m pretty sure it goes back to the first monks try­ing to decipher the mean­ing of life. It‘s become a con­ta­gious man­tra through­out the times and you won‘t spend a day in Thai­l­and without hear­ing it at least once: Same same, but different.

It can be applied to everything: from fake jew­el­ery match­ing the ori­ginal brands look (it‘s the same appear­ance, but a „dif­fer­ent“ maker), to boys who look like girls but are, well, not. And when you’re asked how you doing? Same same as before, but dif­fer­ent, because it’s another day. It also works for Chi­ang Mai, a city that had all of the fea­tures we saw in Bangkok, and yet was entirely different.

Chi­ang Mai caters to every­one. Cook­ing classes, Muay Thai Box­ing, mas­sages, trekking the beau­ti­ful province, temples, ruins, bars, clubs, lady­boys and a vari­ety of mar­kets. Just like Bangkok (see Find­ing Bangkok). Minus the smog, the noise, and the most annoy­ing of all touts who try to sell you cheap tour­ist crap. After almost drown­ing in the pesty cap­ital and sweat­ing our asses off in the jungle, Chi­ang Mai came like a resort, a real home. We stuck to it for longer than we had pre­pared to, roamed the streets like we were the only ones to ever visit this beau­ti­ful place, went out of town and in again and gen­er­ally never wanted to leave again (we did, and we found even more charm­ing places, although it was hard to believe).

With only a few thou­sand cit­izens, Chi­ang Mai is not a met­ro­polis as we would usu­ally por­tray here at Find­ing Ber­lin. But I’m skip­ping the size from now on– it doesn’t mat­ter. When we roamed the 2 kilo­meter Sunday Walk­ing Street mar­ket, I found myself back in the hustle of a Sundays Mauer­park Flea Mar­ket (see A Sunday Kind Of Love). The same clothes, the same crowds, the same music — but dif­fer­ent time, dif­fer­ent place, dif­fer­ent people. Same same, but dif­fer­ent. It never gets old.