Tag: Sunshine Massage School

I must say that I’m enjoying my Sunshine Massage School experience. I’m also enjoying the studying and the daily routine that goes with it. It feels like I’m actually living in a foreign city.

Every day my alarm goes off at 7am, I do my yoga practice, make some toast and a cup of tea then head out for my daily commute to school.

I’ve hired a bicycle! “Not that unusual” I hear you say. Now let me tell you that the last time I did any cycling on roads was during my Cycling Proficiency Test at Church Hill Primary School. Ok, so it was in my last year, but Gallants Farm Road in East Barnet doesn’t really compare with tackling the mayhem of Thailand’s second largest city. At least they drive on the left.

Picture this: There’s this moat that encircles the old city and a dual carriageway on either side of it. Think London’s North Circular. To get into the old city, you’re on the dual carriageway surrounded by hoards of scooters, tuk tuks and songtaews (little jeeps that pick people up). You have to cross the moat by scooching into the right (ie fast) lane and then whizzing over intermittent bridges over the moat and directly into the oncoming fast lane. Then you do a left off the dual carriageway. Not easy at all. But so far so good!

Oh and traffic lights? What traffic lights? Whole families on scooters just nip across where there’s a gap in the traffic. They seem very adept at it and car drivers are very accommodating of all these two wheelers everywhere. I just pootle along sitting very upright on my squeaky Raleigh, map close at hand in my basket. Even the old blokes cycling rickshaws manage to overtake me. Their calf muscles are a sight to behold.

There’s cobblers (complete with sewing machines) sitting on the pavement and I pass street food stalls selling all sorts of weird and wonderful things. You can buy a bag of fruit for 12 Baht (22p) so I sometimes stop at her stall or there’s always the Thai favourite: 7 Eleven. It beats the District Line, that’s for sure.

Today at school we focused on The Face. All of us took turns to run fingers over temples, rotate thumbs on closed eyelids, stick fingers in ears, do ‘the hair shampoo’ and hold chins. You should have seen us afterwards – hair sticking out at right angles, looking totally spaced out. Bliss.

We’ve now learnt all the moves for a basic Thai massage and now we just have to remember them. We’ll spend tomorrow and Thursday practicing and then we’ll be tested on Friday.

There’s so much to remember – not only the strict order of the body parts, but what things you do to them, how you get the person into the position and just as hard is remembering how you’re meant to be positioned.

And I’m teaching yoga there! There’s a free class taught by one of the tutors and he’s asked me to teach. I haven’t taught for months and it’s so nice to start sharing Michel and Roslyn’s knowledge.

In the evening, some of us may meet up, or we do our own thing. Tonight I went to a local place for a quick plate of rice and veg and I was the only Westerner in there. I spoke to my Mum on Skype and did some dull admin.

But I like that. I like the sense of routine and we’re all creatures of habit. On Sunday, I rode an elephant, went bamboo rafting and did a walk to some hilltribe villages. So there you go. It’s all about balance.

I have survived the first week of my Thai massage course. It’s been intense – 9am – 4pm every day with an hour for lunch. There’s eight of us students and we’re taught by Dot Po. Think small and quirky Thai lady in her late 40’s (or early 50’s). She talks slowly and quietly and says things like, “if patient has belly like mountain…” and, “you have beautiful hair but it messy”. When we come back from lunch we find her curled up asleep in the middle of the room – it’s not surprising seeing as she spends her evenings studying for a degree in Thai medicine.

Yesterday she told us that she used to be a Thai dancer. It took no encouragement for her to be up, curling her hands and fluttering her eyelashes whilst singing a funny little song about the energy lines.

I feel like I’ve been pulled in all directions this week and that’s probably because I have. We watch her expertly massage one of us and she talks us through it. We frantically scribble notes and then have a go on each other. “Na-ah-ah-ah!” Dot attempts to shout across the room “What are you doing to her?!”

We have to commit to memory a sequence for the whole body and we’ll be examined next Friday. It’ll take about two and a half hours to perform the entire thing. It’s going to take a small miracle for me to pull this off.

In the meantime, here’s a clip of Dot performing ‘the pike’ on yours truly.

I have just had the most amazing massage. Let me tell you about it.

At today’s lunch break of my thai massage course (day two), three of us went to the local cafe on the corner. It was hard work explaining that I didn’t want anything with meat but I was happy when my food arrived. This was an improvement on yesterday when I chose fried rice and kale only to be confronted with a load of pork. Some explaining was required.

Anyway, so we joined Horacio, a Spanish guy who’s also at Sunshine Massage School but is a week ahead of us. He said that they’d been told that they had to get as many massages as possible whilst in Chiang Mai and next on his list was a massage at the School for the Blind. “I’ll have some of that!” I thought.

And so after class finished at 4pm and some Googling later, I was in the back of a tuk tuk heading for a dark street within the old city walls. The driver pointed me towards a white backlit sign and zipped off into the humid night.

A gecko darted across the sign and, as I approached, a lady sitting behind a desk greeted me. “You want massaaaaage?” I chose a standard hour’s Thai massage and I paid the astoundingly small amount of 180 baht (about £3.60).

She led me into a back room with about eight beds lined up. Four were taken with Thai people receiving massages. The masseurs and masseuses skillfully moved around the bodies and the customers were like zombies – dead weights being pulled and stretched in every direction.

The lady pointed to a bed and I was introduced to my masseur – a young guy of probably no more than 20, wearing an earpiece that I guessed went to a mobile phone in his pocket. I’d already said to the woman that I wanted a soft massage as I’d read online that they were known for their needlepoint accuracy and deft touch.

I was pleased I piped up as I dread to think what a hard massage from this guy would be like. But, boy, he was good. We’ve been learning so far on the course about massaging the legs – working with the flows of energy or ‘sen lines’ and you massage along these to remove blockages. Yesterday I was struggling to locate sen line 1 and 2 on Alan, a 6ft 3in muscley American guy. This masseur could have found them a mile away.

He worked around my body using his palms and thumbs and released knot after knot. At times he was standing on the floor and then he would clamber up so he was kneeling on the bed next to me. The fact that he couldn’t see made me feel more able to obviously watch his technique.

The guy on the bed next to me was dying. The woman working on him seemed to be performing some kind of magic fast-fingered combination on his knees which made him cry out in agony. He resorted to stuffing a towel in his mouth to stifle his groans and when he saw me looking at him, he pulled the curtain in front of his face. I’ve always been told not to stare. I never learn.

An hour later and my masseur’s speaking clock told me it was over. I thanked him and walked out. I stopped to talk to the lady on the door and asked where was good to eat nearby. She suggested a place down the dark, silent road and I set out with trepidation. I’m now sitting in what can only be described as a goldmine. It’s a place called Huen Phen and I’m surrounded by beaten up Buddha statues, treadles from old Singer sewing machines, pot plants and wooden Chinese dragons. There’s old french posters on the walls and Nina Simone playing. It’s like sitting eating in an ethnic antique shop in Camden Market. There’s also printed articles on show from when it’s been featured in Conde Nast Traveller magazine and some Japanese magazines too.

I was brave an ordered papaya salad with local crab. I think it was a step too far. The crab was chopped up and its tiny pincers clawed at my papaya. With tea, It came to less than £2. Anyway, good to try these things!

I guess that’s the case with my entire evening – you’ve got to give everything a go or you’ll never know.

So far I really like Chiang Mai. If only it wasn’t quite so steamy hot…