The old city of Chiang Mai in Thailand has a 6+ Kilometer long moat around it. Today’s walk was around that moat.
One of the things that I love about your planet Earth, is that you don’t hide your history. Where I’m from we are forbidden to know our history.
I learned that the moat and the fortress that is protects is over 720 years old! Wow, that was mind-blowing.
The story goes that Chiang Mai was established in 1296 by King Mengrai as the capital of his Lanna Kingdom. In order to protect his city over 90000 men worked over 4 months, to construct the city walls in rectangular shape 1.8KM by 2KM. And around that wall a moat 18 meters wide, in order to help defend the wall.
There where 4 gates which where placed in the middle of each side of the square wall that surrounds the city. Most of the gates and some of the wall has still survived after all these years.
In order to preserve what is left of the wall, there are signs for Earthlings (I guess and me the alien as well) not to climb the old walls (which I have not).
All around the moat there is amazing vegetation. On my planet we don’t have that much free growing vegetation due to the lack of direct sunlight. So being able to walk around without a mask and see vegetation outside an artificial environment was just amazing for me.
Another thing that is amazing is that there are bridges to cross the moat both for pedestrians and Earth transportation vehicles (which I’ll write more about in future blog posts).
Some of the pedestrian bridges are just amazing and covered in lush green vegetation. I have never seen that in my life. It was a site to behold. When I finally build the universal communicator and send this picture back, my people are not going to believe what wonders exist on this amazing Earth!
There are patches of some bright red grass that just makes you stop and appreciate the fact that you are alive.
On my planet citizens are not allowed to grow flowers since they are considered useless and without purpose. We illegally had a few in our secret cave in the hills above my village. None of our flowers had the beauty of the ones I saw around the moat in Chiang Mai this morning. I can’t imagine anyone ever getting depressed on this planet among all this beauty.
I also noticed that there where tourist information signs with some weird symbols that I didn’t know how to use. One of my Earthling friends gave me an Android communication device, but I’m not sure how to get that tourist sign to work on the device. Do you know what App I would need in order to get that information? Thanks in advance.
Some of the tourist signs where in analog and I was able to read them without a digital translation device. I did notice the sign is very old and it started to wear down, probably from the weather. It’s colder here then on my planet, but still hotter then what an optimal temperature might be for maintenance of such sign.
There are just amazing artistic statutes all around the moat. I’m not sure if they where built 700 years ago or at a later date, but they are just wonderful to look at.
The amount of work that went into producing the wall, moat, bridges, road and other infrastructure around the old city of Chiang Mai was something to marvel at.
One thing I was puzzled by was regular everyday Earthlings feeding the birds, freely and with no fear. If this happened in my village and a leader saw you, that would be it. Our food is rationed and giving food to birds is something that you would have a hard time explaining to the authorities.
An Earthling just sleeping on a bench! What a sight! No one back home would believe me if I told them. You guys are so lucky, go happy, stress free beings! I’m very happy to to be stranded on this planet with you!
Sleeping on peoples’ property is a felony crime with mandatory prison sentence on my world. What I heard is that if you repeat it, you then go to one of our freedom camps. Freedom camps from what I have learned so far is that you don’t have those on this planet. I had to go a few times in school for educational purposes. It’s to show us what we get if we are not good citizens. Basically you do things you don’t like for example remove weeds from a corn fields or manually or cut branches of trees under power lines etc. But you get “free” food and housing. I didn’t like the freedom camps.
I also like that there are modern activities on this old location such as one of the Earth sports I’m not to familiar with called street basketball. I will make sure I attend it to see what the sport is about. I use to like sports; cross country running. I was good at it in college and won the provincial competition, but because of the incident for which I got later thrown out, they pulled me out of University Planetary Games and send the runner up since he was deemed a more law-abiding citizen.
I’m looking forward to learning more about Earth sports. This Basketball thing from the Youtube videos looks amazing and we don’t play it on my planet, so it’s going to be fun to watch.
One more thing I have never seen on my planet and those are the devices that pump water into the air. The are just a wonderful to watch. On my planet it’s not something that would be approved. I hope to see more of them in my future travels around your world.
I suspect that my world once was like yours and that we had such amazing views. We no longer do. I’m not sure why. But as an alien stranded on your planet, I can tell you that you are just the most lucky beings in this Universe. I have only been on 2 planets, but if I had been to 2 billion of them, I can’t imagine there is one more beautiful and free as Earth.
Be free, be happy, be true!
Stranded Alien