So this last weekend was mothers day here in Thailand (ie the Queen's birthday.) Quite a big deal here as it is an official national holiday with it's own flower, symbol, etc. However, for us just an extra day off of work to travel! Just Hannah, Travis, and me on this trip - we left town about 6pm on Thursday on a super nice bus with seats that went almost all the way back. Unfortunately leaving so early meant that we arrived in Chiang Mai at the fantastic time of 4am...
Fortunately, since I'm the planner, I looked into a cooking class that provided accomodation outside of town and when I called on Thurs afternoon they even said they'd pick us up at the bus station at 5am. A nice lady from the office drove us out to where the cooking school is - about 20km south of town in a really quiet rural area (see http://chiang-mai-kitchen-cooking-school.infothai.com/ ) So we got there, found ourselves the only ones at the bungalow style accomodation and promptly went to sleep for 3 or 4 hrs. The owner of the cooking school Mr. Teng then woke us up a bit after 9am to take us to a market shopping for food. Nothing too new there as we've been to plenty of markets. There was a little girl there who was fascinated/absolutely terrified of me. Her mom kept holding her and trying to get her to say 'sawadee ka' but the poor thing must've thought i was a devil or something with my red hair - definitely a sight around here.
At any rate we returned to the school and started cooking. Just the three of us conveniently enough so we chose our own dishes - green curry, phad thai, fried bananas, sweet and sour chicken, and spring rolls. Cooked the first three just for lunch - definitely a full and intense day of eating! Luckily the last two we made in the afternoon and were able to wait to cook/heat up right before dinner time. The office was even able to arrange Muay Thai tickets for us so Friday night we were finally able to see Thai boxing.
A pickup drove us over to the stadium - plenty of farangs down front but more Thais showed up later in the evening. About 8 or 9 fights total starting with really young kids - maybe 6 or 8? Hard for me to tell the age of Thais correctly as they tend to be so small anyway. Anyway, they enter the ring, wai to everyone, and then as the live music (a drum, finger cymbals, and a recorder type instrument) played they would dance something they'd made up to represent their school. Most incorporated very similar elements but it was interesting to see dancing right before fighting. Then a very violent struggle - kicking, kneeing, and a standard left/right punch being integral. Weird to see little kids going at it like that, but just the next fight they seemed to be teenagers and able to choose such an activity... Most of the fights in the middle did end with one or both contestants bleeding. And that night was different in that a few farangs (foreigners) were actually fighting. One was finnish (looked ackward but had good reach) who won and the other lebanese (huge guy who forgot how to punch) who lost. Also the very last match was what seemed like a pretty old/skinny/ripped Japanese guy against a teenage thai about his size.... crazy.
Back to our bungalow in the country for the night and in the morning we were picked up by a group to do a trek. Trekking is really big and pretty standardized in the Chaing Mai area but we all had a great time on Saturday. 6 total in our group - one english guy and an italian couple were with us. First we hiked a couple of kms up to a Hmong hill tribe village, really a cultural center sort of thing. Wouldve been an easy hike but it had drizzled all day on Friday and kept going with stronger rain at times on Saturday. The trail was incredibly muddy and coming back down the hill was quite a feat! At any rate our guide was pretty good - gave us an overview of the tribe - originally from China, now Thai citizens mostly. Poor, but really seems like an okay life farming and getting money from tourists. Always seems better to be poor in the country then in the city. At any rate we got to wander around for a bit before the muddy/slippery hike down - only ended up on my butt once! After lunch then we went to visit a Karen village. Not such an exciting hike but interesting to see a different tribe - different style houses/different looking/same getting money from tourism deal. Next a hike up to a pretty cool waterfall - a good reason to visit in the rainy season I would guess. Then the standardized riding elephants/bamboo rafting bit which was actually really different from what we did in Kanchanaburi and better in lots of ways. The elephant ride - how can you complain about riding an elephant?? was awesome, throught the jungle and across a river. Then the bamboo raft, a long skinny thing, which we rode down a much faster river - with actually some minor whitewater sort of stuff. Definitely good times. It started absolutely pouring about halfway through, such an awesome feeling to be on a raft in a river in a jungle being drenched by a tropical downpour... glorious! Well needless to say we were pretty worn out and after finding a guesthouse in Chiang Mai the most we could do was find the Night Bazaar (rather infamous - 10 blocks long!) and finish our Thailand shopping.
On Sunday, Travis took off on another tour thing while Hannah and I had another girls day. Started out with a Muay Thai lesson. We'd gotten a flier at the fight on Friday night and decided to give it a go. We were the only 2 students from 8-10am. Met outside the place (really a conglomeration of bars with a boxing ring in the middle) by our teacher, a short, middle ages Thai guy who was obviously a former boxer himself. Basically the 2 hours were spent in training and conditioning. Not really any actually fighting. Started out jumping rope (don't laugh! I know i'm no good at it ;) ) then jumping on a tire, kicking over a stick, kneeing and kicking things, moved on to punching and kneeing the pads he would hold. Apparently I have a pretty good right knee - watch out! hehehe... Anyway by the end of the two hours I looked like I'd been swimming - just drenched in sweat. A quick cook down/stretch out and we had to run back to check out of our room at the guesthouse.
So feeling we'd earned it after a hearty lunch we walked around and chose at random a massage place (tons of them in Chiang Mai). Decided to go all out and got a facial scrub followed by a full body oil massage that in all took almost 3 hrs. Glorious! I'm getting way to addicted to these awesome less then $10 massages... Well after that, all relaxed and refreshed by some delicous homemade ice tea we wandered the old town and headed out into the new town to visit a market we'd heard about. Only then did we see the effects of the rain the previous days. Horrendous flooding of the river and canal. Apparently it hasn't been so bad in years and years. First thing everybody asked me when they saw me this morning was if it had effected things. We got to the bridge over the canal and found that the blocks between it and the river were completely flooded - waist deep at some points. So that but a limit on things. It poured a bit more so not too much happened after that. Dinner when Travis got back, and I'll admit I'm busy reading Harry Potter which Hannah bough and finished last week.
Got back into bangkok about 6:30am this morning and I gave up and came straight to work. So a long day most likely, little chemistry and probably plenty of stalling on this paper thing... bah!
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