Fun in Chiang Mai

It wasn't all work in Chiang Mai. We went to the Habitat for Humanity banquets the first few nights, took in a floor show at one. While I thought the highlight would be the dancing, the highlight turned out to the the sky bound luminaries. These look like upside down spinnaker bags. At the base were round wires holding the bag open like the base of a lampshade. In the middle was a fire like the ones used to heat banquet food. The luminary heated up, putting lots of pressure on the luminary. When the three of us let go, it sailed up a little, sideways for length of a football field before ascending high in the sky along with dozens of others. The sky lit up, the luminaries taking away all the bad spirits, and for us, blessing our extended stay in Thailand.

Another night we took a cooking class from Uye, owner of the Lots of Thai cooking school. Tired as we were, we were enthralled to be able to make green curry, pad thai and my favorite, mango and sticky rice. Now I just need to find good mango in the states to savor this exquisite Thai treat. In between times, we luxuriated in Thai massages--2 hour long dry massages, oil massages, foot massages, or whatever other parts we needed to work out the kinks. Hammering and carpel tunnel don't mix well so these massages were very welcomed.

Brain, Laura's husband, joined us late in the week, catching up on the Thai massages before we saw him. On Saturday, now released from our HFH work, we were escorted around the area--riding elephants, bamboo rafting down class one rapids with much splashing between our three rafts along the way, eating Thai food in a countryside restaurant and walking through a Karen village on our way to a waterfall. And of course before leaving Chiang Mai for Bangkok we had to have yet one more massage.

We arrived in Bangkok late on Saturday night, the lights from the plane illuminating the extent of Thailand's capital city. The ride to the hotel was indicative of the crazy driving here, and we soon learned places are not known by the Taxi drivers as is true in London. The driver's call to the destination to figure out what little alley or side street they need to finagle to get drop us off. This was to be a far different experience of Thailand than Chiang Mai.