THAILAND!

The adventure begins.....

A side note: currently sitting in a hostel common area in Chiang Mai eating a delicious deepfried banana-y chocolatey thing that cost $1 -just thought you should know.

And back to the important stuff:
I arrived in Bangkok on Saturday night (Sept 4) at around 11:00pm. Unfortunately, my bag did not. I don't know why -actually I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened to me more often considering some of the convoluted flight paths I've chosen. ANYWAY, my beloved backpack was left in Vancouver. Not so useful. As a result, I had to spend close to an hour attempting to find someone to report to and then navigating some interesting language barriers to recieve some meager assurance that my bag would find me at my hotel. And it did!!!!!

...2 days later.

Luckily, Andrew is still my friend. 2 days with no fresh clothes, and honestly, I'd probably questioning the value of being my friend too.

Right, Bangkok. We were actually only there for a day (we're going back on our way to Singapore). Long story short, we saw a giant buddha made of SOLID GOLD = 5.5 tonnes. It was pretty impressive. 60 million $ of impressive.

After the buddha, we braved a night train to Chiang Mai. It was actually very comfortable with the exception of the bathroom/shower. Think 2-in-1 combo consisting of a hole in the floor, bars on the wall to hang on to, and a spray handle for water. On a moving train, this can be challenging.

We've now been in Chiang Mai for 2 days. Its a lot more laid back than Bangkok -pretty amazing from what we've seen so far. Day 1 was mostly wandering. Many markets with many pretty things - and NO, I have not bought any pretty things yet. (don't worry it will happen, its inevitable.) Andrew bought a pretty suit. Haha, ok maybe pretty isn't the right word.

Today, we went to an all-day Thai cooking class. We cooked 7 DELICIOUS courses and ate them all. It was a lot of food. Too much even. But good fun nonetheless.

We will be in Chiang Mai for another 4 nights. May comes tomorrow!!!! We will either be setting up a separate communal blog, or communally blogging on this one :) Stay tuned.