Making Moves

We found ourselves this morning at Angel’s Secrets again. This time, fresh orange juice and a beyond delicious chocolate croissant for me and a smoothie and oatmeal for Mom. Still my new favorite place! We planned to bop around town a little, but we saw a severe weather alert for northern Thailand and decided to move on. No time to weather a flood on this vacation!

As we were walking back to our hotel, we stopped to check out a temple. There were these ladies selling birds right outside, so you could release them inside for Buddhist points. I wonder if and where those old ladies caught all those birds?

bird ladies — the birds are in the wooden baskets

We caught a ride to the bus station with the tuk-tuk driver that hung out at the 7-11 near our hotel every morning. Every morning he tried to rip us off, and every morning we laughed.

We bought some snacks and hopped on the green bus to Chiang Rai, a swanky ride with plenty of leg room, reclining seats, and a stewardess with free cookies and water. It was classy!

bus snacks! (mine were terrible) — bus snacks! hot chili squid and american cheesy paprika potato chips (not clear why they are american?)

We got to Chiang Rai, used the free wifi in the bus station, and found a guesthouse. We got a tuk-tuk to take us there – turns out it was two blocks away! Oh well, it lessened our chance of getting lost while carrying our packs. :)

We checked in and walked to the night market for dinner. They were selling the same ol’ stuff, but they had a ton of food stalls. They have two different stages, one in front of the food stalls and one in front of a restaurant. We chose the restaurant, and had a delightful dinner while a trio played acoustic instruments on stage.

One thing I don’t understand about Thai street food is that they fry stuff at the beginning of the night, and then set it out for you to buy and eat cold. My mom thinks they might drop it back in the fryer real quick or something when you purchase it, but I don’t know. One thing I just can’t roll with is cold French fries, which were everywhere!

Cooking! And Eating! (and eating and eating…)

This morning we had breakfast at my new favorite little restaurant. It was called Angel’s Secrets, and I had some fab French toast and tea. Mom had some coffee with a jasmine tea chaser (which apparently is customary in this part of the world) and a delicious fruit parfait. Yum! It was a cute little place, and I recommend it to anybody traveling through Chiang Mai. (They have free WiFi, too.)

you'll see this pose a lot this post! — you’ll see this pose a lot this post!

After breakfast, we walked to a massage place that we saw advertised on a bulletin board at the restaurant. We opted for one hour coconut oil massages this time – a little more relaxing than traditional Thai massages!

Feeling good, we walked back to our hotel to be picked up by the cooking school we booked a class with. Turns out, we had Tak and Cooking at Home to ourselves! We drove first to a market out of the center/tourist area of town. In a rice shop, she explained to us about how the rice is harvested and how to best use the variations for for cooking.

We also went to a coconut shop, where we watched a guy make coconut cream.

i think i'll stick to buying it at the store! — i think i’ll stick to buying it at the store!

She pointed out various other fruits and vegs to us, then gathered some ingredients for our class and headed to the school, which was in the backyard of the house where she lived with her sisters family.

We hung out on the back patio while everything was set up.

my mom adapted very well to thai cooking! — my mom seems to have adapted very well to thai cooking!

Tak would demonstrate a dish while we watched, and then we would replicate it at our own station. The exception was dessert – we made sticky rice and coconut topping together as a group, since you only need a little and there were three of us.

The menu:

Pad Thai with prawns
Green chicken curry
Tom Yum soup with prawns
Sticky rice with mango (my fav!)

After we cooked each course, we would eat!

I handled myself quite well, thank you (only had problems with a tomato rose garnish). One of my favorite things we’ve done so far, but sooo much food! Tak brought us back to our hotel, overly full and satisfied.

Accidental Tourism

Overnight train took so much longer than we thought! What we thought was a twelve hour train ride actually was fourteen hours – almost as long as it took us to get to Beijing from L.A. We didn’t arrive in Chiang Mai until lunch time.

At the train station we were offered a free ride to town to check out a hotel. A quick google revealed some odd reviews on TripAdvisor, but it was nice and had air-conditioning so we stayed. We could do a heckuva lot worse for $16/night! (The bad reviews were regarding the owner’s aggressive tourism services sales, and his questionable reactions if you turned him down. Several people talk about being kicked out after not booking tour services through him. We didn’t find him to be a problem, although we just listened to his sales pitch and then told him we were still thinking about it.)

We were instructed to find this line of red taxis that would take you to a temple on the far outskirts of town. We weren’t sure why only the red ones would take you, but there must have been some reason! We were walking along and got some bomb smoothies for like, seventy five cents each for lunch.

somebody is trying to please a red-soda-loving spirit

We finally found the line of red taxis and pointed out the temple on the map. They nodded and we haggled price, and they handed us a brochure – should have been our first clue – and asked, “it’s okay?” We assume it is, because I pointed out the temple on the map, with a picture and everything.

We get there – it takes much less time than the hotel receptionist told us it would – and my mom keeps asking about a cable car to take us to the top that she heard about. They put us in a horse drawn carriage which was cheaper than a tram shuttle kind of thing – maybe they thought this was the car she was referring to.

this doesn't look like you need a cable car to get to the top... — this doesn’t look like you need a cable car to get to the top…

My mom still thinks this might not be right, but we go with it. Our carriage driver doesn’t speak much English, but is funny and has pictures and explanations of what we are seeing in English. We stopped at a few different temple ruins in a loop, and our driver shows us pictures of how a flood a few years ago affected them. Mom asked him what he was doing during the flooding? “Swimming!” he replied, and we all had a good laugh. He even pointed out his house as we rolled by it. We got back to our songthaew ready to leave, and the driver was taking a nap in back and told us to go walk around and give him a few more minutes!

Later that night, while looking up stuff to do around town the next day, my mom realized we were not at the temple we thought we were at, but instead at the old city ruins or something. We thought we were at like TripAdvisor’s #2 attraction in Chiang Mai, but really we were at like #47 of 49. We had a pretty good laugh about that.