Chiang Mai Thai

Posted by Emily

The next day in Bangkok involved more visiting of temples and adventures around the city. We first visited Wat Tramit, which houses the largest solid gold Buddha in the world. Quite impressive really. I was quite large, maybe 4 ft tall? We then took a walk through China Town, very crowded and busy, to the river and caught another water taxi to go way up the river. From there we had a very long walk in the heat to visit the largest teak mansion in the world, which used to be the favorite house of one of the former Thai kings. It has 72 rooms. The complex is quite impressive but the inside is painted, which I wasn't expecting. When I heard teak mansion I was imagining beautiful woodwork.

The weather in Bangkok ranged from cloudy and a bit cool to rainy to sunny and hot. It was most often cloudy but on this particular day it was HOT and we quite a distance to walk. From the mansion to our next destination of Wat Benchamabophit, or the Marble Temple, we took a lunch break by some food stands and at first had trouble finding anything that we wanted to eat. Nicki and I finally settled on spicy papaya salad, made from grated unripe papayas, peanuts and an array of other lovely ingredients. Alex found some sort of grilled skewer and then some sort of soup, that we later discovered was chicken blood soup. Apparently they steam chicken blood until it coagulates into a tofu like blob and use it for cooking. This time they happened to use chunks of it in a soup. When we asked Alex if the soup was good he said "Goodish." Like tofu, I guess the chicken blood absorbs the flavor of whatever it is cooked in. I think he is very happy he didn't know what it was at the time!

That evening we decided to have our first Thai massage experience. I think it was about 10 dollars for an hour and a half massage. Thai massage turns out to be about one part deep tissue massage and one part acrobatics as they twist and stretch your body all over the place and massage you with feet, elbows, knees. Quite the experience but actually very nice. Massages are so cheap here that we are going to keep trying them out!

On Saturday, we took a trip to the Chatuchak Weekend Market and had quite a good time finding gifts and skirts and whatnot. Thailand has an abundance of comfy clothing so we have done a lot of shopping for that! That evening we hopped on the night train to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, about a 14 hour trip which was made much better by the fact that we had sleepers. It makes a big difference when you can sleep on a bed during the night instead of sit up the whole time, like in a bus. We arrived quite refreshed even though the trip was quite long. It saved us from having to nap for half a day when we got in.

Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand, with a population of about 170,000 (Bangkok has about 10 million) and the area we are staying in is very quiet. It's a very nice change from constantly busy streets! We walked around and saw a few of the 300 temples that are found in this city. In the evening we went to the Sunday Market and found more things to buy! It must sound like we shop all the time but it's not true! There is just a great abundance of cheap markets and walking through them is always quite a good people watching experience as well.

Yesterday we spent the day at a cooking school learning how to make several WONDERFUL Thai dishes, on of which involved setting the wok on fire. We took pictures. It was some very exciting cooking! The group we were with was very cool and the instructors were super funny. I just hope that I will be able to recreate the dishes when I get back to the US because they were so good!