The Present and Future in Chiang Mai

Hello Again! We figured you all needed a break from our stories, so we took a writing hiatus during our time here in Chiang Mai. For those of you who don't know, Chiang Mai is in the north of Thailand and is the second biggest city in the country. Ryder's mom has been living here for the past year and so we decided to come up for a 15 day visit. We had an uneventful overnight train ride from Bangkok up here. Though we had a couple of hours to kill in Bangkok and it happened to be the Chinese New Year. This was great as it made our couple of hours very interesting with lots of music and dragons filling the streets.
Upon arrival in Chiang Mai, we met up with Julia (Ryder's mom) and our mellow, but fun, stay here began. Chiang Mai is a neat city with lots of great restaurants and many, many temples. The old city is surrounded by a moat and parts of the original wall that fortified the city stand. Around the city are jungle covered mountains, caves, waterfalls, hot springs, and all sorts of outdoor delights. It is also well known here for being a starting point for treks into the mountains where you visit rural hill tribes such as Hmong communities. We didn't see a great deal of this stuff, partially because we didn't feel the pressure to squeeze it all in. Why wouldn't we want to squeeze it all in? Well, because our big news is that Ryder and I accepted teaching jobs here for next school year! Through a string of random events, and without expecting it at all, Ryder and I ended up interviewing at Nakornpayap International School here in the city and after visiting with the vice principal for over 4 hours, we all agreed that we'd like to make something work. Within a day we had job offers, me teaching middle school Life Science, high school Biology, as well as a French course, and Ryder teaching middle school Math and a Business Math class. Although this is not Ryder's ideal content area, we agreed that we liked the school enough to take the offer. If we decide to stay on for a second year, they are 99% sure that a Social Studies position will be available to him. Anyway, we are quite excited! We really got a great feeling from the school and, as just mentioned, Chiang Mai is a nice city with lots of interesting, beautiful things to see. Ryder can pursue ceramics here (it was the ceramics capital of Thailand, I think), we can hike, rock climb, mountain bike, soak in hotsprings, etc. and rent a nice little home for a fraction of our income. We think it'll be great. So after getting our job offer and accepting, we didn't feel quite as much pressure to hit all the hot spots of Chiang Mai.
So how did we fill our time in Chiang Mai?
1. Eating. Yummy, delicious curries, noodles, fruits, etc. are on every corner. We ate ourselves silly.
2. Visiting temples. Although Chiang Mai is a fraction of the size of Bangkok, it has the same number (if not more) of temples. Thai temples are quite ornate and colorful, with beautiful carved doors and window shutters, and colored glass mosaics. There seems to be one on every corner of the city. One particularly beautiful temple is found at the top of one of the mountains just outside the city. It is called Doi Suthep and we enjoyed a 16 kilometer ride on our motorbike, that we rented from our guest house, through the jungle on the way up the mountain. Once there not only did we get to enjoy the beautiful buildings and grounds, but we also got to hang out with an elephant. He was very fun! He wrapped his trunk around me and I got to pet him. What an enormous, majestic creature!
3. Eating some more.
4. Going to the flower festival. Every year Chiang Mai has a huge flower festival that includes all sorts of amazing plants on display (from bonsais to orchids and such) and a parade with floats made almost completely out of flowers. What a site!
5. Checking out ceramic artisans. We cruised around on our handy-dandy motorbike to little towns outside of Chiang Mai where there is massive pottery production. Some shops are smaller and feature all thrown pots. Other places have big enough factories that they are supplying Pottery Barn with all those pots you see in the States. At one of them, Ryder, being the master of smooth talking, got them to let us cruise around the factory (usually not allowed). It was pretty amazing to see all those hands at work hand painting pots, as well as the huge kiln yard. We also found an abandoned place that was like a strange ceramics ghost town. Maybe one day Ryder will buy it and realize his dream of being a master potter.
6. Then we ate some more.
We did other fun stuff too, I'm sure, but will not write more for now. Adrian, Ryder's brother, joined us for the last few days of our time here and that was great. We all laughed a lot. We also celebrated Ryder's birthday with a trip to the Chiang Mai Zoo (we especially liked the koalas, white tigers, and hippos), the International Festival at our new school, a good dinner, and a banana split (not a typical Thai dessert, but a good cake replacement).
I have some fun pictures to post, but am having technical difficulty at the moment. In a couple of days, I will post pictures from Chiang Mai. In the meantime, we are leaving for Laos. We will take a two day boat ride down the Mekong river from the border crossing here in Thailand to Luang Prabong. We're very excited for this leg of our trip. Anyway, until next time!

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