The Perfect Mix of Adrenaline Rushes and Peace and Quiet

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Bold Photo blog this time around.... The best way to see them is to click on the first picture and keep clicking on next or else you won't be able to read the full captions or see the pictures clearly.

La meilleure facon de bien voir les photos et lire les commentaires est de clicker sur la premiere photo pour l'agrandir et apres les faire defiler une apres lautre.

Heading to Cambodia tomorrow... stay tuned!:

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Photos

As you can see rice is a big deal here
We decided to take a cooking class in Chiang Mai, which was a lot of fun! We first went to their local garden and received a thorough description of all the herbs, vegetables and spices that Thais use in their food, then our highly energetic Thai chef took us to the local market to show us the ingredients needed for our meal, then we headed back to the kitchen to make some grub!

Proof that I know how to do something in the kitchen
We each chose three dishes to make and moved from the chopping board to the stove and from the mortar and pestle back to the stove quite a few times. Our cook would pace back and forth while we were cooking and take on a Hell's Kitchen sense of urgency as he was guiding us through the steps, it was pretty hilarious actually because he had an extremely high pitched voice, so definitely not the same as being screamed at by Gordon Ramzy but still :)

So proud of our cooking skills
The chef wasn't joking around. We weren't allowed to buy ready-made, machine-ground curry from the local market, although he did make us taste it so that we could later tell the difference between ours and the one sold in the market. We were each given a mortar and pestle and depending what curry we chose to make, we were given specific herbs and aromatic roots to crush until they became a paste. Simo and I chose to make panang curry and let me just say it was a workout!

My three Thai dishes
Tom yum soup, Pad see uw, Panang curry chicken (I also made a stir fry but I gobbled that one up after phase I of cooking)

Simo's new favorite dessert
Mango and sticky rice

Flight of the Gibbons
We spent three hours doing over 2km of zip lines and walking on bridges high in a 1500 year old rainforest (I tried uploading videos but they were over the allowed size limit)

Riding high high up
So since we had recently come back from the South, we were used to the scorching heat and stupidly decided that wearing t-shirts to ride up to the highest point in Thailand was fine... After turning purple for an hour or so we found a village where we bought the warmest thing we could find... lesson definitely learned!

My favorite plant!
Chiang Mai is known for its trekking options so we jumped on the bandwagon and reserved a 2 day trekking tour against Simo's will. The first stop was an orchid farm. The one on this picture is pretty standard but there were some gorgeous colors around!

Comments

[maman]

No comment
A mes adorables et beaux tourtereaux Ce sont de loin les meilleures photos que vous ayez prises depuis le début de votre voyage. MA GNI FIQUES, à en couper le souffle, bien épicées par les commentaires qui rajoutent à leur originalité, De beaux paysages, de belles vues, et surtout de beaux personnages, tbarkallah alikoum, toutes les photos sont réussies surtout celle où vous êtes suspendus tous les deux, elle est très réussie mais il y en a une encore plus belle c'est celle avec les orchidées, on n'a pas envie de passer à la suivante, khalikoum lili, Gros gros bisous à vous deux, vous nous avez gâtés cette fois ci.

[meredith]

Heyyyyyyy
Amazing.....pictures!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 :)))))))))))))))))))) saludosssssssssssssssssssss