Asian Adventure - Day 3 (Chiang Mai)

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Woke up super early on the train. Kind of hard to sleep as the train crew are up serving orange juice and saying “morning, orange juice” …the guy even peeked into my curtain and was shoving the juice in my face but I was clearly still trying to sleep. Anyways, it was nice scenery to wake up to. I just chilled in my bed with my curtain closed taking it all in for an hour! At 9am we got to Chiang Mai & got to our beautiful Empress Hotel. Had an amazing buffet breakfast, showered and left for our 2nd temple visit.

This was a coach ride up the top of a mountain overlooking the city & had to climb over 300 steps to the top. Luckily, it wasn’t too hot as it has been as we needed to be covered up again with “temple dress.” At the top, the temple was beautiful with a gorgeous lookout! There were tons of little adorable girls all dressed up performing traditional dance routines, etc. We actually got to get blessed by a monk here as we knelt down on the ground he flung some water at us and then we got a white rope bracelet tied on for us. Although, the monk himself is not allowed to tie the girls bracelets on, so his assistant had to do all the ladies. Learned a lot today about Monks and their lifestyle which was very interesting. After climbing back down the temple and the bus ride back to the hotel, we actually had 4 hours of free time! I went with others for food down the street and explored the town a bit. Had curried meal with prawns and a strong coffee to keep me going as I was quite tired now. Went to an internet café on the walk back, then tried to have a 40 minute nap but it didn’t work.

At 4pm we left for our first optional excursion which almost everyone had signed up for which was a Thai cooking class. Our chef was quite the funny jokester who first took us to a market to learn all about the spices, ingredients we would be using. The market was quite smelly and disgusting, unlike any market I have ever seen before. It was so dirty and there was just meat and seafood sitting around everywhere in the heat with fans blowing on the extra smelly stuff to try to keep the flies away. We learned how to make a Spicy Prawn soup, curry, black bean dish and Pad Thai. There was so much food when you were done cooking, it was hard to eat it all. I enjoyed 2 beers while I was cooking which was nice! At 8pm we were done and went back to the hotel. A bunch of people went to the night markets there but I was too tired and went back to the hotel. Got myself organized and in bed by 9:30pm.

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