Yes, I had pork for breakfast.

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January 6:

Sawadeekah (hello) from BCNC,

My day started with pork on a stick. Yes, I had pork for breakfast. The meal was complimented by sticky rice and coffee. This was at 8:30 am after only getting around 5.5 hours of sleep. Knowing we only had lunch at 11 am, I decided to head back to the apartment and blog about the day before.

For lunch, we had the traditional Pad Thai which was one of the best dishes I have ever had. My previous experiences with Pad Thai were at Thai restaurants at home. In the US, this dish has a very strong peanut taste, but over here in Thailand it is much more mild. For dessert we had sticky rice, fresh mango, coconut sauce overtop, and sesame seeds for crunch and flavor. I am not a huge coconut fan but this was delicious.

The next part of our day began with heading to a large bank so we could all convert our money. This was quite the experience and one that took longer than expected. Apparently our American money needed to be in perfect shape with no pen marks or ink dots. As for me, because one $50 bill had a slight red pen mark at the top of it, it could not be used. Fortunately, Thailand offers very cheap items so not being able to access this money would be okay. To every US dollar, there is 32 baht. So around $3 is 100 baht.

Now that we officially had baht to spend, we headed to a large outdoor mall. The amount of shops was overwhelming but with my buddy Mean helping me and being my translator, the experience was less stressful. The main goal of this shopping trip was to find a traditional Thai outfit. On Tuesday of this week, we are going to a fancy restaurant and are to wear a traditional Thai outfit. This consists of a nice shirt and a long skirt that you wrap around. After looking through numerous shops, Mean and I found the perfect one. The shirt and the skirt combined were 300 baht ($9) to show you how inexpensive everything is in Thailand. We continued walking through the streets and looking at all of the vendors. At one of the places, I must have looked excited to see a bright handmade scrunchie, so Mean decided to purchase it for me and gave it to me as a gift. Thais are very much into gift-giving and are good at picking up on things that you like.

Shopping continued until 4:00 pm and as energized as I was in the morning, I had zero gas left in the tank. Everyone passed out in the vans on the way back to BCNC, and followed up our ride back home with a 30 minute nap in the air conditioning. Other than feeling like I was hit by a bus, the day had been great so far.

For dinner we had chicken stir fry, pork shoulder with mushroom soup, and fried egg with chili sauce. As usual, everything tasted amazing. We quickly finished up dinner to head to another shopping destination which they call walking street. It was cool to experience Chiang Mai at night and to see all of the lights. If I could explain what Walking Street was like, I would say it would probably be similar to walking around in NYC on New Year's Eve. Most of the time, the only way to walk was to push through people but seeing what the vendors had to offer made all of this worth it. It was a long narrow street that had vendors on either side offering items from various foods to clothing/trinkets. If I thought the market earlier in the day was cheap, these items were even cheaper. A pair of elephant pants here were 100 baht ($3) and the ice cream I got for Mean and I was a total of 60 baht ($2). It was a really awesome experience to see what the people of Chiang Mai had to offer in terms of arts and crafts. We also saw many different international visitors including many English speaking people who were exploring Chiang Mai. Libby and I's buddies bought us these colorful jelly-like beans (looked like colorful olives) which are a dessert in Thailand. They were okay (not our favorite) but I soon realized that this was not a place that offered cakes or pies for dessert but offered much more unique options. We walked and walked until we could walk no more and then hopped back onto the bus and headed back to BCNC.

We said goodbye to our buddies and thanked them for a fun night. Crawling up the four flights of stairs seemed impossible but well worth it when we climbed into our beds. Tomorrow would be yet another busy day and I couldn't wait.

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Comments

[Aunt Gail]

Sounds like fun!
You are going to havre a great experience! Enjoy wish I could be there with you!

[Ez1160]

Thanks so much Aunt Gail!