“Good morning you want orange juice”

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is the cry that greets you at 6:30am on the sleeper train to Chiang Mai. For some this is a lovely way to be woken but for myself I could think of nothing worse! I try to discuss my annoyance with a Canadian girl but her rebuttal to me when I try and engage her in conversation is that she only speaks English! So I just decide to read my book more, occasionally trying to wake Mhairi from her slumber as the orange juice man could not stir her to waken.

We arrive in Chiang Mai at last and we only know this because everyone is getting off and we are the last ones to get off the train. We get some good accommodation in the heart of the old city and set about exploring Chiang Mai and all the Wats (temples) it has to offer - 300 of them! Sunday night is market night and what a day we have chosen to arrive. The market sets up roughly 300 meters away from our guesthouse and spreads itself along roughly 2 miles of streets that are closed to traffic. It is a wonderful place with so much energy and local made food and crafts.

Monday was when our week took a little bit of a turn for the worse…..we decided to have a massage and being in Thailand we opted for the Thai variety. It was a bit uncomfortable, well agony for parts but I felt great afterwards so we decided to walk to the shops and have a potter about. We treated the day as normal really had some dinner went to bed.

The next morning I announced to Mhairi as soon as she was awake that I was going to be grumpy today as I had not slept well. Well I nodded back off and woke up later feeling like I was on my last legs. So the next few days involved us both having fevers, bad tummies and generally feeling rubbish. Now me not wishing to believe that I could be ill decided to research Thai massages! Oh yes they can make you ill, flushing toxins from muscles, lymph glands and all sorts of fun to be had. The proper routine after a massage is to lie down and drink lots of water to flush the toxins away not go shopping and eat a massive ice-cream sundae….oops! Now in these few days of unrest and illness I discovered how to edit photos so you may notice that my photos look a bit fancier and not as maybe real looking but after spending the majority of three days at it I feel they look better after a little tinkering!

We were fully recovered by the Saturday to take our cooking course which was a great day out. We went to a farm in the countryside and saw where many of the ingredients grow. We learned to cook some Thai dishes from scratch, though we did have some prep done for us, but other than that we pounded and stir fried everything on our own!

We had taken some brilliant photos of the banana trees, coconut trees, me in an apron and a funny hat but unfortunately we had a bit of an accident with my portable hard drive and lost most of our Thailand photos so far. Therefore we haven’t got any cooking pics to put on the blog, sob sob. (I may have made our loss sound trivial but I’ve going through the mourning process and I’m trying to get over it!)

I will be hunting everyone down for photos from the past couple years as all my previous photos are gone except what is here on my blog. Thanks You Travelblog!

After heading away from Chiang Mai we took the bus to Sukhothai which is one of the old capitals of Thailand the main attraction here is the old city which has been looked after and preserved as much as it can be. The temples and Buddhas here had a different aura about them as you did feel a more old world connection to these ancient buildings rather than them being built all around and having 7-11 stores near them as in Chiang Mai!

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Comments

[wrtgw]

why?
why is orange juice good for you in the morning?