It’s starting to feel more like home here since I bought a cell phone and blanket! On Thursday I did not have class so I went exploring for some lunch with some other girls and we got some really spicy food! After we got back I went to another waterfall that had a natural slide where you can go down it. That was so much fun! It was a ways up from the first waterfall and hard to get to but well worth it when we did!
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| Me at the top of the waterfall |
Later that night we went the Bazaar, which is in the “old city” of Chiang Mai.
This place was really crowded but awesome! There are shops everywhere and lots of food stands. I tried a cricket! It was salty and I could feel the legs, but it wasn’t so bad. I also had pig intestine, an entire squid, coconut milk and rice in bamboo. It was so much fun to try new things and to watch the others try things like crickets and what not.
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| Some of the food selection at the market |
The next day we had a full day of classes and then after we went to a Mexican restaurant because a lot of the kids from the southwest were missing the food! We also went to a local Thai spot after and celebrated one of the girl’s birthdays! Saturday we explored “the old city”, which is apart of the city enclosed in the original stonewalls, and surrounded by a moat. We ended up walking around for almost 5 hours and saw so much! About every block or so there is a wat, or temple. We went to about 5 that day. The biggest one we went to had hundreds of people there, and about a 30 foot Buddha statue! It was very cool to see the awesome detail that is put into these temples and to see the monks still using them today. We also stopped at a market and I bought a painting for 300 baht, which I bartered down form 490! I also bought a pair of “Aladdin” pants for 150 baht, which I bartered down from 290! Shopping is fun but also stressful here because it is really hard to think in baht.
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| Inside the temple with the huge Buddha in the back |
On Sunday we visited an elephant park where we were able to feed and play with the elephants! That was so much fun even though I got a good bit of elephant snot on my shirt. We also went to a really famous temple, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. It was up a very steep and curvy road, which we took a double-decker bus up. Almost everything at the wat was painted gold and reflective, so on a sunny day like today it was hard to look around! Also there was a bird’s eye view of the city from the temple! Later that night we went to the Sunday night market for food and shopping! Tomorrow we leave for a 6-day meditation retreat at a temple up north. We will be waking up at 4:30 every morning, only eating breakfast and lunch, and meditating for 11 hours of the day. Needless to say I will not be updating or contacting anyone until after the 6 days!
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| Me with Elephants!! |
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| At Doi Suthep |
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| Doi Suthep |
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