"It's 7:26, must be time for people in the wat down the street to start yelling into the loudspeaker again."

 

There were way too many pigeons

 We took tons of pictures of food and animals over the last 2 days, so these (and a few others) will be throughout the post in roughly correct order.  Mu is posting many more pictures on Facebook, so you can check them out there.  This is a pretty long post because there were lots of things!  Also, right now I'm sitting outside in the lounge area of our guesthouse and what sounds like a school marching band is rehearsing very loudly a few blocks away.  It's kind of awesome.  Also also, the blog title is how we feel every morning.

Selfie on boat, not that you can tell where we are

We had quite a full day yesterday and a busy morning today, but we're back to chilling now.  Yesterday morning, we went on a tour/river cruise called the Mae Ping River Experience.  Mae Ping is the name of the river that goes through Chiang Mai, but the tour name was a bit of a misnomer.  We spent some time on the river, yes, but there were non-river related components to the trip!

Boars, including Cindy's name sake

Our guide, Nong, picked us up in the morning along with one other person, a woman named Hannah from Australia.  Our first stop was actually a wat on the river bank whose name I'm not sure I ever got.  This wat was built by Burmese Buddhists, back when this area was under Burmese control.  It's now popular for both Thai and Chinese Buddhists as a place to release live animals to make merit -- since it's on the water, you can release both fish and birds there.  Nong told us that the only problem is releasing turtles, since not all of them actually want to live in water, so the well-meaning pilgrims might be killing them!  We did not bring any animals to release, but we did make small donations to feed pigeons and fish.  I'm not sure why feeding masses of pigeons increases one's merit, but here we are.

Jackfruit in the wild!

Nong, who's a Buddhist himself, wanted us to make alms and receive a blessing from a monk.  We each got a basket, looking rather like a prepackaged gift basket but with things such as bottled water, dried noodles, and soup.  We also got flowers, and Nong wrote all our names, and his own, on an envelope.  The monk on duty received our gifts (Hannah and I had to place ours on a piece of his robe, since monks aren't allowed to touch women or take things directly from them in case touching happens by accident), recited a blessing, and tied a white string around each of our wrists.  I think it's one of those things you're supposed to wear until it falls off, like red strings Jews will sometimes get in Jerusalem.  Mu's and mine are still on today.

A small section of the huge market

The wat visit was probably my favorite part of the tour, though the rest of it was nice, too.  We took a reasonably fast boat about 45 minutes up-river to visit a farmer's house, where we got to see tons of fruit, vegetable, and herb plants (including mango, jackfruit, and coffee, which I was most excited about), as well as pigs (one of them was named Cindy!), very large bunnies, and chickens. We also ate lunch there -- kao soi again (the Northern Thai curry noodle dish), but with chicken this time.  I liked this version better than the one the other day, actually.  After lunch, we took the boat back to the city, but got off earlier to visit one of the big markets, Warorot Market.  Mu and I went there briefly last time, but really didn't see much of it.  It's a place you can buy pretty much anything.  There were fruits and vegetables (fresh and dried), prepared food, clothes, fabric (a huge section devoted to just fabric stores, Cindy!), purses and watches and jewelry, and lots of random stuff.  We wandered around for a bit, though Mu and I want to go back again in a few days to get some souvenirs. 

The massage place even had a sleepy kitty.

Scary-looking albino wallabies

That was the end of the tour, but instead of going back to the hotel, Mu and I got another massage (Thai for him, foot and leg for me -- it was nice, but I didn't expect to have my toes and feet poked with a wooden stick in the middle!  I also didn't expect to get a short back and shoulder massage that felt like being attacked by someone very angry and/or sadistic!).  We had to also make a brief trip back to the airport -- we had forgotten my jacket on the plane and needed to retrieve from the Air Korea office, which is only open from 4-8pm, and was surprisingly hard to find (the airport map was less than helpful because it turned out that each section -- offices, services, food -- had its own set of numbers that were all the same but listed in different colors.  Thus, yellow 38 was not what we wanted (taxi services), but green 38 was (Air Korea office).  Anyways, having accomplished that, we decided to go back to the Chiang Mai Night Safari.

Thirsty kitty!  Look at those paws!

Mouse deer, very strange.

You may remember that we visited there last time and were a little underwhelmed.  I wanted to go again, though, because we were pretty rushed last time and while we got to do the trams, we had a really short time for the Jaguar Walk, which is where a lot of the animals are housed. This time, we came super early and spent over an hour wandering along, taking pictures and generally geeking out over random critters. They had a whole albino section -- wallabies, porcupines, a raccoon, and alligators!  There were also beautiful wild cats.  I particularly loved the leopard cat (about the size of a housecat, meaning smaller than ours) and the leopard (full sized, with adorably fluffy paws!).  There were also some creatures we'd never heard of -- a kinkajou (apparently often mistaken for ferrets) and a binturong (sort of like a beaver?  maybe?  it never actually came out.).  As evidence that we're not in the US anymore, you could, if you were sufficiently stupid to want to, stick your finger into the cerval enclosure, or touch the monkeys.  We, needless to say, did not.  Also, there were mouse deer (really tiny and strange looking) and pygmy hippos (tiny, for hippos). 

The Uncles.  Could they have a creepier name?

Our dose of weirdness that evening happened when we made the mistake of eating dinner at the park.  We hadn't planned our timing very well, so we knew we'd have to get crappy food there.  It turned out to be quite an experience.  The only restaurant in the park was a 2-floor building where from the second floor, you could see/feed giraffes.  That part was cool (though we didn't feed the giraffes, we'll do that at the zoo).  What was less cool was that there was a "60s and 70s style!" band called, creepily, The Uncles who were crooning American light rock loudly the entire time!  The food was super expensive for Thai prices (though still pretty cheap for US) and not great, and the waiters, surprisingly for a place like that, spoke no English.  Weird.

Our instructor sowing us vegetables for Tom Yum

Taking a turn at curry paste

To make up for that food fail (well, not really, but it did make up for it), we took a cooking class today and it was great!  There were 8 of us in the class -- 2 other Americans, a couple from Germany, and a couple from Spain (well, one of them is French but they live in Spain).  Our teacher, Anne, took us to the market to start (different market than any of the ones we've already been to, and one that seems to cater to cooking classes because we saw at least 3 other ones there at the same time, heh).  After learning about different ingredients, we headed to Anne's house to cook and eat.  One really cool part was that we got to choose which dish we wanted to learn in each category -- appetizer, stir-fry, curry (with curry paste), and soup.  Mu and I picked all different dishes so we could learn and try multiple ones.  We also got a recipe book with all the dishes in the end.  As Cindy said when I talked to her before the class, we'll have to cook a Thai feast when we return. :)  The hard part will be finding ingredients!

Mu is about to make stir fry

The plan for tonight is to chill and maybe walk around some more, and tomorrow, we go to visit (and bathe with) elephants!  Sounds like fun!