Stop #10 Chiang Mai - Songkran Water Festival!

We celebrated the Songkran Water Festival in Chiang Mai -- it is the celebration of the new year and has turned into a multi-day, citywide water fight. You can't escape getting water either dumped or sprayed on you. So, rather than trying to fight it off, we joined them.

I (Kersti) had a pink elephant water gun backpack and Billy had a big water gun. We also had a bucket. We stood on the street by a bar with a bunch of other people. There were 2 big trash cans that were being continually refilled by a hose. And you could periodically purchase ice from a man across the road to bring down the temperature of the hose water. This was all well and good when it was hot - but in the early evening the wind picked up and it became quite cold! When you're covered in soaking wet clothes, you can't regulate your body temp as easily. Anyway, it was great fun.

We really enjoyed Chiang Mai. There were tons of temples to visit, lots of street stalls selling good food, heaps of markets to walk around at night and very nice people. It was also nice that our hotel was equipped with properly working air-con!

We took another cooking class (Baan Thai Cooking School) and we have to say that it was not a very good class. It was not nearly as good as the one on Ko Chang. There were too many people trying to cook too many different dishes. The instruction was poor and the recipe book they gave us has probably only 40% of the actual instructions. They also used a lot of ingredients that are going to be hard to find, and they weren't big on supplying substitutes. Here's what we learned to cook:

Billy: pad thai, red curry, deep fried coconut covered bananas, tom kha gai (chicken/coconut) soup
Kersti: green papaya spicy salad, chiang mai noodles (curry dish), sticky rice w/mango, tom yum spicy soup

At the cooking class we met a couple from Sweden whom we liked very much. We ended up going to a bar after the class to do some more water fighting and then joined them for a stroll around the night markets later that evening. Hopefully we shall see them again somewhere!

The food was really good in Chiang Mai - they even had a chocolate shop that we went to. I had the most delicious chocolate milk and a lovely molten lava cake. The waitress was a thai girl who had spent a year in Indiana. Her english was top notch and we enjoyed talking to her and learning about the festival.

We also had a few massages... we both had thai massages (after going to the chocolate shop) and then billy had another the next day while I opted for a foot reflexology massage. It was interesting to compare that foot massage to the one I had in Ko Chang because the areas that hurt the most were quite different (in ko chang they had been my head/sinus zones since we had just been scuba diving, and in chiang mai they were different -- though I don't know which zones they were since the poster was in thai and they couldn't translate!)

Anyway, thai massage is great for both of us because it's a lot of stretching and relieving muscle stress. It's perfect for billy who is notoriously tight. I think his bones are too big for his muscles. Anyway, he loves the cheap massages!

Here are all the pictures (they're combined with Bangkok):
http://picasaweb.google.com/kersti.miller/ThailandBangkokChiangMaiPai?authkey=Gv1sRgCPnFga_E857liAE&feat=directlink