After Bangkok, Chiang Mai felt like a sleepy backwater, surounded on all sides by a watery moat and positively brimming with temples and orange-robed monks. We spent a couple of days soaking up the culture and taking in the beautiful sights. The Thai's appear to have a fondness for immortalising their important dead monks in a Madame Tussaud's stylee and housing them in glass cases inside the temples. This is really FREAKY. We spent 10 minutes too frightened to approach the first one we saw, convinced that he was a real monk in some kind of meditative trance. Spooky.
Next on the agenda was a spot of Thai cooking in a cookery school out in the countryside. Facilities were somewhat rudimentary but what we lacked in hygiene we made up for in taste! Our day included a trip to the market to buy ingredients and then a mammoth cooking session of over 8 dishes all presided over by the hilarious Mio - a formidable Thai woman who shouted "you rubbish, you fail" at every slight mistake made. She was also full of helpful tips about the perils of "chilli willy". Yikes! We had a fab day and as we were full to bursting of all the delicious food we'd made, we headed straight to a rooftop bar with our newfound cooking chums. At 5pm. By 2am we'd made about 20 new friends, had a gymnastic competition in the middle of the bar, had to pay $5 in damages due to the aforementioned gymnastics, and lost Kristian's flip flops. A bloody good night by anyone's standards.
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