cHiAnG mAi =)

Since the students has Monday & Tuesday off as a result of the holiday Kaopansa, our team and 2 students left last Friday to take a short vacation to Chiang Mai. It's in the mountains of Northern Thailand, and I think it's the 2nd largest city in Thailand. It was about a 12 hour bus ride, which we did overnight and arrived at 9am Saturday.

Saturday: settled in, walked around exploring the city; went to the Night Safari!

Sunday: while the team rode elephants & bamboo rafts, I went to church & the Chiang Mai Zoo (huge!)...It took me about 3 hours to go through it all and see almost every animal you can imagine!
That evening we went to the Sunday market--incredible! We were there about 3 hours, and I'm sure we missed parts of it...mobs of people, good bargains, endless crafts/souvenirs/clothes...made for us being very tired shoppers with probably too much stuff at the end of the night!

Monday: the team went to zipline (I had done it, so decided to visit other things :) and white water rafting... All the while, I slept in, went on a mission to find a couple specific souvenirs, and visited the oldest temple in Chiang Mai. For dinner, we decided to take advantage of such a touristy city and go to a Mexican restaurant--so good! Then we went to the Night Bazaar, which seemed to go on forever! But it was definitely a fun experience :) Ginny and I even ran into a guy that eventually started talking to us all about Myanmar and the type of government they had, etc...He had volunteered in a village in Northern Thailand that has Burmese refugees...It was so interesting!

Tuesday: went to Wat Doi Suthep, a very famous temple outside of Chiang Mai, set beautifully in the mountains. It was incredible! It was also an eye opener for us as we saw many Thai people walking around the temple 3 times for Kaopansa (Buddhist Lent)...
Later we went to the mall for awile before leaving for our bus that night. Come to find out, as a result of some miscommunication, we had missed our bus (scheduled for the previous day)...long story short, we got it worked out where 3 of us left at 9pm and sat in the aisle of a bus for the ride there; and the other 5 left at 3:45am and got home around 5pm...We made it home and are so glad to be back in Mahasarakham!

Overall, it was an amazing trip...Even better that we got to have 2 of our Thai friends with us :) I had a great time and I know the rest of the team did as well!