I think I am well overdue for a post and I apologize for that.
Anyway, I still need to talk about Chiang Mai. In my last post I left off on a train ride with three other girls from Massachusetts. My hostel set me up with them because they happened to have a spare bed in their bunk and we were all around the same age. They were really nice and fun to hang out with, but they were really close friends so it made me miss all my close girl friends at home. One day I want to travel around South America or Asia or Europe with a couple friends (or sisters! Jo, Gabe, Sam, Ashley f? Everyone else, you reading this?)
Anyway, back to the train ride. It was a night train so I didn't have to leave for the station till around 6 pm (I think). Then we got a bunk to sleep in and blankets and pillows and stuff. The train station was really busy since trains are still a really popular form of travel in Thailand (and Korea too, I'm taking one this week, but that's a different post!). We found our bunk no problem then just hung out and talk and ate some snacks. Finally we all tried to sleep. The train was fairly quiet, but the movement did keep me awake a bit. Still, it was cool to wake up in the morning and find I was in a different place. The countryside was really beautiful in the morning, all misty and cool looking. Lots of green plants I'd never seen and rolling, open fields. It was magical.
When we arrived in Chiang Mai we caught a kind of cab to our hostels, this is where the girls and I parted. The 'cabs' in Chiang Mai were basically small pick-ups with covered back, benches in them and they had an open door at the back. But very comfortable and cheap to travel in. I made it to my hostel and was happy to find friendly guests their. The first girl I met was an American and immediately invited me to go see a temple with her and some other girls. Unfortunately we didn't make it to the temple that day, but I wandered around the edge of the main city and saw some really beautiful temples. Chiang Mai (apparently) has over 200 hundred temples. Suffice to say I will be returning there. It also has a million scooters, even more than Bangkok. Scooters were the main mode of transportation. My favourite temple in Chiang Mai was definitely the first one I found which was done in the lanna style architecture (I believe). It was different than the temples I'd seen in Bangkok, there was a lot less gold, but it was covered in beautiful, intricate carvings everywhere (photos on facebook). It was all done in a dark wood and it had huge sloping roofs. It was amazing.
I wandered some more, following the canal that surrounds the city and found one of the old gates that surround the city, it was pretty neat too, clearly in decay, it was all made from a red brick. I wish I remembered how old it was, but my memory is failing me here.
Next I returned to the hostel and met a British girl named Fabby, who was from Jersey, no not New Jersey, just Jersey, yeah I'd never heard of it either. Anyway she was in my room and invited me to dinner with a bunch of other girls, it was kinda funny because there were three girls from Australia, a girl from New Zealand who was traveling with a girl from Germany, a second girl from Germany who was traveling alone and then Fabby and I. I thought there were 9 of us, but I can't remember who everyone was now.
The hostel I stayed at was really cool. Lots of the people were traveling in small groups or alone so it was really easy to meet people and go out and do stuff. I met some really interesting cool people there and it really felt like a community. There were, of course, some bad apples, but the majority of the people were really friendly and nice.
The hostel also planned neat day trips, I didn't actually go on any because the first day I arrived everyone had already left for the lake and the second day I was sick (so sad). So I just rested at the hostel, everyone else went hiking. Luckily a few people stayed behind and later new people showed up. Including an American girl for somewhere near Pittsburgh I believe. She was only 18 and traveling alone, which I found fairly impressive. I doubt I could've done that (or would've for that matter, well I don't know, maybe I'm selling myself short here). Anyway, strange despite our age difference and stuff we actually had a lot in common and ended up going to check out some old ruins together that afternoon. They were really amzing, like the giant they were all brick and there were tons of them. We kept thinking our tuktuk driver was finished then he would take us somewhere new. It was so fun.
After, we go back to the hostel we hung out and rest for a bit (I was still not feeling great) then we went to find some food. Jessielle, wanted to go to this smoothie place near the south Giant of Chiang Mai, which was sort of across the city from us. When we got there were found tons of street food, it was awesome. We got our smoothies, well we were waiting for them another guy was getting his and he said, these are the best smoothies in Chiang Mai. They were pretty delicious. All fresh fruit and you could chose to have it sweet or sour, I got sour, naturally. After the smoothies we wandered and got some other foods then headed over the the nigh bazaar. It was sorta like the weekend market in Bangkok, endless booths of stuff. As I was walk over my flip flop broke so I had to immediately find some new ones, luckily the first stall we found sold sandals and flip flops, lucky!
The market was overwhelming and seemed to have a lot of the same stuff over and over again, still it was really neat and I enjoyed it a lot. By the time we had looked for awhile it was getting late so we went back to our hostel, but not before I got some yummy fried noodles. They were delicious. Thick and chewy with a kind of salty, spicy sauce and some veggies with them. The next day I had signed up for a cooking class in the afternoon, then in the evening the hostel was hosting a bbq for one of its staff members because he was leaving.
The cooking class was really cool. They picked me up from the hostel and drove me there. I met the other people in my class in the truck on the way there. The first guy I met I was a Korean guy, I immediately was excited because we had something in common. It was really funny though because I asked him where he was from in Korea and he kept saying oh you won't know it, you won't know it, well, what do you know, but he was from Changwon as well. I got really excited and was like I live there! He was so surprised. The he asked which part of Changwon and I told him and he said he grew up there, what are the chances of that? Unfortunately he had moved to Seoul for university, but it was still cool to meet someone from my city in Korea.
There were also three Chinese girls one from Shanghai, one from Toronto and one from California, they were really cute. They met online and all decided to travel together. I thought it was cool. It was also nice to meet another Canadian. Later, at cooking class I also met a girl from Vancouver. Such a small world.
The class was really simple, you just chose four dishes to make (one of them a curry paste which you then made curry from) and the cooking instructor took you to different stations to make the food. The first thing I made was a papaya salad, it's a kind of famous Thai dish, you can google it. It was really yummy. It had a spicy sauce and you made it with a mortar and pestle, which is really different. The second thing I made was a green curry paste and I realized I'd been using all the wrong ingredients! Oh no. Also, the teacher only used the roots of the cilantro rather than the leaves which is what I'd always done. So I definitely learned a thing or two for my own green curry recipe. I'm excited to try making it when I get home (unfortunately cilantro and some other Thai ingredients are a little hard to find in Korea). Next, we made a curry from our paste and I kept getting the teacher to add extra paste, I think I was the only one who thought it wasn't spicy enough.
The last thing I made was a sweet and sour veggies dish, it had ketchup in it which kind threw me off, but I think they were just trying to use ingredients available to their primarily western students. Everyone has chose Pad Thai for their second dish so I was the only one making sweet and sour stir fry, still, it was delicious. After we finished cooking we got sit down and eat our meal. They also provided rice and some snacks for us as well as a really, yummy sweet tea that you added lime to and it changed from a dark blue colour to a dark purple colour (photos on fb). It tasted delicious as well and really complimented the food.
After we had ate and were relaxing the teacher came over and offered us a shot of Thai rice alcohol to help with digestion. Then she gave us a cook book with a bunch of Thai recipes (which I'm really excited to try out on my friends here at some point, given I can find the ingredients for the dishes. After that they drove us back to our hostels. I rested up before the BBQ that night.
The BBQ was awesome, there was tons of grilled meat, salad and mashed potatoes. It was so tasty. And almost everyone staying at the hostel attended so there were tons of people. Someone also made jungle juice which is basically a mixture of booze and juice that doesn't taste that boozy, it's usually pretty strong so it can be dangerous stuff. During the BBQ I met a lot of cool people including two Quebecois girls, another girl from Vancouver and a girl from Edmonton, awesome more Canadians.
After the BBQ a bunch of us went out for a bar crawl and to do Karaoke. It was pretty fun. Lots more drinking, some kind of creepy guys and lots of terrible singing made for an awesome night. When we went back to the hostel, me and one other guy (who had lived in Korea for a bit too so we bonded over that) were really hungry so we wandered down the street looking for some late night food. We found a fairly busy looking soup place with a really yummy looking beefy noodle soup, of course we wanted it. The lady seemed hesitant to sell it to us so we thought she was closing and we were going to leave, but then she seemed to change her mind. She warned us it was spicy, but we persisted that we wanted it (it smelled really really good). Well it was spicy, really really spicy. I think it was the spiciest thing I ate it Thailand and I can usually handle spicy food better than most westerners (no offence guys).
It turns out this soup not only had noodles, but cubes of congealed beef blood (yummier than it sounds) and blood in the sauce, but it was mainly really really spicy. I think it was also something about the strong beefy, flavour and the blood as well as the spice that made it hard to digest at 2 am so neither of us were able to finish our soup. It was really flavourful and tasty though, I don't think I've ever had anything else like it, maybe next time I'll go for a less spicy version (I can't believe I'm saying that!).
The next day I was supposed to leave for Bangkok, but due to the fact I couldn't get the night train I decided to instead stay an extra night and catch a plane to Bangkok on Saturday morning. Yay, an extra night! I spent the morning sleeping in, but during the afternoon I went and found food with Jessielle and we wandered around Chiang Mai looking at random places. I think the last night was the best though, or at least when I had the best food. I went out with a few of the people from the night before and we hit up the street food places. Immediately one of the guys I was with found a yummy looking pork place, we weren't going to chose it right away, but on our second pass he realized it was actually a really famous pork place that had been featured on a travel show that we'd both seen, well that decided it for us, we had to try the pork. It was super flavourful and came with just some rice and an egg. The only problem was the portions were kinda smalls so we were still hungry after.
Next we tried a really delicious kind of coconut soup/puddling thing with tapioca balls and a quail egg in it. So so so good. It was the best thing I ate there. It was really creamy and deliciously sweet, but also had a rich salty, savoury flavour in it. I still crave sometimes. After that Rob and I (the guy who lived in Korea and also really liked food) wanted something else to eat so we ended up sharing some greens as well, which were also delicious. I almost forgot, to start my street food feast I had a pork bun as well. After stuffing ourselves full of delicious foods we went to the nigh Bazaar again. I also ran into the Korean guy from my cook class again and then we just wandered around looking at stuff. We were all still pretty tired from our night out the day before so we ended up heading back early, grabbing some beers and hanging out at the hostel to watch a movie. It was just chill night.
The next morning I packed up and caught a flight to Bangkok, then from Bangkok to Shanghai. The only thing about my trip I kind of regret is not getting a better flight home. I had an 11 hour lay over in shanghai over night. It was so boring. I sat in really uncomfortable airport benches and tried to sleep, but you couldn't. A mother sitting beside me got angry at me at one point cause I grabbed a bottle of water her kid knocked over. She didn't speak to me or anything, but gave me the coldest glare and grabbed her kid. It was a strange night. Finally, morning came and I got my flight to Busan, thank god!
I honestly loved my time in Thailand, but there was definitely a lot of stuff I didn't get to see. I really want to go back there and see more, learn more and experience more of that wonderful region. I know it's a bit of a cliche to travel to South East Asia in your 20s, but it's a backpackers paradise with young people everywhere, amazing food to eat and a wonderful, ancient culture to explore and learn about. I have to admit it still fascinates me and I long to go back to that region. I can't wait to see what Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have in store! I will go back. I will.
