I managed to survive the snowboarding trip just fine and then sliced my finger open while making a sandwich on Monday. If there is a lame injury to be had, I'll be sporting it.

I think I'm finally feeling back to normal. I was quite tired yesterday despite getting lots of sleep on Sunday night (getting up at 4:45 in the morning will do that for you. Matters were not helped by my ride showing up at shortly after 5 am all cheerful and energetic.) but I think that was due to some sort of nasty cold or flu virus trying to gain purchase on my insides. Luckily I have an insanely strong immune system thanks to all the germs I've been exposed to over the years and a bit of sleep and a lot of tea seems to have made things all better. I certainly hope so, anyway...Stuart had influenza last week and in addition to feeling like crap it also cost him a fair bit of money in doctor's visits and paying people (one of whom is me!!!) to cover his classes. If I manage to avoid getting the flu I will come out ahead this month, money-wise.

I know, I still haven't finished breaking down the Thailand trip. I guess now that it is an hour to February I have to accept that it is truly gone, right?

I did finally manage to make it out to Doi Suithep on January 2nd. I gave up on the notion of trying to go by myself and managed to join a tour. Traffic was still insane...the tour normally took in the temple and then another place but we spent so much time in traffic that we only made it to Doi Suithep for an hour. Like the White Temple, it's a place I'd like to go back to when the whole of Thailand wasn't attending.

On the 3rd I went off to elephant camp. I was curious as to how it would be different from the experience I had in Laos and the answer is: a lot. All in all I think this is the better option, as the elephants get to hang out at the park and don't have to carry tourists around. I still think the Laos version was doing the best with what they could...there is a fine line between being able to rescue elephants and let them do their elephant thing and still appeal to the tourist dollars that keep them in bananas. I chose to stay overnight, so after a fairly relaxing day of feeding the elephants and splashing water on them in the river and watching a show about the truly horrific way elephants are trained* the majority of the people left and I just sort of hung around until dinner time. (That is one thing I think they should include on their website...there is a lot of down time and if you are travelling by yourself, a book is a must.) There was a huge group of volunteers staying at the camp, and they were quite nice and very friendly, but they also all knew each other and the camp and had their own thing to do, so it was a bit intimidating to try to jump in with them. Luckily there was one girl who had come up in the van with me who was going to stay for two weeks and she felt much the same way, so we hung out for most of the night until it basically got too dark to see. As in the camp at Laos, the accommodations were surprisingly posh, in a very basic way. There's just something about a mosquito net that adds a certain elegance to one's bed!

The next morning my very nice Thai guide, Ten, acted as a human alarm clock by waking me up at 6. (He also scared the crap out of me as I flailed out of sleep, but that wasn't really his fault.) We breakfasted and then a diminutive American lady named Jody took a small group of us around the park. (This was Ten's third day of work so he was treated more as a tourist than as an employee at this time, although he spent more time furiously jotting down notes than the rest of us.) She has been with the park for around 8 years and knows all of the elephants by sight and knows all of their stories. I think we were out there for about three hours, none of which dragged. Not even the bit where we got more up close and personal with elephant dung than I ever really wanted to. After lunch Ten grabbed me and some random expats who had come up for the day and we went tubing down the river. At first I was a bit worried about not knowing where to stop and get out, but it turned out to be pretty obvious. "See the elephant there? Yeah, get out before that." Elephants: the SUV's of the jungle AND a fantastic landmark!

After that I had to head back into town, where at least I got to wash the river water off of me. The next day was my last in Thailand and I'm still quite pleased with the plan I came up with: Go for a three hour spa package. I was tempted to opt for the 4 1/2 hour package but that would have involved having to skip lunch and eat at the airport, so no. As it was, I was so relaxed after three hours they basically had to pour me back into the taxi. I got back to the hotel around 2 and managed to sneak a beer from my new friend on staff...apparently after New Year's the police start cracking down on lots of stuff like serving beer between 2 and 5 pm (but it's A-OK from 11 am until 2!), but she brought me some beer in an oversized coffee mug to disguise it. Fun fact: beer tastes better when it's sneaky!

Then I had to fly back to Japan overnight and deal with the cold. I'm still sad about that.

I don't think I could ever live in Vancouver. It started to rain on Thursday night and by Friday afternoon I was well and truly tired of it. Of course, at least part of that was because I needed to do laundry, and I guess in Vancouver I'd have a dryer. But still. I much prefer sunshine. (Rainy season is a bit different, since I spend the first half grateful I am no longer sneezing and the second half dreading the minute the cloud cover lifts and I start boiling in the sun.)

Next Sunday I am getting up at 5 am to go snowboarding. I forget why I thought that would be a good idea.

Almost done my first week back at work. It's been fun but I'd be lying if I said I preferred this to bumming around Chiang Mai all warm and toasty and filled up on mango shakes and papaya salad.

Because I'm nosy, I've been asking the kids about their otoshidama, or New Years money. They don't have to tell me if they don't want to, but it's interesting to get a gauge for how much money kids get depending on how old they are. I'm still not sure why the younger ones prefer this to Christmas presents, as their parents usually swoop the money away and deposit it in their bank accounts right away. Fiscal responsibility is all well and good, but in a seven year old? I suspect this is because when I ask them if they would rather get presents, I am thinking of the mounds of presents an average child receives for Christmas in Canada, rather than the one or two small presents they might get here.

So far the bar for "most money received" has been set at 250 000 yen. No, that's not a typo. One high school girl got that much money this year. 200 000 of that was from her grandparents, probably a "well done on getting into one of the best high schools in Hamamatsu, you" gift. The average for kids that age seems to be about 50 or 60 000 yen so she made out pretty well, I think! (For reference, that is the same as my monthly salary. In all fairness, though, she works a lot harder than I do, what with the constant studying.)

I'm trying to imagine what I would have done with that much money at the age of 15. Probably I would have put most of it in the bank but if I'm being honest, there would have been a shopping spree. The damage probably wouldn't have been too bad as this was before the age of internet shopping and I would have been limited to what was available in Prince George (ie, not a lot).

I'm glad I don't have masses of young Japanese relatives as shelling out cash for all of them would put a serious hole in my bank account. Still, it seems like a pretty great way to slowly build up a university nest egg over 18 years.

I think maybe this allergy attack is over, or at least waning. Please? We nearly ran out of tissue at work yesterday and I had to email Masami to bring some when she brought Liam for his class. (He then tried to kick her out of the school because he was TOTALLY able to do it without mama there, to which she was all "That's great, but I kind of work here?") I am mostly back to normal today except for the exceedingly red and chapped nose. Isn't that a lovely image? Shall we cleanse your palate with more talk of Thailand? Have I mentioned lately how warm it was and how cheap the food and massages were? Sigh.

New Year's Day was pretty uneventful. I had planned to sleep in anyway and staying out until the wee hours did not change my mind on that score. After I eventually meandered downstairs to have an omelette I thought I'd try going out to Doi Suthep, a temple on a hillside that everyone and their dog said a visitor to Chiang Mai simply couldn't miss. The girl at my guesthouse said it was a simple matter of catching a song teow to the zoo and transferring there.

Song teows, incidentally, are sort of like buses in that they run a set route but sort of not like buses in that they don't adhere to a time schedule and also they are pickup trucks with benches in the back. I kind of love the concept, actually. In theory you just stand on the road and flag one down, hop on, and then hop off when you get to where you want to go. No running for the bus stop or having to get off three blocks early because that's where the closest stop is.

I say "in theory" because I could not find one to take me to the zoo at all. I was nervous at first because taking unfamiliar public transportation is always an adventure, but by the time I'd flagged down my fifth or so I was mostly annoyed. Later I found out that because it was New Year's Day and the traffic to the temple was insane that they had closed off some of the roads or something and you could not find a song teow to take you up there for love nor money. I eventually gave up and found a park where I sat and read instead. Not the worst way to spend the first day of the new year, really.

Eventually I decided that the best way to kill the remaining few hours before the Sunday market opened was with a long massage. Incidentally, if you are ever in Chiang Mai, may I recommend Lila Massage? It's a bit different from other massage places in that all the people who work there have served time. For what, the website does not elaborate, but there is a lot of discrimination when they get out and with no jobs forthcoming a lot of the women fall back on crime again. So the massage place offers them a chance to go legit, which means that while you are getting your feet rubbed you are also helping to contribute to society. I contributed a lot while I was there. The spa is actually really nice and had a spot mere blocks from my guesthouse. I went to two locations and they were both quite spacious. Some of the smaller establishments look a bit suspect but this one felt like a real spa.

By the time I emerged the Sunday market was setting up, so I ran back to my hotel room and grabbed some more money. Now, the Night Bazaar is famous in Chiang Mai, but if you are going I urge you to stay for the weekend so you can hit up the Sunday market. (I missed the Saturday market on account of being on the trip to Chiang Rai that never ended. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually still trapped on that van and have just started hallucinating.) The Night Bazaar is fun enough, and cheap if you can bargain, but it is also very touristy and with lots of cheap Chinese goods. The Sunday market seems to attract a good mix of locals and tourists and featured more individual handicrafts. Unlike at the Night Bazaar, if you see something you like, you'd best stop and buy it then because it is unlikely to be duplicated at 16 different booths. The prices were also set a lot lower, probably because it is still meant to be more for the local people than for the tourists. And the food! Oh, the food. Street food is the best and this was no exception. The only thing that made me sad about it was I filled up pretty quickly and then couldn't try more.

The really nice part was how while my guesthouse was located a bit far from the Night Bazaar, it was right up the street from the Sunday market so I had the chance to go take a short break and dump my purchases. I eventually staggered back to my room a lot lighter in the wallet but pretty pleased with myself.

Oops, got a bit behind here. In my defense, I was off having fun and no internet access at elephant camp, and then when I got back to the hotel the wireless went on the fritz. I got home Friday morning after a rather short overnight flight and one hour of sleep so mostly I spent the day napping. Today I woke up sneezing so there was the day gone, really. If this is the actual outset of seasonal allergies and not just a bad day I may require someone to come shoot me.

So, back to New Year's Eve. I took a tour out to Chiang Rai. I can't really recommend not doing it, as the White Temple in particular was fabulous, but it was the kind of tour I really hate...lots of driving and then 20 or 30 minutes at the location before hopping back in the van. They picked me up promptly at 7 am and by 7:45 we had collected everyone. We drove for an hour until we got to the hot springs, which sounds like it should be relaxing but was really more of a bathroom break and a chance to grab breakfast for anyone who rolled out of bed two minutes before the van picked them up. There were souvenir stands galore and the hot springs were not the sort you soak in, but rather the sort you boil eggs in. Why? I have no clue. There were ladies selling various eggs but I really couldn't see the point. If people had then been making egg salad, maybe, but they appeared to just be boiling eggs for the hell of it.



After about 20 minutes here we got back in the van and drove for another hour to the White Temple. Now, this was worth the price of admission, but we only had 30 minutes there and there were approximately eleventy million people visiting that day. I would love to go back sometime with more time to spend, less people milling about, and a guide who could explain more. It wasn't until I got back to my hotel and told Nancy (one of the staff) where I had been that she mentioned some things about the temple that explained the tree full of heads and the grasping hands reaching from below.



This place also had the fanciest bathrooms I've ever seen, although I didn't go inside so I can't say if the facilities match the facade:



We then drove for about an hour and a half to arrive at the Golden Triangle, the point where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet. We did a little boat tour up and down the area for about 30 minutes and that was nice. We saw a strip of land known as "no man's land" where they used to meet to sell opium, and saw a couple of casinos on Burmese and Laos land that are really in the middle of nowhere. Then we landed on the Laos side for another 30 minutes of hanging out at one of the more dispiriting markets I have ever been to. We hadn't even gotten off the boat before we were accosted by begging children, something that I never actually saw in Thailand. I didn't give them any money...if they earn a lot begging they will never get the chance to do anything else, and it's not like the kids even get to keep the money anyway. Also, once you start you will get swarmed by all the other children in the area, so instead I put some money in the Red Cross box they had up by one of the stalls. I think the point of this was mainly to get a piece of paper saying we had been to Laos (we didn't need our passports for this trip) but I would not count this as a visit.

By now we were an hour behind and so were very very glad to finally get to the restaurant for lunch at 3 pm. I was so hungry that I can't give an honest opinion of the food, but at the time it was certainly among the best I've ever tasted! We then went to a local market where apparently we could also buy stuff from Burma but we didn't really have a lot of time and I'm not sure what we were meant to be looking for. Local markets are fascinating, but generally speaking I prefer the tourist ones. They are less "authentic", yes, but I don't really need school supplies or t-shirts with cartoon characters on them. Getting in and out of the market was a nightmare as the traffic was beyond insane, so when we finally got out of there we had to rush straight to the Karen hill tribe village in the fading light. We met some of the women of the tribe (the men don't modify their bodies so aren't of any interest to us camera-happy tourists) and bought some scarves. It was a weird experience...interesting to meet the ladies but at the same time such an obvious tourist trap. Still, if it brings them some extra income, good for them.

By this time it was becoming clear that we were not going to make it back by the promised 8 pm. I had left my room key at reception because they were going to clean my room and do the laundry, but there was only the one key so I was worried that they would close up early for NYE and got the guide to call the hotel for me. It's a good thing I did because, yes, they were about to close up and I would have been locked out for the night! We finally got back at 10 pm (where I discovered that they'd forgotten to do the cleaning/laundry so I could have just taken the key with me...no skin off my nose but annoying for the staff, I'm sure!) I was pretty tired by this point but I knew better than to just "rest for a bit" as that would mean I would not leave the hotel room again until morning, so I just chucked my hill tribe scarves in the room and headed back out. As luck would have it, the staff were leaving at the same time and Nancy invited me to come along with them for a drink. Probably they felt sorry for me by this point, but hey, I'll take it! I was still pretty tired and I just planned to go out for a bit, see some of the local festivities and then hopefully be lame and in bed soon, but a rather strong mai tai or two perked me right up and I ended up staying out until 2:30. New Year's Eve in Chiang Mai is really something that you should try at least once. Hundreds of people release lanterns throughout the evening and it is really a beautiful sight to see. (Plus, sometimes the lanterns catch on fire and come flaming down to the ground, adding a bit of excitement to the evening. Drunk people and fire, what could possibly go wrong?) Eventually I hit a wall again and since I was tired and had to pee and the hotel was just around the corner, I said good night and headed back. I usually prefer a quiet NYE without all the crowds, but it is a lot nicer when the weather is balmy rather than freezing.

Cooking school was fun and tasty. I successfully mastered the art of turning a tomato peel into a rose but the rest of it did not go so swimmingly. If I'm being honest, though, turning an entire tomato into a lotus flower is probably not something I will ever do again in my lifetime, so I'm ok with my mediocrity. After we butchered several carrots (turning carrot slices into leaves is much harder than you might think) we finally started in on the cooking and lo, it was delicious. I'm reasonably confident I can replicate most of the recipes at home, although some substitutions will have to be made and it will be a bit of a struggle without a team of bright young chefs-in-training standing by to assist and then do the washing up.

Friday I went for a hike in the jungle and learned that I am really not cut out for that sort of thing. About ten minutes in I had managed to get splintery scratches on both hands and was very busy concentrating on not falling down the hillside. In retrospect we didn't actually do all that much jungle hiking but it was plenty enough for me. We took a nice long lunch at a waterfall. If this was Japan, said waterfall would have been outfitted with picnic benches and possibly a bbq pit, with a vending machine thrown in for good measure. As it was, it was very much on the basic side. The company supplied lunch and it was very tasty. Our guide whittled us some bamboo chopsticks, which I thought was cool until he then made a pair of bamboo spectacles.



Fetching, no?

We then walked out of the jungle and onto a very dusty road and into a tribal village. No one was about except for one woman whose job appears to be sitting around waiting for tour groups to appear so she can look picturesque and maybe offer them a hand rolled cigarette in a dried corn leaf.

Yesterday I did a journey out to Chiang Rai that, against all the laws of time and space, appeared to last at least a week. That is a post for another day, however, so I will leave you with this google image photo I found of Chiang Mai on New Years Eve: