Chang Mai

Here we are now, in Chang Mai. The night on the train was not too bad, actually quite comfy. The temperature here is a bit more pleasant, not so hot as in Bangkok and in the night it cools down quite a lot as the mountains are very close.
The first day we spent a bit time on planning our further steps. We decided to head to Laos and booked our 2day trip to our next destination Luang Pradang on the 11th of January. In the evening we checked out the huge night market, that spreads out along a long road with all kinds of useful and useless bits and pieces and a lot of food stalls.

Yesterday we attended a Thai cooking class on a Thai farm. We started with some shopping on a local food market and drove then to the farm. It was a very pretty place with all sorts of trees, plants, vegetables and herbs that is grown in an organically. Our teacher first showed us around the garden and gave us some information about herbs we were going to use and then we started the first cooking session. We were 8 people and everybody had his own cooking station.
We started with making our own curry paste for the curry, then a soup and a stir fry in the wok. We were already starving before we started to cook the soup, but we had lunch not until we had finished all three meals.
He showed us how to eat with sticky rice, that you dip in your different dishes with your fingers.
In the afternoon we made some desserts and Pad Thai, a very famous traditional Thai dish with noodles in the wok.
It was a really nice day out on that farm and we have definitely learned some new things about Thai cooking. Some of you may come to benefit from our new knowledge in time ;-)

Today we rented a scooter and drove a bit up into the mountains. We visited another big, important monastery and a small hill tribe village.




For tomorrow we are plannig to take it easy, maybe try a Thai massage and visit some more monasteries, that you can find here around every second corner.
We are looking forward to our trip on Friday, that will take us a part of the way on the river Mekong and over a less-travelled border into Laos. We will try to get online later on next week. We hope all of you are fine :-)