Sorry I lied to you all, promising that I would blog. I would have, but yesterday morning Emily, Natalie and I woke up early to do laundry and grab breakfast.

Let me briefly explain what happened on day 2 in Bangkok, and if my descriptions aren’t enough, I hope my pictures will help you.

That morning, our day plan was all set. We planned on visiting the snake farm, going to Chinatown & Indiatown and going to watch Thai boxing. But, like always, we are out of luck. We got lost and weren’t able to find the snake farm. Before we got lost, we had our first  sky train experience. In Bangkok, they have subways that go above the car roads and they call them  sky trains. Wei-Hao got something similar to a water ice on the way. Everyone took a bite out of it and it was very tasty. (On a side note, mom, here are two pictures of me with friends. I am alive and having fun in Thailand!) Anyway, eventually we gave up on finding the snake farm and headed towards china town. We browsed through the streets, and saw more street vendors. We had lunch at a chinese restaurant and I had egg noodles with shrimp.

After touring more of china town, we tried to find the snake farm again, and when we turned to the other direction and found the snake farm. The snake show was pretty cool. We saw king cobra, mango snake, etc… and at the end they let us take pictures with the snake.
We went back to the hostel to rest a little and left for the Thai boxing match. I don’t have much to say because I was asleep for more than half of the program. It was very humid in there and we did not eat dinner before. (Mom, you will see pictures of me sleeping later.)
After the Thai boxing, we did some shopping on our way back to the hostel and I got an orange purse which I am very happy about 🙂

Day 3 (which was yesterday), like I mentioned earlier, the girls got up and went to Starbucks for coffee and muffins. We left the hostel around noon, after checking out, and went back to china town to find the singing bowl place. We had our first tuktuk experience! We divided our group into 3 tuktuks and headed to “Ban Baht.” T. Deb and Wei-Hao, JM and I were in one, and Alex, Paul, David and Emily were in one, and Amadou, Peter and Natalie were in one. When my tuktuk got to the right place, we did not see the rest of the group. JM and I were stunned to not see the rest of the group there and looked for the others for a little, and T. Deb and Wei-Hao decided that we would eventually meet at the hostel anyway, so my group went to see the golden mount, another Buddhist temple.

On our way back, we got in a boat, headed to the national stadium and went to the biggest mall I have ever seen in Bangkok, maybe the only real mall. We ran into David and Paul in the mall. Us four, 2 teachers and 2 students grabbed dinner, and walked around for a while and went back to the hostel. If there weren’t enough trouble for the day, there was one more problem that we ran into. Our original plan was to leave the hostel by 8 for our train to Chang Mai at 9. T. Deb said that we should get some water and snack for the 10 hour train ride, so we went to Seven Eleven. We were taking our time, deciding on our snack but T. Deb ran in to tell us that our train was at 19:25 and she confused 7:25 as 9:25. So once again, we were in a hurry, running to the hostel, grabbing our luggage.

We lost one taxi, but ended up grabbing enough to get to the train station. We were afraid we were going to miss our train but we didn’t! The train station looked really cool. But we were in a hurry, so I did not get to take any pictures. We chilled on the train for a little bit and I eventually went to sleep around 9.

Day 4 (today!)

I started out the morning with taking pictures of everyone who were up and who were not up. We had breakfast on the train and arrived in Chiang Mai close to 10AM. We drove to the guest house that we will be spending the night at, RUX THAI, and we had free time until 7. So we browsed through the city and went to the market and got some bracelets and presents for people back home.

For dinner, we went to this fancy restaurant filled with tourists. The food was absolutely yummy and there were shows following the meal. Now I am sitting in my room, getting ready for bed. We leave for the Elephant Nature Park tomorrow morning. We are all excited to work with the elephants.

Flickr is currently not responding, so I will upload the pictures to the blog post later, but for the time being, please visit my Flickr to see the pictures! Sorry!

February 26, 2011

Lynn