Jen’s birthday bash

I am still in Chang Mai, but Kathy left to go to Phuket this morning so I am here on my own for the first time! (Kathy’s only here for a few weeks so she wanted to head south right away to have time to see more stuff but I wanted to see more of Chang Mai so I decided to hang around. We’ll probably hook up again in the south in another week or so before she heads back to Bangkok.)

I’ve booked a three-day jungle trek for Thursday – Saturday with another girl here at the guesthouse. She is from New Zealand and is also traveling on her own.

So yeah, it was my birthday 2 days ago (the 29th). I celebrated the first anniversary of my 29th birthday. It was a good day. I didn’t do much during the day because it was raining and it just felt like a lazy day. They have a lounge room at the guesthouse and you can rent movies and watch them on their gigantic television so we rented Galaxy Quest (it cost about 75 cents to rent a DVD here). Then I treated myself to a foot massage for 150 BAHT (about $3). I went to a Blind Massage center to try it out and it was ok. All the masseuses there are blind. I thought it would be a really great massage but I had a young kid and he was really more interested in talking to his buddies then working on my feet. Oh well, it was something different worth trying.

Anyway, Kathy took me out to dinner and we had some great Thai food (ok what Thai food isn’t great I know) – Chang Mai curry vegetables and spring rolls. Then later we went out with 2 other people from the guesthouse – Rebecca (the girl from NZ) and Robert (from America). We headed over to the river and saw some live music for a while and then went to a local disco called’Bubbles’. It was a good time! A late night for me though… It was after 3am by the time we got back (Kathy and I had been lucky to stay up until 9pm before).

So yesterday of course I was not moving very fast (could it have been all the Chang beer?). But I did some great shopping and basically walked around town all day. We rented another movie back at the guesthouse in the afternoon – this time it was Fight Club. Then, last night Kathy, Rebecca and I went to the falafel place for dinner again – it was great food! Kathy decided to go back and pack and so Rebecca and I headed out to the festival in town.

The celebration here that’s going on is called Loy Krathong – it’s a festival to mark the end of the monsoon season and quite a party to be had. Supposedly last night was a warm-up and tonight is the big night. All the Thai people make these floating candle things with fresh flowers and incense on them and they light the candle and then send the little float down the river, making a wish for the next year. Tonight when we went down there were a lot of them on the river but I think tomorrow there will be even more. I bought one and set it out with the others.

We also took lots of photos of the various fried bugs for sale at one of the vendor booths – grubs, cockroaches (large and small – your choice), and grasshoppers – all fried and ready to be eaten!! We were pretty grossed out, especially as we watched Thai people come up and buy them!!

Then, there were the firecrackers. You’d think it had been National Firecracker Day the way people were (and are) setting off explosives EVERYWHERE! And I mean EVERYWHERE! All directions, left, right, up, down – as you walked across the street it was like a battlefield. I was amazed that we didn’t see anyone get hit. I can only imagine the mayhem of fireworks that we are in store for later tonight. Even now at 10am there are sounds of fireworks all over the city!

Getting’ ready for the jungle trek tomorrow…

Happy Halloween!

Jen’s birthday bash

Fried Bugs for Sale!

Nice photo (but no I did not actually eat the bug)

Add comment October 31st, 2001