First Day in Thailand

So there are a million fun summer activities that I need to report on, but haven't had time. I'm going to get back to these later.

At the moment I'm in Chiang Mai, Thailand, visiting Nikki while she completes her 3 month foreign service internship here. Idea is that she does an internship (which is going really well so far) here at the consulate, then we move to DC in the fall, then she finds out where her first real posting will be, then we ship out 6 months to a year later (depending on how much language training she needs). The consulate hooked Nikki up with a great apartment here with a fantastic view of the city and surrounding mountains (first picture below). She's pretty well settled after over a month in Chiang Mai and seems to feel pretty comfortable. The city is pretty safe and she's got all of her little favorite stores/local gems. Nikki is getting to work on all kinds of interesting stuff for her internship and has made some good friends in the little community of people working at the consulate. Looks like she will have Thursday - Sunday off work, so we're figuring out what kinds of adventures to plan. Until then, I've got a couple of days to tool around by myself (at least until she gets done with work at 4:30 - gotta love the gov't job).

I got here Monday morning after 23 hours of sitting on airplanes (and another few hours in airports). Needless to say I was fresh as a daisy. The trip was actually not so painful and I got to watch all those bad movies I'm been missing out on (including hotel for dogs, yikes). China Airways is really good and I ordered all kinds of random stuff I didn't recognize on the flight and on my layover in Taipei. I jumped right to it after finding Nikki's apartment and we went out for the first of what I think will be many delicious meals. The steet food here is amazing, so we sampled fried coconut patties, blended fruit shakes, banana-chocolate roti, etc - I'm leaving the chicken heads and grasshoppers for later in the week when I'm better primed with some local EColi. When NIkki went back to work, I wandered the city, checking out the many wats/temples (second pic below) and crazy markets. Old Chiang Mai is built within a 2k square moat/wall (3rd pic below), so I cruised the perimeter and made friends with about 100 shop owners.

After work, Nikki and I hit up a fabric center/tailor to get a couple suits made for me. Picking the first one up today, so I can be Nikki's arm candy at some consulate event tomorrow. We had an early dinner, where I tried "frog in chilli sauce" (4th pic below). Cruised over to the night market afterwards for some shopping/more street food (5th pic), and took a break for an hour-long thai massage (I think it cost 2 dollars each). Yeah, it's a tough life. On the way home, we stopped into a bar/restaurant on the Mae Ping river where we had drinks and listened to a couple of great musicians play guitar and sing (mostly covers of American songs. They were really talented! Didn't speak English, but could mimic the words pretty well and got it right about 90% of the time). It was a perfect scene, with paper lanterns and live music next to the river (last pic below, pretty blurry but you get the idea).

Pretty good first day. I'm off now to do some single-track downhill mountain biking (down the mountain in the first pic below). It's going to be an exciting week and I'll try to be good about updating the blog with stories/pictures.