Chiang Mai

We've been waking up around 5am the last couple days and so the day we were scheduled to move onto Chiang Mai we decided we'd take advantage of this early morning and try out the hotel pool before breakfast. The pool was nice and refreshing even this early. It was a great start to the day which was then followed up with breakfast in our room for only a delivery charge of 200 Baht. (Remember the exchange is 30 to 1). Just to put some perspective to the heat we're experiencing we have the hotel air conditioning set to 24C and find that a relief.

Flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is one hour. We flew Thai Airways. Even with this short flight we had drink service as well as were served a snack....nothing more needs to be said when comparing airline service to North America.

We arrived mid afternoon and checked into our hotel. Shortly afterwards we were picked up for our Thai cooking class. We read that this is one of the things to do in Chiang Mai. Our class was booked through Siam Rice Thai Cookery school and it was well worth it. No promises we can recreate the dishes we learned to make, but we'll give it a try! We registered for the evening class. After pick up we head to the locals' food market. There we learned about different Thai food ingredients. Once done in the market off we were to our actual class which took place at the owner's house. Our instructor was named Sim and he was quite the character. The evening class included learning to make 5 different dishes. It was a lot of fun and a great experience. One of the best parts was that we could all choose individual dishes from their selection; we weren't all making the same thing. The best part of the class was eating what we made, though after dish two I was already starting to get full. This is one of the highlights of the trip so far. When we arrived back at our hotel it was time to pack up for our adventure the following day and get some shut eye because we were going to need plenty of energy.