Looking down our train car
Shortly after I woke up, I went to use the restroom on board. It looks just like a regular bathroom with one exception: the toilet doesn't have a pipe - everything falls directly down onto the tracks below! Fascinating! (I intended to take a picture but was more than a little nervous I would lose my phone to the tracks...)
I climbed back into bed after brushing my teeth and a lady came around asking if we wanted breakfast - so hungry! I ordered a ham sandwich and Jon ordered eggs. She came back literally 30 seconds later with 2 plates. Both freezing cold and the most DISGUSTING looking food on them. Jon drank the coffee and ate his cold eggs. I ate a banana, the 4 cold french fries, the 2 pieces of cucumber and 1 slice of tomato. I took one bite of my ham sandwich (which did NOT look like a ham sandwich - smothered in white cream, white "ham", and some sort of questionable vegetables) before I couldn't eat any more. I left 9/10 of the sandwich untouched and didn't even unwrap the "apples" which were legitimately covered in MOLD. Awesome. Still hungry. At least we didn't have to pay for them. Or so we thought. 30 seconds later the woman was back to collect our trays and handed us a bill. $7. WHAT THE FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
I find that when you're travelling there's a fine line between speaking up and recognizing cultural differences/recognizing what you have vs. what others have/ recognizing things are done differently elsewhere. This was one of those times we decided to just shut our mouths, thank the nice lady, and call it a day. We had been trying to think of what our worst meal in Thailand was when we had been in Bangkok. Well, we won't have to wonder about that anymore.
For the rest of the train ride until about 12, Jon listened to music and read on his phone while I blogged. We arrived at the Chiang Mai train station around noon and caught a shared taxi (lots of people heading in the same direction) to the city center. We arrived at our hotel in 20 minutes and were grateful to put down our bags in our room (even though it's on the 4th floor!!) After checking in we took a look at some of the brochures of different things to do around the city. Knowing many people who have been to Chiang Mai, we were told the best things to do were play with elephants and take a Thai cooking class - sounds good to me! We asked the woman at the front desk to book us a Thai cooking class for tomorrow. Then we went for a walk and grabbed lunch while looking at BILLIONS of brochures for different elephant excursions. There are SO MANY places that care for elephants around Chiang Mai. They range in price from about $20 to $250 for a one day excursion. The difference is in the experience you have, and also the facilities where the elephants live. Some places seem MUCH more friendly and natural for the elephants than others. We read through the pamphlets and realized that all the elephant excursions are a full day, and we didn't have enough time to do elephants AND the cooking class. MAJOR BUMMER. We decided we could do a cooking class anywhere, and ELEFANTES are more important (always) :). We finished lunch and went back to our hotel to cancel our cooking class and book our elephant excursion for tomorrow. Oops. SO! Tomorrow - we will be playing with elephants in the morning, before going on a hike to a waterfall, swimming, and white water rafting! Awesome! Very much looking forward to it :)
We were glad we had a half day today to explore the city and wander aimlessly. It had been a while since we hadn't really scheduled much. We took out our handy dandy city map and began walking towards Wat Chedi Luang. Well, at least, we meant to. Somehow, we missed a turn somewhere and ended up at many different Wats along the way...
We also ended up at Wat Chueng Mun, the oldest Wat in Chiang Mai.
We continued wandering, kind of having a general direction in mind, kind of not, when we saw a road sign that said Wat Phra Singh (the other temple we were headed to) was directly to the right. We made a right hand turn and started walking...and walking...and walking... until... we came to a dead end. And no more signs... We made an executive decision to turn right...and glad that we were correct. Even knowing we were headed in the correct direction (based on the road sign) it STILL took us about 45 minutes to find a huge temple.
One thing we've learned about Thailand is that they like to give you a small IDEA about where something is (turn left here), but there is never the additional directions that you want (like another sign, or a distance...) Basically, signs here are fairly useless and not at all helpful. Thanks, Thailand!
We continued our journey and ended up at Wat Chedi Luang (again, our original destination), right as it was closing at 6 pm - PERFECT TIMING!
Inside, a prayer servie was going on and it was filled with monks praying (along with lots of other tourists like us...):
After our wanderings we headed back to our hotel to shower and look up some plans for our next few days of travel before going out for dinner. Now, bedtime so we can rest up for our elephant encounter tomorrow!!
Jess' highlight of the day: Wat Chedi Luang
Jon's highlight of the day: the realization that we only had one more Wat to visit in Chiang Mai after today :-p
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