Mia, meet Chiang Mai.

It's a strange feeling getting off the plane knowing that I wouldn't be leaving here anytime soon. I'd been jet-setting for the last week and I'm finally staying put. This is my new home, and I was hoping we (Chiang Mai and I) would get along ok. We have so far. A smile was glued to my face the entire ride to the guest house. We stayed at a place called Lanna House, which was rather modern and upscale. It was within the moat; the Old City. Chiang Mai is located between the mountain of Doi Suthep and the Ping River, a rather advantageous spot for the founding settlers to kick it for awhile. The heart of the city is surrounded by a moat that makes a nice square around the old city. Each side of the moat is about a mile. The river is on the east side, Doi Suthep on the west. Probably has to do with feng shui.

Our first stop was to "hike" to the Wat (temple) at the top of Doi Suthep. Once we got there we realized you have to be straight up out of your mind to actually hike it by foot. We got a cab to drive us to the top. Cabs are different here. They are called sawngthaews (pronounced song-tows), which literally means two-bench. It's basically a red pickup truck with a cover over the back and two benches to sit on. Kind of sketchy at first, but there are hundreds of them, so they have to be safe, right? It was a 40 minute curvy ride to the top (can we say "hike" again?, right.) Once we got there, we realized we weren't appropriately dressed so we felt a little awkward roaming around with our bare shoulders and shorts on. We stayed a short time, then decided to head down and across to another mountain to the Mae Sa Waterfalls. These were incredible. I wish I had more photos, but my camera died. It's a total of ten falls, each about 200m apart, so it's quite the hike. (We did do some hiking as planned).

The most interesting interaction we had was with an older American man around fall 9. He has been living in Chiang Mai for the last 6 years and gave us good advice on which mosquitoes to look out for. (The ones in the city are the worst kind). He then said that he wanted to take a picture of us to make his girlfriend jealous. He mentioned that his girlfriend was our age...or a little younger. This was weird. It's actually quite common for farang (white, foreign people... more on that term later) men to have young, very young, Thai girlfriends. I will never get used to the idea of this, and I can speak more of what I think about this type of relationship. I'm still trying to digest the whole thing.

Once we got back to the city, we went to the night market. It was better than Bangkok, but still overwhelming and tourist oriented. I'm not a huge fan. The food was incredible though.

In short, I love Chiang Mai. I think she and I will get along quite nicely. It's green and peaceful and friendly and bustling, and a feast for the senses. I'm a happy gal.