favorite travelling thing:

wandering around aimlessly. by far, the best thing to do.

except for a couple of other things. sean and i have something of a plan for the next few days:
tomorrow we're set up to be at an organic farm from 9am to 4pm, learning how to cook and taking a trip to the market. six meals in seven hours? we can deal with that! i think sean is the happiest person who's ever lived. he's been talking about these cooking classes in chiang mai for a while now. here's hoping it's as awesome as it sounds!!
when we get back into town, unless we're dead, we're gonna check out this place just west of the city walls (btw: chiang mai has a fucking moat. and city walls.) called the Night Bazaar. which i'm expecting to be absoulutely insane, considering how ridiculous the area was in the daytime today.

the day after that is the 31st for which we have no plans yet, except jumping on a bus at 7pm and spending new years on the bus to some city on the way to Ko Chang. all other ways to get there are booked until jan4th, which is four days before we fly out of bangkok. so we figured, fuck that, i want to spend more than a couple of days on the island, so we sucked it up and decided to have a bussy new years, and maybe celebrate on solid ground on jan1st. ahhh, such is life :S

alright, we're off to find something to eat, and i'm gonna see if htere are couch surfers in... rayon! that's the city! right, the CS search.

btw, our host in chiang mai is AWESOME.

Chiang Mai

after having spent all of twelve hours in Bangkok (three of which actually sleeping - note to other travellers: it's probably a bad idea to stay at a hostel if it's on the floor directly above a bar that's open until 5am every night)... we decided to take a 12-hour overnight sleeper train north to Chiang Mai.

City known for the culture, the one thing i noticed most was the sheer number of vegetarian restaurants. and temples.

after a good 6 hours of walking around the city today, and seeing all sorts of great things - the people, the streets, the traffic on the streets (so many motorcycles!!!), the architecture...
it's pretty neat, this city entirely makes me think of south-east asia as the most amazing way in which asia and africa could have possibly been combined. everything is colourful, the people are beautiful, the street food is plentiful and smells fantastic, and everything seems to be running smoothly.
this is truly the place to be overwhelmed with eye candy withing three minutes of stepping out the front door.

heh, and sean and i have realized that, although we are almost always standing directly beside each other, we're always perceiving two entirely different places. he keeps pointing out everyone's tattoos, and random little bits of eyc candy all over the place, and i point out other things entirely... neither of us ever taking note of the same thing. i feel like sean's version of the world includes far more people than mine, and my version perhaps more neat trees and old buildings. yet somehow we agree on what places are the most picture-perfect.

also, this place makes me think that i'd love to come here with either ainslie or nadine, there's a certain laid-back air to the streets. i also get the feeling that jjess would enjoy all the pretty colours and body-mods. :D

we're having tons of fun over here, but we miss everyone - and the bunnies
hope everyone is enjoying their winter breaks!!! unless you're in korea and working through it, in which case i hope your break in february is ridiculously amazing :)

two weeks in Thailand

sitting int he airport... thinking of how fun this is going to be.

we haven't planned our trip too much, which i figure means that it's bound to end up being a hell of a good time :)

i'll try to keep this trip updated.. i'm pretty bad at these things, though

i wonder if we'll bump into any of the other gazillion wonju-ites who are in thailand at the exact same time as us. sounds like most of them are spending most of their time in the far south. who knows, though, erin+nick might find us!

signing off!