Bye Bye Chiang Mai

On Sunday I woke up to the sound of silence outside my room. This was something new for my as my hostel is on a crossroads and is normally pretty busy with people, tuk tuks and BANG lots of fireworks. One of these normally wakes me up.

I looked out of the window and the streets were deserted. I went for a walk around and it felt a bit like the beginning of 28 days later (apart from the fact that I did see some people and they weren't zombies). The festival had finished and people had all up and left. A welcome change from the last few days of constant BANG.

I had met a Canadian guy, Paul, the previous day at the light festival and had told me about Monk Chat. I had heard about this - you basically go to a temple and chat with a monk who wants to learn English. They tell you about Buddhism and what it's like to be a monk. You help them with their English.
I've taught lots of different students, but never a monk, so I was looking forward to going along. I also had lots of questions about Buddhism and monk life in general - do the bells in the temples get annoying? can you explain karma to me? I also thought we could swap tips on shaving heads.

So I jumped in a tuk tuk to Wat Suan Dok temple and followed the signs for monk chat. I was getting pretty excited as there didn't seem to be many people around and I thought I might have my pick of the monks.

After a few minutes I found the building with a big 'MONK CHAT' sign on it.

It was closed. I had got the wrong day. Div. Probably why there weren't so many people round.

The temple itself was open though so I had a good look around, and it was sunset which made it all the more beautiful.

I headed back into town and met Annie and Lizi for our last dinner in Chiang Mai. We found a Thai restaurant of questionable hygiene on the corner of my street. It had pretty much anything you could think of on the menu but we all had authentic Thai - although Annie was considering pie & mash at one point.

Full of rice, we headed to Goong's restaurant to say goodbye. She had just finished a cooking class with Paul and a Taiwanese girl called Joyce. Goong started laughing like a nutter and didn't stop for about 10 minutes. Then she told us about how she had nearly stabbed a guy with a pen at a club the night before.

We made our excuses and left.

A quiet drink at Fang's place up the road and earlyish to bed for our journey to Chaing Rai the next day...