Last day in Bangkok

As my last night in Bangkok, of course I couldn't sleep, and because I had already been awake since 4am, I decided to get up at 530am and go up to the roof. On one side, there was the almost full moon, and on the other...

A beautiful shockingly colorful sunrise. I was overwhelmed at the amazingness of it, especially since it was the first sunrise I'd actually seen in Thailand without being blocked by buildings all around. The sun seems to bounce into the sky here, it usually is a very few minutes from the time that there is a glimmer of light to the time that the sun is past the horizon.

A beautiful city so in need of God's truth.
I prayed Psalm 36 as I sat there on the roof;

Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. 
Your righteousness is like the mountains of God, 
your judgements are like the great deep; man and beast you save, O LORD. 
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! 
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. 
They feast on the abundance of your house, 
and your give them drink from the river of your delights. 
For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.

bugs and the pretty country of Laos

I went to the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand with my two dutch friends. They are traveling thru Laos and I needed to get a stamp on my passport so that I can stay in Thailand until the 28th of July.

Lao money is in very large bills, they call their money kip and there are 252 kip per 1 baht and 32 baht per 1 us dollar. so having 700,000.00 kip is still less then 100 us dollars.

We went and visited a wat (temple) in Lao, it had many horrible pictures of people being murdered or other such violent acts on the outside walls. It was rather shocking.

Shhhhhhhhh

yeahhhhh...

Before I went back across the border, I bought an elephant shirt so that I could be appropriately touristy and wear that shirt with my baggy pants and be a total crazy farang (thai word for foreigner, it means guava in thai)
I also got this great drink that was very interesting to watch him make because he threw ice and coconut milk into a blender and then I got to pick the different flavors to put in it, but because it was all in Thai I had to guess at what flavor was what and ended up with this strange bluish-greenish, fruity-minty drink, it was quite interesting, but I liked it. :)

I decided sitting on the roof was a good idea, until the reception guy came and frowned at me. Then I got off. :(

That was the awesome view from the roof. I was looking over into Thailand, but I couldn't cross the border until the next morning, because I only got an additional 15 day stamp on my passport crossing the river.

Back in Chiang Mai, I met up with my friends Sarah, Elaine and a new friend Kadilyn and we all went to a night market and bought bugs of various kinds, this is the thing is a cockroach, which are apparently high in protein. :D Of course I had to try it. The appetizers were silkworm/grubworm (not sure which), wasp (stinger removed), and cricket. The cockroach took a while and was quite tough despite being deep fried.

Kadilyn looking on with some amount of disbelief. I don't think that the 3 of them really thought I would eat it.  Haha, I will admit though, that I felt sick for the rest of the day after eating it...though it may have been psychological.

:)

treks and elephants - and slurfs!

All my momma and poppa and baby water bottles that have collected as I drank half of one and then it got warm so I bought a new one, and then mixed the cold with the warm and drank half of it. etc.

Jak fruit! :P

Baby tigers, awwwww

 durch den monsun

Orchid Garden had a pretty waterfall

Treked up a very high mountain and this is what we saw from the top. We stayed overnight in a hill tribe village.

 Next day we hiked back down the mountain and went to an elephant training camp. Slurf I learned is the Dutch word for trunk, and those crazy elephant trainers could climb up onto the elephant by slithering up the slurf. :P

Stayed overnight in the elephant camp.

The camp was full of rice fields and we got to see how they process rice after it gets harvested.

The Long Necks.

From left to right, Marianne, little long neck girl, momma long neck, Jurien and me.

She had to be the most unnatural looking woman of them all. She looked a little bit like a bug, cuz her legs and arms were so long and skinny and then her head is just the same.

This is so cool. My clothes were wet and smelly from the 3 day trek and I didn't want to wash them in the sink, so I took them to the 'dry cleaners' and it costed me about 2 dollars to get them washed dried and beautifully folded. They smelled so good! ahhh, life's little pleasures.