Our Taste of Thailand: Day 7: Made Our Way Up North to Chiang Mai

Well Bangkok, you have been a blast!!!! I have to say, we are looking forward to getting out of the city and heading to a more relaxed town. With that said, I don't think I have ever been in a crazier city, even Vegas doesn't top it, not Amsterdam from Jake's perspective. Everyone needs to experience Bangkok at least once in their life! Thank you Bangkok for the major dosage of culture shock. It's always a humbling reminder of how blessed our lives are in Canada. It's one of the reasons I love traveling and Bangkok served that humbling reminder up on a silver platter. This city has been one of the best experiences of my life!

But now it's on to Chiang Mai! to get there from our hostel, we hopped on the sky train to the most northern station. From there we could have taken their airport shuttle, which is apparently terribly unreliable, so we decided to opt for a taxi for the remainder of the way. This was our first taxi ride in Thailand so far! It was an interesting experience! Each seat, including the driver's front dash, has a tv! The driver turned on a movie for us all hehe! It was too dark to show the movie on the pictures, but trust me, there was one playing. See here:

After a quick hop, skip and a jump we were in Chiang Mai. The relaxed pace of the city was refreshing compared to Bangkok! We checked into our guesthouse, the "Top Garden Boutique Guesthouse," which is partially owned by a Canadian man from Montreal who came here to retire! In Thailand, foreigners can never own the majority of shares in a company, so Victor shares the company with his Thai wife. We had a private room with a bed, tv, sitting area, desk, safe, A/C, mini-fridge, and bathroom.

We took the afternoon and walked around the city. The population is around 1M but the main core of the city is very all and completely walkable. The city is an old fortified city surrounded by old brick walls and a moat. We got ourselves lost in the flower market and Chinatown. We took at Tuk Tuk back to the guesthouse. During our ride back, Songkran started early! Songkran tha the celebration of the Buddhist new year. Every year, they celebrate this with a water festival which starts early, especially in places like Chiang Mai. You can expect to get water gunned, buckets thrown on you, and even buckets filled with ice. While we were on the Tuk Tuk a bunch of kids had water guns and got us! So much fun and very refreshing!

When we got back to the guesthouse we sat down and had a few drinks with Victor. While we were with him we met an extremely interesting character who took us around the city again. We had a great dinner and then stopped at a bar to enjoy live music for the night.