Chiang Mai, Thailand

It's been raining most of today, the first time that's it's rained on me this trip. Which was okay cause I have a bit of a cold and probably would have stayed in anyways.

Yesterday took a Thai cooking class. It was really good; there were 9 of us in the class, and we started by picking the 5 dishes each that we wanted to make. Next was a trip to the market to buy ingredients. One of the things I liked about this cooking school is that they give you various names for the ingredients, and suggest alternatives if you can't find something in your home country.

Coconut cream was part of everything we cooked -- and we bought it fresh here. You pick out the coconuts in the market, and then the flesh is scraped out, a bit of water is added, and then the cream is squeezed out. It looks a bit milky.

We all had our own woks to cook from. The teacher talked in a rather monotone voice, but he was really enthusiastic about us learning a bit of Thai culture.

Then as the teacher said, we cook, we eat, we cook, we eat, five times. I never thought about that part -- we ate 5 full meals in 8 hours. I was stuffed.

After went out drinking with some of the other people in the class, a Dutch guy and a Finnish girl. Some other people that they had met on treks joined us. We drank Archa beer, and watched the many hot air lanterns rise to the skies. There were many more last night -- at least ten in the sky at any one moment.

Hopefully the rain will stop for the end of the festival tonight. Tomorrow I'm on a train to Bangkok, and then I fly home on Monday.

Here's some of the dishes I cooked yesterday:

Shrimp soup


Green curry


Pad thai


Spring rolls -- check out the presentation!