In some of our planning while in Bangkok, we realized that it would be cheaper (and far more time efficient) to move Chiang Rai to a day trip from Chiang Mai instead of packing all of our things onto a bus there and back again. Unfortunately, as our hotel was booked up past our original stay date, this saddled us with the as yet unencountered difficult of *gasp* having to change hotels within a city. After a morning of planning with friends who we will be overlapping with later in the trip (stay tuned!), we packed our bags and left the north side of the old city to go all the way to the southside. A mile away. Due to the density of the old city, we hadn’t yet explored it, and similar to our first morning on the northside, we wandered by the south gate of the old city. Delicious lunch at 4th generation vegetarian restaurant Aum (truly delicious, and if you are enthusiastic about enjoying the food they will let you have misorders from other tables, which in no way influenced my desire to talk them up here), was followed by a visit to the famous Silver Temple. Well, I got to visit the inside, but Kaia only got to visit the outside of the silver temple, as a woman “her energy is such that it would deteriorate the holy relics”. So she was given a keychain as a consolation. The temple married traditional design with some more modern imagery, further embracing this split-persona with centuries-old aforementioned relics juxtaposed with the imagery of modern Thai Baht bills on the ceiling. 

Our evening and night were mostly a cooking class. Beginning with a visit to a local market (Kaia and I felt very “old-hand” having visited the same market earlier the previous day), but mostly taking place on their organic farm 40ish minutes outside of town. The class was nice, more touristy than cook-ing-y, but the worst part of it by far, was that we were the lone non-Dutch in our 12 person class. The quick wit and sarcasm-laden commentary by our teacher Im kept us on our toes. 

The keychain given to female visitors to make up for the fact that they aren't allowed in the pagoda.

With a long day trip planned for the next day and a full travel day to follow, we decided to take a down day and do some catching up. Laundry, trip planning, less blog catch up than we had planned, and a call home occupied our morning while we enjoyed our leftovers from the cooking class. 

In the evening we walked more of the southern old city, enjoyed an early dinner at Chada, and returned to Aum for dessert. 

We didn't realize we would be sorted by what we cooked, and thought we'd get to try more if we chose different items! Kaia is thrilled with her station partner.