My husband's first day in Chiang Mai!

Last wednesday my husband finally joined in on my adventure! It's been a long, long 5 weeks without him, we are never apart for this long, so I was thrilled to be able to pick him up at the airport. He arrived late at night so I threw on a nice dress, bought a chocolate rose and hopped in a cab to go get him. Once he came out of the gates, we had the most long-awaited and satisfying hug ever! He was thrilled to be in Thailand with me and even though he was exhausted from the long journey, was very much looking forward to seeing everything there was to see.

I took him back to my hotel and showed him around the streets a little once he got settled in to get a lay of the land. I had decided to take the next day off school so we could be together, I'd had 100% attendance up until that point so it wasn't a big deal. How could I stay in school all day knowing my love was back at my hotel for the first time??? Not happening! I was looking forward to sleeping in a little (I get up at 7am everyday) but Byrd was up by 6, then 8 and rearing to go so off we went. I took him to a little restaurant nearby to introduce him to Gai who has been feeding me on a regular basis for the last several weeks and then off we went on our first adventure. My hubby loves monkeys big time so we had decided to go to the monkey centre just out of Chiang Mai and grabbed the first tuk-tuk we could find to get us there.

I have to say we were both disappointed with this place. For the first time since I've been here I left with a bad, bad taste in my mouth. The "centre" was tiny to begin with and seemed ok until we saw dozens of monkeys tied to trees with only about a foot or so of room to move around. They couldn't even interact with each other. So sad. We bought some fruit and vegetables to feed them but had to toss them so they could actually get them and didn't have nearly enough to feed every one of them. Even the zoo was better than this - they had an entire monkey village that didn't have a cage around it, full of trees, waterfalls and streams where the monkeys lazily picked bugs off each other and swung from branches, free to do whatever they wanted to do.

I hesitate to even share any pictures with you and will save you the hardship of having to see all those monkeys tied to trees. But there were a couple of cute moments during the "Monkey show" and we had fun playing with a baby monkey, but those were about the only highlights of this place. We both felt awful being there and afterwards, I would never have gone if I knew it would be this bad....

handing out "monkey balm" 

Off for a ride

Cuddling with a monkey

So, so soft and sweet

Trying to balance a baby monkey on his palms

He was a squirly one!

But look how zen he is when getting a thai massage!

After this very short and pretty sad trip to the monkey centre we decided to check out one of the other nearby sites since we had already gone so far. Byrd wanted to see a waterfall and there was one just down the street pretty much so we headed there and our drivers (husband and wife) joined their tuk-tuk friends and hung out while we spent a couple of hours walking up and down the beautiful Mae Sa Waterfall. It was a LOT bigger then we expected! There were 10 different levels to it and we kept walking up and up and up at the hottest time of day. By the time we made it to the top we were exhausted but it was so worth it for the view! We spent a little bit of time sitting at the top, chatting about life and catching up on everything from the past 5 weeks which was really nice. Then we wandered back down to our tuk-tuk and headed to the hotel. All in all they had driven us around for 3 and a half hours and to start with only asked for 150 baht each way but we had the long detour at the waterfall. When asked how much more we should pay they said "It is up to you", so we have them 500 baht and called it a day. Some may say we overpaid but they were great hosts, giving us mints and water and not over charging us like many would so we felt good about giving them almost double what they had originally quoted us. 

Afterwards we chilled out by the pool for a bit and then went to meet up with a friend of Byrds from the movie industry we was living in Chiang Mai. He had fallen in love with the place while filming Rambo and bought a condo there. And what a condo it is! My god! Two bedrooms, big living room and kitchen, a huge wraparound deck, all for only $75,000 Canadian. Truly tempting to buy something here, you could like like a King on a Canada pension! Him & his fiancé spend only a few months of the year here when they are not working on movies. They know Thailand much better since they'd been there for almost 3 years or so and decided to show us a real taste of Chiang Mai. We headed off in a Songthaew and walked up an alleyway, wondering where they were taking us until we emerged onto a big parking lot and practically football stadium sized restaurant for dinner. It fits 5000 people for dinner at once! Insane! It's called a Moo gah ta which translates to "Pig's trough" and eat like pigs we did! Basically you are seated around a cooker fueled by coals with a trough around it for boiling water, vegetables and making soup, with a big metal grill in the middle for your meats. There is a massive buffet table of all kinds of seafood, meats, veggies, you name it to choose from as well as many different sauces. We ordered a tower of Chang beer (which was awesome!) and sat down grilling away, chatting and eating until our bellies were full. Somehow we had room for ice cream and then Byrd's friend kindly paid the bill, saying he was showing us around and it was on him. How sweet! It was the kind of place we never would have found on our own which was pretty obvious as we were the only white farangs in the joint....

I had asked them where to take a big party of people in Chiang Mai since our graduation was the next night and we still had no idea where to go so he took us to a place called Warm Up Cafe which is more of a bar/club/lounge/restaurant then a cafe really. It was perfect! Its almost all Thai college kids, has an outdoor dining lounge surrounding a koi pound, a trance-dub lounge area as well as a rocking dance club. And its HUGE so it could easily accommodate all 30-40 + of us. We had a few Sam Song sets (Thai rum & cola) and parted our ways feeling like I had just seen more of an authentic Chiang Mai in a few hours then I had in many weeks.