Andrea's birthday that will never be matched in awesomeness

Did I forget to mention we slept with airconditioning in our room for the first time since we had been in Thailand? We felt like royalty!

We rode our bikes to catch the bus to Mae Sai, and before long were crossing the river once again into Burma (or Myanmar if you want to be politically correct. I'm sticking with Burma though).



We were a little shocked at the sights, smells, and (ahem) shopping options in Burma the first time we went and because of that we didn't venture far from the border crossing area, but we decided to make a morning of it this time. We have worked with a lot of people fleeing Burma and wanted to have a little taste of it, even if it was just the roudy border city of Tackhilek. Prepped for what awaited us across the border, we braved the vendors and made it far enough to snag a tuk tuk driver to take us on a tour.

 First stop was a Burmese temple which conveniently matched my shirt exactly. This was the most run down of the three types of temples we visited, interestingly enough.

Burma Buddha isn't my favorite, but it was interesting to see the different style.

Next stop was another Burmese temple over-looking the city. This one reminded me more of what we saw regularly in Thailand.

View of the border from the temple. You just never know how your pictures are gonna turn out when you hand your camera off to your tuk tuk driver..

 Lastly we stopped at a Shan temple, which was the most meaningful to us. We've met a lot of Shan and feel a connection to them and their situation. We appreciated being able to go into one of their temples!

Beautiful Shan writing.

And that was the end of our tour. We were glad to actually go inside Burma and explore the border town a little, but at this point we were anxious to get back to Thailand.

 Back to Thailand safe and sound. Phew!

We had arranged to meet Ting Ting and a friend for lunch, so we rode our bikes back to the village to meet them.

You'd better believe I was telling all these people 'Ni hao!' as we passed!

 A HUGE highlight of the day was our lunch location. We ate on the banks of this secluded lake surrounded by mountains on three sides, overlooking the reflection of the trees in the water. It was AMAZING. One of the coolest places I have ever eaten.

Fried rice, noodles, chicken wings, oh yes and friend chicken elbows, ankles, and knees. They were better than I expected!

Ting Ting was so nice to treat us on my birthday!

We had a bus to catch, but couldn't leave without crossing this amazing bamboo bridge to see a mountainside Buddhist cave.

And we were off again to the Chinese-settled mountain village of Mae Salong! My love for China being the theme of this weekend, we saw it as the perfect opportunity to spend a night there exploring.

It was a happy miracle every time we made it somewhere on public transportation!

Headed to Mae Salong on a song tao

We checked into our villa and were happy to upgrade to one with an awesome view for the same price.
 

We wasted no time and headed right up the mountain to the temple that overlooks the valley!

Justin contemplating the meaning of Buddhism.

Walking up a bumload of stairs. It was a huge workout!

 BUT the views were worth it!

One of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen! Northern Thailand at its finest.

Temple at the top.

 We walked back down and explored the tea fields that lined the mountainsides.

Birthday dinner at our villa. Not quite authentic Chinese but close enough.

It was a marathon, multi-cultural birthday of travel and excitement that will make every birthday from here on out seem pretty dull! It was a little weird to not be surrounded by family and friends on a birthday, and instead be a foreigner and not even being able to communicate to anyone that it's your special day, but it was a blast to spend it with the most important person in my life, and to have his love and complete attention all day. I know there will be birthdays in the future that will get crowded by other things so this was a really memorable birthday for that reason, too. I'm so grateful for Justin and his continual concern for my happiness. He's the world champion at making me happy!

Birthday weekend kickoff. Monkeys included.

 7.20.12

Our second visa run to Burma happened to fall on my birthday. Which initially made me super mad but when I realized I would have a stamp in my passport with my birthdate, I was actually really excited for it. The trip to the border takes a lot of time and would have stunk to do on the morning of a birthday, but fate stepped in last time and gave us an adorable Taiwanese friend who offered to arrange a room for us at a guesthouse near the bordertown of Mae Sai for dirt cheap, so it worked out perfectly to head there the night before!

Waiting for the bus with our fried rice and pad thai to go!

Outside the guesthouse. It had been my dream the WHOLE TIME we were in Thailand to ride bikes and tour around somewhere, and not 5 minutes after settling in we were given bikes and told to ride around the Taiwanese village. Heavenly!

We rode around in the direction we had been instructed by our friend Ting Ting. We weren't sure we had arrived at the so-called monkey temple, until all of the sudden we realized a big monkey was walking through the entrance to greet us. And for the next half hour we were so overwhelmed and confused at what was going on. REAL MONKEYS roaming the temple grounds. What??

Monkey creeping at me. They are scarier than I ever thought!

This is the closest we got to one. Too close for comfort!

I can't really explain what happened next. We were handed bamboo poles and told to head up the mountain by a monk, but then got stopped on the steps by a monkey sliding down the handrail towards us, when these presumably intoxicated people showed up in a car, bought fish food, gave us one of the bowls, and posed in pictures with us. Yep..I'm just as confused as you are.

Cannot describe the confusion we felt. Maybe this facial expression will help convey it?

So. Many. Monkeys.

Annnnd at this point the monkeys started attacking the drunk lady and scratching her legs trying to get food from her, at which point the drunk man grabbed Justin's bamboo stick and started chasing them away. That was our cue to leave this crazy place!!

We enjoyed the rest of our evening, monkey-free.

The view from our guesthouse

This whole village was full of Chinese-speakers, which left me feeling happy as can be. I was able to remember enough Chinese to order food and make a little bit of conversation. It was awesome!

Noodles and unidentified fried food from street vendors. We washed it down with a Coke and didn't get sick after..haha

Birthday banana split

Justin and the Confucious statue in the lobby of the guesthouse

Thailand video of greatness!

We took a whole day last week and whipped up a tribute movie documenting our time in Thailand. For our sake (and yours) it's only one song long, but we had enough video footage to make a much longer one. For that reason it's pretty fast-paced, so watch it a couple times ;) It shows the best of our time in Thailand! We also chose this song before it got popular in the U.S..that's annoying, but we used it anyway.

Eventually we'll catch up on all of the blog posts we've missed (...), but a movie is probably more exciting anyway. We sure miss Thailand and the adventures we had there every day, but we are happy to be home with family and friends and catching some summer before school starts up again. Be sure to catch up with us on our regular blog! just-an-adventure {dot} blogspot {dot} com.

Enjoy ^_^

A taste of old Siam

When we first started thinking about how to spend our vacation days, we really wanted to make a trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, but the longer we’ve been here, and the more Baht we’ve spent, that dream has sort of fizzled out.  Luckily, our lonely planet Thailand book, provided us with a lot of tempting substitutes.  Siam has been around for hundreds of years, and hundreds of kings, until around fifty years ago when the name changed to Thailand.   Constantly at war with Burmese and Laotian armies, there are plenty of ancient strongholds, temples, ruins, and capitols.   One of the more recent capitols, Ayutthaya is conveniently one hour North of Bangkok, and when we started putting our itinerary together for the long weekend, this was at the top of our list!  Lucky for us, our hostel teamed up with a tour group and provided day-long tours to many of the surrounding tourist attractions, including Ayutthaya!  Tuesday morning we woke up at six, got ready, packed up our backpacks, ate a few pieces of toast, and loaded up in the tour van.  We were one of the first to be picked up, but over the next half hour we stopped be a lot of little guesthouses and boutique hotels, and our van filled up with Koreans and Europeans.  We’re still pretty sure we were the only ones on the trip who spoke English as our native language!  It was an amazing trip and a really meaningful cultural experience.  We made a bunch of stops at different ancient ruins, some original, some restored, and some still in use as Buddhist temples. 

First stop was Wat Phukhao Thong.  This temple was a little bit outside the city, and was built in 1357!  It had been restored at some point, but was still overgrown by plants, and looked like it was starting to lean to one side a bit.

Next stop was Wat Lokayasutha.  This temple had another giant reclining Buddha, but the rest of the structure was mostly destroyed.  Apparently the  architecture in this and a few of the other buildings in Ayutthaya shows the time period that Siam was a Hindu country, but then converted to Buddhism.

We don’t remember the name of the third stop…and we can’t exactly find it anywhere in our tour book, but it was also really cool! It’s still in use and we even saw some monks there being filmed by a film crew. The temple itself was wrapped in a HUGE piece of golden fabric, and every Buddha statue lining the outer wall around the temple was wore matching sashes. It was impressive to see so many Buddhas in one place! Our tour guide informed us that the hand position of these Buddhas represent victory.

Wat Phra Mahathat was a stark contrast from the stop before. The collection of buildings was located in front of the Grand Palace, which is interesting since we thought it reminded us of the temples at the Grand Palace in Bangkok! They were built in 1374 in the same Khmer style as the structures at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Urge to see ruins fulfilled! The most striking detail of this place was the Buddha images. When Burma invaded the city, they set fire to the buildings and cut the heads off all the Buddha statues—ironic because all of the Buddhas here are in the victory pose. We couldn’t get over how impressive the sight was even now, and wished we could go back in time and see it in its prime. It would have been enormous; the ruins stretched on forever!

Another amazing sight was this Buddha head wrapped in the roots of a bodhi tree. No one really knows why this head was left when the Burmese invaded—perhaps it was abandoned or simply too heavy for the invaders to haul away. It’s a highly photographed monument in Thailand, and is commonly seen on postcards, partially because of the mystery surrounding it but also because Buddhism began after Buddha was enlightened under a bodhi tree. Pretty amazing how fitting it is! When photographing the Buddha head  you are not allowed to stand, because it is disrespectful for your head to be higher than Buddha’s. You’ll get yelled at if you try!

We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant. We don’t have pictures because we were too hungry to document it..but it was amusing to see how differently we ate as compared to the other tourists with us who have probably only been in Thailand for two weeks at most. Most people didn’t even attempt to use the spoon, they were dousing their food in sweet chili sauce, and the girl across the table from us took two bites of rice and nothing else. We, on the other hand, ate like it was our last meal, enjoying the more mild version of these dishes that are more suited for tourist. So much for trying to dispel the myth that Americans eat a ton..

Wat Phra Si Sanphet served as the ancient palace for 117 years. Most of it was rubble, but three main chedi have been reconstructed to give a taste of what the whole collection of buildings would have looked like. The Viharn Phra Mongkol Bopi Buddha was in a nearby hall, and it’s one of the biggest bronze Buddhas in Thailand. For hundreds of years it was exposed to the elements after its temple was burnt down by the Burmese army, and it was further damaged by lightning after that. In 1955 the Burmese prime minister donated 200,000 baht to reconcile what his country did 200 years earlier.

We were quite exhausted after this historical view of Siam, so when we got back to Bangkok we wandered around a nearby market. 

We were doing pretty well at avoiding the vendors until we saw a sign for a foot fish massage. We paused for just long enough that their employee caught us and offered us a deal we couldn’t pass up. Next thing we knew our feet were washed and we were sticking our feet into GIANT tanks full of hundreds of little fishes waiting to nibble at our feet. It..was the tickliest thing in the world. The fish were supposedly eating the dead skin off our feet, and with so many of them chowing down it was as much as we could do to not laugh our heads off. They were thorough, getting in between our toes, around our heels, and even up our calves a little bit. Fifteen hilarious minutes later, our feet were admittedly smoother!

Needing to catch our bus soon, we checked out of the hostel, explored the market a little more, ate some red curry and mango sticky rice, and headed to the bus station. We took one last look at the city and went on our way!

Saying goodbye to our awesome hostel

Party bus on the ride home

After a weekend full of new sights, our familiar Northern Thailand mountains were a welcome sight! We had an awesome view from the front seats on the second story of our bus!!