Downtime

Had a bit of an up and down weekend - probably to be expected given the move, the weather, the adjustment, the end of the first week, being by myself in a new country, etc. Had a very farang morning yesterday - scrambled eggs for breakfast, Western grocery store - and then spent the afternoon variously napping, talking to friends back home, writing emails, perusing my new map of Chiang Mai, that sort of thing. Last night I went out for dinner with a couple of expats which was not bad - I think everyone was sort of a bit tired though. We wanted to have a couple of beers after dinner (perfect beer weather - this from a strictly wine girl!) but couldn't quite find a place to our specifications, and somehow ended up at a bar in the red light district (no skimpily clad girls chorusing, "Sawadee kha" in suggestive tones at the place we went though). I guess it's good to go there once, if only for future reference (ie to avoid at all costs hereafter).

Today I slept in and wandered down the street around lunchtime, got the world's largest takeaway pad thai and struggled through it here - it took me two goes in the end. A fairly famous temple in the forest is about 1km from where I'm staying so I walked up there this afternoon. They have talks by foreigner monks on Sunday afternoons so I was hoping for a bit of interesting discussion but in the end the session was monopolised by weird, new-agey American tourists asking odd questions, answered very nebulously by one of the monks (I wanted to know what the other one had to say!) and so I left and watched the fish in the lake for a while instead, before meandering home.

Tonight I hit one of the "walking markets" - not the famed Night Bazaar, but loads of fun nonetheless. Brightly lit stalls as far as the eye can see, cheerful sellers, lots of Thai people as well as farang, lots of chat, sooooo much food and just lots of colour and buzzing activity. Had good company too, which always helps, and then wound down with a beer at the end of the night. My head has been spinning with a million things, so a cruisy evening of talking and wandering was probably just the right tonic.

On a completely different note, last night as I was walking home I saw The. World's. Biggest. Centipede. crossing the road in the dark. I thought it was a piece of debris until I realised it was moving. Seriously, it was the width of my thumb and nearly my hand-span in length. I was going to take a photo, but it was dark and I thought it might eat me.

Back to school tomorrow.