Christmas Day

My Christmas Eve slumber was like that of when I was a kid. I didn't sleep well. Unfortunately, it wasn't because of the excitement of what Santa has brought, but because there was a dog that was barking for easily 4 hours throughout the night. It was terrible. Since I used to have really bad insomnia at college, I've pretty much adapted to functioning with a poor night's sleep the next day.

Christmas day. It was spent on a train all day. Our train arrived an hour late, which seemed to be the norm in Thailand. If it's 30 minutes late, it's still on time. If it's an hour late, it's properly late. We rode 1st class - which gave us seat cushions, air conditioning and some food. I couldn't eat the food because it was all meat but even if I had eaten meat, it didn't look that appetizing. We called Ruth's food, "prawn head curry" because we weren't exactly sure what it was - but the head of a prawn was the biggest thing in there.

(above: Ruth and I making the time pass acting like fools)

(above: Kyla and Andres making the time pass, too)

(Above: and of course Emily, too!)

I taught Ruth the American childhood game of MASH. We had a good time doing that for about 30 minutes. We played "guess where the foreigners are from" making up code names for countries. The scenery was nice but it was very similar to Japan. The sun had set leaving us with about 2-3 hours of nothing to look at outside the window. Kyla taught us a game called GHOST which got a bit heated up right before the train ride ended.

I think we arrived to Chiang Mai at about 9:00ish. Our guest house was really nice. The most spacious rooms we had in the whole of our travels there. The staff was friendly and it was clean. We wanted to have a Christmas dinner but by the time we got situated most places weren't serving food anymore. 711. 711 is everywhere. Seriously, every turn in Thailand offers a new 711. That's where Christmas dinner came from. It was by far the most disgusting Christmas dinner I've ever had. I had muesli, which was good. Then, we tried making sandwiches out of cheese, jam and wheat bread. Nasty. Andres had bought "pickled mango" thinking they were something else. Pickled mango is nasty, I don't ever recommend it. The best part of Christmas dinner was the beer. I called my family on this night and then headed to bed. It's just another day, now isn't it?

Andres: These pickled mangos are going to make me puke!
Ruth: They're going to make you pube? what? what is that American English word?
Andres: You thought I said I was going to pube? and that is his face that followed that conversation