Chiang Mai

I love Chiang Mai. It is more manageable than Bangkok but still a city - the main tourist part is all concentrated within the old city walls. It is also a bit cooler, especially in the morning. And the food is amazing; there seem to be cooking courses on every street. It's a good base for other, more outdoorsy activities too: trekking, zip lines, abseiling, climbing, rafting, elephant training... With the kids most of that is all out but we do want to see elephants. It's proving a bit hard organising just a simple visit though - we just want to see them getting washed, dragging a tree trunk around a bit, maybe feed them and even ride them. But it seems that the offer on hand is a full-on elephant training course which is really not that a useful skill in Madrid.

Lucas has worms. Rather than trust the pharmacy we went straight to one of the hospitals. It was very clean and modern, with a kiddie play area which was ch appreciated (2 in 2 days!). They didn't do much in the way of examining him, just listened to our description, and then prescribed us something which apparently was for most types of worm (later confirmed to be true). As I remembered from an earlier Aisha episode that it could be quite infectious I asked for a prescription for the whole family.

After the hospital we went to see the main temple, Wat Phra Singh. It's been some time since we saw one so we were all pretty enthusiastic. We even bought some gold-leaf to put on one of the statues as an offering. Aisha found the people praying quite fascinating (and puzzling), so they were dully copied. She also likes the monks (finally she's stopped calling them monkeys) quite a lot.

Didn't achieve much else, just wandered around for a bit having a bite here and a bite there, soaking in the vibe, and getting a bit lost because the map is a bit pants. Finished the day off with a session at the hairdressers for the 2 boys, which Aisha insisted on joining in.