So much has happened in the past few days! First of all, on Thursday and Friday of last week, we had Sports Day at Lertlah, which is basically like track and field with cheerleaders. The cheerleading was by far the most important part too, and some of my kindergarten kids have been missing naps for weeks in order to practice. I had been told that the kids would be dressed up, but I was definitely not prepared for what I saw. There were little Jean-Bennets running around everywhere, little three and four year olds in fishnet stockings, boots with heels, heavy eyeliner, the works. It was crazy. This is a picture of my three year olds doing their routine. I still can't belive how decked out they were, it was unreal.

On Friday, we left Bangkok to spend our long weekend in Chiang Mai. My parents went there when they were here and absolutely loved it, as does everyone who goes there, so we were quite excited. We had a completely packed weeekend, and had a ton of fun. On the first day, we toured the city in the morning, and went touring factories around the area in the afternoon (we went to umbrella, silver, gem, Thai silk, and laquerware factories). That night we went shopping in the amazing market. The next day we took an absolutely amazing Thai cooking class. We learned how to cook all of our favourite Thai dishes...and they actually tasted really good! The best part was making chicken cashew and lighting our onions on fire, which is what I am doing in the picture. It was terrifying, but really fun. We also learned how to make pad thai, green curry, tom yum khun (hot and sour thai soup), spring rolls, and mango sticky rice. They also took us on a guided tour of the market, let us taste the different kinds of Thai curries and showed us all of the different Thai vegetables and herbs. At the school, they let us taste all of the Thai fruits that we had always wondered about in the markets, which was very interesting as well. The best part is that they are sending us a cook book with easy recipes for all of the dishes that we made, so if you're nice to me, I can make you good Thai food when I get back!

That night we went to the Sunday market, which is the most famous market in Chiang Mai. Things were ridiculously cheap and we bought far too much, but my apartment is going to be so beautiful next year with all of the decorations, wall hangings and pieces of art that I have bought so far, I can't wait to decorate!

On our last day in Chiang Mai, we took a tour that took us to the highest point in Thailand. It was 8 degrees at the top of the mountain and we were absolutely freezing. I actually took a picture of the thermometer because we were so cold. The coldest temperature on record there is -1, I didn't think that it got that cold in Thailand! The tour was good, but we were all super tired, so we were very happy that we spent a lot of our time in transit so we could sleep in the van! That night we went back to the night market, and bought even more stuff that we probably didn't need, but it was all so cheap that we couldn't help it. We got all of our stuff packed up and headed to the airport to find that our flight had been delayed! It was really annoying and the flight that was supposed to leave at 10:15 pm only ended up leaving at 12:45 am, which meant that we got to bed at about 3:30 last night, only to get up 3 1/2 hours later to come to school. So we are all pretty tired today, but it was worth it because of the great weekend that we had!