Baba Bobo

My new favorite Thai vocab word: "baba bobo," which means crazy.

I have been slacking big time- my apologies.
But to catch up on the events of late, I will start with a brief synopsis of the past week:

Last Friday we went to Crazy Horse climbing area- about a half hour out of Chiang Mai.  It was beautiful! We broke into small groups and then headed off for adventures.  My group started out spelunking in big time caves.  Apparently the whole mountain is limestone and essentially hollow because of all of the caves inside.  We took a "tyrolean Traverse" across the biggest cave.  It was like a zip line only ropes, not cables, and we pulled ourselves across the cave about 40 m in the air.  Then we switched lines and repelled down to the base of the cave- it was SO fun.  The afternoon was full of climbing and checking out the views from the top of the routes- lots of scenic mountains.

Saturday, my host mom, sister, and Alex (neighbor ISDSI student) and I took the bus to Chiang Rai at 6 am.  It's about 3 hours away.  I didn't really know what was going on, but apparently we were going to stay with a friend.  Turns out the friend owns a resortish place a ways out of the city, so they picked us up and drove us to this beautiful and very fancy little hotel.  We stayed in our own little adobe hut and the friend drove us around to a bunch of tourist hot spots.  The weekend consisted of driving A LOT and taking tons of pictures.  It was a lot like sightseeing with Grandma- they just love taking the individual pictures in front of everything.  But it was fun overall- esp. the ridiculous quantity of pineapple! We say 31 road-side stands in less than a twenty minute drive.  What a wonderful place.

Other highlights of the week:
-It's been pretty rainy= cooler weather
-There was a frog in the shower with me
-Paw is teaching me a thai song on the banjolele

Today, we are headed to hike up Doi Suthep, a nearby mountain/national park.  We're doing an intro to ecological field studies and apparently the mountain itself has over 1200 species of trees! Pretty exciting.  Should be a fun day!

Thai Thai for  Now!
Hannah

P.S. I put some pictures up on the fb. I will try to post some here if I figure it out...