We're in Thailand!

Last week was a frantic week in Delhi, buying souveniers, trying to eat at all our favorite restaurants, confirming our ongoing flights and hotel reservations and sending things to the post office. After a lovely farewell dinner with our friends from JNU, Dan and I boarded a 1am flight from New Delhi to Bangkok, arriving at 6:45am Bangkok time. The city is huge! It is also very tall and suprisingly clean. We were happy to arrive at our gorgeous guesthouse, Sri Ayuttaya, and settle into a comfortable and clean room (with a private bathroom and shower!!!). We've been eating a lot of great thai food, and also some homey scrambled egg breakfasts, and cornflakes with soymilk. Compared to New Delhi, Bangkok is a fantasticly easy city to get around in. There are proper taxis with meters, and there are also tuk-tuks (which rival the auto-rickshaws of india). There is a strange mix of street food and diesel fuel and fish in the air, constantly changing as we whiz by the markets going 60mph in the tuk-tuks. I decided to sign up for a 5 day, 30hr course at Wat Po traditional massage school, and I enjoyed it so much that Dan decided to join a different class the next day. In those five days, we learned 5 complicated steps to the fascinating dance that is thai massage. Some of the steps, as Dan puts it, involve kneeling, bending, twisting, and stepping on people, for an hour and a half. At the end of the course, there is a final exam where we had to do the entire massage on a person as the teachers looked on. We both passed and now have nice certificates to show for it! Tomorrow we're taking the overnight bus up to chiang mai, and we'll be staying there for about a week, before going back to Bangkok then down to Cambodia! In Cambodia we'll see Siem Reap (Angor Wat) and Pnom Penh. From there the plan is to head up to Vietnam, to the city of Hoi Ann, by way of Saigon. After Hoi Ann we'll go up to Halong Bay, and then across past Hanoi to Sapa, before going back to Hanoi. Our departure is May 16 :( This trip has been incredible, and I'll be sad to see this last 5 weeks slip by so quickly!