Chiang Rai for the Queen's Birthday

We had another semi-long weekend here in Thailand! It was the Queen's birthday on Sunday which means that on Monday all of Thailand has the day off and everyone celebrates Mother's Day! Wat Metang celebrated Mother's day at school on Friday.  It was suuuper emotional! The 6th graders all brought their moms to school and there was a huge ceremony all morning.  There was singing, dancing, and many different speakers, in Thai, of course so Mel and I had no idea what was really happening.  Everyone was crying though so we knew it must be touching...Then all of the students took their moms up on the stage and wai-ed them, gave them some jasmine, (The Queen's flower) and hugged and cried a lot, until their turn was over.  The Lockers came up to us and told us we would fill in for the moms who were working or who had died.  Yeah, it was that blunt.  At one point she brought me two girls who were crying hysterically and said, their mother died, go up with them.  It was so sad.  Mel and I even cried, it was so emotional.  Seeing some of my tough 6th grade boys crying with their mom was so sweet.  I had to call my mom after the ceremony. It was so tough to see so many children without moms and made me so grateful to have such a great mom!


Anyways...we decided to go up to Chiang Rai for the weekend.  It is the Northern most province and is in the mountains and super beautiful! And it isn't even that far away, only 3 1/2 hours! We were excited! We went and saw the White Temple, which was only built in 1998 and is really different than most other temples.  The architect wanted to show lots of heaven and hell references and it is stark white instead of the usual gold. 

The White Temple!

Our "punishment" skirts for wearing shorts to the temple :-(

So pretty!

The next day we decided to go on a tour of the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet.  We found a tour company that would take us on a tour all day Sunday and to many different things! We were so excited! We went and saw the Monkey caves....

We fed them some bananas!

Mel did NOT like them and was prepared to use her stick to scare them away!

They were pretty scary actually...

The monkeys were very aggressive.  I got a bucket of bananas to feed them and probably 40 of them all came at us at once! Our tour guide, Kern, took charge and started hitting his stick to clear a circle so they wouldn't attack us.  The babies kind of looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings and the older monkeys were very mean and fought each other for the nanners.  It was sort of scary sometimes.  We then moved on to Scorpion Mountain, which is the mountain that overlooks Myanmar.

Hanging over Myanmar

 Scorpion Mountain with our tour group, Italians!

 

Theeeeen, we headed over to Mae Sai, the northern most city in Thailand. It was really interesting because it has a lot of Chinese influences because they come over the border there.  It reminded me a lot of Taiwan! 

We then made our way to a yummy restaurant that had Thai food, Chinese food and Burmese food! (Sorry Laos! :-/) It was so fun! Burmese rise, chow mein, and som tom all on one plate! Good times. Next stop was the infamous Golden Triangle! This is where Myanmar, Laos and  Thailand all meet, along with their rivers! It is also very famous for producing and trafficking opium and used to be the number one exporter (? I don't know drug terms very well?) So we also went to the Opium museum and learned about opium! We learned the best position to smoke it, there are special pillows that looked really uncomfortable to smoke it on, and if you smoke it long enough you go cray cray! Good times with opium. 

We went from opium to jumping on a boat and cruising down the Mekong River! We were so excited about this! The famous Mekong! With Myanmar behind us and Laos to our left and Thailand to our right, we couldn't believe it! Another one of those moments, where Mel and I look at each other and can't believe where we are!

 

The Golden Triangle!

 Cruising down the Mekong River!

 

We docked on the Laos side and hung out in Laos for about 30 minutes, I wouldn't even really say that we have been there because it was all knock off purses, clothes and not much Loatian history...but it was cool while it lasted. 

 Our last stop was the ancient city of Chiang Saen, another old capitol city of Thailand.  We were so tired by this point though that I can't tell you much about it...

 The whole car ride back we slept and the whole bus ride back to Phrae that night we were EXHAUSTED! Such a great and tiring day and weekend! 

Miss you all!