spontaneous day

yesterday i ventured out on my own to hang up some more english help signs around the other side of the university campus. i ended up finding the language institute building this time. in my search for a regular posting board (not a fancy one covered in glass), i saw some postings for a thai conversation class. the latest installment started already, but i though i would ask about it out of curiosity. the girl in the office directed me to the guy in charge. he spoke english with a britich accent, which was really intriguing to me. once he explained a little bit about the class and the cost, he asked if i had an hour. since i had no real plans, i said yes and he offered to take me to the class and observe the last hour for free! it was pretty cool. it was only the second day, so the teacher was teaching many things that i have already learned myself, so it wasnt quite so scary to walk into the middle of the class and have to recite things in thai! i will probably not take a class there because it is much more expensive than the ymca, but it was a cool opportunity none the less.

after lunch, even though it was a little misty and cloudy, chris wanted to go to doi suthep, a place we have been meaning to go but it has been so cloudy! doi suthep is a wat (temple) on the closest mountain to us. you can see it from our apartment window. we tried to catch a truck truck from our house, but they wanted 300 baht to go there when it should cost 40! so we jumped on our bikes to ride to the foot of the mountain. we found a truck, but the driver was determined to get 10 passengers to make the ride worth it. after waiting about 15 minutes, there were a couple europeans that were interested in going. the guy from switzerland spoke thai and he got the driver to leave without a full load of people, but for just a bit more money.
it was a 20 minute drive up this really curvy road where everyone ignores the lines in the road!
the temple is really cool and is its own little village at the top of the hill. you have to walk up 306 stairs that are lined with naga the dragon to get to the temple. there was lots of gold and more buildings than your usual wat. when you go to the one side there is this amazing lookout to chiang mai. you can see everything. luckily it cleared up a lot by the time we got there and we had a really good view. there are pictures up on shutterfly. here is what the lookout looks like.