Cute Clothes and Thai Boys

Rounding out Day 1 in Chiang Mai was 1) realizing there was a vintage clothing shop right across the street from our little outdoor cafe of Thai Tea ecstacy and 2) dinner with Nick and his friends at LaPaz cafe somewhere just outside central Chiang Mai.

The vintage shop was just basically awesome. The shop person, a hip guy of around 20 took a liking to julia's hip yellow sunglasses as we purused the racks and after julia had found three shirts and I found a sweater (kelly green) and my first pair of hip flats (white with green flowers), julia was generous enough to trade her hip yellow sunglasses for the best find of the day. (Danrae, we hope you love it.)

Upon getting back to our guest house, we called up Nick. Nick is a Thai guy we met in the Taipei airport during our final lay-over. Having spent the last 14 months in LA working on his English, Nick is a 19 year old guy returning to Thailand to go to university. And he was eager to show us around his favorite city, Chiang Mai, where he was from. (Liking to think I have somewhat of a creep-monitor by now in my travels, I rated this guy a zero, being not a creep at all.)

We called up Nick. He invited us out to dinner with his friends, his first night back in Chiang Mai. He would pick us up in half an hour.

And dinner was a great experience. Julia had read that Thai people eat very communally, and this extended into every one taking their fork to the same dish and sharing just one bowl of soup--each person dipping their spoon in for each sip of the delicious Tom Yum soup (my favorite). We had multiple, multiple dishes from friend rice to sweet sauce pork to some type of fried whole fish (yes, I tried it) to hot dogs dipped in batter and fried to octopus to things I'm not even sure what they were but they were spicy! With a constant flow of mixed drinks (seriously, you basically had to be forceful for them not to refill them) and good conversation and laughs, the night was a very, very good one. Sadly, julia ended up feeling not very well at all and we retired, rather thankfully (it was a full day for us) back to the guest house to sleep soundly.