Thailand Day 1!

This first few hours in Thailand have been a whirlwind!  I flew in on a 14 hour, red eye flight to Taiwan and it really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  I slept on and off for about nine hours and watched some movies and TV shows, it was so cool we each had our own personal TVs!  Dad let me borrow his noise-canceling headphones and it made all the difference, I never want to fly without some again! 

We had a three hour layover in Taiwan and then went on another four hour flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand.  The first thing I noticed when we were flying in was how green everything was and that there were many farms that seemed to be growing trees or large bushes, I'm not sure what those are yet.  I also noticed how oddly the buildings were spaced, there would be a condensed area of houses or stores then just open fields and farms.  I wish I could have gotten a picture but we weren’t allowed to have any electronics on during the landing.

Once we arrived in Chiang Mai we were greeted by our university correspondent and then rode in red truck taxis to our housing.  They were so fun and it was nice to have the open windows since it was so hot and humid out already.

From there I barely put my stuff down when we left to go get cell phones.  I didn’t buy one because my uncle had already bought me one and my aunt is shipping it up to me tomorrow, but I wanted to go where everyone else was going.  We ended up in this mall/department store place that had a grocery store, banks, clothing stores, and even a Dunkin' Donuts!  There was just about everything that you could need.  Once everyone got their phones we went into the grocery store and bought big containers of water since we can’t drink the tap water here, it’s not filtered enough.

When I got back I got on the internet to contact my family to let them know that I had arrived and right after that we left to go to the Chiang Mai night market.  It runs every Saturday and Sunday night and it is huge and I mean HUGE!  Streets and streets full of vendors and performers and food and people walking around, it felt like the whole city of Chiang Mai was there.  I saw a lot of interesting things but I waited on buying anything, we’ll go again next week.  Afterwards we took a taxi back to our place and I’ve been working on unpacking and getting settled in ever since.  Now I am going to go to bed and get a full night’s sleep before our orientation and first day of school tomorrow.  Goodnight!

Michelle <3