Chiang Mai

Hello friends and family!
We're up north in Chiang Mai right now. We took an overnight train from Bangkok which was pretty cool. Bangkok is the second largest city in Thailand but only has 250,000 people living in it. It has been really nice getting out of the big city. You can walk anywhere here so we've done a TON of walking. Both of us are even kind of sore from all of the walking. Luckily you can get a foot massage here for only $2/ half an hour which we both indulged in yesterday. We are staying at this funky little backpacker place called Julie's Guest House (I like the name:) that has more white backpackers than we know what to do with from all over the world. One thing we have noticed is the abundance of women traveling both in groups and by themselves. There is probably a ratio of 3 to 1 in favor of women travelers here. Something you probably wouldn't see if you were in Egypt but here, women have no problem traveling on their own.
So this place is FILLED with people trying to sell you on excursions. You can go visit the hilltribe peoples (like the long-neck women), go riding on an elephant, whitewater rafting, climbing and trekking. We are leaning towards a zip line tour of the jungle. There is a lot of controversy about supporting the exploitation of the long-neck women who are being used as tourist bait for the Thai government. Also, a lot of the elephant operations here don't really take very good care of their elephants by over-working them and providing poor living conditions. Therefore, we decided to go with an excursion that did not involve these things. We'll let you know how it goes.
Last night we went to a street market. They close down this popular street every Saturday night and people come to sell their wares. You see a lot of the same stuff as everywhere else but this was nice because there were actually Thai people there shopping instead of just foreigners. Gabe ate some questionable food trying to get the full Thai experience. Luckily he didn't decide to try the cockroaches and other insects they had for sale to eat. It was a great experience and we bought some cool stuff to bring home.
So finally I wanted to mention that we heard the song "West Virginia" play again today in a restaurant. Not sure what the fascination is with that song but I will continue to document how many times we hear it while we are here.
We're not sure where we are going to go after this. Probably down south to the beaches which means we either fly (that's expensive) or take the train back to Bangkok and then a bus down to the beach. The world's largest Full Moon Party takes place on July 19th on an island down south. They have anywhere from 8,000-30,000 people come to one particular island for the party. We've decided not to go because we would rather spend our beach time with each other rather than 10,000 other tripping foreigners. So we'll probably head to the other side of the country first to miss the crowds and then visit Ko Tao later to go diving!
Ok, well we miss all of you and would love to hear from you. It costs us only 50 cents for an hour of internet use so feel free to send an email or two. We'll try to post some pictures now.

Love, B & G

p.s. Mom and Dad- please love on the kids for us!!!!