Thailand: Day 2

Hi everyone, Bad news. The computer we have access to right now does not accept a memory card from our camera so right now we don't have a way to put pictures on the blog. But we are going to be at the church later today and staying with another family later this week, so hopefully at some point we can put pictures up - they just may be from the whole week and you'll have to figure out what they are! :-)

Everyone is doing well - Elijah has even learned how to say "Swatdikaa" which means hello and bow to people, and I probably butchered the spelling on that word! He is really taken by the Thai people with their smiles and friendliness. They are such a loving culture and love American children - they think he is so cute and want to hold him and touch his hair. He's not too sure about that but he tries his best to be friendly to everyone! :-)

Yesterday (Monday) was a very busy day! We woke up early, around 6:30 am after going to bed about 7:30 pm and had breakfast with the Todd family. We had french toast and mango, it was really good! By the way, if you want to see pictures of the missionary families, click on "Chiang Mai Team" on my links on the right side of this blog. Then Sean Todd sat down with us and we came up with an itinerary for the day. He had asked O, a Thai Christian at the Cheung Doi church, to take us around yesterday and O graciously said he would do that. We had such a good time with O! He was able to practice his English, which is very good by the way, and he taught us a lot of Thai words and phrases. He and Elijah quickly became good buddies!

First we went to the Chiang Mai zoo and wow is it different from zoos in the states. We had so much fun there because you can get so close to the animals - there is barely any distance between you and the fences. Elijah got to feed a giraffe some bean sprouts and an elephant some bananas. He also got to ride a small horse around part of the zoo. I have the cutest pictures from the zoo and hopefully I can put them up soon. This is not a walking zoo though, although I saw some people walking. It is about 24 acres of hills and winding roads and so O kind of followed us with the car and then we drove from one area to another. No wonder Thais are in much better shape than Americans - they do a lot of walking and eat a lot of fruits and vegetables!

After the zoo, we ate some wonderful Thai food at a restaurant near the Cheung Doi church. We told O what kinds of food we wanted and we trusted him to order for us. He did a great job and the food was great! We had a big buffet of different foods on our table and shared them all - for all of us it cost about $10! We then went back to the Cheung Doi church and O showed us some of his artwork - he draws wonderful Christian themed paintings and his dream is to come to America one day and open an art studio of his own. He is very talented and even showed us his art studio on the Chiang Mai University campus later in the day. It was so neat to hear his dreams and hear the story of how he came to know Christ. When we told the missionaries later that evening how much English he had talked with us, no one believed us because they said he is embarrassed to speak English around them! I guess we ratted him out by telling them how good he was! :-)

After lunch, we headed up the mountain to visit the Soi Duthep temple - O said that this was the center of religion for Chiang Mai. There are hundreds of temples in the city, but this one is the main one where spiritual rest and peace are found. You can see the entire city of Chiang Mai from the this temple and it was just beautiful! We climbed 307 steps to get to the top - we were all pretty exhausted when we got back down but it was worth it. There were so many interesting things to see up there and O explained them all since he used to be Buddhist as well. We saw many families with their small children bowing down to idols and burning incense to Buddha. It was very eye opening to see the need for Christianity in this country. We had a great day and then topped it off by having dinner with all of the Chiang Mai missionary families last night. We ate pad thai and mango with sticky rice & coconut milk. It was very yummy, and then we sat around and talked with them. They asked us questions and we asked them some questions. It was a great time to hear their stories of life on the mission field and gain some perspective that way. Well, I need to go get ready for the day. We have another busy day planned but somewhere in there I'm going to get a Thai massage and I'm very excited about that. It costs about $10 for a 2 hour massage - wow!!!! We will post again soon and hopefully get those pictures up. Have a great day! - Summer