Week 3: floating lanterns and lazy days

Now that I've left the comfort of esther's and internet is no longer free I will not be able to blog as often and my blogs will be much shorter.

Floating Lanterns

The last few days we were in Chiang Mai was the lantern festival. Everyone in thailand takes these white lanterns made of a thin paper (maybe rice paper) writes wishes on them and then lights a small candle attached underneath with wire. the hot air fills the paper bags (like a hot air balloon) and the lanterns float away. the whole sky is filled with them. All weekend people were sending them up. It was very beautiful. Esther threw a fundraiser dinner for the festival. Marissa and helped out by bartending because we speak english. (not because we know the first thing about bar tending) we each sent a lantern up and also put a flower offering into the river. the idea is to absolve your sins. it was very nice. there was also a parade on the last night. it was really crazy. It was huge. it wasn't moving very fast so marissa and I decided to walk the other direction to make it move faster. it must have taken us twenty minutes to walk the parade. there was so many decodant floats.

Lazy Days in Laos

On the 14th we flew to Luang Prabang, Laos. The plan was to spend about 3 days there and then go to the Gibbon experience. unfortunately the Gibbon experience was all filled up and we couldn't go. As a result we spent the whole 7 days in Luang Prabang. We are starting to get a little bit sick of doing all the tourist activities (treks, tours, classes, etc) and there wasn't all that much else to do in Luang Prabang. So we had a pretty chill time here. There are many beautiful temples and many markets. We spent a lot of our time walking from place to place, seeing temples, going to the market and buying fresh fruit, eating. Laos culture is very relaxed. It just seems really easy to lose a day without doing all that much. I think Marissa got a little bored with it, but all in all we really enjoyed our time here. I really felt like I got to know Laos culture and the people reallly well. Luang Prabang is beautiful too. It is on a peninsula in between two rivers. It is surrounded by mountains on all sides. There a lot of travel photographers here. We also spent many of our mornings volunteering at a youth center helping kids with their english. If the learn english they can get a good job. It was really fun because we really got to learn a lot about the people here. THey are so sweet. They all invite us back to their village (many of them are from hilltribes in the north.)

Vietnam
Tomorrow we leave for Hanoi, Vietnam. We will be in veitnam for a week. We haven't really decided what we'll do there yet. In addition to Hanoi, we want to go to halong bay. we also may work I way south and enter Canbodia by land. we'll see though. Hope everyone is doing well.