Bangkok to Chiang Mai
This morning Riley woke up at 3:30am talking about elephants with flowers on them and oranges. She was so happy. Somehow Sage and I didn’t feel too bad or sleepy (surprising given how much wine we drank the night before) so we all played in bed for a while. Riley anounced that it was time to wake up and have breakfest (“Can we wake up now?), so we ordered her fish and chips and a glass of milk and started packing up our bags. Since we arrived at the hotel, Riley has been trying to call Michael on every hotel phone she can find. This morning she asked again, so I let her call on the cell phone to tell him about the swimming pool and the fish.. She’s getting pretty good at holding a phone conversation. It’s pretty entertaining to put her on speaker phone. At 6am the swimming pool opens, so we put on our swim suits and went downstairs. It was still completely dark (Sage got some really cool pictures with his tripod), but the sky quickly got light while we were swimming. We were pretty much the only ones around, it was really peacefull. There were lights that changed colors on the bottom of the pool that Riley really liked. After a while we went back up and showered and finished packing in time for a quick breakfest before heading to the airport.
People keep coming up and touching Riley here, some even pick her up or kiss her cheek. Sometimes she doesn’t mind, and sometimes she doesn’t like it, but it’s hard for us to tell how’s she’s feeling. I didn’t want her to feel weird or bad or uncomfortable about it, so we taught her to put her hand up and say “no touch” if she doesn’t want someone to touch her. We practiced a few times and I think she’s got it. We’ll see if she actually does it.
When the conversation gets over Riley’s head and she can’t understand, she’ll break in and say “What you telling guys, hey!! what you saying??” over and over until we explain to her. She does it during tours too when she can’t understand the tour guide. “What’s the lady saying?”
In Chiang Mai we stayed at the D2 hotel. Our first day we ended up napping much of the afternoon (it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep sharing a bed with Riley… I love sleeping next to her and cuddling in the morning, she’s very sweet and funny when she first wakes up, but all night long she moves around a kicks… anyway, that’s why we were so tired) and swimming in the pool. In the evening we walked through Chaing Mai’s famous night market, which is basically stall after stall of merchants selling everything you can imagine. There’s a lot of knock-offs for sale… I thought the Tiffany stalls were amusing, everything looked the same, except the color was just slightly different. There’s also lots of colorful food and kinciknacks… plenty to look at. Eventually we made our way to a restaurant and had on ok meal. The highlight was not the food, but the geckos which were everywhere. Riley had a great time spotting them and chasing after them. After dinner we took our first Tuk Tuk ride…
Good fun for all. It felt like we were on a crazy amusement park ride chasing after Dallas and Vida’s Tuk Tuk.
Click her for pictures