I am in Luang Prabang, Laos right now, after spending the last couple of days in Chiangmai, Thailand. Elizabeth and I flew from Singapore directly to Chiangmai. We did the usual- caught a taxi at the airport to our guesthouse where we crashed for the night, arising to a glorious morning. The weather was soooo perfect the entire time we were there. Sunny but not too hot. What a difference from Singapore! Chiangmai was certainly still humid, but nothing compared to Singapore where the wetness just hangs in the air, day and night.

We rented a motorbike for next few days and spent our time zooming from place to place. We did a lot of shopping at local markets and factory stores. Elizabeth had a list about a mile long of people she had to buy gifts for, and luckily Chiangmai is the perfect place for gift-buying and she was able to find things for nearly everyone there. Besides shopping, we also went out to the Elephant Camp at Mai Sa. I had been there before with Colleen, Chizuru, Nathan, and Sarah, but what a difference! The place has developed so much- many more elephants, more visitors, and the show now involves around 20 elephants instead of the handfull that performed for us 4 years ago. Also, the elephants have learned all kinds of new tricks. They play soccer, play the harmonica, dance, curtsy, bow, and even paint beautiful pictures.

We also went to two very different, but equally "cultural" shows, while in Chiangmai. The first was a lady boy cabaret, where the beautiful transgender thai men, who happen to look like stunning female catwalk models, put on an over-the-top cabaret show. The cabaret involved gorgeous costumes, elaborate sets of royal palaces, Asian jungles with a real waterfall, Havana Cuba, and even an Egyptian tomb, all while danging and lip-synching to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai songs... The sets and costumes blew me away, as did the exceptional beauty of the Thai men perfoming for us, though the lip-synching and awkward dancing sometimes had me inwardly laughing. I think the "girls" were concentrating so hard on moving like women that they lost the abiility to dance with ease and their movements sometimes looked quite awkward and stiff. There was one girl though, who was quite amazing! After the show we go to see them up-close and I have to say that their beauty was more stunning from afar, because the masculine traits were much more apparent up-close and of course when talking to them...

The next evening we went to a Khantoke dinner at the Old Chiangmai Cultural Center. This was a traditional meal where we comfortably lounged on the floor watching Thai dance performers while tasting many of the different Northern Thai specialties. We ate till we were stuffed, watched the Thai dancing until we nearly fell asleep from satiation and the slow, entrancing movements of the dancers, and we decided it was time to go, hopped on our motorbike, and went off to the night bazaar.