Busy Bees!

CHAING MAI (excuse the massive amounts of info...we've been busy. Since it is so much info, it is divided up with subheadings)
- We like this city much more than Bangkok - it is cleaner and it is enveloped in beautiful tree-covered mountains. We visited a wat in the mountains that overlooks the city which gave an interesting vantage point for the city and of course we paid homage to the large buddah there and rang the bells for good luck. While in Chaing Mai, we also visited the following factories:
jewelry: saw beautiful jewlery being made...mainly jade, ruby, emerald, and sapphire things. I bought a really cute ruby ring.
umbrella: a lot of steps go into making these umbrellas - paper making, painting, sanding wood, gluing pieces together, cutting perfectly shaped pieces.
teak: When I am rich, I am importing the beautifully carved pieces of furniture that these woodsmiths make. Goregous scenes complete with elephants, monkeys and villages emerge from trunks of trees.
silk: what a lot of work for some fabric...it all starts with the boiling of cocoons and the tedious job of pulling out strings and moves to dying and looming.

HILL TRIBE TREK
Plowing through rice fields, through the humid, hot jungle, and a bamboo rafting we went! Why would we expose ourselves to such torture? Well, to visit the hill tribes! The hilltribes are minority groups in Thailand that live in the northern mountains. Most of the groups live very secluded lives and don't have TV, radio, electricity, cars, etc. After hiking in the jungle (I have sooooo much more of an idea of what Vietnam would have been like) and sweating more than humanly possible, we arrived at our first temporary home of the Lisu tribe. Basically envision chickens, pigs, dogs, people, red dirt floors, simple housing, squat toilets, beautiful Crouching Tiger-like mountains, and farms and that is where we found ourselves. The stars were absolutely goregous at night and the chickens, pigs, and roosters made some interesting noises for all of us to enjoy!
To get to our next tribe, we rode elepants (woo hoooo!) who were super cute and exciting and made our own bamboo raft to float down the river. The next tribe, Karen tribe, lives in teak homes that are on stilts about 10 feet above the ground on the river. The kids all were swimming and water buffalo (picture horse and hippo mix) were roaming freely. The houses of this tribe were much more substantial and we fancied them more. At night, we drank Chang Beer (6 % here in Thailand - catches up to you !) and our guides sang Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, and Simon and Garfunkel songs in addition to teaching us the Elephant Song. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did:

Elephant, elephant, elephant
Have you ever seen elephant?
Elephant have big body
Elephant have long trunk which we call moung
Elephant have two teeth we call neah
Elephant have two eyes and two ears
Elephant, Elephant, Elephant, Elephant, Elephant

TRADITIONAL THAI DINNER
We went to a Kabuki dinner which entails sitting on the ground and sharing a variety of dishes with your comrades. We dined n fried pork, chicken, spicy pork, sweet rice, sticky rice, fried bananas, and chili paste-ish mush. In addition to feasting on such healthy food, we watched traditional Northern dancing which was surprisingly slllooowwww paced and included some great outfits (chicken costumes, for example) and some neat props (fire, swords, long Halloween like fingernails). In addition to this dancing, we saw Hill Tribe dancing with the cutest kids you could ever imagine! Just the happiest things ever. One of their dances included a dragon suit with 2 people in it and they crept up behind some viewers and scared them to death! It was a riot. It should be noted that some 13 year old British girl was behind us and was balling her eyes out the whole time and her dad kept telling her to be quiet and that she was a drama queen. I thought she was going to die of suffocation.