Our last day in Chiang Mai began with a Thai cooking class. My favorite part was the field trip to the market, where the instructor taught us all about the raw ingredients we would be using. I never knew there were so many types of rice!

Ryan and I cooked up some yummy pad thai, pad se ew, two soups, and a green and red curry dish, with our very own homemade curry paste. Yes, I did actually make and eat curry. We learned that
1) Curry tastes a ton better when made with fresh ingredients including chilli peppers, garlic, lemongrass, galangal (similar to ginger), shallots, and coriander
2) Curry dishes are very good and not spicy if only an itsy bitsy bit of curry paste is put in them for flavor (that would be my observation) and
3) Making curry paste is time consuming and an upper body workout.

           

The cooking workout was followed by a Thai massage at one of the Lila spas. Lila is a business that employees former inmates, providing them with good jobs when they re-enter society. Thai massage includes a bit of deep tissue massage and a whole lot of stretching, in some rather odd positions. I think Ryan found it more uncomfortable than I did.

On to dinner at the night market.  The walk took us past a middle school marching band practicing behind the school. It was fun to watch and listen for a while as they played songs from The Wizard of Oz. We also walked by a ton of temples, one with a large stone structure in the middle of the complex that looked like a mountain from the back.
      

Unfamiliar fruit count now up to 5.
The three tried in Chiang Mai were durian (I didn’t think it smelled that bad, but Ryan said my nose wasn’t working), mangosteen, and sapodilla. I also learned that we’ve actually been eating rambutans, not lychees, though lychees, rambutans, and longans are all part of the same family.