Thailand Day 4

The Golden Triangle Tour.
We got picked up a little late and ended up leaving about 2 hours after we were slotted to. Our tour was with a very varied group of tourists. There was only one other American on the bus, a couple of French girls, some Canadians, a Dutch couple and two Israeli men in their 50s. I ended up sitting up front so I wouldn't get car sick and chatted with the Israelis for a while. That’s right! I broke the “anti-social no making small talk” rule. I thought it would be good for me to be outside my comfort zone for a while. The Israelis met in the army when they were 18. One lives in Haifa and the other lives in a kibbutz by Beersheba. They are vacationing in Thailand for 3 weeks. Surprisingly, the one that lives in Haifa knows almost no English. It was cool to chat it up with them for a bit.
Our first stop was at the "White temple" I have to say that this was probably my favorite part of the tour. The temple is beautiful and extremely understated by Thai measures. There are fountains around it and the mural inside is very modern. Also, there was a monk sitting in the middle of the temple meditating. Masha thought that he was real and argued with me for a little while that he was just deep in meditation, but he is actually made of wax :). We took a bunch of pictures here. In the pictures we took it kind of looks like we're in because of the white of the temple and the white of the clouds against the background of the deep blue sky.
On the way out I stopped to use the rest room and it was a little strange. You stand in line. Take off your shoes and put on other designated bathroom shoes. Once properly attired you go, do your thing, and then come back through the exit only to change back into your original shoes again. I think this has way too many steps. As a side note I noticed that Thai people love to have one-way traffic everywhere. There is always an entrance and an exit. In a lot of temples you have to follow only one way. The same is true for baggage storage at the airport and apparently some public bathrooms.
Our next stop was the golden triangle itself. I have to say that the location is not beautiful, and I am surprised that it's such a big tourist destination. We took pictures with Laos and Myanmar in the background, but were pretty bored since there was not much else to do there. The lunch we had there was not bad at all, but other than that “The Golden Triangle” wasn’t anything ultra exciting.
After lunch we were driven to the northernmost point of Thailand. There was a big market there and we bought ourselves some "jade bracelets" We are not convinced, but they look cute so who cares? Again, OK experience but nothing out of this world.
I will take a moment here to tell you about our guide. He makes very low brow jokes, is extremely hard to understand, and usually walks facing forward so he is also hard to hear a lot of the time. Neither Masha nor I liked him very much.
After the Northernmost point we were taken to a couple of Thai villages. We both really liked this part of the tour. Some of the older women were wearing the traditional costumes so it was nice. I thought that it was funny that some homes were built in an old school way but had satellite dishes. Everyone can see this in more detail in pictures when they are ready.
The ride back was horrible for me. We were driving fast through the mountains and I got extremely car sick. I couldn't wait to get out of that car. We were the second to get dropped off. After the Dutch couple left, the driver made a rude comment about their tip ("40 baht, that’s almost a euro, how generous" the tour guide exclaimed.) God I hated that guy.
We finished our night at the night market and bought all the presents that we needed. Both of us were completely shopped out by the end of that night. As we were walking to get a cab, both of us realized that we didn't know the address of our hotel. We never needed to remember it before since tours just picked us up and dropped us off there. We talked to some tuk-tuk drivers and thought we figured it out. However, when we got to our destination it became clear that it was not our hotel and we were totally lost. We told the driver to just circle and look for an internet cafe so that we could pull up the website but as we drove around we saw that everything was closed. Suddenly I saw our hotel sign and the crisis was averted. All is well.