Happy new year!

Perinteinen jokilaiva. - A traditional thai style river boat.

Our funny guide.

Fishing.

Mantree...

... and ladytree.

Scorpion Tailed River Boat Village.

The water level of the river Ping after the tsunami in 2004!

Who has the heart to ask for a ride from this gentleman?

The Grand Palace, Bangkok.

Quite a few hours of handicrafts I suppose.

Is this real?

New Year's party.

This is only the beginning.

Exchanging gifts in a holy light.

The party people.

Happy New Year everybody! Before telling you about our new year's festives I will shortly conclude our trip to Chiang Mai.

We went for a little river boat cruise on our last day in Chiang Mai. The boats were traditional thai style and the back of the boat reminded of a scorpion's tail, and hence the name Scorpion Tailed Boats. Our guide was a known historian (according to his own words) and he was a funny old man. He ended all of his historical facts to a joke to which he himself laughed at the most. He had a pretty strong accent so it was a little bit difficult to understand him but what we did understand is that it used to take 5 months to travel from Bangkok to Chiang Mai by these boats. We made a stop at the Scorpion Tailed River Boat Villade where we were served a traditional thai dessert: sweet sticky rice with mango. Our guide could not wait to be able to show us the man-tree and the woman-tree...he was laughing so hard that he almost had tears in his eyes.

We took the bus to Bangkok on Thursday. We are now staying at Khao San Road and although it is absolutely packed with tourists it is a must-see if you are in Bangkok. We got a room from Khao San Palace which is right in the heart of this area. Luckily the bars in Thailand close around 1am... :)

The new year's party yesterday was great. We met a lot of new people and everybody was really nice to us. It was also great to see a thai-home and be a part of a typical thai party. There was a lot of delicious home made food: squid, scallops, fish, bbq pork and chicken, some vietnamise stuff, crab, king prawns and fruit. The food was served pretty much until the end of the evening. The drinking culture, however, was something new to us. Whereas in Finland people bring their own beer, thai people bring whiskey or other liquers to a party (and they mix it with coke or mineral water). One of the girls explained that this is because thai culture is about sharing. I had never thought of it from this perspective and the more I think about it the more I like it. How come we have never thought about this in Finland?

The party ended quite soon after the countdown for the new year. We took the taxi to Khao San and it was quite a circus that was waiting for us here! There were probably thousands of people on the street, drinking, dancing and singing and the whole area was like a gigantic bar. At some point we needed to get through a group of people who were dancing Macarena in the middle of the street, how random is that! What a night all in all!

Tomorrow we will take the bus to Krabi. Hopefully the sun is waiting for us over there, fingers crossed!