One Last Entry before We Go

Let's say you travel around the world. Which of the following activities would be on your list of priorities? (a) Spending hours in the hotel computer lab, playing video games. (b) Eating at the McDonald's in the hotel lobby. (c) Spending the day drinking Corona at the bar next door to the hotel. (d) Getting a tattoo in the tattoo parlor off the hotel lobby. (e) None of the above.

My choice is (e), but there are a whole lot of Western tourists in this area who choose a combination of (a-d). Maybe I just have too strict a definition of acceptable vacation choices, but the main rule on my list is this: don't do/eat things that you can do/eat at home. (I realize that I can blog at home, but that's different, because I'm practicing my travel writing skills, skills which will support me when I move to Thailand. And I'm entertaining my loyal readers.)

Breaking that rule, we ate dinner at a pizza place tonight. (But it was Thai pizza, he rationalized.) There isn't anywhere around here to get good Thai food, and we didn't want our last meal here to be bad Thai food. It was nothing like dinner last night, at a restaurant owned by a friend of a friend of Rebecca's: Eat Me Restaurant and Art Gallery. I didn't expect to be eating at a luxury restaurant any time on this trip, especially not one with $50 bottles of wine. We ate with Jim, from Axis of Evil, and Rebecca's friend Brian and his boyfriend, whose name sounded like "A." Decorating the walls was a series of photographs re-enacting ancient Greek sculpture using nude male figures. And beach balls. It was a perfect combination of goofy and artsy. Jim and Brian teach at the same university here, so we were glad that they seemed to hit it off. Tim volunteered to pay before he realized that a single dish at Eat Me cost about as much as a meal for four up in Chiang Mai. Ouch.

So we have to be in the lobby of the hotel at 5:45 in the morning. I should try to sleep, but of course I'm not tired, nor will I be for a few hours. I suppose this will help me sleep on the plane. I was going to write up a list of the things I forgot to mention in my various blog posts, but I forgot most of them. Maybe they'll end up on my travelogue CD after I ask Rebecca to remind me of them. I'll close with the name of the lounge singer in the Hotel Amari Rincome in Chiang Mai: Dang Fantastic. A good description of this entire trip.

See you guys in a couple of days.