We went to visit a nearby wat, or Buddhist temple. It also had an impressively huge buddha statue.


Afterwards we went to some gardens and this is the tribute to the king’s palace.

We celebrated the New Year in Thailand at an old historic mansion, in downtown Chiang Mai. There was an outdoor dinner which was all the fantastic Northern Thai food you could eat for about $7.

The dinner was followed by a series of cultural dances, which our kids copied on the sidelines, to the delight of many other viewers. Bence especially can certainly shake it with the best of them!


After the dinner and show, we went back to their house and did the traditional Thai thing; light lanterns and let them float up to the sky. The kids love this.


Some people even attach fireworks to them so they are trailing fireworks as the float up. There are hundreds going up all night long, quite a sight. If there are hundreds of lanterns, there are thousands of fireworks, and it is quite an amazing sound both near and echoing off in the distance.

We wish all of our friends and family a wonderful 2011; may it be filled with love and laughter!!

One of the crazy things they have for tourists here is the opportunity to see and be right beside a tiger. At first I was not too thrilled, all I could picture was the freak accident that involved one of us. However, these animals have lived their whole lives in captivity and are remarkably tame. It doesn’t hurt either that they are mostly nocturnal and we are visiting them in the heat of the day. The little cubs are the absolute cutest!


The girls even got to feed the baby tigers, they are about 3 months old.


After that Simon and I got to sit with the adult tigers, there were 3 of them. Each male weighed from 150-200 kg. When you are sitting next to one, they are huge! It was a pretty cool experience!

We are spending the holiday week in Chiang Mai with our Revelstoke friends who are living here for a year and a half. Our kids are similar ages so the house is full of action.
We visited the zoo one day.

We also went on a nice hike to a national park to see a set of 10 waterfalls.

It is always more fun for kids to hike together, it keeps the motivation going. Here we are at the top having a break:

Christmas this year was spent in the tropics of Thailand visiting with our friends from Revelstoke; Gary, Gabriella, Bence and Lutza. It was a little strange getting into the Christmas spirit amidst palm trees wearing shorts and t-shirts. There are several Christmas decorations on the nearby houses though. On Christmas eve we went carolling with 3 Americans and their Thai families. Carols were sung in both Thai and English. It was fun.
Santa did manage to find our kids and it was a happy Christmas morning for the kids.

Happy Holidays to all!