I just ate delicious Thai food, cooked by ME!

I realized I forgot to mention our trip to Tainan (Southern Taiwan) in between Penghu and Kending to see Kate and her family for a day. Her little brother (Charlie) was so sweet, and drove Kate and Clay out to the Kaohsiung airport to pick us up so we wouldn't have to take the train to Tainan. Then we got to take part in the neighborhood BBQ celebrating Mid Autumn Festival and be completely stuffed with Chinese BBQ! After we got to stop by and see Charlie's beautiful wife Olivia, and their adorable 2 month old daughter, Fion. Then we walked along the river front to see fireworks, lit sparklers ourselves, then hung out at a nice cafe (which didn't have cold beer, so Andrew and Clayton had to drink their beers on ice! Ha!) They helped us find a place to stay for the night, and then the next morning we had shaved ice at a famous Tainan spot and went go-carting! My legs were too short to comfortably step on the gas, so my fastest lap was slower that Kate's slowest lap. yay being short! We were then dropped off at the Tainan train station to take the train to Kending.

And I forgot to talk about the point of our Three Gorges Cruise, the Three Gorges! They were, as I kept calling them to the annoyance of Andrew, "'Gorge'ous." We passed through them so we saw them from the boat, they were beautiful and breathtaking, and we took lots of pictures. I wish I could have come earlier to see them at their full height, but at least I saw them before they are 20 meters shorter! Definitely glad we did the cruise down the Yangtze. (We learned from Michael that the whole river in Chinese is called another name, but a British guy named the entire river Yangtze because the section he saw was called the Yangtze, he didn't see the whole river or bother to ask if it had a different name.

OK, back to where I left off:

We had breakfast at the airport and then figured out the MRT (subway) system to get to the stop closest to the train station. When we got to the train station, we dropped off our big bags at the left luggage room since we would only be in Singapore for a little bit. We stopped by our hostel, but it was too early to get our room, so we walked through Chinatown, and took the MRT to see the ultra famous Raffles Hotel, and window shop at the gigantic shopping complex of Raffles City. We had a delicious Indian lunch buffet, and then went back to the hostel and completely crashed for the afternoon. (we were exhausted in Beijing, and really didn't get much sleep on the plane to Singapore) We wanted to see the Botanical gardens, but never had time to. But we made it out to the Singapore Zoo for the "Night Safari." They have the nocturnal section of the zoo open from 6:30pm to 12am, so you can see animals doing their thing at night when they are active, instead of just sleeping during the day time. And the zoo has natural barriers and clear panes so you are just mere inches from an animal, or can see them clearly without any cages. I really liked how they have the zoo set up. Anyway, we were mere inches from leopards, had harmless fruit bats hanging inches from our (well, Andrew's) heads. We got to see a flying squirrel leap past us, lions, sea otters, mousedeer, and a whole bunch of other cool creatures. We watched their "Creatures of the Night" show, where they trained sea otters to sort cans and bottles for recycling, hyenas, a gigantic python, barn owl fly by our head, bearcats scaling a rope over our heads. It was all a lot of fun. And if you made a donation, you could have your picture taken with a wild cat of some sort, and hold a snake and take pictures! Andrew held the snake, I just stuck with the cat that hissed at me.

The next day we went back to the zoo to see the rest of the animals, which ended up taking the whole day! They have a cool "Fragile Forest" area, where it mimics a rainforest, and you get to walk in and have hundreds of butterflies flying around, bats hanging in trees, birds squawking at you, and my favorite, curious lemurs that go by your hand as you try to take a picture. They had the standard zoo animals (lions, giraffes, white tigers, hippos, etc.) but they also had cool primate areas that was big enough to support a few families of monkey (or baboon or whatever the primate was.) So the primates weren't just a few chimps in a cage staring wistfully at you, it was packs of primates ignoring you because they were busy defending territory, or grooming, or taking care of their young.

After the zoo, we headed to the train station, and took a sleeper train to Kuala Lumpur, arriving at 6:40am in the morning. Head breakfast at the train station and then taxied to our hostel. Of course, we were too early to check in to our room again, so we had some coffee and tea at a local cafe, and then went to see the Petronas towers! Too bad the sky bridge is closed on Mondays, the one day of the week we were there. But we walked around the Petronas mall, which was very upscale. Then we went back to our room and, guess what? Crashed. We woke up in the afternoon and went to a really tall communications tower that I can't remember the name of. But you can go to the top and see Kuala Lumpur from above, and be eye level from the Petronas towers. We had dinner at a cafe in the tower, and then headed back to our hotel because the next morning was a 7am taxi ride to the airport.

We got into Chiang Mai around 2:30pm yesterday, and was picked up by Noi, a wonderful lady that works at the hotel/hostel we are staying at. She asked what we wanted to do while here, and is helping us book our stuff, everyone at the hotel has been so nice! So today we had the day course in Thai cooking. I learned how to make: Hot and Sour soup, spring rolls, green curry, pad thai, papaya salad, and chicken with cashew nuts. Andrew made: Fried bananas, thai beef salad, coconut soup, yellow curry, and chicken spicy noodles. We got to eat what we cooked, and it was all delicious!!! Needless to say, we were allowed to take our leftovers with us, since no one could finish all of their food. We also got a cookbook that included the recipes of what we made today, and lots of other yummy thai dishes. Tonight we are going to try shopping at the night bazaar, and tomorrow we are getting picked up at 8:30am to go bamboo rafting and elephant riding! I love Thailand!