Emma Willard School in Thailand

Day 4 – First Day in Chiang Mai 

As everyone awoke and looked out the blue curtain of their small but relatively comfortable train bunk, you could see the excitement in everyone’s faces to finally arrive in Chiang Mai. This happiness was then quickly shot down by the fact that we still had 5 more hours to go, but this didn’t matter because we were all having fun together. We all got ready in our temple outfits and ate a small breakfast on the train. When the train screeched to a stop, the chatter and loudness of our excitement  quickly filled the train.  We then left the train station to begin our first day in Chiang Mai. We proceeded to the hotel to freshen up and leave our bags before going to lunch. 

After lunch we got into our new party bus to go visit some extraordinary temples. These temples were covered from head to toe in rich colors such as golds and reds of all shades. We also made some new friends. You wouldn’t believe it, but they were monks! The friendliest monks on earth; they told us about their religion and what they were studying, plus they told us funny jokes. We were all upset that we had to leave our new monk friends, but we still had a whole day of adventure ahead of us. 

We all returned to our party bus and went to the Umbrella Factory. We didn’t know what to expect and it turned out to be one of the highlights of our day.  When we arrived, they showed us how they made every part of the umbrella. Now we know this doesn’t sound very interesting, but we haven’t gotten to the cool part yet. The last step of the process was painting the umbrella with beautiful designs varying from dragons to elephants to flowers. We soon found out that we could get anything (we mean anything) personalized. Everyone then quickly raced for any open artists station shooting out words a mile-a-minute. Some of us got designs done on our phones or our shoes and when everyone was done, we put them all together to take a picture of all the awesomeness.

We knew it was time to leave when it started to get dark and everyone started to get hungry. So we left with all of our amazing new things for dinner. When we arrived at the restaurant, we were all ready to eat. The dinner was very good, but as everyone’s eyes grew weary we knew it was time to return to the hotel and get a good sleep to prepare for the next fun day ahead of us. Today was a really great day that we will never forget.

Love,

Jharana & Ximena