What are we doing??

We've had no significant adventures to report recently. Mostly we're just living the good life here in Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai is blanketed with excellent restaurants which we've slowly been working our way through. Every few nights I get a lot of cheap and excellent sushi from the night market. We also frequent a number of vegetarian Thai places and eat a lot of Tom Yam and Tom Kha soups, papaya salads, various kinds of curry, and mango with sticky rice. There's one of the absolute best north Indian restaurants I've ever been to here, as well as a great Mexican place, and a "California-style" burrito place (run by a young guy from New Orleans, actually). We just got back from an all-you-can eat vegetarian dim-sum buffet, which was awesome. We'll probably go back to that and take pictures next time.

There's also a shockingly large number of excellent used bookstores here--better than most cities in the US, in fact. So we've been doing a large amount of reading. I re-read 'Anna Karenina', a pretty good sci-fi book called 'Timescape', and a few collections of nonfiction essays. I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse', and Karen Armstrong's book 'A History of God', both of which are pretty interesting. Oh yea, and a really amazing autobiographical book called 'Planet of the Blind' about the author's experiences growing-up blind. It's some of the most vivid, descriptive writing I've read in a long long time. Jen has been reading from the same pool of books I have, only she's also read several poker books as well.

So, life is great! Sometime later this week or next week we plan to do another cooking class, and go on a rock-climbing trip which we're very excited about, but in the mean time things are pretty quiet.