One more day in Chiang Mai. We've decided to get out on the town with a motorscooter today instead of a bike.

Yesterday was our cooking class. We made curry with a stone mortar among many other yummy things. If we can find the ingredients in the US you, our friends and family, are going to be very lucky. We considered taking a Thai massage course today but opted not to so you are not going to be that lucky.

Our class was taught by a hilarious, fiery Thai woman Gan. She teased everyone and explained the art of Thai cooking with such informative phrases as "The little chilies are spicier, like Thai people, small but dangerous. Big chilies are like you, foreigners, big and mild." Besides eating our weight in wonderful food we had made ourselves, the class also gave us the chance to talk to some other travelers form all over the place. We ended up going out in the evening with our Thai teacher, a Dutch couple and an American on a Watson that they had met.

Gan took us to a Thai club attached to a hotel. It was a strange crowd and a stranger act. The crowd was a mix of young Thais pumping their arms in the air to the music, older foriengers with Thai ?escorts? and a mix of young foreigners who rolled in baffled off the street and older foreigners from the attached hotel.

The act was a live band with probably 5 different singers who took turns. I thought I was seeing something else when one of the male singers came out in full 80s gear with a jean jacket and a curly wig, but then the 3 almost nude female singers came out accompanied my guy dancers who looked like they had failed to pass into Brittany Spears' group. Later the jean jacket guy returned with a new getup. On his chest he had painted some sort of super hero emblem. He had a cape and long tan long Johns (meant to look like skin) with a skimpy thong over them. The kicker though was he aptly formed sock stuck sideways in the long johns. I don't even know.

What kind of music accompanied this you want to know? Well everything from the macarena to the Cranberries to a techno version of "I'm going o San Francisco"

I spent the evening drinking a very Thai drink, whiskey with soda water and a dash of coke, listening to our Thai teacher tell me how drunk she was and that she had to work in the morning (did she teach our class hung over?)and just being baffled.