Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays, everybody! I heard that Idaho got a sorta-white Christmas, which is better than nothing. It's certainly better than the warm-and-sunny-with-slight-chance-of-showers Christmas that we had here. We had a very difficult time remembering that it was actually supposed to be Christmas. In our local 7-11 (which are multitudinous in Thailand, by the way) they had some tinsel hanging around the shop and Christmas lights around the cigarette case. That was our first indication, other than the calendar date, that Christmas was approaching.

The Peltons (the missionaries who had us over for Thanksgiving) invited us for Christmas dinner. We had traditional American food which was a nice break from stir fried veggies and rice. Not that stir fry isn't an integral part of every holiday meal. But it was very nice of them and we had a great time.

Sheena employed her 4 years of art education to make the beauty you see pictured below, which added a very "Christmasy" feel to the house we were staying in. It was a nice reminder that the holidays were near.

In other news, we are planning on heading to China very soon. On the 30th we fly from Bangkok to Shenzhen, where we'll meet up with one of our NNU buddies, Isaac Stone, who has been living there teaching English for the last year and a half. We'll spend New Year's Eve there
before heading up to Beijing. The scheme is to get jobs teaching English on the side while working on various and sundry creative projects to build our respective portfolios and digest the place we'll be living in. Beijing should be a very interesting city with the Olympics on their way this August.

Here are a few pictures of things we've done in the past month:

Our Christmas tree (Sheena made it).

Sheena, right before punching me for taking a photo of her.

The outside of Un's house, where we stay. The bamboo makes it feel so delightfully Asian.

A traditional Thai kitchen. Propane stove, rice cooker, & a mortar/pestle combo. And no oven, to Sheena's infinite chagrin.

An old temple in Chiang Mai City.

A young girl decked out in Northern Thai dress. She sits on one of the 309 steps that lead to the summit of the mountain where Wat (Temple) Doi Suthep sits.

A wall fresco at the aforementioned Wat Doi Suthep. Pretty old, we think, but we can't really tell. The temple was founded in 1383, but there's no way to tell how old the present structure is (unless you read Thai, that is).