Leaving Chiang Mai... finally!

Is it possible to be TOO relaxed? I would have previously thought the very idea was absolutely ludicrous but now I'm not so sure. It is a concept I am pondering... and happily testing out.
.

Sarah and Dani signed up for a Thai cooking class today. Anyone who knows me knows there is just no good reason for me to even go through the pretense of feigning interest in a cooking class, so I politely passed and planned to spend the day chilling (as opposed to every other day, right?). They left early so I took advantage of having the whole, lovely room to myself and... slept in. Aaaaah.

I figured everybody else would also be out and about by that hour so headed down to the lounge on my own, laptop in hand, planning to do some 'work' and unexpectedly found Duncan there hanging out. It took about, oh, three full minutes before we decided to go get massages. Seriously.

It is just SO cheap here to get a massage that it's almost literally impossible to pass up. I figure that, for the price of one massage at home, I can get 15 here (I'm not kidding). So since I've had four so far, that means I have to really get cracking to be able to squeeze in the remaining 11 in the week I have left here. I need to get on that.

We went to lunch and I drank coconut juice straight from a real coconut. I also let Duncan sell me on the idea of a bacon cheeseburger. I don't usually eat hamburgers in foreign countries both because it seems kind of silly to come to a foreign country and order something I could eat any day back home and also because I have had some bad foreign hamburger experiences in the past (there's something about the meat that is just so DIFFERENT, and not in a good way, than in the US). But it suddenly sounded SO good and was bringing up such tantalizing mental images of a thick, juicy burger with sizzling bacon and gooey melted cheese, I just had to try it. Mental note to self for future reference: always trust your instincts regarding red meat in foreign countries.

.

In the evening, everyone met back up at Julie's Guesthouse, the place that brought us all together in the first place, to spend a last couple of hours there before Sarah and I had to catch our bus. I swear, you would have thought we were saying goodbye for good, not just for 2 days. We just kept stalling and putting it off... and off... and off. Seriously, I wonder how much therapy for codependency runs in Thailand these days?

So now we're on a bus, riding 11 hours overnight back to Bangkok. Yuk. I wonder if it's possible to go 11 hours and not have to use the bathroom? I am definitely planning to try!