Today is the Queen’s Birthday and therefore Mother’s Day in Thailand.  We had to be up earlier today so that we could leave Mirror at 8am to go to the ceremony for the Queen in town.

We got to the Administration Building and had to park on the grass because of the massive amount of people that had shown up.  The grass was soaked and incredibly muddy because of all the rain we’ve gotten this week.  Then we trekked through the muddy grass up to the road where there were food, clothes, and all other type of vendors.  We went to the main pavilion and joined everyone else in a line to watch the proceedings.  Two people from each village, I believe, lined up to step onto the stage and present a decorated vase for the Queen.  Each village was announced to the crowd, and you could see people in traditional hill tribe dress throughout the crowd.  After that, they played two songs, in which everyone sang along to.  Naturally we have no idea what the songs were but I’m assuming they have to do with the Queen.  After that, some people went up to the stage to present presents to their mothers.

Soon after, we began to head back and twice we had to push our cars out of the mud.  Well, other people did, I couldn’t because of my foot.  It was an effort well done by those who braved the mud though!

The day was quite boring.  We didn’t really have much to do, and because of my foot, I couldn’t even join in when they spent some time scrubbing the sidewalks.  We spent time in the office, reading and on our computers before we got dinner and got ready to go into town for the night.  Dinner tonight was delicious!  There was omelet with onions and veggies, and a pork with lots of veggies dish.  The food at Mirror is actually something I look forward to now (for the most part!).

There was a good sized group of us that went into town tonight.  There was Stacy, Chelsea, and myself, along with Alex, Sarah, Stefano, Adrianne, Brittany, Steph, and Max.  Max is one of the Thai interns working at Mirror.  He is currently going to college in Chiang Rai.  Once in town we split up and agreed to meet up at one of the local bars in about an hour so we could just all hang out and spend time together on our last night together.

Stacy, Chelsea, and I went off together and we walked to through the market quickly before we went to our special pineapple smoothie café.  We sat and talked while enjoying our pineapple smoothies before meeting up with the group at the Cat bar, the bar where people were doing Karaoke last weekend.

There were games at the bar, and when we sat down, some people had already grabbed connect four and were playing.  Max had learned how to play from Stefano very recently, but even though he hadn’t been playing long, he was beating every person he played.  Everyone was taking turns because they wanted to try and beat Max.  Once he knew he was going to win, he would hold up, 2 or 3 or 4, of the discs used to play and say, “Two more and I will win.  Do you see? Do you see?”.  He would taunt the people he would play against.  It was quite amusing to watch!

Stacy, though, she took on his challenge and beat him!  She beat him twice in a row no less.

There was also a world map on the wall, and a lot of us spent time looking at the map and talking about all of the places we want to go!

When we got back to Mirror, we remembered that earlier, before we left, Stacy had blown the fuse in the girls dorm and we had no power!  It was so dark!  Luckily there were a few of us with flashlight so we weren’t totally out of luck.  We took advantage of the situation though and enjoyed ourselves.  We rotated telling scary stories and each story, even the one she told, Stacy would move around to a different bed because she was scared and needed comfort!  It was a lot of fun, very reminiscent of our childhood.