For our first day’s excursions around Chiang Mai, we started at the east gate and headed east.  Today we decided to start at the south gate, and head south.

The south gate has a market that’s notable as a great place to get breakfast.  It certainly seemed like it, although we got decision paralysis pretty fast.  But hunger eventually got the better of us.  At various stalls we grabbed some sausage, a filled pastry sort of like a samosa, and these amazing purple donuts.

Seriously – if we’d run into these things first, I suspect we’d have just gotten a couple of dozen and called it good for the morning.

First off the bat was a little geocaching.  I won’t bore you with specifics, but there were two in particular that I wanted to find for achievement unlocked purposes.  We found the first one, and ended up replacing the second one ourselves when it turned up missing.  A mint box for an obscure music technology company with a coffeeshop receipt is a perfectly fine cache, right?

From there, we headed south into the silversmithing district – Leigh wanted to look at more pretty shiny things, and there was also a specific temple we wanted to check out.

That would be THIS bonkers thing:

This is Wat Sri Suphan, the Sliver Temple.  And it certainly is.  The entire inside and outside of the temple is covered in a mix of silver and aluminum.

I had to take this picture, since unlike MOST of the temples we visited, this one did not allow women inside.

Now to be clear – while this religious site is hundreds of years old, the silver ordination hall dates from the 21st century, so it’s not exactly an ancient relic.  Still pretty impressive, though.

The reason this particular temple is covered in silver is, as I mentioned that this district of Chiang Mai is especially associated with silver jewelry.  We saw a few different silver making classes in progress as we walked around, and Leigh was able to have a browse in half a dozen different interesting shops.  By this time, it was starting to approach lunchtime, and we wanted to try another signature dish of the region – Khao Soi.

Khao Soi is a curry soup with a mix of fresh and deep fried noodles and usually a meat such as beef or chicken.  You can get it everywhere in Chiang Mai, but Benny had recommended a place not to far from where we were, so we hoofed it down to Khao Soi Lung Prakit Kad Kom.

Now, we only picked this place because it was on the list of restaurants Benny had sent us before the cooking class, but it turns out this place is reasonably well known from having appeared on the first episode of “Somebody Feed Phil.”  Which is apparently a television show of some sort.

Possibly due to this notoriety, there was a big crowd of folks waiting for a seat, many of whom were confused tourists like ourselves who were trying to figure out how the whole process worked.  Do we wait in line?  Is there a list? How do we order?

Eventually, however, we worked it all out, and found ourselves rewarded with some of the best soup we’ve ever had.

I know we keep using superlatives like that, and I apologize if it’s getting old, but I promise absolutely every one of them is deserved.  Thailand is an amazing place to eat.

Oh, and this soup was about two bucks Canadian, to boot.

From there, we started walking back up towards town.  There were still plenty of shrines to see.

But we were starting to wilt a bit from the heat, so we ducked into a nearby coffee bar / donut shop / recording studio.

As you do.

Seriously, Chiang Mai is great.  We could live here.  (Except for the fact that apparently it’s an unlivable smoky hellscape two or three months out of the year during the agricultural burning season.)

At this point, we thought it was high time we actually had a gawp at some of the sights inside the city walls, so we headed up there to look at some temples.

I’m sorry the running commentary has sort of dried up at this point – these photos kind of speak for themselves.

At least, this one certainly does:

We probably visited half a dozen temples over the course of the afternoon, each one more absurdly opulent than the last. 

By dinner time, we had also managed to visit the north gate, so only one left to go.  We headed down to a restaurant recommended by one of Leigh’s friends to have a delicious dinner of sizzling seafood plate and duck in mango curry.

Trust me – that’s what you’d have seen here if we’d remembered to take a picture before we scarfed it down.

Surely that must be enough silver and food for one day, right?  Nope – time for the night market!

This is the central street in the silversmithing district that we had walked down earlier in the day, but it was utterly transformed at night – something like a kilometer of stalls selling beautiful hand made handicrafts, cheap plastic tchotch, amazing food, terrible food, massage implements, and so much other stuff.

Leigh found a necklace that spoke to her, and I found a cinnamon roti.

What’s not to love?