Four simple steps.

I'm blogging from my iPod because I'm too hungover to get off my bed to get the computer. Why is a hang-ogre punching me so insistenty in the face, you ask? Well, because I didn't follow Mr. Jill's fantastic four step hangover prevention and recovery program! Obviously the first step in preventing a hangover is to not drink anything ever. No fun good health clear head no friends. I call that step 0, but most of us skip that step in favour of delicious things like mojitos and sometimes undelicious things like snake wine. The rest of the steps kick in just when you get home from your consumption establishment of choice.

 1. Step one is the prevention aspect of Mr. Jill's Fantastic Four Step Hangover Prevention and Recovery Program. it's pretty simple: before you go to sleep, drink seven thousand liters of water. Stand at the sink and drink as much water as you can fit in your body. I'm not kidding, seriously drink so much water.

 2. Step two is part of your recovery, perhaps even the best part. It takes place in the morning, after you've hopefully got at least a few hours of sleep. Eat some eggs! I like bacon and eggs, sunny-side up very runny yolk please. Hot protein on a plate! Dream of dreams.

 3. Step three is to take a shower. Look at you, you're so gross from the bar! Your hair smells like cigarette smoke, your feet have weird black stuff on them (did you take your shoes off at the bar? Weirdo.) and that klutzy girl's drink is feeling kind of sticky on your leg. Clean up! Use some soap, maybe wash your hair. Get into it! Showers are amazing.

4. Step four is a beautiful thing. Put the jammies you didn't quite get to last night on and curl up in your bed for a peachy little nap. There! Don't you feel magical?

 And that's that. Sometimes you party a little too hard and ya gotta eat some bacon. I hope that all of you are sensible enough not to have to follow this advice very often, but vodka happens to the best of us. Hang-ogres: I won't judge yours if you don't judge mine!

Miss you all.

don't be this girl

scooters and hotsprings!

I haven’t really told you about the time in Thailand when we rented scooters and went for the most terrifying and amazing adventure ever.  We were staying in Pai, a few hours and a savagely snaking highway north-east of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.  If you’re familiar with the town of Nelson, BC, picture it situated in the middle of the roasting Northern mountains in Thailand and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of Pai.  The pace is slow, the cafes are excellent, and the hippies are strangely abundant.  Honestly, I didn’t even realize there were that many hippies anymore.  There are!

Everyone in Asia has a scooter.  On crowded roads, they’re much more efficient than a bulky car.  Scooters zip around cars and in and out of lanes of traffic like it ain’t no thing.  IT IS A THING.  I feel like scooters are enormously unsafe, given their driver's typically wild motoring habits and disinclination to follow any of the normal rules of the road.  These same traits that repel me (nickname: Mother Goose) attracted Jessica (nickname: Bonecruncher) and our good friend Nicole (nickname: Nicole).  

And so I was roped into passenger-ing on a scooter ride to some apparently nearby hot springs.  Just down the quiet highway and then off a side-road.  No big deal!  Note: whenever anything is no big deal?  DON’T DO IT because it TOTALLY IS A BIG DEAL.  The highway was fine – quiet, easy to avoid the large trucks going by.  The sideroad?  Oh my god.  Steep, bucking, pot-holed, dirt.  The hills went straight up and then straight down, gravel all the way.  We pushed our scooters up more than a few, passed en route by whole families piled onto one scooter, giggling at us.  Whatever, my intention is not to die on a scooter in remote Northern Thailand.  

Luckily, the pay-off was more than worth it.  When we finally found the hot springs, they were dead-quiet, just us and a flat pool of bath-tub warm water.  The water was crystal clear and shallow, the bottom lined with smooth pebbles.  It was absolutely spectacular.  Vines hung over our heads and we lounged in the water until we were more prune than lady.  Sometimes one just has to suck up the slightly dangerous factor and embrace the fact that you’re in Thailand, goddamit!  Get on the scooter and get in the hot springs.  It doesn’t get much better than this.  

I believe the technical term is 'bitchin'

Crickets!

We’re obsessed with markets.  Probably the best thing about Asia so far has been the food, mostly made for us by street-side vendors.  Bowls of noodle soup with lots of chilies and fish sauce, skewers of grilled baby octopi, impeccably fresh fruit, endless pad thai.  You name it, we’ve tried it.  As of last week, though, there was one thing we still had to try.  The bug table catches every market-goers eye.  Picture an old lady with ten trays of deep-fried bugs, from maggots to the ubiquitous crickets to giant water bugs the size of rodents.  Obviously we had to see how they were for ourselves.

The perfect moment came in a post-beer wander to the market for snacks.  We picked up all of the strange things we could (vegetarian dumplings, ‘corn tubes’, steam buns with animal faces and so on) before stumbling upon the bug table.  It was now or never.  We spent a buck on a bag of crickets, picked up a few more Changs for liquid courage and headed back to our hostel. 

Somewhat predictably, it was Jessica who ate the first cricket.  Jessica is the husband of our friendship – she squashes spiders with her bare feet, lectures me about slugs (her favourite animal growing up) and rolls her eyes when I freak out about the frogs in the toilet.  Nothing about kingdom Animalia grosses her out, including crunchy deep-fried crickets.  She tossed down two before Nicole or I could even blink.  “Fine.  Kind of greasy.”  She shrugged and knocked back another one.

Some of us needed a little more time.  Nicole and I started slow, first tucking crickets inside of corn tubes and eating the two together, or just chomping on a spare leg or two. For the record, we’re talking a bag of full-size, wriggly crickets here.  Heads, wings, legs… no anatomical detail has been fried out of existence.  Despite this disturbing fact, we both eventually managed to eat a cricket or three without the aid of a corn tube casing.  Nicole even ate the enormous one, which we optimistically named the daddy of the pack.

All in all, we three girls ate a full bag of crickets.  Some of them were a little gushy, but mostly they were just fibrous crunchy earthy things.  It was fine!  We survived!  Eating weird shit is totally the spice of life.  Now if only I could manage a green pepper…

the daddy of the pack was a litttttle chewy.

Songkran!

Sorry it’s been so long!  Jessica’s beloved computer is kind of giving up the ghost and we’re trying to extend its lifespan as long as possible.  Since we last spoke, Jess and I have been through Bangkok and Chiang Mai in Thailand before leaving for Luang Prabang in Laos, where we are now.  While I have great stories about all these places, Chiang Mai is the barstar of my heart.

I love New Year’s, which is lucky, because I’ve already been to three in 2012.  You’ve already heard about the first two – my messy and amazing Canadian party and the baffling but strangely fun Hindu New Year in Bali.  Now there’s Songkran, the Thai New Year. 

We were lucky enough to have our friend Nicole tip us off to the Thai New Year all the way back when we were in Australia.  We booked a hostel two months in advance, absolutely no idea what we were getting into.  Something about a water fight?  Uh, let me tell you.  Songkran is traditionally celebrated by Thais splashing each other with water to bathe off the past.  Obviously gently splashing each other with water quickly devolved into a week-long country wide water fight.  Chiang Mai is the epicenter of the action, and the fight is street to street, restaurant to restaurant.

Jess and I bought water guns, rented bikes, and spent seven days being entirely soaked as trucks drove around the town, their beds full of people with buckets trash cans of water.  Music blasted from downtown and the favourite game of everyone in the city was to find the bewildered western tourist and let fly.  Even the police had their possessions in little plastic pouches around their necks – apparently even a uniform and a gun isn’t enough to save you from a bucket of icy water.

Needless to say, it was extremely, extremely fun.  Sadly, we don’t have many pictures as the flying water made electronics a bit of a no-go.  We did take a few with our waterguns, though, including my beloved backpack gun.  If you ever get a chance to spend Songkran in Chiang Mai, go.  Pack your waterproof mascara, a pair of goggles, and every ounce of game you have.  I’m already jealous.

See you guys in less than a month!

also, we ate crickets, but that's a story for another time.

also, we rented a scooter, but don't tell my mom.

FIST IN THE AIR CAUSE I'M HAPPY

Paradise or Whatevksis

It is such a cliché to describe something as paradise, especially when that something is a perfect little island with perfect turquoise water.  Our ice-bound North American selves tend to think of this kind of thing as heaven – hammocks, white sand, glimmering water.  While I think we’re just a little blind to our own mountains and lakes, there’s a pretty good argument to be made for beaches.

The maybe-paradise I’m talking about it called Gili Trawangan, and it’s a very tiny island off the coast of another small island which is itself next door to Bali which is itself a part of Indonesia.  Complicated to describe, not so complicated to love.

Gili Trawangan is pretty unique in that it has no motorized traffic.  None.  No cars, no scooters, no nothing.  Horse carts clip-clop along dirt roads and tourists and locals alike ride around on bikes.  It’s a pretty nice change after the noisy and perpetually traffic-clogged streets of Bali.  Despite the relative antiquity of the transportation, the long strip of stunning bars (many with gorgeous pools) and upscale seafood (and seaside) restaurants is anything but outdated.  It’s a perfect combination of rustic and modern – all the benefits of island life (10,000 adorable cats, quiet nights, walkability) with all the comforts one can ask for (cold bintangs and clean-ish bathrooms).  

 Jessica and I are going to continue our research into the possible perfection of this place for another four nights, adding to the two we’ve already spent.  We promise to diligently record every glowing sunset, note carefully our growing obsession with the national dish nasi campur, and definitely detail our swims in that glimmering turquoise water I told you about.  Maybe paradise isn’t lost after all… 

I finally bought myself a pineapple and then I ate the whole thing and then I had a sore mouth.

that's my little jessie pony!

sideways! but this is my bag-on-foot shower adventure look.