safe and sound

After a 2 1/2 day journey, I have finally arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. A lot of new, fun, upsetting, and embarrasing things have already happened!
The travel was long, taking about 22-23 hours of air time to get there. 5 1/2 hours to San Francisco, 14 hours to Hong Kong, 2 1/2 hours to Bangkok, and 1 1/2 hours to Chiang Mai.
I arrived in Bangkok June 2nd around 11:45 p.m. My group ended up staying there in a church facility overnight. The morning was really fun, it was my first time to see Thailand during the day. We walked down the streets looking for some breakfast. Well, the streets are covered with vendors selling food, coffee, tea, and other nonfood items. I bought some cut up pineapple and watermelon for breakfast, and also a special type of tea (in Thai, called chai yen), its a tea mixed with sweet condensed milk. First of all, the fruit here is amazing. They had fruit stands full of so many types of fruit i've never SEEN in my life. Some of them looked like sea urchins, but they are all delicious! Whenever you buy drinks on the street, like the tea, they fill up a plastic bag with ice and the drink, and give you a straw to drink out of it. It's a very interested way to drink something.
The money conversion is definitely to our advantage. Their money is called Bahts. 30 baht equals 1 dollar, so everything seems really cheap to us.
We left at 1 this afternoon and flew into Chiang Mai. WHAT a difference in scenery. Chiang Mai is much more beautiful, probably because its not a big city like Bangkok. It's a lot cleaner and has many mountains covered with canopies of trees. We were picked up by our missionary and some other christian Thai students. We got to explore a little bit today, went to a place similar to a Walmart and did some shopping of things we needed for our dorm rooms. During check out, the Kings song played. Well of course, I didn't know what this was, so I wasn't really paying attention. What happens is, at 8 AM and 6 PM the King's song is played on the radio/in stores, etc, and you stand still with your hands by your side while it's playing, out of respect for the King I suppose. I will definitely remember that for next time.
We ate out in a Thai restaurant tonight. Thank goodness for translaters because the Thai language is pretty tough to understand. We had some great food though, except at one point I accidently ate something that made my mouth burn for the rest of the meal. Thailand has some VERY spicy food.
I was a little down today because my laptop was lost from my luggage in my travel here. I absolutely do not know what happened to it, but I do know that I no longer have one. I was very sad, but won't let that ruin my trip.
I'm going to try to catch up on some sleep tonight, since I haven't got much sleep in the past 2 days. My body still needs to get used to the time change. Tomorrow night we're spending the night out on a house boat in a river, so I'll make sure to update you the next day how that went. Farewell for now!