Today was our Thai Cookery course and we have just finished it. Was great fun, the 'teachers' were all excellent and spoke superb English interspersed with sporadic mad humour. We cooked:
Clear Soup with Minced Pork (the celery stuff in it was horrid though...)
Spring rolls - FANTASTIC
Red curry with duck - not that great, also Jen's looked like an albino curry as she didn't use much paste to avoid it being spicy...it was kinda grey in colour.
Chicken with ginger - both of our favourites, utterly wonderful
Chicken in pandanus leaves - think Thai KFC, kind of TFC I guess
Mango with sticky rice - much nicer than I thought it would be. We then tried a few exotic fruits and were on our way. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has the remotest interest in food or cooking if you're ever out here - we went to 'The Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School' which is the oldest and must surely be one of the best here. I think we paid 900B (about 15UKP) each. BARGAIN!
We also met a Canadian woman who had been diving in the Similan Islands and she recommended us an operator there who will do a 2-day excursion and 7 (!) dives for about 120 UKP. The visibility is apparently about 30m+ at the moment and she said it was wonderful so it's now on our list...

We leave Chiang Mai tomorrow, after alot of toing and froing and changing our minds about where to enter Laos we have decided to go back to Bangkok to see the floating markets and see the bridge over the river Kwai before either flying to Vientiane or going up via the friendship bridge. We didn't fancy either 2 days on a slowboat (read barge) or 6 hours on a speedboat (already been 2 people killed this year on them when the boat hit some rocks and the water levels are very low at the moment...)...

We should still be on plan for Laos on 28 Feb and Vietnam on 11 March. Our method of choice is once again employed and we are going to Bangkok by overnight train...