We began Wednesday, our last day in Bangkok, with our final breakfast at the hotel. Bangkok Loft Inn, a boutique-y hotel we discovered because it was a TripAdvisor pick in 2011, was small and cozy. Daily breakfast orders were taken via a little slip of paper, filled out the afternoon before at the front desk. We had a selection of American options (eggs) and a selection of Asian options (spicy chicken, soups), as well as the plentiful buffet of fresh regional fruits we have come to enjoy.

The breakfast itself was served in the Terrace Restaurant, a little room whose low ceilings Chaz became all too acquainted with:

We continued our morning with a trip down memory lane and visited the city’s National Museum, a treasure of archives found in the oldest part of the city, among the temples and palace remains. The museum encompasses several different buildings, many of them former royal residences and temples.

We inspected the various exhibits, ranging from dioramas reminiscent of the Museum of Natural History to rooms crammed full of Buddhas. We got to see some of the relics rescued from Ayutthaya, a fun discovery after having been in the ancient temples ourselves. There were so many beautiful items on display, but they seemed to have been thrown together with little rhyme, reason or explanation — just jeweled Buddha upon Buddha, heaped together in a dark room. Other parts of the museum left us with the feeling that we were watching an advertisement for the royal family.

After walking around the museum for a couple hours, we hopped into a taxi to go have lunch. We knew taking a taxi midday in traffic-filled Bangkok was a risky maneuver, but the museum is in a location difficult to reach by Skytrain. But after 30 minutes of nauseating traffic, we realized we had made… a huge mistake.

With a familiar-looking Skytrain station in sight, we hopped out of the cab at a red light and made a beeline for solid ground. It was an unfortunate way to spend our final afternoon in Bangkok, if only because it cemented the image of a disorganized and hectic city.

The Bangkok Loft Inn had originally offered us only a complimentary pickup at the airport, not return service. But it turned out that they were picking someone else up around the time that we needed to go to the airport, so they offered to take us back at no charge, which was very generous of them. After hitting even more traffic in the hotel’s van, we arrived at Bangkok’s enormous new international airport, which, on Wednesday, was particularly empty. So we quickly made our way through it and onto the short Air Asia flight that brought us into Chiang Mai around 7 p.m.

The capital of the northern region and of its namesake province, Chiang Mai is lauded as one of the developing urban centers of the country with a huge business in tourism. Compared to Bangkok, the city might as well be a small countryside town. Quiet, calm and surrounded by mountains, Chiang Mai is walkable and easy to navigate, and the only buildings even resembling skyscrapers are the hotels.

Our various guidebooks led us to a riverside wooden building, home to Antique House, for a late dinner upon our arrival in Chiang Mai. Northern Thai food is a little different from what we had been eating in Bangkok and from what we are used to, so we were eager to dive into a new menu. We didn’t wind up straying too far into the unknown in our first dinner, starting with golden bags and enjoying two different chicken stir fry dishes.

The menu featured many spicy salads, an item we have come to enjoy immensely, and so we decided to try out the mango salad with catfish. What we received was not at all what we expected: the fish had been fried into crumbs, beyond the point of recognition, and then reassembled into the shape of a fish. Served alongside it was a small, but spicy, mango salad. Definitely interesting.

We headed back to our hotel after dinner to get some sleep in preparation for Thursday’s big activity: cooking school!