sarah had been trying to get us to come to these lake cabins she discovered and so this was our chance. We packed our things and went for an hour's drive or so out of Chiang Mai. From there we were picked up on a boat to be ferried to our cabin. It was raining pretty hard and we all got pretty wet. Esther did her best to shield us using "the world's smallest umbrella."
Quote Esther: This is a pretty good analogy of the CV program, don't you think?
Question for the ages: why are Kevin and Anisha wearing sunglasses?
The scenery actually reminded me a lot of New Zealand, what with the mist and rain. The weird thing about Thailand is that when it rains, it's still warm outside. so you're wet, but you're not cold. An odd sensation for this northerner.
The cabins were actually floating cabins, situated just a few yards from shore. I was reminded of trips to my uncle's cabin in Idaho and felt right at home. We ordered lunch and began to swim while we waited. I just realized that I forgot to take a picture of the menu, which is a shame because it had the most hilarious English translations. I did take a picture of lunch however, which included this freshly caught fish.
Because this is Thailand, the cabin had a karoake machine. In fact, many of the cabins seemed to be outfitted with this form of entertainment because we were plagued with karaoke pretty much the entire time. Oh my gosh it was awful. I was in agony. This was meant to be partially a spiritual retreat, and the off-key warbling coming from next door was particularly distracting as we tried to meditate on scripture and pray for one another. I had been hamming up my annoyance because I was expected to as the resident music major. And then I made one of the most embarrassing mistakes of my entire time in Thailand.
The cabins weren't super tidy and there were some odd things lying around on the deck. I had gotten up to stretch my legs after a devotional and before a meeting about CV stuff. I noticed a random shot glass containing a clear, probably alcoholic liquid just sitting on this small wooden platform. Had someone left it there? How funny. "Hey guys, look!" I said, raising the shot glass in a pretend toast. They didn't seem to find the randomness quite so amusing.
"That's for the spirit house..." someone warned me. Wha? Oops. I looked back at the platform and realized that it was decorated... The cigarettes and things littering it were actually offerings. I hastily replaced the glass and looked around to see if any Thai people had been watching. Thankfully I don't think there had been, but I was teased mercilessly by the group about how I'd brought bad luck on us all. And coincidentally, just seconds later, a group of Thais arrived at our cabin in order to do maintenance on our karaoke machine. We were subjected to lots of unpleasant, loud noises for the two hours that we were trying to hold our meeting. I will pretty much never live this down. From then on, anytime anything bad happened guess who got the blame. Not to mention the endless mocking. "Hey Heidi, this looks like a small doll house. Why don't we play with it?" Ha. Haha. After a while I told them I thought it was getting a little old, but nobody else seemed to agree. Ah well, what else am I here for.
But despite the bad luck, it was still a good time. We spent the evening playing a great game of "golf" and listening to our own music in order to drown out the increasingly drunken karaoke. We got to swim in the warmest lake water I've ever experienced. And overall there was a lot of great fellowship.
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