At this point you might be wondering, “What is this, some kind of cooking class blog?” I won’t lie to you, the idea of attending every cooking class I can get my hands on and then reviewing them (Lonely-Planet-style) definitely appeals to me. May be a little too niche though. This will have to do.

I recall Ubud, in Bali, having various cooking classes to choose from, but Chiang Mai takes the cake. There are so many cooking classes being offered here, it’s bewildering. So we consulted Trip Advisor and chose one of the more highly ranked classes, Siam Rice Thai Cookery School, without looking further.

The format of the class involved choosing multiple dishes to cook across several courses. There were 6 courses (soup, noodles, salad, stir-fry, curry, and dessert) and each course had 4-6 options to choose from. For example, here are the choices from a flier for another cooking school that I picked up.

In theory the format seems great. Everyone gets to choose their favorite Thai dishes, couples can choose different dishes and sample each other’s. But in practice, it’s kind of chaotic.

If you’ve got 8 people in a class (or 10 or 12—too many in my opinion), and everyone is cooking different things all at once, there’s less focus on learning, technique, and quality, and more on keeping all these disparate dishes from tumbling off a cliff. In many cases the instructor would step in and just do something for us because everything was moving so fast and his attention was split four different ways. And since Stephanie and I had chosen different dishes for each course, we were put in different groups, which took a lot of the fun out of cooking together.

That said, the class was enjoyable, the people teaching us were a lot more engaging than our instructors in Laos, and once again, we ate so much food, we skipped dinner and breakfast the next morning. Here’s what we cooked:

Update: After spending a week volunteering at Elephant Nature Park, I decided to take another cooking class, which I felt was a vast improvement over my first attempt. Read about it at Thai cooking, take two.

Jodi Ettenberg heard about my transpacific “wifi” antics via Waxy (or was it MetaFilter?), and sent me an email last September while we were still en route. Once we’d settled back into full bandwidth life on land, I looked back at her blog, only to discover she’d returned to NYC and had all her computer equipment (and the photos on them) stolen. Ouch.

Skipping ahead to January, I was reading a blog post that included tweet mentions, and lo and behold: there was Jodi. Once again I clicked back to her blog and found out that she had moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. At the time, Stephanie and I were sketching out our next few months and saw that we might be in northern Thailand sometime in March. So I gave Jodi a heads up.

To make a long story short, we arrived in Chiang Mai, got settled, emailed Jodi, and found ourselves in the middle of cabal of travel bloggers, including Shannon O’Donnell of A Little Adrift, Travis Ball of Flashpacker HQ, Wes Nations of Johnny Vagabond, James Clark of Nomadic Notes, and of course Jodi of Legal Nomads (not to mention a few non-bloggers, Paddy Mangunta and Jeff Boda). It was a veritable meetup!

I have to admit, after 7 months on the road, it was a little surreal to hear people casually tossing around terms like “SEO”, “affiliate marketing”, and “analytics” again. On the other hand, it was super cool to be warmly welcomed into this geeky group, who shared with us their favorite barbecued pork at the Sunday Night Walking Market, invited us out for drinks, and gave us something to look forward to nearly every night of the week.

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The first thing we do when we arrive in a new place is look for a cooking class. Laos was no exception. We came to Luang Prabang (after several dreary, unmemorable days in Hanoi, post Hạ Long Bay) happy to be back in the warm, laid-back atmosphere we liked so much in Cambodia. The class offered by Tamarind came highly recommended, but our timing was poor—they were not offering classes in March. So we poked around and eventually found one offered by the Tamnak Lao Restaurant.

It began with a trip to the local market, which I always look forward to. Invariably there are vegetables I haven’t seen before, as well as familiar foods seen in a new light. That said, I can now confidently identify lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir limes (and their leaves) during the show-and-tell sessions.

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Arriving in Phnom Penh felt like a homecoming. Sure it had been 8 years. Sure I’ve been to many places since then. Sure a lot has changed. Yet it felt familiar: warm, dry, dusty heat, and happy, charming people. Usually we let ourselves collapse after traveling to a new place, but something about Phnom Penh energized us. In a rare move, we hired the tuktuk driver who picked us up at the port to find us lunch (“good khmer food”) and to take us see some sights around the city including Wat Phnom, the Central Market, and Tuol Sleng—after we had settled in at our hotel.

The hotel itself, the Blue Lime, deserves mention, as it stands out among the multitude of places we’ve stayed during this trip. The room and all the furnishings were fabricated out of exposed concrete and rebar. It made for a very cool, modern feel, softened with colorful wall hangings. The pool was set in a little garden oasis, reminiscent of the Tropical Bali, and our room included a substantial breakfast with good bread. Simple pleasures. I only wish we had been able to stay for more than three nights, but they (and their comparable sister hotels) were all booked. At least it was long enough to give us a taste of Phnom Penh and to reaffirm my original evaluation that this is a place I could live.

In another rare move, since we had a short amount of time in Phnom Penh, I booked a cooking class for the day after we arrived. This particular class came highly recommended from Stephanie’s cousin in Austin. In fact I can thank them for sparking the cooking class idea in the first place. My food awareness, particularly of Asian ingredients, has been forever broadened.

The menu for the day had two dishes in common with our Vietnamese cooking class—which makes sense: southern Vietnam used to be part of Cambodia, before the French colonial era.

1. Chaio yor (spring rolls)
2. Amok (steamed fish curry)
3. Nyom trayong jek neung moan (banana blossom salad)
4. Sticky rice with mango

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The big reason that tours of the Mekong Delta exist are the Cần Thơ floating markets. As I understand it, in the days before bridges across the delta’s tributaries (and distributaries), people with produce from upstream and people from villages on either side of the river downstream would meet in the middle to trade.

Of course with prosperity has come bridges, which is gradually lessening the need for the floating markets. Judging by the gridlock of 20-seat tourist boats making the circuit (of which we were one), I got the sense that one day this will be a floating market in spirit only, not necessity. That said, I was happy to have the chance.

From our homestay we were shuttled by boat to meet back up with our tour group. It was before 8, the sun was still low. I enjoyed the variety of houses on stilts by the side of the river. It felt voyeuristic peeking into people’s lives early in the morning.

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