Stolen Pictures and a Weekend at a Pizza Shop (Minus the Pizza)

It's 1:30 a.m., and I don't feel like uploading pictures to Facebook, so I'm stealing pictures from other people's blogs and albums that might not be visible to some of you on Facebook and calling it my own original blog post.

Beyond letting the pictures speak for themselves, a brief summary of our weekend goes as follows:

Friday afternoon I left with a couple other interns and several people from church here to drive about three hours to Phayao, a city north-ish of Chiang Mai. We were going to help a group of missionaries from A&M with a pizza shop they're opening in just a couple weeks. The drive took us past rice paddies with foggy mountains in the distance and farmers bent over their fields.

After stopping to help a couple headed to Phayao with us whose car had for no reason spun out on a curve in the mountains (they were both just fine) we made it to Phayao (there's a huge lake smack in the middle of the city, by the way), had dinner, went to bed, and woke up earlier than most of us would have liked to for a day of cleaning every bit of dust left from construction out from every corner of a whole building. Fingers were turning blue from Windex, lungs were suffocating from dust leaking between our face masks, feet were pruning from standing in soapy water used to clean the floor, and everyone was having a fantastic time even if we weren't eating any pizza. The shop looks great and is getting close to ready for its opening day.

On the drive back to Chiang Mai we stopped to visit the family of one of the women here, Oi, and they served us traditional Northern Thai food, and lots of it. I even tried boiled pork blood, which is placed in a bag and then boiled until it congeals into a gelatinous blackish lump. I can't tell you how it tastes, only that I ate it; I took only enough to legitimize that claim and not gag, not taste anything.

The weekend was great, as were all the other moments seen in the pictures here (which are not laid out rationally or in any kind of aesthetically pleasing manner, I know, but oh well):






Heading to Phayao, with Oi, Ahn, and Ying (left to right)

Stopping for coffee, of course

The whole group at Phayao, matching Brick Oven Pizza shirts to celebrate being finished.













And Berm ("Bum") with his chihuahuas. See a previous post for more explanation. Hah--now I've got you interested and you have to read my blog if you haven't been...

blessings.