Saturday, February 6

First of all, Jon and Clark would truly like to be home with their families during the very dangerous snow storm hitting the Washington D.C. metro area. We're very concerned and praying for our family's safety.

Today we spent in town and within walking distance of our hotel for a couple of reasons: 1) The people from the mission that shuttle us around and work with us, want to spend the weekend with their own families and 2) There was a parade outside our hotel today; The Parade of Flowers, making it impossible for anyone to pick us up. So......we went out our front door and watched the parade. It's much like our own parades, even the music played by the marching bands was western music. I think one played the theme from Oklahoma and the other played one of the themes from Rocky (1 through 7, I can't remember which one).





Afterward, we walked to Old Town, Chiang Mai which is comprised of several city blocks (about one mile by one mile) with in a perfect square and surrounded by a wall and moat that were built about 500 years ago. We stopped at several "Wats" along the way. Wats are Buddhist temples. We learned something more today about the customs of Thailand, at least Chiang Mai, and that is shorts are not worn by hardly anyone and are not allowed in the Wats (neither are shoes, which we could have taken off without any objection, unlike our shorts). And, if you see someone wearing shorts, you can be pretty sure that they're not from Thailand.



A couple of other observations: No one smokes, therefore there aren't any cigarette butts lying around. There are few people that are overweight, especially compared to the U.S. And finally, they have as many 7-Eleven's as Manassas, Virginia - one on every corner. Okay, we saw one over-weight man from Thailand and he was coming out of a 7-Eleven with a "Big Bite".

Tomorrow, we're headed to church where Jon will be preaching. Our prayers are with all of you.