What do you do when you only have one final day on holidays? Why you treat yourself to luxury. And in Thailand, that means massages, first class cinemas and good food.
After our experience of first class cinemas in Phuket I was excited to find that they were at the Maya Shopping Mall in Chiang Mai so we walked the 4km from the city to check them out. It was fantastic. We enjoyed some delicious pre-movie canapes for an hour. Then we were shown to our fantastic couples seat with independently reclining chairs. Once the King’s song and some very funny commercials were over we settled in under our blankets to enjoy the movie. The only strange thing was that I had ordered us salty popcorn but we ended up each being given a big bowl of mixed popcorn. There is something a little disconcerting about eating a mix of cheese, barbecue, salt and sweet popcorn in a darkened cinema. You never quite know when the savoury experience will be interrupted by a mouthful of sugar. Chalk it up to a funny Thai experience. The movie we watched was Jupiter Ascending. It was full of special effects with limited story line but a pleasant choice that didn’t require too much thought so we could settle in and enjoy the comfortable surrounds.
It was already dark by the time we exited the cinema so we went up to the Maya Shopping Mall roof to enjoy the view. There are lots of bars and restaurants up on the roof but all were empty but for the staff. The views were nice though.
We took a stroll around the big food street near the shopping centre to find some food but found that most of what was on offer was either Western food or over-priced Thai food (compared with what we had been eating in the old city). The street lighting was lovely though.
So we took a tuk tuk back to the Old City where we dined at Khao Tom 1 Baht, which has become our favourite Chiang Mai restaurant and is well worth the wait in the queue that forms. The pineapple fried rice is particularly good.
And so ends our trip to Thailand. The next day we missed our flight home due to my reading the booking information but we managed to book an alternative flight to Kuala Lumpur, which allowed us to connect to our original flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Gold Coast.
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