der weg ist das ziel

Coco woke me up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep, thinking about our plans for southern Laos. The thing is, since we need to be in Bangkok by Dec 10 (Coco is flying to Kathmandu Dec 11 to Dec 16 to visit her best friend Sujata), and since the Lao National Day is Dec 2, which means nobody works (except the police, making sure that no one else is working), as celebration is mandatory (how sad, that a country has to make celebration of its national holiday mandatory...), we would have had only very little time in southern Laos. (by the way, in German these long sentences are considered fancy...) So Coco came up with the idea of going to northern Thailand now, so we can have 2 weeks in southern Laos late Feb/early March next year. This means that I will have to do a visa run to Burma late December, but that should be interesting...
Anyways, so we took the 14:30 Thai-Lao International Bus from Vientiane to Nong Khai, where we caught a Bangkok-headed bus to Udon Thani (we literally jumped onto the moving bus), where we quickly got a tuk tuk to the other bus station, where the Chiang Mai headed buses leave, where the 19:00 bus was about to leave (it was 19:20), and we had to convince the woman selling the tickets that we could pay in dollars, as we only had about 40 baht (what I still had from last Summer in Thailand minus the money for the bus to Udon Thani and the tuk tuk to the other bus station). And then we were off. We arrived in Chiang Mai at 6:30 after a freezing night on an uncomfortable bus (it was so cold I could see my breath...).
Anyways, now we're here and it's a bit strange to be back somewhere I know after 2 1/2 months in Russia, Mongolia, China, Laos...