A Weekend in Udon Thani

For our anniversary, Matt really wanted to go to the movies. Matt and I really enjoy going to the movies, but it is a lot more difficult in Laos, aka impossible. There is one movie theater, but they only show movies in Lao or Thai and we've heard it's not what we would call "clean." So, to go to the movies, we brought two teenage sisters from the branch (who are here with their family from Colorado) to watch the kids and got two hotel rooms so we could stay overnight. The borders close every night, so after a certain time we couldn't get home anyway. We also found out when we got to the theater that they only had one movie--and only one showing--in English. So, we saw the new Wolverine movie at 8:30pm. It was pretty good, and it was fun to see Matt so excited. That was the main goal of the trip, but here's what else we did:

We went to a Buddhist statue park and saw a bunch of cool statues. I wish we had a tour guide with us to tell us who was represented, but it was still worth a quick walkthrough.

 Some random Thai girls whose parents wanted pictures with our boys.

 Can you see Matt and Bobby behind the flower?

 That's a big bug.

 Scott really liked this tree stump, so I took a picture. He said it looked like a fish.

  There was a place you could feed fish, but we didn't have any food. Scott really like watching them, though. They all came over to look at us expectantly. It was a little weird, but kind of cool.

And we got some sunglasses for the boys...

Then we passed a sign for a crocodile show, so we decided to give that a go.

We ate a restaurant in the mall where you cook your food on a hot plate in front of you. I think it would have been a lot more fun without the kids...

 The food travelled around the tables and you just picked up what you wanted.

The next day, we went to a monkey park... also known as a regular park where probably a hundred monkeys happen to live.

 And we were more interesting to some people than the monkeys eating peanuts out of our hands...

 It was pretty cool, but it started to get a little bit scary as the monkeys started fighting with each other and showing us their teeth. Then, it was time to go.

Do you see the little baby?

 We had lunch at a Japanese buffet, which was actually quite good, but Matt lost his mind and decided to eat this:

 a baby octopus. Ewww.

That's about it! We had good time. If I get to it, I'll post a video of the crocodile show.