I’ve talked about how making friends with locals leads to some crazy experiences. Well, on the same day I went to the strawberry festival with no strawberries, I also ate some beets that weren’t beets.

That’s right. It wasn't beets. It was raw, uncooked buffalo meat that tricked me into thinking it was beets. I can’t believe a piece of meat would try to lie to me like that. What a jerk.

It was covered in blood which gave it the red beet color. To be honest, I thought it tasted amazing. It obviously had some good seasoning on it.

It was really weird eating cold meat, though.

And especially once I knew what had happened, I was SO worried that I would get sick and die because I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories of people eating raw meat...

...and it not ending well.

Here's my friend Rit (Thai), Matt and me. Matt is way too happy about this raw meat potentially killing him:

But, good news. Nothing bad happened other than the queasy feeling in my stomach at the thought of getting sick.

When you go out to eat with Thais, they just order a bunch of dishes that everyone shares. Since there was no menu in English, I had no idea what they were ordering.

This is one of those times where I question if I go with the flow too much.

After eating raw buffalo, I had an adventure that made me forget all about it (thankfully).

We went to the Mae Sap Cave. Here's most of our group:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a cave before, and I absolutely loved being inside the dark inside the caves. It felt like I was living a real-life ghost story. I would love to spend the night there and just freak out about the bats flying above me and tell ghost stories all night.

Here’s me telling one in the cave:

I also loved how small I felt next to the huge rocks surrounding me on the outside. Pictures don’t do it justice. Especially my pictures, ‘cause I’m an amateur photographer with a cracked iPhone. Iphone on crack, haha.

I tried to get the spider to bite me so I could become spider woman and have superpowers, but he refused to do it. This spider just does what he wants.

Take a quick trip to these caves if you’re ever in Chiang Mai. You get to drive past some beautiful rice fields on the way there as well.

I also recommend pretending to be a cave man, so I don't know how trustworthy you think my advice is anymore.