Thai cooking class (July 23)

I went to the gym in the morning before breakfast again. Then I got ready to go to my Thai cooking class in Chaweng, which is the biggest town on the island and about a 15 minute drive from Lamai. There were about 15 people in the class, and besides for a Scottish couple, a Canadian girl, and a Japanese girl, everyone else was from Australia and New Zealand! First we learned how to make green curry paste, which was fun. 

Ingredients for green curry paste

I learned that Thai ginger tastes very different from regular ginger (it is much spicier), so substituting regular ginger is not a good idea, which I had done before when I tried making Thai food. We then used the curry paste to make green curry, and we also made sweet and sour vegetables with tofu and a glass noodle salad. The green curry wasn’t my favorite (we used coconut cream, which the teacher said was better for curries than coconut milk, but I thought it made it too rich). We only had curries with coconut milk a couple times when I was in NE Thailand, and there the coconut broth was very thin, which I liked because it was much lighter. However, both the sweet and sour vegetables and glass noodle salad were really good! The class lasted about three hours because the teacher gave lots of explanations and details, which was good. Then we got to eat lunch! 

Preparing a glass noodle salad

After that, I was extremely full! I walked around Chaweng a bit, but it also seemed pretty touristy, so I caught a taxi back to the hotel fairly soon. Then I headed out for a swim, and this time there was not a downpour. However, I was still too full to run on the beach, so I took a leisurely stroll instead. The water was really nice and warm! Interestingly, the waves here are really small, probably smaller than the waves on Bainbridge Island, so the beach feels surprisingly quiet. I wasn’t really hungry for dinner, so I just bought some fruit at a stand near the hotel.