Today we had a sweet breakfast, which I enjoyed. Even though
I am enjoying the food here, sometimes it is hard eating what I would consider
“dinner foods” for breakfast every day. Bu had made some blue sweet sticky rice
with coconut milk, we had the egg custard that we made the night before, and
then there was sweetened coconut milk to drizzle over the whole thing. Yummy!
At school I was teaching the fifth graders today. I was in
the other building again today, because Bu was still rearranging the classroom,
but it was much better than yesterday, both because the fifth graders are
easier to keep on task, and the other classrooms weren’t filled with students
goofing off. The students are really
into doing the hokey pokey now and keep on requesting it many times per class,
although I generally do it just once, either at the beginning or end. The fifth
and sixth graders are starting to know it pretty well (at least some of the
students).
After school, we went back to the house. Kai (Bu’s mom) had
gotten up at 3am this morning to go and pick mushrooms in the mountains, so I
admired her harvest: two large bowls of mushrooms, one filled with dark brown
mushrooms and the other with bright yellow mushrooms. Apparently these
mushrooms have a very short season so they only eat them once per year, I guess
I came at a lucky time! Then one of the aunts who lives next door (and is also
a teacher at the school), showed up and invited me to go to the market with two
other teachers. One of the teachers had just gotten a new car (it only had
about 1500 km on the speedometer, I noticed) so we drove in her new car. I had
assumed that we were going to one of the markets nearby, but it actually turned
out we were going to Nan Bua Dang, which is the capital of the district we live
in. It was about a 30 minute drive away, and I enjoyed watching all of the rice
fields going by outside. Nan Bua Dang is the biggest town I have seen here,
since I left Chaiyaphum town the day Bu picked me up. There was 1 traffic
light, and a sidewalk! First we went to a big street market, where we picked up
a variety of goodies—custards in different flavors (pumpkin, banana, and yam),
kanom mo (the steamed rice with coconut, wrapped in a banana leaf that we made
a couple weeks ago), kanom tai (also steamed rice wrapped in a banana leaf, but
with banana and beans inside, and in a different shape), something kind of like
corn muffins, and this other thing that is hard to describe: it was square and
there were white and green layers and it had a sort of rubbery/bouncy
consistency—probably made from rice flour. Then we stopped at a 7-11 (the town
I am in is so small, there aren’t any 7-11’s), and got some packaged foods—I
picked up some yogurts and a “coffee flavored milk drink” to try. On the drive
back, one of the other teachers in the car, who is learning how to drive a car
(she already knows how to drive a motorcycle), drove part of the way, so we had
a very slow trip through the countryside at 10-20 km/hr. There are a lot of
dogs here (I would estimate each house has 3-4) and they are often hanging out
on the road. When you are driving and you see dogs on the road, you honk and
the dogs are supposed to move off the road, but some of them seem to think they
own the road and won’t move when a car is approaching, so then the driver has
to navigate around the dogs or come to a stop and wait for them to slowly amble
off the road. Car drivers also honk when they are about to pass bicycles,
scooters, farm machinery, or other modes of transport on the road. There were
quite a few market stands on wheels, attached to motorcycles, probably heading
to an afternoon market. We passed a magnum ice cream bar stand on wheels
driving down the road, I wouldn’t have minded stopping there if it hadn’t been
in motion. The school stocks magnum ice cream bars (the vanilla ice cream
covered with chocolate and almonds variety) in the freezer, so they are my
treat from home that I indulge in periodically.
I am starting to get sad that I only have a few more days
here before I go back to Bangkok (although I am excited too about exploring
other parts of Thailand in the next couple weeks). While there were times when
I thought it would be nice to have something that isn’t available here (western
style food, a coffee shop, western style bathroom, easier communication, …),
overall I have had a great experience here. Bu’s family has been extremely
welcoming and has on multiple occasions invited me back to stay with them again—I
hope that I can do so some time, or Bu and Piano could visit me! They really
made me feel like a part of the family, at dinner today the father was saying
that he felt like I was a daughter in the family now, which was sweet of him :)
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