Nonthaburi

Last night we ended up just eating dinner in the kitchen on the fancy new table (which takes up the ENTIRE kitchen by the way). Beam cooked some pork steaks up esepcially for me though. It was probably one of the nicest things someones done for me since I've been here. She was all worried that they wouldn't taste good, but actually they were AMAZING. They made my day. We also had a bunch of barbequed shrimp, which I thought was cooked a questionable amount (i.e. it wasn't cooked very well), but they all seemed to like it.

Today I went with Kla, Beam, and Beam's mother to visit the rest of Beam's family in the province of Nonthaburi, which is right next to Bangkok. It took us about an hour to drive there. Beam told me that Nonthaburi is famous for fruit, and she wasn't joking. Her family there (which includes about a million aunts) owns an orchard/plantation thing, I'm not really sure exactly what to call it, where they grow all different sorts of fruit. We spent the morning driving around in the weirdest contraption I've seen in my life. I think they use it for rice farming. Thailand never ceases to amaze me with it's countless methods of transportation. For some reason blogger isn't letting me upload pictures onto my blog lately. So keep checking my photo page for updates instead if you're interested.

We drove around to different plantations, where they grew and sold many different fruits and flowers. We saw plantations for guava (although it wasn't the same kind of guava as in Hawaii), orchids (they're sooo cheap here, I can't believe it), lotus flowers, and forget-me-nots. Beam's mom and aunts bought some different flowers and an insane amount of fruit. They gave me an entire plastic grocery bag full of guava. Although I think the fruit tastes very good, I really don't think I can eat that much. We ate lunch at a riverside market, part of which actually floated on the water. We had duck with noodles, and I ate the entire meal with chopsticks! I think it was one of my greatest accomplishments yet. Now I won't have to face the embarassment of having to ask for a fork when at Chinese restaurants with my host family. Since they're Chinese, we seem to eat Chinese food alot (go figure), and I'm sure everyone in Canada knows that me and Chinese food don't really mix. But at least me and chopsticks now do. After our main course, we went and had some Thai desserts, which involved some kind of fruit and/or vegetable (I'm not really too sure) which is coated in flour, then fried into a little ball, mixed with coconut milk and ice. It was good, but I wish I would have chosen the green slimey one instead, because I like the flavour of that one better. At the market, I saw the saddest looking little puppy dog ever. It only looked a couple of months old, but I think it had some sort of disease which made all it's fur fall out, and it was soooooooooo skinny. It was just laying there sleeping, but I kept looking at it to make sure it's chest was still moving up and down. Poor thing. I just wanted to take it back home to Canada with me and nurse it back to health. I cannot stand the animal abuse here. I'm just going to be honest and say it. I know I'm not supposed to be critical of my host country, but it's just deffinately not the right country for someone who loves animals.

We spent the afternoon walking around Beam's plantation, while her mom and aunts picked fruit to eat and sell in Bangkok. They had all different kinds of fruit, including Starfuit, and GIANT oranges (that were actually colored green). When all that was done, we headed back to Bangkok to eat dinner with my host family. I took a shower, and now I'm here. My gecko friend appears to not be in my bathroom anymore, unless he was just hiding tonight. I'm kind of a little sad he's gone, because he deffinately made taking shower's more interesting.

Tomorrow I have to wake up at 8 (a fairly reasonable hour I think) to go shopping with Ajan Supanee. That's another weird cultural difference. People basically just refer to eachother by their first names, sometimes with a job title in front included. Ajan means teacher, so we just call all the teachers "Ajan (insert first name here)." For the first little while I was so confused, because most students just call everyone "Ajan." So Patch would tell me to go talk to "Ajan" for something, and I wouldn't have a clue who she was talking about. They also don't normally ask people "how are you?" in Thai, instead the ask "where do you go?" ("bye nye?"). So, whenever I say hello to someone, they will right away ask me where I'm going or where I went the day before, rather than how I am doing.