Sunflower Fields Forever

On Saturday (I was feeling 100% better sickness-wise by then.. but a bit depressed about upcoming Christmas, I must admit...) Elisabeth came over in the afternoon. Since there's really not too much to do around Nongchok, we walked to Carrefour, loaded up on foreign type snacks, went back to my house, and had a mini-foreign movie marathon to celebrate it being our HALFWAY DAY! and all... it was good fun. We even managed to find a couple of Christmas-themed donuts that we ate happily.

Sunday morning we woke up early to go to Lopburi (a bit farther north of Bangkok than Ayutthaya.... and famous for it's herds of monkeys, although we managed to see exactly zero monkeys while there :S) to see Sunflowers. And when I say we saw Sunflowers, I really truly mean it. I've never seen fields of sunflowers like this before. I really really really wished the Beatles had written a song called "Sunflower Fields Forever" so I could have listened to it while standing in this gigantic field of Sunflowers. I'm sure we have such fields in Canada, but unlike the Thai's, I don't think we'd make these fields into a popular tourist attraction. Why Thai's love their sunflowers so much, I'm not quite sure. They're not really even big fans of eating the seeds. Which reminds me, since I'm now over halfway through this thing, I better break into my huge bag of spitz that I brought with me soon... They had all kinds of shops set up selling all kinds of random things that just happened to have sunflowers glued to them. Elli and I bought ourselves Santa hats with sunflowers! Only in Thailand I tell yeah. My host parents bought us little stuffed monkeys to add to our whole outfits.

Then we went to go have our picnic lunch at a place which at first appeared to only be a park. Upon closer inspection though, we realized that this park was located right next to a huuuge body of water. This is where things got confusing. This body of water was huuuuge, had waves, and was all blustery, which made it appear to be ocean-like. Yet, we did travel north of Bangkok, and the ocean happens to be South of Bangkok. Just when Elli and I thought we would never ceased to be amazed with the things you can find in Thailand (an Ocean in the middle of Lopburi? I was detemined to go taste the water to see if it was salty or not), my host mom ruined our fun by informing us that it was actually a dam. We spent a few hours hanging out around this dam. There were all sorts of people there (well all sorts of Thai people, we were the only foreigners), and all sorts of shops and activities to do. We spent some time being pulled around behind a tractor all the way across the dam wall (trust me, it was sure blustery out there on that ocean), and painting little ceramic sculpture with my host sister. Even though I tried to keep to the shade as much as possible, I (being the silly-skinned person I am) somehow managed to get a sunburn. In the middle of December. Yay me! (Honestly, who gets a sunburn in December?)

On our way back home we stopped at a little rivery, and shady (so I quite enjoyed it) place, where we rolled up our pants and waded into the water a bit. As beautiful as it was, there was still quite a bit of garbage floating around in the water. Seeing things like this really makes me feel sad. Thailand has such beautiful scenery, but also has a habit of leaving garbage all around, which makes all thes beautiful places kind of stinky and not quite so enjoyable.

Today I went to school again, which wasn't too eventful, but I enjoyed it anyways, since I haven't really actually gone to school too much lately.