Where in the Wang Dang are we?

Production level is low, obligation to blog is high, thus here I am.

Past few days have been fairly uneventful, in a good way. Well, kind of.

You may recall my excitement about sleeping in on Friday, a statement in which I completely jinxed myself. Thursday afternoon Pi Yod requests our presence at the office at 7:30AM to leave for a field trip. Good thing our field trip was fun, or I would have been pretty dang upset!

So Friday we went to a province on the east side near Cambodia.

If your reaction is “oooh, Cambodia!!” you need to be reading more CNN.

If your reaction was “oh I hope you didn’t go in the area of tense international conflict,” good job.

That was a test.

Anyway, we truck over there for about 2 hours, (Pi Spider took a picture of me sleeping)  and the first stop was an agricultural learning center. Villages usually have a “local wisdom”—a man or woman who is educated and can help farmers become more resourceful and solve crop problems. They had hundreds of different plants for medicines and Pi Chad bought us some virgin coconut oil. Yummy- still don’t know what to use it for.

FDA Approved?

Nature steals ideas from Dr. Suess' The Lorax

Pi Yod picks a snack for us

Jackfruit + Ant Colony

"That's either a tiny seed or a chubby hand" -Sarah

For lunch we had wild boar. It was so tough that neither Sarah nor I could chew it. We just gave each other the “what the crap am I eating?” look and swallowed it as best as possible. Phew.

Next stop was a buffalo farm. This woman had learned about the nutritional qualities of buffalo milk and wanted to start a market for it in Thailand. And brace yourselves…

We had real cheese.

She made us a fresh caprese salad with her buffalo mozzarella and it was so nice. I miss cheese. A lot.

She toured us around and we got to kiss some buffalo and see a newborn blink his big ol eyes at us. Pretty presh. What wasn’t so presh? Her annoying goofy dogs that ran around with us. Little yappers, I tell you. One had a broken leg in a cast. Because it didn’t seem to be in pain, I felt ok laughing at it.

interspecies snorgling

Pi Spider with a young'n

Newborns say "bleeeeat."

Glad to be back in the company of civil society

Spazzy McGee w/ cast

Last stop was a mango farm. The man who was to talk with us was late, so what did we do? EAT THOUSANDS OF MANGOES. Real mangoes, people. The farmers put carbon bags over the fruit while its still on the tree and because it blocks the sunlight they become super sweet. (Not sure of the science of that quite yet.) We learned about how the mangoes were grown and then were given about a dozen each. Fantastic. I had to make sure to get a knife on the weekend so I could cut them up like a local.

This looks like 2 player FruitNinja

Pi Spider goes for the gold.

On Saturday we had a very successful trip to future park. (Is that possible?!) Sarah and I bought all the necessities to make bomber valentine’s bags for our office.

Ben let us know that an island near him is having a Full Moon Party this weekend, so we spent a little bit of Saturday trying to plan for that. Should be very fun.

Sunday was spent packing for another week in a hotel, plus a weekend trip, plus another week in the hotel. Needless to say, living out of a backpack is getting a wee bit old, but it is also still refreshing to live with less STUFF all over the place.

Took us about 3x as long to get into the city because of the red shirt protesters and a Bangkok-illiterate cab driver, wah wah. The protests are not even exciting to us anymore- just a nuisance. Quit beating your drums in the street, its midnight.

Sunday night we went to our favorite movie theater and saw “The Rite”… we expected it to be a lot scarier, but it probably was good that it wasn’t because Sarah and I had to share Jordan as our protector from creepy things (the only thing he has done is an excellent job at scaring the bejeebers out of me after we were followed by a goofy tuk tuk driver:)  ).

We have a new hotel/hostel (I don't like saying hostel because it sounds like the horror movie...) room for this week and here are some of the things we said in reaction to it:

“Yes!! There’s a shower curtain!”

“Did you realize the beds don’t have sheets?”

“We have skylights in the bathroom…”

“This bed makes my bed at AIT seem luxurious.”

“Why is the mirror above the toilet?”

 

So there’s good and bad.

Oh hai, BKK! ... the sign to our Hostel

Our hostel is green-people friendly

Internships are turning out to be pretty interesting for each of us in different ways.
-Sarah and I got to go on the sweet field trip and have a week-long one coming up soon (hopefully to Chiang Mai)
-Jordan got to score the winning soccer goal for his office team in the league championship
-Chelsea has spent 2 weekends at a PDA school and hotel
-Chad is spending the week doing eco-stuff in Chiang Rai
-Torey is conducting interviews, writing emails for big wigs, MC-ing anniversary events, and her picture will be in the Bangkok Post this week
-and Ben is a beach bum


It's crazy how all of our experiences have basically been shared until the past two weeks- now we all have different stories and crazy experiences to talk about... which we will do over tropical drinks at Coyote:)

Lets see what else has happened…

-Valentine’s Day was successful. Everyone really seemed to like our goodie bags:). Our office gave us these really pretty embroidered towels that were made locally. It was fun to celebrate vday here, but it was definitely the most homesick I’ve been. It’s not anything too terrible or too consuming, but I would have loved to spend that day with my people.

-Today Pi Spider showed us pics of famous Thai ladyboys for about half an hour. We thought it might be a little NSFW, but no one cared, they just came over and talked about them with us. There are some pretty big ladyboy celebs over. Cosmetic surgery is pretty wild over here.

-I had the BREAKOUT OF THE CENTURY- I think a mix of pollution and humidity and heat and sweat and weird food caused me to have this crazy crazy breakout of sorts on my face and neckline. It was seriously like nothing I had ever experienced before. Gross, I know. Thankfully it is starting to dry up, and I should be good to go for out beach time this weekend. Cross your fingers.

-Today we ate coagulated pork blood soup for lunch. NBD. Looked like liver, another food I would rather not consume. 

Normal food: Pumpkin- and Black Bean Buns for Breakfast. Hope that's food coloring, not sharpie.

-We learned out to take the #16 bus to Siam Square. Quality of life has greatly improved because of this discovery.

That’s about it! Tonight should be a pretty quiet night and tomorrow the Capulets and Montagues are reuniting for a night of fun (ladies night!!) at our favorite hotspot, Coyote. It has the most legitimate Mexican food we have been able to find thus far… 

Love to America,

Rosie

PS, my coworker’s ringtone is “Blah Blah Blah,” by Ke$ha.