don’t really care about it, but they liked all the activities (and I liked not having to make lesson plans!) We made paper turkeys (which they all thought were chickens), colored cornucopias and did some turkey day word searches…awesome. I think my favorite thing was trying to explain Thanksgiving with diagrams & hand gestures:‘The Pilgrims (insert drawing of pilgrim) came to America by boat (insert paddling motion). They were cold (shiver) and starving (eating motion). The Indians (place hand in feather position on head while tapping your hand on an o-shaped mouth) brought them corn and turkeys (use cornucopia and turkey activities to demonstrate). The Pilgrims said Thank You (long and drawn out: Thaaaankkkk Yooouuuu) and now Americans eat a lot of food (eating motion while patting belly) and say Thank You on Thanksgiving (‘what holiday is this class?’) That’s right, Thanksgiving.’
On
Thanksgiving the 7 of us Americans went to Soi 35 (the house Michelle and Katie) live in for a feast. Well we had spaghetti instead of turkey, but Michelle made an amazing homemade tomato/vegetable sauce for it! We also had lettuce salad w/ homemade dressing, garlic mashed potatoes (which Ryan F made in a rice cooker), CHEESE and crackers and apple cider (well the apple cider was actually like 80% pomegranate juice, but mai pen rai). We sat around listening to music, reminiscing about past thanksgivings, wishing we had stuffing/gravy/turkey/ cranberries/pumpkin pie, etc, but it was really great. After some cards, we had dessert which was awesome: cinnamon fried apple slices (kind of like a cobbler) and whipped cream!Friday night we went to the mall and saw New Moon (I can’t really believe I’m admitting I paid to see it, but any movie in English on a big screen is worth it to me). We came home and went to bed cuz we were getting up early for a couple days of travelling!
Josie, Emily and I left Soi 18 at 6:30am on Saturday to get a cab. Well there were no cabs, so we had to walk over 30 min to the main road to get one to HomePro to catch a bus. Well we pulled up and the bus was pulling away, but thankfully we found a miniwan that would take us to the BTS (sky train) station to take us to the metro to take us to the train station. Yes all of that to get a train. We were running a little behind schedule and had to sprint from the subway through the train station to catch our train to Ayutthaya-thankfully Leora and Jenny were waiting for us with tickets so we could get on in time. Well worth it too cuz it only cost 20b or (60 cents for the train)
The train ride was a little over an hour and pretty nice to see the countryside. When we got to Ayutthaya we had to take a ferry across the river as the main city is located on an island. Leora didn’t want to stay in a hostel (as she had a crappy one the night before in BKK) so
she paid for a hotel room for the 5 of us to share-pretty great deal! After checking/ sneaking in we all hopped in a tuk tuk and made our way to the ruins.Ayutthaya was the capitol of Thailand before BKK for 417 years. It was ransacked by the Burmese, but has some really amazing ruins. We got lunch from some street people (and some street sweets too) and headed in to one of the sites. The first one we saw was a huge area that is famous for a Buddha head that looks like it is growing in a tree. We walked across the street and saw another one and started making our way around the historical parks.
Josie, Emily and I decided to keep going and spent the afternoon exploring. Our tuk tuk driver took us off-roading and we thought for sure we were going to fly out the back. We saw some really awesome sites including a 13m tall Buddha, an elephant show, a market
and spent some time lounging in a park by some ruins. It’s so crazy to think what a city 
like this would have looked like in its heyday (at one point there were supposedly 1 million people living there and much of the city was covered in gold). We ran into some friends from orientation and they joined our group as we went on a sunset longboat cruise around the island, seeing some more temples, the local way of life and a ton of monitor lizards sliding in and out of the water. At first we thought they were snakes, but then saw their legs. They are actually 5-6 ft long and really gnarly looking-definitely would not want to swim with them. After the boat we spent sometime in the night market and had some dinner/drinks by the river. It was really relaxing after being in the sun ALL day-definitely need to invest in some sunscreen.Saturday we woke up early and almost missed the train again (good thing the trains are late!) and made our way an hour north to Lopburi. We even had time to get some Roti Sai Mai which is a renowned food they eat in Ayutthaya. It’s basically these little flour/dough tortilla things that you wrap around this spun sugar that looks liked colored hair. It’s really good, but REALLY sweet. In Lopburi, we visited the famous monkey temple which is actually a temple (and
surrounding city) covered in macaques that jump and swing and eat sugary treats (no seriously we ran across several of them drinking coke and eating cotton candy). 
They will steal from you, so you have to have all your things in bags and will come grab treats right out of your hands. As some people put it, it felt like we were in Jumanji, as packs of monkeys are running through the streets, jumping on buildings, taking things from people. So bizarre. It also happened to be the annual monkey festival there that day, so there were a TON of people and a big celebration going on at the temple grounds. There were even a bunch of men who parachuted into the temple from a helicopter which we didn’t really understand what the correlation was, but it was cool anyway.After a long and tasty lunch we headed back to the train station for BKK. While waiting a bird decided it would be a good idea to poop on my hand. What a jerk.
No comments:
Post a Comment