Spent two days doing a cooking course at ‘The best Thai cookery school’ (yep, we thought it was original to!). Lots of fun, food and flames- as you can see!
Archive for November, 2009As we prepared to leave, Lucy took us to Pattaya train station to get tickets for the sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, only to find out that it was completely sold out. (Note: we had tried to book tickets over the internet, but it had failed Things to do here: cookery course, massage course?, trekking, riding elephants, visiting hill tribes, day & night markets… should keep us busy! Got a speedboat to Ko Samet, a gorgeous island near to Bang Chang where we spent the weekend with James and Lucy, lounging on the beach, swimming in the beautiful water and eating and drinking lots whilst enjoying some fire-dancing
As planned, we joined Lucy on a few projects she’s involved with. We’ve handed out food and drink in a couple of prisons. Prisoners generally only get 1 bowl of rice per day as the money allocated to feeding them doesn’t seem to make it to them, they also have no changes of clothing and no washing facilities and there’re generally 8-10 men for a cell which in the UK would house 1 person. We heard that the week before we’d visited an American had been locked up having been mistaken for being drunk when he was actually diabetic. We saw a jewellery project ‘Freedom Stones’ that Lucy is managing which helps women and men to leave prostitution by giving them an alternative source of income whilst also training them in business management and budgeting. The necklaces & earrings are beautiful so once the website’s up and running, it’ll be well worth a look. Handing out food, drink, clothes and providing some basic first aid in the slums here was very different to the soup run I was part of in Nottingham – mainly because there were loads of young children. Also, there was no moaning and trying to get extras. The Project also did a kids ‘class’ which so we tried to follow the instructions in Thai (much to the kids amusement) and played with them for a while. We were really pleased that there were some native Thais on the project too so it wasn’t another project where it’s just the rich ‘farangs’ (the slightly-derogatory Thai term for foreigners) dishing out charity. I guess projects with just westerners, even though they’re beneficial, can also seem patronizing and help to maintain a power imbalance (hence we didn’t take any photos of this ). We also spent an afternoon at Mercy Children’s Centre which houses and cares for kids who are at risk. Later we did an impromptu computer class with some of them and joined them in their ‘play time’ picking up a few Thai words along the way!
Later, we floated our kratongs in the sea which is a rather lengthy 30-second walk from James & Lucy’s (no, we’re not envious at all!). There were also HUNDREDS of chinese flying lanterns being launched which are so peaceful and beautiful as they float off into the sky and become stars – unfortunately very hard to do justice with a photo so we’ve not uploaded any. The peace was regularly broken by people throwing fire crackers & fireworks – sometimes landing just a few metres away from us. Fireworks here are exciting in a whole new way! We had a lovely week with James & Lucy and they made us feel very much at home. (Thanks again if you’re reading this!) * – as an aside – there is no standard way to go from Thai script into Roman script, so one word can be written a whole load of ways. e.g. one hotel we’re staying in is called Mitapap, Mittaphap or Mattapip depending on where you look! It’s pretty much their way of working – there’s no single right way necessarily… |
). We were about to make a plan B, when a Thai lady who spoke very good english came up to us and explained that she had 2 tickets that she was about to return for that same train. WOW! Great! Even better was that for returning tickets you only get 50% back, so we agreed we’d pay 70% so we all walked away happy. EVEN BETTER STILL: they were both lower births in the train, so we had more space and less light, so we both slept rather well as we trundled along for 14 hours to Chiang Mai, where we are writing this.
Unfortunately, Alex and I forgot to take our anti-malaria during the day and so took it several hours after eating…the results weren’t pleasant, but thankfully very short-lived!
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