AKA: we get the afternoon off of classes because the students are making us flowers. I'm certain I'll report on that later. However, I do not have to teach this afternoon.
This left me with three options:
1. Work on lesson plans. We were just informed YESTERDAY that all lesson plans May-September need to be turned in by June 30th. HAHAHAHA. I'm dead serious. I'm going to die. I don't even know what I'm teaching next week, let alone in September.
2. Go to the hospital. I've been consistently sick for the past three weeks. I've only been able to eat about 500 calories per day and even then, it comes right back out. We've jokingly been calling it my tapeworm, Tapie. They prefer they/them pronouns and white rice: NOTHING ELSE. However, today I'm feeling ok. I had white rice and chicken for lunch and CASUAL BRAG/GENTLE FLEX I haven't been sick yet.
Bright side of #2: I have lost 6.7 kilos since moving to Thailand. My clothes fit the best they ever have and my driver's licence is wrong but the unusual way. O.o
3. Blog.
You'll all note which of the options I've taken here.
(Don't worry. Fred and Amanda are making me go to the hospital if Tapie starts acting up again.)
***
*Musical interlude while I go get a ชานมไข่มุก (milk bubble tea - pronounced: chai noom kai mook) It is one of the very few Thai words I'm comfortable with.)
In this picture we can see Man-U (M1 student on the floor), Fred (man in chair - he teaches Math), Amanda (if you don't know her, you haven't been paying attention), Aw (M1 homeroom teacher), me, and my milk bubble tea. The bubble tea is worth all 25B it costs.
***
Anyway. The post is called Sunday Funday. I'll get back on track; I promise.
This Sunday was one of the most fun days I've had since moving to Thailand. Amanda and I got up around mid-morning and went to the 7-11 to top up our phones (pay money to the cashier in the hopes they understand we want more data on our phones). Since we have the world's worst internet at home, we run through data like Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics.
As soon as we got data, we called Roxi. It's odd calling someone here.
We took this pic last weekend at the Sadet market, but it's too cute to not share.
Anyway we called, she answered, and we decided to meet at the Tesco mall to see the new X-Men movie!
We arrived at the mall, had a coffee (I had this delicious matcha latte), and told Roxi all about our Laos adventure. We ended up missing the 1:10 movie time and went to the food court to wait until the 3:30 movie.
Matcha Latte
This is prime Thai advertising
We figured out the food court. (It was easy once we started people-watching. The trick is you have to pay in advance and then give a pre-paid card to the people making food.) We split a Pad Thai with prawns, a bowl of cilantro broth, and one of the best green curries I've had since coming to Thailand!
Tapie liked the broth and rejected the rest. But the broth was delicious so I'm cool with it.
We then did a hardcore exploration of the mall. It's about the size of the Apache Mall in Rochester. It pales in compassion to the Mall of America - but we have high standards for malls where I come from. My two favorite finds at the mall were a beautiful ombre skirt and a book store with an English section! Oh and we found piles of cute pens. Cute pens are everywhere in Thailand. I'm very pro-this.
Our favorites were the mushroom pens!
At the bookstore, I bought a pocket Thai emergency phrases book and it's already come in handy! When I'm at a store, I can pull it out and point to like: 'batteries' and it says it in English, Thai, and phonetic Thai. It was worth all 300B (9ish USD). It's 6cm x 4cm x 2cm and fits perfectly inside my purse.
It was finally 3:00pm and we were headed off to the movies! We went upstairs, got in line, got our seats picked out, and the lady at the theater looked at us and said: "not in English, no subtitles".
WELL.
Now that simply wasn't going to work for us. I like X-Men too much to not be able to hear or understand the plot. We thanked her for the information and headed back downstairs. After a couple minutes of debate, we asked Roxi if she wanted to bike back to Lofter, get some cold coffee, and play SkipBo for a while. She said yes and told us that apparently there was a night market on Sundays as well - but she hadn't ever been and wasn't certain as to where it was.
You do not need to twist my arm into trying to find a night market.
We headed back to Lofter. It's about a 2km bike from the Tesco mall complex and we arrived back at our apartment about 10 minutes later. We parked our bikes at our apartment and walked to Lofter. (Parking is limited outside the coffee shop and we only live a block away. It's our favorite coffee shop. I will do just about anything for this place to stay open.)
We grabbed iced teas and played about 10 rounds of SkipBo. Roxi picked it up like a natural and before long we were having actual conversations accompanied by cards. We stayed there for about ... 90 minutes before heading off to find the night market.
While we were sitting at Lofter, they starting bringing these HUGE rocks past the windows. It was amazing to watch the men carrying them. They were both incredibly strong and incredibly delicate. I can't imagine how hard it would be to lift a rock as large as that for 20m down a wall of glass windows without breaking or scratching a thing. Lofter is expanding their back deck and from what I've been creeping by the bathroom it looks glorious.
We looked up where the train station was. I was almost certain how to get there, but Google Maps suggested a different and faster route. I'm always more than happy to try something new, so we took off down the shorter road.
IT WAS NOT A ROAD. IT WAS A TINY DIRT TRAIL FULL OF POTHOLES AND SWAMP. Honest to goodness, I've followed better deer trails in the woods.
We tried that for about 50m before turning around and going the other way.
We arrived at the train station and instantly saw the market. It was HUGE. I've never seen a night market this large before and I was honestly blown away. We parked the bike, walked over the train tracks, and began to explore the night market. There was a section about 1km long full of clothes and another section equally long or maybe longer full of food. The sections wound together around each other in a twisting maze of vendors, marijuana paraphernalia, ridiculously cheap clothing, and the craziest food you've ever seen.
We wandered for hours. We saw items for anything from 5B to 1000B. Most items were between 20-100B. Imagine a flea market around dusk that is also full of fresh fish.
There were kiddie pools full of fresh fish and prawns, stalls full of flower petals for potpourri, piles of durian, fried quail eggs, strange flour balls full of various things (cheese, seaweed, shrimp, etc), and these interesting taco things that we had to try:
The front ones were a crispy shell made of a sweet rice flour dough and filled with marshmallow creme. The topping is various sweet toppings. They're like the sprinkles of Thailand. Personally, I think they're sickly sweet.
And then we found the best part of the market.
It was better than 50B pants.
We found the puppies.
If you want a 500B puppy, let me know and I'll grab one for you:
I named her 'Boofer'. She took a nap in my arms for 15 minutes before I put her back down. Amanda told me I couldn't bring her home.
Stupid responsible Amanda.
There were so many puppies. And I wanted to take them all home.
The market started to shut down around 8pm. We had seen the whole thing quickly once and we didn't really stop at all - so we were walking probably a 30 minute mile and we were there for almost two hours. You do the math on how long the market was.
It was a blast. We got home as sticky, sweaty messes and I couldn't have asked for a more wonderful way to spend the weekend.
14/10. Ragingly successful weekend.
Also, we found out from our M3 student (and my uncle Jon's penpal), Pin, that the nearest place to watch English movies is Udon Thani. So at some point, we're going to take a van to Udon. Pin has requested a tag-along.
Sounds like a great adventure. Your mom says you are in need of some help. What can I do for you?
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