SAWATDEE!

Hello Blobs!
After another great week of teaching it is the weekend....and a long weekend at that! so we decided to go on a bit of an adventure for our four day weekend. Right now we write to you from our beautiful bamboo guesthouse on the bank of the Mekong river in the small and sleepy town of Nong Kai. From our bamboo jungle village we can see Lao accross the river, and people in boats fishing. It's a very peaceful place to be.
Now...onto the bloppling!!!!

Sitting under one of the many bamboo shelters at our Mut Mee guest house this is our view of Laos and the Mekong river. This picture does not really do justice to the beautiful view, or plant life, or lovely huts and hamocks.....but it sort of gives you an idea.
As well as visiting the sculpture park, market, village weavers workshop, and other local places we have really enjoyed sitting in the garden of our very peacful and friendly guesthouse. there are quite an assortment of travellers here and everyone is exteremly friendly, it feels like a community of sorts. Here you can see Thomas sitting under a bamboo shelter, probably working on this very blob posting.
Along the Thai side of the Mekong there is a beautiful board walk. In the day time when you walk down it there are many people (but not too crowded or busy at all) and by about 8 o'clock there is almost no one....it is a very quite and relaxed town. This is us walking along the quite boarwalk one evening in search of mango and sticky rice at about 8 pm, and everything was closing....no sticky rice for us:(
Again, another boardwalk picture. is that the moon in the background?
So this is us in the city of Khon Kaen. We are enjoying an awesome meal, on one of our free weekends. Khon Kaen has been really great for us, because it offers us some relaxation in a place where we can just do nothing for a little while. The hotel where we stayed was super nice, and we watched movies, ate good food and used the internet.
The same meal mentioned above, only Michelle is seen enjoying Pat Thai and Som Tum. OUR FAVORITES! Here is a recipe for some som tum, for those who are interested.

4 oz Green papaya
1 garlic clove
3 small red or green chilis
lots of peanuts
1 oz long green beans, chopped
2 tb lime juice
3 tb fish sauce, or light soy sauce
1 ts sugar
1 tomato diced
Cabbage leaves

Instructions for Som Tam
Peel the outer skin from the green papaya and finely shred the flesh on a cheese grater or chop very finely into long thin shreds. Set aside. In a mortar, lightly pounnd the garlic, add the chilis and lightly pound while occasionally stirring with a spoon to prevent the resulting paste from thickening. Add the long beans and slightly bruise them. Add the shredded papaya, lightly pound and stir until all the ingredients are blended together. Add the lime juice, soy sauce and sugar and stir into the mixture. Finally add the tomato, stirring once. Arrange the Chinese cabbage leaves on a serving dish and turn the yam on to them. We hope that you make it!

This is Michelle munching out on carbs that we do not usually get...and it was the best pastry that we have ever eaten. The hotel we stayed at was very nice, and had a bakery inside it, we ate a few cherry filled doughnuts and croissants, ok, maybe a dozen. HAHAHA

Vietnamese food. Very tasty, and very light. This meal consisted of rice paper (to wrap), lettuce, afew herbs, cucumber, garlic, chilis, starfruit, green banana, rice noodles, pork and peanut sauce. This food is awesome...but needless to say, you have to eat alot in order to feel full! This meal was eaten with our Thai mom and her sister and towards the end of the meal, They both started laughing. When they laugh, all you can do is laugh along, that is what we did. Then she translated their comments, by saying "ohhh michelle, you have gotten so fat!" Michelle is definetely starting to feel the push of being thin in Asian culture. Although her appearance has not changed at all, all of a sudden fat comments started and haven't stopped...but just from our thai mom.

An after school excursion with our students where we saw some of the countryside around Ban Non Pho. In this picture, Thomas is reaching for a tasty berry, that tastes almost exactly like tapioca pudding. Thomas was the only one tall enough to reach the tasty treat, so his services were indespensible for a while.
This is our Thai mom and our principle with us at a huge gathering of Thai scouts. The evening was Hawiian themed, and we both felt very overwhelmed by the sheer size of the gathering. There was hundreds of tents, and probably five hundred scouts in total. We were guests of honour for some reason, and got wreaths of flowers to go along with our status.

This is a lovely shot of Michelle with our students. This is primarily grade five and six students, and they all love to get photos with the two of us. After class is over, we not only teach them English, but they teach us lots of Thai!

We took a field trip to Khon Kaen with our school...Sixty students crammed into the backs of three pickup trucks, roaring down the highway...no big deal, they had permission slips! And We attended a festival held in the name of sustainability. The trip was mainly a shopping trip for our Thai mom, so we looked at orchids, orchids and more orchids. After that, we took care of a couple of students while our mom went shopping at a Thaimart. We had no idea what to do with them, and were tired from the orchid shopping, so we took them for pizza! We thought it would be an awesome idea, but they took one bite of the pizza and spat it onto the plate! One girl tried very hard to finish a slice of the stuff, but right after consuming it she ran out of the restaraunt to go to the bathroom. She must have really had to pee! Ironic that all of the children always say that their favorite food is pizza...We think that they are lying. we don't think they have ever put so much dough or cheese in their systems in their whole lives.This picture had to go into the blog, because those of you from RJC, and maybe still going there will recognize this sweet little boy. Thomas has dubbed him Chandler, in response to his mannerisms, moods and charming good looks. We love him to bits, and he makes us miss home!

The delicacy being consumed through a straw here is freshly pressed sugar cane juice. It is lightly sweet and very refreshing!
This monk grabbed Thomas' hand and gestured at Michelle to take a photo. That is what she did. It surprised us because we view them as such holy and highly regarded people. It made our day! Well, it made Thomas' day, and made Michelle a bit jealous. She is not even allowed to touch them! In any city you will see monks walking about, and they are sometimes surprisingly liberal. We have seen them doing everything from driving a scooter, to buying building supplies in a hardware store, to talking on cell phones to smoking cigarrettes. It seemed strange to us to see such holy figures doing things like this!

This is a picture that Thomas took on one of his WILD ANIMAL SAFARIS! There is a video of this, but we were unable to upload it. It is a praying mantis! And it was occupying the wall of our bathroom. It was as big as Thomas' hand, and has the most flourescent green. We were pretty sure that it could bite us if it wanted to.

This picture was also taken on our after school adventure in the country side around our village. We all went for a swim in the river, and had a jolly good time!Michelle is somewhere in this bean field...CAN YOU FIND HER?
Michelle enjoying some sugar cane. It is a bit more difficult to consume than sugar can juice, but is just as delicious.
We are playing with our students in a stream. The cold water was nice to splash...at us! Need we say more?

Our past week teaching was wonderful, we are really enjoying our students, and the Isaan culture is wonderful to learn about. We hope to teach about Canada next week, so we will be explaining what snow is! We barely remember what it is ourselves!

Well, this is the end of our post. We did not put many photos involving us in Nong Khai, we will do that next time! Much love and we hope to hear from you all via the comments!
T. and M.