Thailand ~ Funny Signs

Alas, the trip is over, we're home and happy to see that the cat survived 10 days without us! She was super lovey dovey this evening, staying in my lap while I uploaded the last of the photos and caught up on email. I have a couple more Thailand posts coming up, but I'm going to start out the week easy with a few funny translations.

Being a poor language-learner myself, I can commiserate with their translations troubles. That said, this post isn't meant to poke fun, just to give you a good Monday-morning chuckle!

These first two are from an "opposites" poster in Sarah's class {the quality's not great, but words are clear}::


This was found in a bathroom::

And this one was from the Beijing airport::

Ko Samet

Wednesday was a holiday in Thailand called Makha Bucha, which celebrates the Buddha's first sermon to his disciples. Schools were closed, giving Sarah and I just enough time to take a little trip to Ko Samet. There are many beautiful islands in the Gulf of Thailand, but Ko Samet is fairly popular for both Thais and tourists because of its proximity to Bangkok. Sarah's talked about the cost of living in Thailand {cheap, cheap, cheap}, and I thought it would be fun to use this trip as another example.

First, I wanted to orient you as to where we are, and where we're going. Here's the big picture::

And zooming in on that red box, here's the trip we took::

$4.00 one-way bus ticket::
Sarah lives in the city of Chon Buri, from there we hopped on a bus for a 2 hour ride to the port city/town of Bon Phe (pronounced Bon Pay).

$1.50 round trip ferry ticket::
From Bon Phe, we catch a ferry to Ko Samet. There are a few scheduled rides early in the day, but as evening approaches, you have to wait for the ferry to fill up before it will leave. For us that meant waiting about 40 minutes until they had 20 passengers. The key to traveling in Thailand is to always carry a book. We were happy to sit on the dock and read while we waited, and the timing couldn't have been better because we took off as the sun was setting and the moon was rising.




$12-36 bungalow
Once on the island, we found a bungalow for the night. Although it's nearing the end of tourist season here, visits to Ko Samet were still in full swing. We like to travel on a shoestring, but since we hadn't reserved a room, the cheaper bungalows were sold out, so we had to fork over $36 for a bungalow with a private bathroom and air conditioning. It was still an amazing deal, but for the second night we transferred to the bare bones bungalow. It's just a mattress on a platform with a mosquito net, a fan, and a shared bathroom. Some would consider it too bare, but we love it::

An additional perk of paying for the more expensive bungalows was breakfast on the beach!

$1 beach chair
After breakfast, we walked along the beach and reserved our chairs for the day. Rather than carry your own chairs to the beach, it's common outside of the US for there to be chairs and umbrellas set up along the beach. You find a location you like, sit down and pay for the spot. The chairs are yours for as long as you want them ~ a couple of hours or the whole day.


$1.30 coconut on beach
All day long you'll find vendors walking the beach selling food {fruit, bar-b-que, ice cream}, fabric items {sarongs, bags, wall hangings}. In the picture below, you can see how the food vendors operate; they have two large baskets of food that are tied to a long piece of bamboo and balanced across their shoulders. Around mid-morning we bought a green coconut, enjoying the water from inside and then scraping out the fruit for a snack.

$12 fish & $1 banana apple smoothie
Once we had worked up an appetite for lunch, we walked down the beach to one of the restaurants and ordered a steamed white snapper and an apple-banana smoothie to share.

$7.50 massage on beach
Massage is popular throughout Thailand, even on the beach. In the shade of the trees behind our beach chairs, it was easy to find a masseuse with a menu of options {anything from a foot or hand to full-body massage}. After you lie down on a blanket in the shade, you pick your massage {we both choose the 60 minute head and shoulder massage} and relax.

$14 drinks and free internet
Sarah knew of a bar with wireless, so we stopped in to get online and enjoy a few mojitos.

$6 dinner for two
After yet a few more hours of relaxing, reading, and swimming it was time for dinner. It didn't take us long to walk along the beach and find a menu we liked. Most of the restaurants serve seafood and a variety of Thai dishes, and there are a few that will cater to the tourists, serving pizza and burritos. We opted for the traditional Thai, splitting chicken with cashews and a green curry.

$3 dessert
Two dishes of coconut ice cream to complete our island adventure.

The next morning we were up with the sun and on the first ferry out of Ko Samet, heading back to Chon Buri for Sarah's afternoon lesson.

In total, here were our expenses for the trip:
$16.00 bus tickets {$4.00 one way times two people to Bon Phe and back}
$3.00 ferry tickets {$1.50 round trip per person}
$36.00 bungalow
$12.00 bungalow
$2.00 a couple of beach chairs
$1.30 fresh coconut snack
$13.00 fish and smoothie lunch
$15.00 two head and shoulder massages
$14.00 drinks
$6.00 dinner for two
$3.00 coconut ice cream!

$121.30 is our grand total for a one day-two night trip to Ko Samet for two. With everything in one list, it's easy to see where one can splurge {$14 for four drinks} and where the cost of Thai living is really affordable {$6 for dinner for two}.

Flowers from Sarah's neighborhood::
We're off to Ko Samet this afternoon!

Thailand ~ Day 1

It was a traveling miracle, after 21 hours in the air, running to catch a connection, and getting in at one in the morning Thai-time, I woke up at 7am on Saturday refreshed and ready to go!

We spent the night in the Lub.d Hostel in Bangkok. The building was as awesome mix of concrete and plywood ~ it looked sleek and modern, but was so hard to capture on camera. For US$30, you can sleep in a "railway twin"; it's a private room with two beds {Sarah's the lump sleeping on the top bunk}::
Turning around, this is the rest of the room:: There are shared bathrooms on each floor, a bar downstairs, free wifi, and plenty of little lounge areas to relax and meet other travelers. A fantastic deal for anyone traveling on a budget!

And in the lobby you can examine an elephant's finer side::

Apparently the view's better from the inside looking out...


Leaving the elephant behind, we spent the morning in Bangkok's large market where we picked up breakfast, and enough t-shirts and sunglasses to outfit a small army, and then it was off to cooking school!

There are a few different cooking schools in Bangkok, we attended Course 2 of the Silom Thai Cooking School.

The class begins at a local market where our teacher, Oliver, reviews key Thai ingredients:: Ginger, basil, chili peppers, lime, lemongrass, and coconut are all staples of Thai cuisine, providing aroma and spice. The rest of the ingredients are either proteins {chicken, been, tofu, shrimp, fish} or vegetables that they refer to as "fillers" {tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, corn, baby corn}.

Back at the cooking school, there was a bit of prep work to be done before we started the lessons. Sarah and I helped one of the teaching assistants prepare the proteins, deveining shrimp and cutting up the chicken.

All lessons were taught on the floor. We sat in a circle around the ingredients. Oliver would discuss the dish were about to make, reviewing the key ingredients and discussing preparation techniques. In some cases we would prepare the ingredients and dishes individually, in other cases we would prepare one dish that was then divided among the group.

After preparing the ingredients, we would go out to the porch where we each student operated their own wok... We were the only Americans in the group with included a woman from Ireland and a bunch from Norway. Halfway into the first dish, Sarah and I decided that we have to add woks to our Christmas list this year! What surprised me was the way the dishes were cooked. I would have thought that the soups and curries were cooked in stages {first the meat, then the hard veggies like carrots and onions, then the more tender ingredients}. The cooking was not like that at all ~ we would add all ingredients to the wok at the same time, and it would all cook for the same amount of time.

We would sit down and eat each dish as soon as it was finished and before beginning the next dish. This may have been the most challenging part of the day ~ eating your piping hot dish without burning your tongue, but fast enough to keep up with the group.

Our menu included seven dishes:

Dish 1: Chicken Galangal Coconut Soup The key aromatic ingredients for this dish were coconut milk, lemongrass, lime, chilies, and ginger. Of course you can easily buy coconut milk in cans, and this is what most Thais do, but we learned how to make it from scratch. You shred the meat of a brown {old} coconut, pour warm water over it, mash it with your hands, and then strain out the pulp. After the first round, you have coconut cream. If you pour more warm water over the pulp, mash it, and strain it again, you produce coconut milk. The filler ingredients for this dish were tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, and scallions.

Dish 2: Fried Cashew Nuts with Chicken
This dish got a lot of its flavor from the chiles, Thai garlic {cooked with the skins on}, fish sauce, and oyster sauce. Fillers included scallions, two types of mushrooms, baby corn, and onions::

Dish 3: Glass Noodle Salad with Shrimp This was a "group dish", we prepared the ingredients, and our teacher assembled the salad in one big bowl. A leaf of lettuce was topped with the shrimp, glass noodles, onions, and tomatoes covered in a dressing of fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, and chilies.

Dish 4: Fish cakes... I was too busy licking my fingers to take a picture. As we ate the fish cakes, we worked on the red curry paste.

Dish 5: Red Curry Paste All ingredients including chilies, cumin, peppercorns, Thai garlic, among other things were put into a big mortar and pestle. The mortar was passed around the circle for pounding, and after about 15 minutes, we had our paste.

Dish 6: Red Curry Chicken
This is an example of how all ingredients are added to the wok in one step. The dish's aromatic ingredients included curry paste, ginger, and lime leaves. Carrots and pea-eggplants {those pea-shaped veggies} where the dish's fillers, and it was accompanied by a side of brown basmati rice.

Dish 6: Bananas in Coconut Milk. This was another group preparation dish ~ small, finger bananas were simmered in coconut milk for 15 minutes, and then topped with a sprinkling of rice before serving. You can see the final product sitting on the table above our red curry chicken.

And where does all of that chicken meat come from? We're not sure, but these chickens in the alley behind the school may be involved...


With our bellies full, we boarded a bus for a long nap and a ride to Chonburi.

Master Procrastinator

Oh boy, procrastination has taken over my life. I don't respond to emails. I don't pack until the night before a big journey. Grading papers? I'm scrambling to enter the grades into my grade book just moments before class is about to start. It's gotten so bad that it's even attacked the blog! I've had posts that I've been writing in my head all week, but they never made their way onto the computer.

Not anymore, C and I have decided that we need some spring break resolutions. Mine? 1. stop biting my nails {for the 100th time}. If I've stopped before, why did it start again? Because I get nervous when I procrastinate and am hitting deadlines left and right. Oh the vicious cycle. 2. stop procrastinating, this should probably be number 1, but a resolution about procrastinating should always come last... of course, they aren't going to start until we get back. Procrastinate much?

And now I'm off To Thailand to shop and eat and hang out with Sarah! If you haven't been keeping up with her adventures, you should. I'm sitting here in the airport with my liquids and gels in a baggy, a new book, some emergency Cliff bars, and my mom's fantastic quinoa salad. Can't wait to share our adventure as it unfolds this week.

How we fought off the winter greys ~

The morning's walk with the dog was beautiful; the sun felt warm, and the air smelled sweet. This was not the case last week. Last week I thought I was going to suffocate in the dreary, grey, cold winter weather. It's not that the winter has been bad, just long, and rather mild with a lack of quality snow storms {the kind that require you to stay inside and hibernate like all good animals should}. Instead of staying in, we just had to trudge through it, and at this point we're ready for spring. Calder was feeling the weight of winter too, so we fought off last week's winter greys with a whole pile of sunshine in the kitchen.

It started with juicing the last of the Christmas grapefruits:: The pitcher of juice provided a few days worth of enjoyment and vitamin C, and by the end Calder and I were bartering for the last delicious drop. He drinks his straight up, I mix mine with seltzer water for a bit of fizz.

Then it was time to test out the new jellyroll pan, so I baked a meyer lemon spongecake and filled it with an almond buttercream {meyer lemons and almonds ~ two delicious crops from the sunshine state}::

And finally, there's nothing like a rainbow of color on your plate to add some sunshine to your day. This is a simple kale, beet and quinoa salad :: To put this together:
~ roast some cubed beets, sliced carrots, bell peppers and onions in the oven {with a bit of olive oil and salt}
~ cook some quinoa on the stovetop
~ sauté kale and garlic in olive oil
~ chop up some cherry tomatoes and cucumbers
~ mix it all together and enjoy! If you want a bit more flavor, you could add your favorite vinaigrette. We keep it in the fridge and eat it for lunch throughout the week.

The first snowdrop bloomed over the weekend and the daffodils are popping up, it looks like we may survive after all...

And yes, we knit

A new sweater is on the needles. This is the Fuse sweater from Wool People, Volume 2. I really love the collections of garments and designers brought together in this work. And, I particularly love the good, hearty wools that are used. They are all designed using Brooklyn Tweed's Shelter wool; I didn't have any on hand, but I did have a sweater's worth of Carodan Farm's worsted weight, which I find to be a great substitute. After my success with the purple Aidez sweater (also Carodan farm yarn), I decided that I'd go out on a limb again and add more color to my closet. This is their peach color-way, and the second photo below is a truer representation than the first.

So far this sweater has been fun to knit. You begin by casting on 16 stitches, and knitting back and forth, making a long strip that becomes the lower edge of the sweater:: You then go back along the length of that strip to pick up the stitches for body of the cardigan. This is a sweater-knitting-puzzle at its finest. But my favorite part? The sweater is seamless!

I've knit the body from the bottom up to where I have to attach the arms {photo below}. I'm now knitting the arms {two at a time on circular needles, so that they match exactly}. Once the sleeves are long enough, they will be attached to the body, and I'll continue knitting the yoke up to the neck. This should make a perfect early-spring cardigan!