Cooking in Thailand

Dear All,
We had out cooking class and it was amazing!
Da is the one who taught us and she's a great twenty five year old who's married to an American and spent several years studying in the States and makes great western food as well as Thai food.
First she took us down to the market and showed us around to where we could buy all of the ingredients we would be using and showing us different things and the names for stuff. The market is much bigger than I would have guessed from our walks through it.
We started with a curry paste and mashed it all up ourselves, that was quite an effort but it turned out really well and was super good! And not as spicy as what the Thai's use. Then we made six different dishes, appetisers and a dessert and all sorts of good food in the middle. We stopped after each dish to sit down and taste it and take pictures of our masterpieces- they looked as good as they tasted!
We were there a good five or more hours and had an incredible time, we ended up going home with a sack full of leftovers each and have been eating well ever since.
Wednesday Erika ran into our neighbour Michael on her way to buy rice to go with our leftovers and invited him over for dinner. He's quite a character, he's been in Thailand for two years teaching English literature at one of the universities here and is writing his own novel. He says he left the States to get away from the Bush administration, he had never left the country before coming to Thailand!
Anyway, after a nice long dinner with him he took us out to the Swensons here for ice cream, apparently he spends a good deal of time at this ice cream joint and everybody knows him. It was really good ice cream and large amounts of chocolate! Next door to Swensons is a pizza place and across the street is the night bazaar. We hadn't seen any of this because in our first week or so we walked past the street and saw more foreigners in that block than anywhere else in the city and scared us! They move in packs apparently! But the night bazaar is amazing with everything you could ever imagine for sale and food stalls of all sorts. Michael introduced us to some of the Thai ladies he knew who worked in the night bazaar and they all asked if first we were his girlfriends and then if we were his daughters.
Now we're working on getting up earlier in the morning so it's not such a shock when Erika has to start work next Monday at seven thirty in the morning.
Love to you all and write when you get the chance, Kristen Rose

Cooking School

Dear All,
It's boiling here! I feel like I'm drowning in heat and humidity! It's impressive, actually, how hot it can get here and how curly my hair becomes with all this humidity. Didn't expect that.
Tomorrow Erika and I are taking a day long cooking class from Da our friend at the Teak House restaurant. She's going to take us all around the market so we know where to get everything when we start cooking on our own and how to buy all the different vegetables and whatnot. Then we're making our own curry as well as a starter and saute and dessert and all sorts of interesting things! We'll have enough food to feed us for a week when we're done! And we might actually know how to do some things with the vegetables and fruit they have here so our cooking at home can really gear up, I'm excited.
Yesterday we had quite a trial getting out to the University for church, our "soong thaw" (truck bus) didn't know where we were going so kept pulling over to ask us how far and he didn't understand English. At one point he made a call to a friend of his who spoke English to try and figure out what we wanted- he still didn't understand.
After church we went down to hang out at the pool and had a nice long conversation with Mike, another American who lives in our building he's been in Thailand for two years and is a literature professor at one of the universities here. He's a very interesting character and it was nice having a long and in depth conversation in full English sentences with someone other than the two of us.
Everything is mostly closed today, it's some sort of holiday though we're not quite sure what holiday.
Hope everyone is well and enjoying life on their side of the world.
Kristen Rose

Continuing in Thailand

Dear All,
First off I want to appoligise for my terrible grammar and spelling in these letters from Thailand. It turns out that is not my area of expertise and I don't take the time to spell check as I'm paying to communicate with you all. Very sorry.
So, on to other things.
Thailand is doing well, at least this bit of it. From what we hear the south is having some trouble with response to the coup and things aren't going as smoothly as everyone would hope. If we didn't read about it in the paper we wouldn't know about it at all because we don't see any of it up here and no one seems to be concerned about it. Thai people though, we're learning, aren't concerned about much. They all seem to be in a generally good mood all the time and very little upsets them and if it does they don't seem to mention it. It's beyond me but we're learning to deal with it in them.
We celebrated our one month anniversary by going to one of the fancier restaurants near our building and having a blow out meal. It's one of the more expencive restaurants we ever go to but the lady who runs it is married to an American and was trained in the States. We can order real American food and receive actual American food. Not only that we can have chocolate in many forms! We made the mistake of watching the movie Chocolat on TV, it's near to impossible to watch that movie without actual chocolat to eat!
Erika has yet to start Thai lessons but we've begun to pick up the essentials of conversation; numbers, rice, hello, goodbye and thank you. Now we've begun to look for teachers ourselves and we might have someone lined up so as soon as we run it by the school she might actually be able to get somewhere.
Yesterday we ended up attending two church services. One meets across town at the university here and is in both Thai and English and there are both students and missionaries that attend, it was a very interesting service and twice as long as a normal one as you have to wait for everything to be translated. The second service was in the evening and is the International Fellowship that they have here in town which is almost entirely made up of missionary families- everyone asks what organization we're with and we have to tell them all that Erika's working and I'm just hanging around. The great thing about both services is that they have a free meal afterwards, potluck style! The international church even has American food- macaroni and cheese and the like!
That's all for now, I'd love to hear from you all,
Kristen Rose

Catching up

Dear All,
Well, to be honest there's not much to report.
We're enjoying ourselves and our time off, we spend our days down at the pool, reading and writing or painting and watching movies on TV. We get down to the market about once a day and have enjoyed eating at several different kinds of restaurants and roadside stalls.
We also got a small gas burner for our flat so we can now cook at home and that has made things a little bit more interesting and gives more to do and more experiences.
Erika still hasn't gotten her Thai lessons lined up and we're not real sure if it's going to happen but we're lelaxing and taking things as they come. Thank you all for your prayers and hopefully I'll write again soon.
Love to you all, Kristen Rose

Culture Shock and Travel

Dear All,
So much has happened and I just don't have the words to describe it all. I want to start out though with asking for you all to pray for us as we go through all of this and as we think about maybe changing the time period in which we come home (the reason for this following).
Since we have the month off we were planning this as our time to explore the north and do some travelling. Tuesday, on our way out of town, we stopped at the school to ask a couple of questions before we left and ended up staying for an hour while Erika talked to Sirirat on the phone, there have been... to put it nicely, some miscommunications about such things as the breaks of the school and what is actually required of us.
So we've now discovered that this holiday is about three weeks long, there's another two weeks in December for Christmas and then a two and 1/2 to 3 month holiday starting sometime in Feb. This means Erika will only be teaching for a couple of months before a long break in which they will be paying us to do absolutely nothing and then another month before we leave the country. People keep saying that our very presence is an encouragement but it's hard for us imagining sitting around Chiang Rai with no real job during those three months. So we are thinking of leaving sometime around March and it's not an easy decision at all.
We did end up taking our trip, though we were told it wouldn't be the best- if they meant they didn't want us to go or if the weather would be bad or what we're not sure. We took a boat trip up the river to a small village called Tha Thon where we stayed in a little bungalow at a resort called Garden Home and thoroughly enjoyed the quiet and relaxing without worrying about running into someone we know or finding out about yet another something we don't understand.
We also were able to sample the message parlors Thailand is so well known for and Erika got a "Thai Message" while i got an hour long foot message which ends up going most of the way up your leg and being incredibly relaxing! We had a really enjoyable week and spent a good bit of money before taking the boat back down the river and returning to our flat.
Now we are at Sirirat's house once again visiting with her family, the orphans and a family that is in town for a revival of sorts that they are holding at the school in Chiang Rai. The family is an interesting one the father being Thai and the mother American who has lived in Thailand since she was fifteen as her parents were missionaries before her. They have ten children and have homeschooled them all and they all speak great English, three of them are now in the States going to college.
So we are returning tonight and Erika begins Thai language lessons this next week, one of the things the schools introduced to us rather out of the blue. She's going to help to teach me, hopefully the act will work to implant it a little further in her own mind after she's had her own lessons.
We're taking this life day by day and leaving all of our large decisions until as late as possible so we have a good long time to think them all over before doing anything rash.
My love to you all, Kristen Rose