Festivals and Suphan

Hello, Hello!

Cyrus and I have been back to the grind ever since we got back from our two week winter break.  This means our weekends are limited to hanging around Suphan, and finalizing our lesson plans for the end of the year.  We don't have any big adventures or trips to write about, but I hope these snapshots of "Suphan Life" will be entertaining enough...

Thai people love festivals.  It seems like they have one every other weekend. The first couple festivals we went to were fun and exciting, but I feel that once you've seen one, you've seen them all.  Every Thai festival includes the following things: stupid carnival games (almost always involving popping a balloon), vendors selling anything and everything including $2 watches, used shoes, t-shirts with bad English on them, colored contacts, car cleaner, and stalls and stalls and stalls of meat on a stick.

You can also buy bunnies in dresses if you want...

And sometimes there are elephants...

This is a picture of one of our favorite people in Suphan (the woman on the left).  She is fondly known by all of the Western teachers as "Pad Thai Lady", but her real name is Mon.  Her restaurant doubles as the family living room, and it's not the cleanest place I've ever been, but her pad thai is "the bomb" and there are hardly any other restaurants that make it.  We go at least 3 times a week, and a meal there sets us back 30 baht....or $1.

This is the night market in town.  It's just a road with a bunch of food vendors.  Some of our favorite things to get are pad see ew, sushi, green curry, spring rolls, mango and sticky rice, and pineapple smoothies.

People will drive right up to the stall on their motorbike, order, then take the food back home in plastic bags.

On the back of a "song tow", a.k.a. a pickup truck with benches that drives people around.  Needless to say there are no seat belts.

This is the road our apartment is off of.  If you walk 100 yards you will get to Pad Thai Lady's restaurant.

We spend a lot of our Sunday mornings at this coffee shop.  A super cool woman named Banya owns it.  She speaks English really well and makes a deeeeelicious Thai iced tea.

We only have three more weeks until our big two month break, so we are just counting down the days. Hope everything is good at home!

Paige and Cyrus

p.s.  Look out for the next post detailing Cyrus' Thai basketball debut....