NONG KHAI Week 4
The clouds were quite impressive, but didn't photograph well.
Had to do the big bike ride at least once a week to get bread for breakfast and packaged chicken or pork. Wasn't game enough to purchase the meat from the market! Amazing how great cheese slices are when they are the only cheese available for miles! They had small jars of the most delicious marmalade too.
The biggest local market was almost opposite the Lotus store and had a good selection of fruit and vegetables as well as fish, meat and other stuff to do with food. Must admit I didn't know what it all was. However, for those who enjoy different things - the silk worm grubs I ate are as above.
The fungi is a little different than NZ and the variety is great.
Sausages anyone.
I would really like to have put some nail varnish on the claws - they look so like fingernails!
The blur is a couple of small plastic bags tied to a stick that is waved continuously over the food to try and keep the flies off.
Two flies were more determined to settle on the fish..
This lady amazed me as she obviously has a different thermostat to others - leggings!!!
Skinny hungry kitten scavenging around.
I was curious to know what these two old fellas were up to in their boats, so zoomed in - was none the wiser after watching them for a few minutes!
A spot of home cooking - green ingredients below - two types of eggplant, yard long beans and spring onion.
This lady spent a long time hand sawing logs that had been salvaged from the river.
Grass grows incredibly fast and is usually dealt to with a noisy weed-eater and I had wondered how they dealt with the school lawns. When I spied this fella after school one afternoon I thought he had a kind of lawn mower that would make short work of it until I realized the blade was less than 30 cm across. You can see it in the bottom photo.
The bus for the three hour trip down to Khon Kaen had only 3 passengers and was relatively new as opposed to the crowded trip back on an old bus on it's last legs! Air conditioned and only 155 baht - about $7.
Couldn't resist this out of the bus window - there is a little girl being dropped off at school under the raincoat.
The countryside was all pretty much like this on the trip.
Ingtara hotel in Khon Kaen interior of room and view out the window to the lake.
The bilingual school I visited was such a contrast to where I was teaching. The children spend half the day being taught in Thai by their Thai teachers and the other half in English by their predominantly Kiwi teachers.
New bus depot on outskirts of town. The one where I was dropped off in the middle of the city was more typical - 4 big buildings bursting at the seams with people and every kind of bus from the big expensive two story ones to ones with windows at the back half only.
I was pleased to get to see the whole process completed on the day before I left. You can see the already empty nets on the left. Here they elevate one end and scoop the fish out the other end and pulley them up to the waiting ute where they are tranferred to a container full of water on the back - after each basket is weighed.
These are my best buddies from the village. "Hunny" on the left and her parents, own and operate the place I ate at mostly. She has a growing vocabulary of English words and a cellphone with an app to help us translate. We would often all sit around the table if there were no customers and communicate in any way we could. I even got invited to stay with them next visit.
