Hi friends and family,
I’m going to tell you about another great day I had here and about some of the food we’ve been having here!
Each day while the girls were on holiday, we taught them English. I teach some of the middle school girls, and at first I was nervous because in Sunday School I would typically teach first grade and under. At first it was hard to see how much English they understood and coming up with lessons that were fun but also taught them a lot. In Spanish classes back home, I always loved doing creative and fun projects and I wanted to do that here. So, I came up with the idea to have us design our own menus for a restaurant. We included authentic Thai foods and some American foods. They learned so many different kinds of foods in English and they had the opportunity to be creative! We had so many laughs and this was the first class where we went overtime by 15 minutes! My teammates and I were struggling to fill the time and keep them entertained for the full time. I was really happy how much effort they put into the menus and it overall was so amazing!
I’ve been asked about the food experience here and I realized I never really talked about it before! In Cambodia, we had a pretty repetitive food menu, but it was delicious nonetheless! For breakfast, we either had ramen or loaves of bread and My Boy, a brand of sweetened condensed milk. My Boy became a fan favorite for our team and I will definitely be eating bread and sweetened condensed milk at home! For lunch and dinner, we almost always had a type of greens, chicken or a different kind of meat, and rice. We had a chili sauce that we put on our rice and dang was that stuff delicious! In Cambodia, we also tried new fruits. Durian, aka stinky fruit, is super popular here. It’s odor is pretty stinky and the taste of it was not my favorite. It was kind of creamy and stringy, but it’s super popular among the locals. We also had rambutan and lychees, which are SO delicious! They are look very different on the outside but the insides are quite similar. Rambutan is pink and spiky on the outside and lychees have light brown skins. When you break them, inside is a clear ball that has the consistency of jello. They are both sweet and kind of tasted like pear and cantaloupe. We also ate fried spiders when we went to the Spider Village, and it kind of tasted like a potato chip.
In Thailand, we have quite the variety of meals! Every meal is served with rice and we can have either soup, noodles, or roasted veggies. They are very creative with making meals and pretty much every thing we eat is delicious. We have glass noodles sometimes, which are clear noodles, and they’re so good! I have 2 favorite meals here: chicken and roasted veggies and pumpkin soup! We have variations of roasted veggies but they’re so delicious every time! And pumpkin is super popular here, so sometimes we will have it in soup or mixed with noodles. It doesn’t taste like pumpkin back home, it tastes more like a sweet potato. We also have lots of fruit here like in Cambodia, which I love! On our most recent adventure day, we went to a night bazaar and got mango sticky rice. They cut up mango and mix it with sticky rice. The restaurant gave us a bag of coconut milk to drizzle over it and it was so good! The mixture of the juicy mango with the sweet rice was so yummy!
One of my teammates, Hannah, and I have been helping cook for our meals and the girls’ meals! We have been doing tons of prep work like peeling eggs and cutting up veggies. We do this all on the floor and we cut on top of tarps. We jam out to music and talk and it’s a really fun way to help out! So far we’ve made pad thai and various soups and noodle dishes, which have been super good!
Thank you for your continued prayers!!
Blessings,
Natalie
