Last Sunday and Monday we took off with our translator named, Boom. No that is not her given name, though everyone calls her that, including her mother. It seems that most Thai people go by nicknames. She took us to her home village about 2 hours from Selaphum. It was apparent that this village rarely, if ever, sees white people. We felt like animals on display in a zoo! They wanted to watch our every move to see how we did things like eat, sit, talk, etc. It was quite hilarious!
The first great experience of the weekend was the plucking of the chicken for dinner. Natalie, Blair and Liz were a little disappointed that they didn’t actually get to kill and butcher the chicken, but they seemed to have a lot of fun playing with it while plucking away!
Boom’s brother and cousins took us on an adventure through the jungle where we saw 2 elephants just roaming about. We went to the nearby river and dove in digging for clams! It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed myself immensely. (Even if the clams weren’t very tasty when we ate them at lunch…tasted like chewy river water, yum!)
After the clam digging excursion, we rode motos to the Elephant village. Unfortunately we missed out on the Elephant shows where they supposedly play soccer and basketball, but we did get the opportunity to ride the elephants for a decent price! Yes, I did ride, too, I’ll have to get those pictures from my teammates camera later.
And to top it all off, I was once again blessed with the opportunity to watch the sunset over the horizon with just the rice fields and trees in the view. No buildings or towers or anything else to obstruct my view! I enjoy watching the sunset and sunrise and remembering that its the same sun that comes up back in Kansas too and it makes me feel a little bit more connected to back home, even though I am half way around the world!
