Amphawa Floating Market

After the mangrove activities, we drove to Amphawa, a small nearby fishing village that comes alive on December 31.  Lots of Thais come here for the celebration and floating market.  We are just about the only farangs (white westerners) in town.  We checked into our hotel and had the evening to enjoy the Amphawa Floating Market before the midnight New Year's Eve countdown.  Because of the passing the Thai king this year, the festivities were minimal.  Thus, unfortunately the music and dancing new year's celebration that we usually enjoy was not to be had this year.

But the floating market was still in full swing.  Here are Hli and Zoe enjoying the beyond fantastic phad Thai nachos.  OMG these are incredible...  And we have never seen the girls smile until now!

Lots of other organic matter was available for sale to eat.

BBQ squid.

Who doesn't love a snack of fresh tentacles?

At the floating market, boats line up along the elevated walkway selling seafood and other eats.

Vendors line the streets as people walk around looking for good food and bargains.

Rose apples.

Fish in a basket or...

... Fish in plastic

Meat on a stick.

Fish and seashells for dinner

Maybe some crab?

At the stage show where there is normally an upbeat new year's celebration with music and dancing, this year was marked with mourning and remembrance for the king.

Mangroves

We left Bangkok today and headed southwest along the coastline to Samut Songkram, where there is a mangrove conservation area.  In our fall class, the students learned about mangrove ecology and conservation; today we wanted the students to experience mangroves.  We had two activities by which I think they now have an indelible concept about this important ecosystem.

Here's the before picture of our students heading out to the mangroves at the Samut Songkram Conservation Area around 2 hours SW of Bangkok.

Sydney and Rachael kayaking to the mangroves.

Most of the students in their kayaks paddling into the mangroves.

Lu (Alexa) and Zoe.

Out in the mangroves, our students experienced this ecosystem up close.  They saw monitor lizards, mudskippers, mangrove snakes, and ...

...long-tailed macaques.  At first they're cute, but then you realize they're more like aggressive rats with prehensile tails and long canines.

After kayaking through mangroves, we went out to an open-ocean platform for lunch.

Our lunch was phenomenal.  We had tom ka, gai phad met mamuang heemapahn, egg noodles, phad thai, bird wings, guava, and som tom. 

We had two tables for 17 people.  And still there was food leftover... specifically the tom ka.  I can't believe the students at this table didn't like the tom ka :-(

After lunch, we went to a mud-flat area at low tide to plant mangrove saplings.

Sydney and Alyssa trying to navigate out to the area where we will be planting the mangrove saplings.

Taylor is looking for a place to plant her mangrove tree.

Alexa is soooo happy about working in the mud.  

Scavenging and Cooking

We had two major activities planned for today.  In the morning we had a scavenger hunt in the vicinity of the hotel.  The ground rules were that the students could not use any kind of transportation, could not cross the streets except for the pedestrian overpasses, and they had to be respectful as they interacted with the Thais.  I gave the students a page of things they had to search for and photograph, and a few things for which they had to talk to Thai people who had limited or no English skills.  That was followed by an early lunch, after which we went to our cooking class.  The class lasted for most of the afternoon; we learned how to choose vegetables at the produce market and prepare 5 Thai dishes, including tom yum soup, green curry, phad Thai, larb, and the most delicious dessert known to humanity: sticky rice with mango.

Here I'm explaining the ground rules for the scavenger hunt to the students.  We divided them up into four groups.

In this group was Alexa, Alyssa, and Elliott.  Here they are determining if these cut orchids satisfy any of the scavenger hunt categories. 

Zoe, Kaylee, Rachael, and Sarah are scanning their scavenger hunt pages to see what else they need to find.  This group ended up winning the scavenger hunt.

In the hotel lobby after the scavenger hunt, we checked the teams' lists, validated some photographs, determined that nobody knows what a siamese cat is, and declared a winner.

After the scavenger hunt, we had lunch at a nearby sidewalk restaurant.  We all had khao pad grapow with some sort of protein or vegetables.

In preparation for the cooking class, the chefs took us to a local produce market to show us how to choose vegetables for our dishes.  Here is Chef Khung showing Brandon how Thai lemon grass smells.  Sydney, Alyssa, and Sera are waiting their turns.

Chef Jae letting Kaylee smell a ginger root with Elliott and Taylor looking on. 

We split the class into two groups of eight, each group with a different chef.  Here, Brandon and Elliott team up to squeeze the water through coconut shavings to make coconut milk.

Hli and Alyssa also working the coconut...

Chef Jae showing his group the varieties of rice that are used in Thai cooking.

For each of the five dishes, we prepared the vegetables and then cooked in woks on a series of gas stoves.  Chef Jae's group (right to left): Sydney, Sarah, Kaylee, Taylor, Ashley, Sera, Rachael, and Emily.

The other half was in Chef Khung's group; L-R: me, Zoe, Alexa, Alyssa, Hli, Elliott, Brandon, Ajarn Wayne.

Ajarn Wayne showing us his tom yum soup... made from scratch.

Zoe with her tom yum soup.

Ajarn Wayne said something humorous about not wanting to be a good wife.  Chef Khung set him up for that comment.

Sydney is proud of her green curry dish.

Alexa with her green curry.

And here's Taylor and her green curry.

I think the kids are more than capable of preparing some delicious Thai dishes for their parents.