A night of gaiety in Silom soi 4

A group of us went out to Silom soi 4 (one of the gay adult streets) to celebrate our friend Garry's birthday.  To start the evening off Garry had to blow out the candles on his very suggestively shaped "birthday cake" (I'm not exactly sure what it was made of).  We were also kept company by one of the friendly bar-cats lazing on a bar-stool next to our table.  The evening included watching some male dancers strut their stuff, a cover band fronted by a ladyboy and making a McThai run for cheeseburgers and Chicken McNuggets before heading home.

My least favourite school lunch

The meal consists of the standard clear Thai soup (which is the nicest part of the meal) accompanied by gristly pieces of minced pork (boiled, which makes it even more horrible), some boiled greens (usually cabbage, which I hate) and cubes of boiled blood (pig or chicken).  Yes, you read it correctly, boiled BLOOD.  

The best part of the meal was watching my fellow Saffa's (who are much less adventurous eaters than I've become) recoil in horror when I revealed to them what the gelatinous brown cubes in their meal was.  It would have been funnier had they actually eaten any of it, but being picky eaters they had all obstinately avoided the foreign objects in their food.

The Pannawit Crew

Meet the English Program teachers at Pannawit School (my current school). Excluding the Thai assistants and our Filipino coordinator, only ONE of the teachers is not South African. 

Birthday cake

We were all invited to one of our Thai assistants' birthday party at her house. The farang teachers all clubbed together and bought this ice cream cake from Swensen's (a dessert restaurant similar to Milky Lane).  The cake was delicious, but then again at a whopping 780THB it had to be...

Full size cakes in Thailand are ridiculously expensive and I for one would rather just have baked one, had I actually had an oven...  Another little Thailand curiosity. In our Thai-style townhouse we have a room that serves as a kitchen, but other than a wooden table, a fridge and a microwave, the room didn't come with anything else you'd find in a conventional kitchen.  The Thais don't use kitchens and tend to do most of their cooking either in the lounge or outside in their front courtyard.  Even in the more modern houses, where you might be spoiled with kitchen counters and cabinets and if you're really lucky a gas hob and a sink, you still will not find an oven. 

Sunset over our village

The photo doesn't really do it justice, but I found it striking that half the sky was a bright pinkish-orange and the other half was a clear blue.

Temple Turtle

We spotted this little fellow lounging next to one of the small ponds on the temple grounds.

Wat Klang

As you enter the temple grounds, there is a little under-cover section on the right with more statues as well as rows and rows of what I could only assume are offering bowls.  There was also a stunning display of glass figurines of all the different animals of the Zodiac with more offering bowls in front of them.  This section leads to the indoor section were an ancient-looking monk resides.  I have been told that people come to see this monk to have their fortunes told. He will read their auras and their palms and is said to be very wise and enlightened.

While admiring the Zodiac figurines we were approached by a man visiting the temple who introduced himself to us and proceeded to tell us a bit more about the temple.  I don't remember the man's name, but he had some kind of military background and was very friendly and helpful.  He informed us that the thing that Wat Klang is the most well known for is it's magic.  He also asked us to join him in having a meal with the monk, but as we had already eaten and were quite thoroughly intimidated by our lack of knowledge of Buddhist customs, we thanked him and politely declined. We were, after all, on a mission of a different kind.