Learning the Thai language/Cooking classes

We have now had 2 language classes. We furiously write down as our teacher talks! (Tina, I'm using that great little small journal you gave me for xmas, so I can take it anywhere!). We are learning I, you, we, they, the 5 w's, hello, goodbye, thank you, etc. We are also learning key phrases. We learned alot of important verbs and nouns....and today we learned numbers, colors, and foods. Their language is extremely hard to learn because there are a possibility of 4 or 5 different ways to pronounce the same word, so that it means something different. You can say it with a flat tone, a medium tone, where you start low and get higher pitched, where you start high and then get lower, and then one that is just high. For instance, the word gai...could mean chicken or far, depending on your tones....or tao, which is the color grey or could be turtle! It's crazy....and frustrating. And they kind of pronounce their l's like r's and vice versa.
We saw yet another temple yesterday....this one had the largest reclining buddah in Singburi province. It is 47 meters long, which is a little over 154 feet! They were doing some construction on it, but you could still see it....so BIG!! I also got to hit these 4 big gongs...I think it's for good luck or something.

I'm very excited for next week, which is culture week, because I'd like to learn more about Buddhism....some of the rituals and stuff are very interesting to me, and I think it would be helpful to learn about the history.

In the afternoon we headed to Singburi (the ecohouse we live at now is about 5 or 6 miles outside of Singburi), to this huge market which is right next to this supermarket or supercenter sort of place. I thought Singburi wasn't that big, but this would tell me otherwise! Inside their center they had tons of places to eat, a grocery store, many department stores, and something that was quite shocking....of all things it had a KFC in it! After that we went for dinner at a Thai BBQ place. You get some finger food to start off and then they put these grill/fryer things in front of you and give you meat, veggies, noodles, etc and you basically cook it yourself. It was soooo scrumptous! I ate like a little pig!

Oh, I'm not sure if I mentioned this already but there is this sweet little internet/grocery place like 2 blocks from our ecohouse...and it's only 20 baht for an hour! That's like 60 cents! Unfortunately there is no wifi here.

The last thing that we did this afternoon was we had some Thai cooking classes! It was splendid! Don't worry, I wrote it all down and I will be ready to make it upon my return home! We made papaya salad (not like the papaya we know though), pad see ew, and something with banana and coconut for dessert (sorry, I didn't write that one down...no bueno on the bananas!).