Dusit Zoo and Ahaan Thai

K3 went on a field trip! haha We went to the Dusit Zoo last Thursday. The kids were so excited! It's pretty much your average zoo, but it was a lot of fun. We hit some highlights like the big cats, snakes (for some strange unknown reason this was most of the kid's favorite), monkeys, birds, and lots and lots of turtle. The turtles were met by many rounds of "Tiny Turtle". It was great.

Malaysian Bear. I tried very hard to teach them all sic 'em... they didn't get it. By I thoroughly enjoyed doing sic 'em bears by myself several times. haha

Malinee, Manolia, and I in front of some anteloupe. Peace- Asian style.

Aly, Vanessa, Callum, Pavlos, and Vincent waiting to see the snakes. Boys will be boys.

Meena and Aly playing with bubbles. Don't ask me how they all acquired bubbles at the zoo.

YaY! Look guys- it's a WHITE tiger! haha My favorite kind of tiger. haha

In other exciting news- today was my first day of Songkran break! I'm pumped. I think I've typed that about Songkran several times and I always mean it. haha Today I took a Thai cooking class, which I was very very excited for and it definitely lived up to my high expectations. I have been planning on taking this class for weeks and weeks now and I finally did it. I only signed up for one, but I think I'm going to do a couple more, so that way I can get a Thai cooking certificate.

There were 11 people in my class and they were all traveling around. I was the only American and the rest were French, British, Taiwanese, Canadian, and Chinese. It was a good mix of people. Our instructor's name was Nusi (pronounced like nosy). He made the group laugh quite a lot, not because he was funny but just because of who he was. He was gay Thai guy who hated Americans and just acted annoyed by everybody, but not in a bad way. haha He turned out to be very nice.

As soon as we all got there we headed to the market to buy all of our ingredients. It was cool to actually buy things from the market that weren't cooked already. I mean- we bought EVERYTHING there, all the herbs, chicken, shrimp, eggs... everything. To be quite honest- I would normally be very spectacle about doing such things, but apparently it's actually okay. Who would've thought. Then we came back and had to wash and prepare everything. I was fine washing all the vegetables and herbs, but then the job of preparing the shrimp came to me and I quickly had to get over the grossness of ripping of the shrimps heads and peeling of their legs and deveining them. Then we made our own coconut milk. Which was probably my favorite part of the day. It's so simple and fun. All you do is take ground up coconut- add water- moosh it around with your hands- squeeze out of the juice and discard the solid parts. It was crazy fun playing with the food. haha We had to use the coconut milk in all of our dishes, except pad thai. We ended up making tom yum goong (I must say- I made a smashing tom yum), pad thai goong, green curry paste, chicken green curry, laab gai, and rubies with coconut milk. Rubies with coconut milk is a dessert that are these little jelly things in coconut milk- but today I found out that the jelly things are actually water chestnuts and tapioca pudding! I couldn't believe it. It was just very cool to learn about how all the food I eat here is made.

All of us at the end of the day.

Pounding green curry paste in the mortar. My arms will probably be sore tomorrow. haha

Nusi- adding green curry paste into my geng keawa gai. Chicken green curry.