Elephant Nature Park, Thailand

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DINING ROOM, ENP, CHIANG MAI, THAILAND

Saturday June 7th, 2008

I managed to get out of doing any jobs for the day yesterday, due to my horrible itchy bites. Becky, Maddie and myself went on a homestay in the local village, Maetang. We stayed at the home of one of the local woman - she is actually a woman who does massages at the park. It was good fun. We helped to cook our dinner - well, we peeled leaves off a stem, and we couldn't even do that right! The daughter who is a teacher at the school had to come and take over. The dinner was spicy but delicious. By 8.3o pm the three of us were in the daughters double bed watching 'A Knight's Tale' on my PSP. I tried to sleep, but I was desperate for the toilet. The daughter, who's room we were staying in, told us to wake her up if we needed the toilet in the middle of the night, because the toilet was in an outhouse, and she was sleeping on the sofa incase we needed her. We felt pretty rude kicking her out of her room, then waking her up because we weren't independent enough to go to the toilet by ourselves. Tony, our translator told us that this was normal Thai hospitality. We still felt a bit pants.

So I tried to hold in my pee. It didn't help that I had drank lots of water with my spicy dinner, then didn't go to the toilet before bed - what an idiot! It got to the point where I was in severe physical pain, and at 4.45am I decided enough was enough. I used my mobile phone to light my way, and luckily Maddie woke up needing to go too. So we crept out as quietly as we could. Maddie tried to open the door but didn't realise there was a latch. The daughter woke up and stood out in the rain waiting for us while we used the stone hole they called 'toilet'. Loo issues? Me? Nah!

I thought I'd be able to sleep after that, but no. I kept itching quite badly. I eventually slept for about three hours, and then got up to a traditional Thai breakfast of rice soup and rose apples which looked strange but tasted delicious with sugar.

Back at the ENP I didn't really do much for the rest of the day. I read my book which was relaxing, wrote out the rest of my post cards to send home. We had a traditional Northern Thai dinner which was really nice - a basket of sticky rice each, which you eat with your fingers and tastes really good dipped in curry.

After dinner I spoke with Burm. We talked about university, football, and the fact that Wayne Rooney looks like Shrek. Bless him, he didn't know who Shrek was. But he did know who Roy Keane was! That made me extremely happy!

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Photos

Homestay kitchen
Your parents think your kitchen is messy? Try getting them to cook in THIS one!!

Homestay
Myself, Becky and Maddie sit down to our delicious home cooked meal in a Thai family's house.

Homestay
This is us with our Homestay mum and sister.

Northern Thai Dinner
Absolutely delicious!!!

View from the dining room
how weird do the clouds look?