Advertisement
Published: January 14th 2014
Edit Blog Post
Day 3 of our Chai Nat adventure continued.
When I woke up this morning I slowly rolled over to grab my phone to see how much time I had left before the 5am Music Fest. I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw it was 530. A break at last, turns out yesterday was either a 1 day event or I just so happened to get here on day 99 of the 100 days of mourning.
We started the day by greeting the monks on the street with some fresh rice and ramen. After we put the food in the pot they were carrying, we bowed down and they blessed us, which I figure can’t hurt when you are in a new city.
Our first stop today was to a pre-school. Now let me tell you, I figured this would be pretty cute but I had no idea how adorable these kids were going to be. My favorite was this chubby kid who didn’t seem to have much friends, but that also didn’t seem to bother him. At one point all the kids were sitting on the floor in front of us and he wobbles over
to grab a chair up against the wall, pushes it (quite the feat for such a tiny kid) over to where the adults are sitting, scrambles up in it, then just sits down like an adult. We taught them a few dances, then we played a game that was sort of like tag but lacked any sort of organization of understandable rule system. I played for one round then graciously backed out and told them it was to take pictures.
The second stop for us was to make organic insecticides out of corn. When we first pulled up we filed into the demonstration area. I guess no one told them there was a farang in the group, because as I turned the corner all the workers turned and pointed at me and burst out laughing…a reaction I’m unfortunately getting accustomed to. I didn’t really understand too much of what was going on, although at one point I was filling a bag up with corn and then the next moment they were putting it in a kiln like device. We are going back tomorrow, so we’lll see how this turns out.
The rest of our afternoon was spent making
bamboo fans. If you are anything like me, the first thing that came to mind was “how long could that really take, do we need a full afternoon for this?” Yes. Yes you do. This was the single hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. You have to take 25 tiny bamboo strips and weave them into a fan. I thought I was killing it when a Thai man walked over, took it out of my hands and completely redid most of my hard work. He then handed it back, I worked on it a little more before he came and took it away from me again. After 3 hours of intense concentration I produced a pretty respectable fan. So respectable in fact I won an award and you can go ahead and shelve that judgemental look of "so you really feel better about yourself beating out a bunch of 13 year olds in an arts and crafts competition". Consider this, their tiny nimble hands were made for this sort of work…my totally normal and adult sized hands are not.
Also...I won “hardest worker” which seemed like a backhanded compliment. It did come with a pretty sweet flower wreath
and some banana chips though so I shamelessly accepted.
All and all it was a pretty awesome day.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0524s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb