I'm SO Jealous of My Kids' School Lunch

So there is a restaurant/bakery close to us that is really yummy. They grow a lot of their own veggies and try to cook healthy western and Thai food. At the beginning of this school year they became the "caterers" for CMIS's lunches. The kids can choose from lots of Thai and Western options that range from 20 to 40 Baht (about 75 cents to $1.25). Orin gets 40 baht a day to spend. Sometimes he gets a cheaper meal so he can get some sort of cookie or juice. And the preschool has their own little set menu that she provides for them each day that includes and morning and afternoon snack and lunch. They sometimes get fruit and fresh veggies but also sometimes get the cutest mini cupcakes or cookies. Anyway, all of this to say, I never thought I'd be jealous of my kids' cafeteria lunches! I need to start going to school and eating with them more often!

Last week Micaiah's class took a field trip to the restaurant to see the kitchen and how they cook things. It was cute to see these little preschoolers on their first field trip. Micaiah was so excited and begged me to come. After we did a little tour of the kitchen (which would definitely fail any sort of inspection for sure in the US but was pretty nice and clean from what I've seen here) they provided the kids snack - hot chocolate, a slice of homemade wheat bread with a bit of homemade grape jelly and homemade peanut butter (with lots of chunks of peanuts in it). I had to laugh knowing that peanuts or peanut butter would never be allowed near a bunch of school children. It was a fun morning.

The hot chocolate was the perfect temperature - warm, but not too hot that it would burn little lips.

A little girl from Korea who will be in Kindergarten with Micaiah next year.

Spreading on the peanut butter and jelly.

Boy, he was concentrating really hard!

In the car later that day. He loves those sunglasses. We actually brought them from the US and he STILL has them!

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Chiang Mai Flower Festival

The week before we went to the Strawberry Festival in Samoeng, we went to the Chiang Mai Flower Festival. It was another fun afternoon just soaking in Thai culture. (Well, once we actually got there - it took about 30 minutes of driving around to find a parking space.)

There were a bunch of floats all decorated completely with real flowers. It's pretty neat.

This float had images of the king all over this float. It was pretty amazing.

Amazing!

There was a small tree and flower competition. I thought these were pretty cool.

So many floats!

Seafood on a stick. It wouldn't be bad if it was the kind of seafood I actually eat.

The festival was right outside and inside this cute little park that we go to often. But I've never seen so many people there. It was incredible.

I don't know why they do this here, but they always have random tags on clothes they sell. They must get leftover tags and just stick them on - even if they aren't the same brand as what they are selling. This was even funnier because it was a women's size pair of jeans with a Carter's size 3 month tag.

It still felt pretty local, but since the festival was inside of the moat there were quite a few tourists there. At the strawberry festival we saw maybe 3 or 4 white people the entire time.

The kids played in the bounce house, we got some Chaa Yen (Thai Milk Tea), ate Roti, got the kids the cutest little deserts for 1 Baht (3 cents) each. It was really fun.

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Sates of Matter

So for the last few weeks Orin class has been study about States of Matter during their Science class. I had no idea 1st graders learned that kind of stuff but he's really enjoyed it. His teacher does a great job making things fun and last week they took a field trip to try to solidify the ideas in their little minds.

First we went to a sliver factory. They take the sliver nuggets, melt them down, reshape them into something beautiful and then sell them. The kids were totally into it.

Little M learning too.

This woman spoke English pretty well (better than most) but I think the kids missed a lotm so Mrs. Michelle rephrased most of what she said.

Orin was so intrigued by this woman washing this silver bowl. He kept waiting to see what she was going to do with it. Unfortunately, she just washed it for the entire 20 minutes we were out there.

This woman was hammering pictures of animals into her small sliver bowl. The kids were mesmerized.

When we went into the store we realized why that woman was washing the bowl for so long. We found a similar bowl inside for over 180,000 Bhat! (almost $6,000)

After the sliver factory we went to Sa Paper Factory. Here Mrs. Michelle is giving them strict instructions on how to act as we walk the busy, yet narrow street to the factory.

The kids did great.

We made it!

So I learned a lot about making the paper. Sa paper is pretty cool because they don't have to cut down the tree to make the paper - and taking the bark off doesn't kill it - the tree will just grow more. The first step is to boil the bark to soften it. They will also boil it with the dye so the color gets mixed in really well.

Then these women take the softened bark, after it's been boiled for about 3 hours and peel of the "meat." That is what gets turned into the paper.

Then the "meat" is mixed in these machines until the flakes rise to the surface. Here they are making white paper.

Then someone takes one of these screens, dips it into a huge tub of this mixture, and the flakes cling to the screen in a thin layer.

Then the screens are laid out in the sun to dry - it takes about 2 hours.

The kids were wondering where the paper was?

They actually dry it with the paper on the bottom - so that the color doesn't get bleached by the sun. I liked the green paper reflecting on the grass.

If they want to make this a better quality, and more expensive (although not much) paper, someone takes a bowl like object and runs it over the dry paper to make it smooth. For some reason the kids thought this was so cool.

There was quite a bit of down time because the workers only spoke Thai. So first they telling us about the paper in Tha, and then some of the moms would translate for Mrs. Michelle and then Mrs. Michelle would tell the kids. Here the boys had gotten rocks and were hitting them together to make sparks while they waited.

And the last step is to peel the paper off of the screen. Pretty cool!

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Strawberries Everywhere!

Last weekend was the Samoeng Strawberry Festival. Samoeng is about an hour away and I had read that there was going to be a festival - but since it's basically impossible to find out anything about events in Thailand we decided just to go and hope it was fun. Orin is LOVES strawberries and it was so hard for him this past year not to be able to get then. So we want to try to get him as many as we can while they are in season. We thought it was worth a try - and it was! I love these kind of things. So different than anything at home.

At every festival they have a small parade. We didn't see the parade but they always have the floats out on the street for the rest of the festival. They were so cute with strawberries all over them. 

The first thing we got were cups of cut up strawberries. Anytime someone is selling strawberries they almost always sell these.The kids love them because they can add sugar and they only cost 10B (about 30 cents).

These were so pretty and I loved the strawberries interspersed throughout.

Then we got strawberry juice. Yum!

Winners for the best tasting dried strawberries.

They look so yummy!

Strawberry wine winners.

We ate lunch. The boys shared a chocolate drink (can you believe it wasn't strawberry?) and we had chicken on a stick and fried shrimp.

Sora gulping down the strawberry juice. She loved it.

Orin loves being the photographer. We could work on his centering a bit, though. :)

Then strawberry ice cream for dessert. I opted for the strawberry smoothie but forgot to take a picture.

At any Thai event there is always plenty of photo ops.

Strawberry Brandy. The one thing they weren't giving samples of. I thought the illustration was pretty strange looking.

 As we were leaving I saw strawberry soft serve ice cream - my favorite. So we got one for all of us to share.

As we were driving to the festival we had noticed this huge strawberry farm. People were all over and we thought they were picking strawberries. So we stopped on the way back. Unfortunately there were just all taking pictures and we couldn't pick.

Poor guy wanted to pick some so bad.

So when we got far back into the fields we told them they could pick just one.

Orin chose a green one because he said he likes them "sour" - yuck.

See, it IS a great place for a photo.

Driving home we passed some elephants walking up the mountain roads. We've seen this plenty of times before but it still surprises me.

Such a beautiful country!

I bought some strawberry wine to bring home. It's pretty good.

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