Don Wai floating market

     This weekend View took us to a floating market about ten minutes down the road from our apartment. It is apparently one of the most well known floating markets in Thailand and the favorite among Thai people. It was a nice morning on the water so when we got there View bought us ticket for an hour and a half river boat ride. The captain gave us each a small loaf of bread to feed the gigantic fish jumping out of the water below us. The market is located behind a temple which means fishing in the area is prohibited, so the fish flourish like nowhere I have ever seen before. I took a bunch of pictures of them but they didn't really come out well, and without a normal sized fish to compare them to they just look kind of average. In the shallow parts of the river many farmers grew different plants that Thai people eat as vegetables (some are called morning glory and taste really yummy). I saw a few men in the water up to their shoulders harvesting these plants and throwing them up onto the small boat beside them. I thought it was pretty cool. Below you will see a completely unrelated picture of some green tea ice cream that I tried a few days ago. It was pretty good. I was expecting it to be gross so it made the blog.

Green tea ice cream :)

selling produce from the boats

part of the KEI group on the river boat :)

A boat similar to the one that we took a river cruise on.

     Don Wai did not have many foreigners at all. In fact I think we might have been about it. At one point some of us had sat down for lunch and a Thai lady on a boat shouted over to our table that a foreign boy was down a few aisles and wanted to know if he was supposed to be with us. Indeed he was, I thought it was kind of funny that we stuck out so much a stranger felt comfortable doing that.

typical menu at a restaurant

live eels at the market, they believe that releasing them is good luck.
View said they just get eaten by the fish immediately and she doesn't see the luck in that.

     Ewwww I thought the eel thing was super gross. I know you can't really tell how big that they are in the picture but I would say each one was about as big as my arm. The fact that the fish in the river eat them kind of puts into perspective my comments about the giant fish earlier. Two days before this my tropical medicine class took a field trip to a snake farm where they make all of the anti-venom for people who get snake bites in Thailand. It was pretty cool but I felt bad for the snakes. Isolated and alone in their cages, no chance for real love, poor little myanmar pit vipers. I have also found that it is hard for me to take somebody who is supposed to be a professional seriously when they can't really speak English. I know it is horrible and probably something that I should add to my personal "needs improvement" category but it is hard for me to truly respect somebody who is supposed to be an expert in their field when they can not speak intelligible English. So the guy I have been indirectly referring to for my last few sentences was our instructor at the snake farm. It was his job to tell us about all of these poisonous/venomous animals in Thailand. He got really excited every time an animal came up that you could eat a part (which according to him was most animals). Sorry for being a close minded American here but getting the recipe for how to fry an oil beetle (which produces its own oil to be fried in) started to gross me out. Anyways, the floating market was awesome, the snake farm was gross, and I now have just under two weeks left in Thailand. Yayy Thai!

Rainbow tomatos 

traditional Thai house on the river

WOOT sweetened condensed milk

this is for Joanna