Yesterday, I had an adventure.
My day started out like any other by waking up late and sitting on the couch for the morning watching movies on my laptop. I was pretty depressed you know after watching movies all day every day for two weeks straight, you would be too. That is when I decided I HAD to get out of the house.
I saw my friend Tack was online on Facebook, and luckily she wasn’t busy. I suggested she take me for a ride on her motorcycle. Thai teenagers love to take me out on their motorcycles because I think it is so awesome. So she invited me to go to her house for the afternoon. She picked me up on her motorcycle and we started off. We drove down the main street, I go down every day and then we turned off onto this little two lane road, heading basically nowhere. We drove for miles on this two lane road surrounded by endless rice fields. It was so beautiful. Just imagine speeding down this empty two lane road in the middle of these vast rice fields on a sunny day in Thailand. It was awesome.
We started approaching her little teeny tiny village. It was just sitting there in the middle of these rice fields. There was one little teeny tiny temple and a little convenience store. We drove down this tiny alley way that was filled with chicken and Thai children running around. Then we came up to her house. In her small village people live really close together and everyone just kinda hangs out, outside. There was a lady across the road just lying in a hammock nursing her baby, there were children running up and down the alley, my friend’s grandmother was frying crab over a fire, and right next door, a family was making purses.
Tack told me that, they make bags by hand here and sell them. Then she brought me to another house down the lane where they make even more styles of bags. It was a Sunday so everyone in the family was working even; the kids were cutting out rivets for the bags. They asked if I wanted to buy one and I couldn’t resist, after seeing where it was made, I thought it would be worth it.
Next Tack took me on her motorcycle to the reservoirs where the local children like to swim. Me and Tack went down to like a drainage pipe thing and were crouching in the shade with our feet in the water, talking when I looked up and saw all the village kids standing there staring at me. They had this what is the crazy foreigner doing look on their face. They stared for a bit then got in the water. The kids just come whenever and jump in. No parents or people watching them. They played in the water for a while until a lady who was nearby chased them away, because she was afraid of them getting hurt. It really made me think of that quote,” It takes a village to raise a child.”
We went back to Tack’s house and I played with her little brother for a bit. He is ten years old and very friendly. He showed me his yo-yos and gave me some sunflower seeds to eat. Then I guess he wanted to take the Farang (foreigner) to a farang (a type of fruit) tree. So all three of us, Tack, her younger brother and I, pile on the motorcycle and take off on some dirt road in the rice fields. We drove for quite a while before we parked the motorcycle on the side of the road and walked to a little opening in the rice patties. Now one thing you should know about rice, it’s grown in water, in a marsh like environment. So we stepped into this ankle deep water and followed Tacks, ten year old brother along this clay path in the water, in the middle of the rice fields. This clay path was put in by farmers, to check their crops. It is about a foot wide about 3 inches under water and if you step off it by the slightest bit you are waste deep in rice water. YUMM YUMM. So as you can guess, I was soaked by the time we finally made it to this little dry patch with a farang tree and two patches of wild bamboo. Yep just sitting there in the middle of the rice field. My friend’s brother then went on to climb the tree to retrieve us down the biggest and bestest farang he could find. He pranced from branch to branch walking out on limbs and swinging down from the top. He reminded me of Mowgli from the Jungle book. After we ate all the good farang we could find, we walked back out of the rice fields and drove home.
Tack had to tidy up and buy dinner so I played with her little brother. He gave me these little exploding things; they are like a powder wrapped up in white tissue, that when you throw at the ground they explode. He gave me half and he took half and we threw them at each other’s feet for a while before dinner. Then we ate dinner which was some crazy Thai food that I don’t really know the name of or what it consisted of. However I did know that there were these little tiny crabs and a charcoaled fish that the grandma had cooked over the fire. I am not sure where these came from so I tried a little bit of the crab and ate the fish. Did I mention we put the food on a mat on the floor and then sat on the floor to eat? That was a first for me, but I liked it.
After dinner Tacks brother lit me sparklers and we played with those for a while, spinning around and waving them in the air. He thought it was so funny because I couldn’t work the lighter yet he, a ten year old boy could. Thailand isn’t big on safety.
After that tack and her brother drove me home. It was the perfect day.
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