Chaing Rai Market

 

 

An international marketplace offers the average American a rather interesting assortment of sights, sounds and smells, from the squirming mass of snakes(or eels?) in the bucket above to fried cockroaches and grasshoppers for consumption! We often go to the local night market here for supper rather than a restaurant because we can a get a decent supper for a third or fourth of the price, but we haven't bought anything strange like fried insects :)

 This is a lady from the Akha tribal group. Many of the Akha people come from Burma. They use the same cream on their faces that the Burmese like to use. I can't remember what plant it comes from, but they use it as a sunscreen and skin conditioner. We visited this woman's farm with the folks from MMF where we are visiting this week. They work with the tribal people, teaching them self-subsistence farming, animal health-care, etc.

This is a lowland rice field on the lower flats. They terrace it and flood it with water. The upland rice fields grow a different kind of rice and can be planted on the mountainside. Most of the farm work is done by hand or with water buffalo.

 This is an Akha village. We stayed overnight in a village almost like this, but the tribal name of the group is Lahu. Their languages are very similar and many of the Akha people also speak the Lahu language and interact with them. First we went to see the village in the picture above, and then they took us to the village where we spent the night. We took a tour of the village (Darren slipped in the mud with John and almost fell in the pig pen! :) And then we sat around and waited for supper to be made while it got dark.

 Here is an Akha baby in the traditional headdress. She is so cute! Her name is Mekayla.

Here is another of the tribal ladies.

This is a Lahu boy in the village where we spent the night

 Here is our room. The pink to the right is the mosquito net we slept under. It was sort of .... not my favorite to sleep in a room with three other men besides Darren! They had a separate mosquito net, but it still felt strange! And then there was the animal noises that we are unaccustomed to, like pigs snorting under the house during the night. The soup we had at breakfast included water buffalo tastebuds! They eat everything around here, including putting blood chunks in the stews!

This is some breakfast cooking! And the tribal dogs looking on. In this tribe they are not usually eaten, but in many of the tribes they are. 

We enjoyed our visit and I will tell you more about some of the other activities we are doing later.

One Term Finished!

Last Saturday night Darren and I took the children and Mariam(my Iranian friend) to night bazaar. It's the evening market here, and you can find just about anything there. This lady (above) is carving and painting soap. She is VERY good at it, as you can see.   There were some tribal ladies who followed us around TRYING and TRYING to get us to buy carved wooden frogs that croak when you  rub their backs with a stick. They could tell that John was very fascinated with the frogs so that egged them on to keep trying.

There were all kinds of these lights! I thought they were kind of pretty!

Almost every day it DUMPS down the rain here! You would have to see it to understand. Just step outside and you are drenched to the skin. The streets can run like streams at times.

We took student pictures for the year book at the park, and John had a lot of fun playing in the fountain and riding back to IGo on the motorcycle with Lavonn, the guys dean.

Saturday breakfast and supper are American food time. Some of the students really look forward to it for that reason.  For supper tonight we had meatball sandwiches, chips, broccoli cauliflower salad, brownies and ice cream.

 This is Airport Plaza. It's a huge mall. One of the girls took me out to a coffee shop there tonight. It's almost like being in America!

We finished first term testing yesterday. Now we have three days till we leave for ministry trips. Darren and I are going to a remote tribal area in Northern Thailand. I'm not sure if the people are Lisu or Karen, but I think it's one of the two. We will be buy ourselves as the rest of the students are going to China and Burma. We decided to take our trips in Thailand, just in case God works it out for us to save enough money to stay a second term.

Here's what our money here looks like

We went shopping last night and bought some "Birkenstocks" for about $6.50. I have a sneaking suspicion that they aren't authentic, but they will be nice here, where you need to slip out of your shoes if you enter a building. It's a lot of on and offs of shoes if you want to go anywhere, and the ones I had needed to be buckled and unbuckled everytime, which made it unhandy.

In Thai money the ones we got cost 200 baht.

Our Fellow Student Body

Here are our fellow students for this term.

Christy's 1st Birthday

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Some of the girls here put together a birthday party for Christy's 1st birthday. It was so sweet of them