Brian and I have been reading some of the submissions as they come in, and we are both moved by your honesty and passion. I’m also proud of those who are nominating themselves. As women, we can struggle with self worth and the idea of deserving a gift. Whether you’ve suffered trauma or not, if your a mom, you deserve a break and a gift. 🙂 Amen?! For anyone who missed yesterday’s post, make sure you enter someone you love (including yourself) in the Running on Empty Contest before Wednesday!

Want to hear about the rest of our Homestay in Ban Tale Nok?

We woke up a few times the second morning. The first time was at 5:30am when the rooster crowed and crowed AND crowed. When he was done the neighbors rooster crowed and crowed and crowed. And when all the roosters had their final say for the morning, we woke up again at 7am with the Gibbons singing their beautiful songs. Every living thing was alive in the early hours of the morning. Day two started with a vibrant energy!

Mr. Hem’s wife invited us over for breakfast and taught us how to make our own Roti Thai pancakes.

Blaze loves Roti pancakes and didn’t waste any time getting started. You’d love them too: fried dough with condensed milk, sugar, chocolate and sliced bananas on top.

For all my Photo Recipe lovers, I shot the above image with the Sony DSLR-A900 at an aperture of 2.8. My ISO was high b/c the kitchen didn’t have a lot of light. My ISO was at 1250. My shutter speed was 125 or 1/125th of a second. Metered on Blaze’s face.

After breakfast, we were given a tour of the village’s Animal Rescue Shelter. This set up is awesome. When monkeys or apes are injured, the village has set up the means to help rehabilitate them so they can enter back into the wild.

As you know from past posts, it’s rare to see a Gibbon ape at our house. We hear them, but rarely see them. Well guess what! The village had a handful of beautiful Gibbons!

We have a couple white Gibbons living in our backyard! We’ve spotted them two or three times, but it’s always from a distance. It was AWESOME to see the white ones up close. They are just beautiful!

Not only do Gibbon apes have amazing songs, but they also do the most incredible acrobatics with their long, strong arms. I could watch them for hours and not ever get bored. But watch out for those long arms, they swiped the sun glasses right off a man’s head! Lickety split! His glasses were gone! They can reach through the cage a lot farther than you’d ever guess! You can see how they are spying on Brian and Blaze, waiting for the perfect moment to grab that video camera. 🙂

After the Gibbons, we went on to more activities! The day had only begun. One activity was meeting the beautiful soap making women and being taught their trade. The other activity was learning to palm weave. Both of these experiences were amazing and could be their own blog post! I’ll start with the palm weaving and see how far I get.

This amazing woman taught how to palm weave.

She will get an order for 400-500 sets of palm weaving that becomes a bungalow roof. Have you ever been to Mexico or Hawaii and had a bungalow bar on the beach? Next time see if the roof is made up of palm weaving.

She earns 5 Thai Baht for every length she does. See the piece on the top of the pile? How the colors are brown and green? For that whole thing, she is paid 5 Baht. It’s mind boggling. In US dollars that conversion is 14 cents.

For almost two hours, she sat with us and the kids and taught us how to do her trade. This woman didn’t speak a word of English, but she had such a heart of gold in wanting Pascaline and Blaze to learn for themselves.

Blaze loved her. The two of them spent almost an hour together working on one piece. He kept asking her questions, and she would just smile at him and nod–sometimes saying “Wow!” or give him a thumbs up with a BIG smile. Oh, Blaze soaked every bit in. They were total buds.

With the help of our friend, we all finished our own pieces.

In the evening, some of the staff from Andaman Discoveries came by to teach the youth how to make compost for organic gardening. AD is doing an AMAZING job with the villages, on so many levels!

Pascaline and I joined the village w
omen and learned how to shell cashews. The village women do this every night. I asked them what they like to talk about together. They said men and how to make more money. Women are women! 🙂

For example, I was making fun of Brian behind the camera. And even though these two women don’t speak a word of English, they totally got was I was saying. When someone is crazy in the head, Thai people call them “Ding Dongs.” Brian said we use the same word in English. Husbands are husbands (and often Ding Dongs), no matter how small your village is.

Aside from the occasional (HUGE) beetles wedged between the curtains, we had an AMAZING time! Some Thai people fry these beetles and eat them with chocolate sauce. This is a tough one for us to grasp. 🙂

We want to thank AD and all the villagers of Ban Talae Nok for welcoming us into their homes. The experience was life changing to say the least!

And a HUGE thank you and BIG HUG to the sweetest, most savvy Thai woman you’ll ever meet!

Her name is Tu, and she was our translator the whole time. She owns her own restaurant in Thailand. And when we were done with our homestay, she took us back to her restaurant and gave us Thai cooking lessons!

It was AWESOME! We love you Tu and miss you terribly!!

Brian tried to do some Photo Coaching Tu by teaching her how to lean forward to elongate your neck for pictures. She almost did it as good as me. 🙂

Maybe if you had blue eyes Tu, it would be easier. 😉 (little inside joke we have with Tu)

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