Saturday!

So just to give you an idea of yesterday, I took 368 pictures…. Yeah. Now, this isn’t all that impressive, because the Automatic focus broke on my lens, so I have to manually focus; thus I take a lot of pictures to make sure that I’m getting some decent shots. But yesterday was crazy and busy and beautiful and fun…. and I love life right now. But I’ll break down the day by pictures, and hopefully that will keep this somewhat entertaining. So we left at about 7 am, and the five of us (Weldyn, Barb, Kaitlyn, Kelsey, and I) all climbed into a big van, with green leather interior. Yeah, that’s right. Green. Anyway. We got on the road pretty early so that we could skip the traffic heading out of Bangkok, and jumped on the freeway. The first thing we came to, and actually stopped at, was salt fields. They looked like rice paddies, but the guide, Nom, said they were salt fields. Now apparently, there are two kinds around here. The water in the fields was brought in from the ocean, which meant the salt was iodized. But the salt from the ground wasn’t. So we pulled over so that Nom could get some salt.

                           

The clear bags of salt came in two sizes- 20 Baht (70 cents-ish), or 50 Baht- ( About $1.70); it was rock salt, which Nom said made great ice cream. You could also get refined salt, and table salt, and pretty much whatever kind of salt you wanted. It was pretty cool to see all the equipment and stuff they used…. and lots and lots and lots and lots of salt. We drove through this crazy market about an hour-ish outside of Bangkok. Kepp in mind that its only about 8 in the morning, but there was a market in full swing- So much so that stalls were set up on train tracks. We asked Nom if the tracks were old and not used anymore, but she said that no, the train just went slow in that area so that people could pick up their stalls and get out of the way. All I could think was that they better train their conductor well.

                           

Next Stop: Coconut Farm!

This amazing looking stuff is not only amazing. Its every good adjective that you can think of. Also known as coconut sugar. Oh my goodness that stuff was delicious. The farm had pretty much any kind of product made out of coconut that you can imagine. Purses, lamps, honey, teacups, mugs, plates, earrings, elephants……. it goes on and on.

Okay, it won’t let me post any more pictures, so I’ll continue a little bit later. Sawadika!