Busy busy!

For the past two weeks we have been working on building a fish pond that will feed the children and monks who live at a temple inside a small village about 20 minutes from Surin. We had to fix up the pond, make it leak proof and build a roof over it. We have painted it with a pretty underwater scene that the kids will love. Also, today, we bought about 400 baby catfish that will grow and feed many people. The kids are so cute. They come to the temple during the day while their parents work in the rice fields. They are all really young, preschool age. They are totally facinated by our white skin, it's funny.

We have the weekends off and last weekend we traveled to Chiang Mai with a few friends it was an amazing trip. The busride was 15 hours but totally worth it. We did a tour where we rode elephants again, went to a longneck village where the women stretch out their necks and legs with brass rings, hiked through the jungle to a waterfall, and went whitewater and bamboo rafting...oh and visited an orchid farm. It was an amazing day!! The markets in Chiang Mai are like nothing I have ever seen before. We also visited a few temples and talked for hours to a group of monks. We shared stories and learned all about their lives and the ways of Buddhism.
We actually experianced what I guess you could call reverse culture shock in Chiang Mai. They were so many westerners there! We are used to Surin, where it's just us and we understand no one. There, we kept hearing English and understanding what everyone was saying... And there were hamburgers and warm showers and toilets that actually flush! Crazy.

We are back home now, in Surin. We only have about a week and a half left in Thailand which is hard to believe. Time goes so fast! It will be sad to leave all of the friends we have made here.



Fish pond we fixed then painted



Village we worked in