Cooking

We are finished with language school! We had three weeks of three hours a day learning Lao. On our last day of class we read a story about Khamdee and his sister eating breakfast, going to school and other things. It took us an hour and a half to get through the 6 pages, and I still don't understand a lot of the words and sentences in the story. But it's kinda exciting to be able to read a little! I really liked our school, the teachers were great and I learned Lao! But it's nice to be finished. Next week we will get a tutor for probably an hour a day five days a week, and most likely continue for the whole year.

It was very helpful to learn a language right before I will be teaching one. I have a better idea of what is helpful and what is not helpful for teachers to do during class.

This was Julia's and Elise's class. Joe and I were in the other class. We had six students and one teacher for conversation and another for reading and writing.

I haven't really done anything too exciting since my last post. We've had more meeting/training at Corky and Maurice's (our leaders) house. It's been good. Lots of new, insightful information. This week we have team training for the whole team. (The past weeks have only been for us four new teachers.) We'll be going over rules, guidelines, teaching stuff.... and we get to meet all of the other teachers. There will be 12 teachers on our team this year - 7 in Vientiane at two different departments - the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of English, and 5 in Pakse. I'll be at the Faculty of Education in Vientiane.

We did cook lunch with our Lao friends, Mon and Jiam. We went to the market at 8:00 AM on Friday to buy all of the ingredients. Our first purchase was a fish. The lady picked one that was swimming with 10 of his friends in a tub of water. She knocked his head with the back of her knife and started scraping of the scales. Two slices of her knife later and the guts were out too. The meat section of the market is not my favorite! Then we went to buy our veggies. It was pretty fun. I just followed Mon around. I don't know how they decide to get the ingredients from. We got mint from one lady, sticky rice from another, and carrots from another. We piled our stuff into the motorbike baskets and headed to Jiam's house to start cooking. We did lots of chopping! Which is one of my favorite parts of cooking!

Julia and Jiam are stirring the curry.

Jiam is mushing up the bones and scales of the fish to use for adding flavor to one of the dishes. The food was pretty tasty and we had fun cooking with them.

Here are some other random pictures of life in Vientiane.

This is how we eat almost every breakfast and supper. Sitting on the floor in Julia's room. But now, the maid has taken away our bedspread/tablecloth... we wanted to use it to shake out our crumbs so Julia wouldn't get more ants in her room. For breakfast we have fruit, bread and yogurt, and for supper we usually go to the night market and get sticky rice, spring rolls and try other food sometimes and take it back to her room to eat. It's probably not the easiest way to eat, but it works pretty well!

This is Elise and Joe and I eating at a yummy Asian fusion restaurant; I had delicious Thai curry!

Last week Saturday, Julia and I made chocolate chip cookies at Corky and Maurice's (soon to be ours) house. They will be going home for the year, so Julia, Steph, and I will be living in their house! It's pretty nice and has a nice big kitchen! :) The ingredients for the cookies were a little expensive, but we found all the ingredients that we needed! The best part was the dough! :) They were delicious and we ate too many too quickly.

Sorry, I can't turn it the right way, but they look tasty, huh?