Habitat Build Day 3

So hot today. They were saying something about a monsoon coming so that's why it's so hot out. I was sweating even before I started working. Today we started putting up the brick walls for the outside of the house and the inside.


It was definitely another hard day. Though I think a lot of the exhaustion was due to the sun and heat. One of my teammates went back to the hotel after lunch because of heatstroke and another girl was feeling sick by the early afternoon. I've been keeping hydrated. After getting sick last week from heatstroke I don't want that to happen again.

So we get the day off tomorrow and we will be working Saturday instead. We're going to the Elephant conservation centre tomorrow and we get to be a mahout (elephant trainer) for the day! =D

Thai Cooking Class

Just got back from a cooking class. It was a 4 hour course. We started off at the market to buy fresh ingredients. So many different types of ginger and basils. Wow. Bought some junk food at the market for tomorrow while we were there too.

So each person chose 4 dishes to cook for themselves. I chose: pad thai, chicken coconut soup, green thai curry and for dessert I made coconut sticky rice with mangoes. The mangoes were so sweet. There in season right now. All of the dishes were good. Susan was my guinea pig for the green curry. It's too spicy for me. Got a recipe book from them after the class so I'll definitely try some recipes when I get home.

Habitat Build Day 2

Wow, what a day. It was hard work today. We had to mix concrete (everything's by hand here! no machines at all) to pour for the floor of the house. Our team is so awesome. We work really efficiently together and we're the fastest team they've ever seen. We were done by 1:30pm today! So Melanie, the habitat coordinator here, has arranged for us to take a thai cooking class this afternoon. It starts at 4pm and we head to the market to buy the ingredients for the dish we're making. Should be fun!

This was how much we did by morning break at 10:30am.
This was at lunch time at 12:30pm.
And now it's done!
Tomorrow we'll start putting up the walls. Mortar and bricks here I come.

Here fishy, fishy, fishy

Oh my goodness. I couldn't stop laughing for like 5 minutes when I stuck my foot into the tank of fish. Some of the fishes were so big I could really feel them nibbling on my feet. Glad I tried it. My feet feel softer now =) Like a pedicure.

Habitat Build Day 1

What a great hotel. I'm sharing a room with Susan. It's a big room, but most importantly there's air conditioning. Breakfast was delicious at the hotel. I had french toast with bananas and syrup. A nice breakfast for our first day on the construction site.
We started work around 9am this morning. We had to move the dirt piles into the house and to the other side of the house. We have a team of 10 volunteers from Canada and 4 other workers on the site. The mother who we are building this house for cooked us a delicious lunch and snacks and drinks were provided throughout the day. The mother and her oldest son even helped us when we were doing the assembly line of buckets of dirt whenever they had time. It was great. Our team has good laughs together while we work and we're fast. We finished at 2:30pm today so we have time to go check out the city before dinner tonight.

Chiang Mai finally!

Finally in Chiang Mai. We landed at the airport at 5pm, picked up our bags and had a taxi drive us to our hotel by 5:30pm. Dinner and orientation with the Habitat group was at 6pm. The construction team seems to be a good mix of ages and more girls than guys as expected. I look forward to building with the team. We all seem to click well together over dinner so hopefully we'll work well with one another on the build site. Dinner was good.We all got a flower necklace. I think it was Jasmine flowers. It smelled so nice!

I took a picture of this in the front lobby. It's for Susan's blog called Traveling with a Porpoise..hehe....ooops a porpoise is a dolphin/whale like animal. I thought it was a tortoise.

Bangkok Airport

I've been up since 6:15am. Was at the airport by 7:30 this morning to catch our flight to bangkok. Our layover here has turned out to be a bit longer than expected, but we'll be boarding our flight to Chiang Mai in about 10 minutes now. Looking forward to getting to our hotel and relaxing a bit. We'll be meeting the Habitat team tonight for dinner and orientation. We had burger king at the airport here and it's the most expensive food we've had in SE asia so far. Susan had a burger combo and I had just a burger and it cost us over $10. Can't wait to get out of the airport and see Thailand. It's been about 8hrs in the airport/flight so far today.