Weekend Trips

It's been a while since my last post, but I've been pretty busy!  Three weekends ago Ashley and I went to Ratchaburi for a night to visit some of our friends from training who are working there.  Ratchaburi is about an hour and a half west of Bangkok.  There aren't too many foreigners who go there, but it is known for having good floating markets.  When we arrived on Saturday our friend Melinda had been invited to lunch and a trip to a floating market with some of her students and we were able to tag along!  We were taken to an amazing seafood restaurant and feasted on some small lobster-type things, a fried fish, a crab salad, mussels, squid, tom yam shrimp, and of course sticky rice.  It was delicious!  Then we headed to the floating market in Amphawa.  Unfortunately we were reminded that we are in Thailand during the rainy season and it wasn't the best weather for the market.  It was still a lot of fun though, nothing some ponchos couldn't take care of!

Melinda's students and our hostesses for the day!

The river is lined with food stalls and vendors and then
 there are boats in the river which sell food as well.

 Last weekend Ashley, Luke, Olivia and I decided to take a daytrip to Ayuttaya. It's about an hour and a half from Lopburi and was the ancient capital of Thailand before Bangkok. We rented bicycles and rode around the town for a few hours. There are lots of ancient ruins and nice parks, which made it a very pretty town to bike around in.

This past weekend we were lucky enough to have Friday and Monday off due to a Buddhist holiday.  We took advantage of the long weekend and a group of us from Lopburi went to Koh Samet, a small island off the coast of Bangkok.  It took us quite a while to get there; two hours to Bangkok, three hours to Ban Phe, and a 30 minute ferry ride.  When we got there it was actually raining a little bit and we had trouble finding a plce to stay due to it being a holiday weekend.  We ended up finding a bungalow that we could fit five of us into so we only had to pay 200 baht each (less than $10!).  We met up with some other friends from our training course and had a great time on the island despite some cloudy weather.  We decided to leave on Sunday and spend a night in Bangkok.  We had some really good Indian food and then saw the new Harry Potter movie at a theater in Bangkok!  It was only 220 baht for a ticket and the theater was nicer than most I've been to in the states.  We indulged once more and had some Mexican food for dinner the next night and made our way back to Lopburi.  It was a great weekend, but now it's time to get back into teaching mode!