Nawa Pictures and other happenings

So I'm a little behind on blogging - it's been a very busy couple days.
But here are the pictures from Nawa - the silk factories and instrument making villages.

This is me, my field director Nell and John, the guy whose house we are staying at with all the silk weaving ladies! They were so happy to meet us and got a lot of laughs out of our Thai names (mine is rose -gu laap, others are "coconut", "doll", "lotus", etc. We didn't quite pick them ourselves but they were given to us by the teachers at our schools. They seem to be pretty amusing to everyone else but they haven't let us in on the joke yet.

the below picture is of the silk weaving. we had a couple demonstrations. 

Above is one of the other volunteers playing a classical Thai instrument. All you have to do is blow into the reeds. It's pretty easy and sounds wonderful. 

We also went to a few temples (wats) in the past few days. We went to That Phanom, which is one of the top wat's in Thailand and met a monk and everything. We also burned some incense in front of one of the alters...what exactly we were doing, I'm not sure. This is one of the wats, though.

There was also a market outside of the wat at That Phanom (there are markets everywhere) and I guess you can buy some of these snakes to set free? Or you eat them. Something got lost in translation but they sold these snake/eel things by the bag and there were dozens of them.

looks good, huh?

Me and some of the other volunteers enjoying some fresh green mango! It was the first we had seen here in Nakhon Phanom....ton's of pomello ( a grapefruit type orange thing), and guava. We have guava with everything, so it's starting to grow on me. 

And then of course, we were blowing off some steam. There's this metal rocking horse type thing we were hanging out on. Right beneath the light so there were crazy bugs but there is this fly zapper thing we've got - a picture to come soon! 

The bugs are enormous here. As there are 8 girls in one room and not an efficient way to keep bugs out (there is a crack between the floor and the bottom of our screen door), there is generally a lot of screaming before we go to bed. And during dinner. And breakfast. We're talking 3 inch grasshoppers and 4 inch long scarab (rhinocerous?) beetles. One was flying around at dinner the other night and everyone freaked out. One of the girls here, big Nom, just grabbed the thing out of the air! It was ridiculous. But she showed it to us and also made it hiss. So that was an experience. She tends to grab huge cicadas out of the air as well. I have to say I'm not a fan of the bugs but we've been reassured that there has been no malaria here in recent memory. So all the bug bites we are getting are of no worries to us! Someone's got a picture of the giant beetle so I'll see if I can get it to show you all :).