To Aum’s

Today I managed to sleep past 8am. It was great. I packed and updated my blog in the morning before we left. I also, however found out that there had been a bomb in the early hours of the morning in Hua Hin. Some of my friends back home had messaged me to make sure I wasn’t anywhere near there. After reassuring them the director came to our room, before he and Ben headed to the Queen’s loyalty ceremony in Ubon, asking if we wanted to use the phone to call people. I declined knowing that it would cost a fortune. The director also explained that the bombs were due to a political disagreement, which seemed to match what I had read about online. Thankfully none of the ETAs were hurt in the bombings. One girl was spending the weekend there, but was now on lockdown in her hotel room until they were sure things were okay.

After checking with Ben and Aum that we would be okay flying to Bangkok we waited for Ben to come back from the ceremony to take us to the airport. It was a tight squeeze with four of us in the back of the car (Sensei, the Japanese teacher, was in the car too) but we got to the airport with plenty of time until our flight.

We arrived in Bangkok around 3.30pm and met Aum in the airport. We found out that the next bus we could get was leaving at 7pm, so we walked to the train station. There we found out that we could get the next train at 6.50pm. Aum also said that it would probably take longer. So Aum called his brother to pick us up, and said he’ll be there in around two or three hours (apparently he drives quickly). We then got a taxi to Aum’s old university and sat in Mcdonalds for the next few hours. Once his brother arrived, we squeezed into the back of his car and talked and napped until we got to Nakhon Sawan where Aum lived.

We had picked up one of his Chinese friends along the way. Despite not speaking much English she was really nice. We then got to Aum’s house, got introduced to his nice American pitballs. The not so nice ones were locked away and barking at us through the fence. But his dogs Peter Pan and Hook seemed friendly enough to me. The others didn’t seem so sure!

After 40 minutes we were ready to go out. Aum and his brother Aun (confusing, right?) took us to one of the bars in his town. It was really nice; there was a band that was just starting to play. They played a mixture of English and Thai covers and I recognised a mixture of both. It’s surprising that I’ve learnt Thai songs just by living in the country for the past 6 weeks. The highlight of their set was definitely when they played Adele ‘Set fire to the reigns. After the band finished their set, the bar DJ played, the music was a bit too electronic dance for my liking, but it was fun to dance to and have a night off.

At the end of the night we found a stall outside the bar that was selling pig sticks! We did go a little mad for them as we had not seen or eaten them since we had seen Aum all that time ago. The pig sticks were taking a while to cook, so Kate went and helped to cook them. She just had to brush this oil on them and turn them so they did not burn. I can confirm that the pig sticks weren’t burnt, but they oil was actually a chilli oil and we unwittingly made our own pig sticks spicier! I don’t think it has satisfied my craving for pig sticks at all. I do, however need to learn Thai for ‘not spicy’!