I found really good cake

I've just found an internet cafe that lets me use the internet for a hour for about 10p if I buy a cake, which costs about a pound. And the cake, I have to say, is awesome. Chocolate cheesecake. This is not good, I was not supposed to be eating cake in Thailand! My excuse is that I'm rounding off a two day eating binge the best way. Yeah, thats it.

Cooking today was fun again. We started off with a trip to a local food market. Which was very interesting. But slightly disturbing to see a tiny little, fairly old, Thai woman wrestle a huge fish (probably almost her own height) that looks a bit like an eel (but is in fact called a snake fish, or something) out of a basket and beat it repeatedly with a club until it was dead and then very aggressively chop off it's fins. Not really what you expect to see at 10am. One of the women in the group looked absolutely horrified.

First on the menu for cooking today was Tom Ka Gai, which is a chicken soup, but made with coconut milk and cream. It was really very nice. Next up was thick noodles with pork in a thick oyster sauce. This was lovely but the noodles are fried in whats called sweet soy sauce, but I actually find the taste a little bitter so it wasn't my favourite meal. Lunch was a thai red curry with fish. This had quite a kick but was really nice. We also made a vegetable stir fry, very simple with a fish and oyster based sauce. In fact pretty much everything that isn't a curry has this base. The final two dishes were a papaya salad with sticky rice, of which I liked the sticky rice, but not so much the actual salad, and a steamed banana cake. This was really nice. It was very simple, just mashed banana with coconut cream, sugar, two different kinds of flour that I can't remember the name of and fresh grated coconut. Then it was steamed in a kind of banana leaf boat. Very sweet and very lovely.

Once school was out I stayed in town today. Me and one of the girls from the course spent ages looking around the huge Sunday walking market. And I do mean huge. And also ages. About 5 hours. We did have a break mid shop in a beautiful little courtyard off the main street in a very nice bar. There is just so much to see and so much I could buy. I'm just trying to decided whether to buy things here or to wait until later in the holiday. I will have to carry it, which will be annoying.

So now I'm done with my organised course for the moment. I have another week until my trip starts in Bangkok. So now I just have to find things to do for the week. I don't think it will be hard. I seem to be able to manage to walk around gawking at things without any problem.

xx