Today was an awesome day!
We left at 9am to go to an NGO whose main operation is fish-farming. They breed tilapia, then sell the fry to locals to raise in their ponds, who sell them back later as larger fish, when the NGO sells them to local fish markets and companies. The fish food is primarily plankton, which are fed by manure from the local cow and pig farms. They also do work with the locals creating a Christian community using local traditions, such as language and music.
In any case, we got to help retrieve eggs from the breeding ponds. Yup, we got to go in armpit-deep manure-y mucky ponds to grab fish and flush the eggs from their mouths. Awesome! It was actually a lot of fun. However, many students needed different shoes that wouldn't get lost in the muck. My chacos were good for it, but a couple workers went to the local market and got a bunch of cheap crappy shoes. They brought them back and students tried to find ones that fit. That's when the fun started. Turns out, cockroaches like to live in crappy shoes, and at least 3 pairs had about 10 cockroaches living in the shoes. That was fun. And funny. Picture it: 22 college students and 2 women putting on shoes filled with cockroaches, then dumping them all over the ground and bashing the shoes, paranoid there are more (most of the time, they were right; they held on pretty well). Even people who didn't have bugs started double checking and triple checking. Needless to say, very glad I had my chacos.
Anyway, we walked through the muck and the uck in the pond towards the netted mating pairs. The workers in wetsuits dragged a net through it so we wouldn't miss any, and we proceeded to scoop them up in a net, put it over a larger net (the eggs would fall through the first net but not the second so the fish wouldn't crush the eggs), open the mothers mouth and gills, and dunk her head in the water to flush the eggs out of her mouth. Tilapia hatch completely in a week, so they check the fish once a week or so, and have a few dozen mating groups with 100 pairs in each net. Each group gives a few thousand eggs each time, so they go through a lot of fish.
After, we ate fried tilapia (which is hard for us Americans used to frozen filets, but not for the Thai people who aren't afraid of eating bones) with rice, a stir fry and fruit. Very delicious. We were also given a concert by the music specialists at the fish farm. It was interesting to hear the local instruments. One was violin-like, only held vertically and rotated to change strings. The sound box was a coconut.
After we returned home, and showered for a long, long time, a couple of us went to do some much-needed laundry. However, our laundry machine kept breaking and we eventually washed only one load of laundry in 1 hour and 20 minutes. Unfortunately, we budgeted 50 minutes, and were 30 minutes late to our class dinner at a fancy hotel restaurant on the roof. :( It was still fun though.
When we got back, we went right back out again to the bars. We started at Blar Blar Bar, where I proceeded to drink a 1/3 of a bottle of scotch with pepsi. Not so bad, taste-wise, but after that I knew I was done for the night already. At Warm Up later, another person in our group drank half the bottle, and she wanted more. But we cut her off when she started acting like Farang Kinok (birdshit farang). The Thai people are very reserved. At bars and clubs, if they're really drunk, they might sway a little bit and tap their foot to music. There were some Australians there who were dancing like crazy, jumping everywhere and bumping in to everyone. They got a lot of glares. When they asked us to dance with them, we said "No, Thai people don't dance." and they said "We're not Thai!" When in Rome does not apply to them, I guess. Studying culture may have given us more sensitivity to respecting local norms, and therefore improving our safety. Fun night overall, but even drunk little me was babysitting. Ah well! Sabai Sabai!
