We got up this morning to meet my mom’s cousin, Cotton, had a nice catch up, and then he took us to the Queen-sponsored Thai handicrafts shop (so you know they were made by actual Thai people with Thai material). We also swung by The Erawan Shrine (one of many, many sacred spots in the city), and Cotton explained some of the Buddhist traditions to us. Apparently we were in the middle of a holiday weekend, sort of like a Buddhist version of Lent. We saw people leaving flowers and lighting incense, buying birds and releasing them, and ladyboys dancing. It was, um… different than how we do it in Baptist land.

For lunch we ate at a real (read: not touristy) Thai restaurant near where Cotton and his wife, Koi, used to live. He ordered a bunch of different things for us to taste. “That’s medium?!” I asked as I started sweating after one bite. Whew!

After lunch, we hopped in the car for an hour or so to where Cotton and Koi work and live. We picked up Koi and their adorable grandbaby, Best. Apparently everybody in Thailand has a nickname, as Thai names tend to be long. Some of them are very, um, honest (fat, toad, fish). I guess Best got the best of that deal. :)

We drove a little further down the road to Bang Sean for a sea side picnic. Koi and Cotton ordered for us from a stand they like to eat from. Each stand had a few of it’s own little tables on mats on a concrete pier right next to the ocean. We took our shoes off and sat on the mat around a two-foot tall table.

And we feasted.

A server brought us two types of green papaya salad, a hot pot of soup, crab legs, giant prawns, horseshoe crab egg salad, some different types of soup and some other things I didn’t catch what they were – but I tried them! We had so much food they had to bring a second table.

Only one thing made me seriously sweat, but general consensus is that I might have eaten a “rat shit” pepper, a terrifying tiny little thing that Thai people put in dang near everything. Yikes! I also ate some things you aren’t supposed to eat, like the stalk of lemongrass in one of the curries (then why put it in there?). We had beer and wine, sat on the ground with the ocean waves crashing on rocks behind us and a market and a concert going on in front of us.

Sigh. It was fabulous.