Being Bold in Thailand: Day Trip To Ayutthaya

Last weekend the whole group took a day trip to Ayutthaya, a city about an hour and a half from Bangkok. I was excited about seeing some ancient temples but mostly I was looking forward to visiting my TA, P'Wit's house. His family has a farm there and they graciously welcomed 15 rambunctious UNC students for a day of cooking Thai food and hanging out. We took a bus to a another bus to a van and arrived in Ayutthaya. We walked around an outdoor food market and I followed P'Wit around "helping" him get supplies for the lunch that we would prepare at his house. Mostly I just smiled at the sellers and helped carry the fresh produce he bought!

We rode another 2 buses and arrived to P'Wit's house hungry! We immediately started making preparations for the feast. There were stations for cutting limes, peeling garlic, cutting up herbs, killing frogs, slicing mango and pineapple...oh wait, did I say killing frogs? Yep. You read that correctly. One of the main food items on P'Wit's farm are frogs. P'Wit's dad recruited some of the boys to go down and kill the frogs he had captured. They were in a sack and they were told to whack them with a wooden plank until they stopped hopping around.

Cameron taking a whack.

I have always loved crabbing off our dock at the beach and finding clams to disect on the beach so I was a little disappointed to have been left out of this activity, but have no fear! I got plenty of interaction with the frogs later on in the meal preparations...I helped P'Wit butcher them so they were in "good pieces for frying". It was much harder than I expected though and cut up about 2 in the time P'Wit did 5. Nevertheless, it was a good experience and I now can proudly say I know how to properly butcher a frog for frying.

P'Wit demonstrating how to butcher the frogs.

After a hard few hours of preparations we enjoyed a fantastic meal of Somtum (papaya salad), fried frog, muscles in pineapple curry, rat curry (yes...rats), and for dessert: sticky rice and mango. It was by far the best meal I've had in Thailand and I had so much fun visitng P'Wit's home.