Thai Cuisine Cooking Course with Smart Cook in Chiang Mai, Thailand

[Momster & Popster - earmuffs for a paragraph] 

So, turns out going out til all hours of the morning isn't the best decision before going on a full day cooking course. 

Despite getting very few hours of sleep and feeling crazy nauseous, we stuck it out and had the most amazing day of all time. 

We got picked up at our hostel (turns out the driver had to come a couple of times since he came earlier than he said he would...oops!) and we joined the group at a nearby market to see the types of ingredients we would be cooking with. 

We were then brought to the train station and went to a nearby village. There was a designated spot for monks to sit. I'd like to learn more about monks in Thailand, their customs, how and why someone becomes a monk, for how long, etc. there are 'monk talks' at a lot of the temples, def going to have to hit that up at some point!

Once we arrived at the village, we got bikes and had an awesome bike ride through the village and along canals and fields. I forgot how awesome it is to bike - can't wait to rent a bike again soon! 

The location that we did our cooking course was really nice - spacious, clean, organized, and the staff was amazingly friendly and spoke really good English. 

We had a bunch of different options of plates to make, and I chose: chicken and coconut milk soup, pad thai (obvi), massaman curry (my fave!), green papaya salad, and mango sticky rice. 

I don't have that many pics from the day, my iPhone ran out of space so I had to revert back to the ol' point-n-shoot, but I set up a drop box last night so now I'm good to go ;) 

Thai dumplings *drool*

I feel like our days here kind of revolve around good - when we're going to eat, where we're going to eat, if we're going to take a chance and try something new...food, food, food. 

Today was not an exception: we literally spent all day looking, talking about, preparing, and eating delicious Thai food. 

Tom Kha soup 

We were with an awesome group of girls - all of us were around the same age and alllll female haha - so there was a lot of sharing (sharing IS caring, after all) and chatting. 

Our instructor, Kiki, was hilarious and very informative. He also made super inappropriate jokes throughout the day (the size of the bananas, the speed we pounded the curry spices, etc). Too funny. The other group that was there with us was a bit faster, and by the end he said that we needed to rush back to catch the train. 

Green papaya salad with wilted cabbage leaves 

I have never biked so fast haha. We literally dropped our bikes off and ran down the road and across the tracks so that we weren't hit by the train. A hilarious ending to a great day!