back from le jungle!

hola!
so i made it back from the jungle in one piece, and am now sitting at the breakfast table at the little guesthouse having had my morning fried egg, mini hot dog, wonderbread toast, and tea, waiting for the tuktuk to come and get me and fellow culinary student ann (another australian. they are everywhere. a plague. but she seems very nice. also there are just absurd quantities of french people in thailand, which seems funny to me). we are going to our first day of cooking class! it includes a trip to the market to buy ingredients and a cookbook, and i am very excited to be going to the food market with someone who can tell me what the hell everything is. i have had a couple of exciting meals from street vendors, when i point to something that i think is a meatball and it turns out to be a banana fritter, or something that looks like it might be mango icecream, and it's actually fried fish eyeballs. it all adds to the adventure.
jungle day 1 was a four hour trek with frequent stop offs for waterfall and river dips - it is very beautiful, very humid, very noisy with birds and frogs and crickets etc. - up to a traditional karen village. we arrived around five in the afternoon, and washed ourselves and our clothes in the river as the sun set, which was just lovely, and then our jungle guide, anan, who i totally would have taken home with me had he been amenable, whipped up (over a campfire, remember) a beef panang curry, stir-fried vegetables, and sticky rice, with sliced pineapple for pudding mmmmmmm. we slept all together in a big room on grubby mattress pads under pink mosquito nets (i get inordinate pleasure out of the silly colours that mosquito nets come in. in paraguay they were all neon green, yellow and orange) and listened to G, the fat new yorker, snore all night long.
oh crap i have to go the tuktuk is here - will write again soon!