a night out on the town!

Last night, (Friday Night) I asked my Khun Ma and Khun Pa if I could stay in the city for dinner with some friends, and they said yes! So after classes were over a group of 8 of us (Myself, Kelsey, Molly, Natalie, Madison, Ian, Josh and Alison) decided to look around for some dinner. We were walking along the Front Gate of CMU when we spotted Aj Mike and Aj Ann eating dinner. So we figured it must be a good restaurant. So we went over to talk to them, and Aj Mike offered to order us some dinner. We tried some of his food (he's just like a grandfather...not like a professor) and all sat down at a table. We divided into a "spicy food" table and a "non-spicy food" table. It worked out to be 4 and 4. He ordered us an aray of food and we had it family style. It was fun. And a good time to get to know some of the people on the trip. The food was excellent and we got to try a bunch of new stuff. Dinner cost around 50 baht...which is pretty good. After dinner we walked down the street to a night market and shopped around a bit, and decided it was time for dessert. Madison had been to a really good dessert place earlier in the week so we went there. It happened to be just down the street. It was called the Milk Garden and was such a cute coffee shop. We ordered a few desserts for the table and all shared...again family style. We got some really good Indian Yogurt...called Lasi. I know what you are thinking Mom, I do not eat Yogurt but this was like a milkshake...it was GOOD! We got some cookies and creme gelato which I was so excited about so the group let me have the first taste! We also ordered a very strange thing that some people really liked. It was like a frozen hot chocolate with bread at the bottom. So weird to me. I just couldn't get over how strange it was. It was dessert with soggie bread in....too weird. And one of the guys got a coffee that I tasted and it was really good. So dessert cost about 20 baht for each of us. Again, really cheap. Then we had to get a rot-dang across town to where Madison's Khun Ma was going to pick a few of us up. So we signaled for a rot-dang, told him where we wanted to go in Thai and bargained the price down from 20 baht to 15 baht... all in Thai. We were so proud of ourselves. Usually our Thai buddies do that for us but we did it all on our own. So we rode almost all the way across town for about 50 cents. So that total for the evening was 50 + 20 + 15 = 85 baht....that is a grand total of $2.59!! If we were to do the same thing in NYC that would have been at least $100! It was such a fun night! I wish things all over the world were that cheap!