Would you like rice with that fish head??

Ok...where did I leave off last time. Oh yes, Tiger Kingdom!
My Khun Ma took my brothers and I to lunch at the Tiger Kingdom. This place is cool! It's like zoo for tigers. You eat lunch right next to their cage. And I use the word cage lightly...it's more of just a chain link fence between you and the tigers. I watched the tigers splash in the water and play with each other. It was really awesome. Each time I see new animals they move up my favorite animals list. On top, it's a tie between giraffes and elephants. Feeding the elephant a few weeks ago was probably one of the coolest things ever...and riding it too! But seeing giraffes run wild through the African plains was pretty cool too. But now, watching tigers dive into pools is coming towards the top. Tigers are awesome and very pretty. For some extra money I could have gone in the cage with them and touched them, but that wasn't on the schedule for my Khun Ma...maybe one my extra week in Thailand I'll go back and play with some tigers. :) haha. For lunch I had the greatest (well maybe not the greatest, but anything will be great when you eat rice everyday for 3 meals) spaghetti with chicken and tomato sauce. It was delectable (haha, that's a big word)! Right in the middle of my eating it, my youngest host brother decided it look so good and had to try some, so he reached his fork over and picked up a piece of chicken. He liked it, though he didn't go back for seconds.
After Tiger Kingdom we went to get the boys haircut...it was 60 baht for both of them...that comes to a little less than $2! I'd say that's a pretty good deal. This barber was pretty funny too. He had one single chair that looked exactly like Floyd's barbershop chair from Andy Griffith Show. It didn't look like the chair was fully functional...meaning the head part was kinda falling off, but it served it's purpose.
My youngest brother had a piano recital that evening. He is just a beginner piano player but does very well. He practiced his song so many times I could probably play it in my sleep with my toes. I woke up Sunday morning to him practicing it. The piano is right outside my room. The speaking part of the recital was in Thai, so I couldn't follow any of it, but piano music is international so that was good. Some of the students were so young and soo good. Wow was all I could think. I had a front row seat for the performance. At the end my Khun Ma wanted to get a picture of my host brother and me near the piano. It was pretty special.
On our way home from the recital we stopped at the book store. They had a little collection of dead insects on display...I walked in and stopped dead in my tracks...the size of some of those bugs was gigantic. I hope I never see anything that big...EVER! I asked my Khun Ma if she had ever seen any of them and she said no, so that was a big relief. The book store had a small English section and a few magazines I recognized...so I read that for a little while. But they were so expensive. An English magazine that would cost about $2 in the US cost nearly $10 here. Needless to say I did not make any magazine purchases.
After the book store things got interesting. We stopped at a little cafe for dinner on the way home. I looked at the menu. The one side only had fish. So I flipped it over thinking the other side would have non-seafood items...I was very wrong. The menu was only seafood. And the seafood was not your average seafood, like salmon, catfish, etc. It was fish HEAD, fish SKIN, fish stomach, and the list went on. Oh and there was shrimp on the menu. If you know me, I would almost rather eat fish head then shrimp. I just can't eat shrimp...can't do the texture of it. Ewww! In my head I was trying to figure out the least painful item to order. Boiled rice with fish head, fried rice with fish skin, spicy soup with fish stomach... I couldn't figure out which item would do the least damage to my stomach. Then my Khun Ma says "ut oh! no muu (pork), no kay (chicken)....is this ok?" I laughed...it had to be ok. There was no other choice. We couldn't just switch restaurants all the sudden. I frantically searched the menu again hoping that I had missed something. Anything! Even tofu would have been better than fish head. And then I found it....Fried Morning Glory! That was it! It was better than anything else I saw. So I asked my Khun Ma about it, and she ordered it. No options given, she just ordered it. I guess whatever it was going to taste like I had to eat it...it was my dinner. At home (in NJ) we used to grow Morning Glories up the front light post. All I could think was I am going to eat the flower we grow at home. Weird. The plate arrived and oh boy was it spicy! AH! Not only that but it had the flower part still on it. It was like the chopped it out of the ground and fried it up with spices. We just happened to be eating family style that night with various plates in the middle of the table. They all ordered seafood so I figured my only hope was to try to eat around the fish. That failed and my Khun Ma told me to try the fish. It didn't look too bad, so I picked it up with my chop sticks..oh yeah did I mention I had to eat this whole meal with chop sticks. I haven't mastered that art yet...at all! Dinner is very difficult when eating with chop sticks. So I picked up the fish, put it in my mouth and told my self to swallow quickly. And it actually wasn't too bad. I had a few more pieces because I couldn't eat the spicy morning glory and I was starving. I asked my Khun Ma what kind of fish it was so next time there was nothing else on the menu I could consider ordering that...she told me it was "fish from the sea". haha. I will never know exactly what it was. Though it might be best that way.