Wednesday 11th of July

On Wednesday, our friend Bobo and I took Gaynor, David, Seth and Imogen to Lucky tea shop. Lucky tea shop is a well known tea shop in Mae Sot and is written about in the guidebooks for Thailand. 

Breakfast here is so yummy so I wanted Gaynor and her family to try it before the left for Burma. 

We had 4 dishes of curry, potato and dahl. We also had two massive plates of flat bread, which they cook in their oven. They fling the flat bread onto the walls of the oven and bring it over to your table straight out of the oven. 

We also had burmese tea, a water and 2 juices. This all came to just under £3.50!  

Meanwhile, David and Gaynor's youngest daughter Livvy was munching away on her banana pancake with extra sugar.

After we finished in the tea shop, Bobo went to meet up with my mum and Geoff and the rest of us headed to Hle Bee school. I wanted to show Gaynor and her family Hle Bee school because it's very different from CDC school. It's a much smaller school. The headteacher who runs the school is called Thazin and many members of staff are her family. Because the school is quite small, she knows the children very well. 

When we got back to the hotel, we decided to go out for ice cream. There is a new ice cream shop in Mae Sot. It's very strange, they get a big block of ice cream and use a machine to shave the ice cream, this made it really stringy and weird, but tasted exactly the same. 

They have all kinds of ice cream, papaya, grape, banana, coconut, vanilla, chocolate etc. And all kinds of toppings, quite minging. They had noodles, jelly, nuts, grapes, watermelon, sweetcorn!!

That day we had to sort money out, close my Thai bank account and exchange money. So we spent the rest of the day doing that. 

We had to change the US dollars we got in the UK (because we were told we could use it in Burma but then got told we'd be ripped off if we used dollars) back to Thai Bahts. Then go to the Burmese black market and change them into Burmese Kyats. 

At night we all went to Casa Mia for the Allen family's leaving meal. We all ate so much. 

Then Thein Naing came to say goodbye. He stayed with the Allen family last year and was one of the exchange teachers for CDC. 

The Allen's dropped their bikes off at Borderline shop and we all walked back to the hotel and waited for their mini-bus to take them to Bangkok airport, from there they would fly to the capital of Burma, Rangoon. 

The bus finally came and we had a really emotional goodbye, Mae Sot is a really hard place to leave. 

We had news the next day that their mini-bus journey went down as one of the worst journey's ever, 3 of the children were sick on the way to Bangkok and they had to leave piles of their sicky clothes along the way! Ew!

When the mini-bus left, Thein Naing asked us if we wanted to join him at the night market for a drink, he hadn't eaten yet. So we went along for a beer. He ordered frog and asked us if we'd like to try!

We made sure that he'd ordered dead frog because in the market they tie live frogs down with rubber bands so they don't spring away! He assured us that they'd be dead and cooked. 

I tried a little bit of the frog and it was really tasty, like chicken but tastier. But it was really hard to chew and swallow. 

Then, shock horror, Mum, who never eats anything but toast and pasta in Mae Sot, tried a bit of frog too! 

Congratulations Thein Naing, for being the first person ever to make my Mum eat something other than toast in Mae Sot! This will go down in history!