Day 6

Day 6 - Thai Culture, Cooking, and Tea

01/14/2025

Aya Naboutt

Today, we started our morning with more Thai language learning on LingoDeer for just 30 minutes. Our language learning was cut short because we were visited by Ms. Connie Lacobie, a Thai culture expert! She gave us a presentation on her trip to Thailand in 2019, and we learned about the best places to visit in Thailand, including the temples, and respectful behavior both in the temples and out in public. 

After that, we all headed to the kitchen to begin the best part of the day: making Thai food! We split up into pairs based on what ingredients we preferred and how spicy we wanted our food, and made green papaya salad together. Green papaya salad is made with green papaya, long beans, peanuts, tomatoes, garlic, dried shrimp, fish sauce, Thai chili, and more. After adding all of these ingredients into a bowl, you smash the ingredients together and you're done! Green papaya salad is perfectly sour and sweet, and those of us who were just trying it for the first time were happy with our results. 

After making and eating our green papaya salad, Ms. Connie Lacobie taught us about Oolong tea. She made some for us while we learned about the different ingredients in a tea blend and their benefits. After that, we all got to fill Ziploc bags with the ingredients we learned about to make our own tea blend that we could take home and make ourselves! The ingredients included dried orange peel, lemongrass, galangal (Thai ginger), Chinese celery flower, and finally, Iron Goddess Oolong. 

We then had lunch together. We ordered egg rolls, noodles & tofu, white rice, and curry from a Thai restaurant and made our own plates. After having lunch, we learned about another type of tea: black spice tea. Ms. Connie Lacobie again taught us about the benefits of more spices in this tea blend, and we made our own in a ziploc bag. The ingredients in black spice tea are assam, cardamom, star anise, and tamarind.

That was the end of our Thai culture workshop. Since we didn't get to finish the film we were watching yesterday, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, we watched the final 20 minutes and did some research on the film afterward to better understand the ending of the movie, which was somewhat confusing to most of us. We ended the day with another reading, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" by Yiyun Li.