Remember remember the 5th of November.

We decided to throw a little party for bonfire night and after telling our host, the ball started rolling until it seemed as if half the school would turn up at our humble home.
I decided that I wanted to enlighten some of the teachers to toffee apples, so after buying all of the ingredients, which isn't an extensive lift, I began. For my first batch I used muscavado sugar so the toffee would be more like treacle, it was very stressful as I had to heat it to 140 degrees, and I had a limited selection of tools, so i was trying to do it all with a metal spoon. The toffee was bubbling away in the pan and looked rather terrifying, I then just went for it and started to coat the apples in this bubbling mixture and overall was quite successful. The next batch worked even better, I am not sure whether it was due to the fact that I used different sugar, or just improved after my first attempt.

They were delicious, the best toffee apples I have ever tasted and everyone else enjoyed them as well which was good. We invited some volunteers from near our project and the teachers supplied the food, which was lovely. So, along with a quaint little bonfire that just made us sweat and an assortment of fireworks, we had a nice night. There were some problems with the fireworks and one I set off went straight towards Lewis, hitting him in the ankle and he just managed to get out of the way before the final explosion.

I did the gentlemanly thing and offered my bed to the girls, which the eagerly accepted, which left me on the floor, leading to a very poor nights sleep, meaning that I was not in the best state for teaching. Apart from my two lessons, I have been asleep pretty much all day, waking up about an hour ago feeling much fresher, but also with the realisation that I might not get to sleep so early tonight.

We went to Phana on Saturday to see Robyn and Claire, it was nice to catch up with them and after some free food and some whisky, we settled down to watch a film. We know how to PARTY!

This saturday should be somewhat more eventful as we are going to Ubon with all of the volunteers in the area for a night out and are going to stay in a cheap hotel.

Next week we are going to Bangkok for a day, then to Nakhon Sawan to visit some more volunteers. We are not teaching next week because most of the students will be helping at home with the rice harvest.

Everything has been good apart from one thing, the death of my phone, I was on my back and it fell out of my pocket. I assumed it would be fine as it had survived a similar trauma without a scratch. To my dismay, it just would not come back to life. The worst thing is that I had to buy a new one, which has made a rather large dint in my months allowance. It is much more difficult to live off £90 or 4500 THB than I had originally thought it would have been, money just seems to vanish, even though I am being very anal about what food I buy and making sure that it does not go to waste.

The biggest worry for me is that I will not be able to afford a substantial amount of food to keep myself in shape, so I might be returning home next year actually fitting my Grandads description of be of being a long, long... pipe cleaner.

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