earning my farmer's tan

alrighty i just got back from another homestay! this one was for our "Food" unit about organic farming and the farm bill and fair trade and stuff like that which i was vaguely aware of but really had no idea what it was. I spent 4 days living with a rice farming family in Surin province. They were really really nice people who had a rice farm, raised cattle and sold snacks and fruits and vegetables in a green market. i got to go out with the mom to the rice fields in the morning to weed. i don't know how many of you have ever seen a rice field or maybe pictures but it is all in like a foot or so of water. i took of my shoes and sunk like 4 inches into this thick mud and waded through pulling weed from between the rows. i had a little straw farmer's hat but my head was too big for it so i got crisped. the fields were gorgeous, and went on for as far as you can see with little huts and temples scattered throughout. all around the village there were kwai (water buffalo) roaming around. i thought they looked like a cross between a hippo, a cow, and The Lorax. (They have bushy mustaches and ears.) the family caught their own fish in the area, and the major pests of the fields are little fresh water crabs so they caught them too, and they fried them up for every meal, or used a mortar and pestle to smoosh them into a fish paste that looked and smelled and tasted like chum (i guess because that's what it is). They fried the little fish and you just popped the whole thing in your mouth all at once. I mostly just stuck to the fried eggs.
I also got to see our neighbors, who i think were also family, spin silk out of the silkworms. i never really thought about it, but i would have thought that they sort of spun silk like a spider and you just collected it or something. it turns out they are encased in this silk cocoon and you just throw a whole bunch of them into boiling water and pull the silk off. they have a little spool type thing that the string goes over and twists around so that it spins into a usable thread. i am doing a really poor job explaining it but it was really cool! i'll post pictures or something. by the way the rest of my group who actually have unbroken cameras are posting on flickr. if you go to flickr.com and search for cieethailand07 a bunch should come up. i have to go eat now, i will finish this later.
to be continued......dum dum duuuuuuuuh