Church Search

We spent most of Saturday searching out our church options. It felt a little like a scavenger hunt. We pulled off every church we could find off the Internet including addresses and headed out with our rudimentary map and Thai driver. We spent a couple of hours locating all of them and trying to speak to someone or get some more information about each particular congregation. At the end of the day Mark's comment to me was, "The church thing may be harder than we thought." We will attend a bi-lingual one today, the only one we could confirm that English was spoken and we agreed with the limited amount of information that was on their web page-Hope of Pattaya Church. I'll let you know how it goes.

Afterwards we went to the Outlet Mall and largest grocery store in Pattaya. It is nice that most things you can purchase are cheaper than the states. Food is much cheaper and so tasty. We saw jeans for $8 and some dress shirts for Mark-$6. We were looking for some electric hair rollers for me. I knew I would have to buy most of our small appliances here because of the different voltage I had an old set of rollers and brought them to use as long as possible, they lasted 3 plug-ins worth and then fried! So we were searching for rollers and sugar. My sourdough starter made it all the way!!! I still use starter that I obtained from Chris Jordan over 8 years ago. I have to feed it with sugar at least once every two weeks.

We found the sugar at the Lotus which is a lot like our Wal-Mart except it really smells different. Mark and I have noted how contrasting smells can be, every now and then here you just get a whiff of something that isn't pleasant. No rollers, I'll try a curling iron/blow-dryer combo for now. Mark said he would look for me in Singapore in two weeks when he is there. I'm not holding my breath, everyone here has straight, straight black hair. I'm grateful for my naturally curly hair and may have to do the headband thing for three years.

We then perused every aisle of the large store looking at our grocery options, it's really sinking in on really what an adventure this is truly going to be!! I saw no ground beef, no Velveeta, no Tostida chips, no frozen pizza, waffles, pastries, no pop-tarts...I'm starting to figure out why you see so few obese Thai people-very little processed and packaged foods and all the packaging is about 1/3 smaller than ours-no super sized anything. The Ritz cracker boxes are small, all the candy bars are about 1/3 smaller than our regular size bars, the cereal boxes smaller, two chicken breasts per package...There were pallets of rice everywhere and lots of fresh seafood and huge amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables. They seem to only like potato chips here even though we did see some small bags of Doritos. I'm glad I brought my bread starter at least something will taste familiar. I'm wondering what kind of cinnamon rolls I can make here-papaya filled perhaps? Dustin is going to have to learn to like more fruits and vegetables for sure and I'm going to have to widen my cooking abilities as well.

I'll post some pictures of the Sugar Hut we ate an early dinner at. Ethan is enjoying the good life as you'll see! It's still amazing that we are living in Thailand.