Kanchanaburi Trip

Don't we have the greatest university? YES!! Chula should be your choice - because you get to go on totally free trips!
This time we went on an overnight trip to Kanchanaburi, a province west to central Thailand. First we visited a beautiful temple on a mountain with a great view over the landscape.

After this we visited the River Kwai Bridge and the war cemetry. These are remainings or sites related to the second world war.
Then we rode the train to a restaurant to eat. The train ride was great. I personally love trains so being in one in Thailand was fun for me. =)

We finally arrived at our place to stay for the night: The Lake Heaven Resort. Fantastic!!!
You have to walk over a swimming bridge to the houses, everything the bungalows and the place to eat, it all swims in the water! The bungalows are really nice, clean and you have a rather big terrace where you can look over the water and relax. In the middle of the builiding on the water are a trampolin, a thing you can climb on, and lots of other water activity things. We all jumped right in, got our life vests, which you have to wear, and had two hours of fun, playing in the water!
The food was good, and we cloud even sing karaoke after eating.
The next morning we had breakfast with luckily european things too like toast and marmelade.
This place is absolutely fantastic to stay at!! If you can afford it it's totally worth coming there!!

The last place we visited was the Erawan Waterfalls. It has seven steps, you can climb up over steps and stone and see beautiful parts of the waterfall. I went up to step four, hab enough of climbing and went down to step one again, my favourite so far. The first step is the end of the waterfall and you can go along the way and see the little steps it takes down there. There are also lots of beautiful butterflies flying around in the sun that shines through the branches of the bamboo trees. It's peaceful even with the tourists there and a lovely place. And perfect for pictures ^^

food *-*

There is this special thing here. The one thing that is a major point for me to really love being here.
Food.
I do miss the german food, there are lots of delicious dishes I love, and I am looking forward to eating Brezen again, sooo much...
But food here in Thailand is an adventure for itself. Not only the food you can buy in the streets or restaurants. There is another thing with the food here: delivery services.
If you don't want to leave the house to get something to eat and especially if you want to have some european or junk food the possibilitys are endless. There are dozens of italien restaurants where you can get your long missed pizza and pasta und tiramisu. And lots of other restaurants offer delivery too.
The greatest one for me was a delivery service that we don't have in Germany (or at least not where I live) but it seems to be all over Asia: McDelivery! It's a McDonalds delivery service! How I love the little things like this, providing you junkfood when you really need (ok want) it (sometimes it's just nice to have ^^).
And the delivery guys even bring the food up to your room (even though we have a security system that should onbly allow the tenants with cards to enter). So I just have to open the door, I don't even have to leave the room. That's a lot american in Thailand ^^

Oh and, by the way,  I got nicely tanned today because the weather is ridiculously sunny - to all the europeans dealing with autumn weather ^^

Ayutthaya

Yesterday we went on another of the great field trips organised by the univeristy. This time we visited Ayutthaya. This city has been the capital for a long time but was destroyed a few hundred years ago and the capital then became Bangkok. In Ayutthaya you can visit hundreds of beautiful tenple ruins and some temples who are still in good shape. If you go there you will see an unbelievable amount of Buddha statues - or at least their remains - some of them really, really huge.
We visited four different temples and everyone has it's own beauty. If you have the chance to come to Ayutthaya, take it! The temples are totally worth walking around in the sun for hours!

visa extension

I am sitting here in the goverment builing that is responsible for visa extensions. It's some time outside the centre of Bangkok in Chaeng Watthana Road. I was surprise how beautiful the surrounding here are. It is a place full of government buildings. They are huge and pretty impressive... -
They have built a nice park like aera here and it is actually a place where I would like to take a walk in the afternoon. To find the building we needed to go to was not so easy but we had no major problems because everyone working here really knows the place.
When we entered the building I was really impressed. It us a huge wide hall more or less empty and on the sides are the real departements. It is well organised, you can even take photos and make copys here.
There is also an area downstairs with food and clothes stores abd you can get a massage while your waiting. We arrived here at 10:30 am and by this time there are already lots if people here so we just have to wait for it to be our turn I guess. But there are no complaints from my side I think this is good organised and the wait us appropriate when you see the mass of applications that are handled here every day.

water... water everywhere...

Yes I know it was raining for two days. Yes, heavily raining. But when I went to university today in the morning everything was normal. It started raining soon after I arrived. Well, heavily raining.

I heard it was pretty something at Nonsis where I live. So I got myself a cab and drove here. Well it's strange when you don't hear street noises anymore but the sound of waves. And then you look outside...

And then you are in your street and suddenly you realize that your not in a car anymore but in a boat. Because there seems to be no street anymore but a river instead. And I thought how lucky we were that there was no flooding during our stay here. So much to my luck.

moonbar

aand another great skybar! the moonbar on top ofthe banyan tree - very nice! I love these skybars I wouldn't have a problem with being up there over Bangkok everynight :)

soup!!!!!

I really love Thai food. It is spicy and has so many flavours and it's just yummy. But from time to time I miss the german food. I am not used to eating so much rice and if I do I do not eat it for breakfast because we don't do that in Germany. So I was sooooo happy when I came home today and there was a package for me! And inside were these:

Soup powder from Germany!! I LOVE YOU MOMMY!!!!! Just such a great idea - feels like home!