Ton (Tang's brother) is a fun guy and Tanner and I enjoy hanging out with him. He also likes us, so that's really great. We love when people like us :) He invites us to the movies fairly regularly. We saw Maze Runner, The Fast and the Furious and a few others with him. He was supposed to go to Bangkok this weekend but it fell through. Saturday morning-ish he called to see if we wanted to go see a movie with him. We had talked about how Tomorrow Land was coming out and I wanted to see that. Sadly that is only showing in Thai. He said San Andreas was playing (and informed us that it was pg-13. We told him early on that we don't watch r-rated movies so now he always checks for us beforehand :) ).
We decided to go to the 3:40 showing and eat dinner afterwards. It takes about 45 minutes to drive up to Phitsanulok so we left around 2:30. There was a bit of traffic but we got there just as it started. A couple things about Thai movie theaters. 1) They play the national anthem with a video of the king before the movie starts. Everyone stands up for that. They recently made a new one and the photographs change into line drawings with water colors. I like this version a lot better than the old one. 2) they do assigned seating. When you buy your ticket you select your seats. I really like that. ton has a small bladder and always has to leave a couple times during the movie so we always get 3 seats on the end. Ton on the end, then Tanner then me. The movie itself was well done, but I felt really anxious and edgy the whole time!!! So many earthquakes and destruction. At one especially crazy/intense part I turned to Tanner and said, "I don't like this one bit!" I think action movies are not my favorite... But I do like getting out and going to the theater, eating popsorn and having it be in English!
After the movies we went shopping. They have a store called Macro and it's sort of like a Thai Costco. They have things in bulk and it's less expensive than other places. They also have some things you can't find anywhere else. They have SO MUCH CHEESE!!!! We bought a wheel of Edam cheese and a block of Cheddar cheese! They also had refried beans (we bought the 5 cans they had). We had seen packaged tortillas before. I don't care for packaged ones much though. I have learned to make them and that's what we have been doing. In the frozen area we caw frozen tortillas! We bought them and had quesadillas on them today. They are really good! We also bought some cream cheese and banana muffins. There was ground beef too! We even found some pickles. Needless to say we were in heaven. Living in Thailand has made us realize how much we miss food! There was a section of interesting meats: whole frozen snapping turtles, big frogs, shark, ostrich, boar, and a few others that I can't seems to remember. We bought ingredients to make homemade salsa. We made about 50 oz of salsa yesterday afternoon.
Some people go on vacation over 3 day weekends, we buy and make Mexican food! Haha! We met and older man there who teaches English at the university. We talked about Mexican food with him, then listened as he talked about how phony this country is... I think he liked speaking to other white people.
After shopping we had worked up an appetite for dinner. We went to Oshi Ramen. I got pork ramen with boiled egg. Tanner got some fried noodles with veggies and pork. Ton got fried noodles with no veggies and a side of battered octopus. It was good and I would eat there again. There is another Japanese ramen place we have been and I like the other place a little bit more.
