New Year, New Job, New Life!

L/R Andrew, Josh & Ben. Fireworker's extrordinaire!

New Year's Day is a holiday for our Thai staff. This effectively left Joan and I alone with about 70 guests. You've got to find it in your hearts to feel sorry for them!
The early start to get breakfast, would have been fine, if it wasn't for the habit that New Year's Day has developed of following straight on after New Year's Eve......
We had a great day on New Year's Eve. We started with an early trip to Makro before breakfast; making the school boy error of forgetting our shopping list! As it happened we only forgot seven items but this didn't stop us needing to go back later in the day. We got the wrong bacon, the wrong ham, the wrong rice, etcetera,  etc, etc. (to quote a former, if fictional, King of Siam!) It's a well known joke, that when a Thai person says "same, same" to you, it means something very different!
We had two superb ideas from among our guests. One started as an innocent enquiry as to whether it would be OK for them to have a few fireworks. 

This developed into a posse of the men hiring a songthaew to get a shed load of massive fireworks and organising a brilliant display for the majority of our inmates!
The other idea was that instead of cancelling the evening meal on New Year's Day, we could all make pizza's. This suggestion came from a former baker and so seemed like a fairly easy option for those who didn't want to go off site. More about that later!

N.Y's Eve went very well, I roped off half the field (Once a teacher always a teacher), and Andrew and Josh set off the fireworks with barely a pause between, ending with the most massive mortar bomb imaginable! The kids ended up with loads of sparklers and it made a great end to a good day. What I didn't anticipate was the previously mentioned love of fireworks of the residents of Chiang Mai. The noise on the stroke of Midnight, as the fireworks in town started rivalled anything we've heard in Hyde  Park, London or on the Thames at New Year at home. The display went on until well after 2.00 am and any possibility of sleep was out of the question. It was this that meant a 6.00 am start in the kitchen was achieved with a little less ease than usual!

All systems go!

The last time I fried so many eggs would have been back in the 1970's at Boy's Brigade Camp, when I was a cook for a few years.
We provide cereals, fruit (bananas, pineapple and pomelos), toast, yoghurt, porridge and we set 8 big tables with jams, marmalade etc, so it's a lengthy task. We were ready in good time and thankfully we had some willing volunteers to help wash and dry! We were ready to start on the soup and rolls by about 11 o'clock!
Another batch of volunteers washed and dried after lunch so at 2.30 pm we were ready for the great pizza festival!

The "A" Team, Who's that in the washing up?

 We had scoured Chiang Mai for strong flour, yeast and mozzarela cheese. We found a tomato sauce to use for passata and we had lots of other bits to use for toppings.
We should have suspected a problem when no one seemed to be signing out for dinner. We ended up making 14,  24" x 12" pizza's and having barely any left overs! 
Our team of willing helpers ranged from 11 yrs old to 17. They followed M, our master pizza chef's instructions to the letter and mixed and kneaded dough, sliced and chopped meat and vegetables (even the onions), grated cheese and cooked curried chicken. The final assembly line would have put pizza express to shame!

The Pizza Meister and a growing band of helpers!

By the time we had all eaten and cleared up the kitchen and dining room it was getting on for 8.30 pm.
Joan and I headed straight for the pool as after a full day in a hot kitchen, handling food made us feel in need of a cool, lazy swim to unwind.
We had a great deal of fun working with a group of kids again, and it was interesting to hear a little bit about their lives. Their conversations between themselves were really no different to any of the children their age that I've taught in the last 30 odd years.

Joan say's she's emailing using the
Nelson & Colne ipad (leaving gift) 

Joan and I continue to learn our way around the very different life here. One salutary fact is that nearly everyone seems to travel by motorbikes, from school children to Grannies, rarely wearing shoes or jackets, often without crash helmets. At least two of our staff have been crippled in some way from accidents riding their bikes. One of our staff left on Christmas Eve expecting to enjoy a family holiday only to find that her bother had been in a crash and had broken his jaw and sustained serious facial injuries. Now the family need to raise 60,000 Bt to cover 3 nights in hospital and also enough to cover an operation for him. He has medical insurance which covers some but by no means all of the costs. They will all join together to pay his bills, that's how they cope here.
One really good aspect of this job is that some of our guests come to Chiang Mai to have babies. We had two families over Christmas who could have provided the live new born for a Nativity  Caleb was only a few days late for this engagement being born on 3rd of Jan, his Mum, is doing well. The proud Dad is the guy who helped by playing guitar for our carol concert. Two more of our Guests are expecting any day now too. It is a privilege to help out, as surrogate family, for those who need it. We think back to the days when our neighbours did this for us!

The braver part of the crowd. Most were a good 20 feet
further back, I hid a fire extinguisher behind a tree!

A  humorous incident to close, one guest who works in a hospital in Bangladesh decided to bake some cookies for her boss to give as a Christmas gift. She decorated then by piping the Ladies name on each cookie in red icing. She left them wrapped up on her bosses desk and went home for the holidays. Returning to work after Christmas, she was surprised when the boss said nothing about the gift. The lady asked around, only to be told that to write someone's name in red, in Bangladesh, is to wish then dead!