Silk Silk Silk

One of the English teachers in the college offered to take us (Clem, Yok Soyai, Fah Sai and myself) to Surin to see silk being made and the elephants. Surin is the province next door to Si Saket and is famous for elephants, silk and silver so we all jumped at the chance and said 'hell yeah!'

We were going to have an early morning of around 6am but thankfully that was changed to around 9am. We set off on the long journey crammed in the car. Two in the front and four in the back. Lets just say by the end of the two hour journey, I was pretty uncomfortable.

The first stop was at a silk weaving place which was beautiful. What was good as well was that there were these two looms set apart from everything else and on them was silk being made for the king and queen of Thailand. We even sneakily touched it! We touched silk for the royal family! We found out that it takes around one day make 5 inches! Talk about order in advance. Afterwards we looked at the dying of the silk. It was a bit weird to hear that they get the blue colour from a leaf as I always thought that blue was such an unnatural colour to find in tree's leaves or berries.

Next came the elephants. Unfortunately we missed the show but we were able to ride one around the elephant village which was good. Each elephant has their own keeper who looks after them and feeds them so all the houses were made up with two floors. The top for the person who looks after the elephant and the ground floor, which was a sheltered area, for their elephant. 

It was a really good day as instead of being tourists and just going to the touristy areas, we were able to go to a place which is more of the 'Thai scene' (if that even makes any sense).