A butterfly made from a carrot. Beautiful!

Dad had a glass of orange juice and pineapple juice with ginger. It was really delicious. They made it very pretty with a piece of carrot made to look like a butterfly. If you even need a pick me up try the orange juice/ginger combo. It did have fresh pineapple juice too but who has that at home?! Thais can afford to spend time creating beautiful things because labor here is very cheap. Cheap in the sense that the rich are very rich and exploit the poor who can be very poor. The guesthouse where we stay is not in a tourist part of town. A British man married a Thai woman whose father gave them the guesthouse as a wedding gift. They are probably about our age. This side of Bangkok is where the international airport used to be, but now the new international airport is on the other side of the city which has hurt business for the guesthouse. However, we have found an interesting new, small, shopping mall near here (Ari BTS station) that has a Starbucks and nearby is a McDonalds. They are both very popular. When we have been there we have been the only foreigners there and at times it is crowded with Thai people. Goes to show there is a thriving middle class. When we were in Nepal the big news in the paper was the grand opening of the first fast food restaurants in Nepal. They were KFC and Pizza Hut. We met an American man at the airport who spends a lot of time in Nepal and is friends with a Nepalese couple. They are both in the police force, he being a higher rank than she but the wife as a police woman makes $150 a month and her husband slightly more. They both have college degrees. They have a little girl and are paying $25.00 a month for her schooling, which shows how much they value her education. I don't think the average (and lower) Nepalese will be able to afford to eat at KFC or Pizza Hut. However, in the hills around Kathmandu are large homes which shows that they too have an upper class and those are the people who might support western fast food restaurants. Here in Bangkok it looks like there is a large middle and upper class. Strange, isn't it, coming from America and thinking people from middle and upper class eat at McDonalds!! It seems almost low class to us to eat there. Food prices at McDonalds here are about the same as in the U.S. They do have an egg and cheese breakfast sandwhich which isn't half bad. It is very white bread but at least it is bread and something different than rice.