Some of this may be repetition from Steve's post, but I wanted to add my own comments here.

Digital photography is an interesting thing. We were standing outside the market and I was aware that that everyone coming and going on bicycle carts was different than it was at home, but it didn't really strike me as "exotic" until I looked at the display in my camera (chimping as Steve calls it).

But when we entered the market and saw all the plastic bowls of eels, frogs, snails, and unrecognizable squirming things, then I really knew I wasn't at the farmer's market at home.

Some of the food was ready to eat,

but mostly the market was filled with people shopping for what they were going to cook that day, which was what we supposed to be there to do. (Actually, they had done the shopping for us already, we were just shown everything we would be using in our class). What was great about this, is that I frequently go to 99 Ranch or Marina Foods at home and have no idea what many of the produce items are, so I took the opportunity to ask lots of questions about what things are while Steve focused on taking pictures ( you can see his blue jacket in the middle of all this):

Then we went to a small village where the cooking school was located.

The first item we prepared was steamed chicken:

The complete menu was:

• egg wrapped dumplings
• steamed chicken with mushroom
• eggplant with soy and oyster sauce
• stir fried pork with vegetables and oyster sauce
• green vegetables with garlic.