N.B. This is NOT a Thai Haute Cuisine course. Indeed, there will be no attempt to teach cooking per se, what is more to put every student in front of his or her own stove with space and materials enough to reproduce x numbers of the plat du jour. All the activities will be communal, and take place in and around a working Thai kitchen, most of which is outdoors and quite indistinguishable from the surrounding garden. There is also no Friar Laurence herb garden either, Romeo & Juliet style, no boxwood hedges or even pathways — the herbs are mostly self-propagating in the hedge rows, and a number of the vegetables are gathered rather than cultivated. You will learn to use a machete on a coconut and to pound, break, and smash roots, seeds, bark and fruit with stone mortars and pestles and/or the broad side of a meat-cleaver.. You will also get your hands dirty with a ‘jop’, the ubiquitous Thai hoe, carry baskets, stir woks while coughing your life away on the blue smoke, and even put on a few kilos eating what miraculously gets cooked!