Kornography

This weekend Pee Ann invited me to come with her to Wiang Haeng, a TINY town Northwest of Chiang Mai, about 15 km(~9 miles) from the border with Burma. It quickly began clear that this trip, although purporting to be work-related, was a complete boondoggle for Pee Ann to visit her friend (Pee Oot) who had moved to Wiang Haeng. I was all for it, and life soon took the form of the perfect vacation: sleep, wake, eat, repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

I started my Thai lessons this week, waiving goodbye to the complete freedom I have been enjoying, and returning to the real world of alarm clocks and appointments.  On Monday I had to swallow my apprehensions about learning a new language, one so very different from my own, and just dived in, taking one-on-one lessons for two hours every morning.  It helps having a good teacher, and mine is awesome; she is in her early seventies, about 4 and a half feet tall, and has me laughing out loud at least a few times a day.  Read the rest of this entry »

It has only been a few days, but I am a complete convert to the life of bicycling, and this only made things worse when Mao decided to cease cooperating.  In the midst of a typically strenuous bout of peddling that follows the changing of a light, all at once I noticed something amiss.  I looked down at my left foot, thinking that perhaps my sandal had broken, but instead was faced with the shocking vision of a barely dangling pedal.  Read the rest of this entry »

I biked down the road to my neighborhood wat, Wat Suan Dok, and again, while wandering around, started chatting to a monk. Gee, who turned out to be a high school English teacher, talked with me about Buddhism and Thailand and the King, and invited me to come visit him at his wat, on the other side of the city. Our interaction ended with him giving me his cell phone number and email address and telling me to contact him when I wanted to come by.

I cannot describe how amazing this past week has been, Read the rest of this entry »

Today I really got a chance to explore the city under the attentive stewardship of Mao.

This day of biking around the city taught me a few important lessons about the traffic, and specifically about the place a person on a bicycle occupies in its larger scheme. First of all, in direct opposition to Boston and DC (well, America in general, I suppose), people are very open about letting one merge. Now this is true even if one happens to be riding a bicycle that may predate the first computer, as long as said one happens to have said bicycle up to the speed of traffic, despite the aforementioned shortcomings of said bicycle. The key, I have learned—regardless of the limitations of one’s fitness—is to think of one’s self as riding a moped, in terms of Read the rest of this entry »