Merry Christmas!

Santa has already come and gone on this half of the globe, but I wanted to take a second to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I miss you and love you, and cannot wait to be reunited in 2009!

Spending Christmas in a Buddhist country, where the holiday is at best a novelty, is pretty strange, especially if you are like me and have never been away from home for the holidays. But it was great to have Meghan and Adam here, and we had a very relaxed and fun day, and while it would have been nicer to be home, it was pretty good here, too. Plus, Santa didn't forget to stop by my little townhouse, so I guess he got the memo.

We booked tickets today to go south to Koh Chang for New Years, and we have a visit with my host family and a day at the Elephant Nature Park scheduled between then and now, but I'm going to really buckle down when we get back to try to get this blog current!

Thanks again for reading - friends and family that care enough to visit here are the only present I really care about. Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and good night!

The Big Mango

The first two things I noticed about Bangkok were that the taxis were all sorts of crazy, bright colors, and that people keep to the right when they walk on the sidewalk.

In Chiang Mai, the taxis are all a dusty, deep red, and people walk on the left, which is where you would expect them to walk in a country where you drive on the left side of the road.

That - and the fact that a fresh cup of coffee is surprisingly hard to come by - are all I really have to say about my trip to meet my parents in Bangkok, which ended roughly a month ago. The rest is pretty well-documented in the captions of my photos, which you can find here. It was great to see my parents, and even better to tour Bangkok with them and live the high life for a few days, but I think you can get the gist from the photos. Much more on watching Mom and Dad navigate Asia in a forthcoming post about showing them around Chiang Mai.

One thing that went almost completely undocumented was the Yara Bangkok Challenge, the adventure race I did with Elena just 12 short hours before my parents arrived. Afterwards, I said that the race was by far the hardest thing I'd ever done, and Elena, who has run a marathon and summitted Kilamanjaro (separate incidents), agreed. After 6 hours and 23 minutes of exhausting Type-II fun, we'd biked 46km and ran 16.5km on roads, through temples, and across rice paddies; swam 0.5km upwind across a lake wearing backpacks and lifejackets and dragging a truck-tire innertube; kayaked 4.5km in the midday sun; accidentally waded through a sewage pit; and crossed the finish line 21st out of 39 teams (or 4th of 9 in our Mixed division).

Some lessons were learned: 1) Eat bananas beforehand. I was dealing with major leg cramps for the last 2.5 hours. 2) Don't eat a lot of GORP in the morning, and only drink water before the bike sections. Your body doesn't have much blood left for digestion, and all of the liquid bouncing around on the runs just doesn't feel good. 3) Bring sunblock. 6.5 hours of sweating and swimming is too much for even the heartiest lotion. 4) Pick your teammate. Elena and I were having a great time, in spite of cramps, sunburn, and exhaustion, while the guys we were battling for the last two hours were swearing at each other the whole way. We named them the Assholes. (Their name ended up being the STUDS, which is somehow unsurprising.) Guess who won?
[Full results, times, photos (none of me) and distances are here, if you care!]

Battlezone, Chiang Mai

No, this isn't about the much-publicized political protests and airport closures in Bangkok.

This is about Loi Krathong, the Thai holiday that occurs on the full moon in November. This was two weeks ago, but things have been a little crazy, so I'm writing about it now.

Loi Krathong is a festival of lights, but where the Jews light candles, the Thais light fireworks. Big fireworks. Which include homemade bombs packed into terra cotta pots with short, unpredictable fuses. Real fun stuff.

But I digress.

Loi Krathong is a time for Buddhists to make merit and give themselves good luck by floating handmade boats down rivers, in lakes, etc. at night time. In fact, Loi means "to float" and Krathong is the name of the little barges with candles and incense on them. This means that (even without the "googled" phenomenon), Loi Krathong is both a verb and a noun, and both singular and plural. This leads to such usages as:

"I need to go home (to, for) Loi Krathong."

"My girlfriend is mad at me because I didn't Loi Krathong with her."

"My Krathong didn't Loi."

And my favorite, "Loi that Krathong."

And here I am, just before I Loi that Krathong:

In case this seems potentially boring, it is all made much, much more exciting (read: terrifying) by the fact that, as you Loi your Krathong, you are an exposed target for every male over the age of 8 to shoot fireworks at. Any supposedly serene, peaceful, or romantic moment is erased, as everyone's yearly Krathong wish becomes "Please, Buddha, just let me survive Loi Krathong."

I don't know if I can adequately express the terror of the three days of Loi Krathong, except to say that no matter where you are, you are never safe. I was sitting in my living room, just after sunset on the first night, and I kept jumping out of my seat as random explosions took place just feet from my front door. One bomb was so big that it set off car alarms on my street. And there aren't even cars on my street.

Anyway, I managed to make it through Loi Krathong with all of my fingers and toes, and although I'm not sure that my hearing will ever recover, it was kind of worth it, because I also got to take part in one of the oldest and most beautiful Thai traditions. About three days before the Loi-ing officially begins, there is a festival at a local university at which about 10,000 fire lanterns are released at once. It was truly an incredible sight that I'll never forget. A friend got pretty good video of it a few years ago, so you can get some kind of an idea. (Click the photo to view; requires QuickTime)

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In other news, the airports in Bangkok have been closed for three days, with no forseeable end in sight. Everyone is hopeful that this will resolve itself by the King's birthday on December 5th, but nobody really knows for sure. Mom and Dad are rebooked on a flight back to the States on the 8th, and with any luck they'll be able to get home then.

But as long as you're not trying to go anywhere, life in Thailand, and particularly in Chiang Mai, goes on, unaffected.

Out of Hand

Thanks to several of you for concerned calls and emails over the past 24 hours. Things seem to have gotten a little out of hand down in Bangkok at the moment, but everything is, as always, completely normal in Chiang Mai. The only remote concern that I have is that Mom and Dad won't be able to fly down to Bangkok on Friday, and then to the States on Sunday. However, we're all pretty optimistic that the 50 million Baht/day cost of having Suvarnabhumi airport closed will push the otherwise-sluggish Thai bureaucracy to find a solution quickly. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, the trip to Bangkok was incredible, and Mom and Dad's visit to Chiang Mai has been even better. I leave you with this gem as a teaser:

And I'm Off!

Leaving for Bangkok in about an hour! It's going to be a fun-filled and action-packed trip. I'm staying with Alanna on Friday night, and then I'm doing an adventure race with Elena all day Saturday. The parentals get in on Saturday night, and then it's two or three days of touring the big city before bringing them back to Chiang Mai! Next weekend my Thai family is having a two-day housewarming extravaganza, and my (um, real) parents and I are sleeping in the new house, which should provide for some funny cross-cultural moments.

I'm going to have a lot to write about, so stay tuned!

Halloween

Alright, so it's been a while, and I've got some catching up to do, so I'm going to keep this short.

I went out for Halloween last week with my roommate, Dao, and some of her friends. The rich culture of Halloween is sort of lost on the Thais, but the collegiate spirit remains the same: it's viewed as a night when you can go out hard, and nobody really looks at you twice for looking or acting a little strange.

After dinner, we headed to Tawan Dang, a huge, warehouse-sized bar and concert hall in Chiang Mai. I think it's named after the much more famous German brew house and live music venue in Bangkok, but that's about where the similarities end.

If Halloween is a night when little abnormalities are overlooked (if not celebrated), then Tawan Dang is the ideal venue for such an occasion. Functionally, it's pretty much like any other Thai mega-bar. There is a huge stage, absolutely no dance floor, and a couple hundred tables that are waited on by cute girls wearing 100 Pipers or San Miguel uniforms. People order bottles of whiskey and soda water, and you sit or dance around your table, having a good old time.

Except Tawan Dang is kind of Facist. Tawan Dang means "Red Sun," and around the border of the whole bar are 20-foot tall portraits, the kind you would see at Mussolini rally or in V for Vendetta. And there are certainly a few portraits that hit the mark: a couple of Thai generals are the first thing you see when you walk in.

But then things get weird. Turn to your left, and you see these guys:

 

That's right: Elvis, Che Guevara, and Karl Marx. Turn your head a little more, and you see a Marx-sized portrait of Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Thailand is a strange, strange place.

[More pictures of Halloween]

Work: An Introduction

So some of you (namely my mother) have been asking for more details about work and life in general. I'm at work, and don't really have a lot of time to write at the moment, but I thought a glimpse at the company iTunes would give you guys a good glimpse of what it's like to work here.

Keep in mind that we have a stereo system installed, so these choice selections are routed through the entire office and looped all day long.