let's start with ridiculous.

Well here it’s been another week.

Sorry I haven’t quite been in the writing mood this week, not sure why, just homeworking and listening to music and blah.

Let’s start with now and go backwards.

It’s Thursday night. Tomorrow, we’re hiking up Doi-Suthep (chiang mai’s ye olde big mountain) to the Temple. Apparently we’re stopping somewhere halfway up at a waterfall for lunch. (: then hiking the rest of the way, touring, exploring, souvenir-ing and undoubtedly photographing before returning back into the city by Rot Daeng* (phonetic translation for Car Red) the local standard for public transportation.

The past two days have been rather standard. Nothing incredibly noteworthy, crossfit’s sweaty as usual. It’s been raining a lot. So there’s that, there’s talk of floods in Chiang Mai and south of here.

Tuesday, for the sake of practicing Ethnograpic research skills (Oh Heyyyy Qualitative, I hated you), we were sent into the city to go to 1. the mall and 2. Warorat Market* (the huge daily market in Chiang Mai). It was a nice way to spend the afternoon. Active is always better than a lecture for me!

Monday, was starting to get some 24hr bug so it was a struggle, but we had a guest speaker, a local political science professor whose name I would massacre if I tried to sound it out now. He was great though. Very open and honest and had the most wonderful deep voice. One thing of interest I remember: 19 September will mark the 4 year anniversary of the first coup de ta here in Chiang Mai and the 4 month anniversary of the start of the riots in the spring. There is a scheduled peaceful parade/protest that we as farang* students (whites/tourists) have been instructed to not attend. ):

Over the weekend my Mae and her friend Pa Noi + husband took me and their host student Andrew to see the elephants at Mae Sa Elephant Camp located about a half hour drive outside of the city up a steep mountain road. They were beautiful, and strange. Animal training’s always given me the creeps, but it was a very fun morning and feeding them and touching them was almost too much I was giggly like a 5year old. Afterwards, we continued driving up the mountain to a hotel/restaurant where we stopped for lunch. It was beautiful and the food was great!

Ahh look it’s raining again, something new and different.

And now last Friday, Rock climbing was so wonderful. When you’re up there it’s slightly terrifying, naturally, to be clinging to a rock face relying on the strength of a rope as your back up plan, but every time I touched the ground again the thrill of surviving once more just made me want to scurry up another climb even more! I think I’m going to have to go back before I leave Thailand! And find somewhere to climb outside in the Midwest.

There you’re all caught up I think. I’ll move on to the next less structured post!