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November 13, 2001

if you don't see anything, then you don't have flash -- get it here!

June 29, 2001

An elephant walked by as I was eating dinner last night.

June 5, 2001

Everything here is pretty good for now. I'm staying at an all-pink all-the-time guesthouse [pink walls, pink curtains, pink tiles, pink towels, etc. etc.], which is a 5-min. walk from the office. It is in NW Chiang Mai, a bit outside the main city, but near a bunch of local expat places. So far, I haven't met many expats, though they're certainly a lot here. I've been hanging out mostly with the summer interns (a lot older than our interns) and exploring the city with them. Last night, I bought a DVD of Finding Forrester, and we all set up my computer as a movie screen in my guesthouse and watched the movie with beer and squid balls.

Last week, however, was my first true adventure, when I went to a refugee camp to meet folks and give trainings. We had to hike in through rice paddies and wade through rivers. We spent four nights and five days there. We slept in a bamboo hut on stilts and I still have bruises on my hips from sleeping on my side. Water is difficult to obtain, so I was quite dehydrated when I left. The funniest story (which will be accompanied by a photo soon) is our bathing time. Everyone there bathes around communal wells out in the open. Being modest, however, they wear sarongs while they bathe. While the men just wrap one around their waist and thighs, the women have to wear one tied above their breasts and hanging down to their ankles. Not a lot of skin showing to actually soap up. The idea is you pour buckets of water over you, soap up the sarong, and try to get the soap to go through the sarong onto your skin. A side- effect of all this water, however, is that you are now standing in public in a dripping wet, very thin piece of fabric that keeps wanting to come untied (really untucked, since you don't actually tie anything). And, since we were quite the attraction, the entire camp came out to watch us bathe. By the end, the three of us (all women) were laughing so hard, we were rolling on the ground with tears streaming.

The best is yet to come, though. After you've managed to soap up and wash off, you can't just walk back in your dripping sarong (it's ok to be virtually naked in public near the well, but you can't be seen anywhere else like that), so you need to put a dry sarong on over the wet one and take the wet one off without losing the dry one and without showing any skin. We watched the others and tried to mimic their "shimmy." Basically, you shimmy very quickly and shake the wet one off, while tying the dry one. This was definitely my weakest area.

After 5 days of difficult sleep, little water, and barely bathing I was quite ready to come back, however. I bought four beautiful sarongs (completely unlike the ones in the U.S. or central america), and learned how to tie them fairly well. I also bought a couple bags from the women's weaving cooperative. I even bought a camera here. Yesterday, I went clothes shopping at the one fancy mall in Chiang Mai, which is close to my guesthouse. It was quite the orgy for me. I bought five little t-shirts (the kind with cap sleeves and little cutsie things on the front), a pair of pants, and two pairs of shoes, all for about $15. The shoe stores are absolutely unbelievable. They are gigantic and have about 200 different kinds of sandals/slides -- all very cool and ranging from $2-5. Unfortunately for me, only about 10% come in my size, but you would go nuts here. I wanted about 15 pairs.

I guess that's the extent of my travels for now. I'm eating quite yummy food, and staying mainly veggie for now. There are many Italian restaurants here (now I understand the two Thai/Italian places in DC, that is very common here), and I ate pizza yesterday. Other than that, though, it's lots of rice and veggies. And I got bitten by some kind of nasty bug yesterday on my toe, so I'm limping a bit.