Stratospherical: The Football, The Monastery, and The Ugly

After a twelve-hour train ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok last night, I find I'm not particularly thrilled to be back in this steamed-out metropolis. I seriously feel sort of like a dumpling here, you know? Maybe not. Shrivelled, damp, claustrophobic - these are the things I'm trying to communicate. At least my room for this one night is nice, though. It actually has a window to "the outside" rather than just a hallway. That's some serious ritziness for the Khao San area. Tomorrow morning, I'll be headed to Beijing, and then from there on to Mongolia! Mongolia by Sunday. It could be a movie title.

Speaking of movie titles, the attentive reader - attentive enough to realize the obvious, at least - will notice the title I used for this post. Think of it as narrating the photos I'm posting, and then "The Ugly" just had to go in for good measure.

As for The Football, one of the Thai youth national teams - say, under-21 maybe - played an exhibition match against a really strong South Korean club at a stadium in Mae Sot. That's right: a) Mae Sot has a stadium (a sandy one) and b) two well-regarded football teams would visit it. I was surprised, too. The whole town turned out, it seemed. The sidelines were packed. I spent most of the match craning my neck over the bald head of one of the Burmese guys I worked with last summer. For the shoot-out, the result of a 0-0 tie, the whole crowd lined around the 18-yard box. It was sort of the populist thing where it's like "the people's game," where every neighborhood kid comes out to see what's up with the show in town. After the game, everyone swarmed the Korean team (which lost in the shoot-out) for pictures and handshakes, though none of that could happen until after the Korean team's prayer circle had ended - a good compliment to their coordinated dance routine during half-time set to a song "Celebrate Jesus." Turns out their club is called "Hallejulah," and their jerseys say "God Loves You." There were a few hippy-ish white missionaries (I'm assuming) who came in on their bus. Weird stuff.

Then for The Monastery, it's Doi Suthep. It's on a mountain outside of Chiang Mai, and it's definitely super scenic, beautiful, etc. But of course it was choked with tourists. After snapping the obligatory photos, I retreated to a bench down the hill a bit and finished a novel - "Waiting," by Ha Jin - while doing some journal writing. All I could here down there was birds chirping, water running (a brook? no, a water spigot, but still), and monks' robes swishing past every so often.

Which reminds me! I've been meaning to post my reading list for this semester, i.e. the books I brought with me. My list from last summer provoked some of the more interesting comments, so I want to throw them out there again. Along those lines, I just figured out why none of your comments showed up last summer. Because I have to "moderate" them! Somehow that option never made itself known to me; they just disappeared. Until now, that is, when the system was kind enough to let me know I should publish the 24 comments that had been lurking mysteriously. I'm psyched to read them.