I'm not actually crazy.

I spent the last 45 minutes trying to beat the solitaire game on my iPod. I’m lying on the bed in one of the countless musty hotel rooms I’ve stayed at since being here, playing the waiting game. I was at the point where I could tell I was going to beat it - you know, where you’re finally able to start putting all the cards up into the corner. One after the other … sixes then sevens, then onto tens and jacks!! Oh, the glorious ending was so close! My mind raced back to days growing up when Dad would bring his laptop home from work and my brother and I would take time away from Wildenstein 3D to play the solitaire (God bless Windows 3.1) and when you won, all the cards would go bouncing around the screen in 10 seconds of pure, untainted digital joy! (You can’t have worked with a computer during the 90s and NOT know what I’m talking about … unless you’re really bad at Solitaire). I thought, surely with this new video iPod, some secret awaits he who completes the game successfully … perhaps some hidden video giving me the secret to wavy, natural looking hair, or maybe a treasure map to find a free years’ supply of Peeps marshmallow candy. The possibilities were virtually endless, I thought, as I raced on, fingers flying fast over the controls. Queen of hearts, queen of spades, kind of diamonds, king of spades …. And then I paused, looking at my final card … the King of Spades. I acknowledged that my life may be forever changed after that moment, and then moved the scroll wheel to place the card in the stack.

“Looks like we have a winner,” appeared the small white letters at the bottom of the screen. I sat there for a full minute waiting for more, but that was it. No fireworks, no pomp and circumstance, no “I’m going to Disneyworld” speeches. Just those words. “Looks like we have a winner. Yes. Yes we do.

This blog entry really isn’t supposed to be about solitaire. I’m trying to give you a sense of what can happen in my mind with this much downtime. One thing I am learning about being a journalist, especially one working overseas, is that you are pretty much at the mercy of your sources. That is, you will meet them when they are ready to be met, where they are ready to meet, and you will wait by yourself until that time comes. For example, today I rode my motorcycle about two hours out of the way to meet with a guy and ask him if an idea of mine would be a possibility. When I got to where he was, I pitched my idea, but he said that he had to run somewhere, and that I should hang around for about an hour until he returned and then we would talk about it. I waited for him to come back, which he did – three hours later. At this point I again pitched my idea to him, simply to have him tell me no. Really worth the extra mileage and waiting, huh? But I did run straight over a snake today that slithered right in front of me, which was at the same time horrifying and awesome; always a good combination.

Now, don’t think that I spend all of my down time playing solitaire … this was the first time, in fact. I mean, I read books n’ stuff! (please read that to yourself in as galumphing of a super-jock / meat head voice as you can). But really, I do. I’ve read several this summer. I was even becoming so desperate that I read Pride and Prejudice! (If any of my roommates reads this, please give at least a second’s warning before you punch me square in the gut for admitting that. I do deserve it, though). I justified my reading of a Jane Austen book as another chapter in my ongoing quest to figure out women. It didn’t help … (and I’m told that there really isn’t anything I can do to figure them out anyway).

I’m spending the next week or so moving from place to place up north on my own, trying to gather the last of the material I need for my research. I may not have mentioned yet on this blog that I managed to finagle some school credit out of this summer. Believe it or not, I head back home already in just two and a half short weeks. I was writing in an e-mail to my Dad just yesterday that I’m not really sure how long it feels like I’ve been here. When I think about the fact that I’m almost ready to go, it feels like I just got here. But then I take a step back and realize that I’ve gotten so used to the way of life around here that I must have been here for a while. I mean, by the time I leave, I’ll have spent a quarter of 2006 here, which is something substantial, I think.

But, for now I need to keep my head in the game here. It’s easy to let my mind begin to wander at how soon I will be home, and the prospect of spending time with my family and seeing a certain special someone doesn’t make it any easier to do the work a guy’s gotta do. There’s enough of it left. Looking forward to seeing all of you, though … wherever and whenever that may be. Thanks as always for reading. More to come soon.

P.S. I’ll throw a few of photos down at the bottom, just to please my mom.

A few little girls performing at the Sunday night market in Chiang Mai. Cute.

A woman harvesting tea in a field just south of Mae Salong (near Thoed Thai). The area has a huge Chinese immigrant population, and they sure do love their tea.

This is my Dad, Jan, with a huge muskie he caught during a fishing tournament. This photo has nothing to do with Thailand, but a) it’s a great photo, b) that’s one heck of a muskie, and c)I love my Dad.

Photo slideshow

Hello friends. I know, I know … it’s been over two weeks since my last post. But I do have an excuse. Over the past week I’ve been away from Internet access up north with a medical team here from Colorado. I tagged along and took photos while they held clinics for hill tribe people, giving them free medical care and medicine. It was a long, good week. I put together a short slideshow, narrated by Shaunessy - the Global Refuge team leader. I threw it up on my Web site, so rather than reading a long blog entry, you should just check it out:

Click here to view the slideshow

Only about three weeks left here now, so most of it will be spent finishing up the research for the story I’m doing to get some school credit. I’ll try to get a more detailed blog post up soon. Hope everyone is well.

A few photos

So I was on the phone with my mom this morning and she told me that it "sure had been a while since I had posted any photos." I am not new to this technique employed by mothers around the world – this subtle hinting at what they would really like to happen. And so, as I’m learning here about Thai culture, Mama gets what Mama wants.

I have this little hard drive I carry in my camera bag that I dump my memory cards on when they’re full - kind of a poor man’s way around buying more memory cards. I’ve pulled a few photos off of that drive to try giving you more visual examples of what this place is. (You can click them for a larger version).

This is a Karen woman weaving a skirt like the one she is wearing. It’s an incredibly complex process, and suddenly made the boxers I sewed in Junior High Hom-Ec seem severely less impressive an accomplishment.

Rice paddies. There are a whole lot of these around here. I'm going to try to learn how to pick rice before I leave. I hear the paddies have lots of leaches ... so that will be fun.

I was walking out of a tribal village one day when I came upon a big group of people, mostly women, using pick axe-type tools to dig a new road. I saw a few women with baskets slung over their shoulders about the size of small laundry hampers. I didn’t think much of them until one of the natives with me said “Baby” and pointed at the basket. The woman then stopped swinging her tool and pulled back the cloth over the basket to reveal a little, chubby face, fast asleep inside.

This boy is of the Mien hilltribe. How could you not love those hats?

A boy at a small, discrete school attended by the children of migrant workers.

Fireworks over Chiang Mai

It’s not easy getting a barbershop quartet together in the middle of Thailand. So instead we had three older, grey-haired women, carrying the tunes to songs like “America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land” in a manner that would lead most spectators to believe harmonizing was never invented. I was inside the U.S. Consulate grounds in Chiang Mai and as I walked around, I felt like I had been transported back to the Newburgh Summerfest for the evening. The balance of faces was suddenly very heavy on the white side, kids running around with puckered little drying American flags painted on their faces. There were hot dogs and McDonalds hamburgers and pizza and apple pie, root beer and Dr. Pepper. There were people in gaudy red, white and blue hats and American flag shirts. There was even a bouncy castle that remained incredibly enticing throughout the hour and a half I was there.

The tune crept quietly over the loudspeakers. I didn’t even hear it until, “what so proudly we hail,” and by the time it got to “the twilight’s last gleaming,” the entire place was standing straight up with hands over hearts. And then, in the middle of Asia, about six or seven hundred American citizens belted out “And the rocket’s red glare! The bombs bursting in air!” BOOOOM came the first explosion from behind the flag we were saluting. We sang the rest of that song with fireworks exploding every few seconds, the kind of fireworks that are so close you can feel them in your chest. But I think this feeling was amplified a bit by another tightening in my chest.

I remember a conversation I had with my mom just a couple of days before I left for Thailand. I had been practicing a few key Thai phrases and sauntered into the kitchen to practice them on her. She asked me if I knew how to say “My name is Andrew” and “Where is the bathroom?” Then she asked me if I knew how to say “Where is the American Embassy?” and I kind of chuckled and made some remark about how I would likely be telling people I was Canadian anyway to avoid certain problems Americans can often face overseas with our image in lots of places. And then she said to me, “You know, it’s really too bad it has to be that way.”

As I stood there tonight listening to that song and the rumble and tightening in my chest, I realized a couple of things. There are a lot of things our country does very wrong. There are many policies we goof up on and our greed as a world power often makes us do things that go against our own founding principals. But … there are also a lot of things that we have done and continue to do right. I think that being at the place I am in my life, a college student at a fairly liberal school, I am taught to think that our nation and our leadership is pretty jacked on everything, and that most everything American is gluttonous and selfish and greedy and bad. And don’t get me wrong, much of it is.

But there is also freedom, and freedom is a darn beautiful thing. It’s often times not until you are in or very near a place that has much less freedom and independence that you realize just how much these freedoms afford us … not only physically, but intellectually. We have a freedom to think how we want and to tell people what we think. We have the power to change our situation if we don’t like it and to make a difference in the things around us if we choose to.

The fireworks display lasted about four minutes, and by homeland standards was a pretty weak show. But I have to say, I’ve never felt as patriotic on a fourth of July as I did tonight, standing in the middle of a city in Asia with my hand over my heart. Take a moment today to really consider what it is that these things, these freedoms, afford us. Look at the first amendment, and try to imagine what your lives would be like without it. I’ve seen what lives can be like without it, and it’s not a pretty sight.

What is it that defines what “An American” is? We’re taught to think it’s our leadership and our wars, and often times unfortunately, to the rest of the world that’s exactly what an American is. But the truth is that you define what an American is. As the body of America, as its citizens, we are the ones that can show the world what we truly value as a nation and as a people. Let’s think about how good of a definition we’re putting out there.

And to sum everything else up, I’ve spent the last week and a half traveling around with Global Refuge. We happened to be passing through Chiang Mai for the evening, just in time to celebrate with our fellow countrymen, and will be heading north again either tomorrow or the next day. The village I’ll be in up north hasn’t exactly heard of the Internet yet, so I don’t expect to be able to make an entry from there. But I do have to renew my visa before the medical team gets in from the states, so hopefully I’ll be able to make a post then. Hope your summer is going well. Thanks, as always, for reading, and God bless.