Regaining Momentum

It's been a while. It has been a while...

Hard to believe that almost ten months have passed since Me, Myself, and Goo last sat down to do a little blogging. A lot has changed, but, more than anything, a lot has just returned to normal. Balance is back, which is always nice.

I am back in Chiang Rai now, in a new house, one with a view of rolling hills in one direction and mountains in the other. It's quiet. It's near a market and not far from the city, yet has a feeling of being away from both. It has a porch. I am a porch person. That's where I am writing this right now. That's where I intend to spend the bulk of my time over the next couple of months.

It will be good to be in one place for a while. I have been doing a lot of traveling over the past few months. I have been to England, Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, back to the US again, Singapore, Burma, Cambodia, and, of course, all over Thailand. The last three locations were places I went while leading a group of eleven bright, adventurous American kids for an outfit called Where There Be Dragons (http://www.wheretherebedragons.com).

Almost all of those are places where I had been before. In Spain, I retraced many of my steps around Barcelona, Madrid, and Toledo from when I had been a student there twelve years ago. All the places seemed very different now, especially for places which consider themselves to be so ancient.

Perhaps it was just me. I know I am much different than I was in 1994, both in how and what I perceive. I am not sure if most of the autoservicios in Spain have always been run by Chinese families, but they sure seem to be that way now, a fact that was very simple for me to pick up given how much the Overseas Chinese have taken over the economy of Thailand and neighboring countries.

It was interesting trying to figure out which language to talk to these shopowners in, whether I should go with my once-proficient-but-now-very-rusty Spanish, or my much-more-immediately-ready-but-quite-limited Mandarin. I tended to go more for Spanish since that is what they were expecting, though the couple of times I did go with Mandarin, it seemed to garner a good bit of amusement.

The one country on that list that I had not visited before was Cambodia, the last of Thailand's neighboring countries for me to explore.

I liked Cambodia. To borrow a Thai phrase adapted from English, it was "same same, but different" to Thailand. Thai and Khmer language seem to have a English-French sort of relationship going on. They are fundamentally different languages with different structures and grammars, but they have beating up on each other for so long that about 50% of everyday vocabulary seems to be mutual cognates, especially "harder" words like "health" or "post office" or "compassion." These words are all just borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali by both languages (probably to Thai via Khmer, but that's just a guess).

The alphabets are very similar also, if you allow yourself a little room for abstracting of the form, phonetics, and relative placements of the letters. Again, I think the Thai alphabet was developed from the Khmer one. Back in the Day, Khmers really had it going on (see: Wat, Angkor).

So, it's good to be back blogging. I credit a lot of it to being around those Dragons kids. They helped get me observing again. And what is observing worth without a little bit of sharing?

I am hoping to start updating this blog very regularly. I probably won't do a lot to publicize it (that takes effort and Goo and Goo's porch are not about that kind of effort), but I hope it will be of some value both to people who have never had a chance to come to Thailand or this part of the world, and also people who have lived here a while and can find some enjoyment in relating to (or disagreeing with) some of my observations.