playing catchup where they only have tomato sauce

nobody@vox.com(John Kaczmarek) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:22:45 +0700

so my apologies for such a delay in posting any updates but i was sick for a short time after our group's trip to the mountains last weekend. to catch everyone up to speed i'm just going to quickly cover some of the cool things we've done since my last update and i'm working on putting some more pictures on my new flickr account (i think i've reached some kind of limit on vox).

two sundays ago now we went to walking street which happens every sunday. basically, they close down a huge section of streets and the whole place becomes a big market. i mentioned before seeing more amazing things that i could have thought possible. well walking street probably doubled that. a few people were handing out flyers for muay thai fights for monday night. that peaked the interest of the three of us so monday (our day off) at night we got a rot dang (“auto red” i think, basically the taxis of thailand) to take us to the place on the flyer. we didn’t really know what to expect, but julie said she had heard that if you sat on the front row there was a chance you might get blood on you. yikes! we were seated (ya on the front row) and we ordered cokes and we waited, wide-eyed and curious. the listing said there would be a total of nine fights! we were almost mortified when small kids no more than 8 or 9 were led to the ring. don’t worry the matches were friendly (like sparring in karate). the combatants slowly got older and older and the fights got more heated. the big fight was supposed to be spain vs. thailand, but it was a huge let down compared to some of the other fights (spain won easily and we were rooting for thailand). the most awesome part of the whole night was when three guys entered the ring and were then blindfolded. as the bell rang the three of them bolted up and started swinging wildly. it was more of a comedy routine with the three fighters bumbling around like clowns, the referee getting attacked several times and then pushing the blind opponents into each other. i got the whole thing on video and i’ll try to post it if i can. afterwards the three fighters went around getting tips from the crowd. all in all it was a fun night.

one other really cool thing was that we met two brits while at the fights and they told us they were rock climbing at places all across southeast asia. the next day robert took us on a “mystery” equipping trip. we went to a place called crazy horse and guess who we met there? our two new friends from mother england, climbing. we said ‘allo again and then went on exploring some caves that robert showed us. one place we climbed down into was quite dark. robert lit a lighter and showed us the four walls and then told us to find the other way out as he extinguished the light. it took the whole team searching but we finally found a huge opening that lead to a grand room with a small hole in the roof about 100-200 feet above us. (it turns out one of the “walls” was only from the waist up) the place where we did our equipping time was called (and get this) anxiety state crisis. after a gut churning climb up a small cliff we came into a beautiful cave with a large opening with early morning light flooding in. again beauty surpassing my ability to describe (just wait for the pictures) and this is where we did our morning study.

the last exciting thing that has been happening is that julie and i are learning to drive the joaw ford. i love driving in thailand. left side of the road, driving a standard, shifting with the left hand, no power-steering, in a place where traffic laws are more like guidelines. i wish americans drove like they drive in chiang mai. let’s just say space is used efficiently. :-P

that’s all i have for now i’ll get pictures up asap and be checking back soon for a multipart report of our trip to mae hong sorn.

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playing catchup where they only have tomato sauce