Biking

I've been biking around Chiang Mai this past week, wearing a tie and black pants and shoving my resume at English language schools. I applied to 17 the first two days I was here, but since they're all expat-run, I have to wait until after New Years to hear back from them. I have one job in January so far for 15 hours proctoring English exams for one week. It's a foot in the door and I hope things just snowball from there. Other than that, it's been boring and pretty lonely waiting for work. I cruised through the first season of Lost, pirated of course, in a matter of days.

A great pleasure has been urban biking. Besides the heinous bus fumes that cling to my nostrils even after showing, it is a wild pursuit. I enjoy taking to the streets aggressively after being taught to drive so defensively in the states. You just put yourself out in an intersection and let traffic figure its own way around you. And being on a bike means that at stoplights I can thread my way to front of the pack every time and get a jump on the green light. Thrilling stuff.

One of my favorite intersections in Chiang Mai is one that features quite prominently in the middle of the street an enormous tree. It is near a Wat so I think there must be a spiritual significance that required the tree to stay even as the highway crews paved around it. As a token gesture the bottom three feet of the trunk are painted reflective white, I guess to highlight to motorists that yes this is tree that they must swerve to avoid. A good example of the brand of Thai logic that I may never understand.