Yogadad Unmoored

This morning I woke up in my own bed. Got home around 6:30 last night, after spending a long day driving across Ohio. I would have made it sooner but I had to spend about 90 minutes in a traffic mess in Cincinnati. They closed the expressway after two semis squashed a car. After getting through the detour, the only thing I had to deal with was the relentless rain, which finally let up around Toledo. By the time I got home it was gone. Too bad. Everything is pretty brown around around here. We could use some of that rain. After I left the coffee shop yesterday, I found a locked up museum in Fort Wright. Turns out they're only open Friday through Monday. That's probably not unusual for a place that runs mostly on volunteer help but you'd think they could have posted that information somewhere, say on their web site so I wouldn't have wasted my time finding the place. In the vast scheme of things, it's a minor annoyance. Actually, getting off the expressway let me find...

Talk about a trip that doesn't go as planned. This is it. Katrina forced quite a major change in plans. Of course, my change in plans is nothing compared to the changes forced on the folks who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Right now, I'm in a coffee shop in Fort Wright, Kentucky, on my way to a new Civil War museum, then home. I cut my trip short by a few days due to Katrina. But I had a great time. After a great day at Shiloh on Saturday, I drove to Memphis and spent some time with the Swanbergs. Sunday morning it was becoming obvious that my southern-most trip plans were endangered by the storm. I called the visitor center at Vicksburg and confirmed that it would be folly for me to attempt to visit there. The ranger said that they were under a tropical storm warning and that they were expecting winds of 70 mph. He thought they might be closed on Tuesday for clean-up. And they were seeing many, many people who were fleeing coastal Louisiana so finding a place to...

Another trip. My last one this summer. Tonight I'm holed up in a Days Inn in Lexington, Tennessee. Lexington is about 30 miles north of Shiloh, my first stop on my week-long exploration of Civil War battlefields. As far as I can tell, there is precious little to recommend this town. It took me all of 30 minutes to scope out the entire town while strolling around and looking for a place to eat dinner. Not even a local watering hole in the downtown. Wow. For a little while I thought I might have stumbled on to a dry town. Thank goodness, no. I consulted the proprieter of the hotel and he directed me to "Carolines", just down the road, across from the Wal-Mart Super Center. So that's where I headed. A fried-chicken dinner and two Sam Adams later, I'm back at the Days Inn. So, is it the fate of every small town to be swallowed up, or more accurately sucked dry, by Wal-Mart and a strip of fast food joints? Maybe it's better this way, more jobs, some vitality. But t...

I'm in Seoul. At the same Internet cafe I started out at two weeks ago. At that time, I thought $3.00 for an hour's Internet usage was pretty cheap. But that's almost 150 Baht an hour - quite a bit more than the 30 Baht I've become accustomed to paying. How perspectives can change. My flight to Chicago leaves in about 2 hours. I think it'll take a little bit of time to digest my trip. So many images. So many sights. I suppose it's inevitable to think about the contrasts between the urban hipness and busy-ness of Bangkok and the smaller towns of Chiang Mai, Lop Buri, and Ayuthaya. Which is the real Thailand? The rural areas or the urban center? I guess it's no different that asking the same thing about the US: If the only place a foreign visitor sees is New York, does he get a real picture of America? Or does he need to go to Kansas, too? Probably the latter but looking closely at New York, it's not hard to see that it really is a microcosm for America. ...

Almost time to head out to the airport to begin the long trek home. My flight is at 1:20 a.m. Wednesday morning. I lose a couple of hours going to Seoul but then pick up a day when I cross the date line and get into the states. This time change thing is weird. The upshot is that I spend about 30 hours flying and sitting in airports and end up getting home the same day that I leave. Wednesday. Today I rented a long-tail boat for a ride around the river and canals. Bangkok used to have a lot more canals, in fact at one time it was known as the Venice of the Far East. But with its rapid growth many of the canals were filled in to create space for roads. Bad move. Now traffic is gridlocked and the river is still a pretty convenient way to get around. I ran into a couple of school teacher from New Jersey, who saw my WSU luggage tag on my camera bag and introduced herself. Her son went to UM so she had a kind of connection to Michigan. We chatted on the train for a bit. She's here on a ...

My Thai adventure is drawing to a close. In some ways, the time went very quickly. In other ways, it seems like forever since Amanda dropped me off at the airport. Blogging has been fun. Internet cafes are plentiful here so it was easy to find places to drop in and write a bit. Today was my library day. I had three guides show me around a bit to some Thai libraries. My guides are from a company that functions much like MLC. They work with vendors to get good prices so that the libraries can purchase access. They told me that they often get 70 percent discounts, but even that is often too much for many colleges to afford. They were very knowledgeable about vendors and we talked about Elsevier, Springer, OCLC, and the rest. They also work with integrated library system vendors so we talked about that, too. Their big vendor is VTLS. I asked them whether they know about III and of course they do. Apparently there aren't a lot of III installations but I gather there are some. We certain...

Not much out of the ordinary today. It was a Buddhist kind of day. I planned my day around a meditation and Buddhist talk at the World Fellowship of Buddhists. That was at 2:00 so I headed out a bit before 9:00 to make sure I'd have enough time at Wat Pho and the Grand Palace, which is next door. These are two of the biggest tourist attractions in Bangkok and they were both busy by the time I got there. Wat Pho is the biggest wat in Thailand and it is pretty amazing. Stupas fill the space between temples. Each one contains ashes of a king or some other important person. There are thousands of Buddhas in Wat Pho but the two that merit the most attention are the reclining Buddha and the standing Buddha. Both are very impressive. The reclining Buddha is said to mirror the position the Buddha took when he entered Nirvana at the end of his life. The statue pretty much fills the hall so it's impossible to get a decent photo. I don't remember the exact dimensions but it's huge...

Yoga class was great. Just what the doctor ordered. Good grief, am I ever stiff! No wonder, after all this walking, sitting in airports and airplanes, and bustling about. The teacher, Justin, was very good. He's an American, from L.A. (of course.), and ha been in Bangkok for about 8 years. He gets to India at least every other year and usually once a year. For him, it's only a few hours flight. I'm glad I took the time to do the class. My body really needed the time and it helped clear my mind, too. At least for a little while. The rest of the day I spent at the weekend market, north of the hotel. Holy cow, what a lot of people. And what a lot of stuff. Anything you want, you can get at the weekend market. Need some new pots and pans? Get it there. How about new dishes? They got it. Jewelry for your sweetie or yourself? Yup. And if you really wanted a new puppy, bird, or fish, you can get them there too. It was a hoot. And very, very crowded. Sometimes the aisles were so j...

Saturday morning in Bangkok. I'm waiting for yoga class to start. That's at 11:00, in about 45 minutes. I had found this guy's studio on the web. I wanted to see whether Iyengar style yoga is any different here than it is at the place I go to in East Lansing. We'll see. He also has another class tomorrow morning but I'm not sure I can make that and also get to the wat to hear the discussion about Buddhist meditation that takes place the first Sunday of the month. Decisions, decisions. So yesterday when I got here, I did a short swing around Siam Square. One of the touristy things to do here is visit Jim Thompson's house. Jim Thompson was an American who settled in Bangkok in the 50s and he's been credited for bringing an awareness of Thai silk to the world. He disappeared in 1967 in Malayasia and has never been heard from again. Now his house is a museum of sorts to show off traditional Thai architecture. It's very interesting. The guy had a fantastic se...

Who would have thought that Net access would be 10 times more in Bangkok???? That may put a crimp in my blogging activities. So it goes. Anyway, Bangkok is everything it's cracked up to be. Big, polluted, crowded, and alive. Tonight I'm out trying to find a restaurant then a place for an after dinner aperitif. What I've found is a street with bar upon bar. And lots and lots of young people. A few geezers like me, but not many. It looks like a city of youth. Maybe all cities look like this after dark and I just don't see it because I'm curled up with a book and ESPN.

It's Friday morning, a bit before 9:00. I have about an hour to kill before I need to check out of the hotel and catch the train back to the Bangkok airport. If all goes well, there will be transportation waiting for me to get to my hotel in Bangkok. If not, I guess I'll need to resort to Plan B. Which I'll need to figure out. Seems like I've had lots of "Plan B" moments this trip. Yesterday on the trip back from Lop Buri as I was watching the countryside go by, I noticed that the railroad crossings all had crossing guards. They carried little flags, one red and one green. And there were often manual gates that they apparently moved whenever there was a train coming. It was an odd juxtaposition considering that in Lop Buri, only a few minutes away, I found shops with the latest electronic gadgets, several places that offered Internet access and the latest Playstation games, and a host of other modern conveniences. But on the railroad there was still a lot of m...

Another day visiting ruins and learning about Thai history. This morning I got on a train to Lop Buri, about an hour north of Ayuthaya and with a number of ruins, although nothing like the volume found here. At one time, the king thought he'd make Lop Buri sort of his home away from home. So there is big ruin of the king's palace, along with a number of smaller sites that were home to some wats and other buildings. Lop Buri is quite a bit smaller than Ayuthaya and more manageable. Also not very many tourists so it was much harder to find people who could understand me. Even when I said the name of the town I'd get blank stares. The Thai language is very subtle. At least it is for my very heavy, thick tongue. I discovered that if I just say "Ayuthaya" no one knows what the hell I'm talking about, but if I say "Ayuthayahhhhhhhhh" they get it. And I have to make sure that my voice goes up on the last syllable. My adventure today was when I got to the ru...

Today for the first time I felt like I was in tropical country. The weather was hot, humid, and sunny. According to Yahoo it was 95. And I was bicycling around the island that contains the old city of Ayuthaya. Maybe not my first choice for weather (or lighting conditions for photography) to visit the ruins of the old city, but it was my only chance. So there you go. It's hard to describe the amazing sight that these ruins are without showing photographs. In 1767, the Burmese army invaded what was then Siam, later to be called Thailand, and trapped the Siamese army in the capital, Ayuthaya. After a short heroic stand, the Siamese army collapsed and the Burmese sacked the city. They literally burned it to the ground and melted down nearly all the golden Buddhas that inhabited the many wats in the city. What's left has been designated a UN World Heritage Site and it's easy to see why once you experience the ruins. There is one wat left standing. For some reason it escaped the...

If it's Tuesday, it must be Ayuthaya. I flew from Chiang Mai this afternoon and got to the hotel here around 3:00 p.m. Nice flight on Thai Air. Short and smooth. My idea of flying. Yesterday was a lot of fun in Chiang Mai. After I left the public library I headed south along the western wall of the city, to the Suan Dok gate, where I thought I'd have a look at a couple of the wats I missed in Sunday's tour. I would head east when I got to the gate and go over the moat into the city. When I got to the gate, I hung a right and headed for the wat. Now those of you who have been reading closely, will notice that I was walking south, turned right, and headed east. Wrong. When one is walking south, turning right means one is walking west. So I ended up at Wat Suon Dok, where I had been on Sunday. Along the way I just couldn't figure out why the landmarks on the map weren't showing up. Another Dykhuis story about directional impairment. So it goes. Anyway, it was a differe...