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...