| Saturday, January 24, 2009 |
| Ode to Chiang Mai - Part 1 |
Walking home from the local internet café, surrounded by the sights and sounds of one of my favorite places in the world, I realized how incredibly special Chiang Mai, Thailand is to me. Outside of my hometown(s), there is no place on earth that has been so monumental to my life and brings such a deep devotion as this city in jungle mountains of Southeast Asia. My reasons for loving it are vast; too many to fully describe in one blog. I’ve decided, then, to break up my “ode to Chiang Mai” into multiple blogs (that I’ll probably never finish), lest any worthy aspect of my devotion be left underserved.
PART ONE: THE MEMORIES
Outside of my relationship with God, there are three things that define who I am and what I am about: my wife, my daughter, and my job. Without Chiang Mai, I might not have any of them.
In late 2002 I was a confused college junior, trying to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do with my life. I had tried a few different fields, and while I showed some proficiency, nothing really struck as something I wanted to do for years on end. In a friend’s dorm room late one night I went over the option of spending the summer abroad teaching English. On the one hand, it made perfect sense, because this opportunity would mix teaching, traveling, and English, three things I thoroughly enjoy. But on the other, for a guy paying his own way through college, choosing to trek across the globe instead of finding a steady job wasn’t exactly responsible. But hey, I thought, this is college. I’ve got the rest of my life to be responsible.
And I had other motivations. There was this girl I had my eye on for most of the year, and I knew that teaching in Asia meant that I would have a good “in” to be able to talk to her more, since she was the contact person for this teaching organization. Combining a good opportunity with a good-looking girl, I somehow managed to parlay a summer experience into the beginning of a romance.
While I had my eyes set on China, that nuisance of a disease called SARS decided to shut down the Middle Kingdom, re-routing the plans of my group to Thailand. I didn’t know much about the country other than spicy food and kickboxing, and I’d  definitely never heard of the city we would live and teach in for the summer. The first time anyone described Chiang Mai, however, was amazingly accurate. “Dude, you’re going to Chiang Mai? That’s a coooooool city.” Short, sweet, and as it turns out, exactly right.
The romance that had been building since December would find its way to Chiang Mai, as well. This dream girl decided that she couldn’t pass up another opportunity to spend some time abroad, and hitched a ride with our group at the last minute.
The two months we spent there were a blur. The images that stick out the most are sweat (have you ever opened an oven with your face a little too close to the door? That’s Chiang Mai in the summer), elephants, jasmine, and smiles. I was assigned to teach a group of seventh graders for four hours every morning, Monday through Friday. My class was categorized as “advanced,” which meant that for the most part they were a bunch of nerds. But they were the most precious bunch of nerds a guy could ever ask for. Twelve Thai middle schoolers, one chubby white guy, and hours of broken English made for an incredible teaching experience that planted a desire deep within me to use my gift of a nativ e language for years to come.
Oh yeah, and there’s still the matter of romantic relations. It turns out that trips abroad, and the mixture of stress and exhilaration that accompany, tend to make a relationship turn from gray mud into rock-hard concrete. We left that summer seeing sides of each other that we’d never have been able to know otherwise, and sure of two things: we wanted to come back some day, and come back together.
Fast forward four-and-a-half years. Danielle and I have just returned from an emergency trip to the local pharmacy in downtown Beijing, and the results are in: we’re parents. Nine flips of the calendar reveal that the day we’ll actually be able to hold our little one in our arms will occur while we’re back in Chiang Mai for our annual conference.
Pulling the strings on a few networks lands us a more perfect situation than we could have hoped for. American nurses with years of experience in Thailand who’ll guide us through the whole process, a doctor who regularly delivers for Westerners, a world class hospital (it says so on the sign!), accommodations that’ll cook, clean, and do our laundry, and to top it all of we get the warm weather and sunny smiles of Chiang Mai.
I won’t go over the details of those 70 days and 70 nights. You’ve read it here before. But closely behind the time I got dunked in that pool in Colorado and that time I stood in the front of a chapel with the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, the day I first saw my little girl, my angel, falls in line as the greatest day of my life.
And as I walked home tonight, each of these pictures ran through my head and made me fall deeper in love with Chiang Mai. |
posted by Aaron @ 2:55 AM  |
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| 2 Comments: |
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Wow! Sounds like a fun place. I think I'll join you - in 10 days!
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your memories and interesting insight to that country makes me want to take a trip to Chiang Mai too!
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Wow! Sounds like a fun place. I think I'll join you - in 10 days!