Ryan A. Dierdorff
Graduate Student, Master in Teaching

It seems almost eternally refreshing to have early-morning sun and wind in your face. Such were the circumstances of my morning, weaving through light traffic in the well- cushioned seat of a tuk-tuk, breathing deeply and waking up in the lucid Chiang Mai morning.

It would be easy to dismiss Chiang Mai as a developing city on some foreign continent at a cursory glance, but underneath its smells and abundance of mangy stray dogs, lies a city with vast idiosyncrasies, like its red pickup truck taxis, its long-stretching night bazaar, and its hill-tribe women and children selling their wares to guilt-tripped foreigners. It is indeed a city perched on the cusp of the modern world, still wearing its umbilical cord attached to its past and yearning for a breath of capitalism.

This dichotomy can be seen in the schools where I have been spending my days: English is a mandatory subject, for no other foreseeable reason than to make its children adept in the modern business world, and yet it still teaches the state religion of Buddhism, a religion that seems inadequate to support the new-world religion of western capitalism. It's like trying to force the wrong puzzle piece into place.

Despite my ability to remain stoic in most situations, finding myself in front of a third grade classroom of forty students, no teacher in sight, tried my steely nerves as I never could have imagined 8 and 9-year-olds doing.

They only thing they understood was how to count from one to 10, and even then, it was due to the fact that they had memorized the order of the sounds. Admittedly, I knew even less Thai. My mind told me, "You need to get outside of the classroom." So outside we went, running about the schoolyard, counting trees as we past them. Controlled pandemonium at its best, make no mistake.

I found it convenient that after the long school day, there was a massage parlor right across the narrow street. An hour-long massage cost me 60 baht, about a dollar fifty. Read that last sentence again. I gave the masseuse a hundred baht bill, and still felt like a con-artist robbing the elderly.

When the day is done, finally, and you find yourself in your room journaling or reading, or simply sleeping, Chiang Mai feels rapid, as if the earth orbits the sun faster here. I sometimes feel like I'm watching a classic movie in fast-forward, but someone else has the remote.

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