lost and naked in the city again

Went on my inaugural bike ride yesterday with the new bicycle. She rides like a dream.

I started out by heading up to the 700 year stadium with Sam. The stadium is this big sports complex with an Olympic swimming pool and a bunch of stadiums and things which were built for the Asian games. I’ve never really understood why cities would pour such huge sums of money into complexes like this which are showcased once and then are sort of used occasionally afterwards. It kind of seems like a waste to meAfter touring the stadium for a bit (the grounds were beautifully manicured and there was hardly anybody there), I said I wanted to go back to the old city to buy some mud guards from the bike store. Cycling in the rainy season is a messy business without them. Sam came with, and after we’d got the guards, he said he wanted to go home and take a nap. I wanted to explore the city some more in hopes of familiarizing myself with it to the point where I wasn’t constantly getting lost, so we parted ways. I toured the cool back alleys and side streets of old Chiang Mai for about 35 minutes before realizing I was completely and utterly lost. I decided I would make random turns and hopefully eventually end up somewhere familiar (why that seemed like a good idea at the time I will never know). 20 minutes later I was still lost, so I decided to go with logical. The convenient thing about a square city is that if you go in one direction long enough, you’ll hit the moat, regardless of which direction you’re traveling. So I did. Once I got to the moat, I still didn’t recognize where I was, so I went left and decided to skirt the perimeter until I reached the corner closest to our place. Then it started to POUR rain. Fortunately I had thought to pack my raincoat before we left, so I put it on and it was back to riding. The rain was coming down really hard so my bottom half was drenched in about 9 seconds, but my top half stayed nice and dry. Or at least it would have if I hadn’t been sweating so much from the hard riding. I would have stopped and waited for the shower to finish but it was about 6:30 by this time and the sun had just set so it was getting dark quite quickly, and also there was no guarantee that the shower would stop any time soon (actually in the end it went on for about 2 hours). Also, I was having the time of my life riding in the rain and didn’t really want to stop. I think I went around the city perimeter twice. In fact I’m sure of it, because I passed the same street market in front of this huge park a second time. I must not have recognized the right corner in the fading light, but I found it the second time. I was really glad I invested in a front and back light for the bicycle though, because they definitely came in handy. I ended up making it home at 7:15, happy but completely exhausted. After going to dinner with Sam and Greg I went straight to bed.

Today I’ve got to recopy the map I made of the farm yesterday. I spent about 4 hours measuring the perimeter, the ponds, the house and all of the vegetable beds so as to make a scale drawing of exactly where everything was. We’ll be able to use this to plan for future bed locations as well as use it to draw up a crop rotation schedule. I think it will also be good to be able to show potential donors interested in the farm exactly what it looks like, because they don’t have another map with this kind of detail.

I am also writing up a funding proposal for help funding a new sidecar for Greg's motorcycle. The farm is currently producing MASSIVE amounts of vegetables (beans, eggplant, okra, morning glory, etc), about 5kg a day. These vegetables are 100% organic and would fetch top dollar at the market, but we currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell them. We were thinking of marketing to other NGOs or schools in the area, but we also don't have any way of delivering the vegetables. That's where the sidecar would come in. We could use it to make veggie deliveries as well as to transport people to and from the farm when needed.

I think I will also go for a bike ride and pick up some more fruit. Two mangoes for breakfast are a lot cheaper than french toast and muselix with fruit and yogurt, and just as delicious as I found out this morning. I bought this new fruit yesterday which is small, red and has soft green spikes. It tastes somewhat like a lychee, and you eat it in much the same way, but I don’t like the fact that it’s got a chewy rind in the centre that you can’t really separate from the seed so you have to chew it up. I think I’m going to stick to mangoes and mangostines from now on.

It's just begun to pour again. So much for the bike ride..I suppose I will work a while until it stops.