I went to see a Takraw practice the other night. The game is like volleball, but the players mainly use their feet (and sometimes their heads). The analogous move to the "spike" in volleyball involves the player jumping off their right foot, kicking the ball down over the net as they flip over to land on their right foot again.
I took some videos, and I'm still astounded. I wonder why this sport hasn't made it out of S.E. asia. Probably because male western athletes aren't *that* flexible.
posted by wtanaka at
1/21/2003 08:16:00 AM
Monday, January 20, 2003
Today, I'm thinking about taking a minibus up to the doi suthep temple and using a rented bike to roll back down to the bottom of the hill after I take some pictures up there. But maybe I'll just end up uploading some pictures.
The past four days, I've been on two one-day tours and been to two one-day
cooking classes. The one-day tours were a little bit . . touristy. But I got to see things that I wouldn't have decided to go see otherwise.
On the second tour, we visit a Hmong village -- we are the only group of tourists there, and the people (other than giving us some glances or stares) mainly ignore us and go on with their daily lives. This young Canadian woman and I walk down the main path through the grass and wood houses, and some little girls start to yell at us and wave their arms. I look around to see 11
year old girls staring at us from both sides, exasperation in their eyes, moving their arms as though to push us toward the side of the dusty dirt path.
"I think we're in the way of their game," I say.
So we move to the side, and watch them throw a plastic bag full of dirty water around and run back and forth.
My Canadian walking buddy realizes,
"they're playing dodgeball."
We watch them toss the bag a few times, and I take a couple of pictures. One girl approaches me and my Canadian walking buddy notices,
"She wants to see the picture."
So I show it to her.
Three seconds later, all 12 of the girls and two or three boys are running toward me, screaming, jumping around, grabbing at my camera, pulling it so that they can see the screen too. I take some more pictures to show them. Each time I show them a new picture, they get louder, closer, and are jumping higher in the air. Soon, I have a mob of 15 screaming laughing kids pushing me
against the wall, pulling at my camera, jumping up and down, sticking their tongues out and waving their arms around.
I grinned for the next hour.
posted by wtanaka at
1/20/2003 07:04:00 PM
Sunday, January 19, 2003
So I appear to have lost many of my pictures in a Compact Flash card failure of some kind. It happened at or before I tried to get the pictures burned on a CD here at a photo shop in chiang mai. If it were any other pictures, I wouldn't have been as distressed, but the card covered most of my second and third days at Angkor, I believe. The card was also my biggest, and I am left with 320 MB as I head into what I imagine to be fairly cd-burner-free laos, southwest china, and tibet.
It was an intensely frustrating feeling. But this is one of those things in life that I can't do anything about, and by now (a day later) I think I've been able to fully let go.
I will try to image the card and pick through it later to fetch out the pictures. I sure hope that works.
posted by wtanaka at
1/19/2003 04:28:00 AM
I don't want to stay in Asia enough to get over my anxieties about what that change in lifestyle would bring, at least not right now. Plus I have to go to the dentist in a few months, which I'd much prefer doing in the U.S.
