Oh boy -- not much going on on this front. Things have been pretty mundane the past couple weeks. As of today, I'm the only student from my group left in Chiang Mai, with the rest either home frozen in blocks of ice, or in Mae Sot, doing some humanitarian something or other. Me? I've been working at the organization that I spent my previous internship at, pulling another four-week stint or so. The work is interesting and engaging (though I can't tell ya what it is), even if it entails eight hour days spent combing the internet for information. Throw in a half hour noodle break, generous cups of coffee, and all-too-regular checks of email, Facebook, miscellaneous blogs, and the iTunes music store and there's my job. The most exciting discovery for me over the past week or so has been podcasts, which if you don't use, I recommend you do. They've been around for a couple of years or so by now, but I'll explain anyway: Basically, they're either audio or video episodes that anyone can put on iTunes and you can download them for free. You can subscribe to one, and then every day it checks for updates and automatically downloads a new one. You then put it on your iPod or just listen to it from the computer. The great thing is, a lot of major organizations with their hearts in the right place take advantage of this great medium to spread their content for free. A novel thought indeed. So that means you can find a ton of news and other types of shows from NPR, BBC, New York Times, ABC, on and on and on. I'm simply addicted, especially to the NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. It's great for those of us who are still relatively media deprived abroad. Anyway, I'll end my podcast soapboxing there, and will leave you with a slightly more corporate blog than before.

Highlights from the past couple weeks:

A trip to Mae Sot last weekend to renew my visa. Mae Sot is a border town, on the border between Thailand and Burma. It's a pretty small place, so we all rented bikes to get around. The end result was an ecstatic midnight bike ride through the empty sullen streets that stands out as one of the more enjoyable times here in recent memory. The downside to this all was that the next day I still had to go to Burma, which never fails to just make me feel sick and haunted.

Today a moment of the bizarre: as I was walking back from the gym down one of the side streets, I noticed a traffic cop in a little smart car sort of deal, which turned out to be just a more official looking modification of a tuk tuk (itself a modified three-wheel motorcycle in an open-air cabin). The cop was driving down the road, which was packed with cars and people, blowing his furiously blowing his whistle. But that's all he was doing. Just long metallic blasts every five seconds or so -- no motion, no explanation, no wavering from his course down the road. I just kind of starred in bafflement for a little while, still walking, impatient to get home. From what I could tell, everyone else around wasn't really sure what was going on either, and everyone either ignored him or shot a puzzled sidelong glance. Once he passed me and reached the mainroad, he turned around and continued back where he came from. I tried my best to stay deliberately in front of him out of sheer annoyance, though he managed to get around my muscular frame. Once he was no more than seventy yards from the point where he last turned around, he pulled into a parking lot and turned around again, heading back down the road in the same way he was going originally. It was absolutely absurd and baffling. He was doing nothing of observable effect, just mozying on down the road, hellbent on maintaining some oddball sense of order.

The thing is, living in this place, as confusing and random as something like that can seem, you still reach a point where you cease to be surprised, and in some ways come to expect it.