Across the world from Chicago to Chiang Mai, we are transplanted travelers living amongst the gracious Thai, settling into a 700-year old city in the shadows of Doi Suthep, sampling new cuisines & living an expat's sun-drenched dream... Instruments in hand & our puppy in tow, looking for a yoga sangha to grow, we offer up this window into our lives, knowing we've arrived home though it feels so strange; so we chronicle this process of how we evolve & change...
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Sandbaggin'
Woke up to a flash flood in front of our home. It initially looked like the gutter had just overflowed, but upon closer examination, the entire neighborhood was under water. It was pretty bad, and the lower-lying houses had water in their actual homes. Lucky for us, our house is on an incline, but the water was still knee deep right outside our gate, and the whole mooban (village) was in a similar situation. We made a beeline to the market on foot to get water, and ran into our neighbors there. They very generously volunteered to drive us back home (only a 15 minute walk in normal circumstances, but a much different proposition when wading through knee-deep murky brown water). On the way home we drove past a couple different army trucks, who had set up sand-bag operations to help people damn the water outside their home. Spent the better part of the afternoon filling the sandbags and then hauling them down the street to our gate and our neighbors, in the hopes that we could prevent any of the rising water from seeping into our driveways, and hopefully keeping it from our homes. It was quite a task, and I found myself, in between shovel strokes, thinking about the desperate attempts in Memphis last year and New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina to shore up the levees with sand bags. The Ping River here is high...the highest it's been in 10 years, say the neighbors... The tropical storm that passed through here has left a lot of damage in its wake... Here's a news article about it... And here are a few pics from this morning & afternoon...
oke up to a flash flood in front of our home. It initially looked like the gutter had just overflowed, but upon closer examination, the entire neighborhood was under water. It was pretty bad, and the lower-lying houses had water in their actual homes. Lucky for us, our house is on an incline, but the water was still knee deep right outside our gate, and the whole mooban (village) was in a similar situation. We made a beeline to the market on foot to get water, and ran into our neighbors there. They very generously volunteered to drive us back home (only a 15 minute walk in normal circumstances, but a much different proposition when wading through knee-deep murky brown water). On the way home we drove past a couple different army trucks, who had set up sand-bag operations to help people damn the water outside their home. Spent the better part of the afternoon filling the sandbags and then hauling them down the street to our gate and our neighbors, in the hopes that we could prevent any of the rising water from seeping into our driveways, and hopefully keeping it from our homes. It was quite a task, and I found myself, in between shovel strokes, thinking about the desperate attempts in Memphis last year and New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina to shore up the levees with sand bags. The Ping River here is high...the highest it's been in 10 years, say the neighbors... The tropical storm that passed through here has left a lot of damage in its wake... Here's a news article about it... And here are a few pics from this morning & afternoon...
I wish we knew the technique before we started shoveling!
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