Can I feel any better?

(This post is from the week after my first fight 09.10.13)

Jin´s blue Ford Cortina L, build in 1977, rumbles over the rugged road and we are heading for an old concrete bridge with many fixed holes and cracks over a small river. The left front wheel of the Old-timer sinks into a pothole and I look with questioning eyes at my Thai-teacher. "Don´t worry!" she answers while we are getting closer and closer to this old bridge. "Everything on this earth will be gone one day!" - "Everyone who loves Old-timers would suffer a nervous breakdown if he could see what you are doing!" I reply a bit scared. But she does not listen to me: "If you think too much of everything, you cannot enjoy your life!"
She is right... somehow. But I still do feel sorry for the car.

Originally Jin invited me to accompany her to her favorite coffee shop. It is a bit outside the city in the middle of the jungle. You only need ten minutes with the car from my flat to be in the silent wild: Chiang Mai is surrounded by dozens of mountains covered with a shining, tropical green of millions of trees. First you are on the highway with hundreds of other cars, then you just take the right junction and suddenly you find yourself on a small street with many bends. To the right and to the left of the street are steep slopes and lianas hang down from huge trees.

But it seems as if Jin´s jungle coffee-shop is not an inside tip anymore: There is no idyllic silence more but a new build parking lot with maybe 40 cars in it, not one free table anymore and a big sign says "Wi-Fi available" so you do not miss the chance to tell Facebook where you are and what you are doing.

Looking for silence and a bit of isolation from the big city, we follow a small, wooden, inconspicuous signpost saying "Waterfall Café" on it. "In the past you did not even get a signal for your mobile phone there" Jin tells me a bit melancholy.

A few minutes later we are about to cross the old concrete bridge.

The condition of the street is no reason for Jin to drive slower until we find what we were looking for (not without producing disturbing sounds when stones scratch the bottom of the oldtimer). A cute, wooden house stands in the middle of a big glade in the jungle and the site is surrounded by a stream. Many creative designed chairs, tables and loungers invite you to stay and relax here. No noises from the street are heard here; we can only hear the splashing of the stream, the songs of the birds and insects of the forest and the roaring of the waterfall in the distance. An Idyll!

Basically we just wanted to have an ice-coffee (or two) and lean back a few minutes but we ended up lying on a bamboo mat with our feet in the cool stream, enjoying chocolate cake and discussing German and Thai cultural differences.

I already started to train on Tuesday after I fought on Sunday – it is Saturday now and I do not only feel that I deserve this time out but it feels even more intense: a welcome change from the arduous training at Team Quest.

After hanging out for a few hours, we lose our way on the way back home. Instead of getting annoyed we see it as a chance to enjoy the beautiful landscape of northern Thailand even more. We stop and just stand there and take pleasure in the awesome view on the hills and the rice fields in the sun of the evening. 

"Can I feel any better?" I ask myself while leaning against the Ford and thinking about the fight, the training and all the other great things I have not written about in my blog...

"No. I don´t think so!".