Today marked the day where I had to deal with the hassle of mailing a printed job application for the first time on my trip - mind you, I'm applying for jobs in computer science where you should think that the days of 'paper' are long past. But alas, bureaucracy is a beast that is hard to kill, and so my quest on this fine day was to feed it with more paper instead of attempting to diminish its health.
So, the seemingly trivial act of mailing a finished job application turned into a half-day hike around Chiang Mai. First, I had to find an office supply shop to buy an envelope and a professional-looking folder to ship the application in. The envelope was simple enough, but to find a suitable folder...! The one I chose at the end turned out to have the characters "ipopo" printed on its front - which I found out only after unpacking it, of course. I hope the search committee is sensible enough to work with the electronic version so they may never get to see the folder. In line with ridiculously designed folders, the department store also had a decorated Christmas tree that was only slightly over the top ;-)
The second step was finding an internet cafe with printer. The first few ones I found were more like gaming cafes and didn't have printers. When I finally found one with a printer, I went ahead and printed the thing on the standard paper they supplied instead of shopping around for 'nice' paper. Finally, I had to find a reliable courier service that would get the application to its destination in less than a week's time. Reliability and speed had their price, of course: I paid about 30 euro to get a small stack of paper posted. The paper version's added benefit? My signature! Bureaucracy be praised.
To reward myself for successfully mailing the application, I visited the Chiang Mai arts and cultural center which is a museum explaining the history of Chiang Mai and its surroundings. There was a lot of audio and video content in the museum which is usually really good but wasn't optimal today: I didn't have much time before the museum closed, and reading would have been much faster. But even when I started skipping the watching and listening, there were a few interesting exhibits. These, for example:
I had already seen these in Laos, in a museum that didn't allow photography, so I was happy to see them again. They are bamboo pieces containing old Buddhist scriptures, and thus quite a valuable treasure.
Another room that was very interesting for me was this one:
The room's theme? Thailand's king. The artwork on the far wall depicts him (the figure that is brightly lit up), and the remainder of the room is decorated with pictures of the king and queen, predominantly taken during their visits to Chiang Mai. Could you imagine a room like this in any Western museum?
In the evening, I went to the cinema - for the first time in more than a year! I had found a movie theater in a mall close to my hostel that was showing an English language version of The Hobbit, and spontaneously bought a ticket for the evening screening when I passed the mall in the morning. The cinema was huge, but almost empty - just a few expats and Thai people wanting to improve their English. There were no advertisements except for a few movie trailers - and then came the highlight of the evening: everybody had to stand up while the cinema played the king's anthem - specifically the king's anthem, not the national anthem. As soon as the anthem was finished, the movie started. I enjoyed it very much, but was a little annoyed by the fact that there was only a single woman in the entire cast. I'd never noticed before, but now that I think about it you can probably observe a lack of women in every single one of Tolkien's books. Sad, isn't it?
On the way back to the hostel, I noticed that one of the temples on the way was beautifully lit up:
