Timeless Theme Present in The Crucible and in Macbeth...

One timeless theme found in many pieces of literature is the abuse of power. Many people who are in power, abuse their power, and commonly become corrupt or unjust due to the power. The essence of human nature is to crave power. Along with this craving of power in some humans is the corruptness and injustice when one comes into power or on one s path to achieving power. This is a timeless theme, as power and human nature have always existed in man s history. This theme may be observed in Macbeth, a play written by William Shakespeare in the early quarter of the 17th century and set in the 11th century. This can also be observed in The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller in the 20th century, and taking place in the 17th century. In the†¦show more content†¦This passage shows just how low Macbeth has sunk, and how twisted his actions have become since his initial stage. As one may now conclude, power strongly corrupts Macbeth. Originally he is a virtuous man, defending his homeland from rebels, yet he slowly gets transformed by power into a ravaging terror, destroying everything in his way. In The Crucible, power as a corrupting force may be seen through many characters. The girls in the Crucible tell many lies to become officials of the court. Mary Warren, for example, evidence may be seen in a scene where Mary Warren is speaking with Parris and Elizabeth: Mary Warren: You must see, sir, it s God s work we do. So I ll be gone every day for some time. I m- I am an official of the court, they and I- She has been edging toward offstage Proctor: I ll official you! He strides to the mantel, takes down the whip hanging there. Marry Warren: I ll not stand whipping any more! (59 Miller) In this passage one may see that Mary Warren seems to believe that she has gained power in the court, and we discover later, that this power was gained through lies. Originally she was considered to be part of one of the lowest classes in the Crucible s hierarchy of society, however telling these lies and giving false evidence has promoted her directly to official of the court,

Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism Free Essays

string(183) " to exacerbate and confuse the debate about values by crowning \(or afflicting\) the Movement with an exaggerated picture of its uniqueness as a vessel of reconciliation \(or harm\)\." Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism John Hoberman University of Texas at Austin â€Å"Well, all right then, let’s talk about the Chairman of the World. We will write a custom essay sample on Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism or any similar topic only for you Order Now The world gets into a lot of trouble because it has no chairman. I would like to be Chairman of the World myself. † —E. B. White, Stuart Little (1945) â€Å"But when it comes to our age, we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world. † —Sun Myung Moon (1973) Back in 1967, Dr. Wildor Hollmann, one of Germany’s most prominent sports physicians and longtime president of the International Federation for Sports Medicine (FIMS), was visiting the International Olympic Academy at Olympia on the day of its annual inauguration, with King Constantine himself in attendance. Naively assuming that the Academy was an open forum for thinking about the past, present, and future of the Olympic movement, Dr. Hollmann expressed the view that, in the not-too-distant future. he â€Å"Olympic idea† itself would inevitably fall victim to the logic of development inherent in the professionalization and commercialization of elite sport. The words were hardly out of his mouth before Dr. Hollmann was engulfed in a storm of indignation, during which an Italian member of the IOC declared that merely expressing such thoughts was in his view nothing less than a desecration of this holy site. 1 Olympic historiography has long been inseparable from the Movement’s stat us as a redemptive and inspirational internationalism. Like so many readings of its founder, Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), historical interpretations of the Olympic movement have generally taken the form of â€Å"either hagiographies or hagiolatries,† and not least because the founder himself â€Å"proclaimed Olympism beyond ideology. †2 Historical treatments of the Movement since the launching of that provocative claim have thus had no 1. W[ildor] Hollmann, â€Å"Risikofaktoren in der Entwicklung des Hochleistungssports. â€Å" in H. Rieckert, ed. Sportmedizin—Kursbestimmung [Deutscher Sportarztekongre? Kiel. l6. -19. Oktober 1986] (Berlin: SpringerVerlag, 1987): 18. 2. John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 2, 6. 1 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) choice but to embrace or call into question the transcendent status of Olympic sport that is symbolized so powerfully by opening and closing ceremonies that tap into deep and unfulfilled wishes for a Golden Age of harmony and peace. Due at least in part to the impassioned and seemingly endless debate between the defenders and detractors of â€Å"Olympism,† with its pronounced emphasis on ethical values at the expense of historical factors, serious study of the Olympic movement has stagnated. Recent monographs have presented familiar events and issues without much in the way of new research or methodological innovation. 3 While the periodical literature of the past decade or so, including voluminous conference proceedings, has offered a wider range of perspectives, the conceptual landscape inhabited by the historian has not really changed in significant ways. This closed circulatory system of topics and problems has rigidified the important debate over values by limiting our understanding of the object of contention—the Olympic movement itself. The arguments between supporters and critics of the Movement that tend to dominate discussion naturally proceed from the assumption that both actually know what the Movement is or, at least, what it is worth to the international community. Yet the sheer complexity of the Olympic phenomenon suggests there is much more to know even without entering the domain of ethnographical research. I would propose that the production of this knowledge depends on reconceptualizing the Olympic movement in fundamental ways. This essay proposes a theory of Olympic internationalism based on a comparative method. Indeed, the fact that no comparative study of this kind has ever been published suggests that the iconic status of the Movement has had a profoundly limiting effect on Olympic historiography as a whole and thus on the debate regarding values. as well. For by exaggerating the uniqueness of the Movement, Olympic historians have conferred on it a degree of splendid (or, alternatively, discreditable) isolation that is contradicted by the historical evidence. An important consequence of this overly narrow 3. See. for example. Allen Guttmann. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992); and â€Å"The Olympic Games,† in Games Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press. 1994): 120-138. The former offers a good survey of Olympic history. The latter discusses the Olympic movement in the larger context of sport and cultural diffusion. See also Christopher Hill, Olympic Politics (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), which pays special attention to Olympic finance and the bidding process. For a highly personal and admiring treatment of the modern Olympic movement, see John Lucas, Future of the Olympic Games (Champaign, IL, Human Kinetics Books, 1992). 4. To this observation I must append an additional (and ironic) one. Even as I argue that the failure of Olympic historiography to embark upon comparative studies has isolated the movement. I must point out simultaneously that historical treatments of other international movements have isolated them in exactly the same way. In a word, nothing resembling a comprehensive theory of these international movements exists, perhaps in part because there are so many of them and they are so heterogeneous. For example, Samuel P. Huntington’s treatment of â€Å"Transnational Organizations in World Politics† (1973) includes none of the organizations discussed in the present essay and lists an â€Å"idealistic† organization like the Catholic church along with profit-oriented corporations and a pair of important Cold War institutions. His list reads as follows: Anaconda, Intelsat, Chase Manhattan, the Agency for International Development, the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Air France, the Strategic Air Command, Unilever, the Ford Foundation, the Catholic Church, the CIA, and the World Bank. The purpose of his essay is to analyze what he calls â€Å"a transnational organizational revolution in world politics. † See â€Å"Transnational Organizations in World Politics,† World Politics 25 (1973): 333-368. Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism interpretation has been to exacerbate and confuse the debate about values by crowning (or afflicting) the Movement with an exaggerated picture of its uniqueness as a vessel of reconciliation (or harm). You read "Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism" in category "Papers" The evidence presented below suggests that a comparison of the Olympic movement with contemporary and analogous international movements reveals a core repertory of behaviors and orientations that are common to them all. The comparative procedure presented here divides the history of these â€Å"idealistic internationalisms† into three periods that are roughly separated by the First and Second World Wars, respectively. The establishment of the Olympic movement in 1894 coincided with the sharply accelerated formation of a broad range of international organizations during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1855 and 1914, their overall numbers increased from a mere handful to around 200, and the numbers have grown exponentially since the turn-of-the-century period. The comparative study of international organizations and the â€Å"movements† they launch remains underdeveloped to a striking degree, and this is so even in the case of important types of international activity. Thus, while Olympic historiography is rather well established, one historian has referred to the world of international science as a â€Å"largely unexplored domain. † On a broader scale, as anot her historian recently noted, â€Å"the construction of internationalism has merited scarcely a glance. †6 Accounting for such lacunae in the writing of history is in itself an interesting, and often difficult. istoriographical problem. It may be less difficult, however, in the case of movements that have created both core groups of loyal adherents and benevolent self-images that in some cases have exercised a virtually global reach for most of a century. The Olympic (1894), Scouting (1908), and Esperanto (1887) movements, for example, have all benefitted from benign myths of origin rooted in reverential attitudes toward the personal qualities of their respective founding fathers and the salvational doctrines they created. One result of such cults of personality is a â€Å"halo effect† that can confer on such movements a degree of immunity to critical examination. As one of the few serious historians of Scouting has pointed out: â€Å"Scouting has for so long been a familiar and well-loved part of the Western world that it appears always to have been with us, less a man-made creation than a natural, indigenous activity of our civilization. † The consequences of according such iconic status to culturally constructed institutions have been profound. In the case of Scouting, â€Å"it is startling that so few have seriously considered what it all meant. Such immunity from critical scrutiny has left Scouting almost entirely in the 5. Elizabeth Crawford, â€Å"The Universe of International Science, 1880-1939,† in Tore Frangsmyr, ed. Solomon’s House Revisited: The Organization and Institutionalization of Science (Canton, MA; Science History Publications, U. S. A. , 1990): 259-260. For evidence for the proliferation of international organizations during the twentieth century, see the Yearbook of International Organizations (Brussels: Union of International Associations, 1974). 6. Crawford, â€Å"The Universe of International Science,† 265; Leila J. Rupp, â€Å"Constructing Internationalism; The Case of Transnational Women’s organizations, 1888-1945,† American Historical Review (December 1994): 1571. 3 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) hands of its own historians and publicists, a situation that is not helpful in trying to understand the origins and meaning of any movement. †7 These words are precisely descriptive of the Olympic movement, as well, the only difference being that Olympic historiography has developed (over the past 25 years) a degree of autonomy the history of Scouting has not. This autonomous branch of Olympic historiography is necessarily based on scholarly or investigative activity that produces interpretations of the Olympic movement that do not always coincide with those of the IOC and its adherents in the press and in academia. And it is here that analyzing the Movement will often be interpreted as â€Å"criticism. † Today, a generation after Wildor Hollmann’s heretical (and prophetic) remark about the future of Olympic sport, criticism of the International Olympic Committee is still capable of offending the dignity of its most powerful members. The landmark event in this regard was the publication in 1992 of The Lords of the Rings, an expose of the IOC’s inner circle by the investigative journalists Vyvian Simson and Andrew Jennings. Translated into 13 languages, the book became a global media event that traumatized the IOC leadership and, in particular, its President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who stood accused of political opportunism and fascist allegiances both during the Franc period and after the Generalissimo’s death in 1975. The publication of Jaume Boix and Arcadio Espada’s book El deporte del poder. Vida y milagro de Juan Antonio Samaranch, containing essentially the same material on Samaranch’s political background, had gone virtually unnoticed by the world press only a year earlier. 8 The reaction from IOC headquarters to the atmosphere of scandal created by The Lords of the Rings deserves a study in itself. On 17 February 1994 the IOC and President Samaranch filed a criminal action in a Lausanne court against the authors but not against their more powerful major publishers (Simon Schuster, Bertelsman, Flammarion). The indictment (Investigation No. : CH. 32. 92) charged libel under article 174 and defamation under article 173 of the Swiss Penal Code. The tone of the document can be conveyed by quoting from its text: â€Å"The plaintiff, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is an international nongovernmental organization, constituted as a nonlucrative association. It has the status of a person . . . . The work of the accused constitutes a lampoon directed against the plaintiffs, against the management of the IOC and its officials and against the behaviour of the former and of some of their co-contracting parties. To a large extent, the formulated criticisms constitute a blow to the honour of the IOC, its president and its 7. Michael Rosenthal. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986): 1, 12. 8. Vyv Simson and Andrew Jennings, The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics (London: Simon Schuster, 1992); Jaime Boix and Arcadio Espada, El deporte de poder. Vida y milagro de Juan Antonio Samaranch [The Sport of Power. The Life and Miracle of Juan Antonio Samaranch] (= Hombres de hoy, Vol 30) (Madrid: Ediciones temas de hoy, 1991). For a very useful summary of this (still untranslated) volume see the review by Arnd Kruger in The International Journal of Sports History 10 (August 1993): 291-293. The author of this essay wishes to point out that he has not read El deporte del poder. 4 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism members . . . The IOC is described as a secret and clandestine organization. similar to the mafia . . . The IOC, its president and its members are depicted as depraved and disgusting persons. † In December 1994. fter hearing testimony from President Samaranch himself, the court sentenced the authors in absentia to a five-day suspended jail sentence and the payment of $2,000 in court costs (which remains unpaid). The explicit reference in the indictment to violated â€Å"honour,† and the failure of article 173 to provide for any assessment of the truth or falsity of the alleged â€Å"defamation,† are a poignant reminder of the nineteenth-century origins of the IOC and th e role that aristocratic ideas about honor have played in shaping the value system and political behavior of the Olympic movement (see below). The furor created by this undocumented work of investigative journalism raised interesting questions for Olympic research. and the most important of these topics may well be the relationship between sports journalism and sports scholarship. 10 As Arnd Kruger points out in his review of El deporte del poder: â€Å"Good investigative reporting often beats much of what historians can offer in terms of graphic information and anecdotal material not so readily available in archival research. To this I would add that, in addition to useful anecdotal embellishments, these journalistic treatments of the political career of IOC president Samaranch offer the historian an opportunity to expand the framework for doing Olympic history in the direction of the comparative method described above. Indeed, Kruger himself points to the larger importance of suc h journalism: â€Å"This book ends many myths about the IOC and its current president† by excavating his political past and raising questions about how a person’s political formation may affect his conduct as 9. The carelessness (or dishonesty) with which the IOC drew up the indictment is evident in one instance in particular. Its list of alleged inaccuracies committed by the authors falsely accuses them of making an unflattering remark about the IOC that is clearly attributed in The Lords of the Rings (p. 211) to William Simon, former president of the United States Olympic Committee, former Secretary of the Treasury, and on account of his prominence, an unlikely target of IOC retaliation. The author of this essay wishes to point out that in November 1994 he sent a letter to the judge trying this care in Lausanne defending the authors’ right to publish The Lords of the Rings. 10. John J. MacAloon has written disapprovingly of what he regards as the degeneration of sports scholarship into a genre resembling sports journalism. He refers, for example, to â€Å"the uncomfortable interpretive alikeness—at least in the U. K. , where socialist analysis is one sort of cultural common sense—of much sports journalism and popular commentary on the one side, and sports sociology, stripped of its academic apparatus and pretenses, on the other. See â€Å"The Ethnographic Imperative in Comperative Olympic Research. † Sociology of Sport Journal, 9 (1992): 110. Or, â€Å"Treated like Journalists, sport scholars are tempted to act like them. † See â€Å"The Turn of Two Centuries: Sport and the Politics of Intercultural Relations,† in Fernand La ndry, Marc Landry, and Magdeleine Yerles, eds. Sport . . . The third millenium [Proceedings of the lnternational Symposium, Quebec City, Canada, May 21-25, 1990] (Sante-Foy: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval. 1991): 36. MacAloon‘s second point, regarding the likely consequences of the IOC’s unwillingness to share more information with Olympic researchers. is particularly insightful. He offers this remark in the context of arguing that sports leaders should not â€Å"deny themselves the professional expertise of scholars. † By contrast. the author of this essay regards the secretiveness of the IOC as essential to its operations as an â€Å"offshore† international body sheltering important individuals whose various operations would not stand up to press scrutiny. I would also point out that in neither of his essays does MacAloon criticize the many journalists who function as de facto publicists for the IOC. At a Colloquy on Olympic issues held in Lausanne in April 1994. IOC Director General Francois Carrard expressed the view that there are â€Å"some ten to fifteen† journalists in the world who actually understand Olympic issues. See â€Å"Proceedings of the Colloquy on the Themes of the Olympic Centennial Congress Held in the Olympic Museum, Ouchy, Lausanne on 8th, 9th and 10th April 1994† (unpublished document). Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) the leader of a powerful international organization that is to be counted among those â€Å"transnational forms, none of them transcendent, innocent, or neutral in political history,†11 which include the IOC. My point here is that the more we know about the formative history of an Olympic politician, the better the chances of finding comparable figures and patterns of behavior in other international organizations. In this sense, a book like The Lords of the Rings, while unsuitable as scholarly source material, has already served Olympic historiography by drawing attention to a triad of interrelated and neglected topics: first, the sheer autonomy and freedom from surveillance enjoyed by many high-ranking international functionaries inside and outside the IOC; second, how the upper echelons of international organizations provide political and financial opportunity and sanctuary to significant numbers of people who have compromised themselves in various ways back in their national communities; and third, the long history of extreme right-wing personalities and attitudes within the IOC. As Simson and Jennings put it: â€Å"The Samaranch who went to the IOC in 1966 would have found himself at ease among the many other members from authoritarian or undemocratic backgrounds. †12 One purpose of this essay is to account for this continuity between the IOC of the fascist period in Europe and the comparable elites to be found at the top of international sports federations today. This ideological continuity is not simply a result of the procedures by which the IOC or any of the other federations choose their members. On the contrary, the selfperpetuating process which renews the membership of the IOC has been made even more efficient by the way it and comparable organizations have served as â€Å"offshore† enterprise zones for right-wing personalities and various amoral opportunists since the political collapse of fascism in 1945. 1. The Early Internationalist Period Any study of the â€Å"idealistic† international movements of the fin de siecle period must acknowledge their diverse characteristics as well as demonstrate the values and behaviors that make them cohere as a distinct category of thematically interrelated organizations that sometimes attracted overlapping clienteles. Their homogeneity and heterogeneity as a class of social phenomena become yet clearer if we expand the scope of our survey beyond the four primary movements to be examined here, namely, the Red Cross (1863), the Esperanto movement (1887), the Olympic movement (1894). and the Scouting movement (1908). It is of fundamental importance, for example, that all of these movements were ideologically distinct from Marxist internationalism. Indeed, this is one way to account for the fact that all of them eventually accommodated the Nazis in various ways. The First International (or International Working Men’s Association) was founded by Marx in 1864, outlawed in France and Germany, and effectively dissolved in 1872. Despite its 11. MacAloon, â€Å"The Ethnographic Imperative in Comperative Olympic Research,† 126. 12. Simson and Jennings, The Lords of the Rings, 111. 6 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism political insignificance, as James Joll notes, â€Å"it had awakened all Europe to the possibilities of international working class action . . . . And so, on the eve of its extinction, the International was endowed with a legendary power it had lacked in its lifetime, and acquired a largely spurious tradition of heroic international revolutionary action. † The Second International (1889-l914), which collapsed when the European proletariat deserted international solidarity for national chauvinism and military service at the outbreak of the Great War, actually employed some of the ideas and rhetorical devices characteristic of the â€Å"bourgeois† internationalisms of the epoch. That these superficial resemblances were outweighed by the ideological barrier is evident in the fact that its ideological descendants would eventually stage an impressive series of Workers Olympiads (1921-1937) that the Socialist Workers Sports International claimed were more genuinely international than the â€Å"bourgeois† Olympic Games. The internationalism of the late nineteenth century could also take the form of an artistic cosmopolitanism. Like the Olympic movement, Wagnerism was an international movement originating in an established cultural medium (music) that developed both a distinctive ideology, composed of a cultural critique and a program for cultural renewal, and an international clientele. The golden age of Wagnerian internationalism commenced in 1872, when the master moved to Bayreuth, and ended with his death in 1883. Olympism and Wagnerism both served up ersatz religious experiences to people disillusioned with European â€Å"progress† and positivis t thinking. There was a pervasive need for an emotional piety that was less vulnerable than orthodox religious observance to the dessicating effects of change, scientific progress. and higher biblical criticism. †13 During the last decades of the nineteenth century there appeared a variety of internationalisms that could satisfy such needs. and the Wagner cult that spread west to America and east to Russia was one of them. To be sure, Wagnerism was German in a way the Olympic movement could not be, although the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, judged as an aesthetic production, was a great triumph of the Olympic â€Å"Germanizers† that put its permanent mark on Olympic ritual. 4 Yet even the Germanness of Wagnerism took the form of a universalistic doctrine that anticipated the Olympic movement and its redemptive mission across national boundaries. For in identifying the Germans as the most â€Å"universal† of peoples, Wagner was proclaiming Germany’s mission to the world. This sort of ethnocentric cosmopolitanism, as we shall see in the next section of this essay, eventually served as a transitional Weltanschauung to expedite the process by which Germany overcame the xenophobic inhibitions deriving from its own cultural insecurities and appropriated Olympic internationalism on German terms. 13. David C. Large and William Weber, â€Å"Introduction†; David C. Large, â€Å"Wagner’s Bayreuth Disciples,† in David C. Large and William Weber, eds. Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984): 18. 14. Thomas Alkemeyer, â€Å"Gewalt und Opfer im Ritual der Olympischen Spiele 1936,† in Gunter Gebauer, ed. Korper und Einbildungskraft: Inszenierungen des Helden im Sport (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1988): 44-79. 7 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) Wagner’s foreign admirers were thus able to enjoy his musical productions as supranational experiences. In addition, as Gerald D. Turbow has pointed out, the Wagner devotee was participating in the general internationalist ferment of the epoch whether he knew it or not. Thus one French enthusiast, â€Å"writing shortly after the Geneva Treaty on War [1864], the establishment of the Red Cross [1863], and the organization of the First International [1864], found the principle of world unity and peace in Wagner’s operas. In characteristic utopian terms he maintained that just as Wagner had eliminated the barriers that existed between set numbers in the formal operas and just as the old boundaries between cities were vanishing, so now would they disappear between countries as well. †15 It is even more interesting to learn that Coubertin experienced his own Wagnerian epiphany. In his Olympic Memoirs (193l), Coubertin reports that a visit to Bayreuth, and the â€Å"passionate strains† of Wagner’s music, assisted him in seeing the â€Å"Olympic horizons† before his mind’s eye. 6 The existence of a Wagnerian internationalism demonstrates that certain internationalist projects of this period were not negations of nat ionalism but rather cultural projections of nationalist impulses employing cosmopolitan vocabularies rooted in ethnocentric ideas of national grandeur. 17 A variety of internationalist initiatives, including the Olympic movement, both included and disguised nationalist and even cultic themes which could be presented as cosmopolitan projects within the European context. Rooted in racialistic European mythologies, such idealistic cosmopolitanisms did not anticipate, to take only one example, the multiracial agenda of the modern Olympic movement. Olympism, Wagnerism, and the Salzburg [music] Festival (1920-) are three such cosmopolitanisms rooted in cultic reappropriations of the European past. Their respective ideological sources are the myth of ancient Hellas, Germanic mythology, and a myth of Austria’s baroque cultural heritage, and there is evidence which suggests they once constituted a single festival metagenre in the minds of some observers. Thus, in 1918, an Austrian cultural critic wrote that the Salzburg Festival was the first â€Å"total aesthetic realization (Durchbildung) of the festival character† since the revival of the 15. Gerald D. Turbow, â€Å"Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France,† in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 153. 16. Pierre de Coubertin, Memoires olympiques (Lausanne: Bureau international de pedagogie sportive, 1931): 64. It is also interesting to note that Jules Ferry, an early prime minister of the French Third Republic, was both a supporter of Coubertin and an admirer of Wagner. See Turbow, â€Å"AR and Politics: Wagnerism in France,† 143, 146. 17. Cosmopolitanism and internationalism have been (properly) defined as different ideals. Marcel Mauss, writing in 1919-1920, regarded these terms as opposed ideas. â€Å"Internationalism worthy of the name is the opposite of cosmopolitanism. It does not deny the nation, it situates it. Internation is the opposite of a-nation. Thus it is also the opposite of nationalism, which isolates the nation. † Mauss defines cosmopolitanism as a doctrine which tends toward â€Å"the destruction of nations, to the creation of a moral order (morale) in which they would no longer be the sovereign authorities, creators of the law, nor the supreme ends worthy of future sacrifices to a superior cause, named humanity itself. † Mauss derides this ideal as â€Å"an etheral theory of the monadic human being who is everywhere identical. † See Marcel Mauss, â€Å"Nation, national, internationalisme,† in Oeuvres, 3 (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1969). 8 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism Olympic Games. 8 What is more, historians of both Wagnerism and the Salzburg Festival have shown how these cultural productions—in effect, nationalistic cults—were successfully marketed to international audiences. â€Å"The tact and success of the pan-European Salzburg propaganda came from the fact that this nationalist program could be expressed as a cosmopolitan ideal that in turn would seem like pure internationalism to the English and the French. †19 The Olympic movement, too, has derived much of its international prestige from precisely this sort of transformation, whereby an essentially national ambition has been perceived as Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. In all three case—Olympism, Wagnerism, and Salzburg—the â€Å"European idea† proved to be a politically viable packaging for nationalistic content. As we will see in the next section, both German â€Å"universalism† and the â€Å"European idea† served to reconcile the ideological needs of European rightwingers to the requirements of Olympic internationalism. 20 Certain international movements of this period can be seen as gendered. embodying a kind of male or a female solidarity and an ideology to express this gendered orientation. The Olympic and Scouting movements began as internationalisms that promulgated related conceptions of the ideal male. an orientation that had political consequences during the fascist period (see below). Even though both eventually absorbed female participants, gender integration occurred in a male-dominated context that ascribed limited capacities to female participants. A countervailing example of gender-segregated internationalism was the organizing of women on a transnational basis, which began in 1888 with the founding of the International Council of Women in Washington. D. C. â€Å"Both by assuming fundamental gender differences and by advocating separatist organizing, women in transnational organizations drew boundaries that separated men from women. †21 This autonomous policy of segregation makes female internationalism especially interesting to the comparativist as a â€Å"control group† internationalism vis-a-vis other groups precisely because its leaders claimed to be building upon a distinct and more pacific type of human nature than that possessed by their male counterparts. In retrospect, however, the comparison between â€Å"male† and â€Å"female† international organizations is interesting precisely because it reveals more similarities than differences, confirming my operating thesis that there is a core repertory of behaviors and attitudes that characterize the important groups that appear during this extraordinary period of internationalist ferment. This repertory includes a rhetoric of universal membership, a 18. Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 18901938 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990): 60. 19. Large, â€Å"Wagner’s Bayreuth Disciples,95: Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, 69. The festival program revealed on every level a convergence of explicitly cosmopolitan and pan-European ideals with a Bavarian-Austrian—that is, a baroque-nationalism. † See Steinberg, 23. 20. I have adapted this paragraph from John M. Hoberman, â₠¬Å"Olympic Universalism and the Apartheid Issue. † in Fernand Landry, Marc Landry, and Magdeleine Yerles eds. Sport. . . The third millenium [Proceedings of the International Symposium, Quebec City, Canada, May 21-25, 1990] (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval, 1991): 531. 21. Rupp, â€Å"Constructing Internationalism,† 1582. 9 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) Eurocentric orientation that limits universal participation, an insistence on political neutrality, the empowering role of wealth, social prominence and aristocratic affiliations. professed interest in peacemaking or pacifism, a complex and problematic relationship between national and international loyalties, the emergence of a (marginalized) â€Å"citizen-of-the-world†-style radical supranationalism, and the use of visual symbols such as flags and anthems. One might also say that all of these movements offered to their members a philosophy of creative international a ction amounting to a way of life for those possessing the necessary dedication and financial independence to pursue it. The Feminist International appears to have differed from its male counterparts in not producing a conspicuous hagiographical tradition honoring its â€Å"founding mothers. More importantly, an exclusively female membership and its doctrine of biogendered pacifism (â€Å"All wars are men’s wars†) precluded their adopting (as the Olympic and Scouting movements did) the ideology of chivalry as the basis for establishing an idealized transnational identity. As we will see in the next section, the establishment of a transnational male identity based upon â€Å"chivalric† ideals played an important role in shaping relations between the â€Å"male† internationalisms and Nazi Germany. In addition to sharing a set of core behaviors and attitudes, the idealistic internationalisms were bound together by personal ties between groups and by individu als with ties to more than one group. For example, Dietrich Quanz has demonstrated Coubertin’s close ties to the European peace movement of the fin de siecle and the prewar Nobel Peace Prize Laureates (1901-1913): â€Å"Coubertin must have noticed this model for international private oganizations. He had had contact with almost half of the Nobel Peace Prize winners, some of whom were his friends. He listed five of them as honorary members of the Founding Congress of the IOC in 1894. † 22 Among Coubertin’s Nobel Peace Prize contacts was the Austrian pacifist Alfred Hermann Fried, who published an Esperanto textbook for German-speakers in 1903. 23 Coubertin was also co-founder in 1910 (with the Nobel Prizewinning [1908] physicist Gabriel Lippmann) of the Ligue d’Education National. he forerunner of the French Boy Scouts,24 while Lord BadenPowell, the founder of the Scouting movement, promoted the British ideology of sportsmanship absorbed by Coubertin. 25 The pacifistically inclined German educa tor Friedrich Wilhelm Forster (1869-1966) called Baden22. Dietrich R. Quanz. â€Å"Formatting Power of the IOC: Founding the Birth of a New Peace Movement. † Citius. Altius. Fortius, 3 (Winter 1995): 12. See also Dietrich R. Quanz, â€Å"Die Grundung des IOC im Horizont von burgerlichem Pazifismus und Internationalismus,† in Gunter Gebauer, ed. Die Aktualitat der Sportphilosophie (St. Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1993), 191-216: â€Å"Civic Pacifism and Sports-Based Internationalism: Framework for the Founding of the International Olympic Committee,† Olympika. The International Journal of Olympic Studies, 2 (1993): 1-23. 23. Ulrich Lins, Die gefahrliche Sprache: Die Verfolgung der Esperantisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1988): 41. 24. Arnd Kruger, â€Å"Neo-Olypismus zwischen Nationalismus und internationalismus,† in Horst Ueberhorst, ed. Gescichte der Leibesubung, 3/1 (Berlin: Bartels und Wernitz, 1980): 524. 25. Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 10, 31. 10 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) â€Å"the best pedagogical book to have appeared in decades. †26 Like Coubertin, the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (Nobel Prize 1909) had multiple ties to internationalist projects. At first a supporter of Esperanto, Ostwald changed his allegiance to Esperanto’s chief competitor, the artificial language Ido, in 1908. He also worked toward founding an international chemical institute. 27 In a more eccentric vein. Ostwald served as President of the International Committee of Monism, a philosophy based on the universal authority of science that aimed at propagating â€Å"a rational ethics. † In Monism as the Goal of Civilization (1913), Ostwald held out the possibility of â€Å"a completely neutral and likewise easily acquired auxiliary language† as â€Å"an indescribable blessing† for mankind. pointing to â€Å"the rapidly increasing international arrangements and relations† and the â€Å"irresistible flow toward the international organization of human affairs. 28 All three of the early international women’s organizations weighed the possibility of adopting Esperanto as a means of facilitating communication. 29 The Intern ational Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sent a delegation to the Esperanto Congress held in Dresden in 1907. 30 The first chairman of the London Esperanto Club, Felix Moscheles, was President of the International Arbitration and Peace Association and a major figure in the pacifist movement. 31 These and other interrelationships confirm the thesis that such groups belong to a genre of international organizations, both unified and variegated, that deserves to be studied in a comparative manner. As the great early promoter of international sport, â€Å"the Esperanto of the aces† (Jean Giraudoux), Coubertin occupies a central position within this configuration of internationally minded idealists. All of the idealistic internationalisms of this period appealed to deep feelings among Europeans that were rooted in anxieties about war and peace. As inhabitants of a political universe that has effectively banished the memory of socialist internationalism prior to the Third (Communis t) International, we would do well to recall its stature as the preeminent antiwar movement of its period (1889-1914). â€Å"For at least fifty years,† as James Joll has noted, â€Å"international Socialism was one of the great intellectual forces in Europe . . . while no statesman or political thinker could avoid taking it into account. The urgency of the feelings shared by Socialist and non-Socialist internationalists alike was evident at the emergency congress of the Socialist International, held in Basle in November 1913, as fear of war spread throughout 26. Karl Seidelmann, Die Pfadfinder in der deutschen Jugendgeschichte (Hannover: Hermann Schroedel Velag, 1977): 28-29. 27. Lins, Die gefahrliche Sprache, 42; Crawford, â€Å"The Universe of International Science,† 264, it is worth noting that Crawford calls Ostwald â€Å"the most ubiquitous of scientists† (264). 28. Wilhelm Ostwald, Monism as the Goal of Civilization (Hamburg: The International Committee o f Monism, 1913): 10, 6, 25. 29. Rupp, â€Å"Constructing Internationalism,† 1578. 30. Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1982): 170. 31. Lins, Die gefahrliche Sprache, 28. 11 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) Europe. Sobered into a state of somber meditation that permitted the relaxation of ideological discipline, the delegates heard the great French leader Jean Jaures sound a religious note, while the next day the veteran Swiss Socialist Greulich, â€Å"when finally closing the proceedings, not only referred to Bach’s B Minor Mass but even, though with an apologetic ‘Don’t be alarmed’, quoted from the Roman Catholic liturgy to express the socialist hope: ‘Exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturam saeculis’. †32 The ideological divisions that separated Socialists from non-Socialists (and, ater, Socialists from Communists) have had a profound impact on the entire phenomenon of European internationalism during this century. The sports and Esperanto movements eventually split along ideological lines into socialist and â€Å"bourgeois† factions, while Baden-Powell’s bo urgeois-nationalist Boy Scout organization was subjected to harsh criticism just after the Great War by his onetime successor-apparent, John Hargrave, a militant proponent of â€Å"World Friendship† who could not stomach the imperialist component of Baden-Powell’s doctrine. That Baden-Powell rejected the charge as â€Å"Bolshevism† only confirms the importance of the division between the anti-imperialist, non-establishmentarian internationalisms and their bourgeois-nationalist counterparts. 3 In the case of the Esperantists, however, this ideological divide was mostly illusory, due to the fact that the artificial language movement appealed to the marginal and the underprivileged from its very beginnings in eastern Poland and Russia in the late 1880s and 1890s. This affinity between the fraternal idealism of the Esperantists and the ethical program of the revolutionary Left was recognized by the early psychoanalytical writer J. C. Flugel, who was himself an Esper antist. â€Å"The Esperanto movement,† he wrote in 1925, â€Å"with its quasi-religious enthusiasm and its attempt to break down the barriers between nations and races, inevitably challenges comparison with certain other movements of a universalizing tendency. It has, of course, certain features in common with Socialism and Communism. These also are international and pacifist in character, and aim at fostering a spirit of comradeship among fellow-members; but they differ from the Esperanto movement in two important respects: (a) In the essential economic basis of their programme; (b) In that the revolutionary and insurgent tendencies— based ultimately on displacements of father-hatred—are very much more prominent. In the Esperanto movement these latter tendencies are implicit rather than explicit . . . .†34 This crucial distinction between explicit and implicit â€Å"insurgent tendencies† was the most important difference between the revolutionary and his typological opposite, the linguistic humanitarian whose progressive idealism was channeled into more symbolic forms of re32. James Joll, The Second lnternational 1889-1914 (London and Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1974): 1, 158, 159. 33. Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 245-247. 34. J. C. Flugel, â€Å"Some Unconscious Factors in the International Language Movement With Special Reference to Esperanto,† International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 6 (1925): 12 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism sistance to political repression and national chauvinism. Despite its nonrevolutionary status, Flugel saw his analysis of the artificial language movement as a contribution to â€Å"the psychology of progressive social movements† in a wider sense. A study of the â€Å"unconscious mental mechanisms with which psycho-analysis has made us familiar† could thus illuminate â€Å"the wider psychological problems presented by language and by constructive social movements in general. Such comments make it clear that Flugel was canny enough to understand that â€Å"rational† policies might well derive in part from nonrational impulses. Thus he did not hesitate to identify the altruism and dynamism of his fellow Esperantrists with sexual wishes and potent ially grandiose ideas about undoing the havoc wrought in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. 35 Still, it is apparent that Flugel saw internationalism as a single genre of activity that was inherently â€Å"progressive† despite its psychoanalytic complications, and it is likely that he associated its â€Å"constructive† potential with the Enlightenment tradition of rational problemsolving and cosmopolitan understanding. The problem with this portrait of the Esperantists is that it is expurgated (or simply uninformed) and thus historically inaccurate in important respects. By 1925. there was plenty of evidence to suggest that the Esperanto movement was not uniformly â€Å"progressive † in a political sense; it would appear, however, that Flugel overlooked these facts on account of his deep respect both for the founding father of the movement and for many of his fellow enthusiasts. The founder of Esperanto, Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof (18591917), was a Jew born in Bialystok, Poland, who was convinced that only an artificial and universally comprehensible language could heal the ethnic strife that plagued this area. (At the age of 10, Zamenhof wrote a five-act tragedy, set in Bialystok, based on the Tower of Babel story. In the years that followed his publication of the first Esperanto textbook in 1887, adherents of the movement deemphasized Zamenhof’s Jewish origins in order to minimize anti-S emitic resistance to their proselytizing efforts. More surprising in retrospect is the fact that the Dreyfus Affair (1895) the great political litmus test of fin-de-siecle French political life, polarized the French Esperantists, demonstrating that linguistic internationalism alone did not guarantee a â€Å"progressive† political orientation. The â€Å"Declaration on the Essence of Esperanto† that was adopted at the first Congress of Esperantists held at Boulogne-surmer in 1905 was a clear declaration of political neutrality that did not even mention world peace. Indeed, the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) was not established until 1908, by which time the influence of Zamenhof’s quasi-religious doctrine of universal brotherhood was already in decline. 36 To some extent this breach between the founders’ ideals and a more practical orientation emphasizing commerce and science reflected a difference in out35. Flugel, â€Å"Some Unconscious Factors,† 171-172, 208, 187, 190. 36. Lins, Die gefahrliche Sprache, 29, 31, 26. 13 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) look between Western Europe (especially France) and Eastern Europe and Russia. where political repression and a high proportion of Jewish Esperantists had preserved the early idealism. The larger lesson, however, is that even early on linguistic internationalism showed signs of the defensive political neutralism and resulting fissiparous tendencies that compromised its independence and opened windows of opportunity for political activists on the Left and the Right during the 1920s and 1930s. That even as well-informed an observer as Flugel did not understand the ideological instability of the Esperantists points to some of our own acquired habits of thought regarding the effectiveness of internationalist ideals and the transnational groups that attempt to implement them. The traditional (though now eroding) assumption that idealistic internationalisms can transform the modern world has been profoundly shaped by our image of the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that dates from the late eighteenth century. The League of Nations, the United Nations, the vast empires of modern science and sport, nd countless international arrangements of equal or lesser scope all trace th eir ancestry (or an important part of it) to a period that has taken on the aura of a Golden Age. It has been more than two hundred years since the American Philosophical Society proclaimed (in 1778) that â€Å"Nations truly civilized (however unhappily at variance on other accounts) will never wage war with the Arts and Sciences and the common Interests of Humanity,†37 but the charm (and the pathos) of such a declaration, and its promise of a Sacred Truce between the nations, affect us still. By the end of the nineteenth century, this ideal was most clearly expressed in what Elisabeth Crawford has called the â€Å"universe of international science. † â€Å"Because science was universal and constituted a common language. she notes, â€Å"international scientific organizations, it was felt, could become models for international associations generally and even help usher in world government. †38 This idealized image of cosmopolitan networking in the service of pr ogress has been the standard against which internationalist projects have been judged for the last century. What is more, this fantasy of a transnational scientific enterprise untainted by national self-interests has created unrealistic expectations in relation to all of the idealistic internationalisms, prominently including the Olympic movement. If we are interested in establishing the potential of the idealistic internationalisms, then the value of the comparative method lies in establishing realistic parameters of action (and even imagination) over the long term. If we ask, for example, whether the Olympic movement has done what it should have been able to do in fulfillment of its professed aims, what we are really asking is whether it has performed on a par with analogous organizations in comparable historical conditions. While no two of these organizations have had identical resources at their disposal, even the (necessarily 37. Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (South Bend: The Notre Dame University Press, 1977): 45. 38. Crawford, â€Å"The Universe of International Science,† 254. 14 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism abbreviated) survey presented in this essay can, I believe, identify that â€Å"core repertory of attitudes and behaviors† that makes comparison worthwhile. Perhaps the most general of these factors is the contest between nationalist and internationalist motives and loyalties (in differing proportions) within the minds of those who led or followed. If Coubertin came to â€Å"the conviction that patriotism and internationalism were not only not incompatible, but required one another,† then this was one (entirely reasonable) response to a problem that could be solved in various ways. 39 In the case of Baden-Powell’s movement, â€Å"the celebration of national greatness,† as Michael Rosenthal points out, â€Å"becomes a problem for the Scouts . . . when the insistence on British national superiority clashes with the equality of all people that is so much a part of Scouting, and more particularly within the movement’s worldwide ambitions that rapidly developed. 40 This potential for intrapsychic conflict affected the Esperantists, as well, even if Zamenhof had personally resolved the internal conflict between the competing identities of â€Å"human being† and â€Å"patriot† in favor of the former. Disagreements among the Esperantists regarding whether they should organize on a national or supranational basis were another manifestation of this basic conflict between national and internationalist affiliations. How the individual member resolved this conflict was a question of political temperament, although it is also true that the range of choices depended to some extent on the movement to which one belonged. The Esperanto movement, for example, tolerated radical, â€Å"citizen-of-the-world†-style supranationalism in a way that the Scouting and Olympic movements did not. A comparative look at their founders can help us understand why. The movements of Lord Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941) and Pierre de Coubertin are strikingly similar in several respects. Both movements proclaimed early on their universal, apolitical, nonracial and nonmilitary nature: while neither founder was a pacifist—Baden-Powell was an acclaimed professional soldier—both claimed to serve the cause of peace: while they claimed to be classless movements, both were also intended as strategies to deal with domestic social instability and class conflict. Both founders were acclaimed as â€Å"educators† and mobilizers of youth. Both shared the racialistic ideas of their time, although Baden-Powell made openly racist statements in a way that Coubertin did not. 41 Both put a high priority on appearing politically neutral, and both understood the importance of creating a rhetoric and a public image that â€Å"transcended† politics. When recruiting the Comite Jules Simon, as John J. MacAloon points out, â€Å"Coubertin reproduced the now familiar claim that ‘we have recruited adherents of all parties, our work is in effect sheltered from all political quarrels. ’ In fact, the ‘shelter,’ such as it was, owed to drawing all of the members from the ‘parties of order’ and 39. MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 112. 40. Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 176. 41. Rosenthal, The Character Factory, 40-43, 181, 254-267. On Coubertin’s racial thinking see Hoberman, â€Å"Olympic Universalism and the Apartheid Issue,† 524-525. 15 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) skewing their ‘neutrality’ toward the right. †42 Baden-Powell pursued the same strategy, and the Esperantists too did their best to establish a nonpartisan profile. 43 (Among the late-nineteenth-century movements, the Red Cross had pioneered the policy of absolute neutrality in the 1860s. ) It is clear, then, that the claim (or pretense) to political neutrality, a policy that would both empower and constrain these movements throughout the twentieth century, was regarded by most non-Socialist internationalists as an absolute requirement for effective action. What distinguished the Scouting and Olympic movements in quite another sense from the Esperantists and the Red Cross was their pursuit of aristocratic affiliations or royal patronage, itself an important ideological signature of movements that were bent on achieving a reconciliation of the social classes. By contrast, Zamenhof saw Esperanto as an instrument of the oppressed, and Flugel later offered an interesting explanation as to why â€Å"the international language movement has enjoyed comparatively little support from the more aristocratic and educated classes. †44 The mononational Red Cross, which until 1923 recruited its membership exclusively from the cream of the Genevan professional bourgeoisie, did not need aristocratic sponsorship. 45 Coubertin, on the other hand, had to create his own establishment. In 1908, European nobility made up 68 percent of the membership of the IOC, a figure which declined to 41 percent by 1924. 46 In Britain, Baden-Powell—a socially prominent hero of the Boer War-had access to a uniquely celebrated caste of royals. â€Å"The Royal family and the English government have shown a great interest in scouting since its inception,† one observer wrote in 1948. â€Å"The King became the Patron of the British Boy Scouts, the Prince of Wales became Chief Scout for Wales and Princess Mary the president of the Girl Guides. † At the first Jamboree held in London in 1920, Prince Gustav Adolph of Sweden was made honorary president of the International Boy 42. MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 105. 43. The official Soviet view of Scouting in the West challenged its claim to political neutrality: â€Å"Scouting seeks to train the younger generation in a spirit of loyalty to the ideals of bourgeois society. Although professing to be unaffiliated with any political party, scout organizations do in fact have clearly expressed political, militaristic, and religious tendencies they strive to keep the younger generation from participating in the struggle for revolutionary and democratic change and to isolate young people from the influence of materialism and communism. Scouting advocates the idea of class peace in a capitalist state. . . The Komsomol [youth organization] consistently struggled against the scout movement. The second, third, and fourth Komsomol congresses (1918-20) adopted resolutions calling for the dissolution of scout groups and worked out a program for the creation of a new, communist type of children’s organization. † Here, as in other areas of popular culture like sport and the arts, Communists faced the challenge of repackaging attractive â€Å"bourgeois† activities in conformity with Marxist-Leninist ideological requirements. See the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. 23 (New York: Macmillan, 1979): 253. 44. Flugel, â€Å"Some Unconcious Factors,† 200; see also 175, 176, 201. 5. Jean-Claude Favel, Warum schwieg das Rote Kreuz? Eine internationale Organisation und das Dritte Reich (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994): 25-26. 46. M. Blodorn and W. Nigmann, â€Å"Zur Ehre underes Vaterlandes und zum Ruhme des Sports,† in M. Blodorn, ed. Sport und Olympische S piele (Rheinbek bei hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984): 42. See also Kruger, â€Å"Neo-Olympismus zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus,† 529, 551. 16 Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism Scout Committee. 47 Appearances notwithstanding, the recruitment of these prestigious sponsors did not point to politically reactionary intentions on the part of the recruiters. In fact, Coubertin used his affiliations with the nobility to advance the cause of sportive internationalism against the resistance of stubborn nationalists. 48 Today, however, the IOC’s interest in recruiting royals appears to be less pragmatic than a response to the prestige-seeking needs of its current President. 2. Olympic Internationalism in the Age of Fascism Olympic internationalism during the Nazi period remains poorly understood, in part because the number of English-language commentaries remains limited. 49 My purpose in this section is to depart from the traditional emphasis on the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, which has been widely misunderstood as an isolated lapse on the part of the IOC, in order to place it in the larger politicalhistorical context where it belongs. We now know that Coubertin saw the â€Å"Nazi Olympics† as the culmination of his life’s work, and it is important to understand why he believed this and why in a sense he was right in doing so. For the Olympic movement during this period is best understood as a rightwing internationalism that was effectively coopted by the Nazis and their French and German sympathizers during the 1930s. This cooptation was made possible in part by an ideological compatibility between the IOC elite and the Nazis based on a shared ideal of aristocratic manhood and the value system that derived from their glorification of the physically perfect male as the ideal human being. It is important for us to understand this IOC-Nazi collaboration if only because, contrary to what many have doubtless 47. Saul Scheidlinger, â€Å"A Comparative Study of the Boy Scout Movement in Different National and Social Groups,† American Sociological Review , 13 (1948): 740, 741. 48. Kruger, â€Å"Neo-Olympismus zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus,† 549. 49. The traditional approach to the Olympic histoy of this period is to focus on the 1936 Berlin Olympiad as an exceptional event in the history of the movement. See, especially, Richard Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971; Arnd Kruger. Die olympischen Spiele 1936 und die Weltmeinung (Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt/M. : Verlag Bartels Wernitz KG, 1972): Duff Hart-Davis, Hitler’s Games: The 1936 Olympics (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). The indispensable sources for understanding the relationship between the IOC and the Nazis are Hans-Joachim Teichler, â€Å"Coubertin und das Dritte Retch,† Sportwissenschaft, 12 (1982): 18-53; Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984): and W. J. Murray, â€Å"France, Coubertin and the Nazi Olympics: The Response,† Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, 1 (1992): 4669. See also John Hoberman, The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order (New Rochelle, N. Y: Aristide D. Caratzas, Publisher, 1986). More recent publications on the Olympic movement during the interwar period include Stephen R. Wenn, â€Å"A Suitable Policy of Neutrality? FDR and the Question of American Participation in the 1936 Olympics,† International Journal of the History of Sport , 8 (1991): 319-335; Bill Murray, â€Å"Berlin in 1936: Old and New Work on the Nazi Olympics. † International Journal of the History of Sport, 9 (1992): 29-49: Martin Polley, â€Å"Olympic Diplomacy: The British Government and the Projected 1940 Olympic Games,† lnternational Journal of the History of Sport 9 (1992): 169-187: William J. Baker, â€Å"Muscular Marxism and the Chicago Counter-Olympics of 1932,† International Journal of the History of Sport 9 (1992): 397-410; Per Olof Holmang, â€Å"International Sports Organizations 1919-25 Sweden and the German Question. † International Journal of the History of Sport 9 (1992): 455-466; and Junko Tahara. â€Å"Count Michimasa Soyeshima and the Cancellation of the XII Olympiad in Tokyo: A Footnote to Olympic History,† lnternational Journal of the History of Sport, 9 (1992) 467-472. On the workers sport movement, see Jonathan F. Wagner, â€Å"Prague’s Socialist Olympics of 1934,† Canadian Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (1992): 1-18. 17 Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1995) assumed, it was not interrupted by the collapse of the Nazi empire in 1945. The postwar denazification of tainted European organizations, limited as it was, did not extend to the IOC, which continued to accommodate its Nazi members and their sympathizers in the old spirit of collegiality. The third section of this essay will examine how this ideological affinity group managed to preserve its traditional viewpoint (and the careers of some important adherents) well into the postwar era, and how its immunity to liberalhumanitarian influence remains a model for the IOC today. At this point, however, some historical background is required. The following narrative can be introduced by a so-called trivia question, to wit: Who was Jules Rimet, the man for whom the World Cup of soccer is named? I found the answer to this question in the April 1933 issue of the Deutsch-Franzosische Rundschau, one of several journals devoted to FrancoGerman cultural exchange and mutual understanding during the period between the world wars. On 18 March of that fateful year, the French national soccer team arrived in Berlin led by Jules Rimet, president of both the French Soccer Association and the international federation (FIFA). Waiting to greet the French delegation were the chairman of the German Soccer Association (DFB), representatives of numerous other sports federations, and the press. In a word, this occasion was a political and media event. The game between the French and German teams, played before 45,000 German spectators under a sparkling spring sky, somehow ended in a tie. Rimet himself observed that the German team had controlled the ball for three-quarters of the game, and the Parisian sports paper L’Auto said the Germans had, in effect, lost a game they should have won. At the traditional banquet after the ga How to cite Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism, Papers

Using Social Networking Sites in Business †Myassignmenthelp.Com

Questions: What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Using Social Networking Sites By Coca Cola? What Are The Impacts Of The Social Networking Sites On The Purchasing Behavior Of The Consumers? What Are The Effective Techniques That Can Help Coca Cola Can Build An Effective Brand Image Through Social Networking Sites? Answers: Introducation This research study will focus on finding the advantages and disadvantages of using social networking sites in business. In recent times, global and domestic companies utilize social media as an essential marketing and public relations tool for their business practices. This method allows the firms to build a strong relationship with their consumer base (Leonardi, Huysman and Steinfield 2013). Therefore the companies are able to gather more information about choices and trends of their customers. With the rapid development of social networking sites, there are newer platforms for the companies to be familiar with their consumer base. Using the tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other blog sites, the companies can ensure their relationship with their consumers. This study will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using the social networking sites for the global beverage brand, Coca Cola. The social networking sites are now a widespread tool for keeping the firm ahea d of the competition and it should also be noted that most of the competitors of Coca Cola, such as Nestle or Pepsi are utilizing this tool for reaching to the consumers and strengthening their web presence. Research Aims The aim of this particular research will be to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using social networking sites of the company, Coca Cola. Research Objectives The research objectives of this study will be: To investigate the major advantages and disadvantages of using the social networking sites To analyze the effects of social networking sites that can influence the buying intentions of the consumers To recommend few effective techniques for building an effective brand image for Coca Cola that can help recognizing the purchasing intentions of the consumers. Scope of the Research Coca Cola is a well known brand that has a global presence and also known for its community involvement and higher sales. The organization has been involved in various social networking sites. Therefore investigating their social media plans and the potential advantages and disadvantages of utilizing the social media will help the future researches to serve a better marketing plan using the social media sites. As the traditional marketing approaches are changing and improving its communication strategies, therefore this study will help in finding out the potential factors that can help in shaping the purchasing behavior of the consumers. Literature Review Comparative Approach The marketing approach with the social media marketing indicates to the shift from the traditional marketing approach. This change not only comes with various opportunities for reaching to the consumer base of the company, but it also carries several risks with it. Therefore, the firms are required to monitor the potential effects that may include the individualization and engagement. The companies should remind that the social media marketing is generally a two way marketing approach where the focus is not only on strengthening the relationship with the consumers but also maintaining the exchange with sufficient responsibility (Okazaki and Taylor 2013). Most importantly the firms that deal with food and beverages such as Coca Cola require understanding the systematical conflicts within the social networking sites along with the potential complexities of the platforms (Bryman 2015). The firms can analyze the social media behaviors of the consumers to build more connection with their consumers. Also there are other implications that analysis of social media movements of the individual consumers can indicate to their decision making process or the buying behavior. Comparative Analysis With a detailed comparative analysis of the social media movements of the consumers the companies can find out the factors that influence the buying behavior of the consumers. Therefore this procedure will help to sort the repression out for the companies. Also other than the consumers of the brand, Coca Cola will be able to connect to the potential job seekers and the small business owners who can act as vendors in future (Nielsen and Schrder 2014). Therefore it will be easier for the company to expand their business vicinity use a successful use of the social networking sites. For the corporate businesses, usage of social networking sites creates a major competitive advantage of the brand. Analyzing the social networking trends the brands are also able to spot their loyal consumer base so that they can put more efforts to the other section of the consumers. As the trend of the marketing approach has changed tremendously the companies will be able to monitor its customer base while they are posting information about their choices and various other information. There are also e marketing trends that can help the brand to hold a competitive edge in the market place. Gap Analysis After conducting the literature review on the advantages and disadvantages of the social networking sites, the study had found out that there is a huge gap in the literatures regarding the potential advantages and disadvantages of the food and beverage industry. Therefore this study will conduct a detailed evaluation of the possible disadvantages and advantages of using the social networking sites of the famous global food and beverage company, Coca Cola. Research Methodology Research Philosophy The philosophies of the researches help the researcher by providing the necessary knowledge and dimension related to the specific research study. The research philosophies also provide the fundamental knowledge, concepts and the facts so that the study can be conducted in a well organized manner. It has also been argued that the specific philosophies of the research come from a specific paradigm. However, there can be three kinds of philosophies for research, positivism, realism and post positivism. The positivism philosophy generally examines several philosophical aspect of the research utilizing the related philosophical aspects. Therefore, for conducting this research the researcher will follow the positivism philosophy. Research Approach There can be two kinds of research approach for conducting the research study, Inductive and Deductive research approach. The Inductive research approach generally focuses on the generation of new models and theories on the basis of the collected information through the researches. However, the Deductive research approach aims for testing the previous models and concepts of the particular topic. Therefore, while conducting this study, the researcher will follow the Deductive approach, as it will evaluate the previous concepts and models on this particular topic. Research Purpose For conducting any research, there are three kinds of research approaches, exploratory, explanatory and descriptive. The research purposes generally provide a precise and structural purpose for the research that primarily provides a definite purpose for the study (Hajli 2014). For this research the researcher will follow the descriptive research purpose, because this will help the researcher to conduct the study with more explanations along with exploration so that the research topic can be enriched with detailed information. Therefore the researcher will be able to explain and define the research study with supplementary information regarding the topic. Strategy of the Research For this research, the researcher will follow the survey process. By utilizing the survey process the researcher will be able to collect the necessary information along with analyzing the information for the further investigation of the research topic. Data Collection Process The data collection process is the most significant part of the research study which analyzes the collected data to come to a specific solution. Sources of Data There can be two types of data for any research, secondary and primary sources. The primary data are the data that are collected from specific sources such as questionnaires or interviews. The primary data can also be collected from different types of unpublished sources. On the other hand the secondary sources are the different sources of published data such as books, newspaper articles or journals. For this research the researcher will collect the data from different published sources. Therefore the research will be conducted on the basis of secondary sources. Data Analysis Technique There are two kinds of data analysis technique for the conducting the research study. Those are quantitative and qualitative analysis. For conducting this study, the research will use the quantitative data analysis technique for analyzing the collected data from the secondary resources. Sample Size As this research will be conducted on secondary researches, the researcher will collect information from the published sources such as books, journals, news paper articles and published research papers and case studies. Research Limitations There can be various kinds of limitations while conducting the research. The researcher may have to face some kind of issues while he will be accessing the relevant sources of the data. While collecting the necessary books and other sources the researcher may have to face different accessibility issues. Also, the researcher may have to face issues related to the budget of the study and the allotted time for the research. The researcher will plan to complete the research in six weeks. However, the researcher will be able to collect more information if he has more time for conducting the research. Ethical Considerations While collecting the data the researcher will have to maintain the ethics while he will be collecting the necessary information regarding the topic. While conducting the research the researcher has to maintain the code so that there is not any kind of wrong interpretation of the data. The researcher has to maintain few ethical codes of conducts so that there is no misinterpretation of the collected information. Research Plan Main activities 1st Week 2nd Week 3rd Week 4th Week 5th Week 6th Week Selection of topic Data collection from the secondary sources Framing layout of the research Literature review Formation of the research Plan Selection of the Appropriate Research Techniques Analysis Interpretation of Data Collection Conclusion of the Study Formation of Rough Draft Submission of Final Work Proposed Plan of the Research Source: Author Conclusion In conclusion it can be said that this research will deal with the possible advantages and disadvantages of utilizing the social networking sites by Coca Cola. Therefore this research will collect the data from the secondary sources and by following the quantitative data analysis process the collected data will be analyzed and the research approach will be a descriptive one. Reference list Bolton, R.N., Parasuraman, A., Hoefnagels, A., Migchels, N., Kabadayi, S., Gruber, T., Komarova Loureiro, Y. and Solnet, D., 2013. Understanding Generation Y and their use of social media: a review and research agenda.Journal of Service Management,24(3), pp.245-267. Bryman, A. and Bell, E., 2015.Business research methods. Oxford University Press, USA. Bryman, A., 2015.Social research methods. Oxford university press. Edwards, C., Edwards, A., Spence, P.R. and Shelton, A.K., 2014. Is that a bot running the social media feed? Testing the differences in perceptions of communication quality for a human agent and a bot agent on Twitter.Computers in Human Behavior,33, pp.372-376. Eriksson, P. and Kovalainen, A., 2015.Qualitative Methods in Business Research: A Practical Guide to Social Research. Sage. Fuchs, C., 2013.Social media: A critical introduction. Sage. Hajli, M.N., 2014. A study of the impact of social media on consumers.International Journal of Market Research,56(3), pp.387-404. Laroche, M., Habibi, M.R. and Richard, M.O., 2013. To be or not to be in social media: How brand loyalty is affected by social media?.International Journal of Information Management,33(1), pp.76-82. Leonardi, P.M., Huysman, M. and Steinfield, C., 2013. Enterprise social media: Definition, history, and prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations.Journal of Computer?Mediated Communication,19(1), pp.1-19. Nielsen, R.K. and Schrder, K.C., 2014. The relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news: an eight-country cross-media comparison.Digital journalism,2(4), pp.472-489. Okazaki, S. and Taylor, C.R., 2013. Social media and international advertising: theoretical challenges and future directions.International marketing review,30(1), pp.56-71. Tsimonis, G. and Dimitriadis, S., 2014. Brand strategies in social media.Marketing Intelligence Planning,32(3), pp.328-344. Verhoef, L.M., Van de Belt, T.H., Engelen, L.J., Schoonhoven, L. and Kool, R.B., 2014. Social media and rating sites as tools to understanding quality of care: a scoping review.Journal of medical Internet research,16(2), p.e56. Whiting, A. and Williams, D., 2013. Why people use social media: a uses and gratifications approach.Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal,16(4), pp.362-369.

Which Media do You Trust to Give You Accurate Truthful Unbiased Current Affair

Background The term media generally refers to the different ways of communication. Written sources were the earliest forms of mass communication. Many forms of media are employed to deliver messages to the masses and the notable among them are the magazines, newspaper, radio, television, video, internet and mobile phones. The radio, T.V. and video came into being at the end of the first half of the last century.Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on Which Media do You Trust to Give You Accurate Truthful Unbiased Current Affair? specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Over the years, major changes have been witnessed in the field of communication especially with the entrance of computers in mid 1950,s which gradually ushered in communication using the internet, blogs and podcasts. It is my view that in this 21st century, for anyone wishing to communicate a message to a large number of people, one should consider the recen t social news networks like facebook, twitter amongst others. Aims This questionnaire is trying to address the issue of media trust; ‘Which media do you trust to give your accurate truthful unbiased current affair?’ The various sources of media that we have today continue to face criticism as researchers and the general public has lost trust in most if not all of them. Most news flushes contains lies created to promote certain products. However, the level of trust among different people varies depending on several factors the most relevant being whether the source of the news is either local or international (Perez-Pena 16). In most cases, international news receives much attention and is more trusted than local news which tends to hind some facts. Locally, Many viewers of television consider whether the TV station is owned by the government or not. This questionnaire is aimed at finding the degree of truthfulness that television, radio, internet and the news paper rece ives from the general public. Hypotheses Null hypothesis Television, internet, radio and Newspaper enjoy equal trust among the users.Advertising Looking for assessment on communications media? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Alternative hypothesis Television, internet, radio and the newspaper do not enjoy equal trust among their users. Method Questionnaires organized into 10 different questions were randomly distributed and administered to 15 respondents of different ages, gender and nationality who then filled and returned it. Notes were taken on the respondents reactions on the questionnaire’s general format and to given questions. Those with difficulty in answering different questions were given assistance. The participants were informed that personal details would remain private and that they had an option to either include their name or leave it while filling the questionnaire. Information on those who refused to fill the forms and of those who were unsuitable was also presented and discussed (Boynton 1) Findings According this survey the number of females and males was equal while 37.5% were young people of between 18 and 25 years. Those between the age of 26 and 33 years contributed 27% and those above 33 years were also 37.5%. The participants interviewed were from South Africa, Australia, Sudan, France, Malaysia and Canada. The findings showed that the demand for news was very high among all these nationalities. 50% of those interviewed watch TV, 25% read Newspaper, 19% listen to the radio while only 6% get their news article from the internet. Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on Which Media do You Trust to Give You Accurate Truthful Unbiased Current Affair? specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Asked what type of news they follow, majority said social news (44%), Sports news was only followed by 19% with political news having a following of 38%.Three-quarters of the respondents agreed that what was reported was true while a quarter of them didn’t trust what was reported. 68% of the respondents showed that they followed the news from their houses, 19% in the car and 13% at work. Only 75% believed that the information received was important in their lives, 25% opposed and reported that it wasn’t. Of those above 33 years, Two-thirds followed political news and the rest concentrated on social information. Half of the people of between 26-33 years were attracted to social reports with political and sport reports being followed by 25% each. Only 17% of those below 26 years cared about political reports, majority (50%) were good at tracking social news and 33% were attracted to sports news. More people below 25 years followed sports news. Slightly less than 7% of those interviewed relied on more than one source of information according to this report and more so the internet. In general, it was shown that the trust in media was increasing and that was indeed high across all ages. Young people have also been proved to be more willing to get information from online. Advertising Looking for assessment on communications media? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More This report indicated that T.V. received the highest following (50%) closely trailed by newspaper (25%), radio at (19%) and lastly the internet (6%) in that order. Online sources appeared to be gaining ground because the customary sources were losing theirs. The findings also showed that media trust was a record high in developing countries when compared to more developed ones (Perez-Pena 22). Summary In summary, research by different groups over the years has shown that faith in news media declined from the 1980s to the ’90s (Pew surveys 1) and then remained constant for a few years (BBC/Reuters/Media Center Poll 1) The pew survey of 2009 showed that 63 percent of those interviewed mentioned that news items were inaccurate and that almost 30percent believed that the news were true. It has also been shown that TV stations do the most followed news overall with over 50 percent trusting it (BBC/Reuters/Media Center Poll 1). Newspaper followed while public radio ranked third. The internet was ranked last thus showing the alternative hypothesis to be held true. Recommendation I would like to recommend a varied approach to the various news sources as proved by these surveys. Various methods of showing whether a source is telling the truth or not should be applied and these more often depends on one’s feeling. If you think that the information you are receiving is not true, it is recommends that you switch to a more trustworthy source (the BBC/Reuters/Media centre poll 1). I would also recommend international news sources e.g. international TV, satellite TV and even international radio as these give news articles that are less prone to interference to fit special interests. Because sometimes corporate news cannot be trusted as it is tailored to fit the corporate welfare, one should consider other more private sites that deliver truest news from the speaker’s mouth. Such sites report on what is true as it is posted by the person involved and t herefore truer. Some websites such as wikipedia are more trusted because it is authored by many people and therefore a lie is removed almost immediately. Thus it can be seen that whether a news article is true or not depends on where you got it and your own intuition. Works cited BBC/Reuters/Media Center Poll Trust in the Media ‘Media More Trusted than Governments’ – poll.2006. 27th October, 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_05_06mediatrust.pdf Boynton M. Petra. Hands-on guide to questionnaire research, Administering, analyzing, and reporting your questionnaire,2004. 28th October, 2010 https://www.bmj.com/content/328/7452/1372.full Perez-Pena Richard, Trust in News Media Falls to New Low in Pew Survey, New York Times.2009. 27th October, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/media/14survey.html This assessment on Which Media do You Trust to Give You Accurate Truthful Unbiased Current Affair? was written and submitted by user Matilda Flores to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. 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Exciting Chiang Mai Attractions Top 20 Things to See and Do

Exciting Chiang Mai Attractions Top 20 Things to See and Do SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Chiang Mai, the ancient city in northern Thailand, is lovingly referred to asthe Rose of the North. Founded in 1296, Chiang Mai has over 300 Buddhist temples shining within and around its city walls. The modern city grew up besidethese golden shrines and crumbling monasteries, creating the beautiful, laid-back city that’s a favorite among travelers and expats today. I was fortunate enough to spend a month in Chiang Mai, and I’ve never felt such a sense of cultural fascination, well-being, or quality of life for the cost of living. When friends ask me for recommendations about Thailand, I have one that trumps all the rest. Go to Chiang Mai, I tell them. You’ll love it. Top Things to Do In Chiang Mai: Table of Contents I’ve picked out the top 20 things to do when you visit Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. Since it’s a long list, here’s a table of contents to help you jump to any particular Chiang Mai attractions that stand out. Gaze at Golden Temples Shop, Sample, and Stroll Through the Markets Make Friends With Elephants Get a Thai Massage Take a Thai Cooking Class Watch Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), or Go to Muay Thai Training Camp Experience the Unforgettable Yi Peng Festival Explore the Trendy Neighborhood of Nimmanhaemin Take a Yoga Class Chatwith a BuddhistMonk Visit the Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand Go Rock Climbing Go Whitewater Rafting Zip Line Over the Jungle Go Jungle Trekking Attend a Traditional Khantoke Dinner and Show See a Cabaret Show Rent a Motorbike Check Out Chiang Mai University Get a Bamboo Tattoo One thing that often gives me pause about traveling to a new place is exactly how to get around. Before delving into this list of what to do in Chiang Mai, read this quick note ongeography and transportation. A Note on How to Get Around Chiang Mai One important thing that you should know about Chiang Mai geography is that there’s an old town and a new town. The Old City is a square area located inside stone walls. These walls were built inthe 13th century to defend Chiang Mai from Burma and the Mongol Empire. There are lots of hotels, hostels, restaurants, and tour agencies geared toward tourists in the Old City. The newer part of the city is everything outside the walls. Most people who live in Chiang Mai live outside the city walls. You can find plenty of restaurants, cafes, markets, and shops outside the walls, too. The square section on this Chiang Mai map is the Old City. It's surrounded by the remains of a stone wall from the 13th century. My suggestions for Chiang Mai attractions are scattered within and outside thecity walls, and some take you further afield into the surrounding hills and jungle. Since the city is so friendly to travelers (in fact, it’s trying to become a UNESCO-recognized â€Å"Creative City,† and its tourism sector is part of that initiative) you’ll find that transportation is easy and cheap. You can take tuk tuks, a songthaew (a pick-up truck that may make several stops), or arrange for transportation as part of a tour activity. Songthaews are less expensive than tuk tuks - usually less than a dollar for trips inside the city - and tuk tuks shouldn’t be more than $3.00. Most prices, even for organized Chiang Mai tours, are negotiable! Now let’s delve into the top 20 things to do during yourChiang Mai trip. In case you were wondering, yes, there will be lots of recommendations for delicious Thai food to eat. 1. Gaze at Golden Temples Chiang Mai is a center of Buddhism, and you’ll see lots of temples and monks in orange robes as you walk along its streets. Since its foundation over 700 years ago, Chiang Mai has had a lot of time to build shrines to Buddha. In fact, there are hundreds of intricately carved temples throughout the city, as well as crumbling ruins dating back to the 13th century. The temples are beautiful, with elaboratecarvings, detailed murals, bright colors, large Buddhas, and statues of elephants and other animals. I always felt a pervasive sense of calm stepping inside the colorful temples, surrounded by flowers and incense wafting through the air. Walking around the streets and stepping into temples is agreat way to spend a morning before the afternoon heat sets in. Below are a few special temples that you should visit, but I bet you'll find your own favorites, too. Chiang Mai Temples You Should Visit Wat Doi Suthep: This is the most famous temple in Chiang Mai and is recognizable as a symbol ofthe city. It was built in 1383 and perches atop a mountain about 15 km outside Chiang Mai. Wat Doi Suthep is a brilliant gold temple surrounded by chedi, Buddhist mound-like structures also known as stupas. To get to this temple, you can climb 304 steps flanked by mosaic serpents or take a tram. At the top, you’ll see sweeping views over Chiang Mai and airplanes landing in the distance. Wat Chedi Luang: At 82-meters, this 14th century temple is one of the largest in Chiang Mai. You can find the colorful Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai’s historic center. Wat Phra Singh: Come to Wat Phra Sing to see the impressive and large golden Phra Buddha Singh statue. This temple was built in 1345 and restored in the 1920s. Wat Buppharam: Step just outside the city walls to see this 1497 temple. It has beautifully intricate mosaics and the largest teak Buddha image in Thailand. Wat Suan Dok: This temple is unique for its Sri Lanka-style architecture. It’s surrounded by white stupas and was founded in 1370. Wat Chiang Man: Built in 1297, this temple is special for its quartz crystal Buddha statue and detailed elephant statues. Temple Etiquette: What You Need to Know Both men and women should dress modestly to enter temples. You should cover your knees and shoulders, so no tank tops or shorts allowed inside. Some of the larger temples, like Wat Doi Suthep, will have shawls, pants, or wraps for you to rent, but smaller temples won’t, so you should go prepared. Similarly, don’t wear hats or sunglasses inside, and you should always take your shoes off before entering a temple. Beyond clothing, you should also be careful about gestures. It’s considered rude to point at others or the Buddha with your hands or your feet. It’s also expected that people back away from Buddha, rather than turn their back to him, when leaving the temple. Even though Chiang Mai can get hot, it’s generally a good idea to bring some sort of covering when meandering through the old city. I regret the times I saw a beautiful temple andcouldn’t go in because of my bare shoulders! 2. Shop, Sample, and Stroll Through the Markets There are so many bustling street markets throughout Chiang Mai, it’s almost hard to understand how they all fit! Some are daytime markets selling fresh fruits and vegetables, others are night markets for dinner, drinks, and shopping, and others fill the streets once a week for vendors to sell their crafts. Discovering new foods and crafts at the markets was one of my favorite things to do in Chiang Mai. Note that the food tends to have fixed prices, but everything else is usually fair game for haggling. Below are my recommendations for must-see markets in Chiang Mai, followed by some tips for what to eat and buy! Chiang Mai Markets You ShouldVisit Night Bazaar: This market’s open every single night from 6pm until midnight. It’s mainly a shopping market with a huge number of clothes, souvenirs, shoes, watches, and other goods. Some indoor shops sell real designer brands, but most goods out on the street are knock-offs. You won’t find as many high quality crafts here as you will at other markets (but you will find lotsof pirated DVDs). There are restaurants all around the market, as well as a big outdoor food court and Muay Thai ring behind it. The Night Bazaar sprawls along Chang Klan Road. Morning Market at Chiang Mai Gate: This morning market opens at 4:30 am and goes until noon at Chiang Mai Gate. Locals come here to buy fruits, vegetables, spices, and other foods. You can especially get a taste of local life if you show up early. Stalls with cooked food open up in this same spot around 5 pm for dinner. Wua Lai Street Saturday Market: This Saturday night market stretches the length of Wu Lai Road from 4:30 PM until around 10 PM. In addition to delicious food, you can find beautiful handicrafts made of wood, paper, and silk. The area is also known for its silver-making studios. Ratchadamonoen Road Sunday Market: The Sunday night market is similar to the Saturday night one. It stretches over a kilometer down Ratchadamnoen and Pra Singh Roads and is ever-growing! You’ll find amazing food stalls, traditional handicrafts, artwork, and clothes. Come here, rather than the Night Bazaar, for authentic Thai crafts. Keep in mind that it can get packed by 6 or 7. You might end up doing a slow shuffle through big crowds. Warorot Market: This large market in the center of Chiang Mai is open all day, every day. Some stalls close down around 6 pm, while others stay open well after dark. The main attraction is the countless food stallsselling all manner of Thai snacks, cooked foods, meats, and fresh fruits and vegetables. You’ll also find handicrafts and textiles from northern hill tribes on the side streets. Warorot Market is located at the end of Chiang Moi Road, near the Ping River Muang Mai Market: Touted as a â€Å"raw fooder’s paradise,† Muang Mai Market is great for wholesale fruit at unbeatable prices. It’s smaller than some of Chiang Mai’s other markets. You can also buy vegetables, meat, and seafood here. Muang Mai Market is open from dawn until dusk and is located on the northeastern side of the old city on Muang Samut Road. What to Eat Now let’s get toa subject of utmost importance - food! Chiang Mai street food is incredible and oh so cheap. You’ll probably end up spending somewhere between $1 and $3 for some of the best dinners of your life. Make sure to try khao soi, the speciality dish of Chiang Mai. It has egg noodles in a coconut curry broth and is usually served with lime, roasted chili, mustard greens, shallots, and crispy egg noodles on top. If you’re looking for stir fry, some great options are pak boon fai deang (morning glory), pat kha pao (a stir-fry with chili and basil), and pat prik gaeng (a red curry stir fry). Kaen khanun, or jackfruit curry, is also a delicious, unique kind of curry. Khao soi is the specialty of Chiang Mai. So. delicious. For meat, you might try the khao kha moo (stewed pork shank or knuckle often served with boiled egg, raw garlic, pickled mustard greens and chilly vinegar), kai yang (barbecued chicken), or sai oua (a grilled herb sausage). You might also try larb, usually ground pork or chicken cooked with spices and sometimes the blood of the animal. Some ubiquitous dishes you might be familiar with are pad thai, pad see ew, and tom yum soup, a spicy soup with lemongrass, kaffir lime leavs, galangal (Thai ginger), lime juice, fish sauce, and chili peppers. Two of my favorite snacks I discovered in the markets of Chiang Mai were steamed quail eggs, often sweetened with coconut, and miang kham, bite sized snacks wrapped inside cha plu leaves. They usually contain peanuts, ginger, chillies, shallots, green mango, and onions and are a taste explosion of sweet and spicy. You’ll also be able to find crickets and other insects to snack on, but for some reason I never found myself in the mood... Finally, you’ll see fresh juices and smoothies everywhere with all kinds of familiar and exotic fruits. One fruit that you should try for the experience - though maybe not the taste - is durian fruit. Hailed asthe King of Fruits, this controversial fruit is loved by some and despised by others. I’m glad I tried it, but to be brutally honest, the texture and taste reminded me of warm garbage. Durian, king of the (gross) fruits. What to Buy at the Markets One of my favorite things to buy at the markets was clothing. You can find colorful patterned pants, dresses, jumpers, shirts, and scarves at super reasonable prices, though the quality can vary. You’ll also find leather sandals and handcrafted jewelry. You’ll find traditional crafts made of wood, silk, ceramics, and paper, as well as prettylacquerware, typically bowls, boxes, and bracelets. You can also find lots of soaps and lotions with natural ingredients - coconut oil is a big ingredient. You may also be interested in the singing bowls, which are used for meditation and relaxation. The typically hand-hammered brass bowls come with a handle that you move around the outside at a steady pace to produce a steady ringing sound. Again, the Saturday and Sunday night markets are the best places to find traditional handicrafts, while the Night Bazaar has a lot of clothes and knock-off goods. 3. Make Friends with Elephants One of my most memorable experiences from Chiang Mai was visiting elephants. Three things I learned: elephants have very thick, wiry skin, their eyes show a great deal of intelligence and understanding, and they will eat a huge cluster of bananas in one gulp if you leave itunattended on the ground. You might have heard the sad statistics about elephant endangerment in Asia as a result of poaching and habitat destruction, as well as the huge problem of mistreatment of elephants in the tourism industry. Elephants are not actually supposed to carry weight on their back for longer than a few hours a day, and many tour agencies force them to carry people and wooden structures for eight hours or more. They also suffer abuse at the hands of their owners who want them to be docile for visiting tourists. Fortunately, there are three great elephant sanctuaries outside of Chiang Mai that rescue abused elephants and provide them with a caring, safe environment to live. These sanctuaries invite visitors to meet the elephants and learn about ethical and sustainable eco-tourism. In general, it’s best to look for a place committed to humane practices that will let you meet, feed, and bathe elephants, but not ride them. Below are three suggestions for elephant sanctuaries outside of Chiang Mai where you can meet and make friends with these magnificent animals. Elephant Sanctuaries Outside Chiang Mai Elephant Nature Park: This center for elephant rescue and rehabilitation is probably the most established and well known among travelers. Also a rescue for dogs, cats, and buffalo, Elephant Nature Park lets you visit for a half day, full day, or overnight stay. It also has options for week-long volunteering. These are the prices for the day and overnight visits. You can find all the details on the Elephant Nature Park website. Short visit: 9 - 3:30, 2,500 baht, about $72 Full day visit: 7:40 - 5:30, 2,500 baht, about $72 Overnight visit: 7:40 am to 5:30 pm next day, 5,800 baht, about $166 Elephant Jungle Sanctuary: I stayed overnight in Elephant Jungle Sanctuary, the newest center that opened in mid-2014. You can visit for a half day in the morning or afternoon, a full day, or a full day with an overnight. These are the visiting options: Half day morning, half day afternoon: 1700 baht, about $49 Full day: 2,400 baht, about $69 Full day with overnight: 4,900 baht, about $140 I had an amazing experience staying overnight. I met fellow travelers from all over the world, learned from the sanctuary’s owners, and got a tour of their village (which, surprisingly, was a Christian village with a church). We made dinner, drank locally made rice wine, and went on a morning hike with one of the sanctuary’s elephants. The full day before also involved feeding and spending time with elephants and bathing them in the river and â€Å"mud spa.† Boon Lott’s Elephant Sanctuary: Like the others, this sanctuary cares for rescued and retired elephants. This 500-acre center was named after its first rescued elephant who broke his back legs and received the first elephant wheelchair. People typicallystay at Boon Lott for at least one night. The price to stay in their guesthouse is 5,000 baht per night, or around $140. 4. Get a Thai Massage Tara Angkor Hotel/Flickr There’s a huge spa industry in Chiang Mai, and you’ll see massages advertised everywhere throughout the old city. There are casual places where you can just walk in to higher end dayspas that offer multi-hour combined packages. While people may have an association of cheap massage places with sex work, I didn’t find that to be an issue here, at least not at places in the Old City. For the most part, I’d say use your best judgment that the place is casual, but not seedy. Thai massages range from only about $5 to $15 for an hour. Most places offer a variety of massage types, but you should definitely try the traditional Thai massage when you’re in Chiang Mai. It’s an ancient healing practice that targets pressure points. You’ll be given loose clothes to put on. In addition to rubbing, the massage therapist will compress and stretch parts of your body and put you into passive yoga positions, like supine twists. I was a little nervous trying it for the first time, but I absolutely loved it. I did have a couple Thai massages where the pressure was way too intense, but I just asked the massage therapist to use a lighter touch. Massage parlors also offer foot massages, head, neck, and back massages, coconut oil massages, and skin treatments. It’s customary to tip for good service, perhaps 50 to 100 baht (between $1.50 and $3.50). Also note that you should always take your shoes off before entering; the first part of the massage will be washing your feet. Here are a few recommendations for spas in Chiang Mai. Where toGo for a Thai Massage Kiriya Spa Vana: This higher end spa has beautiful ambiance and amazing massages. Thai massages are 500 baht (about $14) for one hour. It also has lots of other options for massages and skin treatments, like citrus massage oil massage, cappuccino body scrub, and a chocolate, cinnamon, and ginger body mask. It’s a good idea to make an appointment, but they may be able to take walks in at quieter time of days. Address:47/14 Samlan Road Nimman House: This spa also has a nice ambiance and great massages, and the prices are a bit lower. A Thai massage is only 250 baht (about $7), and some of its other offerings include hot oil massages, milk cream massages, body scrubs, facials, and steam rooms. The mattresses are on the floor, rather than raised up. You usually don’t need to make an appointment. Address: 59/8 Nimmanhaemin Road Le Lux Thai Spa: This more casual massage place gives high-quality massages in a communal room. Hour-long Thai massages are only 200 baht (about $5-$6). Address: /6 Moonmuang Road Green Bamboo Massage: This spot uses organic, homemade cosmetic products. Thai massages are 250 baht (about $7). Some other massages on the menu include coconut oil, aloe vera, warmed bamboo stalk, and Tok Sen, a deeper technique that involves a â€Å"wooden stick and hammer.† Address:1 Moon Muang Road Cheeva Spa: Cheeva is one of the top-rated spas in Chiang Mai. It also has the most expensive Thai massage at 1,200 baht (about $34). It also has all kinds of spa packages that are two to four and a half hours long. Address: 4/2 Hussadhisewee Road Beyond these recommendations, you can also walk around the Old City and find numerous Thai massage places with hour-long massages between 200 and 250 baht. I went to a few random spots, and the only negative experience I had was that the pressure was too intense. The massage therapists lightened up when I asked. 5. Take a Thai Cooking Class If you’re a fan of Thai food, then you might be interested in learning how to make it! Several Thai cooking schools around Chiang Mai offer half day and full day classes, where you’ll learn to make a variety of dishes. Most classes first take you to a market, where you buy and learn about fruits, vegetables, and spices. I made tom yum soup, green curry with chicken and vegetables, pad thai in an omelette, and sticky rice with mango. It was delicious; my only regret was not being able to eat it all. The prices are typically only about $30 per person. Thai Cooking Schools in Chiang Mai Here are a few of the top cooking schools in Chiang Mai. In choosing, you should think about whether you want to do a full-day or half-day course and whether you want to drive out to a farm or go to a school in the city. All of the classes include transportation, and most share similar options on the menu - usually a type of curry, stir fry, appetizer, noodle dish, and dessert. As far as I know, all of them can be vegan or vegetarian. Thai Farming School: This class takes you out to the owner’s organic farm for cooking. First, you’ll get picked up from your hotel around 8:30 AM and head to a market to pick out ingredients. You’ll be back at your hotel around 4:30 or 5:00. The price, which is all inclusive, is 1,300 baht (about $37). Before your cooking class, you’ll get a guided tour of a market and pick out fruits, vegetables, and spices. Basil Cookery School: You can take a morning (9-3) or afternoon (4-8:30) class at this school in the city. You’ll learn seven dishes, and the classes are limited to one to seven people. The price 1,000 per person, or about $29. Thai Orchid Cookery School: This school in the Old City also keeps its classes small at between two and ten people. The full day course from 9:30 to 3 costs 1,200 baht (about $34) and the half day course from 10 to 1:30 costs 1,200 baht (about $26). 6. Watch Muay Thai (or Go to a Muay Thai Camp) Muay Thai is a combat sport similar to boxing, but fighters also use their elbows, knees, and feet. When they practice this â€Å"Art of Eight Limbs,† Muay Thai fighters use parts of their body to mimic weapons. Their hands are the sword and daggers, shins and forearms are armor, elbows are hammers, and legs and knees are the axe and staff. You can find Muay Thai matches on a nightly basis throughout Chiang Mai, though the more authentic fights that locals attend happenonce a week. If you’re interested in learning Muay Thai, you could also take classes or attend a longertraining camp. Muay Thai Matches in Chiang Mai Thapae Boxing Stadium: This stadium hosts 6 to 8 Muay Thai matches every night from Monday to Saturday. Tickets are 400 baht ($) for regular admission and 600 baht ($17) for ringside â€Å"VIP† seats. You can just show up. The entrance is on Moon Muang road, opposite Thaphae gate. Kawila Boxing Stadium: This less touristy stadium hosts fighters who are competing to become nationally known. It holds ten fights every Friday at 8. The prices are also 400 baht for regular admission and 600 for VIP seats. Kawila is one block south of Thapae Road. Loi Kroh: Fights are held here three to four nights a week on Loi Kroh Road behind the Night Bazaar. You’ll see both Thai and foreign Muay Thai fighters. The prices are the same as the other stadiums. You probably don’t need VIP seats - all the chairs are plastic and you can pretty much sit wherever you want. Several gyms offer Muay Thai camps and accommodations so you can learn this ancient form of combat. Muay Thai Training Centers in Chiang Mai All these gyms offer classes for both experienced Muay Thai fighters and complete beginners. Lanna Muay Thai Boxing Camp: Here, you can sign up for a single class or stay for a month or more on site. It’s 300 baht ($8 to $9) for a class and 8000 baht (about $230) for a full month of training. Lanna Muay Thai Boxing Camp:This spot also has single classes or accommodations for a month+ of training. A week costs 2,500 to 3,000 baht ($70 to $85) and a month costs 8,000 to 9,000 baht. High season is November to March and low season is April to October. Lanna Muay Thai Boxing Camp:Santai Gym is another good spot for classes or long-term training. A single day of training is 600 baht ($16 to $18) and one month is 10,000 baht (about $286). Other reputable Muay Thai gyms in Chiang Mai are Gym Bangarang Muay Thai MMA Training Camp and Hongtong Muay Thai Gym. 7. Explore the Trendy Neighborhood of Nimmanhaemin Jill Chen/Flickr Nimmanhaemin is a trendy area northwest of the Old City. While the Old City is more hotels and hostels, Nimmanhaemin is an area where people live. You can find lots of cafes, restaurants, shops, live music, art galleries, spas, salons, clothing stores, and boutiques. There are some really goodcoffee spots with fast, free wifi, thanks for the student population from the nearby Chiang Mai university and Chiang Mai’s group of â€Å"digital nomads,† people who work remotely. Some great Chiang Mai cafes in Nimmanhaemin are Librarista, Marble Arch, Wawee Coffee, Ristr8to, and Coffee Bar. You should also seek out the Nimman Promenade for boutiques and specialty shops, as well as the Ji-Qoo Art Gallery to see works by local artists. If you’re in the mood for a haircut, check out New York New York Hair Studio. It caters to locals and westerners, and I got one of the best and least expensive haircuts of my life there. 8. Experience the Unforgettable Yi Peng Festival Flip Nomad/Flickr Chiang Mai has one of the largest celebrations of the Yi Peng festival of lights every November during the full moon. This celebration of spiritual cleansing and renewal and good luck coincides with Loi Krathong, where people arrange flowers and candles on baskets and float them down the river (these floats are called krathongs). Chiang Mai holds the most elaborate celebrations with three days of parades, fairs, float and lantern contests, fireworks, beautiful decorations on the temples, and beauty contests called Nopphamat Queen contests. You can see and participate in everything for free - just head toward the Ping River - or you can buy tickets for the event at MaeJo University. Tickets for the MaeJo event are about $100. 8. Take a Yoga Class Health and wellness area big focus in Chiang Mai, which you can see with the ubiquitous spas, vegetarian restaurants, and yoga studios. There are great studios throughout the seat with classes suitable for people of all levels. Many classes are geared toward tourists and English-speaking expats, so all of the suggestions below offer classes in English. They typically cost just about $5 to $6 for an hour to an hour and half. Some also offer yoga teaching training, multi-day yoga retreats, and massage therapy classes. Yoga Studios in Chiang Mai Wild Rose Yoga:This studio has classes everyday at 10 am and 6 pm. You can find it on Soi 4/1, a very narrow road (too narrow for cars) off of Phrapokklao Soi 4. Blue Garden Yoga: This studio has daily yoga classes, plus yoga teacher and massage therapist training.Classes are usually at 9 AM and 7 PM. It has a beautiful semi-open space with plants and flowers. Word to the wise: wear bug spray! The Yoga Tree: offers classes in yoga, pilates, dance, and meditation, as well as training courses. It has several classes throughout the day. Other yoga schools in Chiang Mai are Mahasiddha Tantra Yoga School, Om Ganesha Yoga, Wise Living Yoga Academy, Freedom Yoga. 9. Chat With a BuddhistMonk Would you like to learn more about Buddhism, Chiang Mai, northern Thai culture, Thai language, or where to find the best pad thai? You can talk about anything you wantduring these exchanges with Thai monks offered at various temples throughout the week. These â€Å"monk chats† are a really cool opportunity to exchange language, culture, and conversation and gain insight into Thai culture. A lot of young monks participate to practice their English. They’re casual conversations, and you can talk for as long or as short a time as you like. If you’re looking to learn more about Chiang Mai and chat with locals, then you should take advantage of one of these unique opportunities. Times and Locations of Monk Chats in Chiang Mai Here are some of the temples that offer monk chats, along with the times. Wat Chedi Luang: daily from 9 AM to 6 PM. Up to 50 young monks sit outside at large tables to chat with visitors. Wat Suan Dok: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 5 to 7PM Wat Umong: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 5:30 to 7:30 PM MCU Buddhist University, Chiang Mai Campus: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 pm to 730 pm Doi Suthep Temple: daily from 1 to 3 pm. 10. Visit the Hill Tribe Villages in Northern Thailand \ Donna Cymek/Flickr The main hill tribe peoples that live outside Chiang Mai are the Akha, the Palong, the Lahu, the Lisu, and the Karen, also referred to as the Long Necks because of the brass rings that women traditionally wear around their necks. Several groups give you the opportunity to visit and learn about the villages in northern Thailand. Ideally, the group you journey with should employ local villagers as guides andliaisonsbetween visitors and the communities. A couple reputable touring groups are Thailand Hilltribe Holidays and All Thailand Experiences. You’ll have the opportunity to go to markets, try new foods, lend a hand on farms, and possibly stay overnight in a village. You can also check out the Baan Tong Luang Village, an exhibition village featuring five hill tribe cultures. You can take a taxi to this exhibition village; no need for a guided tour. . Go Rock Climbing There’s some epic rock climbing outside of Chiang Mai according to a friend of mine. As a non-rock climber myself, I’ll have to take his word for it. The epicness is due to the limestone cliffs surrounding Chiang Mai. One especially famous crag is called Crazy Horse Buttress. You can climb with a group or private guide and rent equipment or bring your own. The best group is Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures. It’s about $57 for a full day of climbing with a private guide, transportation, lunch, and climbing gear. If you have your own gear and don't need a guide, they'll drive you to the crag and back for just $10 or so. They also have multi-day climbing courses and an indoor climbing wall in their gym. 12.Brave the Rapids on the Mae Teng River People of all ages and experiences levels can go out whitewater rafting on the nearby Mae Teng River. Some good rafting tour groups are Siam River Adventures, Chiang Mai Adventure, Active Thailand, and All Chiang Mai Tours. All inclusive day tours are about $52. Some tours combine whitewater rafting with other activities, like jungle trekking or visiting elephants. When you’re not keeping your eye on the rapids, you may see animals,maybe even elephants, in the jungle along the river’s shore. 13. Zipline Over the Jungle Keeping in the theme of outdoor adventure, ziplining is another fun activity in the jungle outside Chiang Mai! You can fly over the jungle and maybe even see gibbons up there with you in the trees. Ziplining is one of the more expensive of the Chiang Mai attractions at about $100 per person. The best groups to take you out for the day are Chiang Mai Zipline (Flight of the Gibbon), Zipline Chiang Mai, Eagle Track Chiang Mai, Jungle Flight, and Flying Squirrels. 14. Trek Through theJungle If you want to get outside but perhaps stay at a normal height and away from any white water rapids, then consider singing upfor a jungle trekking tour. There are literally hundreds of options and tour groups. When trying to decide, look to see if a group is certified the Tourism Authority of Thailand, as that means itmaintainscertain safety standards. Some highly rated trekking groups are Pooh Eco Trek, All Chiang Mai Tours, Trekking Collective Co, and Next Step Thailand. You can go out for a day or stay overnight for one or more days. The cost isaround 1000 baht, or $29, for a full day. Prices tend to go downif you sign up with a larger group of people. 15. Attend a Khantoke Dinner and Show Khantoke dinners are a centuries-old Lanna tradition. You sit on the floor around a bamboo tray laden with a variety of northern Thai dishes. Some of these foods include fried pumpkin, tomato and minced pork dip, red chili, fried chicken, pork curry, and sticky rice. As you eat, you watch traditional Thai dances and cultural performances. Two famous ones are the candle dance and sword dance. You may also step outside to see more costumed dances and (spoiler) surprise fireworks at the end. The dinner is a rather touristy outing, but the dances are really lovely. The dinner, show, and transportation cost about $25; only drinks aren’t included in the price. Two major Khantoke dinner restaurants are Old Chiangmai Cultural Center and Khum Khantoke. 16. See a Cabaret Show John Shedrick/Flickr Cabaret shows, usually with transgender dancers or performers in drag, are popular in Chiang Mai and throughout Thailand. Commonly known as ladyboy shows, they involve choreographed dances and extravagant costumes. The shows can be interactive, so don’t be surprised by some touchy-feely exchanges if you’re in the front row. To see a cabaret show, check out the nightly performance in Chinag Mai in Ansuan Market. It’s every night at 9:30, but you should probably buy your ticket 8 or 9. The ticket includes a drink and a snack. 18.Rent a Motorbike Are you eager to try out your motorbiking skills? There are lots of rental places throughout the city where you can rent a motorbike for a day or more. Rentals can be as cheap as $5 a day, while more powerful bikes for off-roading may cost between $20 and $30 a day. You can drive around the city, or go off the beaten track to explore northern Thailand. One popular motorbike trip takes you to the golden temple on the mountain, Wat Doi Suthep, and on to dirt roads that pass reservoirs. If you're feeling confident with your driving skills, you could also make the mountainous drive to the small town of Pai, which sits north of Chiang Mai. I say you have to be confident because the road to Pai is famous for its 762 curves, as well as its "sick stations" along the way for travelers who chose to take the bus. As someone prone to motion sickness, I didn't make the trip. If I did have the choice, though, I would take a motorbike rather than brave the topsy-turvy bus! If you are renting a motorbike, remember one key piece of information: Thai people drive on the left side of the road! 19. Check Out Chiang Mai University Chiang Mai University sits on over 700 acres west of the Old City. If you’re looking to get into greener spaces, you’ll enjoy walking or biking along its beautiful grounds. Beside the gardens, there are several great cafes, vegetarian and vegan restaurants, a small art gallery, and a geology museum. Due to a recent problem of Chinese tourists sneaking into classes, the university started charging an entry fee of $1 to $2 for visitors. It’s a great place to walk, have a picnic, see how local and visiting students live and study, and step away from the city. 20. Get a Bamboo Tattoo Amanda Roberts/Flickr Want to make sure your trip to Thailand is an experience you’ll never forget? You might commemorate your travels with a traditional Thai bamboo tattoo. Tattooing with bamboo is a technique that’s over 3,000 years old. It involves one or more needles attached to a bamboo stick. One advantage of this technique is that the tattoo has a faster healing time. Buddhist monks would get tattoos for protection and to show faith. Thai soldiers got them as well. According to legend, Thailand has never been occupied because of the power of the soldiers' bambootattoos. There are some traditional sacred tattoo designs called Sak Yant tattoos that are usually performed by monks. Not all monks will tattoo women, as custom prohibits touching between the sexes. While it’s still possible to get a Sak Yant tattoo at various temples, you should be careful about the standards of hygiene. A few highly rated bamboo tattoo parlors in Chiang Mai are Naga Tattoo, Deja Vu Tattoo, and Sam Tattoo. Visiting Chiang Mai: FinalThoughts Chiang Mai is a city that lingers with you. I can still clearly recall the incense-filled halls and clanging bells of beautiful ancient temples, as well as the bustle of night markets filled with unbelievably delicious street food. Not only is Chiang Mai very affordable, but it’s also very easy to navigate. Because tourism is a large part of the local economy, you’ll have no trouble arranging tours and transportation or finding things to do. In fact, you may find that you have too much on your agenda, between your own plans and the people whoapproach with flyers for Muay Thai fights and cabaret shows. Beyond the temples, streetfood, markets, and surrounding natural beauty, I also lovedChiang Mai'sfocus on health and wellness. Traveling can wear you down, but in Chiang Mai you can easily take care of your physical and spiritual health with yoga, Thai massages, steam rooms, fresh vegetables, and an endless array of smoothies. While Chiang Mai has a nightlife scene, it’s not a huge party city like some of the southern Thai islands. You’ll find that fellow Chiang Mai backpackers, travelers, and expats are more interested in culture, outdoor activities, conservation, and amazing food, all of which northern Thailand has in abundance. If you’re traveling to Thailand, then Chiang Mai, the lovely Rose of the North, should definitely be in your plans. After a few days in this happy, laid back city, you might find, like I did, that you don’t want to leave!