Day 4: Amazing Anxiety

Today, we visited the Chiang Mai University to sit for a lecture on globalization and its effects on Chiang Mai. Tourism and Chinese tourists cropped up more than once, although everything the professor said had already been covered in the news.

Upon interviewing the professor, I learnt that the things she had covered about Chinese tourists in her lecture was indeed taken from the news. In fact, she had little contact with Chinese tourists and their poor travel behaviours. It seemed to me that the media was so pervasive and prevalent that she had been influenced to view Chinese tourists in a poor light. After all, I too thought very poorly of Chinese tourists, arguably because of the incidents I had read about in the news.

The next portion of the day was called the Leadership Amazing Race. Although I was not very close or bonded with my group members, we got along very well. According to Professor Astrid, we operated as a good unit, with different members fulfilling different roles in a team. Her analysis of our group dynamics was compelling, as I had never thought of us in that way before. Although we did not manage to complete the route assigned to us, and we were not intimately close, we were still capable of being adequately professional and efficient in making decisions without conflict.

At the end of the amazing race, we were asked to geographically map out our emotions along the course of the race. One thing I did not expect before this trip to Chiang Mai was to learn more about myself. By the end of the emotional mind map, I had learnt that I was a goal-getter, and when things did not go the way I wanted it to, I retreated to stress and anxiety. Towards the end of the route I had mapped, the emotion “confused” kept cropping up with increasing frequency. I hated feeling at a loss, but I dealt with it by getting annoyed and lashing out at my group mates. I remember becoming more and more reckless on the roads and caring less about the traffic. Although I tried to hide my stress during the race, I could still feel it writhing beneath my skin, putting me on edge.

It was only after the amazing race that I relaxed. It took me a while to understand that plowing through the route was less important than enjoying myself and taking care of my group. I understand now that the race was less about getting the goal, and more about developing my group dynamics as well as my own character.