Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Aloha from Doha
I just had to say that ... other than that nothing is happening. My flight here was good - India was lit up like a Christmas tree and Qatar Airways is sang trọng lắm! It is just now hitting me that I am actually going back to Kenya. Cool. That is a good thing! Maybe I will remember my 4 words of Swahili. And if I only forget four words of Vietnamese then I am cool with that.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Chúc Giáng Sinh vui vẻ
Merry Christmas.
Now that I’ve gotten that merriness out of the way, let me turn to the real business at hand – being grumpy! So how was your Christmas Eve? Mine was sweet. In the morning I packed my stuff to move back to HCMC from a 6 week stint for work in Hanoi. I love going places, I even enjoy moving, but me and packing are like street kids and cops-at-the-end-of-the-month: less contact is better for everybody. After the hour ride to the airport I sat on the floor for an hour or two wondering why Noi Bai couldn’t get enough chairs. In less than two hours the flight takes you from Hanoi, where it really was cold enough to see your breath before you get out of bed in the morning, to Ho Chi Minh City, where you really can start sweating just thinking about putting on a Santa hat. The taxi home was two hours, perhaps a half hour of driving and the remaining time consisted of classic Saigon traffic jam - meditating to Tom and Jerry while my taxi driver, who couldn’t even open the car door for all the motorbikes packed around us, kindly stuck his head out the window to smoke and exchange gossip with the taxi driver in front of us and give dirty looks to the guys who whacked his mirrors with their handlebars to get another two feet forward. After finally arriving home slightly faint with hunger, I headed out for dinner and immediately found myself in another traffic jam (I don’t know why I thought there would only be one of those, the whole city was one massive cardio-motricular arrest). That was a good one, lasted about four hours, and my motorbike does not have Tom and Jerry so I was forced to listen to the impossibly tacky and mutilated Christmas music playing from somewhere. I never did get dinner… It is the true misfortune of Christmas Eve this year that it happened to coincide with Vietnam’s football team’s good fortune, which accounted for a lot of the traffic and the roving bands faux gangsta kids celebrating with bad driving (bad, even for Vietnam!), shouting, and occasionally attacking taxis with Vietnamese flags on bamboo poles, in true unsupervised-13-year-old style. It was a great time. How appropriate that the place where somebody puts on a Christmas show in the park, with lasers and giant Christmas trees and neon and “snow” and ear piercing recordings of medleys mixing the Macarena, a heavy metal version of Silent Night and Santa Clause is Coming, with no more traffic control than normal (which is pretty much none) so the people coming in can’t come and the people going out can’t go, how appropriate that this place is the same place where families suddenly stuck on their motorbikes in a jam so tight you literally cannot walk across the street until 11:30 at night not only don’t have any problem with that, they just decide to make it a party. Buy a hat (which has to be passed over to you through the crowd from the sidewalk saleslady ten feet away), sing a song, send a text message to your friends inviting them out to join the party… Eventually, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that sort of baseless giddiness rubs off on you. So, Merry Christmas to everyone, here’s wishing you a more suitable situation than a traffic jam in which to celebrate, and a Christmas more worth celebrating than a football game!
Cheers!
Now that I’ve gotten that merriness out of the way, let me turn to the real business at hand – being grumpy! So how was your Christmas Eve? Mine was sweet. In the morning I packed my stuff to move back to HCMC from a 6 week stint for work in Hanoi. I love going places, I even enjoy moving, but me and packing are like street kids and cops-at-the-end-of-the-month: less contact is better for everybody. After the hour ride to the airport I sat on the floor for an hour or two wondering why Noi Bai couldn’t get enough chairs. In less than two hours the flight takes you from Hanoi, where it really was cold enough to see your breath before you get out of bed in the morning, to Ho Chi Minh City, where you really can start sweating just thinking about putting on a Santa hat. The taxi home was two hours, perhaps a half hour of driving and the remaining time consisted of classic Saigon traffic jam - meditating to Tom and Jerry while my taxi driver, who couldn’t even open the car door for all the motorbikes packed around us, kindly stuck his head out the window to smoke and exchange gossip with the taxi driver in front of us and give dirty looks to the guys who whacked his mirrors with their handlebars to get another two feet forward. After finally arriving home slightly faint with hunger, I headed out for dinner and immediately found myself in another traffic jam (I don’t know why I thought there would only be one of those, the whole city was one massive cardio-motricular arrest). That was a good one, lasted about four hours, and my motorbike does not have Tom and Jerry so I was forced to listen to the impossibly tacky and mutilated Christmas music playing from somewhere. I never did get dinner… It is the true misfortune of Christmas Eve this year that it happened to coincide with Vietnam’s football team’s good fortune, which accounted for a lot of the traffic and the roving bands faux gangsta kids celebrating with bad driving (bad, even for Vietnam!), shouting, and occasionally attacking taxis with Vietnamese flags on bamboo poles, in true unsupervised-13-year-old style. It was a great time. How appropriate that the place where somebody puts on a Christmas show in the park, with lasers and giant Christmas trees and neon and “snow” and ear piercing recordings of medleys mixing the Macarena, a heavy metal version of Silent Night and Santa Clause is Coming, with no more traffic control than normal (which is pretty much none) so the people coming in can’t come and the people going out can’t go, how appropriate that this place is the same place where families suddenly stuck on their motorbikes in a jam so tight you literally cannot walk across the street until 11:30 at night not only don’t have any problem with that, they just decide to make it a party. Buy a hat (which has to be passed over to you through the crowd from the sidewalk saleslady ten feet away), sing a song, send a text message to your friends inviting them out to join the party… Eventually, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that sort of baseless giddiness rubs off on you. So, Merry Christmas to everyone, here’s wishing you a more suitable situation than a traffic jam in which to celebrate, and a Christmas more worth celebrating than a football game!
Cheers!
Monday, December 15, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Old Places, New Photos
Fishing boats off the coast at Nha Trang.
The memorial at the site of the My Lai massacre in 1968.
The names of the dead.
Rural Quang Ngai Province
Memorial cemetery for North Vietnamese soldiers killed in the Truong Son mountain range.
Outside the museum at Khe Sanh, a major US airfield during the war and site of a lengthy seige in 1968.
Da Krong Bridge, where the new Ho Chi Minh Highway crosses the Ben Hai River near the old DMZ.
Cruising the Perfume River in Hue.
The contemplative path...
Behind Thien Mu Pagoda near Hue.
Imperial tombs outside of Hue.
Tet Trung Thu, the Autumn Festival, in Hoi An.
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