My Lil’ Saigon

I went to China.

It was pretty. I will agree with that. We went to Yangshuo, a wonderful little tourist area in Guilin, Guangzhou province. Supposedly it is one of the most beautiful spots in China. From my pictures (as seen below) you can see for yourself. The area was great, but it is really difficult to get to from Vietnam. I only really had 3 options, and only one of them had a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the one we took involved a 8 hour layover (which then turned into a 10 hour layover). We didn’t have anything we cared to see in Guangzhou, so we just stayed in the airport, where we planned on resting in the airport hotel. Unfortunately that didn’t work out. Eventually I fell asleep on the floor of the airport, something I thought was entirely common, but apparently not. The wife notes that I received many strange stares, and possibly one or 2 people took pictures. In case any of those folks are reading, I’d like to see those pictures.

While in Yangshuo I came to a realization, that I’m not a big fan of southern Chinese food (I’ve had some traditional northern food before, and that was not so oily). I also learned to appreciate Vietnamese food much more. I was actually craving for fish sauce by the time I flew back. Another thing I noticed was that beer was not a common product for consumption. Though it is present, not many Chinese seem to drink it during the meal. It is such a stark contrast to Vietnam that I was shocked, though I had been told that before.

The way back was a nightmare, with flights being “canceled” or as some people call it “non-existant due to no customers”. I’m convinced that the flight we had booked no longer exists or only runs in high tourist season. Either way, we had to sit in a airport hotel for 10 hours until the next flight to our destination, eat 2 meals off of trays I can only imagine they borrowed from the local prison, and deal with power in our room that continually went on and off. Then after being assured through terribly broken English (the best English speaker in the airport as well) that we would have someone waiting at the next airport to take us to a hotel, when we arrived the entire airport was virtually empty (at 10pm), with the only employee for the airline we were using being a stinky little bastard who wouldn’t give me any information and took forever to arrange our hotel room. I was asking for the next flight to Ho Chi Minh, but he kept refusing and stating that I should just come back in the morning at 7am. Finally another employee came by and sat down. So I bothered her until she would look for the next flight for me. She was unable to do it and asked the stinky little man, when he saw I wasn’t going to give up he finally looked and told me it was at 3pm. All of that trouble when he could have just told me the truth about 10 minutes previously. The hotel was passable at least

Enough of that though. I was very happy to be back. Not sure if I’ll ever go back to China. Check Flickr for some awesome pictures of the Yangshuo Area. Otherwise, here are my pictures.

The parents came in on a plane from Japan late last night!

They are here, they slept well, they ate Pho… and now we are off to the City.. More to come later!

I’ve just been lazy.

Latest non-useful addictions have been:

Wilbur Smith Books: Monsoon and Blue Horizon.

TV: House M.D. and Las Vegas (went through 2 seasons on Las Vegas in just over a week)

Hoping to be useful over the next month.. we’ll see though. I’ve promised that before.

So, it’s been a month. No blogging. I really am bad at this.

Anyway. I was back in the states for thanksgiving. I really enjoyed that. There is nothing like a good holiday dinner to relieve any stress you have built up from work, etc. Good ole’ Nueske’s bacon was a definite plus to the vacation. Not much can wake up a person up like that smell.

Anyway, I’m back in Vietnam now. Starting to play soccer and maybe some ultimate frisbee in my free time… after I recover from a badly sprained ankle that I suffered in my 2nd night of soccer.

Other than that? Maybe I’ll post a bit more often.. you never know!

After a long hiatus from anything blog related…..

I’ll now write a short story of intrigue and blah blah blah.

Motto of the Epic Tale: “We do stupid things”

Seemingly everywhere I went while my friend was here, something stupid was done. On my birthday, we probably shouldn’t have had that late night bottle of rhum. At Jungle Beach, it is possible we shouldn’t have volunteered to wake up at 3:30am to carry camera equipment up a mountain (small mountain at least). In Hoi An we shouldn’t have been trusting of our hotel manager when he told us the place down the road was excellent quality for cheap prices (tailor). When we were driving motorbikes, we shouldn’t have let the mechanics continue to take apart the bike when we both were almost positive nothing good could come out of what he was doing. Also, we should have backtracked rather than kept going forward to find the highway (which happened to be… right next to where we would have been if we had backtracked.)

Anyway. That is just a sampler.

My friend Luke found a great many things in Vietnam to be interesting, and I’m pleased to say he fared much better than most White folk. He actually ate real Vietnamese food without complaining about taste, cleanliness, or other. Except for the heat, and incredible pollution of HCM, I’m pretty sure he enjoyed the change of pace from Northern Wisconsin. Besides the first few days of getting used to the bargaining you have to do in the markets, I think everything went well, he did managed to buy 2 pairs of sunglasses, virtually the same, the second pair being 75% cheaper than the first. Nice work.

The overall trip did not go as planned. We spent more days than we should have in the city.

First 5 days: In HCMC, including my birthday.
Then off to Jungle beach for 3 days, 2 nights. I’ll get into that some more in the next posting.
After that: off to Hoi An for 1 night (over night trainride to get there, so we got there really early in the morning).
Back to HCM for 3 days.
2 days of “day trips” which were minimum of 12 hours, most of which was driving from place to place (some of which was sitting at a mechanics place watching them hack away at the bike for no good reason).
Then back to HCM for the last 4 days.

All in all, it was good. I really enjoyed being away from the school atmosphere, it made me miss working in the “real world”. Also I’m pretty sure I’ve contracted an unhealthy desire to own more motorbikes than I can possibly drive. Luckily I don’t have the money to follow through with that….

As Jon said over in his blog, something strange is happening around the city. They are cutting down trees, or branches of trees.

All along the canal ( the dirty, nasty, whoknowswhatdiseasesarefloatingaroundinthere canal) they have taken down ALL of the trees on the Tan Binh district end and it seems like they will continue down the rest of the canal. Why they would do this I don’t know, I can only assume that they are going to be doing more construction. Which is good… if it is water treatment plants, but still, why get rid of the nice trees. When I speed up and down that road I always see people under those trees, they seemed to be a very nice area to rest during the hot midday sun. Well, Assuming that you could handle the odor of the canal.

Also, I happened to be eating at one of Ly’s most favorite childhood breakfast joints, on the corner of Dien Bien Phu and Ly Quy Don, while on the outside wall of the place they workers were going at trees with chainsaws and climbers taking down branchs. Most of these branches were hitting the metal roof above my head, and I was thinking that maybe I should move before a big one came crashing through the roof and onto my head. Anyway, as I was leaving I looked up at the tree and noticed that they had taken a significant portion of the huge canopy away. Like they were scalping the tree or something. A sad sight.

Next I was driving to the W.A.R hq near the HTV building when I saw that nearly the entire street had trees that had buzzcuts. No branches at all, only tiny little twigs with tons of leaves. Most of these trees are 20m tall aswell, so it makes a funny sight.

One can only wonder what the city is doing. I’ve never heard of such tree management plans as this, and I don’t know what they are doing, but I really don’t want to see these trees disappear. If there is one thing that this city desperately needs (let us not count how many things it actually needs desperately) it is green space.

In 3 very long weeks one of my best friends from the states will arrive in Vietnam for 3 weeks of well deserved vacation time. Being that this will be my first long vacation since Tet (save the 5ish days I was in Nha Trang) I plan on making it an adventure. Though if you knew my family, namely my father and uncle, you would already know that any trip I go on ends up with some adventure. Ask me over a beer, you hear some good stories. Moving on. In the 3 weeks that he is here we will manage to do many things that I’ve been planning on for over a year.

Here are the possibilities:

1) Visit as many beer haus’ as possible. I’ve been to a few, but there are many more that claim German or Czech pilsner. I want to know which is the best. I can’t do this alone, and Ly doesn’t drink beer for taste. I have heard that men that drink alone at bars are there for one of two things, Being an alcoholic, or looking for ladies. I’d rather not be grouped in either of those, so if I am to drink alone, I’ll do it at home.

2) Jungle Beach. complete isolation. Sounds lovely.

3) Hoi An. Don’t know much about this place, but it sounds pretty relaxing. I want a silk bathrobe.

4) Hue? Possibly. Imperial capital. Could be done, but I don’t know there is something else that would be better in my mind.

5) Motorcycle ride through the countryside and to Cat Tien/Cat Loc national parks. 5ish hours from HCM and a large preserve. Supposedly it has many animals and it also has (again supposedly) one of the last surviving Javen Rhino populations in the world. You stay in the jungle (kinda) and you can hike and rent bicycles to ride around. Hell Yes this sounds awesome.

Open to any suggestions. I’d really like some ideas for where to go in Hoi An or Cat tien, I’m pretty much clueless there.

I’m not actually posting anything about Nha Trang (haha! Suckers!)

I just wanted to note that my Flickr photostream has been updated and I plan on integrating it into the site. To look at it now, check out my Pictures Page (see link above).

For now I’ll continue to teach 5 year olds in the morning and 3 year olds in the afternooon. Today 40% of them were crying. I’m not lying.

Edit: Fine, here is a link for those of you who didn’t take the time to go into my pictures link.

Progress continues, I have now spent 2 hours on my blog this week!

Please see my “Work Permit Guide” for some information on getting a work permit in Vietnam. I am hardly an expert, as I haven’t been able to get one myself and no one has been able to give me a straight answer, but I wrote down some things that I didn’t see else where.

Also remember, I am from the States, so this won’t work for you crazy Brits, Oz’ or elsewhere people.

Clicky

Apparently…

The entire country of France was looking at my website at one time….