For Now

"For reasons I cannot explain there's some part of me wants to see Graceland."
- Paul Simon, "Graceland"

"And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honour or fall into great misfortune - still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, ... better perhaps than we are."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Susie and I stood, both sweating from the late afternoon weather of the Mekong Delta, in our classroom, looking out over the benches filled with students. The boys sat on the right side - huddled closely together - trying to come to a consensus on what the answer might be. The girls sat on the right side - more spread out, with some sitting in their seats and others using the seats as footrests and the desktops as seats - leaning forward with anticipation. It was their turn. The girls already were assured victory. Susie and I had decided that this would be the last word and the girls were winning 4 to 1 as it was.

My blue shirt was smeared with a mixture of dirt and multi-colored chalk. My forehead shone with sweat, and my stubble (which the girls had played with, in curious horror earlier) was patchy and needed shaving. Susie took the little piece of broken white chalk and began to draw a splotchy line - broken six times with a hyphen in the middle. It looked like this,

_ _ _ _ - _ _ _

It was our last day of class. Three weeks of housebuilding and teaching in the Mekong Delta were coming to a close in a game of hangman with our children.
**Our kids are really good at hangman. Susie and I often wondered if they cheated somehow, given how quickly they were able to fill in the blanks successfully.
So without delaying any longer, Susie, in a brilliant stroke of inspiration, gave the hint for the word we had chosen.

"It's something you have to say, but don't want to."

The girls - after a quick meeting - broke up and began to chant "G! G! G!"

G_ _ _ - _ _ _

I had never looked very carefully at a map of Ireland before in my life until I came to Saigon. It just seemed like a little green blob dropped off the coast of England. No form. No shape. Just a place.

But when you look carefully at Ireland on a map, you will see that it resembles a barking dog sitting on its "bum" with its legs pointed out towards the United States. It's a pretty cute dog if you let your imagination shape it a little bit.

"I'm from the Dog's Bum of Ireland," Michael had explained to us.

We had met Michael after a small group dinner at a Nepalese Restaurant on Le Thanh Ton. Wanting an after dinner drink, we had walked down the street and passed by Sheridan's Irish House - an Irish pub we had read about in our guidebooks. So, figuring that Irish food was just as "ethnic" as Nepalese food, we ducked into the bar.

Sheridan's is a cramped, short-roofed space. Pictures, ranging from maps of Ireland (looking like a dog) to family shields to a picture of Ho Chi Minh in a sailor's hat, cover every inch of the walls. The space is dark and the wood-paneled booths only add to the gloomy (and yet warm) atmosphere. The bar itself sits at the very back of the room, and you have to duck your head under the headboard to ask the bartender for a drink. To the right of the bar, the big-bearded owner (also named Michael) half-sits on a stool with his left hand on one knee and his right hand shifting between his pint and the computer mouse that controls the music. The computer screen shines in his glasses.

Cramming ourselves into a small booth, we had hardly ordered our drinks, when a man, sitting at a booth by himself, leaned across the room, and in an Irish accent offered to trade booths. Overcome with his generosity (and Irish accent), we told him that we'd rather just join him.

And so it was that we came to meet Michael of the Dogs Bum of Ireland.

Sitting with a pint of Foster's and reading a travel magazine, Michael was dressed in a pink dress shirt, khaki pants, and brown loafers - the last detail was something I didn't notice until I had accidentally kicked the empty box of beer out from under his feet.

"I actually might need that. Otherwise, my feet barely touch the ground," he spoke shyly.

Overjoyed at having found a new friend, we began to ask Michael about himself. He was a salesman for an aqua tab corporation based out of Ireland; however, his job had him traveling all around the world for a good portion of the year. He had a wife and three daughters.

"It's pathetic," he shook his head, "I always find myself back in my hotel room just watching these videos." As he told us this, he pulled out his cell phone and turned on a video, showing his three little blonde and red haired daughters running around a small, fenced-in backyard with his wife (with a shy smile) avoiding the camera's eye.

"I miss them a lot."

The night continued on. We talked about politics, his business, college (and why we should all be accountants...), and religion. We laughed, and as the spirit(s) began to move us, we proposed a toast.

"Cheers to...," we began, but Michael cut us off.

"No, in Ireland, we say "Slainte". It means "to good health."

"Then slainte!" We replied as our glasses moved to each others.

At the end of the night as we stood in front of Sheridan's, I shook Michael's hand.

"If I ever find myself in the Dog's Bum, I'll be sure to look you up."

"Good luck to you, my friend. You'll go far," he replied with a smile.

And as I turned to walk away, I began to feel a sharp pang in my heart that I had never felt before. It was a feeling that I have felt increasingly on this trip. It was the feeling of knowing that I would never see Michael again. Even if I did ever find myself in the Dog's Bum of Ireland, what were the chances that I would actually see Michael even then?

He had gotten us through that night and helped me understand that the best way to cope with homesickness was to tell some other homesick soul about what home is.

As I turned the corner, I thought about Ireland and how, thanks to Michael, a spot on a blob had become a bum on a dog and even more importantly, a home of a friend (however short the friendship may have been). I felt myself - as I entered the gates and passed under the trees by our guest house - half whispering the words, "Slainte, Michael."

"O! O! O!" The girls started to scream. The boys looked panic-stricken, and I began to feel a distant pang in my heart. I tried to start taking the faces of the children and the details of the room. Susie walked to the chalkboard and drew two circles over two of the lines. The girls exploded with applause.

Goo_ - _ _ _

I first understood just how little English the manager of our hotel in the Mekong Delta spoke, when I got sick. I must have eaten some bad meat or something, because just about the only food I was able to keep inside myself (besides rice, which was just out of the question at this point) was bread.

We had gotten by just fine for the first week and a half. My main interaction with him had come either in passing (when a nod would suffice), in buying a bottle of water from the behind the front desk (when a few fingers to show "how much" were all that was needed), or in ordering breakfast in the morning when I would simply say "Pho" (to which he would repeat, nod, and bring the noodly beef soup).

But pho was simply not going to work at this moment. I was already a bit suspicious of the meat as the doer of the damage of my stomach, so I couldn't just say "pho". I needed bread - which, I think, is "banh mi" in Vietnamese.

I came into the kitchen around noon and found him walking barefoot to one of the cabinets. He looked at me with his customary smile.

I smiled back.

"Uhm...banh mi?"

His smile widened.

I tried to gesture my eating a loaf of "banh mi".

His smile grew wider and his head began to slowly shift from left to right to left to right.

He didn't understand. I didn't panic. I had come prepared. I took out my notebook and a pen and began to draw a loaf of bread (which, given his reaction, must have looked like a mixture between a cat eyeball and a football). I tried a sliced loaf of bread. He began to understand. I wrote "b-a-n-h-m-i" on the paper. We were getting somewhere. He nodded. Waving me outside, around the corner, and finally to the room of one of the Vietnamese roommates who was also sick that day. The roommate looked around wearily.

"He says that he doesn't know what you want."

I sighed. "Just a loaf of bread."

So as I sat in my room a few minutes later, the man knocked on my door with a piece of French bread in a green plastic bag. Then, with a sly grin, took his right arm out from behind his back to reveal another loaf of sweet bread he had obviously gone out to buy from the market. And, oh, it was delicious.

I was truly thankful to him for not only this one instance, but his general hospitality towards our group. He always smiled and would laugh whenever I (through a translator) would ask for another carton of yogurt to settle my stomach.

But when it was time to leave, I fell at a loss for words again. I had just loaded all my bags into the bus and wanted to go make sure that I hadn't left anything in my room. As I passed back to my room, I passed him and stopped. I nodded. He nodded. And then we shook hands. Smiled once more. And left.

At this point they knew. The kids had to be cheating. We hadn't even taught them the alphabet, and yet they knew perfectly well how to spell this word! The girls were clapping, one girl was standing and screaming on top of one of the desks. It was chaos in the room as the boys tried to out-scream them and drown out the girls' chanting, and yet the girl's voice in the back shot over them all, so loud and so clear.


"D! D! D!"

Susie tried to act like they were wrong, walking slowly towards the gallows that stood empty on the chalk board. Unfortunately, she could only act for so long. The girls began to scream with horror, the boys with joy, until suddenly Susie turned to fill in the "D" above the next blank line.

Good - _ _ _

When we first met Eric, he was doing an Irish jig around the cramped common area between the tables at Sheridan's. We watched him as he would be talking with someone at the bar - seeming quite normal and subdued - until suddenly he would spring forth and with a triumphant "HA-HA!" begin to jig - his feet overcome with the spirit of the lord of the dance.

So it came with mixed emotions, when the jigger, himself, sat down at our table. Not feeling particularly outgoing, we cordially asked his name and he introduced himself as Eric, and then promptly launched off into a spiel about how young people have no soul if they can't dance to the Celtic music that was being played.

He continued to drink and continued to get funnier - throwing in random quips about the decay of society and, on our second meeting, even created a short Dr. Seuss-ish rhyme about the "St-fu".

"Just imagine what the St-fu... can do... for you..." he mused with a baritone growl.

On top of his quips and details of his life in Virginia (that's where he's from), he would drop his head from time to time, his chin hitting his chest. We would think we had lost him until we would notice his head slowly bobbing, and then his feet tapping, and then his body springing fully to life to send him jigging about the room.

On our last night with Eric, he came into Sheridan's with less enthusiasm. He had just dropped off his son with his ex-wife. The conversation was subdued. He began to preach.

"...You guys have so much potential. Just don't mess up like I did. I'm happy for you guys...."

We quietly thanked him and tried to smile.

A bagpipe began to play vigorously in the background. Eric sat, staring off into space for a moment. We eyed each other and watched as his head began to slowly bob. We began to smile, and suddenly - as he always did - he leapt from his chair with a mighty "HA-HA!" and began to jig through the tables.

So not knowing what else to do, we stood up and began to jig (or something like that...) about Sheridan's with him.

Eric was not perfect, but he infused an energy into us every time we encountered him. He made us laugh, shared lessons he had learned from his own life, and had even shown us what kind of soul it took to dance to Celtic music.

I didn't notice the moment he left, but I left shortly afterwards, as I caught him getting into a taxi to go home. It was our last night in Saigon before going to the Mekong Delta, and I began to feel that same pang that I had felt with Michael, our hotel manager, and the kids.

I didn't know what to say, and yet I knew that "Good-bye" in this situation would not do. It was more than "Good-bye". It was "have a good life". It was "we've enjoyed knowing you". It was "you're a better guy than you give yourself credit for." It was "good luck to you." And yet, what I finally heard myself say, as we shook hands and hugged, were only two words that somehow captured everything I needed to say.

"Thank you."

If they had been real, the gallows on the chalk board would have been completely empty. There would have been no crowd to see the hanging as there would be no man to hang. The noose would have swung whenever the wind decided to blow. The children were not going to let the innocent chalk man be hung. They knew exactly what the word was, and yet they were painfully drawing it out.

"B! B! B!"

Susie filled in the next letter.

Good-b _ _

Like I said, it's a feeling I've never had before. They're just two one syllable words. Easy enough, right? I've said it before. I've said it to my mom when I go to run an errand. I've said it on the phone to friends I was on my way to see. I've said it to friends going off to college. And I've said it to girlfriends at the end of a phone conversation at night. Even in situations as painful as saying good-bye to my parents before this trip or college, I didn't get the same feeling I got in saying good-bye to the people I've met here.

It's not a lack of feeling on my part for friends, family, and loved ones. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I miss y'all more than words and actions will ever be able to convey, but my good-byes to y'all (friends and family) always come with an assumed catch, that is, that the "good-bye" is just for now.

Of course, I hate spending time away from any of you, but when I've felt homesick this summer, my heart has been strengthened with the knowledge that I'll be seeing you all again soon, and that our absence from one another is, in fact, only for now.

That said, this pang in my heart that I get when I say good-bye to people I meet here comes, I believe, from the absence of that little catch, "for now."

I don't if I would be friends with Michael or Eric or our hotel manager if they lived in Mississippi (or if I would ever meet them at all!), but there's something sacred about the time we spent together - however brief it may have been.

In a sense, we were all moving - quite lost - along our own paths, and yet were able to come together and help one another (whether through stories of home or through laughter or through jigging about a cramped Irish pub in Saigon) through the darkness of night until the way became light again.

Who knows if we prevailed, but if nothing else, we struggled through it all, together.


The absence of a chalk man on the board meant our time was coming to an end. We were spelling out the end of our time together, and the children could not have been happier. I wished they would mess up, forget how to spell "Good-bye," just so I could have another week, another moment, to take it all in.

"Y! Y! Y!"

Susie filled in the second to last letter.

Good-by_

They hadn't forgotten...

I don't think I know this city, Saigon, very well. It's large and overwhelming, often not very welcoming. It's imposing and frightening. It's loud and confusing. It's dirty. It's chaotic. It smells bad in places, and whenever it rains here, life has to stop.

I went to the top of a building today and was able to look out over the city. There were low clouds in the sky and the city became hidden after stretching out for what seemed like miles. It's a huge place, I realized, and I will never fully know it.

As I drive back home on the back of motorbike at end of the night, I try to take in the city. As terrible and crazy and unwelcoming as it is, it is also beautiful.

Men pull their bikes along the edges of the street with dried fish hanging underneath fluorescent lights strung to their bicycles. Women squat around small griddles, making thin vanilla-sweet waffles. Xe-om drivers call out to you to take a ride and men and women fry increasingly-delicious-smelling foods in little street stands, while people, hunched over their steaming bowls of noodles, cram into tiny rooms around long tables, laughing and toasting one another.

The HTV building glows blue and violet and yellow and green at night. A building flashes the word "PERFECT" on top of its roof. Advertisements blind you with glowing-flashing lights and motorbikes constantly honk and take over even the sidewalks.

I ride on the back of the motorbike back home and try to take in what I can of the city. The city speaks,

"I'm changing, you know," she tells me, pointing to the BMW's and the KFC's and the flashing signs of big businesses.

"I know," I reply. "Though you're very nice the way you are."

"That's very nice of you to say that."

"I'm also leaving soon."

"Well, do try and remember me as I was. I might not be the same city the next time you return."

So I close my eyes, breath in the air blowing so quickly across my face and through my hair, and release my grip from the handles to let my hands feel as though I'm flying along through the streets of the city. We speed up Le Duan, and I open my eyes just in time to see the Prudential building emerge from behind another - glowing red and blue against the black night sky.

Susie and I begin to wave to the children as they begin to cry out "E! E! E!". The boys have been defeated and the girls erupt with celebration. We try to tell them how much we've enjoyed knowing and teaching them, but they are either ecstatic with victory or crushed with defeat. We stand by the door as the children begin to file out, each waving, and saying, with large smiles, "Good-bye!"

To which, it only seems fitting to reply ...

"Good-bye!"

So that's it for the blog. I've had a ball doing it, and I hope you (whoever has decided to keep up or just read from time to time) enjoyed it. I'm sorry for being a bit less productive there at the end, but spending time in a place for long enough forces you to look a bit harder for material to write about.

I'm leaving in exactly 36 hours and will be back home on Sunday. I absolutely can't wait to see you all.

So to you, Reader, I say "Good-bye"

....for now, at least :)

To Those of You Who Can't Sleep at Night (pt. 2)

I hope that the last post didn't drop off too much yesterday. I was absolutely exhausted, and I've been running over sentences in my head, wondering if they made sense or not. Anyway, here's the second part of the blog (and my day).

12-12:30

We eat lunch at the same house everyday. It is probably a 20-25 minute bike ride away from the house we are building, but we can usually cut it down to about 15, given the rabid hunger that sets in around 10:30.
The old woman that cooks for us is very sweet, and I think we call her Ba Bay, which translates to "Mother 7". We have still yet to meet mothers 1-6, but I'm sure they're delightful.
The food ranges from soup with potatoes and carrots to duck eggs (I've been passing on those) to beef with pineapples (a favorite of ours); however, it is the tea that we all bike so quickly for. It's not that it's particularly delicious, but given our dehydrated condition, it is Godly nectar. Mother 7's grandchildren are responsible for refilling our rapidly emptied cups, and they do a wonderful job with it - though the ice-bearing grandchild is a bit overzealous with his duty and will often place a large prism of ice on top of an already overflowing cup. It's a nice gesture, and we always thank him regardless.

12:30-2:00

Something that we do not do (though we should) in the United States is nap in the afternoons. Work hard in the morning, nap for just a bit, and then pick right back up and finish the day. I may start a campaign for the mid-afternoon nap once I'm back.

Anyway, this is my absolute favorite time of the day. We bike from Mother 7's house back to the main road where there is an open-air coffee shop that makes my heart and soul swell with happiness.

Basically, it is a glorified shed with plastic chairs and plastic tables (meant for children and their tea parties). But to describe it as just a shed with chairs and tables would be missing the point. It is a gathering place. People gather around long tables (plastic ones, set end to end) and drink heavenly coffees (1/2 coffee, 1/2 condensed milk...I keep trying to tell myself that that feeling creeping through my heart is love and not an artery being clogged*)
*A quick note to my mom: That last sentence is purely metaphorical, so no worries about things creeping in my heart. I'm fine, and I miss you :)
And when I say that people gather, it is remarkable the variety of people that come. Everyone from local party members to the local pop star diva (I wish I could explain...) gather here for coffee.
Truly, the place makes me want to open a restaurant that could draw the variety of people that this place does.

Unfortunately, our feelings of intense happiness and relaxation, prove incredibly hard to pull away from as 2 draws nearer and nearer. The cafe - as wonderful as it is - is a bit like the island of the lotus eaters in the Odyssey. It's damn near impossible to leave.

2:00-4:00

Susie, Hieu, and I teach English in the afternoons to a group (ranging from 8 students to 35) of elementary-aged students (ages 2-11). We've been teaching basic phrases, lots of colors, and playing lots of games as well. It's a lot of fun, though completely exhausting. Our classroom is a brick-floored, un-air conditioned sauna with two columns of about 6 long desks each.

The left side of the classroom is nearly all girls (all of whom are perfectly brilliant), while the right side is a mixture of indifferent boys, Danh the wonderboy, 2 year olds, and Dat.

Dat didn't come to class for the first week until about Thursday. Class was quiet and lessons orderly. Hands were raised. Questions were answered. Pictures were drawn. English was taught.

Then last Thursday afternoon, a 3 foot tall 5 to 7 year old with a white and blue baseball cap entered our class...

Most of our teaching consists of initially writing words and phrases up on the board and having the kids repeat what we say. It goes a little like this.

Tom: Ok, now can you say "I am fine, thank you"?
Class (with bristling enthusiasm): I am fine thank you!
Dat: BA!

Generally, one on one attention is the best for him, as he is incredibly well behaved in these settings.
Tom: Ok, let's say..."My"
Dat (with doe eyes and turtle lips): My
Tom: "name..."
Dat (Growing quieter, gentler, and cuter): Name
Tom (Becoming encouraged...showing encouragement with eyes and head slightly raised): "is..."
Dat (beginning to crack a smile, though still growing quieter): Is...
Tom (inwardly ecstatic): Dat
Dat (unsure of what's going on, yet encouraged by delighted look on teacher's face): Dat
Tom: Yes! Great! Wonderful job!
Tom begins to turn with smug confidence.
Dat (Kicking Tom's shin and screaming with renewed vitality): BA!

Regardless, we have a blast. Older boys, parents, and old dogs all will gather in the door from time to time. It's nice.

4:00-6:00

I race back to my bicycle to ride back to town. Now, the cows are out on the side of the road - their paddies, lining the roads. Dogs bring their erotic activities out in front of cars with horns blaring. And children - with seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm - rush out to the road to scream, "Hallo!"

...to which we reply, "Hallo!"

The sky is open and the clouds are dramatic, reminding me of laughing crocodiles and baby elephants playing with beach balls. It's a nice Eden up there, and I slow down my pedaling to enjoy the scenery.

When I arrive back to the hotel, I am dripping with sweat (have been all day) and hop in the bathroom for a brain-freezingly and nipple-hardingly cold shower. I usually hate cold showers, but here...here, they are magic.

6:00-7:00

Dinner in the carport. Anything and everything is delicious at this point. Though, the meal becomes even more delightful when Samson offers me one of his frozen choco-pies (think smaller moon pies). Chocolate smears across my teeth, and I am in heaven.

7:00-9:00/1:00

The rest of the night depends on our exhaustion, though typically, it does include me imaginging the possibilities of life on a boat with a tiger (I'm reading Life of Pi, which is quite delightful), playing card games, drinking Vietnamese beer, laughing (a lot), debating every possible human rights/current issue of the day, swatting mosquitoes (is there an "e" in there?), and eventually passing out from thinking about how exhausting the next day will be.

If you're up, send some thoughts my way. I promise you, I'm probably sending them right back.

Sleep well. Will write pretty soon. Back in Saigon in about a week.

Can't wait to see y'all,
tom

To Those of You Who Can't Sleep at Night (Pt. 1)

Rarely do I ever wake up in the night. I'm the type of person that can sleep through most anything once I'm asleep.

It's a blessing and a curse, I suppose. Fortunately, I will never (or...have never) been roused from sleep by the air conditioner switching on. While unfortunately, I have been known to sleep through tornado sirens (they could be louder...) and the alarm in my house going off at night (it's terrifying that i can sleep through it).

Truly, the only things that can wake me in the night are a) shaving cream to the face b) my name, repeated, over and over with nudging c) cold feet d) unbrushed teeth.

D) has been a recent development...a good one, I suppose, but remarkable, all the same. I've been getting into the terrible habit of lying down in bed to read around 930 every night, and what usually starts as a harmless "nap" usually evolves into full-out sleep. Though surprsingly, every night (light or no light, noise or no noise, cold feet or warm feet) my body will tell me with a gentle internal nudge,

"You are disgusting."

This of course grabs my attention. My reason presses my conscience for answers,

"Why!?"

"Because you haven't brushed your teeth, you're still in your clothes, and it's 3:30 in the freaking morning. Gross," It growls with a disdainful harumph.

At this point, the verbal attack turns physical when my conscience begins to pry at my eyes, forcing them open to the darkness of my room - at 3:30 in the morning.

"Now get up and go brush your teeth."

I obey, change my clothes, and fall back asleep - setting my alarm for about 20 minutes later than I had originally intended to get up.

This blog is for those of you that get up at 3:30 in the morning. While you may feel alone and aggravated that you can't go to sleep, rest assured, it's 3:30 in the afternoon (if you're on central time) in Vietnam and I'm teaching (in the loose sense of the word) kids English.

My movements and actions in the Delta are almost robotic in their precision and consistency, so for those of you, who do happen to be up when you shouldn't be, you can think of me and exactly where I am. Just reverse, the am and pm, and you can imagine where I am...

This is how my day goes...

5:30-
My cell phone begins to blare...volume level 5 (of 7)...ring tone: bells. I bolt up from bed, struggling to untangle myself from my covers and dive towards the cell phone on my bedside table.
**I use the word "dive" rather than "reach over" because of my sleeping situation - the bed that I'm sharing with my roommate is slightly larger than a single bed. He's sick right now (lots of coughing and lots of spitting in the shower), so I have taken the precaution of inverting myself in bed (my feet at this head and my head at his feet). As a result, everything else in our room (from my perspective at least) is inverted as well, especially the bedside table, which, for me now, is a footside table. Thus, I "dive" to get my phone.
I hit snooze.

5:38-
Cell phone. Snooze.

5:45-
Cell phone. Snooze. Getting pissed now...

5:55-
Cell phone. Groans. Moral dilemma. Viciously critical conscience begins to set in. I wake up.

6:00-
I throw on some clothes to go down to breakfast. My eyes begin to adjust to the surroundings and the light. I recognize our hotel and begin to remember just how ridiculous it is.
We all think that our hotel is a porn studio. On the wall, just outside my door, there is a giant backlit picture that glows at night, depicting a man and woman (both shirtless) caught in a passionate embrace. They are kissing, and he is pulling her pants down.
Kiley, the first day we arrived, had found a used condom in her bed, while Rob discovered with mixed joy and horror that his sink was in the shape of a heart.
I pass by the statue of Venus on the wall. She is painted all white, except for her nipples...which are bright red.

6:05-6:30
The hotel's dining room is an open-air carport. Given the ghastly early time for our breakfast very little conversation happens and instead we focus on our breakfast which is either bread and eggs or noodle soup...green bananas and plain yogurt are also served.
*I try to eat things that will be as gentle on my stomach as possible, given the outrageously rural conditions of where we spend the majority of our day.

6:30-7:15

We bike every morning to the house we are building. This is one of my favorite times of the day. The ride begins with us passing through the market just down the street from our hotel. Everything is sold here from fruit smoothies to backpacks to women's underwear.
We come around a corner and down a long alleyway that takes us by five large red roosters that are kept under wire cages in the middle of the street. From there, we cross the first of two wooden bridges across the Mekong River. The bridge has enormous gaping holes in it, so the view of the river is a near panorama from left, under, and to the right. The bridge is also so rickety that nearly everytime that I get to the end of it, my kickstand has been rattled down to the "stand" position. I kick it back up and continue.
Another word about the river, it is beautiful. While the water is brown (and awfully dirty), the trees creep up just next to it as if to hear stories from the sailors who travel along it every day.

We continue biking, passing by children running out to the street, screaming, "Hallo!"

We respond, "Hallo!"

7:15-11:30

House building/chicken fighting.

The house we are building is in the middle of nowhere. We have to follow a concrete road (more like a sidewalk) through a green tunnel of palm and banana trees for about twenty minutes until we come to our the location of the house we are building.

The workers here hate the idea of foreign students (inexperienced ones, no less) building their house, so much of our work has been work that requires us bringing sand and rocks through the jungle. If we're not working, we spend the rest of our time kicking and shouting at the chickens (which are everywhere) that seem intent on terrorizing us. While we mostly yell and kick at the air, the workers and children take the much more aggressive and violent method of throwing rocks.

11:30-12

Bike to lunch. We don't speak. We are hungry and thirsty.


To be continued...

Just ran out of time (and inspiration)...more to come soon

Two and a half weeks til I'm home. Absolutely can't wait to see y'all.

Milli Vanilli in Ho Chi Minh City

I'm sure that it's happened to you all at some point or another in your lives. You leave a message on an answering machine - most likely the one at your house - with the expectation of another family member listening to and then promptly deleting the message. It sounds simple enough, but of course, every so often the moon shifts in its orbit and its gravitational pull becomes so strong that it prevents all of your family members from returning home before you, thus making the collision of speaker and recorded voice almost inevitable.

My voice doesn't bother me when I'm speaking. I think the acoustics of my head are such that my words seem to ring with a light, sweet tinkle. I suppose that I always assumed that my voice sounded exactly the same when it leaves my mouth as it did when it was in my mouth. At least, I assumed that until I happened to come home on one of those odd lunar days when I had the great misfortune of hearing my recorded voice - all stilted and bumbling - on our answering machine.

It's humbling to hear one's own voice, and oftentimes it sets off days of silence springing from intense self-consciousness, but at least you can make answering machines stop.

A few posts back, I wrote about having to sing "Seasons of Love" in front of an auditorium full of the Ho Chi Minh City Youth Union. Since then, Susie and I have been asked (or, more precisely, instructed) to sing another song in front of a stadium full of 25,000 Vietnamese students as well as anyone else who might like to watch us on Vietnamese National Television.

I haven't written anything about this, partially because I think I've been in a state of partial catatonic shock - refusing to allow the reality of our fate sink into my consciousness. There are a few things wrong with this whole thing.

First, the largest group of people I've ever sung to was a theatre of - at the very most - 500 people. Ok, so 25,000 divided by 500 is about 50, so 50 times the size of the largest crowd that I've ever performed in front of. Did I mention I get butterflies whenever I have to introduce myself in small groups of new people?

Second, although our performance of "Seasons of Love" was compelling and fun, the Youth Union has asked that we sing something a bit more formal and popular. This is OK until they informed us that "formal" and "popular" to them is something by Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys.
* Given certain - ehem - restrictions, we chose Backstreet Boys.

Third, we are singing "I Want it that Way" - the hit single from the Boys' chart-topping album "Millennium". On the surface, given our restrictions, this doesn't seem like a problem worth giving a whole number to; however, the song and I have a history. The last time I lip-synced to this song, it was at a middle school church beach retreat. I stripped down to my boxers only to realize after the song that - despite their excellent reputation off keeping guys "inside" - Brooks Brothers boxers had a tendency to, how shall we say, help you "open up" to a crowd.

My stripping had not been a premeditated thing. I had just realized that simply lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys was about as exciting as spending an afternoon peeling carrots.

So with one week's notice, Susie and I began to put off practicing as much as possible. After all, we didn't know what the band that the Youth Council would be providing for us would be like. So until our practice with the band, Susie and I set out to listen to the song on Susie's iPod as much as possible - taking special note of the "ooo's" and little falsetto "yeah's".

This past Tuesday, Susie and I got into a cab to go practice with the band. We pulled up at a little clothing shop and were invited by a greased-haired, bespectacled man to come into the back of the shop where were brought into a tiny recording studio with a tiny girl very aggressively singing/screaming an Avril Lavigne song in the little booth.

"So where's the band?" We asked, looking for any sign of space for a band.

Naturally, it didn't take long for the reality to set in that the band was the actual song from the album without any vocal tracks.

"So...we're recording, then? But why?"

Evidently, we had not been compelling enough in our previous performance to deserve the complete trust of National Television. As I began to sweat and look panicked around the room, the truth was delivered in a few strained words of broken English.

"You're lip-syncing."

I'll stop here to say that I have no problem with lip-syncing. I almost think it's kind of fun. Truly, there are few expectations for a lip-syncer other than that he or she know the words and be fun. What I do not think is fun is lip-syncing to myself and trying to pass it off as being live. The situation was getting worse: lip sync to a personal (and very bad) imitation of the Backstreet Boys for a lot of people - and make it look like you're doing it live.

Images of Milli Vanillia and Ashlee Simpson flash in my head. After their own fiascos with botched lip-syncing, both had basically disappeared off the face of the Earth, their careers ruined, images destroyed.

I move into the recording booth - a small wooden box with egg carton matress lining its entire surface. It is about 6 feet tall and I am 6'3. I crook my neck awkwardly and begin to sweat as the climate of the box is suffocating.

You are my fi-ur / My one dee-si-ur...

They stop the recording and play it back in the headphones for me to hear. I don't remember ever singing into an answering machine, but this makes that seem desirable. I continue singing,

Tell me why-ee

My voice cracks. The recording stops. The technicians laugh, putting my cracking voice on a looping loud speaker.

Why-ee! Why-ee! Why-ee!

They laugh more, as I glare from within the Sahara-like box - its window beginning to fog.

I continue to record - realizing that my voice is beginning to fade even further. My high notes begin to fade, and the recording stops again. They speak with a very shy, meek boy for a moment, and he comes into the recording booth - steam pouring out of the doors - to tell me, "Sing Better."

I feel my inner diva beginning to raise its head, hissing. I'm growing frustrated, wanting to demand a break, needing water, a limo ride for sushi, a cool towel. I begin to sympathize with why artists always get a bad rap for being impatient and tempestuous.

At last, the session ends and they tell us they will have the recording ready for our Friday the 13th performance (damnit!).

***

The next few days passed with me giving very little thought to our Friday performance. Knowing that I don't have to save my voice takes a bit of the pressure off. Although the news that we will be following Lam Chu -a Vietnamese pop star (who, incidentally, took a huge popularity hit recently when he was found to be lip-syncing at one of his live shows) makes up for the pressure that had been removed.

Finally (or, more appropriately put, dreadfully), the day of our performance comes. Despite the fact that for the past week it has rained almost constantly - making any outdoor activity impossible (our concert was set to be outdoors) - from our chairs at the stadium, we behold a rainbow beginning to peek through the clouds nearly an hour before the show is set to start.

Profanties begin to stream through my head - erasing any remnants of the words to the song.

***

I can feel myself rambling and the show leading up to our performance does not deserve a lot of detail - I don't think I could write much about it primarily because I think I blacked out until we went on stage.

Nevertheless, as we began to walk out on stage, mouthing along to our recorded "yeah-uh's" and "Why-ee's" (they edited out the cracks, thank God), people began to clap and, as the crowds tend to do here, people began to congregate in front of the stage, clapping and waving their hands over their heads. And somehow, after exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds, we finished - unscathed with our reputations maintained (for now at least...) - and moved back to our seats, feeling much better than we had all week, and knowing that I would never want to sing a song "that way" again.

Upside Down at the Top of the World and Romancing the Vietnamese Jumping Leech

In my old age, I have started - at least on the shorter flights - to be semi-narcoleptic whenever I sit down in an airplane. It has not always been so. In my younger years, I was wide-eyed with wonder at the novelty of air travel, excited at the possibility of seeing new lands outside my window seat, and shockingly overcome with the anticipation of wondering what delicious snack the flight attendant would place onto my tray table.

Now, it's not surprising to find me sleeping before the plane lifts off - not to be roused until the earth-shattering rumble of landing. And as the attendants often pass over any premature sleepers, I hardly know what they serve for mid-flight snacks anymore!

To spread the blame a bit, I will say that my recent history of flying has been rather horrific, so perhaps this automatic sleeping mechanism that engages whenever I set foot on any sort of domestic flight is just a matter of self defense.

Whatever the case may be, this past week we took an airplane from Saigon to Hue for a 5-day whirlwind (and thoroughly exhausting) tour of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. We had arrived at the airport around 3:30, and every spare second that we were not moving or checking in, I would scurry off to a quiet corner, enthralled by the fifth Harry Potter (which I just finished for the first time).

I read in line at our check-in. I read going up the tiny escalator to the main terminal. I read against a post on the floor of the terminal. I read in a house. I read with a mouse, and really just about any other rhyming thing that Dr. Seuss could have conjured up, including the ENTIRE flight.

Perhaps it's just Vietnam Airlines, but I found myself thoroughly enjoying the flight (minus the snacks, which since I have been sleeping for the past five years, have started to include little mixed nut goodies again...which is never good for me). My eyes grew wide again as I watched these thousand story clouds lurking around our plane and then as we began descending into Hue, I just about passed out with awe as I stuck my head into the little window to behold the sun setting over a shimmering, rippled ocean, being watched over by a range of misty mountains just inland from the beach.

Being in a bit of a magical mindset (thanks to Mr. Potter and friends), I couldn't help but think that this place was a bit mystical - a Shangri-La almost. And while I was completely dumbstruck with the entire landscape forming outside of my window, it was the mountains that drew me the most.

So it would come as no surprise, days later, when I found myself on a dinghy, vinyl-sided house boat contraption, cruising down the Perfume River towards the beach, that I would twist myself on my plastic chair - perched so daintily on the rickety wooden boards that exposed the brown (and un-perfumed) water - to look back to the mountains.

"I just want to climb up into them sometimes," I heard myself say.

And that's exactly what we did the next day, as we boarded a bus at 6:30 (with much groaning) in the morning, on our way to Bach Ma National Park - where we would be hinking to Bach Ma Summit as well as to a waterfall in the middle of the park (and the mountains).

***

In the Bach Ma mountains, the higher you go the more your surroundings begin to resemble the bottom of the sea.

The rain was a pleasant drizzle at the bottom of the mountains, but as our van began to wind its ways up into the hills, the rain began to pick up, such that by the time we got out of the van at the mouth to the trail of the summit, we found ourselves in a cold, torrential rain. While the breaks in the trees on the road up the mountain had initially been frames to breathtaking countryside, any openings in trees where we got out of our van yielded only a white wall of cloud.

Nevertheless, to avoid making our 6:30 wake-up call completely fruitless, we pushed on and started the hike to the summit, where we arrived 30 minutes later.

By the time we had reached the top of the mountain, we had passed so far as to rise above many of the view-obstructing clouds. Now they lay in little sandy puddles in the palms of the mountains. From time to time, a particularly strong gust of wind would pick up and suddenly the clouds would look like the sand on the ocean floor disturbed by stomping child's foot. The trees' foliage swayed and waved like coral and other ocean-bottom dwelling plants, and the wind would get so strong at points that the rain not only swept sideways across the hills, but upwards.
*Thinking it would be fun, Pablo, David, and I moved to the edge to test how far our spit might fly if we spat into the vicious current. While David and mine both darted away into Cambodia, Pablo's formed itself into a perfect sphere and floated slowly just past David and my horrified faces.

After a quick lunch, we started our second hike deeper into the mountains to find the waterfall.

This was a much more jungle-like hike as the sun became obscured by the thick bamboo and trees that surrounded us - giving the sense of walking through a tunnel. We walked, trying to take in the beauty of this seemingly untouched (not counting the cleared path...and signs... with directional arrows) place that we were treading across. We walked - heads up - taking in our surroudings, when suddenly a shrill scream leapt out from the back of our pack.

"GET IT OFF!! GET IT OFF!!"

We had met the Vietnamese Jumping Leech.

*In fairness, I'm not sure that they're actually called "jumping" (or Vietnamese) but judging by the places these creatures began to appear, we could only assume that they were jumping to get there.

A quick note on leeches. I'm sure many of you have seen inchworms before. They are cuddly, innocent little worms that crawl by shifting their bodies between a straight line and a shape resembling a horse shoe. They are harmless and were created for the sole purpose of humans spend afternoons pointing at them and remarking how cute they are. Now imagine their evil cousin, and you will have the Vietnamese Jumping Leech. Although both are the same size, there are two primary differences between the two creatures. First, the inchworm is green, while the leech is black. Second (and most importantly), while the inchworm showers you with love and goodness, leeches suck your blood.

Needless to say, the remainder of our journey to the waterfall was spent skipping over murky puddles with our eyes glued to the jungle floor rather than our magical (and probably equally hazardous) surroudings.

By the time we reached the top of the waterfall, our shoes had filled with water, our clothes were soaked with rain, and our legs were aching with exhaustion. Yet despite our exhaustion, we had promised ourselves at the beginning of the hike to take the 700 steps down to the bottom of the waterfall.

The pain set in almost immediately. I watched my shoes foam with water every step I took down the steps. David began singing "Waterfalls" by TLC. Rob and Kelsey took turns counting each of the 700 steps (Rob would exclaim "SEGA!" as he jumped down onto the 600th step. Our exhaustion and enthusiam began to peter away into something more along the lines of drunken hysteria, until finally to our relief (or disappointment...I'm still not sure which) we came to the end on step 675 (liars!).

Without the luxury of a picture (which could never capture the true beauty of this hidden valley we found ourself in), it is almost impossible to explain how beautiful the valley was. I think every last drop of blood had rushed to my legs rather than my brain, making thoughtful observations non-existent. Again, it was mystical.

We struggled back up the 670 stairs and collapsed at the top of the waterfall with our thighs howling in pain. After another leech check, we went back through our previous, leech-filled path to a final opening and the end of our hike.

More leech checks and screaming followed as we boarded the van back to our hotel. When we arrived we stripped down to underwear, shaking with terror at the leeches on our legs and feet (Rob and I managed to have none, while Annalee seemed to have the most...including one she would discover after having napped) and began to smash the blood-filled creatures all over the patio of our hotel. Finishing the battle, we passed out for a while, waking up just in time for dinner and the most complete, perfect rainbow we've ever seen.

We watched as it grew more vibrant and clear - it's end seeming to fall right into the trees on the side of our valley. We watched - exhausted and yet fulfilled - and I could only think that the leprachaun (or whatever was waiting at the end of the rainbow) would have to wait until next time, because it seemed like hardly any pot of gold would ever be enough to sway us away from the prospect of dinner. And, anyway, there were leeches out there.

Mysterious Rhythms

There are times when I wish (and it is often) my brother was here. For those of you who don't know him, he's an architect (a really great one) and also just about the best person that I know. So, given the latter statement, it's pretty obvious why I would want him around. But that's a constant feeling anywhere I find myself - whether it be in Vietnam, North Carolina, or Mississippi (he lives in Alabama).

A feeling that I don't have very often, though, is missing him because of his architectural expertise. I think everything he does is great, but I just don't think I've gotten to that age (quite yet) where I need stuff designed and built for me. Just give me a few years, Jack.

That said, I have found myself wishing that Jack could be here for the purpose of helping me appreciate the architecture in Saigon. I appreciate pleasing looking things, but truly I don't know what's good and what's bad - so I never really feel like I can take pleasure in something until I know about it.

To me, the architecture in Saigon is very soviet and severe. Large concrete buildings with barred windows. The colors are dull and the only thing that keeps me stimulated on my walks throughout the city often times are the low-hanging power lines - crammed and piled together like a package of dried spaghetti. Even the zoo - a bizarre (and depressing) green space in the middle of the city seemed severe and poorly designed.

Maybe I just wasn't seeing something - perhaps the configuration of the doors allow light in to maximize lighting and minimize power use. Perhaps the thin, narrow buildings are unique only to this area of the world. I just wasn't getting it, and ever so slowly I realized that I was getting tired of the city.

I needed a change. Needed to get out just for a bit. Take a break from the constant hustle and bustle of the city and get some fresh air. I needed to see something new - even the single block that we live on seemed eternally long and monotnous, and I started to feel trapped. I needed a break to revitalize me.

This break came in the form of a trip to the beach. Last Saturday, we boarded the bus to Mui Ne - a beach town just east of Saigon. On a map it looks like just a little hop, skip, and jump to Mui Ne from Saigon - maybe the width of my pinky fingernail. We boarded around 6 pm - bristling with excitement for the beach - and started our "little" journey, which turned out to be a 5 and a half hour oddyssey to the end of the world.

I was fine for the first hour or so, but then the singing began. First one voice and then many broke out into songs I had not heard since middle school - Backstreet Boys' entire repertoire, Celine Dion's "My Heart Will go On" and, of course, "Old McDonald," (who was "old" when I was about 6, and, by golly, is still alive).

Childhood insecurities and fears swirled around me and churned in my stomach as I became a timid third grader travelling to Twin Lakes day camp again. Given the darkness outside, I couldn't distract myself with views of the outside world, and instead my entire being became focused on the partial lyrics and flat pitches of such favorites as "Show Me The Meaning" and "Hotel California".

I should have taken dramamine...

Miraculously, we arrived to Mui Ne and found our guest house - a charming, little hotel pressed right against the sea. Almost as soon as we arrived, the rain began to pour and many folks sprinted outside to go play in the rain. I declined, as I had just been given a copy of the fifth Harry Potter, which had renewed my bristling excitement.

Slowly the complaints began to roll in. Someone noticed that the a/c didn't work, then the showers were broken, and I even discovered a large tuft of long black hair stuck behind our bathroom mirror.

We would switch hotels the next morning.

The next day was spent biking around the town through the rain, doing a project that had us talking with the locals about the effects of tourism on Mui Ne. It was quite interesting and we learned many things (including the fact that much of the fish sauce that is exported to China - and please God not the US - is preserved using shampoo and bleach...yum).

We spent about two or three hours biking around under the rainy, overcast skies, and then returned for lunch. It was then that we discovered that the sun, in fact, doesn't care if the skies are overcast or not, because it will still burn the crap out of you. I would admire the perfectly straight edge of tan, red skin along my arm that - without any warning - would suddenly surrender to the pale army of whiteness that was my shirt-covered skin.

The rest of the afternoon was spent taking cold showers, reading Harry Potter (which is fantastic), and blowing my arm whenever it felt like my arm hairs had burst into flames again.

We woke up the next morning and after a tour of the large sand dunes that loom over Mui Ne and an informal game of intertube basketball in the pool, we packed our belongings and boarded Charon's chariot (our bus) to cross the Styx back into Saigon.

Heavy walls of rain began to fall, and after being unable to fight my exhaustion with Harry Potter, I - along with EVERYONE - passed out on the bus.

I had hoped that I would sleep straight through the trip back, but after about an hour or so, I felt a numbness begin to creep over my butt and a stiffness begin to tingle in my neck. My eyes groaned, creaked open, and watched in horror as we thread our bus between a large 18-wheeler and the honking oncoming traffic (this was the first driver - though they've all been crazy - that I haven't liked).

Knowing that I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep because of the strain in my neck and numbeness of my butt (people would periodically stand up in their seats to punch their backsides to regain feeling), I concentrated on reading Harry Potter, which given my history of reading in cars (not good) was surprsingly successful.

I can't remember exactly what it was that drew my eyes to the window, but I found myself no longer reading and staring at the countryside - passing by our window - in awe. The rain was still falling and there was a grayness that had overtaken the land. Men and women crouched underneath their porches as the rain dripped in front of them and the mountains - usually so vivid - had become mysterious silhouettes in the distance. It was beautiful, for up until this point I had been slightly underwhelmed with the visual aspects of Vietnam (city and countryside, alike). Yet now, with much of my vision obscured, I became overwhelmed with the magical beauty of the land - a place where the distance, the land over the mountains, was no longer guaranteed. Perhaps it was that I was reading Harry Potter and in a bit of a magical mindset, but I felt something feel me up, and no sooner had I done so than I realized that - for the first time on this trip - I was craving pho (the unsatisfying and often unappetizing noodle soup).

We pulled back into the city and I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend. It was good to be back in the city. Things seemed familiar. We went to a restaurant that we had visited before, and it was delicious. I was glad to see the rats scurrying down along our guesthouse walls. I was even glad to see the smiling, waving woman who breaks into my room every morning to deliver me my water.

I woke up this morning, finally understanding that Saigon is like a difficult piece of music - most likely Jazz. I walked the the formerly eternal street block from our guesthouse to the internet cafe, where I sit typing right now, and started to see and hear some of those unique rhythms of this place.

I passed the cell phone company with the guy who uses an internet cliff notes site to find notes on the Scarlet Letter. I ducked my head as I passed under the low hanging covering of the fruit shop. I passed the little open-air panini place where the three workers always wave whenver I pass. I stared at the cardboard cutout of the Vietnamese movie star advertising choco-pies, and I wondered if they were any good. I weaved through the young boys breaking ice and parking motorcycles at Hong Hanh and held my nose as I passed through the perpetually urine-infested area of the woman who sells cigarettes and eats red fruit that makes it look like her teeth are bleeding. It was even nice to pass the man who laughs and counts money next to the cage with the graying chihuahua in it.

Saigon finally clicked - or at least began to. It's harmonies and rhythms - though discordant and off at times - made sense, and I was glad to lend my ear to them.

I don't know if I'll ever actually appreciate the buildings here - or if they even deserve appreciation. Jack only knows.

Regardless, it feels good to finally find that pattern, that rhythm, of this city or our single city block. So for now, I suppose, I'll just wish that you were here, Jack, not for your architectural expertise, but just so I could share this with you in person.

I miss and love you all. I might still be lost like I was in the last post, but I feel like this city has got a pretty mean jazz rhythm that I never heard before.

Lost and Found...and then Freaking Lost Again

A thought that I've been having quite frequently over the past few days is how glad I am that I was not born a car. It's an odd thought and one that I have definitely never had before, but I keep having this experience - like a bad recurring dream - of having my elbows knocked very hard by people here (I have a tendency to place my hands on my hips, which pokes my elbows out beyond the reach of my shoulders). This has never posed a problem for me in the past, but in Vietnam, I am constantly having my elbows run into by people passing me by. So, you see, if I had been born a car, I wouldn't have doors any more.

It's frustrating. Before, I would have been able to eloquently pirouette my way through these congested narrow settings, and yet now I can't even go to the bathroom without hitting my head on doorways. Even yesterday, maneuvering my way through a crowded supermarket with my roommate, I could only watch helplessly as he weaved seamlessly through the massive crowd of people, while I clumsily found myself running into dead ends and gridlock.

I'm almost inclined to use the image of literally being a big fish in a small pond, but that's not right. The pond is not small. Instead it's quite big and even spacious in comparison to places I have been before. I think it's just overcrowded.

This morning, Kelsey told me that she read my blog and said that I sounded unhappy - which was terrifying the more I thought about it. Am I unhappy? I hope that all of you with your wonderful comments (they're really great and I truly enjoy reading them so much...thank you thank you) will let me know if I start sinking into some mopey-toned memoir. That said, I don't think I'm unhappy. I just feel lost. A big fish, sure, but in an enormous ocean full of so many fish (and fish driving motorbikes) that I can hardly see my own nose when I'm making my way about the city.

In talking with the other folks on this trip with us, many have shown frustration with the time we're spending here. Some are afraid that their internships aren't worth anything and that their contributions are almost insignificant here. Some of us wish we had more time in the city or more time with our internships - time enough to make some type of ripple (or just a bubble) in this ocean. I've even had moments where I wonder if I REALLY have to go to Vietnamese class in the mornings if I'm only going to be here for a few weeks.

I guess my question is how do we make our time (short as it is) meaningful in a place (large as it is)? Beat our tails as hard as we can and hope that our little ripple will be distinguishable in the waves above?

I promise that most of my posts will not be like this, but it's been a question that's been on my mind since we arrived in Saigon and that finally boiled over yesterday when I was having coffee with my roommate.

The moment itself was rather ordinary. We had come to this neat coffee shop called Cafe Take (Japanese for "bamboo") and were sitting, innocently enjoying our coffee when the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" came on the speakers. It's a song I have never thought myself as having many emotional connections to - especially in comparison to the feelings of love and absolute hatred that my parents have for it. But nevertheless, I felt myself something stir around inside me and suddenly I was taken back to the first play I was ever in (surprisingly not the Wizard of Oz) where "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" would play right before the curtains opened and the lights came on. I can clearly remember sitting nervously on stage in complete darkness - speedily whispering through the monologue I was about to say.

Moments later, B.B. King came on the stereo, and I briefly snapped out of my flashback only to transfer into another moment brimming with emotion. I excitedly told Phat (my roommate) how the blues were born in Mississippi (my home) and was able to tell him about some of its history.

Then, finally, the song "Danny Boy" came on the stereo, and I was vaulted again back into a high school choir concert where we stood singing "Danny Boy" for the last time to our beloved choir director who was leaving us to go to another school. His name was Ben, and we should have sang "Benny Boy," but we didn't. That was all I could think of.

The combination of these three songs and the memories associated with them gave me this tingle at the bottom of my spine that slowly moved up my back into my neck (standing the hairs on end) and then finally concentrating itself in my eyes in the form of burning tears not of sadness - but of joy.


I've found myself on multiple occasions needing to listen to my iPod - listening to songs I haven't listened to in months (or in some cases, years). From time to time, I just get this urge where I feel as though I won't be able to move if I don't hear some familiar song to give me that sense of place - of home - that I need so desperately at times here.

One of those songs has been "Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent. I think we were in class the other day and were learning about how to say "Today," "Yesterday," and "Tomorrow."

I don't remember quite who it was, but someone started to sing "Yesterday" by the Beatles, and in turn we thought of what other songs we could sing that fit with these time words. Anyway, Rent came up with "Today" and then inevitably, "Seasons of Love" was sung. Ever since, I've been singing it non-stop...until last night, when it stopped.

We had been warned that we were going to have to sing a song, but somehow we had been able to put off the reality until an hour before we were to sing in front of a crowd of some 500 Vietnamese youth at a Party Youth meeting. At 5:30 - one hour before we were supposed to be ready to perform - we started practicing "Seasons of Love." When 6:30 came, we could only cross our fingers that we were in good shape.

As we filed into the enormous auditorium filled with Vietnamese students, we had the first inkling that we didn't want to sing. Our attitudes didn't improve when the Korean students, who came on just before us, performed a 3 song fully-coreographed dance show - full with lights and deafening bass beats. (We didn't know we could have requested the lights...or the techno backbeat).

Watching, with mouths slightly open and eyes full of bewilderment, we could only form one small thought into my mind.

"Well, shit."

We watched as the lights went out and the auditorium filled with crazy applause. We excused ourselves from our seats in the auditorium and began to shimmy through the aisles and then up onto the stage. Rob introduced us and with every shred of confidence that we had left, we sang our hearts out for the audience, who, thank God, really liked us.


I write all this, because I think it fits well with what I'm trying (in such a long-winded way) to say about finding meaning (and direction) in an overwhelming ocean that feels like it is swallowing you whole, because when the Korean dancers came on last night, we all looked at each other with that "oh shit" look and yet together, we were somehow able to get through their performance AND ours.

"Seasons of Love" goes, "525,00 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes, how do you measure a year in the life?"

The song suggests daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee before finally settling on love as the best way to measure one's life, and truly it's hard to argue that the feeling we had right before going on stage last night or right before taking a bite into a piece of unknown meat at a dirty noodle shop, was and is not love. It might not be love in that conventional sense, but there was something about that shared humiliation and frustration that we share about the food or about our soggy toilet paper, that I hope - when this summer comes to an end - may serve as a true measure for what made this time truly extraordinary.

No more of these kind of posts, I promise. Just needed it out.

Hope y'all are doing great.

Morning Love

I have always considered myself - give or take a few days (or summers...) - a morning person. I think it's a good time to get stuff done. The air is still fresh. The sun is not too hot and is slanting at such an angle that it sort of speckles across the ground like drops of dew. It's the perfect time of day and like all great things, it seems to slip away too quickly.

None of this is true in Vietnam. In fact, I've found myself counting down to the end of the mornings.

I can't remember who wrote it (Thoreau or Emerson, I'm fairly certain), but the idea of "springing up from sleep in eager anticipation of the wonders of the coming day" does not apply. The only "springing up" comes from the heart-stopping sudddeness of the banging on our doors of the 6:45 cleaning ladies, whose highest end seems to be the delivery of hot water in thermoses to our rooms.
* I have yet to use the hot water once. In fact, I only assumed it was hot until the other day when - in my drunken pre-awakened exhaustion, I accidently kicked over the thermos, which unplugged itself upon contact with the ground, spilling its scalding contents onto our floor and my bare feet.
Also, for the past few days, the morning has been further soured by the series of stomach cramps that have slowly started to phase out the need for my alarm clock (my stomach, Jeffery - unbeknownst to me - seems to set his alarm for about 15 minutes before my cell phone alarm.).
Even still, there is still unfinished Vietnamese homework to do in preparation for our 8:30 class, in which we learn Vietnamese and make honking sounds like geese in our attempts to repeat the Vietnamese word for "old man". (Imagine English students saying "old man, old man, old man, old man, old man, etc....)

And yet despite all that is looked to with fear and uncertainty in our mornings, there is a shining oasis of everything that is good in the mornings.

David was the first to discover it, but it has slowly caught on as a staple (a foundation even...) of our morning food ritual. For just outside the gates of our building's complex, there is a little middle-aged lady in brown and white capris with a hat that looks like Gilligan would have worn. She pushes a comically rickety food cart, and yet she brings happiness to any who meet her. We do not know her name or where she comes from (she disappears after breakfast), but every morning, rounding the corner of our gate, we see her there, frying eggs in a small, dirty black skillet.

It is a unique breakfast dish - fried eggs in a soy-sauce soaked pickle stuffed French loaf wrapped in a sheet of paper torn out of a book (I've had sheets from a computer programming book and a scientific journal wrapped around my bread, while Rob - yesterday - had a shopping list embracing his delicious morsel.)

We cannot speak to her and can only point, but she smiles with an energizing enthusiasm, and shows me that she cooks with "cooking oil" and not peanut oil (I like her very much for this reason).

We then retreat from her stand and sit under the shade of the bushy patio where we order iced coffee (mmm....) and bite into the little flavorful explosions.

This morning, we talked about our regrets at not being able to communicate our true thanks for the food that brings us such joy each morning, and yet we knew somehow that there was a deeper connection between us and the egg-frying lady with the rickety cart. We sat for a minute, digesting our breakfast and sipping on our coffees, and Rob - having reflected for a moment - formed the words that perfectly captured the reason she knows that she brings us such joy morning after morning. Taking one more bite, he profoundly spoke,

"She speaks the language of love."

Just because I like pina coladas, and got caught in the rain...

In fairness to the drink, it wasn't a pina colada. It was something, I think, called a fruity fritter or something like that (mango, pineapple, strawberry, banana). Quite delicious but extremely unsatisfying in its fleeting nature (the cup though tall, is very thin with a an even thinner waist, making for few possible sips).

I think I'm starting to understand this city. It's still very large and overwhelming, but I can point in general directions now and say that our guesthouse, for example, is in that direction. This is a good development since for the past few days I've been walking the city in an effort to find signs of life in the local art community (my main aim being the discovery of neat, original art galleries of which I have found two thus far).

We live in District 1, which you can say is the primary part of Saigon. If I was pressed to single out one district as being "downtown," District 1 would be it. It's also the area where most of the art galleries are.

Two days ago, I set out in search of an organization called Saigon Open City - a non-profit organization aimed at promoting contemporary art in Saigon. It is currently in the midst of a three part series that is looking at the ways art tells about three different periods of Vietnamese history (you can check out more at www.saigonopencity.org ... it's pretty cool).

Anyway, having found the address of a number of galleries around Saigon, I decided to just walk there - a task that sounds much more simple than it truly is.

For me, finding Saigon Open City's office - and really any place in Saigon for that matter - is a bit like trying to find Station 9 and 3/4 in Harry Potter. While it seems simple enough, odd numbers on one side of the street and even on the other, street numbers just disappear, get skipped, or even demolished. I walked up and down one street, trying to find address 2B, and seeing if there was some hidden doorway or passage between 2A and 2D. However, nothing of the sort was to be found.

Finally, rounding the street corner and following along, I was able to find a back alley and through a mixture of sign language and exaggerated motions, I was able to show my intense desire to find 2B, to which the solemn man would simply point towards the office, which was tucked down an alley that was already down the previously mentioned alley. Naturally, the next four galleries proved to be just as difficult to find - with no help from the constant requests by the motorbike drivers to "show me many things".

Exhausted, I finally ducked into a coffee shop to get a fruit smoothie (the fruity fritter or whatever it was called) and emerged, rejuventated. Of course, minutes later, dark clouds began to gather and little helicoptery leaves that resemble quidditch snitches (lots of Harry Potter references, I know) began to fall all around me. Minutes later, I would be soaked.


The reason that I name this post after the pina colada song is because the issue of eating here has come up constantly. Over the past few years, I've started to say that life, for me, is the stuff that happens between meals. Food (especially the good kind...I get depressed thinking about Two Sisters and Keifer's...you Jacksonians are lucky lucky people) has become one of my foundational pillars. It's something I like to talk about. It's something I'm constantly thinking about. And obviously something that - when it's good - brings me unspeakable joy.

I'm not saying the food here is not good. Far from it. It's just different. Here, it is completely normal to have beef soup (pho bo) for breakfast. The other day we even had a crab/shrimp soup at 7:30 in the morning with orange juice and coffee. I'm constantly having to ask about peanuts and peanut oil (the oil is surprisingly hard to ask about, and naturally leads to extra stress when I can't completely figure out what's in each dish). Obviously, my stomach is adjusting, and that once firmly grounded food pillar of mine has shaken just a bit.

The subject of food comes up constantly between my roommate, Phat (who is great), and myself. We are both hungry at all hours, and before he had arrived I had stocked up our bedroom with a few cereals, including Honey Bunches of Oats as well as All Bran.

I've offered Phat both of these cereals which he has enjoyed (I think), but, in the most literal sense of the word, we have different tastes. I love Honey Bunches of Oats, and I eat it by pouring it into my hand and shovelling it into my mouth many hands at a time, so the first day we had met, I offered Phat a bit of my beloved cereal and he ate it politely carefully picking up each little crisp one at a time and enjoying it on its own.

All Bran, for me, is a much more practical cereal. It does not exactly bring joy to my taste buds but rather to other parts of me that receive joy in very unique sorts of ways. Rob even made the comment, after seeing my horrifyingly large box of All Bran with the motto, "TAKE THE TWO WEEK CHALLENGE," that eating cereal should not be a "challenge". His point was well taken.

Despite this however, Phat exclaimed, when I hesitantly offered him the All Bran, that he enjoyed All Bran much more than "that other stuff." I wasn't hurt (I'm sort of glad to have more HBOO to myself), but interested in our differing tastes.

Another example of this came when a group of Robertsons and our roommates went out to grab a quick dinner at one of our roommates' favorite restaurants.

Ducking down another back alley, we came to an "open-air" restaurant (when I say open air, I mean that the front facade of the building is just not there). A few women stood outside, huddled under a canopy and around a gigantic boiling pot of water and noodles. On a table next to the pot, there sat these eerily neon orange pieces of something that I assumed would be added to the stew.

We proceeded into the restaurant, walking past groups of people sitting on tiny plastic chairs around tiny plastic tables. There were children, old men and women, pregnant women, business people, everything, yet, our group were obviously included the only non-locals. That was fine, and we were met with wonderful hospitality by everyone. We continued on up a set of narrow, rickety steps with only enough room for about half a person, and moved up onto the second level of the restaurant - which shook slightly with every step (and movement) that we took.

We sat down at our tiny plastic tables, and my and David's knees came up above our shoulders on account of the tiny-ness of the chairs. Some pale geckos scattered along the wall as we sat down - shaking the floor and the foundations of the building.

Moments later, our food was delivered with the same eery neon orange meat floating in a noodle soup.
*Just to give you a picture of this, imagine going to the supermarket and buying uncooked chicken from the frozen section. You know how pale and plastic it looks under its saran wrap? That's how this looked in our soup.
I tried to politely eat my noodles while attempting to drown the still-living meat in the bottom of my soup bowl so as not to seem completely ungrateful.

I looked for sympathy around the table, but found most everyone slurping up their bowls of the soup. It was aggravating that my stomach, whom I'm going to start calling Jeffery (I think I'm just projected this tempestuous, spoiled school boy image on him based on my own insecurities, but for now we'll just say Jeffery was why I didn't eat)couldn't be just a bit more daring.

So, I'm adjusting. It's a different place, and I hope that in the coming weeks, I (erm, I mean, Jeffery)will be a bit more open to trying some of the things that our roommates see as their own foundational pillars (we went the next day to the fast food place here and ordered double cheese burgers and strawberry shakes...they were magical.)

Anyway, we're working on it.

Playing "Frogger" - Saigon Style

In Saigon, I am a frightened squirrel - a twitchy, frantic, frazzle-tailed, crazy-eyed rodent that plain and simply cannot cross streets.

I'm sitting in an open-air internet cafe in Saigon, sweating (as usual) while watching a woman right outside the door run sugar cane through an industrial looking roller (ideal for catching fingers) to make a drink of pure sugar. I have yet to try the drink yet, because, as I told you, I am a nervous squirrel.

For the past two weeks I have been yearning for a place to settle down, rest my head, call home - even for just a moment. Naturally, we have picked the craziest city, I think, in the world.

I think I wrote in the previous post that I had never seen more motorbikes in my entire life. That was an understatement.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) is home to some 8 million people - none of whom, as far as I can tell, work. From my 2 day observation, it seems to me that every single person in this city spends their entire day riding on their motorbike. Truly, there are moments when the group of motorbikes get hazy it stretches so far and seems to become a solid mass of steel and exhaust they are packed so tightly.

Here lies the problem. Despite the eternally long blocks here, the sidewalks all - inevitably - come to an end yielding to the street - almost liquidy in its concentration of motorbikes. Yet when the sidewalks come to an end, there is generally no signal to cross. The method here is much like frogger, or, in my case, squirreler, in which one has to slowly creep across the street while cars and motorbikes honk at (and yet miraculously bend around) you. Just as in Frogger, it's the first step that is the worst. Once you're on the lilypad, there's generally very little turning back, and instead you are basically committed to crossing. It's pretty horrifying to see a horde of maniacal motorbikes buzzing your way, and yet I cannot begin to tell you the rush I feel on the other side.

Really, the past two days have been a crash course in surviving the city. Though many of us are beginning to get the hang of the whole street crossing business, many (including myself) have yet to master the art of sleeping past about 6:30 A.M.

In my guesthouse, the man next door (whose every move I can hear perfectly through my wall) begins to hawk loogies around 6 every morning. About that same time, two very ill-tempered cats resume a war of which both have probably forgotten the origin. The cleaning ladies begin their rounds, knocking on doors to deliver hot water, whose purpose at 6:30 in the morning I have yet to determine. Additionally, a lady likes to sit outside my window and pick her new cell phone ring for the day, while the single parking spot a few feet away from our building becomes home to a honk-filled traffic jam.

I suppose that all the commotion does have its advantages in that it gets us up early enough that we can accomplish innumerable amounts of things (so far that list of "things" has included exploring the market - filled with everything from knock-off Lacoste shirts to cow brains - as well as finding the perfect coffee shop (Rob and I tried a place today that served a coffee mixed with sweet condensed milk...basically like drinking caramel)).

Just as in Frogger, while the day may be filled with crocodiles and large delivery trucks aimed at your destruction, we have started finding our lily pads and every night (somehow)seem to find our way across the other shore.

Laying My Bus Life to Rest

I never planned on writing this particular post. I thought I had exhausted everything there was to write about transportation in Southeast Asia. Given that we're not exactly seeing sights or doing anything particularly exciting on buses, I would have thought that these posts would be intensely boring if I even decided to write about them in the first place! Nevertheless, I have discovered that I am completely incapable of sleeping on buses (and when I do begin to nod off, the bus drivers usually takes this as a sign to either stop the bus for a break or have his attendant collect tickets from passengers...both causes for me to wake up.)

So, given my handicap, I find myself with extraordinarily large chunks of time that I can use to admire the scenery or just think...no reading, as that makes me feel like crap.

We'll start with the obvious observations.

1. Bus drivers honk a lot.
I think I mentioned this a bit earlier when talking about our Camry ride between the Cambodian Border and Siem Reap, but bus drivers are much worse. They honk at everything - multiple times. They honk at people walking along the side of the road. They honk at houses for leaning too much. They honk at the sky for being blue.
I actually tried counting the number of times one of our drivers honked in one of our marathon trips and passed out from exhaustion and my complete bewilderment that there were numbers beyond trillions.

2. No bus ride here is complete without a movie ... or let me re-phrase, a video.
Calling what we watch a "movie" would be generous. Our trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was taken up with karaoke of depressed young men sitting in exotic locations (atop waterfalls, in grassy fields that look out over mountains, etc.) while longing for a girl they have lost. None of them are happy, but their insistence on isolating themselves into these remote places, I think, does not help much with their situation.
On that same trip, we watched two martial arts movies: one with Jet Li and one with Bruce Lee. As far as I can tell, despite different characters, both movies dealt with the exact same subject in which a karate prodigy (Li or Lee) leaves his school and returns after having learned about the death of their master - who dies under shady circumstances and thus leads the prodigy to retaliate in a fit of rage to reclaim the honor of his master.
Finally, on our last trip from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City, we watched a most puzzling selection of excerpts from action movies (Terminator, a random Van Dam, and a virtual reality something) while 80s love songs were played in the background. (Early in this viewing session, David turned to me with eyes full of bewilderment and we just hoped that the ride would be smooth).

Which it wasn't.

For the first half of the trip, I tried my absolute best to sleep. I had only had two pieces of toast earlier that morning (a recipe for disaster for my stomach) and I started violently struggling to pass out so I wouldn't have to confront the whims of my stomach. Regardless, our trip on the Cambodian side was spent jolting up and down (I feared my hair was being rubbed off by my head rest). We shifted, reclined, straightened, and stretched in an effort to find solace, but most of our time was spent looking at one another helplessly as we bounced up and down in our seats.
The Vietnamese portion of our trip was much better and there is very little to say of it. It felt like there was a lot less countryside before we entered the sprawling suburbs of HCMC.

Based on first impressions, it seems like a cool city. More motorbikes than I have seen in my entire life. We'll be here for five weeks...it's such a refreshing feeling to know that we are finally getting settled somewhere.

Will write again soon. Miss you all, and hope all is great where you are.

Steep and Shallow

As we sat sweating in the lobby of our hotel on our last day in Phnom Penh (and last day before travelling to Vietnam), Rob captured our exprience in every place that we have visited. He said, "It seems like we do a whole lot the first day, sleep in and are worthless on the second, and then travel on the third." After some brief reflection, we all agreed that he was right. It was day 2 of Phnom Penh, and we - in true form - were moaning about the prospect of visiting the Royal Palace.

I promise, though, we were tired for a good reason.

We had arrived in Phnom Penh two days before in the late afternoon, had found a place to eat a late lunch, and then arranged a boat cruise down the river that our guest house lay next to.

As few boat cruises are complete without it, we bought some Angkor beer (a real gem for those of you who have never had it) and shimmied down the dirt-mud path that led to our boat where our hostess - a nice woman with an enormous white visor - met us.

We found out that we would be the only six people on the boat (not counting our hostess and the captain), and moments after this realization, the awkwardness began to settle like heavy snow upon us all.
We sat in little red plastic chairs (many left unoccupied) facing each other on the boat's main deck while our hostess - sweet as she was - tried to interest us in karaoke. We smiled graciously while trying to quietly decline her requests when we all decided to move up onto the smaller deck on top of the boat to enjoy our drinks.
Good move. The smaller setting with no roof eased some of the cramped openess of the deck below and we watched as the sky began to grow dull for a moment until it finally extinguished into darkness, leaving only our boat - green christmas lights lining its deck - as a tiny speck floating through the water.

Our first full day in Phnom Penh was much more eventful. We started out the day driving in a tuk-tuk 7 miles south of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Arts Academy to see traditional Cambodian dancers perform "Pamina Devi: A Cambodian Magical Flute".

Pulling off a dusty road filled with street vendors and "gas stations" consisting of men sitting under umbrellas with liter size coke bottles filled with a strange yellow liquid, we turned into a driveway with a sign with a drawing of a backwardly curved finger pointing right and the words "Khmer Arts Academy" written below.

Suddenly, the sun went out as we came under a cover of trees and to our left we beheld a massive pavillion theater with enormous stone heads looking over it - much like those we had seen at Angkor Wat.

Shortly after we would meet John and Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, the two directors of the Academy (John is American while Sophiline is Cambodian). After a few quick words, we were escorted under the pavillion to six white plastic chairs that lined the side of the main performance space, and minutes later, drums, xylophones, and oboes began in a cacophonous harmony, escorting a line of gracefully arched dancers across the stage in front of us.

They told a story of love, one of following your heart in the midst of chaos - even when others may be telling you extreme ways of finding peace. It was a story of balance - one where both man and woman offer their own unique strengths to endure through seemingly hopeless situations. It was a story of home - one where a hopelessly lovesick birdcatcher finds that his true soulmate is the bird that he has carried on his back throughout his entire journey for love.

We all watched with amazement as the dancers would bend their bodies and fingers - like snakes, Sophiline explained - to tell this story. It was a performance of delicate details as we watched Sophiline move in to guide her dancers, carefully adjusting the curvature of their fingers.

It was beautiful.

Afterwards, we sat crosslegged on the dancefloor in our bare feet and spoke with Sophiline and some of the dancers. I recorded the conversation and will try to summarize it later at some point - I think I could fill a whole entire blog with it.

When we left, John told us a few places we needed to hit while we were still in Phnom Penh. One was the National Theater and the other was Tuol Sleng - one of the prisons used by the Khmer Rouge during their rule from 1975-1979.

We knew we had arrived at the National Theater when we saw the towering steel spire that Sophiline had told us to look for (it had carried the hammer and sickle previously but now spires with nothing atop it). We pulled up and saw children playing soccer in a dirt patch between some palm trees and some guys working on a broken down bus (one of many in the parking lot).

Truly, the parking lot is more like a junkyard - filled with broken down buses, motorbikes, and cars. There is no pavement for people to park primarily because the theater was destroyed by fire 12 years ago.

We decided to step inside to check out what was left within the shell of the pink brick building. Inside, we found water filling the lobby, cars parked beneath the grand stairway, grafitti written on the walls, men sleeping in hammocks held up by the doorways leading into the main performance hall, and beautiful leather shadow puppets hanging carelessly on a blackboard in the lobby. We passed a man watching a static-filled television in a plastic fold-out lawn chair and came into the main hall.

The hall itself has the sky as its roof. Plants grow out of the orchestra pit, and a woman sat cooking something in a steaming pot where the fifteenth row probably would have been. It is easy to imagine what a beautiful space it must have been; however, the building continues to lie in sleep, waiting for the plants to swallow it alive.

From there, we went to Tuol Sleng - a prison made from a school with barbed wire snaking jaggedly around its walls.

I don't have any facts or numbers to give regarding the horrors that went on within the walls of this prison; however, seeing the pictures of some of the two million people killed during the Khmer Rouge's reign, it grew sickening to learn more. I won't try to be cliched in my response to seeing the prison. It was terrible, and it is horrifying to think of what we have (and continue to) do to one another.

The rest of our day was spent resting and keeping inside from the sweltering weather until dinner when we went to a restaurant (also recommended by John) called Pop Cafe - an Italian place around the corner from our guest house. It was a sleek, modern narrow restaurant with few seats, white walls, and black furniture. I felt terribly underdressed.

The food came out (one of the best pizzas I've had in years) and we were having a good time until the power in the restaurant went out (something that supposedly happens from time to time in Phnom Penh).

We would end the night sharing food and stories over two candles in the cafe.

(and of course the next day, we rested.)

How many are going to Phnom Penh?

Quick post, I swear. Sorry to have been going on a bit in the last few.

I can remember my grandfather telling me a riddle over dinner one night that went something along these lines.

"As I was walking to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and each wife had seven cats, and each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, wives, how many are going to St. Ives?"

What I did, of course, was to add up all everyone and then blurt out some huge number, when the answer is actually one, since "I" am the only one going to St. Ives.

If we tweaked this riddle a bit and assumed that we saw a Cambodian man on his motorbike outside our bus window who was also going to Phnom Penh, we would say that he had seven wives (no polygamy here, but just bear with me) and that each wife had seven baskets and each basket had seven pigs (large ones). And the question would be - assuming that he is also going to Phnom Penh - how many motorbikes are going to Phnom Penh?

The answer, like the previous question, would be one.

I wish I had had my camera so that I could have grabbed a picture of these people that we passed in our grimy bus. From the dust up ahead, a stack of chairs would seem to be floating down the road to Phnom Penh, but as we passed, there would be a little man (often with another person with him) tucked underneath these towering walls of furniture/animals on a motorbike! (Their balance is truly incredible).

All for now, I'm blogged out for a bit...couldn't sleep this morning so I decided to do a few. Hope everyone is doing great. Miss everyone very much.

Re-examining French Impressionists, Re-Uniting with Childhood Loves, and Re-Playing Geography Bees in Siem Re-ap

I've been trying to figure out how exactly to approach this particular posting. I've asked different people in my group about what they took most from our visit to Siem Reap, and I've tried to think about what made this particular portion of our trip unique.

For those of you who don't know about Siem Reap (I didn't until about a month ago), it is the home of Angkor Wat, a temple that Wikipedia explains much better than I ever could...

Angkor Wat (or Angkor Vat) is a temple at Angkor, Cambodia, built for King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and capital city. The largest and best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre — first Hindu, dedicated to Vishnu, then Buddhist — since its foundation. The temple is the epitome of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. It has become a symbol of Cambodia, appearing on its national flag, and it is the country's prime attraction for visitors.

Angkor Wat combines two basic plans of Khmer temple architecture: the temple mountain and the later galleried temples. It is designed to represent Mount Meru, home of the gods in Hindu mythology: within a moat and an outer wall 3.6 km (2.2 miles) long are three rectangular galleries, each raised above the next. At the centre of the temple stands a quincunx of towers. Unlike most Angkorian temples, Angkor Wat is oriented to the west; scholars are divided as to the significance of this. The temple is admired for the grandeur and harmony of the architecture, its extensive bas-reliefs and for the numerous devatas adorning its walls.

There. I am truly glad that I saw it, but I'll go on and check it off my to-do list.

My problem with visiting Angkor Wat was two-fold. For one, I had no idea about any of this. And second, anyone with less than a double PhD in archeology and anthropology, will have trouble being stimulated by these temples for more than about I'd say four hours (I think we stayed for about 7). I will say that it was slightly comforting when I ran into a man after our tour who asked if we were all "templed-out" - a similar malady to that of spending the day at the ruins of Pompeii when people who don't know enough about/don't have enough of an appreciation for a place lose all ability to distinguish between things as simple as doors and wallpaper.

Granted, Angkor Wat did have monkeys (which were incredible), the steepest set of steps I have ever attempted to climb in my life (requiring the use of both hands and feet to ascend...as well as size 2 shoes to even begin to fit onto these short steps), and the single most unsuccessful rooftop garden I have ever seen in which the roots of the trees that I suppose once sat nicely upon the top of these temples have now taken on the qualities of the squid from 20,000 leagues under the sea - monstrous roots melting like candle wax on top of entire walls and busting their way between large chunks of rocks.

The highlight of our day for me, however, came in sitting in the back of our tuk-tuk (much better than our Thailand experience) talking with our driver, Monet.

*I asked Kelsey (our resident art scholar) if Monet was a French impressionist. She replied that she wasn't sure because she always got Manet and Monet mixed up and could never tell them apart. After another moment, she replied, "All I know is that one had syphilis and one cut off his ear." So forgive me if Monet is not indeed a French Impressionist...I will willingly change the title of this post if he's not.

Regardless, our driver Monet made up for all the misdeeds of his predecessors. First, he had an extra-sensory knowledge of our every movement within the winding mazes of these temples, and though he never went into the temples with us, if we ever strayed from our path down some wrong road out of the temple, he would race up in his tuk-tuk and tell us that we were going the wrong way but that he would take us to where we needed to go. He also - when I, as usual, had difficulty communicating the the peanut oil aspect of my allergy - swooped in to translate for me and ordered me a bowl of scorching vegetable-rich, peanut-free soup.

Monet is 25 years old - hardly older than us - and yet he, because he cannot afford to go to the university in Siem Reap ($400/semester) has to drive a tuk-tuk. His English is nearly perfect after relatively few years of learning and his personality is wonderful with constant laughter.

At the end of our day at Angkor Wat (and other temples), he took us to the base of this mountain where he told us we could climb to watch the sunset over Cambodia. It had already started to cloud up and the wind was really starting to pick up (Rob noted how the children selling books and little trinkets would stop their selling to chase the leaves whenever they would fall with the wind). Nevertheless, we decided to climb and hope that it wouldn't rain too hard on top of us.

Coming to the top of the mountain, there is another temple, which we also climbed, to behold the vast Cambodian countryside. Pictures nor words would ever do it justice, so I won't even try (I also didn't stay on top of the mountain long enough to take in enough mental description...there were very dark, very large clouds moving quickly toward us). Despite Rob's insistence that we stay to watch the sunset, we decided to go back down the mountain.

Driving our tuk-tuk back along the road - wind flapping in our hair, a nice feeling compared to the absurdly hot weather of most of the day - we turned to our right to behold a sunset made of orange, purple, pink, and yellow. It covered the sky and was so magnificent that the eastern sky began to take on some of its other-worldly colors. Rob gave us the "I told you so" look and we all tried to believe (unsuccessfully) that we had gotten the better view. Still, it was incredible.

Two last quick side thoughts (and co-titles of this post) that I forgot to mention were this.

1. Siem Reap had a quick mart right next door to our hotel that sells strawberry frosted pop-tarts that were just about the best tasting things that I can remember tasting since the first time I ate strawberry frosted pop-tarts. They became my breakfast for the rest of our time in Siem Reap and would be what I nursed on during our drive to Phnom Penh.

2. While eating lunch at Angkor Wat, we were approached by a little girl selling flutes. We had already bought a flute from a similar little girl earlier that day, but our showing her the flute did little to dissuade her from attempting to sell. As it naturally happens, Matt is usually the one to have the hardest sell job put on him by these children. For one, he likes to talk to them and thus gets roped in to buying their products.
In this case, the girl (talking to Matt) made an interesting propostition. She said, "I tell you capital of Russia, you buy three dollar."
You can understand our hesitancy. We could hardly believe that she would know the capital of Russia, but what if she did and we had to buy another flute that we could not play? We figured Russia might be a bit too easy, when she upped the ante to asking US what the capital of Madagascar was.
Now, my history with geography questions has been a streaky one. In eighth grade, I had won our school's geography bee, only to arrive at the state bee to be soundly defeated (the one kid that didn't get a single question right), so I have a bit of a sore spot for geography questions. Generally, capitals come easy to me, but I absolutely couldn't remember the capital of Madagascar.
Hoping that if we ignored her she would go away, we were dismayed to see her still pressing the question. Surely she didn't know that capital too!?
Yet after a few minutes of us all sitting around, I felt the word "Antananarivo" slip out of my mouth and run right into the furious eyes of the girl who obviously HAD known the capital of Madagascar.
Moments later, she finally left.


Having been "Templed-out" by Angkor Wat, we all passed out that night after a meal at one of Angelina Jolie's favorite Tomb Raider haunts, The Red Piano, and slept til noon the next day, preparing for our trip to Phnom Penh for the rest.