Arie Goes to Cambodia

This Is a Call

2008-04-07T18:21:00.004-05:00

Someone emailed me yesterday to ask whether there's an easy way to make phone calls from Cambodia to the United States. I thought other people might be interested, so here's my (edited) response:

You could bring a cell phone, but it won't work in Cambodia unless it's unlocked, so it's probably easier to just buy one once you get there. Once you have a phone (an unlocked western one or one you bought there), to get a sim card you'll need some sort of official letter from a Cambodian employer or landlord or something to show to the Mobitel people. All Cambodian phones are paid in advance, as far as I can tell. You pop the sim card into your phone, dial Mobitel and type in the number of a scratch-off pre-paid card, and you're good. Note that for a while, 3-G phones were not permitted in Cambodia due to the government's concern that they could be used for pornography. The phones themselves are now legal, but video on a cell phone is still forbidden. (Video on the internet, television, DVDs, VHS tapes, zoetropes, and flip books remain legal, to the best of my knowledge. Biggest loophole ever.)

A few times people in the U.S. called my cell phone. It was enormously expensive and there wasn't a great signal. I never tried using my phone to call outside of Cambodia -- at $2/minute, it seemed a bit silly.

Everyone who has to make an international call uses an internet phone. Every internet cafe (and there are a bunch on every block in the foreigner neighborhoods) has a bunch of internet "phone booths" in the back. Calls to the United States are two or three cents/minute. The signal isn't great, but you can more or less hear what's being said and usually you can talk too. Actually, the signal was better than I get with my T-Mobile phone in Manhattan. Sadly, the booths are typically tiny, overheated (a lot of computer equipment in a small, enclosed space), and adjacent to another booth in which a Cambodian man is screaming some things you can't understand. Still, try out a few before picking a favorite -- some are more comfortable than others, some give you cold filtered water or sell you soft drinks, and some are filled with possibly malarial mosquitos. It pays to shop around.

Asia: The Journey Home

2008-01-08T11:09:00.001-05:00

Well, when I said "a post about my trip home is coming soon," it turns out "soon" meant "about a year." Anyway, here it is, to the best of my recollection.

I woke up early, said goodbye to my landlord, and jumped in a cab. This wasn't a hired car like the one I took to Simatai, but an actual taxi. In New York, you sit in the back of the cab and there's a plexiglass shield between the front and back seats. In Beijing, you sit next to the driver, though the back is also available, but the driver himself is enmeshed in a METAL CAGE. Really. You're sitting next to this guy, but there are bars between you. And the bars have lots of little pointy bits, which is good because if you're in a car accident, no one will doubt you when they see the scars.

I got to the airport a few hours early because I had no idea what traffic would be like. Turns out that was a good decision. At the security checkpoint, they looked at my passport and then grilled me for a bit about why I had traveled so much in Asia. Oddly, considering they're all Communists, they were most curious about what I had done in Viet Nam. "Why did you go to Hanoi?" "Uh, tourism?" "Who did you meet with while you were there?" "Um. Waiters?" "Why were you meeting with them?" "Uh, to order food?" Eventually they determined that I was not a Communist, which is odd because they are, and so permitted me to go past the checkpoint...

...and on to the next checkpoint. At this one, they had long lines of people in front of metal detectors. Then they announced that everyone flying to the United States had to go to a separate line at the end of the room. "Haha," I thought. "There's no one at the U.S. line, this'll be quick!"

No.

You know how the United States has all these ridiculous rules for flying, like you can't have more than 17 micrograms of fluid and you can't have any lighters or nail clippers or subversive materials or bombs or magazines in your carry-ons? But it's not a big deal because most U.S. airport security workers understand that the rules need to be flexible and are subject to whatever creative interpretation is necessary to avoid reaching a stupid outcome?

OK, keep that in mind while you try to envision how U.S. airport security would work if it were enforced by the Chinese military.

Yeah, so there were four soldiers in full military regalia plus assault rifles, and they had sophisticated electronics and a manual with the U.S. flight restrictions, and damned if they weren't going to enforce every single rule to the letter. They ran my carry-ons through a large machine that then displayed a pretty color image of its contents with large yellow circles around all the contraband (I don't know how it knew), and then they unpacked the bag, took out a forbidden item, scowled at me, threw it out, repacked the bag, and ran it through again to get more circles. It took eight repetitions and thirty minutes before the machine finally determined that I had been robbed of enough precious shampoo bottles and toothpaste that I could get on the plane. At least some of the things they removed from my bag were amusing to all the other Americans on line.

Worst part was they stole the singing Mao lighters that I bought in Tiananmen Square. They wouldn't even let me repack them in my checked bag. Grr.

The flight itself was uneventful. China Airways has mediocre food. And then I was back in the U.S.A., where it was bright at nighttime and I slept all day and it took me two weeks to recover from the jetlag.

One more post, a summation, will appear sometime. Won't take a year, I hope.

Beijing: The Great Wall at Simatai

2007-01-18T17:29:00.000-05:00

This is day three of my trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

Friday, January 12th, was my last full day in China (and in Asia). I decided to spend it at the Great Wall. Near the southeastern corner of Tiananmen Square is a tourist services place, and outside it are a lot of guys who run tours to Badaling, which is a segment of the Great Wall near to Beijing and very tourist-friendly. I stopped by to get information about it--it's an hour and a half by bus, you spend two hours at the Wall, bus leaves at 8am and returns at 5pm. Simple math and a knowledge of how tours work indicated that most of the trip would be spent at jade factories, crappy tourist restaurants, and Traditional Chinese Medicine clinics (Lonely Planet says each person will be diagnosed with some condition only curable by TCM ("There's a dragon eating your liver. Buy this root.")), and in fact the guides reluctantly confirmed that there were several stops on the way to and from the Wall. Lonely Planet also warned me that Badaling was very crowded, both tourists and vendors. Not exactly what I wanted. (For more information on Badaling, see their web site, which promises that "The Great Wall which be created by the human being will be your nice mind forever!")

That's when I made what was probably the best decision of my trip. I skipped out on the tour and asked a taxi driver to take me to Simatai, a segment of the Great Wall that's farther away and not as touristy. I ended up agreeing to pay about twice what the Badaling tour cost. My driver spoke almost no English, but my Mandarin was sufficient for "I want to go to X" and "No, that is an absurd amount of money." Well, more or less. I told him I had to go to the bank first, and he took me to their corporate office instead of a branch, but we got it all straightened out and away we went.

Or at least, away we went for five minutes until we got on the major road, at which point we sat in traffic for an hour. Beijing has horrible traffic. Eventually we made it on to the Beijing to Chengdu highway (official name: Jingcheng Expressway (get it?)). The highway was empty, we made good time.

The driver and I talked for a while, but my vocabulary isn't good for much. We told each other where we lived, what we thought of various places, and established that we both found the Great Wall impressive and interesting. He turned on the radio and some sort of Chinese language news program came on--I didn't understand any of it. Then he said something in Mandarin, but I didn't get most of it, so he said it in English: "You Americans, very much like kill, bang! bang! bang!" and mimed shooting a machine gun. I explained that I myself did not enjoy shooting machine guns at all, as far as I know, having never shot a machine gun. He responded that I am American, and Americans like to kill Iraqis and Saddam Hussein, and said something I didn't understand about George Bush. I tried to say that most Americans were not happy about Bush or the Iraq War, and indeed a surprising percentage of Americans have never killed anyone at all, but I don't think he understood me. Or maybe he let is pass--I guess in China, you probably don't get to express too much disapproval of your government, and he might have assumed I was in a similar position. I don't know.

Anyway, we got off the highway, drove for another half hour or so, and suddenly there was a giant wall on the mountaintops. There were also goatherds on the roads (I'm told that goats are responsible for a lot of the decay of the wall, they eat roots that are preventing erosion). Finally we reached the bottom of a mountain, and he let me out in a parking lot.

The Great Wall is really big and stretches off in lots of places, but only some of them are open as tourist attractions. Simatai is one of the nicer areas. At the bottom is a mini-town with a guest house, a few restaurants, a ticket booth (there's an admission fee for the Great Wall), and a cable car (in case you don't want to climb all the way up). I paid for admission but, heeding Mao's admonishment that he who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a real man, I eschewed the cable car. (Mao said that to motivate his fellow Communists as part of the Long March northward, but now it's a slogan used to advertise tours to Badaling. If that's not irony, I don't know what is.)

The Great Wall is actually a series of walls linked together. The first wall that was more than just a city wall dates to the 2nd century B.C.E. The Ming Dynasty, which overthrew the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty established by Genghis Khan, faced the problem of Mongolian nobles who were trying to reclaim the empire. The solution was to vastly expand the Great Wall, and it was this expansion which created the modern Great Wall (which, as Badaling's website says, "is not only the magnum opus of human being but also the soul of China!").

In its glory days, the Wall was six thousand two hundred miles long. Its average height was twenty-five feet, and there are forty-foot watchtowers every six hundred feet. It's about ten to fifteen feet thick, with a flat top so that soldiers can run across the wall from one watchtower to the next. The wall is made of packed earth and stone blocks, and parts of the eastern walls have brick facing. Allegedly the foundation contains the ground bones of the more than one million workers who died during its construction. For the most part, the Wall follows the ridge line of mountain ranges. Because the Wall is at the top of a mountain, it's easy to see invaders coming, it's easy to shoot arrows down at them, and by the time they get there they're exhausted from having to run uphill. (Badaling's website: "The Great Wall whose length is more than a hundred thousand kilomitres is the huge Chinese dragon, is the best greatness and grandest work in the history of the whole human being.")

However, the Wall was never a very effective means of defense. Invaders quickly discovered that they could bribe sentries not to trigger the alarm (smoke signals). But the Wall did turn out to be useful--because the top of the Wall was flat, messengers and merchants could move from one end of the empire to the other very quickly. The Wall proved most useful for communications and transportation, not defense.

Once China created a modern road system, the Wall became obsolete. Like many stone structures in the West, it was viewed by local farmers and townspeople as a convenient source of stone, and so was dismantled in many regions. The military used parts of it to build fortifications. Where it blocked roads, it was dynamited. It is only in recent decades that the Chinese have come to value the Wall, and have taken steps to protect it.

Anyway, I found myself at the bottom of a rather large mountain range with a big wall at the top of it. It was about a mile from the base to the access stairwell onto the wall, which was in a small valley where the wall was almost at sea level. From there, I could see that I would have to climb the mountain. Did I mention it was bitter cold? I searched the vendors' stalls at the bottom for some sort of scarf to augment my double-sweater-hat-coat combination, but no luck.

Oh well. I started walking. There's a nice access path complete with badly translated warning signs ("Appreciate the Great Wall lovely view, do not forget the fire is heartless!"--it took me a while to realize they were concerned about forest fires, not just being inscrutable). About half a mile up, there were a number of Chinese women sitting and playing cards. When I passed, one of them dropped her cards and started walking next me. I asked her where she was going, and she said she was going to climb the Wall. Fair enough, I figured--she's going to try to sell me something, but at least it will be entertaining and I can practice my Mandarin.

Another five minutes or so and I was on the Great Wall. Simatai is split by a river, and I was on the eastern part. One thing I didn't expect was all the climbing--Mao's remark was starting to burn in my memory as I walked up the approximately six hundred trillion steps. The woman who was walking with me and I were pretty quickly out of breath. Fortunately, there are watchtowers every couple hundred feet which provide a shelter from the wind and a convenient place to rest. The good thing about the climb was that very shortly I wasn't too cold--hat and gloves off, jacket open, still panting. There were also vendors along the way, some with grills, who sold hot food and soda.

At the second watchtower, I asked the woman what she wanted to sell me. At first she said she just wanted to walk with me, but then she pulled out some sort of book of photos of the Wall. I explained that I didn't want any book, and I also turned down the postcards and t-shirts. I gave her a couple of dollars to thank her for teaching me some Mandarin, and she went back down to rejoin the card game. And that left me alone.

And I do mean alone. Simatai in the winter is the place to go if you want to see the Great Wall as it used to be--not covered in tourists. I probably passed no more than ten people in the three hours that I was on the Wall. Maybe 98% of the time, I didn't see anyone else in any direction, out to the horizons (yes, I did at one point pretend that I was watching for Mongol hordes). It was breathtaking ("The Great Wall which be created by the human being will be your nice mind forever!").

Simatai is also the place to go if you want to see the original Wall. Unlike Badaling and other tourist sites, much of the Simatai wall has not been restored ("many places of The Great Wall have be repaired, which make it more boundless"). There are some metal stairs added in a few places to make climbing easier, and some safety rails in dangerous places, but for the most part, it's as the Ming Dynasty left it. Some parts are too decayed to traverse, and then there are paths marked to the next walkable part. Overall, it's beautiful, especially on a day like this one--cold, but clear blue skies, no one around, and the Wall snaking across mountaintops in both directions as far as the horizon. It's not surprising that locals say UNESCO granted the Great Wall World Heritage Site status after visiting Simatai ("It has become the irradiant treasure of our Chinese archaic civilization.").

I didn't anticipate so much climbing, but I made it to the top (or at least as far as I could--the very peak is fenced off for safety reasons). The Simatai wall is about three and a half miles long. It took about two hours to get up there, maybe another hour and a half to get down. Most of this part of the Wall is very steep. The views are beautiful--one thing about climbing a mountain is that then you get to look down on valleys.

On the way down, I passed some guys who operated a zipline to the bottom. I guess this would have been a faster way to get down, but a zipline in sub-zero weather sounded pretty horrible.

And then I was at the bottom, back in the nice, warm taxi, and headed back to Beijing. The drive back took longer than the drive out because of traffic, and we sat around listening to the radio for quite a while. I was very confused by his music choices--we went from Beijing Opera to some very strange English language song about a soccer player named Andy who was being urged to score a goal for England, I think. The bridge of the song was definitely Turkey in the Straw. I have tried unsuccessfully to find any reference to this song on Google. Dinner in a food court, then home to bed--climbing the Great Wall is exhausting.

Incidentally, the Great Wall is in fact visible from space. If you're very close to the Earth. And the weather is perfect. And you know where to look. And the sun is in the right place (casting long shadows). And you use your imagination. But in those conditions, a lot of things are visible from space. Most astronauts say they can't see it at all.

A post about my trip home is coming soon.

Beijing, Tiananmen at Sunset: Little Red Cook Book! Little Red Cook Book!

2007-01-18T12:22:00.000-05:00

This is from the second day of my trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

That night, I decided to return to Tiananmen Square to take one last look at the various monuments, maybe watch the flag changing ceremony, and buy a few tacky souvenirs. Sure enough, the moment I emerged from the subway station, I was beset by souvenir sellers. Most of them were selling kites or postcards, but I had heard that the Square was somewhere where people go to sell copies of the Little Red Book, and that's what I wanted. It only took a minute for someone to wave a book at me, and a little bargaining and it was mine.

The book, full title Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, is probably the best symbol of Mao's cult of personality. Once Mao was squarely in control of China in the 1950s, he began a series of agricultural reforms aimed at collectivizing Chinese farms. As it did everywhere, this led to famine, and when in 1957 Khrushchev acknowledged the failure of the Soviet Union's collectivization efforts, Mao was pressured to end collectivization. He responded with the Great Leap Forward, a five-year plan to industrialize the nation. Mao decided that steel was the key to prosperity, and so steel production would have to be doubled within a year, most of the increase to come from backyard steel furnaces. Hundreds of millions of people were forced to smelt every scrap of metal they could find--pots, farming implements, doorknobs, anything--to meet wildly unrealistic quotas. Millions of workers were diverted from harvests to iron production. The result was tons of worthless pig iron and unharvested crops rotting in the fields. The Great Leap was abandoned in 1961, by which time thirty million people had starved to death.

Mao was severely criticized for the disaster. He responded by purging his critics and their supporters and then began a massive program to reorient society along Maoist lines. This campaign, called the Cultural Revolution, centered around the creation and mobilization of the Red Guards, composed of eleven million students and young people. The Red Guards ransacked the nation searching for signs of disloyalty to Mao and of "reactionary" tendencies. Millions of people were purged. Many artifacts and other objects of China's cultural heritage were destroyed by the Guards as they attempted to annihilate anything not "revolutionary". Mao was idolized, and posters of him and copies of his books flooded the country.

The most popular of the books was the Little Red Book. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were known to beat or imprison anyone found not to have at least one copy on their person (most people carried at least two). Hundreds of millions of copies of the book were printed (making it the second-most-common book in the world, after the Bible). The book was studied not only in schools, but in workplaces--it was common for offices to set aside time each day for group discussion. Every piece of writing produced in China was expected to quote extensively from the book--including scientific papers.

Today Maoism (or, as China calls it, Mao Zedong Thought) remains official doctrine, but it's not emphasized (especially in terms of economic policy). It's no longer necessary to carry the Little Red Book to avoid being beaten up by the police, and most scientific journals can get through an entire volume without quoting Mao more than once or twice. But the books are still around, and so old ones are everywhere.

Mine is not one of the Cultural Revolution survivors--it was printed in 1996. It's helpfully bilingual and has some poorly printed color photos of Mao at the front. I like.

Incidentally, when Mao was first criticized for his agricultural policy, he clamped down on dissent. But when there was protest, he responded with the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which encouraged intellectuals to openly criticize the government ("Let one hundred flowers bloom; let one hundred schools of thought contend."). In retrospect, it's unclear whether this was a deliberate trap or whether Mao truly believed what he claimed, that if intellectuals discussed the matter, they would see that socialism was the only possible way forward. Either way, once a sufficient number of intellectuals had criticized the Communist Party, Mao had them rounded up, tortured, and executed (half a million people disappeared).

Unfortunately, buying the books marked me as someone in the market for souvenirs. I had to flee from the four or five vendors who noticed and assumed that I would want more copies of the book, a kite, some postcards, a little wooden ball that made noise when thrown in the air, and all sorts of other random stuff. I ended up at the northern end of Tiananmen Square, where a large crowd had gathered.

It was just about sundown, and the crowd was massed around a large flagpole. Each morning at sunrise, a troop of soldiers marches in and raises the flag, and they return to lower it at sunset. Lonely Planet says that the crowds are too big at sunset and the only way to see it is to go at sunrise, but they didn't bargain on it being 15 degrees Kelvin outside. I was only in the second row, and didn't have to wait long--it wasn't even that dark when the police stopped traffic on the road between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and twenty or so soldiers marched across the street and up to the flag.

It's impressive to see because the soldiers are very well-trained; they march in two rows, precisely ninety centimeters apart, and each footstep is exactly seventy-five centimeters. Of course, they walk in perfect unison. The lines split up, surround the flagpole, and then a couple of guys ceremoniously lower the flag and attach it to a smaller pole. Then they return to the line and march it back into the Forbidden City. The whole thing takes maybe five minutes.

After the ceremony, I headed back to my apartment. As usual, I got into a few conversations with people who wanted to practice their English or just meet westerners. One girl asked where I lived, and when I said Cambodia, she asked if that was in Africa--this made me hopeful about the state of the United States education system.

You may want to continue to day three, where I go to the Great Wall at Simatai.

Beijing, Beihai Park: Because I don't like beef chow mein, that's why.

2007-01-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

This is from day two of my trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

Beihai Park is a small park that used to be part of the Forbidden City. It was built in 938, but was only opened to the public in 1925. More than half the park is covered by a large artificial lake, in the center of which is Qionghua Island. The island features a pagoda with a large white dagoba on top. Beihai Park is interesting because it's the best-preserved of the gardens that were once reserved exclusively for the use of the Emperor.

I was interested in Beihai because of its connection to Gengis Khan. Born in Mongolia in the 12th century, his father (the clan leader) was murdered when he was about nine, and he emerged victorious from the subsequent power struggle. When his tribe was pacified, he turned to neighboring tribes, and by 1206 had united much of northern Asia to form the Mongol Empire. In 1211, he declared war on China's Jin dynasty, and quickly advanced to the Great Wall. Expansion of the western end of the Mongol Empire provided Genghis with access to Islamic engineers, who developed sophisticated engines that proved effective against Chinese fortifications. He sacked Beijing in 1215, though it was not until 1234 that his descendents defeated the remnants of the Jin dynasty. Genghis died in 1227, leaving behind the largest empire in the history of the world (as measured by area).

Genghis's grandson, Kublai Khan, came to power after a protracted struggle. In 1264, he moved his capital from Mongolia to Beijing (which he called Khanbaliq), and in 1271 he established the Yuan dynasty (the first non-Han Chinese dynasty to rule China). The Yuan dynasty gave political preferences to Mongols, a move that angered Han Chinese, but they also instituted various progressive policies--they built granaries to guard against famine, expanded highways, and promoted cross-cultural exchange through their network of western contacts. It was during this period that gunpowder, printing, porcelain, playing cards, and various medicines made their way from China to Europe. Marco Polo, a Venetian who worked for Kublai for seventeen years and later wrote a book about his experiences, described Kublai's reign as benevolent, noting that he built hospitals and orphanages, distributed food to the poor, and lowered taxes during difficult times (though as a former employee, he was somewhat biased). Kublai's summer palace at Shangdu was what Marco Polo called Xanadu.

Beihai Park was at the center of Kublai Khan's capital city and was the home for the Emperor and his court. The Yuan dynasty was short-lived (only about a century), and not much of their construction remains. The only thing in Beihai that remains from Kublai's reign is a large jade urn that was carved in 1265. It was apparently used by Kublai Khan to hold wine (the thing weighs 8000 pounds, so that's a lot of wine). Unfortunately, it was encased in glass and the sun was on it so I wasn't able to get much of a photo.

There are two other interesting things about Beihai Park. The first is that normally, there are boat rentals so you can row around the island, but in the winter, the lake freezes. Rather than lose out on revenue, the boats are stowed in a shack and the renters bring out little sled-chairs, and you can rent a sled-chair and a pitchfork and slide around.

The second is the Bai Ta, or White Pagoda, which features a large white dagoba which rises more than one hundred feet up. I'm not sure if there's anything historically significant about it, but it's pretty.

There's also a large Buddha statue carved from a single piece of white jade that was presented to the China by Cambodia in the 19th century. The arm was damaged by the international army during the Boxer Rebellion.

That was the end of my visit to Beihai Park. The unpleasant thing about visiting parks in the winter is that they're by and large outdoors, and it was really cold. I walked to the nearest subway stop (thanks for putting a non-existent subway line on the map, Lonely Planet!) and went to lunch. Continuing the Yuan theme, I decided to have some Peking duck, which was introduced to China during the reign of the Khans.

I went to Bianyifang, one of the most famous Peking duck restaurants in China (there are a bunch of restaurants that serve only Peking duck, and I'm pretty sure the term for them translates into "Peking roast duck house"). Bianyifang has been in business for more than a century, but I guess that's not very impressive in a city founded more than two thousand years ago. Peking duck is one of those things that Chinese people know westerners know--when random people approach me on the street, "have you tried Peking duck yet?" is always one of the questions.

To make Peking duck, a special breed of duck is used. It's force-fed in a cage and not permitted to move so that it grows extra fat (for flavor). Once dead, the duck is inflated to separate the skin from the body, the duck is scalded and roasted, and it's carved tableside and served with pancakes and scallions that you roll together with plum sauce. It's delicious, though I'm not sure I would have thought so at the time if I had known the bit about force-feeding. (I've also had Peking duck at Lee Ho Fook's in London, but there's no blog about that.)

My next stop was Tiananmen Square for sunset.

Beijing Day Two Part Two: The Forbidden City

2007-01-16T18:15:00.000-05:00

This is from day two of Arie's trip to Beijing. You might want to start at day one.

My next stop was the Forbidden City, which is just north of Tiananmen Square. It's called that because during the period when it was in use, 1420 to 1912, it was off limits to all but the Emperor's household and advisors.

When you're white in Beijing, you attract some notice, especially when you're not in a heavily touristed area. Fairly often, people would approach me and strike up conversations. Some were definitely scammers, especially around the tourist sites--fortunately, I knew what was going on ahead of time. A lot of young, cute female "art students" approach travelers and, after talking for a while, ask them if they would like to come see an art exhibit. It always turns out to be a high pressure sales thing. Similarly, tour operators use young people to recruit tourists for various types of tours.

But I also met a bunch of people who seemed like they were just being friendly. While walking to the Forbidden City, two girls introduced themselves and we talked for a bit--turned out they were from Inner Mongolia (part of China, distinct from the nation of Mongolia) and were touring Beijing for a few days. That sort of thing happened fairly often--I think because almost all Chinese students have studied English, talking to westerners is an opportunity to practice. Of all the places I've traveled over the past few months, Beijing has the friendliest people.

To get to the Forbidden City, you must first pass through Tiananmen itself (saying "Tiananmen Gate" is a little like "ATM machine" or "PIN number"--"Tiananmen" means "Gate of Heavenly Peace"). Tiananmen is a gigantic red gatehouse; the original is really old, but the current one was built in 1651. Sort of. It turns out that the government secretly rebuilt it in 1969, but didn't tell anyone until recently (they covered it in scaffolding and curtains and claimed to be renovating). In the center is a large portrait of Chairman Mao; in the Tiananmen riots in 1989, someone dared to throw ink-filled eggs at it, but the crowd seized the guy and handed him over to the police (he was imprisoned for seventeen years and tortured, and was driven insane). The texts to the sides read "Long live the People's Republic of China" and "Long live the great unity of the world's people"--like the Forbidden City itself, the phrase "long live" (literally, "ten thousand years") used to be reserved only for the emperors. The gate is surrounded by a moat; when I was there, it was iced over.

When I first approached Tiananmen and saw Israeli flags flying around it, I thought perhaps the cold had gotten to me. Then I thought about political explanations for it, like a state visit or some new treaty (do Israel and China have any aligned strategic interests?). Then I realized it would make a funny photo. No one else seemed confused, so I figured it must not be unusual. I mean, I've never visited Beijing before. Maybe there are always Israeli flags scattered around.

Outside Tiananmen are two large lion statues which were carved in 1420. The one on the left allegedly came to life to protect the city from invaders, and was shot in the stomach for his trouble. Skeptics claim the bullet landed there during the Boxer Rebellion.

I paid a small fee to enter Tiananmen and climb to the top. There's a bit of a museum, but the interesting thing is the view of Tiananmen Square and of the courtyard beyond the gate.

Beyond the courtyard is the Meridian Gate, which controls access to the Forbidden City itself. The Meridian Gate has five arches; the center one could be used only by the Emperor, by the Empress only on the day of her wedding, and the three top scorers on the triennial civil exams, who were permitted to leave the City through the arch. The Meridian Gate today is where you buy tickets for the Forbidden City (in its current incarnation as a museum).

Sadly for me, the central attraction in the Forbidden City, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, was under repair. It was covered in scaffolding and curtains, though the government was kind enough to print a photograph of the Hall on the curtains so we knew what we were missing.

Fortunately, I was not lacking for giant ornate history-filled structures. The Forbidden City is the world's largest palace (178 acres), comprised of eight hundred buildings with 8886 rooms. I spent several hours walking around viewing exhibits such as "the uniforms of the Imperial guard" and "the palace rooms of the Emperor's concubines". I won't go into too much detail, partly because it would get even more boring than this usually is, partly because I just don't remember much of it, and partly because some of it I still don't understand. For instance, the "Gate of Moral Standards"--what is it? what is morally standard about it? The sign explains that the name means, literally, "Gate of Correcting the Law", but that just raises further questions. But besides the confusing names, the Forbidden City is a fascinating place--it's a giant museum, with all sorts of various exhibits about life in the Imperial court. Many of the more impressively decorated rooms have been preserved exactly as they were, and the buildings themselves are in excellent shape.

Walking around in the Forbidden City was interesting because everywhere in Southeast Asia has construction that mimics the structures in the Forbidden City. The architectural style that we think of as distinctively Chinese is based on the construction of buildings from the era when the city was built, and most of these structures are the originals from that time. After seeing replicas all over the world, it was an experience to see the original inspirations. As expected, the replicas were generally more impressive.

There were a lot of soldiers in the Forbidden City. Most of them were just standing around, presumably guarding things, but some were marching around in lines. There were also large metal vats, which were apparently kept full of water for fire-fighting. The sign notes that "Each of the Ming Dynasty vats has two iron rings, ancient, simple and natural."

One highlight was the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the largest of the halls of the Inner Court. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was the official throne room, but the Palace of Heavenly Purity was used for the daily affairs of government and was where the Emperor met with his cabinet. A board above the throne reads "Justice and Honor".

It was really cold out, and so I was very happy to see a sign saying, "Lounge for Foreign Guests--Heating available. Rest here, no charge." It was, of course, a gift shop with a little restaurant, but it was very welcome. I read recently that there's a Starbucks in the Forbidden City, but I didn't see it--apparently due to controversy, they removed most of their signs. Actually, I may have been inside it and not noticed.

I then walked to the northern end of the Forbidden City, which held the Imperial Garden ("Yu Hua Yuan"). It was built in 1420, during the Ming Dynasty. Many of the plants have important symbolic meanings, and several of them are centuries old. The garden is where the Qing Dynasty selected girls for the imperial harem.

Like everything else in the Forbidden City, the plants of the garden have symbolic meaning. The last emperor, Pu Yi, had his photo taken with his empress after their wedding in front of cypress trees that had become entangled to show that they wished to be together in heaven and on earth.

The gardens also had what I understand are traditional rock sculptures, including one, called the Hill of Accumulated Elegance, that was large enough to have a built-in cave. There are signs which urge visitors not to damage the hill by climbing on it ("A single act of carelessness leads to the eternal loss of beauty").

Moving on, I visited the Palace of Gathering Excellence (Chu Xiu Gong), built in 1420 to be the residence of the Empress and the imperial concubines. It had an exhibit on Ci Xi, a recent figure in Chinese history. At the age of 16, in 1851, she was selected to be a concubine for the Xianfeng Emperor. In 1856, she gave birth to a boy, the Xianfeng Emperor's only male heir, and so was elevated to the rank of Noble Consort, second only to the Empress. On the Xianfeng Emperor's deathbed, he directed Yi and his Empress to help his son rule, and named his eight favorite ministers as regents.

The Empress and Ci Xi acted quickly to marginalize the regents, and were able to have them arrested (as a mark of mercy, they were permitted to commit suicide rather than face execution by "slow slicing", known in the west as death by a thousand cuts). The new Emperor was soon married off, although Ci Xi didn't approve of his wife and separated them. The Emperor began to visit prostitutes, and he caught syphilis and died. Ci Xi had her three-year-old nephew named Emperor, and continued to control the country in cooperation with the Empress until the Empress's sudden death in 1881. The new Emperor also proved unacceptable because of his interest in modernization, and Ci Xi had him exiled and ruled in his name. Ci Xi ruled China for forty-seven years, until her death in 1908. She was buried in an incredibly lavish tomb that she had had built.

The mainstream view is that throughout her reign, Cixi was basically a tyrannical leader who had no idea how to run a country. It's possible that Cixi gets a bad rap, and wasn't as homicidal and foolish as history tends to believe. But it is clear that Cixi was not what China needed at the turn of the 20th century. While Japan was urgently modernizing in an effort to improve its position vis-à-vis Europe, Cixi's extremely conservative principles and her lack of faith in political, social, and military modernization set the stage for the dislocations and chaos that characterized the first half of the 20th century in China. Historians generally agree that her ineptitude was in part responsible for the end of the imperial system (which collapsed four years after the end of her reign).

I figured I was more or less done with the Forbidden City at that point, and tried to wander back to the Meridian Gate. However, a bunch of soldiers suddenly walked in, closed all the doors, and stood in front of them. A crowd of slightly disturbed tourists quickly assembled, and we were told that the President of Israel had arrived and wanted to see the Forbidden City, so we had to stay out of his way. A-ha. Anyway, he would only be a little while, and we should try to be quiet. A few minutes later, he let us out and I walked out of the City. Next stop: Beihai Park.

More of day two coming soon.

Beijing Day Two: Tiananmen Square and Mao's Tomb

2007-01-16T07:48:00.000-05:00

This is from day two of Arie's trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

I woke up early so that I could go see Mao Zedong's mausoleum before the crowds arrived. The mausoleum is in the center of Tiananmen Square, one subway stop from my apartment. The Beijing subway isn't great--it's probably the cheapest system in the world (a ride costs three yuan, about forty cents), but there are only four lines and they're widely spaced. The city is building seven more lines for the 2008 Olympics.

Tiananmen means "Gate of Heavenly Peace" (tian = heaven, an = peace, men = gate). Unlike, say, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square is a recent creation--in the 20th century, a number of buildings were razed to create a large open area. On orders of Mao Zedong, it was expanded in 1949 to become the largest public square in the world (it's larger than certain countries (well, the Vatican)). The square is famous in America for being the site of the June 4th, 1989 incident. Pro-democracy protests involving tens of thousands of students and workers had been going on in the square since April, but after negotiations failed, the government sent in troops. On June 3rd, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and opened fire on the protestors. It took seven hours to clear the square; the Chinese Red Cross reported about three thousand deaths. There's a famous photo of a man standing in front of a line of tanks; no one knows what happened to him, but the Chinese government says he "wasn't executed"--unlike many of the workers who led the protests. Today, the massacre is not discussed in China, and many children know nothing about it. For more detailed information, you may want to read the Wikipedia page on the incident; the Chinese government blocks access to that website from inside China.

Mao Zedong's mausoleum is in the middle of the square. The building itself is more or less what you'd expect a mausoleum to be, squat with lots of columns; I thought it wasn't nearly as dignified as Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi (which was built first). Outside the mausoleum were four statues, two on each side, of a bunch of young Chinese people looking very brave and Communist, all carrying shovels or plowshares or something and walking in a very determined manner.

I was early enough that there was only a very small line, though first I had to go across the street to check my camera bag. The line moved very quickly, pausing only in front of a small stand inside the fence. The stand was selling flowers, and a lot of people were buying them. The line then went inside, and in the atrium was a large statue of Mao, and everyone with a flower leaned it against the statue along with hundreds of others (I later learned that the government has someone collect them all and return them to the stall so they can be "sold" repeatedly).

Past the statue was Mao's preserved body, encased in crystal. The team that developed the crystal coffin apparently had a very difficult task because by that point in history (1976), the Soviet Union, which had created the coffins for the other preserved communist leaders (Lenin and Ho Chi Minh), was not on friendly terms with China and so China had to develop the technology with help only from Viet Nam. The team first had a wax replica of Mao made in case they destroyed his body in the work, and some believe that the real body has long since decayed.

They certainly don't give you much time to look. The line moves quickly past the coffin, and there are armed soldiers who scold you if you stop even momentarily. It was hard to get more than a brief glimpse. Mao's body (I think) is in a crystal case at about eye level, lit by halogen lights that give his skin a bit of a yellow cast. He looks older than I expected, but that's obvious in retrospect--the portraits of him that are everywhere are of him when he was younger.

The last room in the mausoleum was surprising. I expected a few posters about Mao's life, or perhaps a plain hall, but instead there was: a gift shop. Filled with tacky crap. If you want a Mao Zedong wristwatch or bookmark, that's the place to go. I bought a few cigarette lighters with Mao's face on them; when you open them, they play some sort of patriotic song.

The mausoleum was built with material from all over China, and 700,000 people did "symbolic labor" to contribute to its construction. It later turned out that the symbolic labor was actually useless--the government bused in thousands of people to each carry a brick to a "work site", and the next busload would carry the bricks back to the original spot.

I was a little surprised that people here have such a high opinion of Mao given his history. Mao's lack of understanding of economics and agriculture combined with his contempt for human life led directly to the deaths of at least thirty million people, probably tens of millions more. But it turns out that Mao is fairly beloved in China, and there are even temples dedicated to him. The official party position is that Mao was "seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong", though they don’t talk about him much anymore.

I reclaimed my camera, found a Bank of China ATM that would give me money, bought a hat, and walked down Wangfujing Dajie (Wangfujing Avenue), a major upscale commercial area. I was struck by the prevalence of Olympics-related signs and activities (the 2008 Olympics will be hosted in Beijing). Like everything else done by governments, the Beijing Olympics are highly politicized. They have five mascots, animals drawn from all over China; one is the Tibetan Antelope (just to rub in that Tibet is part of China). In preparation for the Olympics, the government has passed laws that enable ejection of non-residents during the Games, requiring locals to stay indoors during the games, and various other suspicious things. Reporters Without Borders has called a boycott because of China's censorship-related activities relating to the Olympics.

At the southern end of Tiananmen Square is the Qianmen ("Front Gate", same "men" as in Tiananmen, known formally as Zhengyangmen). It was once the gate to the Imperial City, which no longer exists. The first gate on the site was built in 1419, though this one is from, strangely, 1914. It's the tallest gate in the city. You can see from its construction that "gate" doesn't just mean a metal door that swings open; these guys are not playing around when it comes to gate building.

Even in the freezing cold weather, Tiananmen Square is crowded (though I imagine it's packed in the summer). There are a lot of tourists, both domestic and foreign, and a lot of police. The Chinese government has learned their lesson; the Square is now heavily monitored by uniformed police and video cameras, and there are a significant number of plainclothes police hanging around. It's creepy. There are also a lot of people trying to sell stuff, mostly cheap Mao trinkets, kites, postcards, etc.

Near the center of the Square is the Monument to the People's Heroes, a stone pillar more than one hundred and twenty feet high. It commemorates those who lost their lives in the 19th and 20th centuries in China's revolutions (from the First Opium War to the Communist Revolution).

Continue to Arie Goes to the Forbidden City.

Beijing Day One: You could make a filament, or a ballast keel, or self-tanning cream, or...

2007-01-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

I spent the previous night in the Bangkok Airport Hotel (Novotel), which is very, very nice. In keeping with the general theme of my trip to Southeast Asia, the hotel lost power for a couple of hours in the evening, but they gave us free sushi and sashimi to make up for it (and it did). Great place. I woke up early and took their shuttle to Suvranabhumi Airport, passed through customs without a problem, and got on a Thai Airways flight to Beijing.

The flight was about 5 hours and passed uneventfully until the very end. I had thought there was a problem with the plane because we started descending, and yet I couldn't see Beijing out the window. We were very low, it was a clear day, and yet all I could see was grey land in all directions. Then suddenly we were almost on the ground, and I realized: That's not grey land, it's smog. There's so much crap in the air that you can barely see the ground. Sure enough, we landed with no problems in Beijing's Capital Airport.

I had made arrangements to rent a studio apartment for a few days (http://www.hw-ielts.com/apartment.htm). The guy who owns it, Kelvin, met me at the airport.

First impression: It's really, really cold. OK, I've been living in Cambodia, where it's 80 degrees every day, and I'm coming from Bangkok, the hottest capital city in the world, but Beijing isn't just temperate, it's freezing. It's well below zero when I arrive, and I had no winter clothing of any kind. Appropriately, given his name, Kelvin drives with the window open.

Second impression: There's a lot of traffic. Kelvin tells me that it's a twenty minute drive when there's no traffic, but it takes us more than an hour. The apartment is fine--a bed, a bathroom, and a door that locks. My first (and most important) mission is to locate a winter coat ASAP. Fortunately, the apartment is a few blocks from a mall, which is good, because by now it's dark and freezing out. I put on a couple of sweaters and shiver my way over.

The mall, I think it's called the New World Center, is just like any mall in the United States--big, fancy stores, a food court, some restaurants scattered around. There's an ice skating rink on the bottom floor, and lots of people are crowded around watching the skaters. I stop to take a few pictures.

I'm the only white guy in the mall, and the only one within a several block radius, so I stick out quite a bit. This surprised me--of all the places I've been in Asia, Beijing was the one where the people seemed least accustomed to foreigners. Not at the tourist sites, of course, but in the malls and on the streets.

Anyway, back to jacket acquisition. I figure, if it's really like an American mall, there's a bargain store in the basement--and sure enough, I find a store selling big poofy winter coats for 129 yuan (about $15). Bought it and a set of gloves, and back outside.

It's still freezing, but slightly more bearable. I stop to take a photo of the giant pig fountain outside the mall and realize that a) it's hard to take photos while wearing gloves; and b) it's too cold to take my gloves off. So there aren't many photos. Anyway, if you look at the pig fountain, you'll see that there's a small round coin down and to the right of the pig. People try to throw coins through the hole in its center, presumably for some sort of luck.

I want to try some Peking duck (there's a famous place across the street from the mall), but I can't afford it. The ATM at the mall won't give me any money, which is vaguely worrisome. It turns out that most ATMs in Beijing aren't hooked up to international networks, and so foreigners can only use a select few. Instead I wander around the markets a little hoping to find something that looks appetizing, but none of the street food looks good. Disheartened and freezing, I get a quick bite at Pizza Hut.

I speak a little Mandarin. Not very well, and I don't have much of a vocabulary, but I can have simple conversations--ordering food, buying things in stores, etc. Most people I encounter speak English, but it's really amazing how friendly people here become when I say something in Mandarin. The waitress at Pizza Hut was very eager to help me with my pizza-ordering skills.

The language situation in China is very complex. The official language, Standard Mandarin, is the most widely-spoken language in the world (almost nine hundred million native speakers). It's spoken in most of mainland China. The Chinese language most Americans encounter is Cantonese, because most Chinese people who came to America came from non-Mandarin regions (like Hong Kong). Contrary to what I had hoped when I started learning Mandarin, the different forms of Chinese are not mutually intelligible; Mandarin and Cantonese are more akin to French and Spanish than to English and British English.

Mandarin has very few sounds. There's a very limited range of consonants and vowels, and restrictions on how they can be combined. To make communication possible, Mandarin is tonal--a syllable spoken with a rising pitch (as if it were a question) has meaning different from what it would be were it pronounced with a falling pitch. One example is the syllable "shi", which can mean, among others, "corpse", "lion", "rock", and "warrior", depending on pitch (the poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" consists entirely of the syllable "shi" pronounced with different tones, and it has a happy ending--no lions get eaten). Mandarin has five tones, while Cantonese has about nine (which is why Cantonese sounds more melodic).

Written Chinese is fascinating. The characters are thousands of years old, and have not changed much--a literate Chinese person can read something written in 200 B.C.E. with no difficulty (whereas an English speaker generally cannot understand anything written before the 13th century C.E.). Even with tones, there are many homonyms in Mandarin, but there's no ambiguity in the character system. A single word can mean many things--e.g., "wu" with a high level pitch can mean "house", "to plaster", "a witch", "filth", "a crow", "to dig a pond", "to falsely accuse", or "tungsten". This can get confusing. If someone offers you "wu", you want to ensure you're getting a house or some tungsten, not filth. But the characters for each of those meanings are different, so if they write it down, there's no ambiguity.

Cantonese is written with some of the same characters, but many are different. A Mandarin speaker cannot necessarily communicate with a Cantonese speaker by writing (although many Cantonese speakers also speak some Mandarin). By western standards they appear to be different languages, but the Chinese government maintains that they are dialects of one language, presumably to give legitimacy to its hegemonic control over so many disparate peoples.

Anyway, after the pizza I went home and went to bed. Not a very exciting day, I know, but on day two I went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Much better.

Penang Days Three and Four: Sights for Sore Feet

2007-01-12T08:25:00.000-05:00

This is entry three of Arie's trip to Penang. You may want to start at day one.

Sunday, January 7th was pouring, so we went to the mall. I thought it was fairly dull (even with an electronics store showing Snakes on a Plane), but apparently there are very cheap shoes there (Jimmy Choo is from a shoemaking family in Penang), and I understand some people like that sort of thing. Indian food for lunch, still pouring, back to the night market for dinner and some shopping.

Monday, January 8th had much better weather. I started the day with a taxi to George Town's Padang, which is a large open field that the British built in most of their Malaysian towns. It was surrounded by various government buildings including City Hall, the State Assembly Building, and the Supreme Court. The first two were beautifully designed, the third covered in scaffolding.

Since the weekend was over, we figured everything would be open. But no, most stores were closed--a guy who was setting up shop (at noon) explained that nothing in Penang opens before 12:30pm. That's right, they don't work weekends and they don't work mornings. No wonder there's been so much immigration.

We had tea at the E&O Hotel, a very old and semi-famous hotel that was recently reopened. There was a beautiful view from its garden. Somerset Maugham wrote about it extensively, and was a regular guest (as were various other famous figures). Lonely Planet told us there was a cheap and tasty lunch, but it wasn't cheap and didn't appear to be tasty, so we passed.

I then walked to St. George's Church, the oldest church on the island and the oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia. It was built in 1818 with, of course, convict labor. It was pretty, and I would have liked to go inside, but it was locked up.

Next stop was Kuan Yin Teng, a Chinese temple--Kuan Yin is a fertility goddess (also peace, mercy, and good fortune). The temple wasn't too exciting, but there were the largest incense sticks I've ever seen burning out front.

After that was Sri Mariamann Temple, this one Hindu (built in the southern Indian style). The top of the temple was highly decorated with various deities, apparently it's supposed to be Mount Meru (which supports the heavens in Hindu cosmology). It was built in 1883.

Finishing my tour of religious buildings was Masjid Kapitan Keling Mosque, I think the oldest mosque in town, built in 1801. It featured a visitors' center where you could go to, for example, study a chart that demonstrates the lineage from Adam to Mohammed.

Comparing the religious buildings was interesting. The most ornate was the Hindu temple, while the mosque was the most dignified. The Chinese temple had the most activity outside it, while the church had the least--I guess there aren't many Anglicans left in Penang anymore.

My next stop was Khoo Kongsi. The Kongsi are houses for Chinese people who share a surname (clan houses, sort of), and the Khoo clan house and temple are some of the richest and most important in Penang. They've had a building there since 1835, and today it's a museum (that gives the history of the Khoo clan, their tribulations in arriving in Penang, and the achievements of their more notable members) as well as a functioning clan house. The original roof of the temple caught fire the night it was completed (or possibly on Chinese New Year's Eve, or maybe both), and the superstitious believe it was because their ancestors were jealous--only the dead could live in a building so magnificent, apparently. It was rebuilt toned-down. Today, the museum says that "It was superstitiously believed that the clanhouse was too stately for deities."

I swung by one more religious building, the Hainan Temple (founded in 1870, dedicated to Mar Chor, the patron saint of sailors), and then on to a tour of Cheong Fatt Tze's house.

Cheong Fatt Tze was an odd guy. He left home penniless at the age of sixteen hoping to escape having to become a farmer. He sailed to Malaysia and started working various jobs for the British colonial authorities, and between his business sense and a series of intelligent marriages to wealthy women, he became extremely wealthy and powerful. When he visited New York toward the end of his life, he was declared (by whom, I don't know) the "Rockefeller of the East", and when he died, the British government ordered that all British flags around the world be flown at half mast.

He built eight mansions for himself in different cities, and in each one he maintained a wife and family. The Penang mansion was his favorite, and he went through quite a bit to build it. He bought the land when it was swampland (now it's downtown George Town), and in his designs attempted to create a fusion of British and Chinese influences (at a time when all other construction in the city was still Anglo-Indian). He had cast iron foundries in Scotland cast most of his railings and metal furnishings, brought in stained glass experts from, well, somewhere, and used traditional Chinese wood and gold decorations to create a series of screens and walls throughout the building. Many pictures are constructed from pot shards, smashed and then pieced together into intricate designs. The outer walls are covered in a special kind of blue paint (which apparently washes off when it rains, the tour guide was a little unclear on that).

He put a lot of money into obeying the dictates of Feng Shui. Feng Shui, which is Mandarin for "wind and water", dictates various principles that should be followed when building to maximize energy (qi) flows through the structure. As the name suggests, the most important principles relate to the flows of wind and water through the house. Many cultures have developed ideas about harmonious placement of items, but the Chinese probably carried it to its furthest development. According to feng shui, qi is dispersed by wind, but is halted by water, and the goal is to collect qi in the home and funnel it towards the occupants. Location is the most important factor--ideally, the hill should be "on the back of a dragon" (on a hill) and facing water so that wind (and thus qi) runs through the house and then stops. Cheong Fatt Tze's mansion is built along these lines--back to a mansion, front facing the ocean, shutters designed to let wind through, and a complex system of pipes which channels rainwater throughout the house so as to maximize qi flow.

His Penang mansion, being his favorite, housed his favorite wife and son. To ensure their well-being, he put in his will that they would be given the then-highly generous sum of $250/month and that the house could not be sold while his son was alive. Of course, after a few decades of inflation, $250/month wouldn't even pay the upkeep on the house, and so it was reduced to a fairly decrepit state (and filled with squatters).

His son died in 1989, and that's when local businessmen jumped in. They bought the house, paid off the squatters to leave, and began a massive restoration project. Cheong's relatives had stripped the house of most of its valuable goods, so they attempted to have many of the furnishings replicated in the manner in which they were originally built. For their efforts, they were rewarded with a UNESCO Heritage Conservation Award.

The tour itself is a bit long--the first half hour or so is listening to the guide tell Cheong's life story--but it's the only way to get a look inside the mansion other than to rent a room (it also operates as a very upscale guest house).

After the tour, I ordered some tandoori street food and watched them cook it. A tandoor is a clay and brick oven developed in northern India and Pakistan that gets very, very hot (900 degrees Fahrenheit)--it can cook a chicken in five minutes. Meats are skewered and put directly into the fire. I had always wondered how they get the bread to develop those large bubbles--turns out they stick it to the side of the oven. It was delicious.

After sunset, I walked around the town some more. The temples in Chinatown and Little India were lit up nicely, and Kuan Yin Teng's giant incense was still sparking a little. I went to take a few more photos of St. George's Church and a rather suspicious guy introduced himself and explained that he had been trying to make friends with westerners for weeks, but none would talk to him--one girl even ran away when he approached. I suggested he go to a bar, and he suggested he walk with me for a while so we could talk. He said he didn't want anything from me, no money, no food, just wanted to talk to someone. I explained that I was there to take photos and it wasn't really a group activity, but maybe he could try going to a bar in the backpacker district. Then he asked me for money. Cynicism triumphs again.

I walked back through the colonial district and up to the Victoria Memorial Clocktower--donated by a local Chinese millionaire to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it's sixty feet high--one foot for every year of her reign up until that point (she went on to hit sixty-four--the longest-reigning British monarch).

Dinner was at a food court near Cheong Fatt Tze's house, satay (sweet and spicy, not like satay normally is) and Baba-Nyonya chicken with coconut milk and rice. The Baba-Nyonya, a.k.a. Peranakan and Straits Chinese, are the first immigrants to Malaysia from China. They were closely allied with the British, and considered themselves an ethnic and social group from more recent Chinese immigrants. Today they have almost disappeared, reabsorbed into the mainstream Chinese culture, but the food lives on.

That's about it for my Penang trip. It's definitely one of the most interesting places I've visited so far--while all of Southeast Asia reflects a mix of Indian and Chinese cultures, Penang is unique because it's a more recent blending of cultures, and a purer one--if there were indigenous people in Penang before the British arrived, they have left no traces. Cambodia and Laos demonstrate the local societies' reactions Chinese and Indian influence over millennia, while Penang was formed from Sino-Indian contact in just over two centuries. It's a beautiful, interesting, and tasty place to visit.

Penang, Day Two: Downtown Penang and the Wizard of Food

2007-01-12T08:24:00.000-05:00

This is day two of Arie's trip to Penang. You may want to start at day one.

Saturday, January 6th. I woke up early so that I could read the newspaper and have some breakfast (our hotel had an excellent breakfast buffet). I'm glad I did. The Star, which is otherwise the worst newspaper I've seen that wasn't produced on a photocopier, had a wonderful article about Jews in New York. It wasn't news, not even soft news, just sort of, "Hey, there are Jews in New York, they brought bagels to the city, and they keep kosher (which is Hebrew for 'halal')." I read it a few times but remained absolutely baffled by its appearance in a local newspaper in Penang (it was written by a Star staff writer, not syndicated).

We tried to take the shuttle into town, but apparently the hotel requires you to reserve it two hours ahead of time, and also it goes to the mall, not town. Oh well, a cab was 20 ringgit ($6). The cab dropped us at a mall too, but one closer to town.

We walked through Chinatown and Little India. As noted, Chinese is the most represented ethnicity in Penang, and "Chinatown" is most of the downtown. Much more so than any other Chinatown I've seen, it seemed less alloyed with the influence of the surrounding cultures. For reasons unclear to us as of yet, most stores were closed.

George Town is a beautiful city. It's small, only about 200,000 people, and you can walk across the downtown in thirty minutes. The architecture is largely Chinese-influenced and at times highly ornate, and the colors are very saturated. Little India is not as architecturally impressive (excepting the temples), but it does smell very good. We ate in an Indian restaurant; the food was excellent, and so cheap that we at first thought the menu prices were in dollars, not ringgit (the exchange rate was about 3.5 ringgit to the dollar).

After the downtown, we walked up to the colonial district. The big sight there is Fort Cornwallis, built on the spot where Francis Light first landed (and named for the guy who failed to stop the American revolution). It was built with convict labor, of course, and is lined with cannons (mostly made by the Dutch, stolen by pirates, and recovered by the British). There's one large cannon named Seri Rambai that was made by the Dutch in 1603 as a present for the Sultan of Johor. When Johor was conquered by the Acehnese, it was given to the Sultan of Selangor, who was robbed of it by pirates, and then the British got it back in 1871. Allegedly the cannon can make childless women conceive, though I'm not sure how and I hope it doesn't involve gunpowder.

Fort Cornwallis has been made into a tourist attraction, but a very low-key one. We were just about the only tourists there. There was a sign saying you could rent a period costume for photos, and now that I think about it, all the employees were wearing period costumes. We walked around a bit, dodged the various chickens and parrots that were hanging around, and walked through the gunpowder magazine.

The Fort also has an exhibit about Sir Francis Light, the founder of George Town. Most suspicious about it was his "wife"; the exhibit switches between calling her a wife, a consort, and a mistress. His will (on display) makes various provisions for her, but in it he describes her as the 'woman who has cohabited with me'. (Incidentally, the will is poorly drafted--it provides her with an economic reward should her children die.) There's a statue of Francis Light in front of the Penang Museum, but apparently it was modeled on his son (who founded Adelaide in Australia, so Light's concubine probably didn't kill him) because no one at the time knew what he looked like.

We took a taxi back to the hotel, and on the way, asked the driver why everything was closed. He explained that it was a mandatory holiday, then clarified that it was only mandatory for the government, businesses could decide whether to open. We were unable to discern the name of the holiday (but stay tuned).

We decided to kayak a little in the ocean, and fortunately, our hotel provided free non-motorized water sports. The guys didn't want to give us a kayak, they claimed because the waves were too strong, but I think because they didn't want to carry it down to the beach. We paddled around for a bit, the current was strong, but that just made it more fun.

I heard there was a night market a few miles north from our hotel, and I figured it would have a food court, so we took a taxi up there for dinner. On the way, our driver mentioned that most stores were closed for the holiday. We asked him what holiday it was. He said: "Weekend." I miss New York.

The night market was at a region of Penang called Ferringhi Beach. It was surrounded by restaurants (including the excellently named "Wizard of Food"), but we eschewed them in favor of the food court. It was a great system--every table had a number, and the tables were surrounded by food vendor stalls. You claim a table, then go around to stalls, order food, and tell them your table number. When it's ready, they bring it out to you. We sat and ate for a few hours (Penang has really good food), and just as we were ready to leave, it started pouring. They quickly roofed over the food court, so we stuck around to eat some more food and watch a British football game, which was inexplicably on the public televisions. After dinner, we walked around the market a bit--very touristy, but funny stuff--and then headed home.

The historical and social information in this entry mostly comes from Lonely Planet: Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore, which is unfortunate because that book sucks. The maps of George Town were wrong, it barely had any information about Malaysian food, it left us in the dark about important facts, and it had entirely the wrong idea about various sights and activities. If I go back, I'm taking Frommer's instead.

Read on for day three, which is long and involves various religious places, but I think it's interesting.

Penang, Day One: Checking in

2007-01-12T08:23:00.001-05:00

This is day one of Arie's trip to Penang.

Friday, January 5th. We decided to spend three days in Penang (the, ahem, "pearl of the orient"), one of the states that make up Malaysia, with the hope of having a relaxing beach vacation. We flew in from Bangkok, and it already got weird--as we were approaching, there was a hurried announcement in Thai followed by one in poor English. We couldn't quite understand it, and I said I thought the flight attendant said, "We recommend you cover your nose and mouth." As we all laughed at my presumably comical mishearing, the attendants sprayed some sort of horrible toxic chemical all over the plane, and we all covered our noses and mouths. Turns out they have to spray for mosquitoes so Penang doesn't get malarial or something.

Penang is an island (the state also includes some of the mainland). The main city, George Town, was founded in 1786 by Sir Francis Light, a British East India Company captain, in an attempt to compete with the various Dutch trading posts in the region. Legend has it he fired silver dollars into the jungle from his ship's cannons to motivate his men to clear the jungle. A generous land grant policy led to massive immigration, largely from Indian and Chinese workers. Today, Penang is the only Malaysian state with a plurality of ethnic Chinese residents. It has had an interesting history; being a British colony, it was a major site for the opium trade in the 19th century, and with opium came organized crime (in the form of Chinese secret societies), brothels, and gambling. In 1867, possibly sparked by a rambutan-throwing incident, various Chinese gangs fought a gang war throughout George Town, killing hundreds of people. Britain pacified the city, hit the societies with massive fines, and then used the money to build the city's first police forth.

Our taxi to the hotel was interesting because our driver was kind enough to let us listen to Malaysian radio. I didn't understand any of the music because either it was in Malay or because it was Gwen Stefani yodeling, but I recognized most of the melodies--these included "If You're Happy and You Know It" and "I Will Follow Him".

Our hotel, the Tajung Bungah Beach Hotel, was not only excellently named, but was right on the beach. It was surrounded by high-rise construction--it turns out George Town had strict rent control which was repealed in 2000, and so the city is now in the midst of a construction boom. Our hotel wasn't in George Town, exactly, it was maybe 4 miles out of town. One of the drawbacks was there was nowhere within walking distance. Tanjung Bungah ("Cape of Flowers") is beautiful, but isolated. It doesn't have the greatest beach, either--there was a big sign warning us about jellyfish, and the sand was a bit rocky.

We were pretty tired from the travel, so we ate at the hotel's dinner buffet, which was excellent--an overview of various types of Penang's food (because of the confluence of Indian and Chinese cultures with Indonesian and Malay spices, Penang is considered to have some of the best food in the region). One of its most famous dishes is "curry kapitan", allegedly named when a British captain asked a Malay cabin boy what was for dinner.

That's it for day one. Day two involves Indian food and a kayaking bit, so that's exciting.

AirAsia

2007-01-11T08:36:00.001-05:00

I've been traveling around Southeast Asia a lot, and most of my flights have been on AirAsia, a regional discount airline. I have a few thoughts about them.

One of the ways AirAsia saves money is by making all seats on the plane first-come first-serve instead of having them pre-assigned--apparently boarding averages 25 minutes, whereas when seats are pre-assigned it takes on hour. Reducing time that planes are on the ground increases the total number of flights per day per plane and so reduces costs.

The problem is that they haven't worked out a good way of managing 200 people clamoring to get on to a plane all at once. The game begins maybe 15 minutes before boarding, when people start to nonchalantly stand in the vicinity of the gate. Other people also saunter over and try not to look too interested. Then one person will walk right up to the gate and get on line, and within maybe twenty seconds there will be fifty people in line. It's really amazing how quickly the line forms. Sometimes it will get triggered too early, and the airline staff will ask everyone to sit back down, and sometimes a few people even listen.

Once the plane is ready, the staff attempts to board families with small children, people with disabilities, and elderly people. This sounds like a nice idea, but it works out poorly for three reasons. First, their definition of "elderly" is absurd--fifty years old, roughly one third of the plane. Second, the announcement is always in broken English and a lot of people don't understand it, so they just see other people getting on the plane and follow. Third, some people do understand but want to sit in an exit row, so they get on too, and the staff isn't going to accost someone and demand to know their disability. But it's good that it doesn't work, because people who get on first tend to sit in the front of the plane, and so when the plane arrived everyone would be stuck behind the elderly and disabled people on the jetway. Clearly, the best method is to let the people who walk really fast board first, because a) no one has to wait very long for them to board; and b) they will get out of the way when the plane arrives. Thus I propose a New Yorker line, and I will update this space when AirAsia adopts my idea. Anyway.

The other thing about AirAsia is that they don't allow outside food or drinks on the plane, and then they try to sell you their own stuff. In fairness, their stuff isn't especially overpriced, and it's not terrible. However, it seems like extortion to put people in an airplane with very dry air and a risk of deep vein thrombosis if they don't stay hydrated, and then charge them for water. The good thing is that while they have their stated policy, they don't seem to ever actually confront anyone about it, and so everyone sneaks food and drinks on anyway. (AirAsia is owned by devout Muslims, and so alcohol is not for sale.)

AirAsia is starting a long-haul budget service, AirAsia X. The first route will be somewhere in England to Malaysia. For the fourteen hour flight, they plan to charge not only for food and drinks, but for entertainment--one article I read said they may rent out Playstations.

I'm cynical about all of this, but except for the water bit, I think it's a good idea. These various ways of saving money mean lower ticket prices, and I couldn't afford to have traveled so much if AirAsia and the other discount carriers weren't around.

Chiang Mai Day Three: Currying Favor

2007-01-11T07:39:00.001-05:00

This is about the third day of my trip to Chiang May. You may want to start at day one.

Thursday, January 4th, was our last day in Chiang Mai (and in Thailand). We had signed up for a Thai cooking class at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, which was recommended by Lonely Planet (so we knew they spoke fluent English and were much more expensive). We were a little sad about it because it was a "shopping at the market" class, and we were sick of markets, but they announced that everyone else would be going to the market while one couple stuck around to learn to make red curry paste. We explained that we also wanted to learn to make red curry paste, and so they let us stay. Score.

Making curry paste involves a lot more pounding on things than I had anticipated. The basic method is to take a lot of dried, roasted ingredients and pound them for a while with a mortar and pestle. Then you add some fresh ingredients and do it for a while longer. Eventually you get curry paste.

A little while after we made the paste, the rest of the class returned from the market (suckers) and we started cooking. We would first go to a classroom where we would watch the teacher make a dish; then we would go to the kitchen, where we each had a cutting board and stove. The first dish, and by far the best, was coconut soup with chicken. (One good thing about cooking class is you get to eat the food after you cook it.) Next came flat noodles with pork (and as they expected, half of us didn't eat pork, so they had saved some chicken). We then cooked and ate two dishes for lunch--a reasonable fish curry (using our curry paste) and some stir-fried mushrooms. Finally, we made a papaya salad and steamed banana cakes.

The best part about cooking class, though, isn't the food. It's the teachers. The first woman was the head chef at the school's restaurant, and a good part of the lesson was her telling us how the things we were doing would increase the price we could charge for the dish. She would show us a curry dish and say "30 baht" ($1), drizzle some coconut cream onto the top and say "90 baht", throw a few sliced chili peppers on top and say "120 baht", and finally cut a few scallions into flowers, stick them in, and say "300 baht!" From what I can tell about the way restaurants price their food here, she was just being honest.

The second woman was the highlight. She spoke in this unnerving monotone (my guess is that when she was learning English, she was told that unlike Thai it's a non-tonal language, so she does her best not to use tones), and while she did a good job showing us how to cook things, her dialogue was a little creepy (e.g., "My name is Pim, but you can call me beautiful. [Picks up and caresses knife.] Am I beautiful?"). The class was worth it just for that, no question.

I ate approximately nine meals over the course of the six hour class, and so the rest of the day's activity was lying around. And that was more or less the end of my Chiang Mai trip. Chiang Mai is a great city, one of the nicest places I've visited in Asia. It's touristy and a bit crowded, but it's also beautiful, tourist-friendly, has delicious food, and is very close to elephants. Can't really ask for more.

Chiang Mai Day Two: Elephants

2007-01-10T10:42:00.000-05:00

This is day two of Arie's trip to Chiang Mai. You may want to start at day one.

I hate organized tours. I hate being shoved into a minivan with a bunch of strangers and forced to go see things according to some pre-determined itinerary. I hate signing up for a cool-sounding tour and then having them stop at horrid tourist traps along the way (like when I took a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels in Viet Nam and they made us walk through a lacquer factory and gift shop on the way). Instead of tours, I now rent taxis and have them take me to the attractions. I decide my own schedule, I don't have to go to random craft factories, it's cheaper, and there aren't random strangers in the car with me unless I invite them.

That's how I ended up in a taxi on the way to Maesa Elephant Camp. Maesa (or Mae Sa, unclear) is a large elephant camp a few miles outside Chiang Mai that houses seventy elephants. Standing outside the camp were two adolescent elephants, and we fed them some bananas and took a lot of photos. We bought admission tickets for the camp and for the elephant show, for which we were just in time. We decided not to take any elephant rides because they make you sit in a basket, and we were only interested if you can sit directly on the elephant (you can, but only if you take their day-long mahout training course (I was tempted)).

The show was starting soon, so we hurried straight to the outdoor theater and managed to snag front-row seats. The elephant show was probably the best show I have ever seen. It started with an entrance parade (with elephants holding a "Welcome to Maesa" sign in their trunks).

The next demonstration was how mahouts get on and off elephants. It started with the mahouts climbing up and down the normal way, but then the elephants started cocking their legs to give the mahouts a step. Finally, the elephants lifted the mahouts with their heads and threw them onto their backs. After that came a demonstration of how elephants sleep, which meant that the elephants all laid down on the ground and didn't move for a while.

What followed was the single greatest thing I have ever seen. Billed as "Elephant Musicians", about a dozen elephants came out in a line, each blasting away at a harmonica held in the trunk. The elephants were clearly having a lot of fun marching around blaring on their harmonicas (all in the same key, thankfully) and stomping in time. At a predetermined signal, they all began to swing their trunks in circles while continuing to play and stomp. It was amazing, and this description does not do it justice.

The elephant band was the highlight of the show, but there were some other quality bits. The next event was Elephant Football (Soccer). At first the elephants just kicked a soccer ball into an unguarded goal (and missed a lot, but give them a break, they're elephants). But then another elephant came out to play goalie. The keeper elephant started bending at the knee and smacking his trunk on the ground to taunt the elephants who were going to take shots. Then the elephants took a few shots, and, surprisingly, the elephant goalie was able to deflect most of them. However, the show took a dark turn when the goalie elephant turned to the crowd to take a bow; one of the other elephants picked up the ball with his trunk and drop-kicked it into the unguarded goal. This taught us an important lesson about elephants: They are cheaters.

Next came elephant painting. The mahouts set up canvases and the elephants carried out their art supply boxes in their trunks. The mahout would dip the paintbrush and put it in the elephant's trunk, and then the elephant would paint a few strokes. I had thought that all animal art was basically abstract blobs of color, but these elephants painted some fairly nice pictures of trees and flowers. One even painted a decent outline of an elephant. I would have thought that the mahouts would guide the strokes, but they were very hands-off, only switching paintbrushes at the appropriate time. The elephants had even been trained to stop from time to time and hold up the brush while they examined their work. When their work was done, they bowed and then carried their supplies offstage.

Next came a stick race, where one of the elephants cheated when it became clear that he had no chance (really, they have no sense of sportsmanship). After that, an elephant went up against some guy from the audience in a dart-throwing contest. The guy won, but we all booed him. The last event was a lumber exhibition, where the elephants dragged some logs around. Normally, watching elephants drag lumber would be entertaining, but not after the wonder that was the elephant ragtime band (shown here). Finally, the elephants paraded again with a sign thanking us for coming.

This is where not being on a tour really paid off. The camp cleared out when the show ended because the tours don't stick around afterwards. But we had noticed that the map on the back of the program marked an area as "elephant nursery". Beeline. The nursery was almost empty, only a few other visitors had wandered over.

All nurseries should be elephant nurseries. We spent a good hour or so feeding baby elephants bananas and sugarcane, stroking their adorable baby trunks and ears, and taking photos of us sitting on them (baby elephants are six feet tall) and watching them do tricks. Baby elephants love sugarcane. Do not try to deny them sugarcane, for their trunks are deceptively strong. I know from experience.

The young elephants were trained to do some simple tricks, like putting hats on people, and it was adorable. They also knew how to pose for photos, and whenever a person would stand next to them, they would immediately wave their trunk around or grab the person with their trunks. They were also trained to ask for payment for their services, which came in the form of 20 baht notes (fifty cents). When paid, they would hold the money to their heads in a traditional gesture of thanks, and then the mahout would pocket it.

When we had had enough of baby elephants (which takes a long time), we bought some elephant paintings, and then, sadly, moved on from the elephant camp. It was probably the highlight of my vacation, and my only regret is passing on mahout training.

The rest of the day paled in comparison. Our next stop was an orchid farm, which looked from the start like a bit of a tourist trap. We were hungry, the entrance fee was 40 baht ($1), and their lunch buffet was 160 baht each. Fortunately, across the street was a Thai restaurant that had delicious noodle soup (total for five people: 120 baht). Sure enough, once we got into the orchid farm, we discovered that it was in fact another tourist trap. There were seven or eight rows of orchids, a butterfly room, a well-apportioned gift shop, and a giant restaurant. It was, in fact, a restaurant with some orchids outside.

The butterfly room was lame. When I think of butterfly rooms, I think of the one at the Bronx Zoo in New York, which has approximately one million butterflies per square foot. I'm not especially crazy about butterflies, but it's kind of fun to be in a room where you can't see because the air is so thick with butterflies. That's what I expected. That's not what I got. The butterfly room had maybe four butterflies, and they were all flying up at the corner of the room trying to escape. There was one other butterfly, but it was dead. There was one monarch butterfly perched on a flower, and an employee was there to point it out to us ("Welcome to the butterfly room. The butterfly is over there.").

They did have a rather nice gift shop, I guess. One of the things about running an orchid farm is that you have a lot of orchids, and so they've come up with some sort of process to varnish and dust them in gold to make jewelry. I don't really like jewelry, but everyone else loved it.

We then asked our driver to take us to a small town outside Chiang Mai that has been a center for umbrella production for centuries. He misunderstood (possibly deliberately) and took us to a silver factory with a rather large gift shop, but we refused to go in and so he took us to the umbrella town. It was interesting to see the traditional method of making umbrellas (which apparently includes a staple gun), but not that interesting. We didn't buy any.

Our last stop was a town of weavers. Lonely Planet claimed there was an area where you could walk through silk weaving factories, and sure enough, we walked through a small wooden building filled with people weaving on old-fashioned hand looms. It was almost certainly a tourist-related construct; next door we saw the actual weaving factory, and it was a lot more like what we had expected--brightly lit, lots of women sitting at tables, machinery in the background.

We had some trouble finding a restaurant for dinner because a lot of places take three days off for New Year's. Sigh.

Continue to day three.

Chiang Mai Day One: wat up?

2007-01-09T02:59:00.000-05:00

This is day one of Arie's trip to Chiang Mai.

Tuesday, January 2nd. Our flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai had landed at midnight, and we had gone straight to sleep, so this morning was our first look at Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is a very old city, and the old city walls still stand (with much of the moats intact). Most of what's interesting to visitors is on the eastern half of the old city and just beyond the walls (our hotel was maybe 1000 feet outside the wall).

There are a lot of white people in Chiang Mai. It's a major tourist destination (for both foreigners and Thai people from all over the country), and anyone with any interest in Thai history, culture, or cuisine eventually finds their way here. It being our first day, we decided to start with wats (Buddhist temple complexes).

Our first wat was Wat Chedi Luang, which has a semi-decayed stupa that was built in 1441 (or 1395 or some other disputed date). The Emerald Buddha sat here for a while before it was moved to Bangkok. There have been some reconstructions (by UNESCO and Japan), but they didn't finish the spire because they don't know what it looked like.

There were some interesting Buddha sculptures, but the high point of the wat was Monk Chat. Lonely Planet says monk chat is only at one monastery on certain evenings, but apparently it's caught on--at Chedi Luang, we saw a sign saying "Please stop and have a chat. If you just look and walk away, we are disappointed." Far be it from us to disappoint monks, and so we sat down and talked to a monk. We initially established that we both had questions for each other. We went first, which was good, because I was dying to know: How do monks afford plane tickets? There have been monks on a bunch of our flights. Do they stand outside the airline office with their begging bowl and fingers crossed?

Our monk explained that he was hoping to visit America soon, and that his parents or the monastery would pay for the ticket. Which led to his question: How can he get a visa to America? We weren't surprised--this is what everyone in Southeast Asia wants to know. Well, we were a little surprised to hear it from a monk. Sadly, monk chat was brought to a premature end when he was called away for a meeting (I didn't know they had those).

After monk chat, we walked over to Anusawari Sam Kasat ("Three Kings Monument"). It's basically a statue of three past kings of Thailand. The kings are three kings from the northern part of Thailand who are closely associated with Lanna history. The Lanna kingdom was formed when Chiang Mai allied with another northern city-state to form the Lan Na Thai kingdom, which reached from northern Thailand to Wiang Chan (now spelled Vientiane) in Laos. The Burmese conquered Lanna in 1558. Under the statue is a bench where local residents leave offerings in the hopes that the kings will bestow blessings.

We went to a few more wats (and walked by the "Salsa Kitchen and Bagel Café"--there's a lot of western food in Chiang Mai). At one of them, there were a couple of young monks (12ish) doing chin-ups on a branch, but every time I pointed a camera at them, they got down quickly and pretended they were doing something monk-appropriate. We then went to Wat Chiang Mun, which dates to 1296. It's the oldest wat in the city, and features the Chang Lom ("Elephant-Surrounded Stupa").

After lunch, I walked around the city a bit. I got a little lost because the Lonely Planet map is a big fat liar, but eventually I made it to the Pung Tao Gong Ancestral Temple, the oldest Chinese temple in the city. It was recently restored, and is very ornate.

After browsing around a bit, I walked to the flower market. It was a little disappointing--lots of flowers, sure, but it wasn't especially colorful or pretty or pleasantly odorous. Maybe it was less nice because it was afternoon, and so all the stalls were covered by sun shades.

I then walked to the main market to continue my tour of Southeast Asian markets. The market was also different from the other markets in the region in that it was much more modern--it almost looked like a supermarket. There were packaged foods, cash registers, and other modern conveniences. It was also less crowded than the markets in Cambodia and Viet Nam, and no one seemed to be in as much of a hurry.

There was a section of the market that looked like the other markets, though, with various chunks of raw meat and seafood in big heaps. There were also a lot of areas where random goods were sold--piles of string, silverware, plates, tires, etc. These parts of the market were more or less deserted, I suppose because it was the late afternoon. I hear all the good market shopping is in the morning.

We walked to the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar for dinner. The Night Bazaar is a giant tourist attraction, and with good reason--it's kinda cool. It's the descendent of the trading bazaar that existed on the site centuries ago, when Chinese merchants followed various trade routes that passed through Chiang Mai. Today it's mostly independent souvenir vendors who set up booths on the sidewalks, but there are also some large buildings with permanent vendors inside. It was crowded, but not jam-packed. If this were Cambodia, it would have spread into the street immediately, but here the streets remained clear for traffic. The food court has a bunch of permanent stalls, mostly serving tasty Thai food, but also some other stuff (I had Thai curry and falafel). It uses a coupon system similar to that of the Bangkok malls.

Then back to our hotel, Chiang Mai Thai House. The rooms are pretty nice, and instead of a Gideon's Bible, we got a copy of Karma for Today's Traveler (much shorter). But the staff doesn't have much of an idea of how customer service should work--they seem unwilling or unable to do simple things that most hotels are perfectly willing to do (like call taxis). It's puzzling. Nice place, except that.

That's Arie's first day in Chiang Mai. You should read day two because it has some great bits about elephants.

Laos Day Two: New Year's Day, Still Vientiane

2007-01-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

This is part two of Arie's trip to Laos. You may want to read part one.

I woke up excited to be in 2007, went downstairs fairly early, and saw on CNN that someone had set off a bunch of bombs in Bangkok. Great. It looks like the bombs were set off by guys pissed about the coup last September, but it got us thinking about our next steps. We were supposed to take a train from Bangkok to Malaysia, but it stopped in Hat Yai, a city where there have been daily assaults and murders by an Islamic insurgency. We decided it might be a bit smarter to fly.

Like Cambodia and Viet Nam, Laos was a colony of France. The French influence in Laos is very evident, from the cuisine to the streets (some inappropriately wide boulevards) to the Arc du Triumphe, a Lao version of the one in Paris. I climbed to the top of it (the inside is filled with souvenir stands, of course) to look at the view. Nice, I guess. It's called Patyu Xai, which more or less means "Gate of Triumph". Lonely Planet reports that it was built in the 1960s using cement that the U.S. purchased, intending it to be used for an airport.

Then I walked to the Lao central market. Much like the market I visited yesterday, it wasn't crowded at all. It had a surprising amount of electronics, much more so than was available in Cambodia. I'm not sure why it was so empty--maybe because it was New Year's Day, maybe because it's just how Laos is. We bought a few things, and the bargaining was suspiciously easy-going--maybe it's just that Laos is more laid back.

Lunch by the Mekong again, then we walked around a bit. Supporting the theory that Laos is a relaxed country was the phenomenon of many stores taking three days off for New Year's. Most stores were closed on New Year's Day, of course, but a lot of them had signs on their doors announcing they wouldn't be open for a few days. We booked a taxi to take us back to Thailand, and the agency had trouble finding someone who wasn't drunk.

Our border crossing back into Thailand was much easier--Thailand doesn't require Americans to have visas, and we didn't even have to get out of the van (our driver handled it all). The Udon Thani airport was very close to the border.

We got to the airport very early, and sadly, the food at the airport was horrible. Our Thai Airways flight was excellent, though, especially when the pilot announced, "I have a wish for you. I wish you a happy 2007 forever." We arrived at Chiang Mai at midnight, took a taxi to our hotel, and went to sleep.

My overall impression of Vientiane is that it's probably a great place to live if you're a westerner. Life is laid back, there's good food, and the weather's nice. There are a lot of NGOs, I hear, although they're located just outside Vientiane. It's not especially polluted, there's a fairly active community of westerners, and it's pretty. Unlike Cambodia and Thailand, there's virtually no prostitution (a foreigner who wishes to have sex with a Lao citizen must first obtain a government permit), and so there aren't any sex tourists or sexpats (except the ones who bring their Thai "girlfriends" here on vacation). It's not a great place to be a tourist because there's just not that much to do, but it's perfect if you just want to relax for a few days.

That's it for Arie's Laos adventure. Chiang Mai coming soon.

Laos Day One: New Year's Eve in Vientiane

2007-01-04T08:46:00.000-05:00

Saturday night started in Bangkok, and we had overnight train tickets to Nong Khai (on the border with Laos). We got to the train station about forty minutes early, plenty of time to stock up on train food and water. The station has a desk with English-speaking attendants and a special window only for foreigners with staff that speaks English--very helpful.

Thai trains have several classes: hard sleeper, second class fan, second class A/C, and first class. For second class, the tickets are divided into upper and lower, lower costs a little more. We had second class A/C upper and lower, and we tried to upgrade to first class, but it was full. We got on the train, and second class looked pretty nice. Each area had four chairs, two on each side, with a bed above them.

We got onto the train with a lot of food and water, but while we were still sitting at the station, a woman came around to take dinner orders. I was glad we had planned ahead, train food does not look especially appetizing.

Sitting in the station wasn't especially pleasant because the train's diesel engine was running, so the car filled with fumes. But once we got underway, it became a lot nicer. I had expected the train to move at a steady speed with reasonably constant noises (good for sleeping), but there were a surprising number of jolts and noises.

Less than an hour after we left, the conductor came through to convert the chairs into beds (the backs fold down). We got into bed and went to sleep.

Or tried, at least. It turns out that Lonely Planet was right--second class A/C is way too cold, and there's no way to turn the air conditioning down. They give you a thin blanket, and even fully dressed and wearing a sweater, it wasn't enough--I was freezing all night. We all wanted to sit together, so we had two upper and three lower seats, and I was one of the uppers. It turns out that upper is much, much worse than lower. The lower beds have curtains that cover the entire bed, while the upper ones have curtains that stop an inch below a large fluorescent light that's never turned off. I had to improvise a blindfold out of a sock. Also, the upper beds are right below the A/C vent, while the lower ones have more insulation. Upper sucks. Next time, second class fan, and only lower beds.

Still, a train isn't a bad place to sleep, and I did get most of a full night. The train is equipped with a shower (though not one I'd want to use), toilets, and sinks, but we were only on for an hour or so after we woke up before we arrived at Nong Khai.

Nong Khai is a small town on the border with Laos. The town itself is supposed to be nice, with a pleasant view of the Mekong River (which forms the border) and some nice spots to sit and eat, but we were eager to get to Laos. We hired a tuktuk from the train station straight to the border, which is at the Thailand-Laos Friendship Bridge (financed by Australia).

The Lao border was fairly unpleasant. We got through Thai immigration no problems, and then took a bus across the Friendship Bridge to the Lao side to get through Lao immigration and customs. We hadn't had time to get visas in advance, so we had to buy them at the bridge, a process that took about thirty minutes. Unlike my fancy Cambodia and China visas, the Laos visa is just a full-page stamp.

Once we had the visas, we had to wait on a very long line (maybe an hour) filled with rather pushy Asians to get to the immigration desk. Finally we made it to the front of the line, got our passports stamped, and we were free--to wait on the next line. This one was mercifully short. It was customs, which in other countries means they go through your stuff to see what you're bringing in (or just wave you by), but in Laos means that you pay them 10 baht. For some reason I was charged 20 baht, but I assume it's because I have facial hair and so am always the target of excess customs scrutiny.

We had a surprising amount of trouble getting a taxi to our hotel, and finally convinced a tuktuk driver to take us. Our hotel, Day Inn Hotel, was great. They didn't have our reservation, of course ("sorry, maybe we no check email"), but they had vacancies. The rooms were beautiful.

Laos has a difficult history. A French colony through the immediate post-WWII period, it became a pawn in the Viet Nam War and North Viet Nam supported a Communist revolution there. It remains a communist nation, controlled by an eleven member politburo. They’ve tried economic reforms with some success, but there’s minimal infrastructure (no rail, minimal telecom). It remains a nation built on subsistence farming. Laos has about five million people, and is slightly poorer than Cambodia. I was in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. It's small, about 200,000 people, and most tourists go to Luang Prabang instead.

Maybe I only have this impression because I was there on a holiday, but from what I saw, Vientiane is a very peaceful, quiet city. There's not a lot of traffic, no loud bars, not a lot of people on the street. It's not heavily developed, no high rises, not even the six story apartment buildings that fill Phnom Penh. It's a pretty lazily spread-out city--so much so that while walking around the city center, we ran into some German tourists who asked us if we could point them towards Vientiane.

We walked to a branch of the Mekong River, which runs through Vientiane, and had lunch on the bank. It wasn't much of a river--it's the dry season, so it was almost completely dried up, and what was left was barely moving. I imagine it's much more scenic during the rainy season.

After lunch we went back to our hotel to use the internet. It wasn't especially speedy, apparently because the government of Laos is determined to ensure that no one is able to dodge their telephone censorship by using internet telephony, and so they block anything that looks like it might be voice traffic.

I then walked to "That Dam" (pronounced "taht dahm"), the Black Stupa. It used to be covered in gold, but their story is that in 1828 the Siamese stole it all. A legend states that a dragon who lives in the Black Stupa rose up and expelled the Thai, but I guess not before they stole the gold from his house. Anyway, now that the gold is gone, it's black.

Then I walked to the market. It was fairly late in the day, and so it was mostly closed, but still interesting to see. Like all the other markets I've seen in Southeast Asia, it was mostly food and clothing, but unlike all the other markets, it was really slow and spacious. The stalls were spread out, it wasn't crowded at all, no one was running or screaming. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the main market in Hanoi.

I went back to the Mekong to watch the sun set, but it wasn't much of a sunset--too many clouds. Vientiane apparently has a bit of a hippie infection--there were people juggling clubs in the middle of a restaurant. There were also a lot of puppies, and lots of people cooking tasty-looking things on grills.

Back to the hotel. Vientiane has a few very fancy hotels, and they were all having New Year's gala dinners. Ours was not--and dinner there sucked. Great hotel, crappy restaurant. It was New Year's Eve, but we were exhausted, so we went to sleep at 9pm (hey, it was New Year's somewhere). Woken up by fireworks at midnight, and we could see them out our window--pretty.

Continue to day two of Arie's trip to Laos.

Bangkok Day Two: Tiger Temple

2007-01-04T08:43:00.000-05:00

This is from day two of Arie's trip to Bangkok. You may want to start at day one.

After the floating market, we asked our driver to take us to the Tiger Temple (and to make sure he understood us, he did an amazing tiger impression). We didn't know a lot about it; we had seen an Animal Planet special about a bunch of monks who adopted baby tigers, and figured that that seemed like a good place to go. Our driver had some trouble finding it, but after asking directions a few times, we started seeing signs that said "Tiger Temple".

Arriving at the temple itself was exciting. There was a gift stand that sold plain brown shirts, and a sign next to it saying that anyone wearing "hot" colors (red, orange, pink) would not be permitted to get too close to any tigers. That sounded promising.

The Tiger Temple is actually "Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yanasampanno Forest Monastery". It's still just a regular monastery, but they're saving up to build a special tiger enclosure (with admission, you get a little booklet that shows projected floor plans for the tiger enclosure (the booklet also has tiger poems)).

We arrived at about 1:50pm, and the brochure said the tigers exercise from 2pm to 5pm in the canyon, so we figured they were still in their cages--we went there first. The cages did have a couple of tigers (and a leopard), but the real attraction was a box with baby tigers in it (it's hard to imagine anything better for a box to contain). They were very small, smaller than housecats, and they were asleep. They may have been dreaming about hunting, because they kept twitching their paws and moving their mouths.

There were a number of other animals in the area as well--a wild boar and her newborn, some horses, some random cows. I guess the monastery accumulates wild animals.

I hung around the baby tigers for a while hoping that one of the monks would sense my natural tiger affinity and let me hold them, but it was not to be. Not disheartened, I proceeded to Tiger Canyon, hoping there might be more tigers in it and that maybe I could play with them.

Sure enough, Tiger Canyon was a well-orchestrated tiger petting zoo. At the bottom of the canyon is a large, round clearing, and half of it is fenced off. In the fenced-off half are five or six sleepy tigers who are chained to posts in the ground. I guess tigers are at their sleepiest in the mid-afternoon, because most of these guys were either asleep or clearly wanted to be. There was a line of tourists (it wasn't too crowded). I got in line, and thirty seconds later a staff member (whose job title, according to his badge, was "Tiger Boy") took me by the hand while another took my camera and followed, and I was sat next to tigers and told I could pet them while they took pictures.

It was probably the greatest thing anyone has ever done in the history of doing things. The tigers didn't seem particularly interested, more like sleepy, except at one point one of them did whack me surprisingly hard with his tail. The tigers did move around a little, but the staff seemed to be in control--at one point, one of the tigers roared a bit and growled at a lady who was stroking him, but they held her in place so she didn't run (presumably that might have triggered a hunting instinct) while they calmed the tiger down. One of the Tiger Boys did keep hitting the tigers with his hat, but they didn't seem to mind.

That's my hand in that photo. Tiger Canyon was surprisingly well-thought out for a tourist attraction in the middle of rural Thailand run by monks. The entire time that you're in the fenced-off tiger area, there's a Tiger Boy or Girl holding you very firmly by the wrist (except during photos) so that you can't do anything stupid. Their brochure says that only once has a visitor been injured, and not fatally.

The trip home from the temple was a little rough--our taxi's battery died at a gas station and we had to wait almost an hour for roadside assistance to give us a jump. The one car that stopped for gas refused to jump-start our car, which really surprised me--in the United States, no one would have refused. I had car batteries die on me a couple times out in rural Tennessee and upstate New York, and everyone was always eager to help out.

That's it for my Tiger Temple adventure. My trip to Laos, coming soon.

Bangkok Day Two: Floating Market

2007-01-04T08:34:00.001-05:00

This is about Arie's second day in Bangkok. You may want to start at day one.

Saturday, day trip day. We checked out of the hotel and got into a taxi we had hired for the day and headed for the floating market. Bangkok was once a city of primarily canals and ferries, and elements of that still remain--you can still take various boat rides in and around the city, and there's a traditional market on a canal an hour out of Bangkok where all the vendors are in boats. Of course, locals started driving to supermarkets decades ago, and so the boat rides and floating market are entirely crammed with tourists.

Our taxi driver took us to a long-tail boat dock. I was pretty sick of long-tail boats after my trip to Krabi, but we didn't seem to have much choice. They were supposed to be 500 baht ($14.25) each, but we were ready to walk away at that price (we weren't that desperate to see yet another market), so they let us have it for 400 ($11.50)--we still weren't thrilled, but we had come a long way. We climbed into the boat and our driver immediately set out at a fairly high speed through the narrow canals. Just as I was telling myself that he had a lot of experience and we were perfectly safe, he slammed us at high speed into a wall. Only minor injuries.

The floating market itself is a few hundred feet of canal space that's absolutely crammed with long-tail boats and rowboats of tourists, and of course dugouts filled with souvenirs. There are also some floating food vendors. No engines are permitted in the market itself, and so the boat coasts in and the pilot rows the boat through the mass. It's so crowded that mostly you sit and wait for space to open up in front of you. The vendors have hooks; the more aggressive ones will hook your boat and pull it over so you can get a closer look at the Floating Market T-Shirts or whatever, while the less aggressive will only hook your boat if you express some interest.

It's interesting to see, but it's so intensely touristy that it's hard to stand for long. Once we were through, we asked our boat driver to take us back to our taxi. Instead, he piloted us over to a dock that didn't look familiar, and a friendly guy invited us to take a tour of a coconut sugar processing plant. He assured us that it was very interesting, that it would only take a few minutes, and then we could go home. Fortunately, we are familiar with tourist traps and had been expecting this, and adamantly refused to get out of the boat. Eventually they realized that we weren't going for it, and our driver took us instead to a large canal where guys tried to sell us fish food. Didn't go for that either. Next stop: our dock.

The floating market was probably a fascinating and beautiful place once, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, but now it's so crowded with tourists that it's just kind of sad. I guess most interesting things can expand to accommodate visitors, but not the floating market, and so it just gets more and more unpleasant. I had a lot of fun, but mainly because I found the whole thing hilarious--once I saw the vendors on boats selling floating market t-shirts, I knew I was going to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, we were eager to get the hell out of there. I urge you to read about the next part of my trip, where I pet some tigers.

Bangkok Again, Day One: The Grand Palace

2007-01-03T09:01:00.001-05:00

This was my second trip to Bangkok, you can read about my first trip here.

Friday morning, Bangkok. We were staying at the Hotel de Moc, which is a great place--the best part about it was their tour desk. We had been trying to finish planning our trip for weeks with no success, but we sat there for about an hour and the guy there made all our arrangements, booked our train and plane tickets, etc. Sweet. They were also having a pool party for some reason, so free snacks and drinks. Also sweet. We ate in the hotel restaurant, which was pretty good for a hotel restaurant.

After breakfast at the hotel (receipt: "Free Breakfast Buffet!!!!!"), we piled into a taxi to go to the MBK, my favorite Bangkok mall. Sadly, it didn't open until 10am, and so we got on the Skytrain to Sukhumvit to visit the U.S. embassy.

One of the things about living in Southeast Asia is that your passport fills up fairly quickly--every visa and visa extension is a full page. My passport was out of regular pages, and I was tired of having to bribe consulates to put visas on my "amendments" pages. I had heard that the U.S. embassies abroad can put in extra pages in about ten minutes, no fuss (in the U.S., you have to mail your passport somewhere, it's expensive, and takes weeks).

Apparently the embassy was closed to U.S. citizens because it was the last Friday of the month. The guard acted like I should understand why that is, but I just smiled and asked a few more times and finally they let me in. After quite a bit of security, I was back on American soil, and a nice lady had me fill out some forms and then sit and wait for an hour while she "checked my name".

Waiting in the U.S. embassy citizens' waiting area is kind of fun because you get to listen to all the other Americans who have come in for various reasons. There weren't many because the embassy was "closed", but a few other people talked their way in too. The first was a couple whose passports expired in four months (you need six months validity to enter most countries, for some reason). They got a rather patronizing lecture about how they should have planned in advance, but the embassy eventually agreed to issue them emergency passports. The next guy was trying to get a U.S. visa for his Thai girlfriend so he could bring her into the country. I'm told by a friend with extensive visa experience that the U.S. hates it when someone tries to get a visa for one purpose (say, a migration visa), but their actual intent is another (to marry someone), and this seemed true here--the embassy guy told the American that his girlfriend was denied a visa because she had no economic ties to Thailand (and so no reason to return), and that she was welcome to apply again, but she would be probably just be denied.

Finally I got my passport with 24 new pages stuck into the binding and headed back to Thailand. It was almost lunchtime, so I took a taxi back to the MBK and ate some more great pad thai at their food court, then back to the hotel.

Trying to get a cab back to our hotel was a little tricky. Bangkok taxis are metered, and the rates are very low--a 30 minute drive across town might cost 50 baht ($1.50). But drivers have figured out that westerners are expecting much higher rates, and so they often try to negotiate a fare instead of using the meter (illegal). I usually just refused to take cabs who did that, but sometimes I couldn't find anyone who would use the meter. Outside the MBK, a driver demanded 300 baht ($8.50), but the actual metered fare was 40 baht ($1.10).

We grabbed a tuktuk to the Grand Palace. The Grand Palace is where the kings lived from the 18th century until fairly recently (now the King lives just outside Bangkok). The Palace is part of a large complex of buildings, including various wats (temples) and shrines, bureaucratic offices, and the royal family's living areas. The Palace is interesting, but the complex is very large and we only had an hour, so we didn't make it through every part of every building (whew).

Seeing the Grand Palace explained why gold is so valuable--it's scarce because Thailand has bought all the gold in the world and used it to cover all their buildings. I even saw a guy painting more gold onto some of the murals, and can only imagine that he got yelled at yesterday ("you call this a gold mural? Get more gold on there right away!").

The ticket for the Grand Palace came with a ticket to see Wat Phra Kaew ("Temple of the Emerald Buddha"), which houses, well, the Emerald Buddha--apparently a very important Buddha icon. I guess if I appreciated the culture a little more, I might see what's so interesting about it, but it just looked like a small Buddha figurine. It's made of jade, not emerald, and it's clothed in a ceremonial robe (apparently the King changes the robe each season). Its slightly suspect history states that it was made in India and given as a gift to the King of Ayuttaya (a pre-Siamese kingdom), was stolen by the Burmese, recovered in northern Thailand, stolen again by the Lao and taken to Luang Prabang, and finally returned to Bangkok by King Taksin. Apparently many Cambodians believe that it should be in Wat Prah Keo, in Phnom Penh, while many Lao believe that it belongs in Haw Phra Kaew, in Vientiane.

The Grand Palace also had a model of Angkor Wat, I'm not exactly sure why. There were riots in Cambodia when a Thai actress was reported to have said that Angkor belonged to Thailand, so apparently that's a point of sensitivity--maybe the model was there to subtly suggest their claim to it without starting any more riots.

Most of the complex around the Grand Palace is made up of structures with shrines, thrones, or other regal or religious items. There was an exhibit of the King's weaponry, but I didn't walk through it--I got the message, which is that the King has a lot of weapons. The guards at the Grand Palace did the Buckingham Palace thing where they stand absolutely still no matter what, and so there were crowds of tourists standing around each one taking photos of each other standing next to the guards.

After the Grand Palace, we walked through a little market. For unclear reasons, amidst the fabric and Thai food on offer was a series of grills where vendors were making and selling french fries and chicken nuggets.

Getting back to the hotel from the Grand Palace was surprisingly difficult. The first few taxi drivers demanded absurd fees to take us. The next driver refused to take us at all, suggesting we try a tuktuk instead. Finally we found a driver who agreed to take us there--but halfway to the hotel, he kicked us out. Figuring we were close enough, we walked the rest of the way. I'm glad we did--we got to see another side of Bangkok. A few blocks off the main road are much poorer areas. It's interesting that poverty looks the same all over the world--these shacks could have been in Cambodia or Gaza or, I'm told, South America.

That's it for Arie's first day in Bangkok. You can go on to day two, the floating market. Also tigers.

Arie Goes to Pattaya

2007-01-03T08:53:00.000-05:00

Thursday morning, last day in Cambodia, first of a long vacation. We loaded our luggage into a taxi and headed over to the airport to find that 1) there's a 32 kilogram (70 pound) weight limit on each individual suitcase; and 2) you pay $4 for every kilogram over 16. The Biggest Suitcase in Cambodia weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds), so we did some hasty repacking and got it to 35kg. The guy at the gate said close enough, weighed them all, and concluded that our bags were 40 kilograms over. He took out a piece of paper and wrote, 4 x $40 = $160, and just as I started pulling out money, he wrote, "just give me $100." I did, and we got on the plane. A good last memory of Cambodia--bribery.

First thing we did on arriving to Thailand was find their left-luggage room. I was not familiar with these things before I started traveling, but most ports of call have a room where you can leave your luggage while you travel. I thought the whole point of luggage was to have it with you, but this worked out nicely--I checked our giant suitcase and jumped into a taxi.

We wanted to spend a few days on the beach before the traveling began in earnest, so we picked Pattaya. Pattaya is a little town a few hours out of Bangkok that has a sort of mixed reputation. It's known as a center of sex tourism, but it's trying to reinvent itself as a family-friendly resort destination. We stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, which was exactly as awesome as it sounds like it should be. It's a very child-friendly place (at least, if your child never leaves the hotel), with hourly activities at the pool, various video games and foosball in the lobby, etc., but because it's in Pattaya, there are condoms in the rooms and it has a very permissive overnight guest policy. This being the high season, Pattaya was absolutely crammed with tourists. It gets more than five million visitors every year (a lot for a city of 100,000 people).

Pattaya itself is not a very attractive town. It reminded us of the Jersey Shore--lots of fast food, bars, convenience stores, neon, cheap motels. If not for the people, you wouldn't know you were in Thailand--it could just as easily be any small beach town on the east coast of America. For unclear reasons, it's very popular with German tourists, and so the town is filled with German pubs and restaurants. I can't imagine what sort of traumatic things you have to do to a person to make them choose German food over Thai food, but I hope they're never done to me.

The Pattaya beach isn't especially nice either. It's covered in umbrellas and chairs, which you can rent for 40 baht or so, and while you sit there, a constant stream of hawkers tries to sell you tattoos, deep-fried seafood, a ride on a jet ski, etc. We sat there for a bit and then moved on to the pool, which was enormous and well-designed, although the music from the Hard Rock Hotel was competing with the music from the Hard Rock Café next door--you'd think they could coordinate.

We took a walk down Soi 6 ("Street 6"), which is apparently one of the brothel blocks. It's easy to spot the brothels because the women are lined up outside them, and as you walk along, they call out to you (or at least, I assume they would have called out to me if I weren't walking with my girlfriend). I'm not sure what the legal status of prostitution is, but clearly the police aren't interested in stopping it. Some of the bars have comical names, my favorite was "Pan.T".

A little uncomfortable, we sought out someplace for dinner that was not filled with prostitution. Finally we found a restaurant that was more or less filled with families with children. One bite and we could tell why--the food was horrible. We ran to a place with few prostitutes and excellent food. After dinner, I made a discovery--Pocky, my favorite candy from Japan, is available in Thailand. Other people come to Pattaya for the prostitutes, I come for the Pocky.

We got up at around 8am the next morning, which made us the only people in Pattaya awake before noon. The restaurants and the beach were deserted, as was the hotel pool. We took a taxi back to Bangkok (had to give directions to the driver in Thai, thanks, Lonely Planet).

While in Pattaya, we found out why the Internet has been unreachable: Apparently there was an earthquake in Taiwan, and it snapped the cable that connects Asia to the rest of the world. I'm not sure exactly why all of Asia has only one cable to connect it to North America, but there it is.

Overall impression of Pattaya: Unless you're there for prostitution, it's not worth visiting. There are brothels everywhere, the beach is barely worthwhile, and it's difficult to find Thai food. The people who bring their children here are crazy, anywhere else in Thailand would be better.

Arie Goes to a Cambodian Amusement Park

2007-01-03T08:43:00.000-05:00

One of the things I had been meaning to do while in Phnom Penh was visit the amusement park. Lonely Planet claimed that about half a mile from my apartment (at the eastern end of Sihanouk Boulevard) was a carnival of some kind, and I could sometimes see the lights from it, but I hadn't found time to visit. My second-to-last day, I walked over to see it.

There was no admission charge, so I walked right in. As best as I can figure out, the amusement park isn't run by a single company so much as it's a large number of independent vendors who all just staked out some land and set up booths. The park straddles a major road, and traffic just goes right through it. (Similarly, people ride motorcycles through the park at high speeds, so sometimes you have to jump off the paths in a hurry.)

The first thing I noticed when I came in was booths where you throw darts to pop balloons. There were dozens of these booths, and a lot of them had customers--I guess this game is very popular in Cambodia. It looked sort of fun, but not very fun. I don't entirely understand why the amusement park needs 30 identical booths, but that's how it was. They also had giant bags of pre-inflated balloons to replace the popped ones, I suppose every carnival does that.

There were also a lot of rides. I guess all amusement parks primarily target children, but this one especially so--there were a lot of slow, not scary rides on tracks and swinging cars with cartoonish decorations. There was one roller coaster, and it looked kind of fun, but it wasn't very large or fast. Most of the customers were families with children, though there were some teenagers and post-adolescents around.

This being Cambodia, it was also filled with food vendors. A lot of corn, both boiled and popped, for some reason. One thing I couldn't quite figure out was a number of large areas that looked sort of like restaurants, but instead of tables they had hammocks. I didn't see anyone in the hammocks, which makes me think that they may just have been where the carnival workers sleep at night. I'm not really sure.

One thing that looks better about this amusement part than ours is the roller skating. Ours are just boring rings with bad pop music. But this roller skating rink had a big wavy floor section, and the more daring kids would get up a lot of speed and then go up and down the bumps, or just try to jump over the whole thing. It looked fun.

I took a lot of photos. I expected to draw a lot of attention; last time I was out with my camera, I attracted a small crowd of men who poked and prodded my tripod and zoom lens. But this time, no one paid me the slightest bit of notice. This was a bit more surprising because I was the only white person in the place. Usually the reaction I get depends on whether I'm at a tourist attraction-- either "good, another westerner, try to sell him something" or "why would a westerner come here?". But at the amusement park, no one cared one way or the other. No one tried to sell me anything, no one looked at me for more than half a second, no one poked my tripod. It was surprisingly pleasant.

I spent some time in front of a ride where people sit in cars that swing around, and then the cars can also spin freely on their mounts. A pair of workers were employed to stand around and spin the cars by hand as they spun around on the motorized ride. I guess this isn't surprising, but I was struck by how the whole scene could have been in the United States. I had seen them all back home--the twelve year-old boy who wants to spin as fast as possible, the two teenage girls who keep trying to stop the guy from spinning them around, the boy trying to impress his date by acting like he's enjoying the ride when they're both trying not to vomit, the father who really didn't want to be on the ride, but is there to hold his incredibly excited six year-old son.

It's not surprising that the best word I can think of to describe Cambodia is "foreign". A friend pointed out that being a westerner in Phnom Penh is alienating because you see people every day and have no idea what they're doing. You see people sitting around, cutting up food, doing intricate things with metal bars, and you don't know who they are, what they're doing, why they're doing it. She notes that when you get on the subway in New York, you can make up a story for every person in the car--and the stories might not be right, but they're plausible--recognizable. To live in Cambodia is to constantly think, "I have no idea what's going on", all day, every day.

The amusement park was a wake-up call. Phnom Penh is foreign because it's a different culture, because it's very poor, because I didn't grow up here, because the weather is different, because the food is different, because the government is corrupt. But it's not foreign because of the people--the people are the same. Poverty is painful because we're all the same. I'm a wealthy American instead of a starving moto driver only because of an accident of birth.

There's a sort of racism you sometimes hear from westerners who have lived here for a long time. I think maybe it's a defense mechanism, a way to justify being well-off and surrounded by poverty. And maybe there are elements of Cambodian culture which contribute to its structural problems. But ultimately, Cambodians are just like everyone else. They're us, except they're what we would be if we grew up where they did.

For me, the most difficult part of living in Cambodia has been seeing children working. I had a fairly idyllic childhood, as far as they go, and while I've been aware for some time about how fortunate I am to have parents who were both willing and able to provide that, it's hard to face children who are being denied that opportunity. One of my favorite restaurants is run by a family, and the eleven year-old son is the waiter.

Visiting the amusement park was a reminder that Cambodia isn't all like that, that there are children riding roller coasters, nervous teenagers on first dates, new parents, just like everywhere else. When I think back to these days, I'm glad that I will have these memories as well.

King-Father Sihanouk

2007-01-03T08:11:00.000-05:00

Since it was my last chance to do so, I went out to take photographs of Phnom Penh. Pictured here is Independence Monument, which was built in 1958 to celebrate Cambodia's independence. Sort of. It's actually mroe of a monument to King-Father Norodom Sihanouk, who has led a very interesting life.

King-Father Sihanouk (whose title translates literally to something like "Sacred Compassionate Sacred Lord Sacred Great Hero", but whose subjects call him, roughly, "Prince Papa") was educated in France. The French picked him to be king in 1941, figuring that he would be easy to control. Post-war, as the communist movement began to agitate for independence from France through violence, Sihanouk kept control of the country by promising to achieve independence peacefully--and he more or less succeeded, going into exile and refusing to return until the French agreed to leave. Two years later, in 1955, as Cambodia struggled with democracy, Sihanouk abdicated the throne in favor of his father, and formed a political party instead.

Cambodia retains elements of the Hindu king-as-god concept even today, and so it's not surprising that Sihanouk's political party was overwhelmingly popular. Sihanouk became Prime Minister, and later had himself named head of state for life.

During the Viet Nam War, Sihanouk attempted to walk the thin line between support for Communism and overtures to the United States. He reached out to China and North Viet Nam, while brutally crushing communist movements within Cambodia. Inevitably he faltered, falling too far to the left, and the U.S. supported a coup that replaced him with an extreme right-wing government under Lon Nol. Sihanouk sided with the Khmer Rouge in their efforts to overthrow Lon Nol, but upon their success, he was confined to house arrest.

After the Khmer Rouge were removed from power, Sihanouk was in limbo. But in 1993, he was again named King, as part of a UN-brokered peace agreement. He abdicated in 2004, and is now living in self-imposed exile. Unsurprisingly given his history, the Guiness Book of World Records identifies Sihanouk as the politician who has occupied the most political offices.

While Sihanouk was an able politician, he was also a rather curious leader. He spent a surprising amount of energy on filmmaking, directing more than a dozen motion pictures, all based on his own scripts. His films include "See Angkor and Die", about a young man with a terminal illness who returns to Angkor to spend his last days; and "An Ambition Reduced to Ashes", about a prince who can save his country, but who will lose all his power if he has sex. I heard somewhere that he's working on a new movie, "Sorry Madam, but I Am Homo", about a man in an arranged marriage who is gay (Sihanouk is a semi-outspoken supporter of gay rights).

Despite, or possibly because of, his rather odd history, Sihanouk remains beloved today. Many people consider him part-deity--when the Khmer Rouge tried to convince the people that he was unnecessary, they were allegedly met with responses like "without the King, it will not rain and our crops will die."

Incidentally, taking that Independence Monument photo was a bit of an adventure. My camera equipment isn't very expensive or interesting, at least to me. But I guess in Cambodia, it's fairly unusual--within minutes of setting up a tripod, four or five Cambodian guys, some with their own cameras, had gathered around me and were discussing my lenses. I became a little uncomfortable when they started grabbing things and playing with them, even though they were very friendly about it, so I smiled and moved on.

Kick the Thing

2007-01-02T04:39:00.000-05:00

Here are some Cambodian guys playing "kick the thing" in the park at sunset. This game is very popular in Cambodia (and Viet Nam), and there's a lot of talent floating around. I think it's basically hacky-sack, except with a badminton shuttlecock instead of a beanbag.

Reptile deities inhale sodium vapor (5)

2007-01-02T04:27:00.000-05:00

There's a Cambodian legend about a race of reptiles called Nagas that had a large kingdom near Cambodia. The Naga King's daughter married the King of Cambodia, and the modern Cambodian people are their descendants.

These statues are everywhere in Cambodia. This one is from Independence Monument, though they can be found on every major structure with any religious significance--temples, shrines, the Royal Palace, Angor Wat, etc. Apparently the naga is an element of Hindu mythology, and local myths in Cambodia and elsewhere about reptilian creatures have been co-opted into naga stories (in China, nagas are equated with dragons), much the same way the Greeks and Romans incorporated other religions into their superstructure through the equation of foreign deities with local ones.

Turns out Kurtz was in Phnom Penh all that time...

2007-01-02T02:12:00.000-05:00

On my last night in Phnom Penh, a few friends and I decided to see another side of Phnom Penh: the rich colonialist perspective. We started the evening with drinks at the Raffles Hotel's Elephant Bar. The Raffles is a phenomenally nice hotel in the northern part of town that's popular with very wealthy people who are making a stopover on their way to Angkor Wat and would like to see Phnom Penh but don't actually want to interact with it at all. It's the sort of place you can spend three days eating excellent food and swimming in their pool and taking their tours of the city and never leave their care. The Elephant Bar is a long-standing Phnom Penh tradition--beautiful place, but very expensive.

After a couple of drinks and four or five baskets of tortilla chips, we walked over to look at the U.S. embassy. For some unclear reason, the U.S. decided to coat every surface with Christmas lights, including what appears to be Santa driving a tuktuk filled with elves and presents. A friend of mine asked someone who works at the embassy about it, and he said the lights were meant to be a beacon of hope for the poor (Buddhist) people of Cambodia. I hope that's not official U.S. policy.

We then grabbed a tuktuk to the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC), another long-standing Phnom Penh tradition. I had never been because it all seemed a little weird to me, but the FCC is very popular with some expats. They have a great location--two balconies overlooking the river--and serve rather good western food. It felt very colonial.

Finally, another side of Phnom Penh: We had a few drinks at the Heart of Darkness, an infamous club. The Heart has gained a reputation for violence in recent years; apparently it's a hangout for wealthy sons of important Cambodian government officials, who because of their fathers' positions are entirely immune from the law. There have been several fights and a few shootings, though the very strict security at the front door has made it safer--at least inside. The rumor mill says that a woman was raped by several wealthy Khmer teenagers on her way home from the Heart a few weeks ago. Anyway, we had some beers and then made our exit, not really understanding what the big deal was. Good music, though--80s metal.

$240 if by air, $38 if by sea...

2007-01-02T02:09:00.000-05:00

One of the tricky things about moving back home from Phnom Penh is transporting a giant mess of stuff. I threw out a lot--books, clothes, DVDs, etc.--but I still have way too much to get into a few suitcases. I bought the Largest Suitcase in Cambodia, still couldn't get everything in.

The big problem was a set of tatami mats and some cushions. Nice stuff, I hope to use it to decorate my apartment back home, but not so expensive that it's worthwhile to ship it by air (courier service from Cambodia to the U.S. is incredibly expensive). I hauled it all into a tuktuk and tried to put it in the regular mail to the U.S. (figuring that I wouldn't care too much if it all got lost), but they flat-out refused--too big. I insisted, and finally they directed me to a local shipping company.

My mats and cushions are allegedly being shipped by sea to New York. I was told to expect them in one to three months.

Life takes visas.

2007-01-02T02:07:00.000-05:00

I'm going to China in a few weeks, and it requires a visa. Unlike most countries, China sets the price of a visa depending on your country of citizenship, and it's most expensive for Americans (even those who are currently volunteering in the developing world). My travel plans were finalized the day before I left Cambodia, so I was in a bit of a rush, and rush processing + American passport = $93.

But it was worse than that. My passport was out of pages--I've been traveling around a lot, and Cambodia and Viet Nam visas fill a whole page. The travel agent explained that China requires two blank facing pages, one for the visa, one for the stamps. I asked if they could use my "amendments" page at the end, and she said they could try--for another $30.

Sure enough, I got my China visa in one day, and it's on the "amendments" page. She told me that they had to ask the Chinese Ambassador himself for permission, though I think that might have been a mistranslation, and also that it was the first time they had ever agreed to do it. I'm vaguely concerned that I'll have trouble when Chinese immigration discovers that they can't stamp facing my visa, but, well, watch for updates.

Bang!kok

2006-12-31T20:18:00.000-05:00

As noted, we're in Laos for the New Year, and so were nowhere near the Bangkok explosions. We appreciate everyone's concern. When this isn't so soon, I will make some jokes about the Khao San Road bomb.

Also Laos.

2006-12-31T04:27:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the lack of updates. I'm currently in Laos and it's a bit difficult to find good internet access--I have a bunch of entries backlogged for when I get back to Thailand (tomorrow). Also, happy new year--I'm spending New Year's in Vientiane. Seems like a good idea.

I don't want a pickle

2006-12-26T00:43:00.000-05:00

One skill I've picked up that I won't get to use much in New York is my moto passenger ability. Over the past few months, I've learned to sit on a motorcycle so that three people and bags can fit, to give basic directions in Khmer ("turn left", "stop", "want to die" (the last one means "slow down")), and how much to pay for various rides at various times of day. Motos are infinitely more convenient than taxis or the subway, and it's something I'll miss when I'm back in New York. Maybe I'll get a Vespa?

It's a fair cop.

2006-12-26T00:33:00.000-05:00

Cambodia recently passed some new laws that raise punishments for traffic offenses and for attempting to bribe a traffic cop. No one expects these to make any difference. As long as police are paid $20/month, they're going to supplement their income with bribes--how else can they survive? Generally here, when you're pulled over, how much you have to pay depends on how much time you're willing to stand around, smile, and smoke cigarettes with the police. If you can spare half an hour or so and have enough cigarettes to go around, you'll probably pay a few dollars or less. If you're in a hurry, it might be a lot more.

I was reading Lonely Planet: USA the other day, and in its discussion on legal issues, it warned visitors that in the United States, if you are stopped by a cop and attempt to "pay the fine" on the spot, you will probably be arrested.

I think a very good use of aid money would be to augment civil servant salaries. I have no idea how many police officers Cambodia has. The states of the U.S. have between fifteen and thirty-nine officers per ten thousand people. Let's say Cambodia has twenty, so about twenty thousand officers. For twenty-four million dollars per year, some donor could quintuple their salaries. Earning $1200/year instead of $240 would transform police officers overnight from near-destitute to middle class. An officer who earns $1200/year values his job a lot more than one who earns $240/year, and so is much more concerned with following the rules (lest he lose his high-paying job). He's also harder to bribe because he values each additional dollar less. At $240/year, a $1 bribe might mean the officer could feed his family that night--it's hard to say no to that. At $1200/year, it means much less.

To get to the other side.

2006-12-26T00:31:00.000-05:00

Pictured here are a couple of monks crossing the road. There are a lot of monks in Cambodia; most men spend at least a few months as a monk at some point during their lives, usually in their teens. Monks aren't supposed to have any contact with women, eat after noon, or have any possessions except for a begging bowl and some saffron robes. There are a few things I don't understand about the system; as far as I can tell, monks spend the morning walking around looking for donations of food. I think this involves walking up to a restaurant and standing outside quietly until you're noticed--if the staff is in a charitable mood, they will bring out some food, otherwise the monk moves on. Every now and then you see a monk doing something incongruous like talking on a cellular phone or riding a motorcycle.

"Bah, humbug", only without the Malthusian elements.

2006-12-26T00:07:00.000-05:00

I live next door to a branch of the American School. I guess they teach classes in English or something like that. It seems like it has very long hours--when I come home from work at 5:30pm or so, the kids are still there, and sometimes still when I get back from dinner.

Yesterday was Christmas Day. There wasn't much observation of the holiday here in Cambodia, given that the country is predominantly Theravada Buddhist, except some restaurants and hotels that cater to westerners (my apartment complex has a Christmas tree). But yesterday was different. Apparently the American School decided to have some sort of all-day Christmas celebration and wanted to share it with the neighborhood, and so I was awakened at 7am by the sound of overloaded amplifiers blaring out various horrible Christmas songs. I walked by at mid-day to find that they had dressed all the children in elf costumes and had them standing on stage waving pom-poms while the music played. Two western guys, I assume teacher/missionaries, were standing on the side looking proud. The courtyard was filled with slightly bewildered parents, and was surrounded by confused moto drivers peeking through the fence. I guess something similar happened at every American School in the city, because for the rest of the day I was spotting little kids in Santa hats. Incidentally, in this country where the temperature never drops below 65 degrees, how many people know what a "white Christmas" is?

Christmas here seems to be a lot like Chinese New Year in the United States--certain minority ethnic groups celebrate it, anyone who deals with those ethnic groups is aware of it, and everyone else ignores it or uses it as an excuse to have a party or a sale. I have no idea what was going on in this picture, except that I think Khmer Claus was trying to get people to participate in some sort of raffle or something.

It grows in bunches / I've got my hunches

2006-12-25T23:57:00.000-05:00

I have less than forty-eight hours remaining in Phnom Penh, and so I'm trying to do all the things I'll miss back home while I still can. As you can probably guess, most of that involves eating. In the past two days I've had four meals from Maharajah, the greatest Indian restaurant on the planet (street 278). I'm considering asking them if I can watch them cook so I can learn their secrets. Or trying to convince them to move to New York. Either one, really.

I also went back to my two favorite Chinese restaurants, Hai Yi, a very upscale place with tanks of live sea creatures outside and tasty food inside, and Peking Canteen, a tiny, slightly dirty restaurant near the Central Market that just happens to have amazing Chinese food.

Finally, I've been having more street food. Pictured are these bananas that I've been curious about for months; on any street in the city, there will be an old woman sitting on the curb slowly peeling little bananas, basting them in this thick white sauce, and then cooking them on a grill. Finally I broke down and bought a stick (1000 riel, twenty-five cents). They were not what I was expecting at all--I thought I was getting grilled banana with some oil on it, but the sauce had dried and formed a thick, chewy skin. The banana was sweet, but the outside was very salty--surprising, but very tasty.

Spins a web, sweet surprise / Catches thieves just like flies

2006-12-23T20:50:00.000-05:00

Here are four things I recently learned about tarantulas:

The term "tarantula" covers many species of spider. When two tarantulas are considering mating, they must first use a series of signals to establish that they are of the same species.

Tarantulas are not especially poisonous. There is no record of anyone ever dying from a tarantula bite.

The first line of defense for many tarantulas is to flick sharp hairs at the attacker. These don't generally hurt people (unless inhaled).

Tarantula tastes like shrimp.

Fried tarantula is one of those things that everyone who comes here sooner or later seeks out. Travel magazines and blogs are filled with stories and photos of giant piles of fried spider and people eating same. It seems a little artificial to me, but I wasn't going to pass up a chance to try it.

Tarantula is a delicacy of Skun, a town about an hour or so from Phnom Penh. I didn't feel like spending an hour on a moto to get there, so I just went to a local restaurant that caters to tourists and oredered up a plate of them. They're more or less exactly what you'd expect--black spiders, about two inches long, covered in fine hairs and stir-fried (heat destroys their venom). The outsides are crispy, but the inside is soft white meat. It's dipped in a lime, garlic, and pepper sauce.

It's unclear how people began eating spiders. The story I heard was that people have been eating them for more than a century, but it became much more popular during the Khmer Rouge, when more than a million people died of starvation. But they still do it today, and I can see why--spider isn't bad at all.

I didn't eat the abdomen--apparently it's filled with organs and sometimes eggs. Some consider it a delicacy, but I don't usually like organ meat and I don't think spider organ meat will be the exception.

Shoe, fly, don't bother me

2006-12-23T20:48:00.000-05:00

I had some shoes made. There's a block on Street 143 that has three shoemakers, and on good recommendations we used the middle one, Sy Phal. It was interesting--they had me stand on graph paper and traced my foot, then I picked a style and a type of leather. Came back a week later and there they were. I had them tightened a bit while I waited, and now I have a great pair of shoes. The fit is good (not perfect, but better than I can get in a shoe store), I really like the design, and they're the cheapest pair of shoes I've ever owned. One thing about Cambodia is that you can get spoiled pretty quickly--I don't think I can afford custom shoes in Manhattan.

Kuala Lumpur Day Three: The Journey Home

2006-12-23T00:52:00.000-05:00

This is the last day of Arie's trip to Kuala Lumpur. You may want to start at the beginning.

Thursday, time to head back to Phnom Penh. We checked out of our hotel (15% discount for using a Mastercard, sweet) and took a taxi to KL Sentral, the central bus station. We grabbed an AirAsia bus to the airport, got through security, and made it to the check-in counter exactly two hours before departure--precisely when check-in is supposed to start.

But it didn't start. We waited amidst the gathering crowd until we got bored enough that I asked an AirAsia employee when we could check in. He told us that our flight had been delayed four hours. I asked why, and he said it was because of flight delays. Helpful. AirAsia decided not to update the giant electronic board, and so we sat for a little while longer looking at the thing flashing "Check-In Underway" before pushing our way through the crowd to the airport coffee shop.

We sat at the coffee shop for a couple hours listening to their rather amazing music, some sort of compilation CD of crappy "lite-rock" covers of 1980s power ballads (I think the café employees enjoyed our lip synching to Eternal Flame). Periodically we'd check the board; eventually, instead of announcing that the flight was delayed, they just gave it a new number and time. Finally, almost sundown, it was time to check in. (I should add at this point that we spent all our money on chocolate and tea. This will be significant later.)

We got our boarding passes and made it into the departure area, where there was an ATM but no money changer, and we certainly didn't want any more Malaysian ringgit. We sat for another hour; eventually, half an hour beyond when we were supposed to take off, I asked someone about the delay. The response: We had to wait for the plane, which was delayed by "technical difficulties", and they had no idea when it would arrive. Confidence-inspiring. It was about then that I really started to dislike AirAsia. I can deal with delays, but I refuse to believe that they didn't know where their plane was, and I don't think it's asking too much for an airline to keep its customers informed--especially five hours into a delay.

Incidentally, the immigration officer wished me a merry Christmas. It surprised me the extent to which there's celebration of Christmas in Malaysia, but I guess it shouldn't--not only are 10% of Malaysians Christians, but a lot of western tourists pass through Kuala Lumpur. It should be noted that the Malaysian constitution states that you cannot be an ethnic Malay unless you are Muslim. I was not aware that this is how ethnicity works.

We eventually took off, our flight was uneventful, and we landed in Phnom Penh airport. Cambodia requires Americans to purchase visas (tourist visa $20), we were entirely out of cash, and all the ATMs were beyond the immigration desk. No problem, assured the police, we could use a credit card. They took our passports, stuck in visas (on the Amendments page, my passport is full), and asked for our money. I handed them a credit card. They said no, cash only. I went to the officer who had said it was OK, but this time he said no, credit cards could only be used outside. Apparently earlier he was trying to tell me that the nation of Cambodia does generally have places in which you can use credit cards. I explained that I had no money. He explained that he didn't care. I pointed out that my credit card was a Visa, and so surely I should be able to use it to buy a visa. This did not go over well.

Finally I found the guy in charge, and he said that once everyone else on the plane was processed, he'd have someone escort me to an ATM, and sure enough, that's what happened. Not exactly my most fun adventure, but now at least I know what happens when you arrive somewhere without enough money to pay for a visa. (Next time, maybe I'll find out what happens if you don't have any money in your account. Probably prison.)

I had forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by poverty. Viet Nam, Thailand, and Malaysia aren't the wealthiest nations in the world, but the gulf between Cambodia and its neighbors is tremendous. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about returning to Phnom Penh after touring the region. This is a great city to visit, but I won't be too sad to return to New York.

Kuala Lumpur Day Two: Many High Places

2006-12-23T00:48:00.000-05:00

This is day two of Arie's trip to Kuala Lumpur. You may want to start at the beginning.

Malaysia has an unusual structure. It's a federation of thirteen states, nine of which are governed by sultans. Under the Malaysian constitution, the sultans are absolutely immune from all laws (members of royal families have killed people and used their immunity to escape prosecution). The modern history of Malaysia is largely the history of colonialism; conquered first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, Malaysia has been shaped by various empires and colonial policies. Singapore was part of Malaysia until 1965, when it exited the nation because of racial and social tensions.

Race has always been a problem in Malaysia. Malaysian business has long been dominated by ethnic Chinese and Indian families. After race riots in 1969, the government decided that racial harmony would not be achieved as long as ethnic Malays ("bumiputras", "princes of the land"), who make up 60% of the country, were significantly poorer than the rest of the country. They passed a law that required at least 30% of every public Malaysian business to be owned by bumiputras within twenty years. Millions of ethnic Malays invested in government-managed portfolios that purchased large chunks of public companies, and over the past few decades, a sizable bumiputra middle class has emerged. Malaysian politics since then has consisted of maintaining a delicate balance between preference for bumiputras and equality.

There was no racial harmony in the Pondok Lodge that morning--we were awoken by loud Asian teenagers. Conveniently, I had just received notice that I had a job waiting for me in New York--time to celebrate. A quick glance through Lonely Planet revealed that we were only a ten minute walk from the Hotel Equatorial, a luxury hotel in the middle of the city. We grabbed our luggage and trekked over.

The Hotel Equatorial is more or less the exact opposite of the Pondok Lodge. We checked into a room on the 13th floor (a non-smoking floor with a no durian rule (really)). Out our window we could see much of the downtown, and the building directly across from us featured a perfect reflection of the Petronas Towers.

Oil is the largest industry of Malaysia, and Petronas is Malaysia's national oil company. Money from the west flows in pretty freely, and so they have a lot of cash to throw around. A few years back, they decided to build the world's tallest building--two of them. The Petronas Twin Towers may have been the tallest building in the world when completed. They were designed by César Pelli to incorporate motifs common in Islamic art. Each tower was built by a different construction company--they had a race (tower two won). Importing steel into Malaysia is very expensive, so they were built with more concrete than usual--less efficient and heavier, and so the building sits on the world's deepest foundation. There's some controversy over whether they were ever the tallest building in the world. The Sears Tower has a higher roof and higher occupied floors, but the Petronas Towers have a taller spire. The Petronas oil company occupies tower one, and rents tower two to various companies (including IBM, Al Jazeera, and Microsoft).

The only part of the Towers open to tourists (besides the mall at the bottom) is the skybridge, which connects the towers on the 41st floor. It's only 170 meters off the ground (the building is 452 meters). They distribute eight hundred tickets each morning, first-come first-serve, and the tickets tell you when to come back. We went to the desk and were just in time to receive the very last tickets of the day, and were told to come back at 4:45pm.

We walked around the Petronas Towers a bit, and then took a taxi to Little India. Lonely Planet made it sound like a little restaurant-filled district straight out of Bombay, but it's actually a few streets of fabric stores and hotels. There was a little sidewalk stand, but nowhere we wanted to eat. We decided to go have lunch at the KL Tower.

Walking to the KL Tower was a bit more of a challenge than we had anticipated. For unclear reasons, there is a forest City Forest, in the center of Kuala Lumpur. I guess they heard about Central Park and wanted to one-up us. Anyway, getting to the tower involved a rather steep trail through the forest, complete with wooden bridges and bird viewing platforms. We later learned there was a shuttle bus.

The Menara Kuala Lumpur, or KL Tower, is one of the tallest towers in the world. Like the Petronas Towers, it incorporates motifs from Islamic art. I think "menara" is etymologically related to "minaret", the towers that surround mosques. There's a revolving restaurant at the top that allegedly has a great view, but its menu was uninteresting--all overpriced western food. We opted instead for an Indian restaurant set into the bottom of the tower--much better. After lunch, we walked back through the forest to our hotel.

It was about time for our Petronas Tower visit, so we hiked over there. They first threatened us with a video about the Tower's construction, but mercifully allowed us to skip it and get into the elevator. We were allowed ten minutes to walk along the skybridge and take photographs. Being on the skybridge afforded a good view of the surrounding area, but it's not especially high. The Towers might be one of the tallest structures in the world, but the bridge is only about a third of the way up.

After the skybridge, we walked around the mall at the base of the Towers and had a snack at the food court. I stopped into a toy store briefly and found that every toy in the place was science-themed. No wonder this part of the world is kicking our ass in science education. The mall also featured a "Premier Paid Toilet" which cost 2 ringgit (60 cents) to visit. Signs around the premier toilet explained that there were free toilets around the corner. It didn't occur to me to do so at the time, but now I regret not going in to see what was so premier about it.

It was getting dark and we were disappointed with the skybridge view, so we took a taxi to the KL Tower, which has an observation platform at 276 meters (almost twice as high as the Petronas Towers view). Unlike the Petronas Towers, there's an admission fee, and so you don't have to line up early in the morning and it's not overcrowded. Yay capitalism. The elevator up to the platform was rather fast, covering the distance in under a minute, and instead of a floor display it had an altitude display.

It was a much more impressive view of the city (and, ironically, a great view of the Petronas Towers). Kuala Lumpur is interesting to see from up high because unlike Manhattan, there are no constraints on its expansion, and so it's quite spread out. There are some very tall buildings, but they're not nearly as concentrated as they are in cities like New York or Hong Kong.

We had dinner at our hotel; one of its restaurants had a massive buffet of various types of Malaysian food and fresh grilled seafood. Can't really ask for more.

Continue to my last day in Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur Day One Part Two: As I Malay Me Down

2006-12-22T07:43:00.000-05:00

This is the second entry about my trip to Kuala Lumpur. Click here to read about my trip from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur.

I should mention at the outset that I had some concerns about visiting Malaysia. Like almost all Muslim countries, Malaysia does not permit entry to citizens of countries that it has not recognized, and the only country it has not recognized is Israel. I come from an Israeli family, and I had qualms about visiting somewhere that wouldn't welcome my grandmother. But I decided to go for a number of reasons. Primarily, boycotting Malaysia wasn't going to hurt Malaysia, it was going to hurt me. It also seemed unfair to penalize Malaysians because of the political decisions of their government--that would seem fairly hypocritical, given the core issue. Finally, I had never visited a Muslim country, Malaysia is one of the most moderate in the Islamic world, and I wasn't going to avoid visiting an entire third of the planet.

I think I made the right decision. Malaysians are the friendliest people to travelers that I've encountered in Southeast Asia. From the moment our flight landed, everyone was friendly and accommodating. I didn't feel like I was viewed as a walking ATM (like I did in Viet Nam) or a carrier of contagious disease (Khao San Road, Thailand). Admittedly, they didn't know I was Jewish--unlike in the west, where anyone with my name and features is immediately identified as a Jew, here there's no awareness whatsoever (I got a lot of "merry Christmas"es). But they did know I'm American. This isn't exactly a time of harmonious relations between America and the Muslim world, but you wouldn't know it from the way Americans are treated in Malaysia.

Anyway, so our flight landed in Kuala Lumpur's airport. We were flying AirAsia, a budget carrier, and so we had to land at the LCCT ("Low Cost Carrier Terminal"), which is fairly ghetto. It's basically a large warehouse with some fences and a coffee shop. Also, it's not really a terminal, it's more like a separate airport--it's a twenty-five minute (non-free) bus ride to the main terminal. Lonely Planet said there was a fast, new, and cheap train from the airport into the city, but it turned out it was too good for the likes of the LCCT, so we took a bus.

Kuala Lumpur's airport is about fifty miles from the city, so it was a long bus ride. We finally arrived at KL Sentral, the bus terminal, where AirAsia put us on a van to take us to our hotel. We had made reservations at a place, Pondok Lodge, and were armed with a street address. The van had some trouble finding it because instead of a neon sign or a big hotel, it was a small doorway with a handwritten sign saying "Pondok Lodge, third floor". Trouble.

I lugged our bags up to what turned out to be a perfect model of a college dormitory. I guess for $15/night we shouldn't have expected much more. The "Lodge" was two floors of a large building that had been divided into "rooms" with drywall. We were given a key that unlocked the padlocked door to our cubicle. We slid the door and were pleasantly surprised to find a perfectly serviceable room, clean with powerful A/C. Shared bathroom, but that's not a big deal. We padlocked our room and went out to find dinner.

Dinner was easy to find. Malaysia's pre-colonial history is the history of the interaction of Indian and Chinese powers, and they've left a culinary impression on the country. We had some excellent northern Indian food.

We got back to the Lodge and discovered that it now stank of durian and marijuana. Durian, or "stinkfruit", is a clever way to mask the smell of weed, and while the third floor of the Pondok Lodge was probably not crawling with NARCs, I don't blame them for being overcautious--Malaysia has the death penalty for possession of even small amounts of narcotics. We decided to stay the hell away from everyone and spend the night locked in our room.

We returned to our dormy but charming "room" to discover its fatal flaw: thin walls and loud Asian teenagers. Decorously divided by gender, the kids had rooms on either side of ours--girls on the left, boys on the right. As it got later and we got more and more tired, they got louder. Finally, I got up and banged on the walls very, very hard, and they immediately shut up. I didn't expect it to work on the boys (in the U.S., banging on the wall of a bunch of teenage boys would immediately lead to a fistfight), but it did.

Little was I to realize that they would soon have their revenge. Apparently Asian teenagers don't need a lot of sleep, because by 6am, the Lodge was once again filled with the sounds of a couple dozen Asian teenagers laughing and throwing stuff.

Continue to day two, where I go up various towers and eat more food.

Kuala Lumpur Day One: Arrival

2006-12-22T07:41:00.000-05:00

This is day one of my trip to Malaysia, which came just on the heels of my trip to Viet Nam.

Tuesday, time to pull a John McCain (a.k.a., getting the hell out of 'Nam). Taxi to the airport to fly to Bangkok for a connecting flight to Kuala Lumpur. Or at least, what we thought was a connecting flight.

The trouble started when AirAsia's Hanoi desk told us that we had to check our bag, and they couldn’t check it through to Kuala Lumpur. Or check us in for that flight. We pointed out that we only had 40 minutes to make the connection, and would not have time to go through Thai immigration, get our bag from the luggage carousel, and go back through Thai immigration again. They pretended they didn't understand English. Finally, we found a guy who sympathized, and he said we could gate-check our bag.

When we arrived in Bangkok, the flight crew revealed that they had no idea what gate checking was. As per the Hanoi manager's instructions, we explained that our bag was in "Hold One". Eventually we got the bag, and tried to make our way to our gate. Oops, turns out no--Air Asia is a "point-to-point carrier", which is code for "no connecting flights". They would not give us boarding passes until we left the airport and came in again. Sux0red.

With fifteen minutes until our flight's departure, they radioed ahead to keep a lane at the ticket counter open for us while we ran as fast as we could through Thai immigration and customs ("How long will you be staying in Thailand?" "Five minutes."). We got there to discover that our flight was delayed 30 minutes, possibly to wait for us, we're not sure. Boarding passes in hand, we discovered we had to pay Thai departure tax again. After a long wait for the ATM, we got our baht, paid the fee, sailed through immigration, and ran through four miles of duty-free shops (sorry, "shoppes") to get to our gate. I set off the metal detector and had to be wanded, but it was OK because we did the thing where you skip the whole line by showing the attendant a boarding pass that says you board half an hour ago.

We got to our gate just as boarding was starting. They were actually pre-boarding (children, people with disabilities, and monks (really)). The airline staff scolded us that we should make sure to leave three hours between flights next time, but why would we when this worked so well?

And that's how I made it to Kuala Lumpur. Continue reading about my Malaysian adventure.

Northern Viet Nam Day Seven: Beer and Puppets

2006-12-22T07:15:00.000-05:00

This is day seven of Arie's trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Monday, my last full day in Hanoi. Lunch was Indian food, which is delicious here--as far as I could tell, much better than northern Vietnamese food. In gastronomic terms, southern Viet Nam is the place to visit—better spring rolls, fresh vegetables, more herbs, and tastier food.

I tried some bia hoi ("fresh beer"), which is an interesting type of beer. Introduced by the Czechs, it's brewed every morning, has no preservatives, and is meant to be drunk as soon as possible. The brewery prepares the day's supply (estimating demand), regional distributors take it to distribution points, and then various bia hoi places around the city take empty containers of all types to the distribution points to fill up. The beer is very light and crisp, very cheap (1500 dong, about ten cents), and very good. It's popular with workers, and at lunch and dinner time, bia hoi places get very crowded. They also serve excellent food; we had some great tofu. I think if I have to go back to Hanoi, I will mostly eat at bia hoi places.

After wandering aimlessly ("lost") for about an hour in the outskirts of the old quarter, we bought tickets for the water puppets that night. Lonely Planet and various others told us they were wonderful and worth seeing, so we figured, sure. First of all: Buy tickets early. We went mid-afternoon and they were mostly sold-out and we had to sit in the back. Second: One hour of water puppets is too much. It gets old.

Water puppetry is a very old entertainment in northern Viet Nam. There's a big tank of mucky water with a curtain in the middle, and behind the curtain stand puppeteers in waders. A traditional band plays Vietnamese music while they move the puppets in various ways to tell little stories, sometimes with fireworks. They told, amongst others, the story of the Golden Turtle reclaiming Le Loi's sword. I'm fairly sick of that story, really. Water puppets are nice for a few minutes, then, yeah, gets old. On the Global Entertainment Scale, I'd say it's better than Everybody Loves Raymond, but not as good as bowling.

That concludes my trip to northern Viet Nam. I flew on to Malaysia, read about it here.

Northern Viet Nam Day Six: Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Smoking

2006-12-20T21:54:00.001-05:00

This is day six of Arie’s trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Sunday morning, more Hanoi. I took a moto to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, one of the sights I was determined not to miss. There was a massive line, but it was moving very quickly. At the first security checkpoint, they took my water bottle (“write your name on it so you can find it at the exit”, right), but let me keep my camera. I set off the X-ray machine, but no one cared. Through the checkpoint was another massive line, but this time there were Vietnamese police to make sure that everyone stayed in two lines—none of the typical Vietnamese approach to lining up, which is to not line up, but instead to form a giant mass and push everyone else as hard as you can while you fight your way to the front. That was what it was like at the security window where we had to check our cameras, but fortunately, I’m one of the largest people in Viet Nam, so I had a very easy time pushing my way to the front. Between the checkpoints, they took away everything everyone was carrying—nothing could be brought into the mausoleum. I’m not sure if it was for security reasons or propriety.

Then we were on the line that led into the mausoleum. The line was long enough that it wrapped around the grounds, through the checkpoint, and out onto the street. Outside was a little chaotic, and between the tour groups massed together and the Vietnamese people cutting in randomly, it was a bit hard to get through. But past the checkpoint, guards kept everyone in line. I’m told that in China, Mao’s mausoleum is similar except that the guards have guns and are much more serious about it.

The mausoleum is a large, squat, dignified cube of gray stone, with columns cut into the front and various soldiers standing around in white uniforms. We saw the “changing of the guard”, which Lonely Planet says rivals the formality and ceremony of Buckingham Palace. Lonely Planet is a liar. It’s just that these dudes walk up to these other dudes, take their place, and then the other dudes walk away. It’s true that they’re wearing uniforms, so that’s something.

We went inside. The line goes up some stairs, around a bit, and then into a large room with a high ceiling. The pathway goes around the outside of the room in a U-shape, and at the center is Ho Chi Minh’s body, locked in a glass box. There are soldiers standing around him, and his body is lit with bright yellow light (the rest of the room is dark). The line moves pretty quickly, so you don’t get much of a look at him.

Most Americans probably know Ho Chi Minh as that commie Vietnamese guy who hiked on some sort of trail in his efforts to stop Robin Williams from broadcasting on the radio. But here in Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh is a national hero. He’s highly respected both for his military leadership during the war and his civilian leadership afterwards.

Ho Chi Minh ("He who enlightens") spent his life fighting for Vietnamese independence from colonial powers. He petitioned at the Versailles peace conference that followed WWI, but when it became clear that the western powers would not willingly grant Viet Nam independence, he turned to Communism. During WWII he fought against the Japanese occupiers of Viet Nam, and when the war ended, he again attempted to appeal to the United States. In an interesting episode, he proclaimed the independence of Viet Nam at a rally where the Vietnamese and American national anthems were played, and quoted from the U.S. Declaration of Independence (the U.S. would not give him a copy, so he quoted from memory). But the west would not recognize his new government, preferring the French colonial government, and so the Viet Nam War (they call it the American War) began. He led Viet Nam until his death in 1969, and presided over the government as Prime Minister and then President. The mausoleum violates his wish to be cremated (he wrote that cremation saves precious farmland).

Ho Chi Minh also presided over the process of the subjugation of the south, which resulted in the deaths of millions of his countrymen. But much like the story of Abraham Lincoln in the U.S., history is written by the winners, and history seems to tolerate a significant amount of bloodshed as long as victory and peace are eventually achieved.

There were several types of visitors to his mausoleum: western travelers, Vietnamese schoolkids, Asian package tourists, and Vietnamese adults. The smallest group by far is western travelers; we’re dwarfed (not actually dwarfed because we are the tallest) by mobs of Chinese package tourists who are herded around and don’t seem especially interested in doing anything except taking photos of each other standing in front of the mausoleum smiling. There are a lot of Vietnamese schoolkids, most of whom are reverent because of the national veneration of Ho Chi Minh. Finally, there are the Vietnamese adults. I guess there’s no one in this country older than about 30 or so who didn’t serve in the army, and for many of them, Ho Chi Minh is a hero. We saw groups of people in military uniforms who were very emotional. Some of them had arrived with wreaths of flowers to place near the tomb. Even the poorest Vietnamese people clearly save up for a trip to the capital to visit the mausoleum; we saw a great deal of economic and social diversity among the Vietnamese visitors. Some of the former soldiers were missing limbs, presumably from combat. Because of the restrictions, they could not bring their crutches, and so they were carried through the tomb by their comrades.

The exit from the mausoleum was conveniently right in front of the Presidential Palace museum, which features such highlights as a “garage of Ho Chi Minh’s used cars”. Instead, we headed over to the Ho Chi Minh Museum. Some students approached us outside and asked us some questions in English as part of an assignment for school; something similar had happened to me at a tourist site in Japan.

The HCM Museum had two floors. The first was the sort of thing you expect to find in a museum—an exhibit about soldiers sent from the North to the South during the war. But the top floor was totally crazy. It was filled with all sorts of inexplicable sculptures, weird artwork, and confusing displays. Lonely Planet says that the Edsel crashing through the wall is supposed to juxtapose the failure of American capitalism with the failure of the American military effort. I’d like to know what the strange warped table covered in giant fruit symbolizes. The most confusing thing was an exhibit about Coc Bo Cave, where some leaders of the northern government met. It was portrayed as a giant brain.

After the museum, we walked to a statue of Lenin, and then down some side streets to look at some other neighborhoods. Then we had lunch at a restaurant called Cha Ca La Vong. Cha Ca is a traditional Hanoi dish, pieces of monkfish prepared with vegetables and served on a little charcoal grill at the table. Cha Ca La Vong, like most Cha Ca restaurants on Cha Ca Street, serves only that dish (they have a little card to explain it to tourists). It was very tasty.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant called Little Hanoi, which turned out to be a serious mistake. It’s apparently listed in some popular French guidebook, which means it’s overpriced and crammed with French tourists. The food wasn’t great for the price, and I’m sure it was surrounded by places that were cheaper, better, and had air not filled with French cigarette smoke.

One of the annoying things about leaving Manhattan is that the rest of the world allows people to smoke in restaurants. One might think smokers would be polite enough to smoke outside while people are eating, and in most of Southeast Asia, people are very polite about their smoking. Smoking is fairly common, but few locals smoke near people who are eating, near babies, etc. However, European tourists light up anywhere and everywhere, and seemed almost to follow us around while chain-smoking. Stereotypically, Americans and Australians are the rudest travelers, but on this trip, every time someone was doing something unpleasant or inconsiderate, they were speaking German or French.

Continue to day seven.

Northern Viet Nam Day Five: Dining at the Hoang Y

2006-12-20T21:45:00.000-05:00

This is day five of Arie's trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Saturday. Unlike Krabi in Thailand, there aren't many beaches in Halong Bay. The exceptions are three beaches surrounding Cat Ba town, and I decided to check them out. After climbing a large hill, I found Cat Ba 1 (brilliant name), which has been almost entirely overwhelmed by a massive tourist resort.

Fortunately, there was a wooden walkway along the rocks to Cat Ba 2, which has so far resisted most development. I walked back, avoiding the over-aggressive moto drivers ("nice camera! how about I take you to top of hill for better photo? why not? come back here!") and checked out of the hotel.

Foolishly, we hadn't brought much money, and were left with only about 40,000 Vietnamese dong ($2.50), two hundred baht ($5), and only $7 in U.S. currency. We immediately discovered that there are no ATMs or banks in Cat Ba. Fortunately, we already had boat tickets back to the mainland. Unfortunately, I was hungry.

Our hotel offered to change our $7 into dong, but at a rate of 15,500 to the dollar. Thinking we could do better, we tried a few of the money changers in town. The first one offered us 14,000, and the next 10,000. They explained that the bills were not worth their face value because they were old. I tried to explain that that is not how inflation works, but they wouldn’t listen. We returned to the hotel, which more closely examined the bills and told us they wouldn’t take them at all.

Demoralized, we returned to Hoang Y, prepared to share something that cost 40,000 dong or less. Fortunately, the owner was glad to take our $7, and at face value. Score. We ordered a massive amount of seafood. Unfortunately, it arrived five minutes before our boat was scheduled to leave, and we couldn’t afford to miss the boat. We rushed through the amazingly great meal (I started to run out, but the owner explained that the boat would wait for me to eat a little more, and put some more food on my plate), ran down the pier, and climbed onto the hydrofoil.

"Hydrofoil" sounds cool, but it was just a high-speed ferry. There isn't even any foil. We sat inside a passenger cabin with a lot of Vietnamese people and watched the VN-language TV for an hour, and then we were at Haiphong.

Haiphong is Viet Nam's third-largest city and a major industrial center. We walked to the bus station and asked for two tickets for the next bus to Hanoi. The good news was that a bus was leaving in fifteen minutes. The bad news: It cost 30,000 dong per person ($2), and the two of us only had 40,000 between us. We dredged around in our bags and pockets and came up with another 17,000 in coins, and stood there in disbelief that we were going to miss the bus because of twenty cents. But while I was looking at the map to find the nearest ATM, an attendant offered to accept our Thai baht. For our 120 baht ($3.50) we received 36,000 dong ($2.25), but I suppose it was a buyer's market.

The bus to Hanoi was interesting. It was actually a van, and we were the only westerners. The drive was only two hours, but it stopped several times--once to pick up a hitchhiker, and twice more where the bus driver got out, came into the back, and exchanged some money with the Vietnamese people on the van. I don't know what that was about.

Halong Bay was an interesting trip. I would love to go back--not necessarily for the bay, or even for the beach, but mainly for the seafood. I could quite happily eat at Hoang Y every day for years.

Continue to day six.

Northern Viet Nam Day Four: Halong Must We Sing This Song?

2006-12-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

This is day four of Arie's trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Friday. We decided to go see Halong Bay, a major tourist attraction in northeast Viet Nam. Halong Bay is an area of limestone karst islands (similar to Krabi in Thailand). It's supposed to be very beautiful. At the center of the bay is Cat Ba Island, a little seaside town with a burgeoning tourist scene.

We took a morning bus to Halong City, about three hours away. The bus was designed for tourists, so it featured a couple of tour guides who told us the origin myth of Halong Bay twice (a dragon descended into the ground, or something). It turns out that everyone else on the bus was part of a package tour that included a boat cruise around the bay and a night in a hotel (or maybe on a boat). We've long since learned that there's very little we can't do better than an organized tour, so we were just along for the bus ride. A German guy on the bus asked our tour guides what they thought of America--they said that no one was angry about the war, everyone just wanted to increase Viet Nam's standard of living, and America was important for that. Seemed fair. As if to remind us that not everyone in the country saw America as just a source of wealth, the bus stopped along the way at a bathroom stop that sold handicrafts made by agent orange victims and war orphans.

We arrived at Halong Bay and parted company with our tour. We walked over to the pier to arrange a cruise around the bay, and it was surprisingly easy--the government has established a central authority for cruises, and there are fixed prices and routes. An agent met us at the gate, explained our choices, and assigned us to a boat that boarded in fifteen minutes. We grabbed some snacks and got on.

The tourist pier at Halong Bay is crammed with boats, and they all more or less look identical. They seem to have restaurants and cabins on the inside, and a viewing platform on top. We parked ourselves in some comfy sun chairs on top of the boat, resisted their repeated efforts to get us to have lunch with the tour group that shared our boat, and enjoyed the view.

The view of the harbor, that is. For some reason, the tour of the bay started with an hour docked at the pier while everyone except us ate. Didn't bother us, it was sunny and we were on a boat. Finally, we headed out into the bay.

Our first stop was Hang Dau Go Cave ("Cave of Wooden Stakes"). The same forces that created the interestingly shaped islands created some giant stalactite-filled caves, and the Vietnamese government has turned these into tourist attractions. Lonely Planet describes the cave as "beautifully illuminated for the benefit of tourists". I would describe it as “garish to the point of comical". What was once in all likelihood a beautiful collection of natural rock formations is now the inside of a disco gone wrong. Ridiculous blue, green, and pink neon lights are concealed throughout the cave, giving the whole thing an aura of absurdity. Near the end of the path through the cave, we came to a small mechanical fountain--that marked the end of my ability to take it seriously. Studying the walls more carefully, we noticed what appeared to be strategic seams in the rock face; I now suspect that the government constructed the entire thing.

We headed deeper into the bay. Another hour of karst islands, and we were at Cat Ba. Halong Bay is a very beautiful place. It's interesting to compare it to Krabi, the other karst island spot in Southeast Asia. I found Krabi to be much more beautiful, with more unusual and unlikely rock formations. On the other hand, Halong Bay is much more peaceful, with beautiful vistas and soft misty rock in the distance. The tourist system is very different--Halong Bay has these overnight boats through the bay, while Krabi is more centered on beach resorts. In fairness, I kayaked around Krabi but not Halong Bay, so I may have missed some of the better parts of it.

Our boat dropped us at a pier 30 minutes from Cat Ba town, and we took a bus through the mountain passes to our hotel, Sunflowers. Once again, there was some trouble with our reservation, but they sorted it out in less than an hour. We dropped our stuff and walked along the harbor looking for a place for dinner.

There are a lot of floating restaurants in Cat Ba. The idea seems to be that you hire a rowboat to take you to and from your chosen place. But we found a restaurant on the island, Hoang Y, that seemed worthwhile. Lonely Planet claimed that it was an excellent place to eat, and to quote something someone had written on one of the menus, "Lonely Planet was right for once!" The food was amazing, simple dishes of fresh seafood grilled with copious quantities of garlic and onions. Hard to go wrong with that, I guess, but this place was pretty special.

After dinner, we tried to figure out how to get back to Hanoi. Our hotel offered us hydrofoil tickets for 160,000 dong ($10), but the same tickets were on sale at the harbor for 100,000 ($6.25), so we bought those. They actually said 90,000 ($5.60), oh well. At this point, I hadn't yet realized that there were no ATMs on the island and I was critically short of funds, or I would have been much more careful. (How's that for foreshadowing?)

Sundown was Hanukkah. For Hanukkah this year, I got: an overpriced hotel room with a bathtub that drained into a sluice on the bathroom floor. Yay! Well, also a trip to Viet Nam.

I took some photos at sunset. The highlight was a group of Vietnamese children who had invented a game: fill a bag with rocks and then dump it over the rail into the harbor. It looked like fun; I didn't play myself, but I think it's a good spectator sport.

Continue to day five.

Northern Viet Nam Day Three: Arie Learns About CensoVIET NAM IT IS GREAT

2006-12-20T21:15:00.000-05:00

This is day three of Arie’s trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Thursday. I got up early to update this blog, and discovered that it was inaccessible. At first I thought maybe Blogger was broken, but no, it turns out that Viet Nam censors the internet.

The official story is that the government of Viet Nam censors the internet to prevent its citizens from looking at pornography. Unsurprisingly, Amnesty International reports that the government's censorship is directed towards politics, not pornography. They say that virtually no porn sites are blocked, whereas everything relating to political dissent is. I suppose there were too many blogs on Blogger that relate to politics, so they just blocked the whole thing.

Still early, maybe 7am, I walked to the morning market. It hadn't really gotten going yet, I guess this city doesn't get going as early as does Phnom Penh (where most of the city is on the street at sunrise). I walked down to Hoan Kiem Lake again, this time to visit Ngoc Son Temple, which sits on an island at the northern end. The temple, built in the 18th century, is dedicated to three people: La To, the patron saint of physicians; General Tran Hung Dao, who defeated the Mongols in the 13th century, and Van Xuong, a scholar (thanks, Lonely Planet!). Inside the temple is a Buddhist shrine. I'm not sure if it’s acceptable to photograph Buddhist shrines, but I was the first person to arrive at the pagoda that morning, so I did.

Also on the center island is a sort of museum about the giant turtles that live in the lake. This featured the body of a preserved giant turtle, apparently found in 1968. I told the story in yesterday’s entry about the lake, but again, it's basically king saves city with powerful sword, king gives sword to golden turtle, golden turtle takes sword down to the bottom of the lake. The usual.

After the island, I went to the Martyrs' Monument, which honors those who died fighting for independence. For reasons that never became clear to me, many statues of soldiers in Viet Nam portray them as holding large sticks with three prongs on the end—things that look like giant plugs, and I had to try not to imagine the statue as a tribute to those who died trying to plug stuff in. It seems somewhat unfair that America's 58,000 mostly military casualties from the Viet Nam War receive so much attention in the U.S. while Viet Nam's 2,000,000+ mostly civilian casualties have a small statue near the lake. The same is true of the search for the remains of those killed in action; the U.S. spends millions of dollars each year on a project to locate the remains of every American soldier (several hundred are still missing, mostly crews of planes shot down over the jungle), while hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families will never find their relatives’ remains. I guess it's one of the advantages of wealth.

I walked around the lake. It wasn't far; the entire old quarter is less than half a mile long. People were very friendly, especially because I had my camera out. One guy called me a paparazzi, though apparently to get my attention so he could offer me a moto ride. Just like Phnom Penh, Hanoi is filled with moto drivers hawking their services. Another guy who was just walking around the lake spoke no English, but was very eager to try my camera. I let him look through the zoom lens, and he was very amused. That sort of thing never happens in Manhattan.

After breakfast, we walked to the Memorial House. The House is just a merchant’s house from several centuries ago, but preserved and filled with various examples of artisans in the area (conveniently, all available for purchase). Like many houses of the period, it's built long and thin with a very small front because houses were taxed based on their street-front area. I think the same thing happened in Europe at various times--there are various streets populated entirely by long, thin buildings. The house is only two stories; no buildings were permitted to be taller than the Royal Palace. That rule has since been lifted, but Hanoi has no skyscrapers.

We walked down to a part of the old city where various art galleries were located, but didn't see anything that seemed worthwhile--everything seemed imitative of western styles to the point of being entirely derivative. A short walk took us into the expensive part of the city, where the embassies are located. We stopped into a little restaurant that was mostly filled with lunching office workers and had some excellent spring rolls.

After lunch, I went to the zoo. Hanoi's zoo is an interesting place to visit, but more to look at the people than the animals. They claimed to have various big cats, but their cages were empty. I started at a monkey cage; several Vietnamese kids had climbed the fence around the cage and were giving the monkeys Q-tips.

The zoo also includes a "fun park". I had thought that meant an enjoyable area with plants, but it turns out it meant a hall of mirrors, a ball tank, and various roller coasters. Most of them were shut down, I guess because it was fairly late (maybe 4pm).

The ostrich pen was interesting--I've never been that close to an ostrich. I was pretty sure it was going to try to peck me, but it didn't. There were a lot of other birds around, but I didn’t look too closely. Unlike, say, the Tokyo zoo, the exhibits here aren’t horrific--the animals more or less have enough room to walk around—but it still seems unfair to the birds to put them in tiny cages.

The zoo was arranged around a lake, and at the center of the lake was an island. The island was where most of the monkeys were. I'm not sure if its official name was Monkey Island, but it should have been. Anyway, this is where most of the people were—mostly families with children and groups of teenagers. They were there for one purpose: to harass the monkeys. Apparently this is a major thing—go to the zoo and try to poke the monkeys, or give them food, or try to trick them into eating plastic wrap (?). I was the only non-Vietnamese person at the zoo, so I was a bit of a curiosity too, and many of the locals were very excited for me to photograph them tossing food to monkeys.

There were a few large mammals. The zoo has a couple of elephants, but they’re chained to the floor--it's not a great scene. There was a hippo surrounded by an electric fence (which I almost touched when I hopped the regular fence to retrieve my lens cover). Watched a few more people tease some monkeys, and then I set out for home.

I figured, can't be more than three or four miles. A couple hours maximum, by foot, and it'll give me a good chance to see some non-touristy parts of the city. So I started walking, at first along the river, then down a few major streets. It was around sunset, a very photogenic time for cities. Walking around, I was again a bit of a curiosity--there were no other westerners around, and I guess few tourists make it to that area. Although I'm not sure where exactly it was--I got turned around a bit, and after getting some bad directions and hiking for an hour and a half in the wrong direction, I gave up and got on a moto taxi. Long day.

Continue to day four.

Northern Viet Nam Day Two: Some Little Hanoiances

2006-12-20T21:10:00.000-05:00

This is day two of Arie’s trip to northern Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Wednesday, my first full day in Hanoi. Hanoi is cold. OK, 65 degrees may not sound cold to those of you in New York, but if you're coming from three months of 95 degree Cambodia, it's cold. Our first mission of the day was purchasing winter clothing.

We walked to Dong Xuan Market, some sort of famous market which burnt down a decade ago and was rebuilt. Unlike the markets in Cambodia, this market was almost entirely patronized by Vietnamese people--the few westerners were, like us, staggering around trying unsuccessfully to buy things.

The market was really crowded. Really really crowded. Lonely Planet claims that about 3000 people work in the market, and I'd estimate that there were about 500,000 customers. Which would be fine, except that the Vietnamese way of dealing with crowds is to grab the person in front of you and move them to where you think they should be. I guess you get used to this, but I wasn't.

Actually buying things proved more complicated than we had thought. In Cambodia, the opportunity to sell something to a westerner for five times its market price is too good to resist, and shopkeepers clamor for westerner attention. In Viet Nam, a surprising number of vendors refused to even talk to us, let alone permit us to exchange money for goods. Fairly often, we would walk up to a stall and the owner would take one look, wave us away, and maybe say "no, no" until we gave up. I did manage to buy a sweater, but only because we located some sellers who were amused by the prospect of a white guy in the middle of the market. Fortunately, we were staying in the tourist district, so the walk back from the market involved passing many stores, most of which were willing to take our money if their friends weren't looking.

Hanoi is an interesting city, and by "interesting", I mean "loud". Like Phnom Penh, it's mostly motorcycle traffic, but unlike Phnom Penh, everyone honks all the time always. I don't know why, and it's really annoying. It's also a fairly polluted city, especially during the winter, because of the older motorcycles. There are moto taxis here just like in Cambodia, but they're more aggressive--instead of just waving or politely saying "moto?", they walk up to you, block your way, and demand to know where you're going and why you won't get on their motorcycle. Also annoying.

To the dismay of the several hundred moto drivers I passed on the way, I walked to Hoan Kiem Lake ("Lake of the Restored Sword"). It's called that because of a local legend, sort of Excalibur in reverse: In the 15th century, Heaven gave Emperor Le Loi (Ly Thai To) a magical sword so that he could expel the Chinese from Viet Nam. After doing so, he found a golden turtle in the lake, and it grabbed the sword and took it down into the depths (restoring it to heaven, somehow). Allegedly there are still giant tortoises in the lake, the descendants of the golden turtle.

After lunch, we walked to a propaganda store. Like in Ho Chi Minh City, there's a store that sells old propaganda posters (except here it was a hole in the wall instead of a fancy gallery). We stopped into a cafe for some green tea, and were totally nonplussed when the owner wished us a merry Christmas.

Continue to day three.

Northern Viet Nam Day One: Scamz0red

2006-12-20T12:02:00.000-05:00

This is day one of Arie's trip to Northern Vietnam.

Our flight landed fairly late at night. Hanoi's airport is about 25 miles north of the city, and the standard taxi fee is $10 for a trip into town. We climbed in, gave the driver the name and address of our hotel, the Viet Anh (we had made reservations online), and the taxi drove towards town on what is apparently the most modern road in Viet Nam, a two-lane superhighway. It was, um, nice. The drive took about an hour because of psychotic cab drivers cutting us off and very slow traffic in the passing lane. And by "very slow traffic" I do not mean people clogging the passing lane by driving 45 mph. I mean oxcarts and pedal-driven cyclos filled with straw.

At one point, the driver pulled over and took our guidebook to check the name and address of our hotel, the Viet Anh Hotel. He pulled out a pen and crossed out the address, which I thought was a little weird, but maybe he was just trying to underline it? We got back on the road, and he made a cell phone call (in Vietnamese), which I thought nothing of at the time.

We got our first look at Hanoi out the window of the cab. It looked more or less like what you would expect--Phnom Penh, only much wealthier. More electricity, nicer stores, more cars, but still full of kids in the streets playing "kick the thing", moto taxis, and people chopping up raw meat on the sidewalk.

We entered the old quarter. Hanoi is one thousand years old (they will be celebrating their millenium in 2010), and the old quarter has been around since the beginning. It's made up of twisty little streets that change their names every few feet, and the whole thing is less than a mile across. The streets are named for the types of stores that were on the block (so there's Pho Cha Ca ("roasted fish"), Pho Hang Be ("rafts"), Pho Hang Gai ("silk"), etc.), though of course now most of the quarter is dominated by hotels, tourism offices, and restaurants.

As our taxi drove, we followed along on the map. This was fortunate, because when our driver pulled up in front of a hotel and a man opened the door and tried to shake my hand and welcome us to the Viet Anh, we knew we were in the wrong place. He tried to help me out of the cab, but I explained that there was a mistake, that we were not at the Viet Anh. He pulled out a Viet Anh hotel business card and showed it to me, and told me that the Viet Anh had moved.

The Lonely Planet reports that this has become common--scammers set up hotels and then work in concert with taxi drivers to trick travelers into staying there. The hotel is then unreasonably expensive. We said we knew this was the wrong place and would not get out of the car, and finally the man got frustrated and slammed our car door, and the driver took us to the real Viet Anh. We didn't tip.

We had emailed the Viet Anh a week before to make a reservation, and they had sent us a confirmation. When we showed up, they (very politely) denied ever having received such an email and asked who sent us a confirmation. We tried to show them the email, but one of the employees insisted that it was not important who sent the confirmation, that the important thing was to find us a room. We're pretty sure it was that guy. Anyway, they were full for the night, but they made reservations for us at an equally nice place, Sunny Hotel, and reserved us a room at their hotel for the next night. They had someone take our luggage over, which was nice. Not once in the two weeks that I have been in Viet Nam has a hotel ever successfully managed to reserve a room for me. There's always something--either they give the reservation away, or they claim not to have received the email, or a giant bird ate the hotel, or something.

It's cold in Hanoi. At least, if you're coming from Cambodia's hot dry season, the 65 degree average temperature at this time feels pretty cold. It must feel cold to the people who live here too, because most of the people we saw were wearing giant parkas, gloves, and ski hats. The kids were all wearing scarves and mittens. It was really weird, or at least, it would have been really weird if we weren't freezing too, but we were, so we fled to our hotel and went to sleep.

My adventure continues here.

Arie Goes to Thailand: Arie Leaves Thailand

2006-12-18T07:59:00.000-05:00

This is day three of Arie's trip to Bangkok. You may want to start at the beginning of his trip to Thailand.

Tuesday. I only had the morning in Bangkok because I had tickets on an afternoon flight to Hanoi.

Just around the corner from my hotel is the Skytrain, an elevated train system that covers part of Bangkok. It's like the New York subway but clean, fast, cheap, and filled with Asians.

I took it to Sukhumvit (passing many, many malls on the way). Sukhumvit is a very wealthy district of Bangkok; it's where all the nicest hotels, restaurants, and embassies are located. It also has a number of marriage registration areas, I suppose for couples that have destination weddings on the beach on Thailand.

Lonely Planet claimed that the best fried chicken ever was in a little restaurant a few blocks outside the ritzy neighborhood. Sure enough, we found a little diner where some guys brought us what is in fact the best fried chicken ever. Half a chicken, fried and covered in shredded garlic--excellent.

Then we walked to a large park on the edge of Sukhumvit. I'm not sure if it was because this was a nice area or if all parks are like this, but the park was surrounded by very high fences and the entrances were heavily guarded. The park itself was beautiful, with well-manicured lawns, stone bridges over slow rivers, and other park-like accoutrements. A few people were there exercising.

Skytrain back to the malls, mostly for more kor lae chicken at the food court. We took a taxi to Bangkok's new airport, Suvranabhumi, two hours early (as suggested for international flights). That turned out to be about one hour and fifty-five minutes more than we needed, even with having to hit an ATM to pay the $15 departure tax, but fortunately the airport food wasn't too bad. And then we boarded, and were on the way to Hanoi.

That's the end of my Thailand adventure (though I'll be going back in a week or so), but the beginning of my Hanoi trip...

Arie Goes to Bangkok: Day Two

2006-12-18T00:26:00.000-05:00

This is day two of Arie's trip to Bangkok. You may want to start at the beginning of his trip to Thailand.

Monday morning. We woke up in the hellbox that was the Oriental Inn (Siam Inn? Thai Inn? Something like that.), deep in the hellhole that was and is Khao San Road. We gingerly brushed our teeth and got dressed while attempting not to touch the floor or walls, and got the hell out of there (did I mention we didn't unlock our suitcase for fear that the suck would get in?).

I went for a short walk around the neighborhood. I figured, I'm never coming back here, so might as well look around. First thing I notice is that Khao San Road (and indeed, all of Bangkok) is filled with 7-11s. I don't know why, but Thais love 7-11. So do still-drunk hippies.

I stopped at a breakfast place on the Road, much to the dismay of the waitress because she had to stop picking her teeth long enough to handle my food. (For some reason, every Thai person with whom I interacted on Khao San Road was almost robotic in their disinterest. I guess if I had to work there, I would disassociate too.) Khao San Road is pretty horrible in the early morning--there are a lot of very hung-over people (and some still-drunk), though I think the tourist police won't let anyone actually sleep on the street. At 7am, some bar was blasting the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I also discovered a mysterious street around the corner that seemed to be some sort of Israeli mini-Khao San Road--little guesthouses with signs in Hebrew and a bunch of Jewish-looking hippies hanging out trying to talk to me in Hebrew (jewdar functioning 100%, Captain!).

Like I said, we got the hell out of Khao San Road. There are three main areas of Bangkok that have westerner-friendly hotels--the aforementioned Khao San Road (backpackers), Siam Square (slightly nicer), and Sukhumvit (expensive). We jumped into a taxi and headed for Siam Square.

We ended up at the A-One Inn. The room wasn't stellar--a bit of an insect problem--but at least there was hot water, quiet, and a blanket. Also they had good internet.

I wasn't in town to see the cultural and historical side of Bangkok--I'll be back in a few weeks for it--I was here to relax. But Jim Thompson's House was just around the corner, and I thought, how can I miss Jim Thompson's House?

No, that's not right. What I actually thought was: Who the hell is Jim Thompson? The guidebooks and friends who have been here say that his house is not to be missed, so we had a look. Apparently, Jim Thompson was a U.S. spy in Bangkok during World War II who stuck around after the war ended (and probably continued spying). He revived the industry of hand-woven silk, and had several traditional-style houses built in Bangkok. He vanished in 1967, not heard from since. Anyway, we decided it wasn't worth the time (or the money), so we moved on.

Siam Square is an interesting neighborhood. Most of the area is made up of giant buildings, but I didn't pay them much notice just yet--the Square itself isn't a large open area, more like a concentration of small streets filled with little shops and a couple of pavillions. I had breakfast in a coffee shop inside a shopping mall called Siam Discovery. For reasons that will become apparent, I will call this MALL #1.

Maybe 60% of the people were wearing yellow. At first I had no idea why, but while I was wandering around Siam Square, a nice Thai guy approached me, flashed a badge, and explained that he was a member of the Tourist Police and that everything would be closed today for King Day. It turns out that this year is the 60th anniversary of the King's ascension to the throne, the King was born on a Monday, and yellow is the color of Mondays, so people wear yellow shirts on Mondays to celebrate the king. There has been such high demand for yellow shirts that the Minister of Commerce has threatened legal action against stores that raise their prices. Perhaps this also explains why the bun store at which I stopped was out of buns.

Tourist police? The English language newspapers in Thailand jump on any crime against westerners, and the government knows how much money comes from tourism, so there's a dedicated branch of the Thai police that deals with tourists. They're all bilingual, most in English, they're stationed in the major tourism areas, and they're very, very effective--apparently they have a reputation for cracking down very hard on Thais who mistreat foreigners. It makes Thailand a much nicer country to visit.

I then walked around a bit more and found the Siam Square Food Center, which was just a long thin alley filled with food vendors. Looked tasty, but not as tasty as the shark fin district. I understand that shark fin soup is a traditional food here. Sadly, many shark fins are cut from living sharks that are then thrown back into the ocean (where they suffocate, sharks must swim to breathe). The process is illegal in the U.S. (shark fins can't even be imported without the entire carcass). Steve Irwin was known to walk out of any restaurant that had shark fin soup on the menu. Anyway, if you really want shark fin soup, this is apparently the place to get it.

I returned to MALL #1 to browse around a little--I hadn't been to a mall since, erm, 2004. Kind of exciting, for a few seconds, until I realized that they were playing Christmas music. Bastards. I went to a bookstore to look up some places to have lunch. Lonely Planet suggested the food court at the mall across the street.

Mall across the street? Yeah, so it turns out that there's another mall, MBK, which I will call MALL #2.

The MALL #2 food court was pretty awesome. You buy coupons, and then there are maybe 50 vendors, and you can buy food with the coupons (full refund for unused coupons). The vendors have little stalls. It was nothing like a food court at an American mall; each vendor was preparing fresh food to order, there was nothing like fast food and no microwaves or franchises in sight, and everything looked delicious (except the pig trotters). Thailand takes food courts seriously; they're known for having some of the best food around. I had the best pad thai I've ever had, though it would have been even better if the fresh prawns didn't still have their heads.

Then I got a haircut. To their dismay, I did not get highlights. To my slight dismay, they made my hair straight with some sort of blowdrying technique. I am told that they tried to make me look Asian. My hair has since returned to normal.

Pretty weird having two malls across the street from each other? Not when they're both right next to the Siam Paragon Center (MALL #3). I thought I was malled out, but how could I resist a giant sign for Siam Ocean World? Sadly, it just turned out to be an IMAX theater. But the lobby was having some sort of Thai food festival.

Thai food festivals are awesome. It was more or less the same as the food court, except without the coupons. I happened across a guy preparing chicken on a little grill with some tasty-looking sauce. It turned out to be "chicken kor lae", which is marinated and then smothered in a sauce made from coconut milk, peanuts, chiles, and some other stuff. Eating this dish actually made me sad, because I knew that I could not eat it forever. Sure enough, I finished it.

MALL #3 was a very expensive mall (except for the chicken kor lae, which was $1.40). We spent some time wandering around looking at the Aston Martins and absurdly luxurious stuff (what kind of mall has a Lamborghini store? who goes to a Lamborghini store? are there people out there who go to the mall to buy a Murcielago? apparently, yes, and they are in Bangkok).

Anyway, MALL #3 whetted my appetite for malls, which was lucky, because just around the corner was the New World Center, a.k.a. MALL #4. Yes, that's right, Siam Square is actually a giant cluster of huge, posh shopping malls.

MALL #4 wasn't so hot, but there was a small Buddhist shrine outside. It's a little bit incongruous to see people praying and burning incense in a thousand year-old ritual, and then going into a giant glass-walled mall to ride the escalator up to the Marc Jacobs shoe sale. I know it's culturally insensitive, but I couldn't resist taking a photo of people praying to the mall.

I was about a mile away from my hotel at this point, and I was ready to head back. Sadly, Bangkok is a rather polluted city, and it was almost rush hour--not a great time to be walking around on the sidewalks. Fortunately, it is possible to get anywhere in Siam Square via malls. This necessitated passing through Siam Center, or, yes, MALL #5, nestled between MALLS #3 and #1. I'm sure it would be the centerpiece of any American city's shopping scene, but it paled in comparison even to MALLS #1 or #3, let alone my personal favorite, MALL #2.

Anyway, without touching the street we made it back to MALL #1 for dinner. This was a mistake--MALL #1 had no food court, and so we ate at a restaurant that boasted 400 menu selections from four different kitchens. I had some tasty but very very spicy squid salad. At least it was dinner and a show--two large, middle-aged American men with two young Thai women were sitting at the table next to us.

Both of my frequent readers will recall that I try to avoid the heavily touristed areas of Phnom Penh because of the sex tourism. In Cambodia, the power differential between the westerners and the prostitutes is fairly extreme, and so watching white men with their rented "girlfriends" is just creepy. Thailand is a poor country, but it's far wealthier than Cambodia, and while I'm sure trafficking and sexual slavery occur here too, it's not as blatant as in Cambodia. Also, in Thailand I saw a lot more conversation between the patrons and the women--I rarely saw that in Cambodia, and when I did, what they were saying was really disturbing. I'm not going to pretend that it's a wonderful scene, but it doesn't cause the nausea that Cambodia's sex tourism does.

After dinner, I was a little tired, but not too tired for one more trip to a mall. I picked my favorite, MALL #2, because they had a camera store. I bought a tripod (hence the night photos on this page), and had some sushi. MALL #2 was my favorite because it was the only one that didn't blast Christmas music all the time. I had thought that spending December in a Buddhist country would mean I would be spared from the hell that is American Christmas, but sadly, just about every store in the city was blaring some horrific children's choir singing about Jesus or snow or something. Still, even with the constant assault on my sanity, any day where you visit five malls has got to be a good day.

Read day three, where Arie leaves Bangkok for Hanoi.

Arie Goes to Bangkok: Day One

2006-12-17T03:15:00.000-05:00

This is day five of Arie's trip to Thailand. You may want to start at day one.

Our Air Asia flight from Krabi to Bangkok was fine, though I still think it's a little extorty to charge for drinking water on a plane. We landed at 11pm and got in the taxi line--a clever thing they do is to have a fluent English speaker who writes your destination in Thai for the taxi driver. We hadn't expected to be in Bangkok that day (we thought we would be on an overnight train) so we had no hotel reservations, and it was late enough that we thought the only hope for getting a room was Khao San Road, the backpacker district, so that's where we went.

The ride into Bangkok was interesting. We passed many hospitals--apparently Bangkok has become a medical tourism destination. The city has excellent medical care and it's very cheap by western standards, so wealthy westerners fly here to get various medical procedures done that they can't afford back home.

Taxis are cheap in Bangkok. Our ride from the airport to Khao San Road, a 40 minute trip, cost less than $10. And so our taxi let us out at Khao San Road, and while the driver seemed to think we were making a mistake, we thought it was our only hope.

Khao San Road. I've rewritten this paragraph a few times, but I can't sum it up in simple prose. Instead I've written a haiku:

Maple leaves flutter /
In the Autumn winds' embrace /
Khaosan's a shithole

Well, I'm not a great poet. The point is that Khao San Road has pretty much the highest concentration of backpackers in the world. It's a short street, maybe four blocks long, but when we arrived (11:30pm on a Sunday night), the ends were blocked off and there were so many backpackers that it was hard to push through the crowds. Everywhere we looked, there were shirtless dudes smoking, passed out girls on the sidewalks, Thai people trying to sell drugs, prostitutes, and hemp necklaces, and the tourist police trying to keep some semblance of order. All sorts of little dark alleys twist off the street and lead to opium dens or something, I don't know and I didn't want to find out. The street itself is lined with bars, massage parlors, tattoo parlors, and western food (including McDonald's, of course).

There were also, thankfully, guest houses, and we were exhausted. We dragged our luggage to what we had heard was a reasonably reputable guesthouse, and of course, they were full and couldn't recommend anywhere. We tried walking into every hotel and guest house that looked in any way decent, but there was only one and it was full.

Finally we gave up, and started walking into the least-scuzzy-looking of the scuzzy-looking guesthouses that fill the area. We found one with a room, Oriental Inn or something, paid the $12, and lugged our luggage up a couple of flights of stairs (there was an elevator, but it skipped floors 2 and 3 for some reason). We knew it was going to be exciting when we saw that the hallways were covered in signs warning that if you were still in your room past 11:30am without having paid for the next day, security their security service would "pay you a visit".

Our room had no hot water, weird hard plastic pillows, a broken fan, no way to turn down the A/C, and no blankets. But at least it had loud hippies in the hallway to wake us up every few hours.

I hate Khao San Road.

Arie gets out of Khao San Road and on to better things in day two.

Arie Goes to Thailand: Days Three and Four

2006-12-16T08:10:00.000-05:00

This is days three and four of Arie's trip to Thailand. You may want to start at day one.

I woke up early on Sunday, excited to be taking a train that night. I was up before sunrise, so I walked across the peninsula to Railay Beach East ("Sunrise Beach") to watch the, er, sunrise. Even before it rose, the longtail boats were arriving, bringing local workers to the resorts (they drove a tractor out onto the mud plains to pick them up). Railay Beach East isn't nearly as nice as Railay Beach West--there isn't much of a beach, the tidal plane is dirtier, and the view isn't as pretty. Not much of a sunrise, oh well.

We went kayaking one more time. I really wanted some photos of the caves, but I'm not foolhardy enough to bring my very expensive digital camera onto a flimsy little plastic kayak.

Haha, of course I am. Armed with a waterproof bag, we paddled through our favorite caves and took some photos to prove it. They didn't come out that great (dark cave + bright sky = lame photo), but they're good to have.

After check-out and one more tasty resort meal, we were ready to head back to Ao Nang. The guy who allegedly booked our train tickets told us that we should be at Ao Nang by 3pm to catch a bus that would take us to Surat Thani, where we would board the train at 9pm. Knowing that longtail boats leave when they have a full load, we showed up at 1pm, prepared to wait.

The official longtail boat fare is 60 baht ($1.75). Once the boatmen determined that we were not willing to pay 400 baht ($12) to rent a whole boat to leave right away, they told us to wait until they could get a full boat for Ao Nang, and warned us that it might be more than an hour. A few minutes later, a family of three showed up and revealed that they had to get to Ao Nang immediately, and so they hired a longtail to take them. The boatmen offered to put us on that boat for 100 baht ($2.50), but we said no. The family then asked if we were going to Ao Nang. The dirty lying boatmen said no, but we said yes, and so they told us we could go with them for free. That made me happy--if the boatmen had treated us fairly, charging us the normal 60 baht fare, we would have gladly paid, but instead they tried to make us wait to see if we would get frustrated and offer more money, and so they got nothing. Karma.

We sat around Ao Nang for a bit with some cold drinks, then the bus showed up to take us to Surat Thani. As expected, it was sent by Krabi Kaiser Tours, our company. Except instead of a bus, it was a guy with a pick-up truck who spoke no English. Whatever, we got in the cab.

Except he didn't drive us to Surat Thani. He drove us to the offices of the Krabi Kaiser Tour Company, where the agent told us that he had great news--he was unable to get our train tickets! Yay! He explained excitedly that he didn't bother telling us in advance because we can take an overnight bus instead! It's much better, he explained, because the seats recline somewhat, and it gets in at 5:45am! Yay!

After some debate, we elected not to set his hair on fire. Extensive scolding led him to call the train office and determine that all the tickets on all the trains that weekend were booked. We got our money back, minus taxi fees to the airport. At the time, I was so stunned that he wanted to charge us a fee to drive us to the airport that it didn't occur to me to be pissed about it. Lesson learned: Don't book train tickets from the beach.

The lying bastard at Krabi Kaiser Tours told us there were no seats on any of the flights that weekend, presumably because he couldn't figure out how to get a commission from them, but Air Asia and Thai Airways both had seats on their flights to Bangkok. Air Asia being half the price, we booked and sat down to wait--four hours until the plane was scheduled to board.

Fortunately, Krabi Airport is pretty sweet. The restaurant was great, and it had internet access--perfect, since we needed a hotel in Bangkok that night. Sadly, no hotel in Bangkok has ever answered an email ever in the history of email, hotels, or Bangkok, but we copied down the phone numbers of a bunch and set to deciphering the Thailand payphone system. We failed--after coaching from the information desk, seventeen tries, and many, many baht, we admitted defeat. I was not able to use the magic talky box to speak with anyone at all, excepting one very confused Thai person who did not run a hotel and would not let us sleep on her couch.

Then our flight boarded, and we were on the way to Bangkok.

Read about Arie in Bangkok, an adventure which includes a stay in the worst hotel in the universe.

Arie Goes to Thailand: Day Two

2006-12-14T02:37:00.000-05:00

This is days two and three of Arie's trip to Thailand. You may want to read day one.

Railay beach is surrounded by small karst islands that rise out of the ocean, and we wanted a better look at them, so we rented a kayak and paddled out to some of the closer ones. It turns out that sea kayaking is a lot of fun, especially when there are little limestone caves to kayak through.

After our kayaking adventure, we attempted to buy tickets for a train back to Bangkok. Sure, we could just take a one-and-a-half-hour flight, but I thought it would be more fun to take a three hour bus ride to Surat Thani, and from there a twelve-hour train ride to Bangkok. So we stood at a tour desk for forty-five minutes while the guy ran back and forth trying to reserve tickets--finally he told us he got us some. Later, it turned out that he was lying.

Anyway, we swam in the pool for a while. Nice pool, not too deep, but lots of children. Then a tasty lunch at the resort, internet (ten cents/minute at the resort), and then we had to wait out some pouring rain. Couldn't wait in our room, they didn't clean it until 3 (despite the "please make up room" sign we put up at 7:30am, grr).

Speaking of which, the Sand Sea Resort in Krabi is an interesting place. The big pro is clearly the location--it's absolutely beautiful on Railay Beach, and the Sand Sea Resort has some reasonably affordable rooms there. There are some cons, though--the service isn't so great, and our room was musty--the wardrobe was too musty to even open. There are also some quirks, like no alcohol for sale in the restaurant. Overall, it's a good place to stay, but not high luxury. Also, the bottled water tastes sweet. Most of the guests are European. Oh, and the cable TV isn't so great--CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, and several types of static.

Saturday, day three, was our last full day at Railay Beach. We spent about three hours kayaking around the islands, even making it as far as a hitherto undiscovered limestone island that we dubbed "Sharp Island" because it's in much better focus than the surrounding background. I'm pretty sure it was hitherto undiscovered, anyway.

One of the best parts of kayaking where there are limestone caves is when you kayak into the cave as deep as you can, then beach the kayak and explore further. Next time I bring a flashlight.

We paddled over to a little beach and went for a swim, but pirates boarded our vessel and almost made off with it and our booty. Well, except by "pirates" I mean "naked three-year-old Thai children" and by "almost made off with it" I mean "barely managed to climb in and poke at the oar". By "our booty" I do mean our booty. We removed them from the boat and rowed back to the resort.

The resort was getting crowded--I guess because it was the weekend, lots of people were arriving with every longtail boat. Sat in the pool for a while, relaxed on the beach. Vacation is great.

Read days three and four, wherein I sit on the beach and go kayaking. More of the same, really, but there are some good sunrise photos.

Arie Goes to Thailand: Day One

2006-12-13T02:20:00.000-05:00

I finished work on Monday, and needed a break, so I decided to spend a couple of weeks traveling around Southeast Asia. Our building manager arranged a taxi for us at 6:45am (ow), and off to the airport via some weird back-road shortcut. The vacation started with a three day beach vacation in Thailand.

Phnom Penh's airport is very, very nice--it's small, but brand new and very fancy. Nice stores, coffee shops, wi-fi. How does a country as poor as Cambodia have a brand-new airport? Probably the $25 that you have to pay to get on a plane there--the highest departure tax in the world. There are cute signs all over the airport reminding you that your tax pays for the airport, but the way this country works, probably a lot of the money goes into someone's pocket.

We flew AirAsia, a budget carrier run out of Malaysia. Left on time and landed on time, and I guess that's what you want. They sell (non-alcoholic) drinks and have a no-outside-food-or-drinks policy, which strikes me as a little cheap--especially since people dehydrate easily on planes and they charge for water. Two guys in the row in front of us almost got into a fistfight.

Flying over the Cambodia/Thailand border is very illustrative of the difference in wealth between the two countries. Cambodia is flooded rice paddies and dirt roads, but Thailand is neatly manicured and irrigated fields and highways.

We landed at the new Bangkok airport, Suvarnabhumi. Didn't get to see too much of it though, our connecting flight to Krabi left in 50 minutes. We sped through Thai immigration and customs (it's nice that Thailand doesn't require Americans to buy visas), and got to the checkout desk exactly one minute after check-in closed. They checked us in anyway, gave us the wrong boarding passes (sorry about that, Dale Bolton and Euon Williams), and we ran to the gate and got the bus that took us to our plane. (Sidenote: This new airport can't be that well-designed if we have to bus to planes.) The second flight was much the same as the first, except instead of a fistfight, we got to watch an elderly Thai couple that was clearly on their first flight ever. Their (mid-40s) son had to get them in and out of their seatbelts, put their stuff in the overhead bins, etc. Cute.

Krabi is a little beach-town on the western coast of southern Thailand, just off the Andaman Sea. The airport is small, and we got right through it and to the van that drove us to the beach. This was my first real exposure to Thailand, and it was nice to be in a fairly developed country after so long in Cambodia. Nice roads (with more than one lane in each direction!), street signs, traffic lights, all that stuff we take for granted in the developed world. They drive on the left, which is a little disorienting. We also saw a 7-11 and a McDonald's, the first we'd seen in months.

The van dropped us off at Ao Nang, which is a little beach a few miles from Krabi. From there, we took a longtail boat to Railay Beach. A longtail boat is just a big canoe with benches and an awning, in the back is a motor attached to a long pipe, and at the end of the pipe is a propeller (hence the name). It's very manueverable because of the long pipe, but it's also loud and stinky. There's no dock, so we had to take off our shoes and wade to the boat--and hold the luggage up out of the water.

There aren't good roads around Krabi, so everyone takes longtail boats to get from one beach to another. There are five or six boats and boatmen hanging around at each beach, constantly soliciting business, and they leave when they have a boatfull (or you can pay them extra if you're in a hurry). The ride was nice because it was our first glimpse of Krabi's bay, which is truly an amazing sight. I have heard that Krabi is considered one of the five most beautiful places on Earth by whomever considers these things, and after seeing it, I'm not surprised. Clear blue skies and clean sand beaches are fine, lots of places have those--but Krabi also has karst formations, which are exceptionally beautiful. Karst is formed when acidic rainwater eats through limestone. Over a few million years, the acid eats the limestone into breathtaking shapes. The bay is full of giant karst rocks that rise out of nowhere, tower a hundred feet up, and loom over the bay. There are beautiful limestone caves, dripping stalactites, and all sorts of other gorgeous natural structures.

We stayed at the Sand Sea Resort, a midrange place on Railay ("RYE-lay") Beach. It's expensive enough that the other guests were mostly families and relatively affluent couples rather than backpackers--in fact, we saw a rather steady stream of backpackers enter the lobby, find out the rates, and leave. I think there are cheap guesthouses on some of the other beaches, but not Railay. But it's one of the cheapest places--we were surrounded by much more expensive places. There were a few curious things about it--for one, the restaurant doesn't serve alcohol (and there's none in the minibar at the room). Combined with the employees wearing headscarves, I think maybe it's run by religious Muslims. The alcohol isn't a big deal, there are restaurants with full bars on either side of the resort, but it's curious.

More of a big deal is the utterly atrocious service. At our first meal, it took us more than 30 minutes of hand-waving, gestures, and requests to get the bill. Great food, though (and no pork on the menu, of course). Another issue was our room--generally fine, but the wardrobe smelled so bad that we couldn't use it (or even open it). Euw.

Straight to the beach. Railay Beach is basically one giant tidal plain, and it was high tide, so we could walk more than a hundred feet out and still only be up to our waists. The water was very warm, but there were some little stingy things in there, so we didn't stay in long. Some time in the pool, and then we walked around the beach a bit. One end is blocked by karst, but the karst pile on the other side has a sort of tunnel through it, and there was a fairly steady stream of people climbing over the rocks to get from one beach to another without using the longtail boats.

The longtail boats are a convenient way to get from beach to beach, I guess, and it's kind of cool to be somewhere that can only be reached by boat, but it's annoying to have them around all the time. They're loud enough to disrupt the tranquility of the beach, they pollute quite a bit (not just the exhaust--the water around them glistens with oil), and the drivers stand around smoking while they try to solicit customers. Could do without that.

One interesting thing about Railay Beach is the crabs that live there. These guys live in little holes in the tidal plane, and when the tide goes out, they come out and comb through the sand looking for tasty treats that were left by the water. They have to search quite a bit of sand to find a meal, and to keep themselves organized, they roll the sand into little balls after they've searched it. So when the tide goes out, the entire beach suddenly erupts with tiny crabs that spend the afternoon rolling little sand balls. By 5pm or so, the beach is blanketed in them. The crabs don't disturb anyone, they all run underground when you come near, but it's impossible to walk around without crushing the little balls. Fortunately, I don't think the crabs care, the sand balls are just the remains of their meals.

Had dinner at the resort, delicious again, and slightly better service. A beautiful sunset (Railay West is also known as "Sunset Beach", Railay East is "Sunrise"--it's on a peninsula, so it gets a beautiful ocean view of both sides). The boatmen were playing soccer on the beach. We went to sleep early.

Continue to day two, which has some cool kayaking bits.

Kirirom National Park

2006-12-06T06:18:00.000-05:00

I had an opportunity to go to Preah Suramarith Kossmak National Park last Sunday with some other westerners and some Cambodians. Preah Sumarith, more commonly known as Kirirom National Park, is about 65 miles (110 kilometers) outside of Phnom Penh. It's a mountain resort on a hill that's about half a mile high.

Kirirom is both a resort and a national park. It's an idyllic place--King Sihanouk had a palace built there in the 1960s. Its altitude makes it cooler than the rest of the country--cold enough that there are pine trees instead of tropical plants. "Kirirom" means "Mountain of Joy", apparently Sihanouk gave it that name.

The Cambodians were organizing the trip, and told us to meet at their office at 7am. I arrived at 7; those of you familiar with Cambodia will not be surprised to hear that the only people there were westerners. The first of the locals arrived at 7:20 or so, and we weren't on the road until 7:40. Punctuality is a western concept.

Our crew for the trip was me, another American, two Dutch girls, three Cambodian guys, their wives, and their two daughters. Two of the wives were pregnant, one very pregnant (7 months in). Something that surprised me was that there was absolutely no special treatment for the pregnant women--they got crammed into the car with the rest of us (eight in one car), did just as much work preparing lunch as everyone else, etc.

So we hit the road at 7:40. As is apparently the Cambodian custom, we stopped for breakfast about 15 minutes later, just outside town. We foolish westerners had already eaten, figuring that we would make the 65 mile drive in one leg. Turned out no. Because of road conditions, 65 miles takes about two hours if you drive non-stop, but no one here drives non-stop.

I made the mistake of asking the waitress if they had coconuts. They didn't, but one of the Cambodians overheard me. We got back on the road, but five minutes later we stopped--to buy a dozen coconuts. I was given one to drink in the car. Note to people who like coconuts and might ride in automobiles: don't combined those things. Coconuts spill.

Anyway, we eventually arrived at the base of the mountain. Kirirom Park costs 3500 riel (60 cents) for Cambodians, but 20000 riel (five dollars) for foreigners. Our hosts pointed out that we lived and worked here and that they were paying for us, but to no avail--and of course they insisted on paying for our admission (and everything else) anyway.

The road became a lot rougher once we were on the mountain. There were a lot of potholes, some of them so big that we had to almost stop and crawl through them. There were a lot of wooden bridges, but they weren't flush with the roads, so getting on and off of them was unpleasant. The road is a bit steep, but nothing our host's Toyota couldn't handle.

We made our third stop near the top of the mountain, for food. There's a large clearing filled with food vendors who sell all sorts of grilled foods and fruit. We bought a few snacks to eat right away, including a delicious rice and banana and coconut mix, grilled in a banana leaf. Our hosts bought a bunch of food for lunch, threw it in the back of one of the cars, and we climbed on the back of the pickup truck and drove on to our picnic spot.

We arrived at the lakeside at 11:45am, almost five hours after our 65 mile trip was supposed to begin. Ahh, the Cambodian way of traveling.

Kirirom is a popular site for Cambodians from Phnom Penh to picnic by the lakeside. The central lake is surrounded by wooden huts with palm frond roofs, and most of them were occupied. Now that I think back, I think we were the only westerners, but I'm not sure about that. We claimed a hut by the lake, the men disappeared, and the women set up lunch. Conveniently, the men reappeared just as the women finished getting everything ready.

Lunch was delicious. We had roast chicken (which has a lot more flavor here than in the U.S., I don't know why), a whole fish, a not whole fish, some sort of dried meat that one guy said was lobster, but then explained that me meant "the deer-like thing with the horns", we think antelope. There were plenty of coconuts to drink, of course.

While we were eating, a few children came by collecting cans. We gave them our empties and made the mistake of giving one of them a piece of chicken--within minutes, the rest surrounded our hut, hands out.

This part of the park was crowded. A lot of people come up here to picnic--mostly families with children, but also groups of teenage boys playing cards. A lot of people were swimming, the boys in their clothing, the children in bathing suits or naked. The huts were fairly close together, maybe three feet betweeen them. I read somewhere that the huts were too close for Americans to be comfortable, but Asians have less of a need for personal space. As far as I can tell, that's total crap--we New Yorkers don't mind when someone's picnicking three feet away, otherwise we couldn't enjoy Central Park.

I later found out that the park covers about 80,000 acres--that's a lot of park. I guess it's just like national parks in the United States--99% of people never go more than a few hundred feet from the road.

The signs claim there are waterfalls, but we didn't see any--only the lake outlet running over the rocks. I'm told that in the rainy season, it's much more impressive.

After lunch, I went for a walk around the lake. There's what's advertised as a "nature walk", ten minutes long. I made a few wrong turns and ended up climbing a fairly steep cliff and found myself in the midst of a field pretty far away from the lake. Concerned about snakes and land mines (this part of the country was controlled by the Khmer Rouge until the early 1990s), I walked back to the crowded area, and this time I went around with one of the Cambodian guys, who knew the trail. The jungle walk was fun, though not very long--there was a bamboo garden, a few wussy waterfalls, and some beautiful views of the lake.

We stuck around for an hour or so after lake, headed back to Phnom Penh around 3pm. Of course, we stopped about 15 minutes in to buy fruit. I don't exactly understand why it takes 45 minutes to buy fruit at a roadside stand, but it does.

Maybe an hour later, we stopped again, and the guy driving said he wanted to buy meat. We went to a small house with a stall outside, and around back the owner had several types of meat hanging from hooks. He bought some wild boar and some antelope. In the car, he explained that he likes to buy meat from soldiers because they hunt wild animals, and bushmeat tastes better. Sure, he admitted, the antelope are an endangered species and hunting is illegal, but it's much tastier. We didn't exactly know what to say to that (and were suspicious of what we ate at lunch).

In Phnom Penh, stopped at a traffic light, the car behind us bumped us. The driver got out and apologized, he seemed drunk.

We got in at 6:45, almost four hours after we left. The mountain was beautiful, and it was interesting to see what the locals do with their leisure time. Admittedly, eight hours in transit for three hours at a park isn't exactly my idea of a fun day, but our hosts were incredibly nice people, very generous, the food was good, and it was nice to get up into the mountains for a bit. The walk through the forest was probably the closest I'll ever come to hiking through Cambodian jungle, and we got to see another side of the country. Also, clean mountain air was a nice break from the grey muck we breathe here in Phnom Penh. Overall, a good day, but a long one.

Arie Goes to a Wedding

2006-12-03T21:53:00.000-05:00

Everyone around here says that if you have the opportunity to go to a Cambodian wedding, you should. A coworker told me that someone in the office was getting married, and I asked him if I would be invited. I guess he put the word out that I was interested, because the next day the bride-to-be came by with invitations for me and the other westerner.

In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge had mass forced marriages--they lined up all the single men and women in a town and told them that they were now officially married to the person across from them. Many of these marriages broke up when the KR were overhtrown, but some survived. I have read that this is why weddings are considered so important--parents want to give their children what they did not have. I'm not sure I buy it, though--weddings are big everywhere, not just here.

Regardless of why, Cambodian weddings are a major deal. One thing that seems universal about Cambodian ceremonies is their public nature. When there's a wedding, funeral, holiday, or any other decent excuse, the first step is always to set up a large tent with tables and chairs. Most people don't have large yards, so these tents go in the street--on a large avenue, they might block off half the road, in a small street, they block it entirely. On any given day I pass maybe two or three of these. On the tent are powerful loudspeakers, and starting at dawn, music (or prayer, if it's a holiday) is broadcast for the entire neighborhood to enjoy.

We arrived at the wedding at 7am, just in time. The tent was up, most people had arrived, and the music was blaring. Confusingly, inside the tent was a small traditional band with amplifiers so that everyone in the tent could hear them, but the music blaring through the outside loudspeakers was different. The guests were very well-dressed for 7am--many women had incredibly elaborate hairstyles and very ornate dresses. I shudder to think how early they must have gotten up to get ready.

The first part of the ceremony was the procession. In a traditional Khmer wedding, the day begins with the groom parading from his house to the bride's parents' house to present the bride price. The parents inspect it, and if it's sufficient, the wedding can go forward. Traditionally, the price is judged not by its expense, but by the quantity of different items that the groom offers, so a would-be groom might prepare 100 separate gifts. Of course, the groom has to draft 50 or 60 people to help carry it, and so the groom ends up leading a large procession across town. The groom's eagerness to marry is also reflected by the distance he's willing to walk.

Nowadays, it's more symbolic. The wedding was clearly fait accompli, given that the tent was up and the hair styled, but around 7:15 or so, the groom's parents started passing out platters with gifts on them. Everyone took one and we all went outside, walked maybe three blocks away, and lined up behind the groom. After pausing for photos, we marched the three blocks back to the wedding tent, where we each presented our platter to the bride's parents. Mine was two bottles of Johnny Walker Red Label--one of the nicer platters, most had fruit or snacks. For each platter, the groom's parents passed it to the bride's parents, who carefully inspected it.

I guess the price was sufficient, because then we all sat down for breakfast--congee, a sort of thin rice porridge with seafood, and fruit. I think we might have been eating part of the bride price, unclear. Anyway, after breakfast, the bride and groom kneeled down for the exchange of rings--I guess this was borrowed from the west.

I should also mention that the bride and groom had to change clothes for each part of the ceremony. Unlike the traditional western wedding where the bride is the center of attention, the bride and groom were more or less equally decorated--both in very fancy and colorful clothing.

We had to leave a little early--the wedding started at 7am and continued past noon--so I was sad to miss the next part, which is a ritual binding of the bride and groom with thread. This takes a couple hours (and a lot of thread). Finally, there's the hair cutting, though modern couples don't actually have their hair cut.

In the evening, there's a large party. I understand this to be much like the western-style wedding party, with a lot of food and alcohol, only many more guests--sometimes as many as 1000. I had to miss the party (though I may get to attend a different one later), so I can't say much about it.

Two observations about Cambodian weddings. First, as in everything I've seen here, no one was really in a hurry. Most of the guests were perfectly content to sit and talk for the entire morning--in fact, the other westerner and I were among the only people actually watching the ceremony. Second, like western weddings, Cambodian weddings are photographer-driven. More so, even; the photographer not only posed photos, but acted as Master of Ceremonies--telling everyone what would happen and when. He ran the couple through quick rehearsals for each part of the ceremony, moved everyone around, then told them to go ahead. I asked around--apparently the photographers do so many weddings that everyone just lets them decide what should happen.

Anyway, certainly very interesting--and colorful. I'm glad I had the opportunity to attend, even at 7am.

National Day of Hatred

2006-12-01T02:59:00.000-05:00

In George Orwell's 1984, members of the Party spend two minutes each day watching a film that depicts the party's official enemies. Party members are expected to express and channel their hatred for these enemies. It's not unusual for participants to become violent. Orwell called this ritual the "Two Minutes Hate".

Cambodia has National Hate Day. Every May 20th, Cambodians across the country gather to watch reenactments of the Khmer Rouge mass murders--films, theatre, etc., and are, yes, encouraged to express and channel their hatred. Coincidentally, the holiday was begun in 1984, when the Vietnamese-backed government was still fighting what was left of the Khmer Rouge and needed to control public opinion. It's not as big of a deal anymore--workers aren't even given the day off--although there are still gatherings, and I understand that the government always has The Killing Fields shown on local TV.

Sadly, I will not be here for National Hate Day. I'm sure it would be very interesting.

Commuting

2006-11-30T20:00:00.000-05:00

Fresh unripe coconuts (for drinking) are available not only in restaurants, but are sold by sellers who walk around with wheelbarrows filled with the things. You buy one, the guy chops off the head and sticks a straw in. A local seller has figured out that I and a coworker like to drink coconuts in the morning, and hangs around outside our office.

One thing I haven't quite figured out is what to do with the empty shells. I can't just leave them sitting around, they would attract bugs, and there are no large trash cans in the office (and there are no trash cans at all on the streets). After asking around, I ended up doing what everyone else does--I leave my shells sitting on the sidewalk next to a pile of trash.

Today on my way to work, I noticed that the shell I had left yesterday afternoon was gone. A little further down the street, outside the house of what I guess is a very poor family (dirt yard and live chickens), there was the smoldering remains of a small cooking fire that had clearly once consisted of a coconut shell.

I don't know what to do with today's coconut. Do I leave it outside the house? Is that insulting? I'll probably just put it in the same spot.

Also on my way to work, I pass by a local school. This is fun for me because there are usually children outside, and a favorite game of Cambodian children is "Who's Brave Enough to Talk to a Westerner?" As I walk by, there's always some group of kids who see me and start poking each other and gesturing, until one works up the nerve to say "Hello!" Yesterday, one kid said "Hi!" and then hid behind his friend so it looked like she said it. For some reason, I find this game entertaining.

Anyway, today, at 7:45am outside the school, there was a man selling cotton candy. He had a cotton candy spinner attached to the back of his bicycle, and was spinning up rolls of the fluffy pink stuff. Mmm, nutritious breakfast. I regret not carrying my camera.

For great justice

2006-11-29T22:42:00.000-05:00

In America, we count using the decimal system, the dec- in decimal meaning "base 10". Hence all that grade school stuff--the tens place, the hundreds place, etc. I think it wasn't until 4th grade that I realized there was nothing natural about 10, and you could have a counting system based on other numbers. But almost every society uses base 10, presumably because we all learn to count using our fingers.

The Mayan system was base 20; I guess they counted with their toes, or possibly in pairs. Certain Nigerian systems used base 12. The Sumerians and Babylonians used base 60. Computers use base 2, the binary system, and there was a Native American tribe that used base 8 (Tom Lehrer: "Base eight is just like base ten, really--if you're missing two fingers.")

I say all this by way of introducing a curious feature of Khmer, the Cambodian language. Counting in Khmer: One, two, three, four, five, five-one, five-two, five-three, five-four, ten (roughly, moi, be, bai, buon, pram, pram-moi, pram-be, pram-bai, pram-buon, dop). The finger-counting origins are even more obvious.

Incidentally, I'm trying to learn to count in binary on my fingers. In theory you could use your fingers to count to 1023 before you need to add in the toes. I don't know of any cultures that use base 1024, but maybe I'll start one.

It's totally worth it.

2006-11-29T22:08:00.000-05:00

The Cambodia Daily, our daily English-language paper, is reporting that the Cambodian government just purchased a $5.1 million townhouse in Manhattan for use by its Ambassador to the United Nations. (The average Cambodian earns less than $500 per year.) They also had to pay $300,000 to someone who had already signed a contract to purchase it to get them to back out. The NY Times has an article that mentions it.

The new townhouse is located at 327 E. 57th St., between 1st and 2nd Aves. It's a nice neighborhood, though not where I would choose to live. But then, the Ambassador currently lives in Forest Hills, Queens, which means at least a 45 minute commute to the UN by subway. He's also Cambodia's Ambassador to Canada, which presumably entails a much longer commute.

Best part: The Foreign Minister defended the purchase by asking, "How do you know it is expensive? In the US market, I don't know how much is cheap and how much is expensive."

The First Cambodian Rabbi

2006-11-26T20:01:00.002-05:00

I'm named Arie, I'm from New York City, and I'm on my way to becoming an attorney. It won't surprise anyone to learn that I'm Jewish. Despite my more-or-less-religious upbringing, God has never spoken to me. I had assumed that was more or less universal.

On Friday, I met Adollah, a very nice Cambodian man. Twenty-some-odd years ago, God told him that he had to choose between Judaism and evil. He chose Judaism, and was told that he would found a Jewish community in Cambodia. At least, that's what he says, and he seems like an honest person.

Adollah, then known as Hanh Nen, was living in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. Their first official action was to evacuate the city, and overnight a million people were forced from their homes and sent to grow rice. Hanh was sent to the region around Battambang.

The Khmer Rouge executed tens of thousands of people, most for dubious offenses (such as wearing glasses), and millions died of starvation. Hanh was arrested and was sentenced to death. He was not a religious person at the time, but when they came for him and held a knife to his throat, he prayed to a higher power to save him from death. The soldiers sent to kill him decided not to do so, and he suddenly discovered that his handcuffs had come undone. Hanh survived the Khmer Rouge regime, though his entire family was killed.

In 1981, Hanh moved to Sihanoukville. One day, he fell very ill. He saw doctors, but no one could heal him. Near death, he once again prayed to a higher power to save him. This time, God came to him in a dream and told him that if he wanted to recover, he should seek the red bible. Hanh realized that the bibles distributed by Mormon missionaries had red sides. In another dream, God explained that he was infected with a great evil, and it was time for him to choose between the great evil and Israel. Hanh chose Israel.

God explained to Hanh that he was now one of the Jewish people. God told him of the rituals and customs of Jews and of the Jewish holidays. God also told Hanh that just as he had renamed Jacob "Israel" when Jacob joined the Jewish people, so too would Hanh now be known as Adollah. Henceforth, Adollah would be God's rabbi in Phnom Penh.

Adollah lives in Phnom Penh, maybe ten minutes away from the city center. He does not leave his house very often; God has instructed him only to eat kosher foods, and kosher food is hard to find in Cambodia. I met his son Moses ("My dad calls me Moses, but at school I am Somnang") and he took me to see Adollah.

Adollah's home is small but well-appointed. God has instructed him to meet Jewish people and prepare to form a congregation; in 2008, Adollah will have a synagogue. Meanwhile, Adollah is reaching out to the local Jewish community. He is eager to meet as many Jews as possible, and he extends them his hospitality. Adollah says that Jews are always welcome in his home--regardless of whether they are poor, sick, hungry, disabled, or homeless, Adollah will take them in. Adollah also says that through God he can heal the sick.

Adollah does not speak English; fortunately, his son was there to translate for me. He also spoke to me in the language of God, which he learned from God but has not taught to anyone--sadly, I was unable to understand it.

Adollah and his family obey something that resembles modern Jewish law, but with some changes. Adollah says that he sometimes sacrifices animals (as required by the Torah). He observes the holidays, but not always on the days that we would. He says these discrepancies were commanded by God. Who am I to argue?

Jewish? In Phnom Penh? Adollah would like to meet you. He's very friendly, free with his blessings, and he may be able to heal the sick.

If you would like to meet Adollah, send me an email (me (AT) arie (DOT) org) and I'll tell you how to contact him--I'm not going to put his address on the internet. Not until he has his synagogue built, at least.

Edited to add: Reports have started to come in from those who have visited Adollah. First thing we've learned: Adollah is a traditionalist, so if you are of the female persuasion, he will not see you unless you are wearing a long skirt. No word on whether he has made any progress with the synagogue yet. Updates to come, I hope...

----

Update: A few people have commented or emailed me for information on how to find other Jews in Cambodia. I'm told that if you'd like to find a (the?) Cambodian Jewish community, you should email (daviejdr (at) gmail (dot) com).

Casino Royale

2006-11-26T19:40:00.000-05:00

Finally saw that new Bond movie, Casino Royale. I'm not really a fan of any of the new movies--I wish they had stopped making them after Albert Broccoli died. I guess this one was better than any of the other new ones.

I understand that it just opened in theaters in America. Here in Cambodia, it's been on TV already--on Pirate Channel, which is a DVD player hooked up to a cable broadcasting unit, and some guy just goes to the market, buys DVDs, and plays them (it's fun to watch him go through the menus to get them to play). I love Pirate Channel.

Anyway, if something's on Pirate Channel, it's also in the stores, so I picked up a DVD of it this weekend. The quality is pretty good, surprisingly--sometimes when movies first come out, the DVD is pretty bad, and it's not until a few months later that a good one comes out.

Arie vs. The Coconut

2006-11-23T21:31:00.001-05:00

For years, people have been asking me: Arie, who would win in a fight between you and a coconut? Are you tougher than the world's toughest nut? Who would crack first, it, or you? Well, wonder no more: Last night, in what was surely my finest hour, I triumphed over a coconut.

My regular readers will both recall that I have addressed the topic of coconuts several times. But last night was the creme-de-la-creme of coconut encounters. For the past few days, I have been buying fresh coconuts on the street to drink with lunch or dinner. A fresh coconut is nothing like the dry brown things we get in the United States--fresh, they are much larger and pale green. They are picked before they ripen, and are primarily drank, not eaten. Many sidewalk vendors have a bunch of coconuts sitting around, usually still on the branch, and usually have a few more in a cooler with ice. A coconut costs between 1000 and 1500 riel. When you buy one, the shopkeeper takes it from the branch or the cooler and, using a heavy cleaver, cleaves off one side so that the coconut is almost (but not quite) punctured. She then pushes a drinking straw through the last bit of membrane, puts it in a plastic bag, and you take it away and drink it. A fresh coconut has about a liter of coconut water, which turns out to be about three cups. Coconuts are a very popular beverage here--they're available in every restaurant, and at mealtimes sellers walk around with wheelbarrows of coconuts.

Last night, after I finished dinner and had drank a dinner coconut, I wanted dessert but we didn't have much in the house. I thought, hey, coconuts aren't just for drinking, right? Now, I didn't have a cleaver, hammer, or even a screwdriver (the usual tools for cracking a coconut), but I did have elbows and a small kitchen knife.

Long story short, I had dessert. Elbows are not the ideal tool for cracking open a coconut, but the key is persistence.

Cheap airfare? Turns out no.

2006-11-23T02:27:00.000-05:00

I thought one of the nicer bits about living here was going to be cheap airfare--for $20/ticket or so, you can fly from Phnom Penh to all sorts of interesting places. So far I've only traveled by bus, but I'm trying to get to Bangkok in December. Found a flight for $16, sounds good. But it turns out there are some hidden costs:

$16.00 -- Ticket price. Yay, cheap airfare. But wait, there's more...

1.50 -- Insurance surcharge. I don't know what that is, but insurance doesn't sound like a bad idea, so fine.

3.00 -- Administration fee. Seems like that should be part of the "price", but whatever.

16.00 -- Fuel surcharge. Yeah, and my dinner last night was only $1, plus a $5 food surcharge.

25.00 -- Cambodia departure tax. The highest departure tax in the world. Pretty smart, Cambodia, what you guys really need is yet another barrier to commerce.

25.00 -- Cambodian visa. Yes, my visa, like all short term visas, doesn't allow reentry, so I need to buy a new one when I get back.

Yeah, so my $16 ticket costs $86.50. Sure, it's still cheaper for me to fly to Thailand from here than from, say, New York, but that doesn't make it suck any less.

I'll take this down if you pay me $5

2006-11-22T22:53:00.000-05:00

I saw this article on why Cameroon is poor somewhere, can't remember where. It basically concludes that the lack of infrastructure and education is responsible for about 10% of it, and corruption is the other 90%. I don't know about Cameroon, but that seems like a pretty good description of the problem here. The article explains:

There's no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There's no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there's no point being a phone company.) There's no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.) There's no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit. (And in any case, you can't borrow money for school fees because the bank can't collect on the loan.)

The United States isn't the most corrupt nation in the world, but we're not exactly at the top of the list. Transparency International has the U.S. ranked twentieth, below Hong Kong, New Zealand, and most of western Europe, and barely above Barbados and Estonia. But in the U.S., corruption just means the government wastes half a trillion dollars a year or so on unnecessary projects, taxes are higher, schools aren't as good, crime is a little higher, and a lot of undeserving people get rich. Here in the developing world, corruption means people are starving to death, or dying because they can't get medical care, or that innocent people are serving life sentences in prisons.

I guess it took a long time for us to realize how serious the problem of corruption is, and now maybe we can start to do something about it.

Incidentally, shout out to a certain party that recently won a major victory in an election where voters identified government corruption as one of their top concerns, and then immediately watered down their anti-corruption bill. Most parties would have waited until they were at least actually in control of the government before selling out their supporters, but not these guys. You know who you are. Well done.

Mui Ne Redux

2006-11-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

The back page of the Cambodia Daily (a photocopied and stapled stack of 8x11s with local and AP news that kids sell on the street) has a copy of a New York Times story about Mui Ne, the beach town in Viet Nam where we went a couple weeks back. The article is about how Mui Ne has become a hangout for Viet Nam's nouveaux riche, and how young people driving Mercedes or BMWs is a commonplace sight there now. It's true that Mui Ne is a beautiful beach town, but as of two weeks ago, there wasn't a lot of conspicuous consumption. I definitely didn't see anything like what they describe in the article, no crowds of wealthy Vietnamese people, only a beautiful but mostly empty beach with a lot of kite surfers and windsurfers. I blame Jason Blair.

Sushi in Cambodia?

2006-11-21T20:28:00.000-05:00

Yes, I had sushi in Phnom Penh. And no, it wasn't that bad. The place was called Origami, a small Japanese restaurant on Sothearos Blvd. It was surreal--Origami could easily be any sushi place in New York. It wasn't the best sushi I've ever had, but it was a lot better than I expected. New York prices, sadly, but when you eat raw fish in the developing world, paying a little extra for quality seems like a good idea. The waitstaff was a little over-attentive, but that's true for every restaurant in this country (it was a little much when they came over mid-meal and tried to rearrange all the plates). Overall, good meal, but too expensive to visit regularly. Not as good as the sushi in Ho Chi Minh City, sadly.

Rumor has it there's another sushi place nearby. Report coming soon.

ugh

2006-11-20T21:59:00.000-05:00

No posts in a while because apparently the internet is broken. I thought it was just our connection at work, but I can't find an internet cafe with a decent connection either. From what I could understand, most of Cambodia's internet connections go through one fiber optic cable in Viet Nam, and someone accidentally(?) cut the cable. So we're all sort of limping along until they can get it fixed. Word around town is maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but I have a feeling that's Khmer for "we have no idea, maybe in an hour, maybe in a month".

Finding good internet here was a bit of a surprise. This is more what I expected.

Find Ocean's 1st, Roberts, Clooney, Hamilton (6)

2006-11-17T03:01:00.000-05:00

Here are some more search terms that have led people to my blog:

Mekong Express Limousine Bus -- Yeah, giant comfy buses with a bathroom on board that go all over the region. I love them, they're the best way to get around, but steel yourself against loud Khmer karaoke videos the whole way.

Beng Mealea Admission -- Five bucks. I don't exactly know how they enforce it, it's just a ruined temple in the middle of the jungle. The toll booth is on the main road, and I guess they figure you're not going to go trekking through the jungle just to avoid paying $5. Besides, they use the money to repair the damage that you're going to do climbing all over it, so just pay it. It's a lot cheaper than $20 for a day at Angkor.

cambodia connotations stereotype tourist -- Outside of Angkor, your choices are sex tourist, pedophile, and backpacker. That's really it. Sorry. Phnom Penh is beginning to get some tourism, but it's a nascent industry.

how to find uxo -- I can only assume that what you meant to google was "how not to find uxo" (unexploded ordnance), the alternative hurts my brain to think about (are you looking for a souvenier? Are you stupid? Do you work for a de-mining NGO and you're googling for ideas?). Here's how I don't find UXO: I don't leave marked trails or paths and I don't go trekking around in the jungle without a guide. Easy. No tourist has ever hit a land mine, don't be the first.

cambodian maids -- beats me. My building provides maid service, and if it didn't, I would ask the landlord to suggest someone.

What Can I Use instead of Corn Syrup? -- Where American foods would have corn syrup, Cambodian foods have sugar. That's what American foods had too, before Congress started a massive corn subsidy program. Stuff tastes better with sugar--Coca-Cola is actually good here.

related literature of bananacavendish fries -- This is a great search, I would like to meet the person who thought of it. Most of it's normal. Cavendish is a type of banana. I've never heard of banana fries, but they sound like something I'd be willing to try. But "related literature", that's what really makes this a quality search.

Cambodia, marijuana, guest houses -- I'm sure there are drug-friendly guesthouses around the lake. This really isn't the right blog to learn about them.

cambodia sex -- Id.

khmer karaoke and move -- Yes, if I have to hear one more Khmer karaoke song, I might move too.

you can substitute coconut juice for plasma -- Apparently it really is true--sorta. Coconut water is isotonic and sterile (until you open the coconut), and if someone is severely dehydrated, coconut water can help. Of course, it has no red blood cells, so it won't help if someone has lost a lot of blood. There's some study of wartime use of coconut water in the Solomon Islands floating around, I think, but I can't find it.

zeagra -- Zeagra, the Viagra rip-off that's for sale in gas stations here. Sorry, can't give you any more info about it than that.

forget about the cheetah -- I want that feeling. The feeling that comes over a man when he gets exactly what he desires. I need that feeling!

marijuana cambodia 2006 lax laws -- I don't think so. From what I understand, it's not that the laws here are lax, it's that enforcement is spotty. But when there is enforcement, it's crazy harsh, and Cambodia is not world-renown for fair trials or humane prison conditions. In summation: It's dumb to use drugs here. Sorry.

need vietnamese music -- Good luck with your problem.

cambodia hates thailand -- No, that's not right. No one here has even mentioned Thailand to me. Perhaps you're thinking of Viet Nam?

harold and kumar do amsterdam -- Dude, let me know what you find out.

Work

2006-11-16T02:13:00.000-05:00

A few people have asked why I don't discuss my job on this blog. There are two reasons. The first is that I'm not a public spokesman for my office and I don't think I should be making public statements about it--especially since I am doing legal work, which demands discretion.

The other reason is more personal: My job is depressing. I'm living in one of the poorest countries in the world and I'm trying to make things better. I am not succeeding, or, if I am, I can't tell. This city has thousands of us, NGO workers and volunteers and human rights people, and I'm not sure we're not making things worse.

America is rich, and being rich means having a lot of stuff. We have a lot of stuff. We have more stuff than anyone else in the world. We have more stuff than we have things to do with that stuff. I am not wealthy, by American standards, but I have so much stuff that I have to pay a company to store some of my stuff.

Cambodia is poor. They don't have a lot of stuff. They don't have iPods or ambulances or MRI machines. They don't even have clean drinking water. We have too much stuff and they don't have enough.

One of the hardest things for me to accept has been this: We cannot give them stuff. We are not capable of it. It doesn't work. I don't know exactly why that is and I don't know anyone who does know and I don't know how to fix it.

I have some guesses. I think one reason is corruption. We give stuff to people in the government, and then they keep it, and now there are people in the government with tons of stuff and no one else gets any. I think another reason is incompetence. The people with extra stuff to give don't know how to do it, and the people who know how to distribute stuff don't know how to get it, and it's rare that those two groups connect. I think a third reason is a misunderstanding of what's needed. I don't think the people with stuff understand the extent and nature of the problems here. I don't think I do.

It's not just physical stuff we can't share. Americans have a lot of ideas, and some of them are a little silly or hypocritical, but some of them are the most valuable things we have. I didn't know that when I came here, but I know that now. We have ideas like everyone deserves their day in court, innocent until proven guilty, you have the right to remain silent. There are people here who don't know what a court is. By some estimates, 80% of prisoners here are innocent.

I think it would be great if we could share our stuff. It would be great if we could send construction teams to build power plants and water filtration plants and hospitals all over the developing world. But we can't. We can't do it in Iraq and we can't do it here and I don't know why. And I don't think we should give up trying, but we need to try something else, because what we're doing isn't working.

It would also be great if we could share the other kind of stuff. It would be great if we could convince everyone here that the government shouldn't act arbitrarily. That they shouldn't take your property without compensation, that education is a right and a privilege, that people should not be bought or sold. Maybe we can do that. I don't know how, but I'm working on it. I haven't come up with anything yet. If I do, maybe I'll write about it here. Until then, I don't think I'm going to write about my job.

Today I didn't even have to use my AK

2006-11-15T02:20:00.000-05:00

The State Board of Law Examiners congratulates you on passing the New York State bar examination held on July 25-26, 2006.

Arie Goes to Viet Nam: More Mui Ne

2006-11-14T03:58:00.000-05:00

This is the last entry about my trip to Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

Mui Ne is a beautiful beach town, but it has a few other attractions too. The most beautiful are the red sand dunes, about 10km out of town. We started to walk, but after about an hour broke down and hired a moto driver to take us the rest of the way and back (it was a hot day). The sand dunes are beautiful, and apparently are some of the most-photographed sights in Viet Nam. I'm not sure exactly why--they're beautiful, but I don't think "desert" when I think of Viet Nam.

You can walk all over the dunes, and a lot of people do, but it's pretty easy to find parts of it without footprints (probably because the wind erases them after a few minutes). There's also a beautiful view from the top of the dunes. A bunch of children hang around hoping that you will rent a sand sled from them, but that didn't look fun at all.

On the way back, we stopped at the local fishing village. Also very picturesque, almost a little too picturesque--it almost seemed like it was set up for tourists. Almost--in reality, we could see daily business going on boats coming in and out, fishermen unloading their catches.

Other than that outing, though, mostly I sat on the beach or splashed around in the ocean for a few days. It was pretty nice--definitely restful. I hope I can go back one day.

That's pretty much it for Mui Ne, and, pretty much, for my Viet Nam trip. The next day we took the bus back to Ho Chi Minh City for one more night (the bus was fairly empty, but the bus manager made everyone get off the last row so he could lie down--classy). That night included a trip to the Sushi Bar, which was very necessary--I hadn't had sushi since August. Our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City didn't get our confirmation email until they were full because of a problem with their email, so they had made us a reservation in an even nicer hotel, the Lac Vien. Sweet. We also made some internet phone calls--internet access in HCMC is much faster than it is in Phnom Penh, but also more expensive.

We took the Mekong Express Limousine Bus back to Phnom Penh. The bus was almost empty, and so it was very comfortable. Two westerners had to get off the bus almost immediately--ten minutes out of the bus stop they realized they had left their passports at their hotel. Oops. The bus company gave us crackers, but ants got into them.

No trouble at the border this time. Bought new visas--what they used to call the "business" visa is now called the "normal" visa, though it works the same way. I bought a "tourist" visa ($20 instead of $25) because I plan to travel out of the country within the next thirty days. Buying the correct visa requires you to predict your future behavior.

This time after clearing Viet Nam, I walked through the no man's land into Cambodia. They wanted the bus to drive us the 100 feet or so, but I'd never walked across a border, and this seemed like a good one to be my first. I would have taken photos, but I think you get arrested for that.

Also, we wanted to ship some of our souveniers home, but FedEx wanted $507 to take a box from Phnom Penh to New York, and $478 from Ho Chi Minh City. Guess not.

Visiting Viet Nam was not at all what I expected. It was a wonderful break from living in the developing world--I know VN is also a developing nation, but it doesn't have the same kind of oppressive poverty. I'll probably have a lot more to say about it in a few months, but for now, it was very a welcome vacation.

Arie Goes to Viet Nam: Mui Ne

2006-11-14T03:23:00.000-05:00

This is part of my trip to Viet Nam. You may want to start at the beginning.

Woke up, quick bite to eat, got on a bus to Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a beach town about three hours outside of Ho Chi Minh City. The birth of tourism there was in 1995, when a total solar eclipse was visible from there, and people rushed to the coast. The bus was almost empty, which was nice. It's very easy to get around Viet Nam, much easier than Cambodia. The roads are in much better condition, and there are dozens of bus companies that run good services. Most buses (called, for reasons I don't understand, "open tour buses") are run by guest houses or hotels, and ours was no exception. They made a weak plea for us to stay in their guest house if we didn't already have a place to stay, but we did, and they didn't mind at all.

We checked in to our hotel, the SunShine Resort (or SunShine Hotel? Not sure.). It was, simply, great. The room was nice, A/C, all the usual stuff, but it was right on the beach, clean, friendly staff, and the food was great. The perfect place to stay, really. The only odd thing was that one day they ran out of shrimp, which was a shame, because their shrimp and cheese sandwiches made a perfect breakfast.

The beach at Mui Ne is probably the nicest beach I've ever visited. The best thing about it is that it's quiet; except for one jetski the neighbors use allegedly only for rescues and a few fishing boats, there were no power boats at all. The sand is fine, but not too fine--lots of shell bits, not too silty. The ocean is very calm in the morning, but in the afternoon it gets rougher.

Apparently the conditions are more or less ideal for kite surfing. It's like regular surfing, but a) the board is smaller; and b) you hold on to a giant kite which catches the wind and pulls you around. It looks like a lot of fun, but I couldn't quite afford to rent a kit. Next time. There are also windsurfers (surf board with a sail on it) but I guess that requires more wind, they seemed to be having more trouble.

Mui Ne is a one road town, and someone came up with the innovative system of marking every building with its distance down the road from the highway. For instance, our hotel was at 13.7km. It's brilliant--you immediately know how far it is between any two places. We walked a lot.

The food in Mui Ne is great. Unsurprisingly, it's almost all seafood, and just about every restaurant offers the same great fare--shellfish and whatever was recently caught, simply grilled or roasted. We ate a lot of squid and shrimp. Most places have seafood caught that morning at market prices; I learned that large tiger prawns each weigh about 100 grams ($1.33 each), and that four tiger prawns is a large meal. One time we accidentally ordered something that ended up with a waiter standing at our table with a little portable grill grilling shrimps. They were delicious.

Of course, fresh seafood everywhere means lots of fishing. The seas were generally filled with fishing boats in the morning, and there were the odd fishing boat or weird floating cup thing with a guy in it pretty often.

One morning I got up just before dawn to take photos on the beach. There was a giant group of locals who were apparently fishing; they had formed into two lines, each line holding a rope attached to a giant net, and they were slowly moving down the beach dragging it through the surf.

There are a lot of jellyfish in the water around there, but fortunately, not the dangerous ones. I got stung a few times, barely hurt. For confusing reasons, sometimes there were enormous piles of jellyfish on the sand in the morning. I think maybe the fishermen with the net dumped them there.

Read the exciting conclusion to my Viet Nam trip.

Arie Goes to Viet Nam: Day Three

2006-11-13T21:17:00.000-05:00

This is day three of my trip to Viet Nam. You may want to start at day one.

My last day in Ho Chi Minh City. Excited, I ordered another "pancake", but it turned out to be an actual pancake, undercooked and runny. We walked to the central market, which is basically a big souvenier shop. Bought some stuff, hard to resist. We walked by Pho 2000, which, as you can tell from their awning, served Pho to Bill Clinton when he came to visit.

Then we took a taxi to Cholon, which is Ho Chi Minh City's Chinatown (District 5). The taxi ride took a while--this is a giant city. The market in Cholon was pretty amazing--bustling and crazy like every market in southeast Asia, but much better organized, with a giant map that says where everything is. We had lunch at a place that looked just like any other Chinese restaurant, but was mentioned in Lonely Planet. While we ate, white people trickled in, most clutching a Lonely Planet. Amazing what a difference being reviewed in a guidebook makes.

We then walked down to Cholon's herbal medicine shops. I learned a few things: 1) store owners do not like when you take photographs of their merchandise; 2) you can buy things made from ivory in HCMC; 3) also you can buy "gecko hippocampus tea" (sorry, no photographs, see #1); 4) there is a tremendous demand for snakes in oil. I don't know what they do with the snakes or what kind of oil it is, but these are for sale all over Ho Chi Minh City. I guess they're some kind of Chinese Traditional Medicine-related thing, given that the herb shops had the largest selection.

After Cholon, I wanted about an hour of feeling like I was in America, so we went to that fancy coffee shop we had seen, then to KFC for popcorn chicken. Bought bus tickets for tomorrow, early dinner, and that was about it.

Ho Chi Minh City is a pretty amazing place. It's remarkably modern, crowded, sprawling. I didn't see a lot of poverty, but I'm told the government has cleaned it up quite a bit in preparation for the APEC summit next week (President Bush, Hu Jintao, and Putin are visiting Hanoi), so that might explain it. It's a great city to be a foreigner in--there's plenty of tourist infrastructure, it's exotic but comfortable, and the food is great. One of the nicest places I've been.

Sorry if day three was a little boring, but day four has great beach photos.