Sail A-Hue

Sorry, But I Just Couldn't Resist (No Offense Intended)

2009-05-03T11:45:00.007-04:00

Having opened the door yesterday with my comment that Oslo seems like a giant sculpture garden, I really have to show you a few shots of a park we stumbled on quite by accident today on our way back from the Folk Museum. On the map, it's called the Vigeland Sculpture Park. And it's, well, let's just call it "different" for lack of a better word. Here's the first sculpture we saw, from a distance, though this photo was obviously taken from closer up. Yes, that's an anatomically correct statue of a naked man and a naked woman. We first noticed the statue because a young girl was standing on the platform massaging, well, you can guess what she was massaging. After she walked away, we went down and took some photos. As we were walking away, another young girl, this one dressed all in pink, ran up, hopped on to the platform, and started massaging the same part of the statue.

Next, we encountered this, as seen from a distance. It's an obelisk, right? Well, yeah, but it's a bit more graphic when seen from up close. Here are a few more shots, of one of the gates to the sculpture platform and of some of the smaller sculptures around the obelisk. I particularly like the honesty in the statue of the two older women.

As the title of the post suggests, I don't mean for this post to offend anyone. The obelisk actually seemed like a very popular gathering place. There were parents taking photos of their children playing around the statues that had children in them. People were sitting in the sun, talking or watching other people. It seemed a nice, relaxed place to gather on a sunny spring afternoon. Can I imagine this in Charlottesville? Not on your life!

Random Shots from Oslo

2009-05-02T13:17:00.011-04:00

It's the penultimate full day of the trip, and it was very slow and mellow here in Oslo today. The husband and sons did some laundry while I re-packed the bags that the husband and I will take home with us on Monday. I didn't really have the energy to write a full post, but here are more than a few shots from the 15 miles we walked and the two museums we visited in Oslo yesterday. The first shot is a larger-than-life-sized fabric flower in the cemetery across the street from where we're staying in Oslo. We have a two-room suite in the Catalina Bed & Breakfast, an older home converted into flats. The images below are all from the Viking Ship Museum. Some are of the ships themselves; others are of things found with the ships. I particularly like what appears to be an Eastern Buddha-like figure.

The photos below are from the Kon-Tiki Museum, a museum devoted to Thor Heyerdahl's expeditions. I remember reading Kon-Tiki in elementary school and being fascinated by it.

Below are a manhole cover and some sculptures we saw on the walk from the museums to dinner (at Peppe's Pizza, a chain we discovered in Trondheim) and from there back to the hotel. The Norwegians do love sculpture; it's like one big sculpture garden here.

Finally, here are a shot of a store window, signs for two streets just made to be together, and a playground something that the sons say they really wish they had in the States. For all I know, they might have it there, but it has an air of "danger" about it that suggests they don't.

We're going to the Norwegian Folk Museum tomorrow and, time permitting, the Fram Museum and/or the Norwegian Maritime Museum before dinner at an Indian restaurant we found on the way back to the hotel last night. Interestingly enough, Norway has actually been the hardest country in which to feed a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, so happening across this restaurant was nice; we wanted to do a nice dinner with which to send the sons off on their own adventure and the husband and me off to home. I was a bit concerned about finding a place in which we could each eat happily, and I think this one will work nicely.

If I don't get a post up tomorrow, let me say that I've appreciated that you've traveled with me via this blog. It's been a wonderful way for me to keep a journal of the trip, much easier than writing on paper or even "to myself" on the computer would have been. I may post some follow-ups such as one about waste disposal around the world, but those will probably to to my more everyday blog since I have to bring this trip to a definite end sometime. If your feet still itch, I imagine that younger son will keep posting photos to his blog, so check in there from time to time over the next three weeks. Happy trails!

The Rabies Tour 2009 (Health Care Around the World)

2009-05-02T03:02:00.004-04:00

My previous experience with health care outside the US was in 1990, when I had younger son in the Netherlands. The quickie comparison, younger son in 1990 in the Netherlands versus older son in 1987 in the US, was comparable pre-natal care (caveat to come), comparable delivery experience, better post-natal care in Europe. The caveat on the pre-natal care was that my doctor for the older son experience in the US was a family medicine resident while my doctor for the younger son experience in the Netherlands was an obstetrician. If I'd been a Dutch woman, I would have used a midwife, but my US health insurance only covered midwife deliveries under special circumstances, so I had to use an obstetrician. The cost comparison? About a thousand dollars less in the Netherlands. I had worried about whether there would be problems with insurance covering everything or at a minimum asking all sorts of questions and making me justify every little thing. A friend who was working for a health insurance company in Ohio at the time assured me that her company typically paid routine foreign medical claims without questions because they knew the cost would be less than a comparable claim in the US.

Getting treatment in so many locations for my possible exposure to rabies has been similarly fascinating. My first stop after getting bitten was the Royal Angkor International Hospital in Siem Reap. The "International" means that they're the first stop for foreigners needing treatment which means that their prices are out of the reach of most Cambodians. When I checked in at the Emergency Room desk, I was told there was a $100 cost just to be seen. Fortunately, that wasn't a problem. The total cost for treatment there was about three times the initial $100, but included a physician's fee as well as the cost of the rabies vaccine, pain medicines (two different kinds, Tylenol and something stronger), and antibiotics (again, two kinds, pills to ingest plus salve for the wound itself).

Since Royal Agnkor was out of the immunoglobulin I also needed (I was the fifth dog bite of the day), they told me to get that in Ho Chi Minh City the next day. I finally found it at the SOS Clinic, which somewhat caters to the health care needs of expatriates. I had to see a physician in order to get the shot, so my bill from SOS lists a physician charge about equal to that on the Royal Angkor bill, and a rather sizable (about five times the charge for the doc) charge for the immunoglobulin. This bill plus the first one put the total cost to almost four digits; fortunately, we had that much cash on hand as well as a good credit card. Fortunately again, we know that insurance should reimburse us for everything when we get home and file the claims.

I got the second and third shots of the rabies vaccine in the Netherlands. To get them, I went to the local hospital in Apeldoorn (yes, that's the place where someone tried to drive a car into the royal family), explained the situation, and asked if they could help me. They did not have the vaccine on hand but were able to get two doses of it the same day. I paid for the two vials of vaccine at the pharmacy then carried them down to the emergency room where a nurse used one of the vials for the dose I needed that day. Can you imagine a hospital in the States handing you vials of drugs and telling you to carry them down the hall? I can't. After the shot, I was told to take the second vial back to the hotel and keep it in the refrigerator for the four days until I needed the next shot, something else that would probably never happen in the States. And when I asked the emergency room nurse what I owed for the shot itself as opposed to the vaccine, I was told there was no charge. For the second shot in the Netherlands, I returned to the hospital, vaccine in hand, went to the ER, and got the shot. Again, there was no charge.

For the next shot, in Trondheim, Norway, I had the advantage of a local contact. The husband e-mailed his cousin and asked him to see what he could arrange in advance so that I didn't have to appear, unannounced, at the local hospital as I had done in the Netherlands. I ended up with an appointment at the local health department. I arrived at the designated time, filled out a medical history, spoke with a nurse, and received the shot. I asked her what I owed, and she replied that I owed nothing. Surprised, I asked whether I needed to pay for the vaccine itself as I had done in the Netherlands. No, she said, assuring me that this had been approved by the director. She said that they would be reimbursed by the national health department for the cost of the vaccine so there was nothing I needed to pay for. If a foreigner needs emergency medical care in Norway (as for an accident), care is provided free of charge. My dog bite may have happened two weeks earlier and in Cambodia, but the fact that I needed the vaccine injections on very specific days, one of which happened to be while I was in Norway, made it fall under the heading of "emergency" care following an accident. Needless to say, I was quite happy about this, though I fully expect to have to explain to my insurance company why I am asking for reimbursement for charges in Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Netherlands, but not Norway.

Why do we make it so difficult and, by extension, expensive in the US? I think a good deal of the problem is not with health care in general as much as it is with the legal system and the possibility of a malpractice claim any time health care is delivered. I could take the rabies vaccine home and put it in the freezer instead of the refrigerator, bring it back for the second injection, have some adverse reaction, and sue the hospital. Or I could lose or tamper with the vial as I carry it down the hall to the ER. It's safer for the hospital to do it all themselves. And to the hospital, time is money so if a nurse spends time giving me the injection, they want to be paid for that time. As you might imagine, I prefer the Dutch model of paying for the vaccine and the shot comes for free or even the Norwegian model that distinguishes between non-elective or emergency care and elective care. I know the issue is much more complex than that, but that's sort of what I've been thinking of in mindless moments on the train, based on the Rabies Tour 2009 (we've actually played around with a t-shirt design).

Final thought at least for now: A friend asked whether I get to wear a rabies tag after I finish the course of vaccines. I think that's an absolutely wonderful idea. Since I have all sorts of rabies tags that have been given to the cats over the years (my cats don't wear collars), I plan to come up with some rabies tag jewelry after we get home. As with many things, laughter may not be the best medicine, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

To Hell and Beyond

2009-04-30T11:12:00.030-04:00

First off, let me be very upfront here. If you could live in Norway on what you can live on in Vietnam or Cambodia, I’d be looking to relocate as soon as we get home. If you love the mountains and/or the water, Norway is about as good as it gets. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you saw some of that in the photos from our weekend at the mountain cabin with Blaine’s cousins. And we saw more of that in our brief journey to the Inderoy peninsula north of Trondheim. Older son wondered at one point if one could overdose on Norway’s beautiful scenery just as one seems to overdose on Cambodia’s temples or Hue’s pagodas and tombs. We were assured by someone who has lived overlooking the Trondheim fjord since 1974 that her heart still quickens each morning when she opens the curtains. She figures that when it doesn’t, it will either be time to move or she will be dead.

As for the title of this post, To Hell and Beyond, our first stop after leaving Trondheim was, yes, Hell, as in the train station in Hell, Norway. We stopped there 19 years ago and have a photo of the sons and me on the platform to show for it. The train station is a bit more modern today, but still as photogenic. Here’s one of my other photos from Hell. I really need to do a post, perhaps on my everyday blog when we get home, on just how far ahead the rest of the world is in the waste disposal business. I have not posted all the photos I’ve taken of the various bins we’ve encountered in our travels. In my informal rankings, Sweden is probably the most ahead, but Norway isn’t too far behind.

After Hell, we stopped at Stiklestad, where King Olav Haraldsson fell in battle against peasants and petty kings in 1030. Olav’s death is considered to be the breakpoint in Norway’s transition from paganism to Christianity. Olav had outlawed all religions but Christianity, and shortly after his death was canonized as a saint, thereby cementing Christianity as the Norwegian religion. Stiklestad and, by extension, Trondheim to the south became prime destinations for Christian pilgrims. At Stiklestad today, there is an outdoor drama in the summer, and a cultural center with exhibits on Olav’s life and death. The cathedral model in the cultural center was pretty impressive. The real church at Stiklestad was pretty impressive, too. There’s supposed to be a rock under the altar inside that figured in one of Olav’s miracles, but we weren’t able to get inside the church to see it.

Our destination in Inderoy was the home of yet another of the husband’s cousins. We’d never met her before, but we bonded almost immediately. She and another cousin were wonderful tour guides for our time in Inderoy. (Totally extraneous but fascinating fact: These two people were both first and second cousins. They are first cousins through one parent and second cousins through the other. I told them they must be first-and-a-half cousins.) The first evening, we walked through a wonderful sculpture garden containing works by a sculptor named Nils Aas. Inderoy sits on an arm of the Trondheim Fjord, and this sculpture represents the fish in the fjord. The scales twist gently in the wind but even more interestingly, the wires are rigged to produce musical tones, so that you hear as well as see the sculpture. Aas was a very versatile sculptor based on the variety of works presented in the garden. This one represents working women. Any cat owner can relate to this one. There’s also a wooden moose and a metal pole vaulter.
Finally, this one fascinated me because the Norwegian word for “squirrel” is so close to the English word “acorn,” which squirrels are noted for collecting. I need to remember to ask my friend the linguist (say hi to Gilbert for me, please, Virginia) about this. As for natural beauty, here’s a shot I took on the same walk, after the sculpture garden and while just walking through the town.
If you’re wondering what we were doing in Inderoy, besides getting out in nature, try this. Yes, that’s the husband’s family name on that lower road sign. The family farm in Inderoy, on which the husband’s grandfather was born and from which he and six of his siblings emigrated to Canada and the US, is still in the family, and it’s something of a pilgrimage destination in its own right for all the North American descendants. On the way there, we stopped to visit what’s known as “the new church” and “the old church.” The new one is from the late 1800s. I just realized that I really didn’t take a photo of the whole outside of the church, so this will have to do. I took quite a few photos inside the church, though. The cross in the above photo sits atop a spherical candle holder. When a death occurs, anyone who wants to remember the deceased lights a candle and puts it in one of the 30 holders around what would be the equator of the sphere. Above the main aisle of the church hang two large light fixtures and this. When I asked, I was told that there’s a ship hanging in most Norwegian churches. It symbolizes one’s journey through life. Another thing I found interesting about the church was that the only stained glass windows were at the front, around the altar. The side windows were all plain glass, which gave wonderful, natural lighting to the inside.
The old church dates from 1150 and was consecrated in the 1180s. They still worship there on occasion, but not regularly since there is no electricity and, by extension, no heat. Unfortunately, we were unable to get inside, but as you can see from the outside, there aren’t many windows.
Perhaps because of my interest in quilting designs, I was fascinated by the metalwork on the doors.

I also strolled around the graveyard. From the hillside above, you can see both the old church (the red roof to the lower right) and the new church (the white steeple) along with the fjord. From there, we headed to Norum. We were enjoying lunch in one of the houses on the family farm when the sons got their own nature moment after a bird flew into one of the large windows. It was only stunned, so the sons held it and stroked it gently as it came to. When it seemed to have awakened sufficiently to get by on its own, they left it on the deck railing from which it flew away a few moments later. After lunch, we toured the original farmhouse which is undergoing yet another interior renovation. About all that is left of the original house is the foundation, but it’s still somewhat awesome to know that six or so generations of the same family have lived on this spot. It’s also somewhat awesome that the fifth or sixth generation of babies is using the family cradle. We have photos from 19 years ago that show the then-four-month-old younger son lying in the cradle and the then-two-year-old older son sitting in it. The latest Norum to use the cradle is three months old; his grandfather is one of the cousins who gave us the grand tour of Inderoy. We also hiked through the woods to see the view of the fjord that the husband and I remembered from our visit 19 years ago. What wasn’t there 19 years ago were two very impressive anthills, so impressive that, like the fish sculpture we saw the first evening, you could hear them as well as see them.
Older son’s taking a photo of the second anthill provides a scale as to just how big the anthills were. And here’s the view from the point that was just as stunning as we remembered.

The ground cover on the point overlooking the fjord was pretty cool, too. I’m betting someone out there will recognize what it is, but I really don’t know. Finally, we drove by one of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, the one connecting Inderoy to Mosvik at Fosen-peninsula. The cables don’t show up too well in this, unfortunately. They’re nominally red in color, but looked to me to be much more pink than red. We also drove over this bridge on our way back to Trondheim. We took a longer way back than the one we came on in order to see a bit more scenery and get a 35-minute ferry ride in the process.

Our final adventure in Trondheim was front row (as in about four feet away from the stage, on chairs in what normally would be the orchestra pit) center (as in the space in between me and one of the husband’s cousins was the middle of the row) tickets to the opening concert of Trondheim’s annual Nidaros Blues Festival. The concert paired the Grand Mothers, the Frank-Zappa-less Mothers of Invention, with the Trondheim Symphony. The symphony opened the concert by playing some Stravinsky, since Stravinsky was one of Zappa’s favorite composers. The Mothers then joined the symphony for some joint pieces before performing two long sets on their own. The symphony then rejoined them for the finale. While the acoustics might have been better further back in the auditorium, I really enjoyed being able to see the faces of the band and symphony members, and the eye contact back and forth. They were clearly enjoying immensely playing together. Sometimes it sounded very much like jazz, with one side playing off the other somewhat improvisationally. And the audience definitely got their money’s worth since the concert started on time at 7:30 and finished at 11:00 with only one 15-minute break.

I’m writing this on the train south from Trondheim; I’ll add the photos and upload it tonight in Oslo. If I get adventurous along the way, I can go roam the train wearing my Blues Festival t-shirt (an advance edition since they didn’t go on sale until today; we got ours early courtesy of the husband’s cousins who are on the festival’s board of directors). The Grand Mothers are supposedly on the train with us to Oslo, and I could use the t-shirt as an introduction. It might be fun to tell them how much we enjoyed last night’s show.

Here’s an interesting aside that I just decided to add since I decided against wandering the train in search of celebrities. In this post, I’ve mentioned a new church and an old church as well as how multiple generations of the husband’s family have lived on the same farm. Every time I have visited Europe, I have come away marveling at the history a European can mark relative to the average American. While we certainly have things in the continental United States that date from the days of Inderoy’s old church, they are not generally celebrated or appreciated. I think the county in which I live, Albemarle County, Virginia, had its 250th (I think) anniversary not too many years ago. The fact that I don’t remember exactly which anniversary tells you how big the celebration was. By way of comparison, in 1997, Trondheim, Norway celebrated its (pausing for effect here) 1,000th anniversary. Now, that’s history!

I will try to post something from Oslo over the weekend since we plan to see some interesting things there including the Viking Ship Museum and the Folk Museum, an open-air museum of Norse buildings and culture. At the same time, though, we need to repack the luggage so that the sons aren’t carrying anything they don’t need during the next three weeks and so that the bags the husband and I will take home are under the British Air weight limit. The sons also want to see about doing some laundry so that they at least start their journey in clean clothes. It probably should embarrass me to say that we haven’t done laundry since Cambodia almost three weeks ago, but it’s really not that hard to lower your standards in the interest of saving money and/or having more time to do neat things and see beautiful places. In fact, if I were packing for this trip now, I’d be packing even fewer clothes since I now know just how many times I will wear the same clothes without washing, and it’s many more than I would have thought two months ago.

A Few Random Shots

2009-04-26T03:10:00.006-04:00

We head back to Trondheim today from a very wonderful weekend at the mountain cabin belonging to the husband's cousins. Here are a few random shots from our time here. This is older son getting to the cabin Friday evening. Here's the view down the driveway. I took this shot yesterday morning as the sons were heading out for a cross-country skiing lesson. They both did extremely well given that they've never been on skis before or on anything similar like a skateboard. It must be their Viking heritage. Here are a couple of shots taken on our afternoon walk down the road. Here's the sauna and the snowbank into which we each jumped, naked, after getting nice and hot. It's actually not as unpleasant as you think it might be. "Refreshing" probably describes it much better than "unpleasant" would. Finally, here's the tree growing out of the sod roof on the sauna. The sod provides excellent insulation. I imagine it also looks very pretty against the red siding in the summer when the grass is green. There are more shots of Norway on younger son's photo blog, so if what I have here only whetted your appetite, head over there for another taste.

Saturday Morning Quickie

2009-04-25T02:56:00.003-04:00

I'm sitting in a cozy, warm cabin in the mountains somewhere south of Trondheim, Norway, drining my second cup of coffee. Yes, there's wireless here. It's an in-between season of not being winter enough to do "real" cross-country skiing, but not spring enough to do "real" hiking. We'll find something to do today, though. One thing is to take some photos; this is a very beautiful place. I'll try to post a couple before we head back to Trondheim tomorrow because our Scandinavianly expensive hotel there doesn't have the free wireless that our Southeast Asianly inexpensive hotels in Vietnam and Cambodia did. Even with that fact, life is good.

A Post Without Pictures

2009-04-23T10:15:00.001-04:00

I’m in Aare, Sweden, with hang gliders filling the sky above me. The hillside over which they’re soaring is covered in snow, though the air temperature down here on the train platform is remarkably warm. Here’s what I wrote on the train this morning; I figured I should go ahead and post it now just in case our hotel in Trondheim has no Internet.

It’s Thursday morning here, and I’m on a train in Sweden heading for Norway. We have been transported from the summer weather of Southeast Asia to the spring weather of the Netherlands to the late winter of Scandinavia. You know it’s cold when you see a Swede wearing a hat, a scarf, a coat, and mittens, as I did Tuesday in Lund. As I look into the woods on either side of the tracks now, there are more than traces of snow. There’s also snow on some of the flat roofs of buildings we can see in the towns. Some of the lakes beside the train tracks appear to be frozen solid judging from the tire tracks on them. The husband has been warned that I may be shopping in Trondheim tomorrow for another Norwegian sweater to add to my collection. We are supposed to spend the weekend at a cabin in the mountains outside Trondheim, and while I assume the inside will be heated, I know that the outside won’t.

The sons and I amused ourselves yesterday in Lund, Sweden, while the husband did physics things at the University of Lund. We were staying at the Djingis Khan Hotel. The cab drivers pronounced the first name with a “j” sound as in “Jingis Khan,” but as I told the husband I preferred to think of it as “Dingis Khan,” Genghis’s nerdy little brother. The sons and I chilled at the hotel until the noon checkout time was almost upon us, then stashed the luggage in the luggage room and headed into the Centrum (downtown) area with no plan other than meeting the husband at the train station at 5:15. We started out thinking that we would be walking through a park; however, it quickly became apparent that we were, in fact, walking through a graveyard. More specifically, we were walking through the area of the graveyard in which were buried babies who had been stillborn or who had died on the day they were born. My stomach jumped into my throat, and I almost cried as I read the tombstones, most with just a name and a single date. One had the same date twice, and one had two dates about a month apart. Almost all had some small toys or stuffed animals; some had fresh flowers; none looked untended.

After lolling a bit and taking some photos around a fountain in what looked to be a courtyard at an older part of the university, we lunched on falafel (younger son and I) and meat (older son) from a Middle Eastern eatery. We then wound our way circuitously to the Botanical Gardens, though we again found ourselves in a graveyard on the way. We enjoyed the Botanical Gardens until it started to sprinkle rain, after which we found our way to the sort of coffee shop in which you can linger for some time over a lavishly decorated latte and an exotic pastry. We left with plenty of time for another circuitous walk to the planned meeting at the train station.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, we ended up walking down the street on which sat a store with the English name “Coins and Arms.” Sitting in the window amidst books, medals, some German World War I helmets (I already have one of these, that my paternal grandfather brought back from the war), and an engraved walking stick, was what appeared to be a vintage katana. We went into the store, and older son politely asked if he could look at the sword. The shopkeeper nodded. Older son removed the sword partway from the sheath, examined it, returned it to the sheath, and almost immediately excused himself. Younger son followed. I stayed and purchased some small coins for souvenirs, I also purchased an English two-shilling coin from 1951 as a gift for the husband (who was born in that year). For myself, I bought an English half-crown coin from 1956, my own birth-year. When I went outside, the sons were almost vibrating over the sword. Knowing the price of new swords not nearly as custom made as the one in the window was, they desperately wanted to split the cost and buy it. They knew, though, that if they asked my opinion, I’d say, “Sure!” and possibly even contribute to the cost. Their father, they knew, might look at it more rationally.

Off we went to the train station to wait for the husband and father. Coins and Arms closed at 5:30, so there was a general sense of disappointment when the husband failed to show at the appointed 5:15. At 5:20, I suggested that younger son return to the shop and ask the shopkeeper if he could stay open a bit late so that they could show the sword to their father. Not too many minutes later, the husband arrived, so I hustled him off with older son and a quick explanation, saying that I would wait at the station for them. The shopkeeper did keep the shop open, though he told younger son that he couldn’t stay for long since he had to go home and walk his dog before his bridge game later in the evening. When the men re-appeared, they were sword-less, though the plan is in place for the sons to investigate options for getting the sword back to the US either with them or shipped. If it appears do-able and if they still want the sword in a week and a half, their first stop on the way south from Oslo will be Lund to see if the sword is still available. There was also a knife in the window that they might be interested in instead of or in addition to the sword.

The excitement of the sword over, we had more excitement when older son realized we were walking by an outdoor store. He had meant to bring his handheld GPS unit with him but forgot it in the packing rush. We asked my mom to look in his room for it so that she could mail it to us in Hue. Older son’s room being a bit on the crowded side, she was unable to find It, so older son has been looking for one since then. The store in Lund did have the model he wanted, so he bought it. The first set of coordinates stored were those of Coins and Arms. There was no way they were going to not find that shop if they do come back for the sword.

We left Malmo, Sweden at 11:00 last night, arriving in Stockholm at 6:00 this morning. We waved farewell to Stockholm all of 30 minutes later on a train west. We had a ten-minute connection to another train an hour later, which turned out to be easier than expected since we got off the train from Stockholm, watched it leave, and then stepped on board the next train to pull up to the same platform. In about four hours, we’ll pull into Aare, Sweden, where we’ll get off and chill for a couple of hours before getting on the train for Trondheim. Train and weather gods willing, we’ll be there at a bit after 8:00 tonight. Assuming that the hotel has Internet access, I’ll post this. If there are any must-see photos from Lund or this train ride, I may post them separately. I don’t expect there to be Internet access at the mountain cabin where we’ll spend Saturday and Sunday. We’ll be back in Trondheim on Sunday night so that I can get my next rabies vaccine shot on Monday before we head to the Induroy area from which the husband’s grandfather emigrated to Canada.

Tripping down Memory Lane: Netherlands Nostalgia

2009-04-21T07:18:00.050-04:00

I’m sitting on platform 6 at the train station in Arnhem, Netherlands. Our train leaves in about an hour. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be at a hotel in Lund, Sweden which hopefully will have the Internet access lacking at our hotel in Beekbergen, Netherlands. We went out this morning and took photos of the various places we sat, using whatever unsecured wireless network we could find. Saturday night, driving back from dinner, I detected an unsecured network. There was a spot to pull off the road, so we did. Younger son left the car in search of a stronger signal, but the rest of us sat in the car, netbooks on laps, doing e-mail. That’s why I haven’t posted anything here about what we’ve been doing. The night I uploaded most of the photos for The Last of the Temples, my butt got mighty cold sitting on the pavement in front of a store that had closed for the evening.

It was an interesting five days in the Netherlands. As one might expect, some things have changed while others have stayed the same despite the passing of 19 years since we lived here for a year. The house we rented for that year, in the small town of Soest, looks much the same. The main street of town had expanded a bit. There were some new businesses, but some of the stores I used to frequent were still there. The toy store where we bought a couple of things that we still have, including one stuffed animal that older son wrote about in one of his college essays, looked much the same. The McDonalds we used to frequent was still there and still had an aviation theme to match its proximity to a museum of military aircraft. In terms of changes, the big one was that the hospital in which younger son was born was torn down in 2000. Here’s what it looked like when we used it; I took this photograph off the information board that now stands on the site of the hospital. Here’s what it looks like today. In the US, we probably would have (a) renovated the hospital to use it for some other purpose (this is a topic of discussion at home right now as one of the two hospitals in Charlottesville prepares to move into a new facility outside of town) or (b) torn it down and replaced it with another large building. Ziekenhuis Zonnegloren (Sunrise Hospital, if I remember the translation correctly) now shows up on maps as Zonnegloren, a nature preserve. We hiked partway around one of the trails, and the place is truly amazing. They are even working on restoring a large area of sand dunes.
Besides exploring the old hometown, we went to two places that older son remembered or remembered having been told about. The first was Apenheul, an open-air primate zoo. The first time we went there in 1989, I was pregnant with younger son and exuding some sort of pheromones that the spider monkeys found irresistible. People were taking pictures of me with all sorts of monkeys attached to my head, my backpack, my arms, my legs, all over. When we went back after younger son had been born, they ignored me totally. In the 19 years since then, they have had various problems with the small monkeys stealing items from visitors’ bags. Today, they use squirt guns filled with water to train the small monkeys not to get on visitors. They still come pretty close to you, though. All of the above were basically right there with visitors. And despite the fact that they are trained not to interact with visitors, they sometimes do. One of the type shown in the last photo above jumped into and then out of my lap while playing with another monkey. It happened very quickly, but it gave me the distinction of being the family member with up close and personal interaction with monkeys on two of our three visits to Apenheul.

The larger apes and gorillas are kept on islands, very visible to visitors while at the same time at a safe distance. There were orangutans. There were gorillas, several with babies. There was also the alpha male gorilla. The young human primates also found some of the children’s attractions quite enjoyable. It’s good to know that your kids are still young at heart.
The other place that older son claimed to remember was Madurodam, a replica Dutch “town” built on a precise 1/25 scale, and located in the suburbs of The Hague. Older son remembered “feeling like a giant” at some place we visited during our year in the Netherlands, and this had to be it. Here’s an example. Looks like a large office building, right? Wrong! Madurodam is constructed to convey information about Dutch history and architecture. For example, this is a “body farm.” The smaller building is the head, the narrow hallway is the neck, and the larger barn is the body. It’s not exactly the type of “body farm” we think of in the States. Here are some other shots, some of which show that everything is small and some of which don’t. Here’s the Alkmaar cheese market. Probably the simplest way to describe this next shot is to say that it’s Amsterdam’s monument to the Gay Pride movement, though in Dutch its name is the Homo-monument. There’s the Rijksmuseum complete with Rembrandt’s “Night Watch.” Below, the building to the right of the one with the red shutters is the Anne Frank House. The only thing they forgot to include is the line of visitors which often stretches down the street and around the block. This is one of Amsterdam’s most popular tourist attractions, as well it should be. We went through it on my first day in the Netherlands in 1989, and it is a very sobering experience.

Finally, there’s even the Red Light District, though I have no idea why there’s a Star of David on the door here.
Driving around the Netherlands, the first thing that comes to mind (well, my mind anyway) is the reliance here on alternative energy sources. There’s a very large wind farm on the coast of the country, but even in the interior you can’t drive or ride on a train for long without seeing a windmill of the power rather than traditional Dutch variety. These three were right along the interstate-equivalent road that we took to get the The Hague.
The other thing we did in the Netherlands was spend half a day in Amsterdam. We went on the obligatory canal cruise. Among the attractions you see is the world’s largest floating Chinese-Indonesian restaurant. It can seat over 900 patrons at a time. You see houseboats. This is not the most elaborate one we saw by any means. You see the narrow canal houses; they’re narrow because properties were taxed according to the width of the building along the street. Interestingly, the other place we saw this was in Hanoi. The “stick” you see jutting out from the top of each house is there to raise large objects that don’t fit up the narrow, back-and-forth staircases inside. Parking along the canals can be tricky. This photo, for example, fails to convey that the rear wheels of the middle car are almost perfectly aligned with the edge of the canal wall. Finally in terms of the canal cruise, I took this shot solely because the reds caught my eye.
We also visited two museums, the Hemp and Marijuana Museum and the Torture Museum. The Torture Museum was so dark inside that I took only one photo, that of a sign on top of the platform beneath the guillotine.
The lighting in one part of the Hemp Museum, while not entirely conducive to photography, was conducive to growing weed. In case you don’t already know, pot is legal in the Netherlands under certain conditions, but the folks who run the museum know that it’s not legal most other places and have the legal disclaimer posted throughout the museum. They also offer samples, which are free though tips are accepted. If you ask me off the blog which family member(s) chose to partake of the free samples, I’ll probably tell you. I just won’t post it here. Since pot is legal here, there are stores selling seeds. This one is run by the same folks who run the museum. This is one of the coffeeshops at which you can request the menu they keep under the counter that lists the types of marijuana they offer.
And speaking of businesses, can you imagine a condom store in your town? We saw the condom shop as we were walking through the Red Light District. Photos of the non-shop sort of business are strongly discouraged there, so this is all you’ll see of our walk through there.

Amsterdam's Dam Square always offers something unusual. On the day we were there, it was costumed figures with whom you could pose for a photo. Darth Vader and Batman were there along with a gorilla and some sort of robot.
Finally, UVa and UvA are not the same. UVa is the University of Virginia, while UvA is the Universitiet van Amsterdam. It was more crowded than I expected in Amsterdam given the season, though we were there on a Sunday afternoon. The sons were not that impressed with Amsterdam saying that “it was just a city, though it did have whores and weed.” I’m not sure that Amsterdam would want to adopt that as a city motto, but it is pretty descriptive.

Other things that hadn’t changed much in the Netherlands included the Dutch reliance on schedules. If you want to eat a late lunch, say at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, good luck finding a café that is open. Lunch extends to about 1:30, but that’s it. “Convenience stores” are those open seven days a week, though they may close at 7:00 at night. The bicycle parking lot at a Dutch train station still rivals the bicycle parking lot at a Hue University dorm. The Dutch people still downplay their skill at English, responding, “a bit” or “a little” if you ask fi they speak English, after which they carry on a perfectly understandable, near-fluent conversation with you in English.

It’s now morning, and the train is chugging through Denmark. We’ll be in Copenhagen in a bit more than an hour. We decided to bypass doing anything in Copenhagen and will head directly on to Sweden. The husband is giving a talk at the University of Lund tomorrow and needs some time to prepare. The sons and I are hoping for wireless so that we can check e-mail and update blogs. If you read this, you’ll know we were successful. The next step will be 22 hours on four different trains, going from Malmo, Sweden, to Trondheim, Norway. There, we expect to visit the mountain house of Blaine’s second cousins as well as the “home place” that gave the Norum family its surname. Thanks to Blaine’s cousin, I have an appointment for my next shot of rabies vaccine, meaning that I won’t have to walk into a new hospital and start explaining about having been bitten by a dog in Cambodia. Our final event in Trondheim will be the joint concert by the Frank-Zappa-less Mothers of Invention and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra. The day after that, it will be Oslo and the Viking Ship Museum (among others). In less than two weeks, the husband and I will be home. It’s been a great trip. As one of the sons said at lunch the other day, “You’ve got a lot for the Christmas letter this year, Mom,” to which the other son added, “And it’s only April.” I’ll be honest and admit that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

And don’t think the above is a farewell in terms of this blog. The Internet gods willing, I’ll continue to post a bit about where we go and what we do in Norway, so check back from time to time over the next two weeks to see what you might see here. In the meantime, as the Dutch say, tot ziens!

The Last of the Temples

2009-04-16T11:05:00.007-04:00

From Europe, here’s a quickie report on the last three temples we visited at Angkor. The first was Banteay Srey, which translates as “The Citadel of the Women.” There’s some disagreement, though, as to the source of the name. One of the guidebooks said that it came from the belief that the very ornate and intricate carvings there had to have been done by a woman. Our guide, however, said that the name came from two armies having been sent out to fight an enemy. One army was made up of men; the other was made up of women. The women came back victorious, hence the name.
Banteay Samre translates as “The Citadel of the Poor Farmer.” According to our guide, the story being this is that the emperor liked the melons grown by one particular farmer. One night, the emperor was desperately craving a melon, so he sneaked into the farmer’s field. The farmer killed the thief, not realizing it was the emperor. Since the emperor had no heir, the royal elephant was sent out to identify the man who should become emperor. The elephant chose the poor farmer. Remember how I said that most of the temples had two libraries, one for the priests and one for the common people? This is one of the libraries at Banteay Samre.
The final temple we visited was Preah Neak Pean or “Coiled Serpent.” This was a temple of healing with each side representing a holy animal and one of the four elements: the lion for fire, the horse for wind, the elephant for water, and the human for earth.
We’re in the Netherlands for the next few days. I've had my second dose of rabies vaccine. We also drove around where we lived in 1989-90, to show younger son where he was born. Turns out that the hospital was torn down in 2000 and the land turned into a hiking park. We all liked that very much.

Murphy's Law of Travel

2009-04-14T03:24:00.002-04:00

If you were waiting for the last of the temples, you'll be waiting a while longer. It's been a very trying two days, and I may or may not get around to the other temples before there's something new to post. As for Murphy's Law of Travel, it's that shit happens, and when it does, you've just got to deal with it.

We checked out of our B&B in Siem Reap yesterday at noon, but didn't have the taxi to the airport until 3:00. We walked into the market area for lunch and ice cream. On the way back, walking down a side street, younger son and I taking photos of flowers, four small dogs ran out of a yard through a gate that was ajar. One of them bit me in the calf. Being a bit afraid of dogs to begin with due to an incident years ago, I was pretty shaken. I got back to the B&B, and the husband looked at my calf. There was no puncture in my cargo pants (I haven't worn shorts on this trip yet and am so very, very glad I wasn't wearing them yesterday), and he didn't think the skin had been punctured. At least his many squeezes and presses did not elicit any blood. The owner of the B&B was very concerned and, after having the husband and older son take him to where it had happened so that he could know which dog was involved, pointed out that the international hospital was very close to the airport and perhaps I should stop there on our way just to be safe. So younger son headed off in a tuk-tuk with most of our luggage, while the rest of us headed to the hospital in a taxi.

I need to e-mail the owner and thank him, because at the hospital they determined that the skin had, in fact, been punctured. They gave me the first of five doses of rabies vaccine that I'll need over the next month. Unfortunately, I was the fourth or fifth dog bite they'd seen yesterday, so they were all out of the immunoglobulin I needed one massive injection of. They gave me written instructions on getting it here in Ho Chi Minh City today, antibiotics, heavy duty pain pills, lesser pain pills, and salve, and I managed to make it to the airport, where younger son had managed to talk his way into the airport despite not having e-ticket documentation with him. Good thing we allowed plenty of time, because this Vietnam Airlines flight took off so early that we landed in Ho Chi Minh City about the time we were scheduled to take off from Siem Reap.

This morning, the husband and I headed off in a cab to the clinic that the hotel said was the place most foreigners go. Got there, but the clinic said that the immunoglobulin was at the hospital and we needed to go there. Another cab ride, to the far end of a very large city. Got checked in, had vitals taken, and sat and waited. And waited. The doctor finally came in and said that she was concerned about my having an allergic reaction. I told her I wasn't and I wanted the injection. When she came back, she said that the hospital only had one vial of immunoglobulin, and that wasn't enough to treat me based on my weight. She did have the pharmacy call around, and they finally came up with a clinic for expatriates that did have enough. The hospital made an appointment for me there, and off we went in another cab. I ended up getting two very massive injections, one in the bite site and one in my hip, from a French Canadain doc who was a delight to talk with. The punchline is that after getting the shots and paying the bill, the husband and I walked back to the hotel from which we'd set out some four hours earlier.

I will get the next two injections of rabies vaccine in the Netherlands, then one in Norway, and then the last one at home in mid-May. I've checked with the family docs to confirm the course of treatment they laid out in Siem Reap. I've been in touch with our insurance company and know what paperwork to get from each site (the total for the first two visits is nearing four significant digits). I have a contact in the health department at home and am keeping her posted on what vaccines I'm given along the way so that the one I get there is compatible. Shit happened, but we're dealing with it.

Moral of the story: When you're going to a developing or Third World country and the travel doc says you don't need a rabies vaccine because you won't be out in the bush, just say no and insist on it anyway. I wish I had. The irony is that older son at home pets any dog he sees, and I made him promise more than once not to do that here. In fact, the only five dogs he's petted were ones at houses or businesses that we visited. So who gets bitten and how? Me, walking down the street taking pictures of flowers. Murphy's Law of Travel at work.

Another Sobering Thought About Cambodia

2009-04-12T23:13:00.003-04:00

The recent history of Cambodia is one of genocide by the Khmer Rouge. Our temple guide related how his grandfather had been tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge, and how even the knowledge of a foreign language was enough to sentence someone to death. What really drives these stories home is the relative absence of elderly people here. In Vietnam, there were as many or more elderly people as there seemed to be children. Here, though, elderly Cambodians are very much the exception rather than the rule. The only elderly people we've really seen are tourists. While the U.S. has its Greatest Generation, Cambodia appears to have a Lost Generation.

Public Service Announcement

2009-04-12T22:43:00.003-04:00

The Angkor complex reminded me somewhat of a state park. You drive along a nice road through the woods stopping every now and again to see a temple, get a snack, or whatnot. The thing is that while state park guidebooks may advise you to stay on the trails because (a) they want to preserve the ecosystem or (b) they don't want visitors to get lost, the Angkor guides advise staying on the trails because they don't want tourists stepping on land mines, and the land around here is very much still mined. We took a break in between temples to visit the Cambodia Landmine Museum, a truly sobering place. Other than a couple of shots that I took of signs (written Cambodian looks, to put it bluntly, beautiful), this is the only photo I took there. That's just a small fraction of the mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) that have been removed from the fields and roads around here.

The museum was started by Aki Ra, a former Khmer Rouge child soldier who first helped plant mines and booby traps. After leaving the Khmer Rouge, he trained as a deminer under the auspices of the United Nations. He eventually started the Landmine Museum as a way to publicize the dangers mines continued to pose to the Cambodian people. The museum also administers a fund to help pay for demining efforts, chartered as an official Nongovernmental Organization by the Canadian government.

I left the museum feeling somewhat embarrassed, possibly even ashamed, to be an American since the U.S. is one of 37 countries that have yet to ratify the Ottawa Treaty, formally the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. In this regard we are among such countries as Russia, India, China, and North Korea. The official U.S. position is that landmines are vital in protecting the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Were the U.S. to ratify the Ottawa treaty, it would be required to remove all the mines it has planted there within a defined period of time. The mines may well play a vital role in protecting South Korea, but the cynic in me has to wonder if the U.S. may not want to sign because it may not have the locations of all those mines neatly filed away somewhere. South Korea might have much in common with Cambodia one day.

It's a Small World After All ... It's a Small World

2009-04-12T21:50:00.003-04:00

I was wondering when we would have one of those small world experiences where you run into someone from home halfway around the world. It happened this morning. We were sitting at breakfast here at the Golden Banana in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The husband was wearing his Hue Advanced Program in Physics t-shirt that has the University of Virginia V and crossed sabers on the back. That caught the eye of a woman and her adult daughter who came over to say that younger son looked very familiar to them. Turns out that the woman is a special ed teacher at Albemarle High School. The daughter now works in Thailand but when in Charlottesville works at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports which is owned by her father. We decided that was where she'd seen younger son since he's a frequent shopper there. The mom's name was familiar to me, which is not surprising since I used to work in the assessment office of the county school system. Interestingly, as we sat at a cafe having dessert last night, I wondered when we were going to run into someone we knew or when I would see someone we knew walking down a street. Mission accomplished. Now all I have to do is get the Disney song out of my head.

Ta Prohm

2009-04-12T07:52:00.010-04:00

We saw three very different temples on our first day out: Angkor Wat, Bayon (Angkor Thom), and Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm means "Ascension of Buddha," and the temple originally served as a Buddhist monastery. While the faces at Bayon gave me an unnerving feeling, Ta Prohm was downright mystical though that likely wasn't the intent of the builder, Jayavarman VII. What makes Ta Prohm mystical is the way in which Angkor's restorers chose not to disturb some of the jungle's reclamation efforts. No, that's not a giant's foot, nor is it the foot of an ent, though that's certainly the image it gave me since I just finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The spot shown below appeared to be the backdrop for the "we were there" shots. We had our guide take one of us, but since it's on younger son's camera, I can't share it here. Finally, the guide said that the scene below had been used in the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Since I never saw that one (but may Netflix it when I get home), I can't vouch for the veracity of that statement. Either way, it's an incredible scene that reminded me all too much of snakes. And that's Ta Prohm. Because it's now the morning of the day on which we leave Cambodia, and the upload speed for photos is anything but speedy, I may not get the other temples covered even by combining them into one post. We'll see how things go with the next post, one I want to do before the temples because if you've seen my current Facebook status, you'll know that I don't want to overlook this one.

Intermission

2009-04-12T06:57:00.003-04:00

What you wear when seeing temples is up to you, though shirts are required. Here, though, are a couple of things I wouldn't wear when visiting temples that are in varying states of decay. First, in the footwear category... ... and in the general fashion category, the next one is just my personal taste, though I'm betting that the fashion police would have backed me had they not obviously taken the day off. Yes, that's a man wearing the outfit in question. We now return to our regularly scheduled temple programming.

Angkor Thom

2009-04-12T06:17:00.011-04:00

As much as I wanted to see Angkor Wat, probably from the pictures I saw of it when I was a child, the Angkor site that I would most like to have seen intact, as it was back in the day, was Bayon at Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom is a fortified city, centered on Bayon. It was built by Angkor's most celebrated king, Jayavarman VII in the late 12th century. There are five gates to the city. Four face the cardinal directions, with an extra one on the east side. Each gate bears four giant stone faces. All told, there are 37 of the original 54 towers still intact; each tower had four faces, one at each cardinal point. I'm not sure you could ever have been out of sight of one of the faces. Like Angkor Wat, Bayon has some exquisite bas-reliefs. Finally, our guide showed us one of those spots guides know about, in which forced perspective can bring you face-to-face with one of the enigmatic faces of Bayon. The photo below was taken by younger son. Several of the guidebooks advise that if you only have time for two sites at Angkor, they be Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, specifically Bayon. The guidebooks are right. Angkor Wat is the defining site, but Bayon is also not to be missed.

So There, Monkey Island!

2009-04-11T22:33:00.008-04:00

Remember how monkeys on Monkey Island would have made the Halong Bay trip just perfect? Well, the trip to the temples around Angkor Wat was just as impressive as the sail through Halong Bay, only here there be monkeys! We saw them running at the edge of the woods as we went between temples on our first day, and on our second day we had a monkey encounter of the elephant kind, a close one.

We got up at 4:00 a.m. (even the sons who usually only see 4:00 a.m. from the still-up as opposed to getting-up side of things) and left the hotel at 5:00 to be at Angkor Wat for the sunrise. Since we were continuing on with a day of temples, we ate breakfast at one of the several open-air cafes on the outer grounds of Angkor Wat. Dinner and a floor show? Try breakfast and a tree show, because after we ordered, up strolled three monkeys to a nearby tree. Up they went, and on went a rollicking show of chasing each other, play fighting, and generally scurrying back and forth and up and down. This is the tree from which the monkey encounter began. See the monkey at the base of the tree? They ended up in lots of other trees, some pretty close to where we sat at the entrance to the cafe. They liked the beach style umbrellas around the entrance. There were times when it even seemed that they were posing for us. Eventually, they jumped to the tin roof over our heads, scurried back and forth there for a bit, and then took the show on the road, down to the next open-air cafe. They never begged for food, though at one point two squabbled a bit over a flower; the winner took it higher into a tree and appeared to munch a bit on it. I imagine they play around the cafes because of the potential for food even if it's scraps. It was a fun start to what turned out to be a very full (over 11 hours) day of temple-ing.

Angkor Wat

2009-04-11T22:27:00.023-04:00

I've decided to do one post per temple that we visited, since that means multiple shorter posts for you to read at your leisure rather than an ultra-long post in which to lose your train of thought or otherwise get interrupted. Since this will be the first post to go up, I'll include some background information on how we got to and from the temple complex as well as from temple to temple. I can't find a figure on how big the temple complex is, but the "small" circuit trip is 11 miles or 18 kilometers, and the "great" circuit trip is 17 miles or 27 kilometers. We went a bit farther afield than the great circuit on the second day because we wanted to take in the Cambodia Land Mine Museum. Since we got off the plane, the only travel we have done besides walking is by tuk-tuk, a small cart pulled by a motorcycle. Two met us at the airport, and we've used two whenever we've wanted to go anywhere that's beyond walking distance. It's like a convertible only slower. The sides have curtains that keep riders (though not drivers) dry even in the rain, a fact I can attest to since our second day out was one on which it rained on and off.
And now, to Angkor Wat, the centerpiece of any temple visit here. Angkor Wat translates as "the City which is a Temple," and may well be the largest religious monument in the world. It was built during the 12th century by King Suryavarman II as a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It has served as a Buddhist temple since the 14th century, though, when Buddhism became the state religion of Cambodia. Because of the temple's uncommon westward orientation, some scholars believe it was designed as a funerary temple. Angkor Wat is basically a three-tiered pyramid topped by five lotus-like towers, though from the front and some other angles it looks as if there are only three towers. Angkor Wat is the best-preserved temple at Angkor since it was never really abandoned to the elements. Still, there is restoration going on, which is why there is scaffolding beside some of the towers. Angkor Wat is surrounded by a moat and an exterior wall that measures 1300 meters by 1500 meters; the temple itself is about 1 kilometer square. Between the outer walls and the walls of Angkor Wat itself lie two libraries, one for the priests and one for the common people. Considering that in 12th century Europe common people did not read, this was pretty surprising. In fact, most of the temples we visited at Angkor had two libraries. The walls of Angkor Wat are covered in very intricate bas-reliefs that could well count as the world's longest piece of art, wrapping around each other for 1,970 feet or 600 meters. The stories told by the bas-reliefs are almost as intricate as the carvings themselves. The walls also include more than 3,000 carvings of apsaras, or celestial dancing girls, each carving unique. Sunrise at Angkor Wat is supposed to be one of those must-have experiences,so we did it not once but twice. The first morning, there were a lot of clouds. The second morning just happened to be Easter morning, and then we really did see the sun. Younger son will have some photos up on his blog soon, I imagine, but in the meantime here are a couple of mine. Younger son was using the tripod, so all of these shots were hand-held. I haven't done any touching up of the colors; these are the straight out of the camera images. I have a couple hundred more shots just of Angkor Wat, so if you want to see more when I get home, let me know. There is just so much there to look at and admire there that it's really hard to do it justice.

Travel Time

2009-04-11T22:16:00.002-04:00

The husband and I have radically different perspectives on some of the basics of traveling. If the ticket says to be at the airport two hours before flight time, I don't mind being there three hours before. That's what books are for, right? And the other people are there for me to watch, right? The husband believes he's timed it right if he walks from the car to the check-in counter, through security to the gate, and never has the time to sit down until he's on the plane. After 24 years of marriage, we try to compromise when traveling together. On the way to Cambodia, though, the husband had to admit that my way has its advantages, one of them being catching the intended flight.

Our Vietnam Airlines flight from Hanoi to Siem Reap, Cambodia was scheduled to leave at 4:55 p.m. Because the cab ride from the downtown hotel went faster than the usual, we ended up at the airport with more time than even I prefer. We were comfortably reading or otherwise killing time when they made the first boarding call at 4:25. We got into line. As we were standing there, about six or eight people back from giving up our boarding passes, they made the second ... and final ... boarding call, saying that people with tickets on that flight should get to the gate "immediately." We boarded the plane, sat down, and realized that the plane was pulling back from the gate a full 20 minutes before the scheduled departure time. At 4:55, we were in the air en route to Siem Reap, where we landed over 30 minutes before our scheduled time. Fortunately, our drivers were there to greet us, and all was right with the world. I would like to think that they knew that everyone with a reservation on that flight had checked in, but I don't know that for a fact. I just know that for one day anyway, my way was definitely the right way.

A Bit about Globalism

2009-04-11T21:25:00.005-04:00

Strategic Goal #1 of the Albemarle County Public Schools is to "prepare all students to succeed as members of a global community and in a global economy." Do you want to know who will be prepared to succeed in the global community and economy? Elliott will. He's a three-year-old we met on our Halong Bay tour. His grandfather, Roland, was one of the 1975 Vietnamese boat people; he's a doctor in France but returns to Vietnam each year to, as he put it, practice his English (and his Vietnamese). With Roland on the Halong Bay tour were his wife (who is French), one of his two daughters, and her son, Elliott. Elliott, like most three-year-olds I know, goes to preschool. The difference is that Elliott goes to a French-language preschool in the morning and an English-language preschool in the afternoon. He's also learning Vietnamese from his grandfather and Spanish. I'm not sure where he's getting the Spanish from, though it might be from his father since Roland said that Elliott was born in Barcelona. In other words, by the time the students in Albemarle County Public Schools start studying a foreign language, Elliott could be fluent in four languages and learning others in school.

There is another reason why I think Elliott or someone like him will be successful while the able students in Albemarle County may not be is that he will likely grow up with a global perspective, knowing that the way he lives is not the only way a person can live and that the things in which he believes are not the only things worth believing in. The other UVa professor teaching in Hue was talking about people's names with the students in his class and mentioned that his son, Joseph, had a "Biblical name." He was surprised at the blank looks on their faces. He explained that the word "Biblical" was an adjective form of "Bible." They still had blank looks on their faces, because none of them had heard of the Bible. [Please do not leave comments that these people are therefore condemned to fire and brimstone because of their ignorance regarding Christianity. I really don't need my blood pressure raised so early in the day.] Somehow, I expect that Elliott will get to young adulthood and recognize that besides speaking differently, people live differently, work differently, and believe differently. Without that foundation, I'm not sure one can "succeed as a member of a global community and in a global economy," and I just don't see our local schools giving kids that foundation. Yes, there are some kids that do "get it," but more don't, and that will hurt their chances as all our lives become more global in nature.

On Board with Us in Halong Bay

2009-04-11T21:08:00.004-04:00

We've been finding that fellow tourists often want to chat with us Americans about our new president. We've had quite long conversations with an Aussie teacher and a doctor who was one of the 1975 Vietnamese boat people and has lived since then in France. We even discussed the primary and general election at length with the Aussie teacher which was more than a little interesting because of his wife's resemblance to one of the major players in the 2008 general election. Below is the reference shot. Younger son figures that in about 10 years (or after the stress of a campaign), our Aussie acquaintance will even more closely resemble Sarah Palin. We were going to point out the resemblance to the teacher or his wife, but on the last day of our Halong Bay tour, their younger son was ill with a fever, and we didn't want to upset them further.

A is for Angkor / B is for Behind

2009-04-11T06:33:00.002-04:00

Two days of temple-ing and more temple-ing have left little time for blogging. I shot 471 photos yesterday and almost as many today. We have declared tomorrow a free day after one more sunrise over Angkor Wat. I am thinking about how to organize some Angkor posts, though I still have some items from Halong Bay and Hanoi that I'd like to post. First, though, there is the pool and then dinner at what appears to be the only vegetarian Khmer restaurant in Siem Reap. There's also the night market to experience. Siem Reap is serving as a transition back to the real world, with prices hovering between the unbelievably low prices of Vietnam and what we expect to be unbelievably high prices when we hit Scandinavia. It's been great here, and will be for a couple more days, but I think we're all ready to get back to where we don't stand out as much as we do here.

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!

2009-04-08T06:17:00.016-04:00

We're in the late afternoon of our one full day in Hanoi. At coffee this morning, after visiting Ho Chi Minh as he lies in state, we discussed that we're all in various stages of being ready to leave Vietnam (the husband) or Asia (younger son). More than anything else, I'm ready to get out of Hanoi. It's a big city, and there are few big cities I feel an affinity for. Boston and Chicago are two that I have felt comfortable in. Hue, although much larger than hometown Charlottesville, did not feel like Hanoi does. My tension level has risen just from being here. I am looking forward to getting to Siem Reap, Cambodia, tomorrow evening, and trading Hanoi for Angkor Wat.

We agreed earlier that the one thing we all wanted to do in Hanoi was visit Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and see his embalmed body. We did that this morning. Unfortunately, you must check your camera (and any luggage other than a purse) at the door, so we were unable to take photos anywhere in the mausoleum complex. The Vietnamese take Ho Chi Minh's remains very seriously. All cars or buses coming into the complex get the complete once-over, including the mirror to look at the vehicle's undercarriage. From the time you check your bags until the time you are out of the mausoleum, you are regimented. You stand in single file here, and then over there you line up by twos. Similar to airport security, the purses go through the x-ray while you walk through the metal detector. There are guards at every twist and turn of the carpeted path.

The one thing that we all thought was very clever we may not have noticed had the people in front of us not had a child, maybe five years old, with them. When we entered the room in which Ho Chi Minh lies, the guard at the door showed them that there was an elevated path, right next to the railing, on which small children could walk and see Ho Chi Minh without an adult's having to lift and carry them. Having lifted one or two kids myself so that they could see something, I thought this was a very, very nice touch. Of course, the punchline was delivered after we exited the mausoleum building and heard the little boy ask his mother and father if Ho Chi Minh were a zombie. Needless to say, this led to spitfire talk of zombie-this and zombie-that, and I now have quite the outline for National Novel Writing Month in November.

Once you leave the mausoleum building, you can get out of the regimented line and stroll through the rest of the grounds as you wish, as long as you're back at the baggage claim area by the time they tell you when you enter. We saw the stilt house in which Ho Chi Minh lived and worked for many years, and were disappointed to learn that the garage in which his used cars were kept was closed. We walked through several souvenir shops, coming out with a Ho Chi Minh pin that I plan to turn into a refrigerator magnet, a keychain with Halong Bay on one side and Ho Chi Minh on the other, and a CD, the contents of which we don't really know. Here's part of the CD cover. How could I pass up "Uncle Ho's Farewell Message" and Karaoke something on the same CD? This may become a party favorite back in the 'Ville.

After the mausoleum, we walked back toward the hotel, stopping to check out the Canadian embassy, admire wiring to rival what we saw in Ho Chi Minh City, admire Vlad Tepes (Dracula) on a poster outside the Romanian embassy, and commune a bit with Lenin in a park. Younger son has some nice shots on his blog of some people who shared Lenin with us.

After we stopped for coffee, we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake. Younger son played around with some reflection photos. I did, too, but in a slightly different way, concentrating more on the reflection itself and not what was being reflected. We found some more trash cans that our friend the environmental science teacher would love to see around home. One side is for compostable garbage; the other side is for the other stuff. We also went through the Ngoc Son temple, which sits on an island in the lake. My shots from there aren't as good as some of younger son's, but this is my blog, so you take what you can get. And now I have no excuse for not doing the repacking. We decided that we'd like to visit the Hanoi Hilton (the site of the real one, not the Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel) tomorrow morning. We leave the hotel for the airport at 1:30, and will be in Cambodia tomorrow night. Check out where we'll be staying if you like; we have rooms at the bed and breakfast side of the operation.

Myo Sim on the Road (Crane IN a Rock)

2009-04-07T10:36:00.004-04:00

There wasn't really a good space for him to do the Am Hak kata in the Halong Bay caves, but older son couldn't resist striking a few poses from the kata so as to be the crane in rather than on a rock. We've all been remiss about practicing our Myo Sim kata while on the trip. None of the excuses are very good. Yes, it's been hotter than hell most days. No, women do not generally exercise in public in Vietnam, and a sweaty woman is not generally viewed as a good thing. When I'm sweaty just from walking, I get more attention than I am comfortable with, and most of that is well-intentioned. "Would you like to sit?" "Here ... for you." This latter is said as someone hands me a kleenex with which to wipe the sweat off my face. We are hoping that Europe will be more amenable to going to a park and practicing. It will certainly be cooler.

Almost Heaven ... Halong Bay

2009-04-07T07:39:00.041-04:00

How do you improve on a trip that offers sailing, sea kayaking, swimming, cycling, and caving in some of the most beautiful scenery on earth without adding martial arts? Add monkeys, or at least the possibility of monkeys. That's a short summary of our three days (well, two days, since travel there took a half day each way) in Halong Bay. We stepped off the information superhighway and followed Mother Nature's lure instead.

That's the intro I drafted for this post. I started to try to write something on the bus ride back to Hanoi, but the road was just too bumpy. After going through all the photos, I think I'll try to keep words to a minimum here and instead show you just how amazing it was. But first, a little background. "Halong" translates as "descending dragons." Legend has it that a family of divine dragons came from heaven to help Vietnam against an invading navy. The dragons were so taken with the natural beauty of the bay that rather than return to heaven, they stayed. Indeed, the 366 islands that jut up out of the bay could easily be the backs or tails of dragons. If you saw Tomorrow Never Dies, that's Halong Bay in the movie's climactic scenes.

First step was taking a bus from Hanoi to Halong City. The scenery in northern Vietnam is similar to that in the central part where Hue is, with the exception of a few industrial touches. We sailed the bay on a replica Chinese junk. This one is smaller than the one on which we spent the first day and night, and closer in size to the one on which we spent the second day. We were on a newly refurbished junk, the Marguerite. She had some nice touches inside as well as out.
The scenery in Halong Bay is absolutely stunning. My photos do not do it credit. Here are a few that may come close in some way. Our junk's first stop was at a fish farm in the middle of the bay. We also stopped at some caves. This is the view from the top of the hillside we climbed in order to enter the caves. And you had to love the warning sign that appeared throughout the path through the caves. Our tour guide pointed out one formation that was particularly interesting. There were others that were much more mundane. The sails on the junks are purely ornamental, especially on the high-rent boats. Then there are some junks with other ornaments. We spent the first night on the junk, and it was the best night's sleep I have had since January 2005. I don't know if it was the slight movement of the boat rocking or the white noise of the water lapping at the sides of the boat, but I slept so much more soundly than I usually do. The next morning we noticed that the boat was listing a bit to starboard. We wondered whether we should be concerned when one of the crew members came to the upper deck and asked us all to shift to the port side and to move some of the furniture there as well. One of the sons wondered whether we were essentially re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We stopped wondering about it when those of us staying on the bay for a second day transferred to a smaller junk. As the Marguerite sailed away, we noticed that only one engine was working, which the physicists explained would make a boat list to one side.

The second day was spent on or around Cat Ba Island, the largest island in Halong Bay and home to Cat Ba National Park. In the morning, we stopped at a very small port in order to cycle into a valley in the island's interior. This gave us our fist close-up view of rice paddies. We also got our closest look yet at a water buffalo. There were some mundane views as well as some more breathtaking ones.
After lunch back on the boat, we spent the afternoon sea kayaking. We had passed an opening in one of the islands and asked the guide whether it would be possible to kayak through it and see what was inside. He said he thought the tides would be favorable, so off we went. That's me in the front of the two-person kayak. The husband was in the back, with our point-and-shoot digital cameras double ziplocked for protection. We couldn't leave the boat without them since the second stop of the kayaking was to be at Monkey Island. Inside the opening was a very pleasant cove.
Unfortunately, Monkey Island was, when we visited, without monkeys, though we heard from some other people that evening that the monkeys had been out when they visited earlier in the day. We heard what sounded like monkeys screeching in the vegetation, but none appeared to offer greetings. We did do some beachcombing, and found some pretty amazing shells. The husband also found some starfish and some trails of unknown origin. Monkeys would have made it better, but we weren't going to complain.

More than one scene reminded us of the movie Waterworld. Here are just a few.

After kayaking on the second day, we sailed to Cat Ba town, where we spent the night in a three-star hotel. After dinner, we walked to the darkened beach and had some fun with photography. You can see the results here, on younger son's photo blog. This morning, we sailed back to Halong City before spending the afternoon on a bus back to Hanoi. We've already talked about whether it might be possible to come back and spend several days in the bay camping, traveling between islands by kayak. It might take some doing to arrange such a trip, but it would certainly be worth it.

Ends and Beginnings

2009-04-07T05:51:00.004-04:00

The work part of the trip (for the husband) is ending, and we're starting in on the part that is more vacation. The husband has added one day in Lund, Sweden to the itinerary that will be work-related for him, but other than that and some e-mails, he's slipping into a more relaxed frame of mind.

It's Tuesday evening as I type this. We left Hue on Saturday, a very bittersweet parting. After a month, it was time to move on, but at the same time there was a comfort to the routine we had there. The husband's students, who had their final exam on Saturday, held their own farewell party for the husband on Thursday afternoon. I had seen a number of karaoke bars in Vietnam but didn't know just what a big deal it was until I spent several hours locked in a soundproof room with the husband and sons, 21 Vietnamese students, and one Vietnamese teaching assistant. Those who know older son may be surprised that he sat through it albeit not with a smile on his face. I politely declined to sing, citing the very real cold I had and the very real possibility of losing my voice. Younger son said he would sing if the husband did (I knew they wouldn't let us down). The husband did "Lola," the lyrics to which were more than a bit altered. The computer karaoke program the students were using gave a score after each song, and the place went wild when the husband's rendition score a perfect 100. Younger son chose "Help!" by the Beatles, though interestingly enough the lyrics to it had also been changed. The food was good, watching the students was lots of fun, and the deafness was only temporary.

On Friday the sons and I rented bicycles to go photograph a sign we had seen on our earlier bike ride to a monastery and tomb. That's why I much prefer walking to cycling as a way to see a city. Cycling is fine if you're going one place. Seeing something, stopping, and taking a photo just don't work when you're biking. Too much trouble. Since we couldn't stop the first time the husband and younger son saw this billboard, we just had to go back and get the shot. If you're thinking the short fellow in the group looks like a condom, well, you're right. This was just too good to pass up!

Also on Friday was the university's official farewell dinner. They presented each UVa professor with a stunning stoneware tea set of tray, pot and six cups. The beer was free-flowing again, though there was also a special wine, supposedly the kind that Minh Mang used to father his 142 children. As at the welcome dinner, the food was excellent, and a good time was had by all.

On Saturday, while the husband did a review session, gave a final exam, and calculated final grades, the sons and I picked up the last of the tailored clothing, which means that I can offer a photo of younger son in his birthday suit. You know, the copy of the suit worn by the Joker in The Dark Knight. The jacket, pants, and vest are all done in raw silk, lined, just really nicely done. In regard to the raw silk, a couple of people have asked if it's sold by the yard or meter. It is, but I had been good, buying some raw silk scarves that could be given as gifts or could be kept for my own use; I knew that if I started buying yardage (meterage?) I might not be able to stop. My men, however, saw how taken I was when the bolt of purple came out for the suit and surprised me with ten meters of it. As a result, I am open to suggestions of how I could use that. I could always have a tailor at home make me something, though the price differential between home and Hue would, I'm sure, be very depressing. Oh, the price per meter for the silk was $3.00 per meter. The husband had been quoted a price of $4.00 per meter, but when younger son went to pay for it and pick it up, they smiled and gave him a cheaper price.

But I have digressed, so back to our last day in Hue. The other highlight of Saturday was the progressive lunch that the sons and I had through some of our favorite cafes. We started at Phuong Nam, home of the best fruit shakes we had. It is also home to Hue's cutest puppy. After two fruit shakes each, we moved on to Fancy for entrees. We finished at the New Space Art Gallery for coffee and dessert. The fact that we ate far, far too much was offset by the fact that we never ate dinner.

Our night flight to Hanoi was uncrowded and uneventful, and the taxi driver was waiting as requested. Hanoi's airport is about 45 minutes outside the city,and the ride in at night reminded me very much of similar rides through the outskirts of American cities. We were on a modern, multi-lane highway, going through industrial zones. There were few motorbikes and more private vehicles than we'd seen in either Ho Chi Minh City or Hue. When we got into the city, though, we were almost immediately taken back to our time in Hue. Our hotel was (and is, since we're back there now) in Hanoi's Old Quarter, meaning narrow streets, multitudes of motorbikes, brightly lit storefronts. The feeling of being Stateside quickly evaporated.

Our hotel, a partner of our hotel in Hue, has four rooms per floor, but in a rather unusual arrangement. Each room is on a different level. The tiny elevator stops on a floor, and you can turn to the right to the door of one room. Go up a few steps to the left, and you're at the door of the second room. Up a few steps to the left of that is a third room, while the fourth room is up a few steps to the right. Very interesting.

It was late when we arrived at the hotel and, with an early start planned for the next day, we saw nothing more of Hanoi. We knew that we'd have a day for Hanoi after the trip we planned to start the vacationing, three days and two nights on Halong Bay. That will be the next post, though it may take me a while to go through the photos and choose which ones I want to use.

A Few Random Photographs ...

2009-04-03T00:48:00.011-04:00

... that didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

The barber is out, probably sitting across the street smoking a cigarette. Many things that you can have done in a shop, you can also get done on the street. A haircut is one of those things.

A different take on a smiley face, this is from the logo sign from the hotel at which we stayed in Ho Chi Minh City. We'll spend one more night there on our way out of the country.

Ever since I saw the silos in Saskatchewan that had "Laura" written on them, I've enjoyed finding people's names in strange places. This was along a street in Ho Chi Minh City.

Sadly, this is the only reference we've seen to any form of martial arts here. We came here with intentions of practicing regularly, but that's been tough to do. One more month, though, and I'll be back at it with a vengeance.

My brother-in-law once said that you know it's time to move on when you start to get used to a place, when one golden altar in a European cathedral looks just like another. It may be time to move on from here, because I've started to get used to seeing scenes such as this, because I do see them every time I go out.

I may actually have used this one or one like it before, but that's okay. I am not getting used to seeing how much someone can carry using a cyclo or a motorbike, because every time I think I've seen the best one yet, I see a better one.

This is a dorm at Hue University. The clothes are the students' laundry. Most people here do not use dryers, at least not this time of year. When we send our laundry to the hotel to be done, we see it drying in the courtyard below, along with all the hotel sheets and towels.

Know what sort of court this is? If you're American and you've played this game, you probably played in on the grass in the back yard. This is a badminton court, and it's in the courtyard outside the Hue University dorm. The husband played serious badminton at one time in his life, so he liked seeing this.

Think this is a lot of bicycles? It's about two thirds of the bikes outside the dorm. The others were to my right as I took this photo. This doesn't include the motorbikes, either.

I've got a few more photos that I easily could have used here. And I will have a photo of younger son in the Joker suit later tonight. I have also started a post about how East and West mixed at a Christian monastery we visited. I will try to get that finished tomorrow while I'm waiting for the last laundry to come back so that I can do the final packing. In the meantime, though, I'm off to the university's farewell dinner. Since the laundry was late coming back, I'm relegated to wearing jeans, a silk shirt, and the jacket I had tailored at the silk shop around the corner (two colors of silk and two colors of embroidery ... it cost all of $13.00). I thought the ao dai might be a bit much especially since the beer will be refilling itself, and I would hate to trip while wearing that.

OSHA? Not Here!

2009-04-02T20:14:00.023-04:00

OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in responsible for all the warning labels and cautions we Americans are used to seeing on everything. For a total change of pace, here's a month of construction on the building next door to our hotel.
8 March 2009
The top floor is even with the fifth floor of our hotel. 9 March 2009
Zoomed out for a fuller view. 10 March 2009
It appears that they're adding a floor. They've also bricked in part of the lower floor.
11 March 2009
A morning view in the fog and an afternoon one in the clear. It looks as though they didn't do too much today.
12 March 2009
They're getting the top floor framed, and they've finished bricking in that lower floor.
13 March 2009
More framing done, and it appears they might be planning for another floor on top of this one.
16 March 2009
I missed a couple of days, but there was work done. 17 March 2009
They're closing in the ceiling/floor.
19 March 2009
Another day I missed and another foggy morning.
21 March 2009
They appear to have slowed down a bit, or perhaps they're working on the other side of the building.
22 March 2009
Where did all the supports go?
23 March 2009
24 March 2009
There's almost a brick wall there.
25 March 2009
More brick wall!
27 March 2009
It's definite. There will be another floor.
29 March 2009
Looks as if they'll be pouring some sort of supports soon.
30 March 2009
They're going to town on that next floor!
1 April 2009
For reference, this man is standing on the top of what will be the seventh floor of the building. He is wearing no safety harness of any kind. He isn't wearing a hard hat either. I've only seen one construction worker with a hardhat here, and he was using it to scoop cement. And if you'll notice how far up the rebar extends on the support columns, there may very well be an eighth floor!

Some other construction notes. If the brickwork looks shoddy, it's because it will be covered up with cement on the outside and wall material of some sort on the inside. THey re-use everything that they can here. I watched one worker take a board, hammer all the nails back through it, then put the board up against another board and hammer the same nails back through the first board to attach it to the second. And if you think you haven't seen much finished lumber, you're right. You haven't. The supports all look like branches, and the pieces of lumber I have seen are far from new. It's amazing how fast everything goes up. Would I have thought when we arrived that I'd see two stories added to the building next door? Certainly not, but I did. And by the time the next UVa professor arrives here in two or three weeks, they may have finished constructing the structure and moved on to covering the brick work. OSHA? They don't have that here yet.

Happy Birthday!

2009-04-02T03:35:00.005-04:00

Today is younger son's 19th birthday; it also happens to be the birthday of the other UVa professor teaching here right now. The hotel gave each of them an absolutely gorgeous not to mention very, very tasty birthday cake, flowers, and, at least in younger son's case, a ride to the elevator on the luggage cart while the staff sang to him. After almost a month here, you get to know the people at the front desk, the breakfast servers, and even the housekeeping staff. It's been great! Here's the plug for the hotel, from the side of the cake. That's the Truong Giang Hotel, and we'd highly recommend it to anyone coming here. Here's younger son with the cake and the flowers. As for younger son's present, he asked for something very specific, something he knew that we'd probably only buy him here. He's seen The Dark Knight an unknown number of times, and what he asked for was the suit the Joker wore. It's purple, with a long tail on the coat. The vest is a shade of green. It could only be custom-made, and that's what it will be, yes, at the silk shop around the corner in, I kid you not, raw silk of the purple and green varieties. If I told you how much or little it cost, I'd risk skewing the results of the current contest to price a three-piece cashmere suit, a cotton dress shirt, and leather shoes. I'll release the price of the Joker suit later tonight, when I announce the new winner.

New Price Is Right Results

2009-04-02T03:19:00.006-04:00

First off, here are the sons in their tailored three-piece cashmere suits, tailored cotton shirts, and custom-made leather shoes. The report on the shoes was that with the exception of the stiffness of the new leather, they felt like very worn-in shoes, naturally shaped to one's feet. Just how much did this set us back? Well, the shoes were $18.00 per pair. That's right. Custom, made-to-order leather shoes for $18.00 per pair. It's no wonder the husband ordered two pairs, one in brown and one in black. The sons also got custom-made sandals at $6.00 per pair. As for the suits and shirts, those combined to cost $119.00 for each son. So, $18.00 plus $119.00 comes to a total of $137.00. We had some guesses under and one over, but the winner is ... Cousin-in-Law Debi, come on down! Your guess of $90.00 was the closest without going over. Your prize, keeping in the vein of things one can get cheap here, is a ladies Rolex watch. That's right ... a Rolex! And not just any Rolex, but one that is so obviously fake it has its own special value. Here it is. I'm not sure which I like better: the huge 9 or the incorrect Roman numeral IIII. It just looked like a fun watch, and since Debi is a fun person, that makes it a very suitable prize for her. I'll put it in the mail when we get back to the States in early May. Congratulations!

The price of younger son's birthday suit? You know, the Joker one in purple and green raw silk? Yeah, that one was $80.00.

East Meets West

2009-04-01T05:24:00.008-04:00

What follows is a post I started in Hue, but other posts intervened, and I never got around to finishing this one. I figured I'd see what I could do now because the alternative is to start repacking for tomorrow's departure from Hanoi, and let's face it, packing sort of sucks.

There's a real mix of Eastern and Western here. Some of it is because of the focus on tourism. A restaurant will have Western items on the menu along with the specialty dishes of Hue. You see signs printed in Vietnamese, English, and French. Nowhere has the mixture of East and West been more striking, though, than the Christian monastery that we visited. There are four Christian monasteries in Vietnam, one a few kilometers outside Hue. We bicycled there with a Vietnamese friend who knows some of the monks there.

From outward appearances, a visitor to the monastery might think they were at a pagoda. There is, for example, the tower found at most pagodas. The one above is from the Christian monastery. The one below is from Thien Mu Pagoda. And this one is from Tu Dam Pagoda. All three have seven stories. We were told, but without an explanation, that seven is an important number in Buddhism. The monk who showed us around the Christian monastery cited the seven days of the week, the seven mortal sins, and the seven sacraments as reasons for the seven stories on the tower there. Still, from all outward appearances, it could be a Buddhist tower. I find this intriguing. I wonder if the Catholic church, knowing that the brothers there would be Vietnamese, designed the tower to be culturally sensitive. Or perhaps it was Vietnamese monks who designed it in the first place. Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask.

Ao Dai

2009-04-01T04:13:00.012-04:00

I don't really know where I'll wear this (the boss' Christmas party, perhaps?), but below is my ao dai. I chose purple because it's the traditional color of Hue. Some ao dais are embroidered or cut a bit differently around the neck, but I asked for the traditional design. This is custom-made to all sorts of my measurements. Both the top and the pants are silk. The cost? A mere $27.00, from the silk shop around the corner.

Incense

2009-04-01T04:13:00.007-04:00

Incense is a fact of daily life here. You can't walk in the city (except maybe in the middle of one of the bridges over the Perfume River) without smelling it or seeing it lit in a small altar or on sale in a shop. You may also see it spread out to dry. I was a bit surprised at how incense is made. The part that burns actually starts out as some sort of dough that is rolled onto a stick. There's a video of this process below. I had better get used to the smell of incense, because the sons bought a large pack of one kind that I imagine will last them for a while once they get home to start using it.

A Few More Randomosities

2009-03-31T21:23:00.008-04:00

I’ve been going through all the various scraps of paper on which I’ve written notes, on tours, from the guidebook, things I’ve been told. Here are some that I don’t think I’ve included in any of my other posts.

Virtually every tree you see is painted white at the bottom. We asked a lot of people about this, and only one was able to give us an answer. Our tour guide to the royal tombs said that the paint is a form of insect control.

Many of the bomb craters left in the fields here are now used as pools for water. Some have even become elaborate fish ponds.

An inexpensive way to get from Hue to Hanoi, one that we would try if we had the time, is the Sleeping Bus. It’s a double decker bus set up with individual beds. You leave Hue around 6:00 in the evening, and arrive in Hanoi 12 hours later. It costs $7.00. If we had more time, we would also consider getting to Siem Reap, Cambodia (Angkor Wat) by bus from Ho Chi Minh City. It takes 12 hours and costs $17.00. Instead, we're flying from Hanoi to Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City at around $350.00 each.

The most people we have seen on any one motorbike at the same time is five.

Being here is at times like being in a time warp. Music played in restaurants is typically about 10 years old or out-of-season. We went out for dessert one night and listened to Christmas carols, some in English and others in Vietnamese. There’s also an element of culture warp, as in this shot I took of the wall of the Hot Tuna Bar and Restaurant. Yes, those are hieroglyphics at the top, and yes, that is Santa Claus underneath.

It is unlucky to burn two kinds of incense together. Burning one kind signifies the present. Burning three kinds together signifies the past, present, and future. Burning an even number of kinds together is considered unlucky. Incense is considered an invitation to the dead to come back and enjoy some time with the living.

When we went to dinner at the home of the director of Hue University’s Advanced Program in Physics, younger son ate all by himself at a table to the side. No, this wasn’t the put-the-small-kids-at-another-table deal. In the form of Buddhism that this man practices, a vegetarian meal is served totally separately from a meal containing meat.

There are five “holy animals” here. The turtle symbolizes longevity. The unicorn symbolizes belief in religion or, if shown without its horn, peace. The phoenix is the graceful woman while the raven is the powerful man; this is why the Vietnamese consider themselves the children of the phoenix and the raven. Finally, the carp symbolizes the scholar that never sleeps.

Not all veggie burgers are created equal here. Younger son ordered one at one bar and got something fairly similar to what we have in the States. He and I each ordered one at a different place yesterday; younger son also ordered "potato salad." His potato salad was essentially mashed potatoes with some diced carrots added. The veggie burgers? They were the mashed potatoes/potato salad in a bun. Carbohydrate loading lives!

There is only one industry of any kind in Hue. That would be the Huda brewery. Huda ... brewed with natural ingredients ... brewed by Danish technology. It's not bad especially given the just a bit more than 50 cents a can price. The local government decided that the brewery was fine but there will be no other industrial development here. Tourism will be the focus, not industry.

Doing the Tourist Thing Again

2009-03-31T03:22:00.044-04:00

Among the scenic attractions of Hue are the tombs of the Nguyen Emperors. Seven of the 13 rulers between 1802 and 1945 were given the honor of their own mausoleum; the other six supposedly died in exile or disgrace. We visited three of the tombs on a city tour. You can approach living in a place for longer than a drop-in visit in two ways. You can take a basic tour of the city when you arrive and learn which places you might want to see more of. Or, you can wait until the end of your time and then take it. You may see some places you’ve already seen, but a guide may help you appreciate them more. You may also have questions from the visit on your own that a guide can answer. That’s what we did here. The basic tour of the city included the Imperial City and one tomb that we had already visited, but the guide added to what we had learned on our own about those places.

The first tomb we visited was that of Tu Duc, emperor between 1848 and 1883. He was the longest-serving of the Nguyen emperors but was considered a weak ruler. He had 100 concubines (according to the tour guide) and 104 wives (according to one of my guidebooks) but no children; the supposition is that a bout with smallpox left him sterile. Tu Duc’s tomb is different in that he designed it himself. He also wrote his own biography for the tomb, which brings up some elements common to all the tombs. First, each tomb complex has three gates. The emperor’s coffin enters through the middle gate, after which it is closed and never opened again. The government officials, or mandarins, use the gates on each side, with the civil mandarins using the left gate and the military ones using the right gate. See how the middle gate is sealed? It’s been that way since Tu Duc’s coffin went in. Each tomb also includes a biography of the emperor buried there. Usually, the biography is written by the emperor’s son, but since Tu Duc had no children, he wrote his own. The emperor’s biography is engraved on a large wall in a central place. Another thing found at all the tombs are statues symbolic of the emperor’s following. At Tu Duc’s tomb, there were four statues, representing a horse, an elephant, a mandarin, and a servant. Here are the animal ones. When an emperor had no sons, the tradition was for the emperor to adopt one of his nephews. Tu Duc actually adopted three of his younger brother’s sons, all of whom became emperor at one time or another. Remember Tu Duc’s 100 concubines? Well, they had their own palace, in this area. The concubines could not leave their palace after the emperor died. For the rest of their lives, they had contact only with each other and with the eunuchs who served or guarded them. The guide noted that this puts the tradition of killing concubines when the emperor died in a new light; he wondered whether that might have been more humane.

Tu Duc’s tomb is in a large (12 hectares) park, where he spent a lot of time, preferring it to the Imperial City. Included in the park is an island on which Tu Duc hunted small game. Hunting was a common pastime but because of his smallpox, Tu Duc could not go to the mountains to hunt there. The land on the right of the photo below is part of the hunting island. The other interesting thing about Tu Duc is that no one knows for sure just where his body is buried in the tomb building. Rumor has it that Tu Duc was buried with a great treasure and that those involved in his burial were executed to discourage grave-robbing.

Finally, Tu Duc’s tomb had the only blatant tourist-trap thing we’ve seen at any of the official (that is, the ticket you buy comes from the government) tourist sites we’ve visited. For a fee, you could dress up as the royal emperor and/or his wife and have your photo taken sitting on a replica throne. Because we were there on a tour and had limited time, no one pressured us to do this, which is just as well since we wouldn’t.

The second tomb we visited (and the one we had visited before) was that of Khai Dinh who, according to our tour guide, was Vietnam’s first (and, I would say last since he was the penultimate emperor) gay emperor. Khai Dinh ruled between 1916 and 1925. His tomb is built into a hillside with “more than 127” (according to the tour guide) or “130-odd” (according to the guidebook) steps leading up to it. The steps are steep, too, supposedly designed that way to keep you looking up, at the tomb, as you ascend. Khai Dinh built his tomb as a tomb; it was not designed as a place to live as Tu Duc’s was. Khai Dinh’s tomb is also very different from the other royal tombs in that he used both Vietnamese and European architectural styles. Still, it has elements common to all the royal tombs including the sealed middle door, the statuary followers and the biography tablet. Because Khai Dinh had no sons, his biography was written by the head mandarin. Khai Dinh had adopted his nephew, but because the nephew was studying in France when Khai Dinh died, he was unable to write the biography himself. Unlike Tu Duc, the location of Khai Dinh’s body is known precisely. It sits in the tomb chamber underneath a life-sized statue of him. I’d show you a photo but I follow the “no photography inside the buildings” signs.

Khai Dinh was not a popular emperor. It took him 11 years to build his tomb during which time he raised taxes 30 percent to fund the construction. It sounded as though our tour guide wasn’t too fond of Khai Dinh’s sexual orientation, making comments such as “face of king like woman” and “makeup like woman, sitting style like woman.” The mountain setting of Khai Dinh’s tomb is gives it a bit more in-your-face sort of beauty. The views from the different levels of the tomb complex are stunning. The third photo is a bit dark, but that way the giant female Buddha (Quan Am) statue on the far mountain is at least a little bit visible. The third tomb that we visited was that of Minh Mang, the second Nguyen emperor who died in 1841. His tomb, like that of Tu Duc, is in a large (15 hectares), beautiful park-like setting. Minh Mang had 33 wives and 107 concubines who bore him a total of 78 sons and 64 daughters. On any given night, he would supposedly spend an hour per concubine chosen for that night. If an emperor married a concubine, then the son of that union could become emperor, if the wife became queen. It was possible for an emperor to have multiple wives, but only one of them could be queen. On the first level of analysis, this would typically be the wife that bore the first son. If there were multiple wives with multiple sons, then a choice would have to be made as to which son should become emperor. Minh Mang was himself a second son, judged better than his older brother in terms of the knowledge needed to rule the country.

As in the other tombs, the middle door of the tomb complex has been permanently sealed. There is also a building housing a biography tablet. I didn’t photograph the tablet up close, instead concentrating on some of the decorations around its top. There were also the ceremonial statues of animals and persons who might be of assistance to Minh Mang in the afterlife. Minh Mang is buried in a tomb mound at the end of a long walk through the tomb complex. As with Tu Duc, the precise location of the body is not known; there’s no rumor of treasure here, though. Entry is not permitted to the tomb mound; the bridge that leads to it is blocked off at the end.

Finally, one of the interesting stories about Minh Mang concerns his queen, Hua (I’m totally guessing at the spelling here), who died at the age of 17. After her death, it was decreed that no one could bear the queen’s name. In fact, the Dong Ba Market that I’ve written about here was originally named the Dong Hua Market, becoming Dong Ba with the decree. The decree against naming anything Hua did not expire until the monarchy ended in 1945.

The tour also stopped at the Imperial City. Although we’d been there before, we did learn some new facts from our tour guide. I think I’ve mentioned that the Citadel and Imperial City are on the north bank of the Perfume River. The tallest structure in the Imperial City is a pavilion that is 60 meters tall. No structure on the north bank of the river can be taller than this Pagoda, similar to the University of Virginia dictum that no structure be taller than the Rotunda. Outside the walls of the Imperial City are five Holy Cannons, signifying the power of the monarchy. The four to the left of the Imperial City symbolize the four seasons, while the five to the right symbolize the five elements: earth, fire, air, water, and metal. The center entry on the gate pavilion was reserved for the emperor; mandarins used the side gates according to the same protocol seen at the tombs: civil mandarins to the left and military mandarins to the right. Women were not permitted to use the main gate to the Imperial City until the monarchy was dissolved in 1945.

I’ve mentioned “mandarins” several times so far. The mandarins constituted the civil service. A man qualified to be a mandarin by passing examinations at three levels: village, district, and royal. For a man to become a mandarin brought honor to his family, and there was a large festival whenever new mandarins were inducted. There were nine grades of mandarin, and they acted in various spheres of influence—education, defense, etc. The tour guide compared it to the American cabinet. The king and head mandarins would meet together at the beginning and middle of each lunar month. The king would sit inside Thai Hoa Palace while the mandarins (the head of each department and his assistant) would stand in the courtyard outside and listen to the pronouncements of the emperor. The acoustics in the palace are supposedly superb. The emperor could speak in his normal voice, and an intermediary at the door would listen and them repeat what the emperor had said for the mandarins standing outside. There was no discussion at this time; that came later, after the mandarins had considered what the emperor had said.

The Citadel was constructed between 1805 and 1832 and then underwent various renovations. Until 1890, all the construction or changes were done in the Vietnamese style. After 1890, the emperor started to introduce European touches. Only 10 percent of the Imperial City is still standing today. A fire in 1947, during the French occupation, destroyed several buildings. More were damaged or destroyed during the Tet Offensive in 1968. The Vietnamese will tell you (as our tour guide did) that the damage during the Tet Offensive was done by American bombs. I have been told by an American who was there during Tet that the damage to the Imperial City was done largely by the Viet Cong who occupied it. I can’t really tell you who’s right in this case.

We did walk around some areas of the Imperial City that we didn’t visit the first time there. An exhibition of photographs from old postcards was hung along this corridor. We also saw some gates we had not seen before. Finally, we got to go inside a worship area in which one could take pictures of the altars dedicated to the various emperors. There were also some interesting objects hanging from the ceiling. Finally, we got to see the Nine Dynastic Urns. These bronze urns were cast during Minh Mang’s reign, and are considered to be the epitome of Hue craftsmanship. They are ornamented with landscape scenes along with, according to one of my guidebooks, “one or two stray bullet marks.” Each urn is dedicated to a different emperor.

The final stop on our tour was Thien Mu Pagoda. “Thien” means “heavenly” or “celestial,” and “Mu” means “lady,” so this is the Pagoda of the Heavenly Lady. It stands, a bit up the Perfume River from Hue, on the site of an ancient temple. There are differing stories as to the events of the pagoda’s founding, but that event, 1601, makes it the oldest pagoda in the Hue area. In the 1930s and 1940s, Thien Mu was a center of Buddhist opposition to colonialism. It gained world-wide fame, however, in 1963 when one of its monks, Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire in Saigon to protest the Diem regime. On display today at Thien Mu is the powder-blue Austin in which the monk drove to Saigon. Even today, Thien Mu is a sore spot for the government, since it continues to protest against any form of repression.

We only had about 15 minutes at Thien Mu, but I did manage to get some photos of a tower at the front, as well as of the river view from the pagoda grounds. Finally, there were these figures on walls all around the pagoda grounds, and I have no idea what they were (the guide didn’t take us on this part of the tour, so I couldn’t ask him), but they reminded me of Disney pirates probably, said the husband, because of the real hair used in their beards. We returned to Hue from Thien Mu by dragon boat, which gave us a nice view of what was along the banks of the river. It made for a long, hot day, but it was a very nice way to see and learn a bit more of what I’ve come to think of as home for a while. It will be nice to get back to the real home in a bit more than a month, but it will also be a little bittersweet leaving Hue. I would definitely come back, and I sincerely hope I get the chance to do so.

Shoes, Cyclos, and Coffee by the River

2009-03-30T08:28:00.012-04:00

I’ve already posted about the big Hue University festivities on Saturday, but that wasn’t all the excitement for the day. Our day started with a visit to a very upscale coffee house on the river, as the guests of two physics instructors at Hue University. It was a very beautiful setting. We sat right beside the river with entertainment provided by some local kids in boats. I have one photo of the kids that is pretty adorable, but given that two of the young boys weren't wearing pants under their t-shirts, I'm afraid to post it. Yes, I view it as art; my intention was to take a nice human interest shot of the kids. It honestly didn't hit me until I downloaded the photos just how exposed the two boys were. No, I won't e-mail it to anyone either, because that could get me into bigger trouble.

The coffee house doubles as event space, and many of the events are weddings. This symbol on one of the doors supposedly means “happiness.” I didn’t get a photo of it, but the stage was decorated for a wedding to be held later in the day. There were two dates noted on the state: 28-03-09 and 03-03-[some Vietnamese words]. The first date is obviously according to the Gregorian calendar. The other indicates that March 28, 2009, was the third day of the third lunar month in the year of the buffalo. The mixing of Eastern and Western cultures is fascinating. I have seen two brides during our visit: One was in a Western bridal gown, and the other was in traditional Vietnamese attire. I know that in Japan they sometimes have two ceremonies, one for each culture; it may be the same here.

We also took a break in the middle of the day to shop for shoes to go with the suits the sons planned to order. Both sons take after their parents and have incredibly wide feet (can you say EEEE?), so getting dress shoes that are comfortable for them to wear has been a real problem. They figured that if they were going to get suits, they might as well have suitable shoes to wear with them. Someone at the university had given the husband the address of a shoemaker. Since it was across the river and a ways into the Citadel area, we decided to speed things up by taking our first cyclo ride. You’ve seen cyclos in some of my photos here. The driver pedals a bicycle at the back, and you sit in a comfy seat up front. Usually, we’d rather walk for the exercise, but we wanted to take these at least once for the experience. Here’s the husband negotiating the fare with four drivers. The fare negotiated, off we went! Here are the husband and older son in their cyclos. I was only able to get a photo of younger son when we got to the address the husband had been given and discovered there was no shoemaker there. One of the cyclo drivers got on his cell phone, and a few twists and turns (including a U-turn in the middle of traffic), we got to the shoemaker. There was then some additional negotiation about the added fare for the extra couple of blocks and the cell phone call. And did we want them to wait to take us back to the hotel? They had trouble taking no for an answer and ended up hovering down the street the whole time we were in the shoemaker’s store. We ended up thwarting them by leaving the store, walking away from them, then as they started to follow us, we turned and went back to the shoemaker because the husband, realizing just how cheap the shoes were, decided he wanted a second pair in a different color of leather.

As for the shoemaker, they start by tracing the foot and measuring around it at several points with a tape measure. Then you look at all the shoes that they have on display and choose what color leather you want, what style toe you want, do you want tie shoes or slip-ons, how high you want the heel to be, and just about everything else you can ask for in a shoe. I know that I said the sons would be ordering shoes and all the photos are of the husband, but when he learned how cheap the sons’ shoes would be, he had to get into the act, too. The sons also decided to order sandals to go with the shoes. How cheap was everything? If I tell you, I’ll have to cancel my latest blog contest, so I won’t. Come back on Thursday morning (US time), and I’ll tell you when I announce the contest winner.

A Short Musing on Photography

2009-03-30T08:17:00.003-04:00

I used to be a much better photographer than I am now, back in the film days when I had taken a class or two and took lots of photos and really thought about many of the shots I took. Photography is one of those interests that got shelved when the family thing intervened followed by my discovery of fiber arts. I wish I'd gotten back to it a year ago when the idea of this trip first surfaced. I also wish I’d gotten more comfortable with the digital SLR I'm using, a Canon xTi I bought used off Craigslist, in the fall. We gave younger son the same camera for his high school graduation two years ago, and he’s been very patient answering my questions on this trip and detecting just when the tone of panic in my voice really means business. The very nice thing about digital photography, though, is the ability to shoot a bunch of photos of the same scene, changing various settings and trying to get it right. The screen on the back of the camera isn’t great, but you can at least tell if something really didn’t work. Many days I’ve shot several hundred photos. Today, on a tour of three tombs, the Imperial City, and a pagoda, I shot 197 photos on the Canon. It would have been more but we were at one of the tombs for the second time and the light wasn’t as good on this visit as it had been on the first. Going through the photos after I downloaded them to my netbook, there was one photo that made me stop in my tracks. I really think that it’s the best photo I’ve shot on this trip. Younger son thought it was pretty darn good himself, which I consider high praise. You can take it or leave it, but I just felt like sharing it. I've taken some other photos on this trip that aren't bad, but this one basically blew me away. All that said, here it is.

Green Liquid in a Bottle (And One Last Contest)

2009-03-29T19:33:00.003-04:00

Just what was up with that green liquid in a bottle on the curb? Remember how many motorbikes I said there were around here. Well, gas stations are few and far between in Hue proper, but then motorbikes don't take too much gas. If there's a bottle with green (or, sometimes, clear) liquid sitting on the curb, it means that the store or kiosk that it's sitting in front of sells gas by the bottle for motorbikes. Sometimes, there's a funnel sitting on top of the bottle.

There was one guess as to what the liquid was, interestingly enough from the wife of someone who rides a Vespa back home. She didn't get it right, but she's getting a prize for trying.

And here's one last chance to win something. The sons have ordered tailored, three-piece, cashmere suits, tailored cotton shirts, and custom-made leather shoes. What was the total cost for ONE set, that is, one of the suits, one of the shirts, and one pair of shoes? Get your answers in as before, to my e-mail address of jean.lightner.norum (at sign) gmail (dot) com, by Thursday night at 9:00 Hue time or 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Prize will depend on if it's going to a man or a woman, young person or older. If you've already won one of these little contests, you're still eligible on this one, so enter away!

We Have a Winner!

2009-03-29T10:04:00.003-04:00

Nancy in Nashville, come on down! You're the winner in The Price Is Right contest. Nancy guessed $15.99, which was the closest guess without going over. There was another guess that was closer to the exact amount, but it was over. So, how much did four loose silk ties, one silk tie in a fancy box with accessories, three silk scarves, one pashmina shawl, one man's scarf, and a twirled silk scarf cost me at the silk shop around the corner? All together, they came to a total of $41.00. The loose ties were $2.50 each; the tie with accessories was $5.00. Each plain silk scarf was $4.00, as was the man's scarf. The pashmina and the twirled scarf were $5.00 each. The prize? Since Nancy told me that she'd always looked at pashmina and figured she couldn't afford it, there will be one coming her way from Hue, via Charlottesville when I get home. And I think I'll give a consolation prize to the person who guessed $50.00 because that wasn't that far off. I don't know what that will be yet, but I'll think of something.

Myo Sim on the Road, Addendum

2009-03-29T06:05:00.004-04:00

No, this is not another video of older son doing Am Hak. It’s a video I shot at the celebration described in the Celebrate! Celebrate! post. As we were watching the Vietnamese students doing this activity, younger son suggested that it might make for an interesting exercise in a Myo Sim class. Who knows? If Master Morton finds this blog, we may just find ourselves trying this some Sunday morning. I will admit that I shot the first part of this video by holding the camera above my head, so bear with those parts where the action gets blocked a bit. And let me know if anyone else out there remembers this from grade school phys ed, because I actually remember doing this many, many years ago. It's actually not that hard as long as the people handling the sticks are keeping a consistent rhythm.

Celebrate! Celebrate!

2009-03-29T05:08:00.025-04:00

And you could even add “and dance to the music” because there’s definitely music playing in the background. This is a majorly big weekend in Hue and at Hue University. March 26 was the 34th anniversary of the “liberation” of Hue, that is, when the Americans evacuated in 1975. This weekend also marks the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Student Union at Hue University. The students are celebrating with an enthusiasm, fervor, and school spirit not commonly seen at the university level in the States. Sure, you see school spirit at a sporting event, but you don’t see all the students there, nor are they basically working to put on the event. This is like an elementary school fun fair, but all the booths have been put together by university students. Many students are wearing shirts that identify them by their major program; those in the advanced program in physics are wearing the orange t-shirts that we brought with us.Those in the regular (that is, not the advanced) program in physics are training to be physics teachers, and I absolutely loved their shirts. You may not be able to see it in this photo, but the atom on the front of the shirt has an apple as the nucleus—an apple for a teacher, even here in Vietnam. And there’s no mistaking the statement on the sleeve. There were some other interesting shirts as well. Did it hit you, as it hit me, that the slogans on the shirts are, for the most part, printed in English? I asked the husband about this, and he said that he got the impression in his meeting with the vice rector of the university that all students at Hue University are required to study English. In the advanced program in physics, much of the first year of study is English instruction, so that when the professors come from the US to teach the physics classes, the students have some degree of English proficiency. It is probably similar here to what we heard from one of the husband’s Norwegian cousins when we last visited there 19 years ago. Norway is a small player on the world stage, so people there can’t expect people in other countries to learn Norwegian. If Norway wants to deal with other countries, they need a common, global language, and English is the closest thing to that at least for now. No, English is not the most widespread language in terms of native speakers, but as a second language, it may get you the farthest.

Students have been quite inventive in the decoration of their booths Yes, that is a giant AK-47. I couldn’t find out exactly what student group had put it up, but the booth had something to do with the anniversary of the liberation of Hue.

The students were also very creative in the design arena, crafting a full-sized stage out of hundreds of desks linked together. When we first arrived, just as the celebration was starting at 9:00, we checked on the physics students first. Their booth featured a dart game in which you tried to predict the sum of the three squares that your darts hit. And here’s the husband trying to explain what a University of Virginia “Cavalier” is to one of his Vietnamese students after being asked about the crossed swords in the UVa logo. Walking around the celebration, we were something of a novelty. It’s probably safe to say that most students were not expecting to see an American family enjoying the celebration. We were the first patrons of the psychology majors’ coffee shop, where we enjoyed coffee with sweet milk and one of the citrus fruits I’ve enjoyed here but never seen in the States. We got a very large round of applause when we departed. We got invited into most of the booths we passed, with some students being more creative than others in ensuring our attendance. Two young ladies just sort of grabbed the husband at one point. I don’t know what this group is majoring in, but they were selling pieces of bamboo stuffed with sticky rice. They got a big laugh when they realized that we didn’t know that the bamboo had to be whacked against a tree to “open” it so that the rice could be picked out. We also bought some dragonflies being sold by one of the physics groups. They illustrate to concepts of center of mass and center of gravity by balancing, in this case on one of younger son’s toes. Finally, the husband played another dart game, winning me two packages of these
Prawn Crackers, which are 3 percent shrimp and actually very tasty. It turns out that older son had tried these before in the States, though I’ve certainly never seen them there.

It all made for a very interesting day. The excitement and school spirit of these students was unlike anything I’ve ever seen from an American college student. I’ve read that in the States, the bachelor’s degree is becoming what a high school diploma used to be in terms of the basic job entry requirement. Although there are still some students in the States who are the first in their family to attend or graduate from college, college is not nearly the big deal that it is here. I don’t know the percentage of college-aged people who are actually in college here, or in the States for that matter, but I imagine that it’s much higher at home than it is here. That may explain some of it, but it probably doesn’t explain all of it. I thought for a while about whether the students here might have a non-worldliness or innocence that the students at home have lost, but I don’t really know if that explains it. Of course, the fact that we get HBO, CNN, ESPN, Discovery, and the National Geographic channel on the TV we have in our hotel room in no way implies that the students get them or watch them. I just know that it was incredibly refreshing to see the students’ excitement.

At the same time, it felt very strange to be so much the center of attention. The husband said that he wondered if that’s what celebrities felt like, with everyone competing for their attention. Older son pointed out that that was why celebrities had entourages and bodyguards, to put up a wall between them and the people who wanted their attention. While it certainly felt funny to have students actually applaud us (literally, as in many hands clapping) when we thanked them and moved on (this happened at several places, not just the psychology coffee shop), it also made me happy that our presence could cause that. I know that sounds incredibly juvenile and hokey to say, but it’s true. It was just kind of nice that our presence had that effect.

A Tale of Two Pagodas

2009-03-27T07:26:00.030-04:00

We’ve visited two pagodas so far in Hue, and the two are as different as night and day. In the old SAT verbal analogy game, the comparison would be something like Bao Quoc Pagoda is to Tu Dam Pagoda as Grace Episcopal Church in Keswick (or any other small, chapel-like church) is to Notre Dame or Cologne cathedral, though even that fails to capture the true difference. I’ll walk you through the two, and maybe after the photos, any explanation I can offer will make a bit more sense. If the lighting looks a bit different in some of the photos from Bao Quoc, it’s because they may have been taken on any one of the three visits I’ve made there, which sort of tells you which pagoda I prefer.

Both pagodas are in the same neighborhood, on side streets off the street Dien Bien Phu. Entry to Bao Quoc is up a long stairway into a bare courtyard. Here’s a close-up of the ornate scrollwork at the top of the building. If you can’t see the detail of the symbol at the top, here it is on something else in a shot I took in one of the courtyards to the side of the main building. Yes, it’s a swastika or variation thereof. You may have heard that Hitler had to get it from somewhere. Since 1940, Bao Quoc has been a school for training Buddhist monks, and it really does seem more like a school than a “church.” There is a room with a small altar, though the husband commented that the many-armed figure seemed more closely connected with Hinduism than with Buddhism. And though we saw several signs of human habitation, on the first visit we didn’t see anyone else there. On subsequent visits we saw monks (some were young monks—are they called “novices”?) walking around or sitting at a table talking. On the first visit, we only saw shoes in front of doorways, and a cat with one set of shoes We saw robes hanging to air or to dry. Apart from people, I saw some designs I want to remember in terms of my quilting. Off the main courtyard there are some smaller places with statues and pools of water. There’s also what appears to be a tomb area. There are lots of trees and many, many peaceful places to sit. I felt a peace or serenity at Bao Quoc that I don’t often feel, and it was very, very nice.

Tu Dam pagoda is further up Dien Bien Phu from Bao Quoc, and you notice right upon entering the grounds that it’s a different sort of pagoda. From this view of this large tower, which is under some sort of renovation, there is a gift shop at your back. Because I actually have what I call my “Vatican church-key,” a bottle-opener key ring I purchased from a nun at a gift shop on the roof of St. Peter’s in Rome, I am hardly one to pass judgment on a gift shop at a house of worship. I’ll just note that it was there (and that I have on my wrist as I type a bracelet that I purchased there at the end of our visit).

Here are the steps up into what looks to be the main worship area. We entered through the side, accompanied by a woman who accosted us in the courtyard where the first tower was and led us to believe she was some sort of guide. She had us remove our shoes and then led us through a side door into the huge main room. She offered us incense to light and add to a small altar. The fact that she then asked for $1 US from each of us and put this in her pocket rather than in some collection jar let us know that she was your basic local huckster rather than some sort of official pagoda guide. Along one wall of the room were several very ornate altars. On the side of the room opposite the altars there was a bell in an alcove to one side and a drum in an alcove to the other, an arrangement we have seen elsewhere including on the roof galleries of the Ngo Mon Gate into the Imperial City. There are some pleasant areas outside the huge main building, and they are expanding the buildings on the pagoda grounds. According to the guidebook, Tu Dam Pagoda’s chief importance is as a center for supporting Buddhism. Maybe the glitz helps in that regard, but it certainly didn’t have the spiritual feel for me that Bao Quoc Pagoda did. If I had to choose between the two in terms of a spiritual “home” or place just to sit and ponder, Bao Quoc would win hands down.

This weekend (March 28-29) is a big celebration at Hue University. Hue was liberated from the Americans on March 26, 1975. In addition, this week marks the anniversary of the founding of some sort of student union, perhaps even the Communist Party one. Classes are cancelled on Saturday, meaning the husband gets a three-day weekend. We may attend some of the celebration festivities on Saturday, though we may also go across the river to a shoe-maker since the sons are interested in getting tailored suits if they can also get some tailored shows or sandals to go with the suits. Sunday we may bicycle to some tombs south of the city with a shopkeeper we have become friends with.

We have just a bit more than a week left here in Hue, and it will be hard to leave. Our life here has a very nice routine. While it would get old eventually (hotels are like that), it has only just started to feel a bit “old.” Hue is a very nice small city. Although there are times I would like to have a t-shirt emblazoned with “No, I do not wish to purchase your goods or services” in Vietnamese, I do like it here a lot. It has been a luxury to have had a month in which to get the feel of Hue, to see things somewhat at leisure. We will not have this luxury in the rest of our trip, but I think the relaxed pace we have had here has left us rested and ready for the next, faster parts of the trip.

The Price Is Right

2009-03-26T04:34:00.006-04:00

Younger son spent all day yesterday in bed with a gastrointestinal bug (apparently not food-related, so no antibiotics were needed), so today has been a quiet day. I'm trying to finish up my shopping for self and for others. Since no one even gave me a quip in response to the contest about the bottle of green liquid sitting beside the road (let me know if you want to know what it is), here's my own special "The Price Is Right" contest. Pictured below are the things I bought in one stop at the silk store around the corner this morning when I was there to order my ao dai. In the photo are four loose silk ties; one silk tie in matching box and with matching pocket kerchief and tie accessories; four women's silk scarves, one that has been twisted for a very funky effect; one pashmina shawl (the stripes); and one men's scarf (tan). The ties and men's scarf were chosen by the sons for themselves; the pashmina and twisted scarf are probably going to be for yours truly, and the other women's scarves are probable gifts for female friends.

The contest is classic "The Price Is Right." What did I pay for this, in US dollars? The closest without going over wins a prize, and it won't be snake wine unless you ask for it. Since I don't want people basing their answers on what other people guess, you have to e-mail me your guess at jean.lightner.norum (at sign) gmail (dot) com . (I'm told that writing the address that way makes it harder for a spammer to pull the e-mail address out of the blog post and use it for nefarious purposes.) One try per person (not per e-mail address, since as the owner of five different e-mail addresses I know all too well about stuffing e-mail ballot boxes). I am picking my ao dai up on Sunday afternoon (yes, I will post some photos; maybe I'll even ask for guesses as to how much that is setting me back), so let's make Sunday the end of the contest. I'll take any guesses sent before 9:00 p.m. Sunday, my time, which is 10:00 a.m. EDT in the States. This means that my Myo Sim friends can get guesses in at the last minute and still make it to class (though not workout) on Sunday.

A Chicken Is Not a Chicken ...

2009-03-25T19:26:00.002-04:00

... when it's really a phoenix. Remember the large statues at the back of the Imperial City in "Holy Hell! It's an Elephant"? The husband heard from a Vietnamese colleague back in the States that what I thought was a chicken was actually a phoenix. This makes sense because we were told that the Vietnamese people are the children of the phoenix and the raven. I've corrected the original post, but wanted to make a separate correction here.

Better Than a Laser Light Show

2009-03-24T21:16:00.009-04:00

It's Wednesday morning here, meaning we've been away for almost three weeks, and what an amazing three weeks they've been. I thought that the close encounter of the elephant kind on Monday might be the highlight of the trip, but then yesterday happened and surpassed it. Here's the story. While we were at the Citadel and Imperial City on Monday, we saw a poster for some sort of ceremonial parade to be held at the base of the flag tower last night. It was for a religious (Buddhist, I think) ceremony that has something to do with agriculture. We decided that it was worth a look so, with the other UVa prof teaching here along for the walk, we headed over there about an hour before everything was supposed to start. While we were getting ready to leave the hotel, I saw a bit of sheet lightning, and younger son said that weather.com (which he had checked to see the temperature before our walk that morning--92 degrees with a heat index of 104), had mentioned the possibility of thunderstorms. When we were preparing for this trip, a Vietnamese colleague advised the husband that we should not wander out without rain ponchos since storms can come up quickly here. Having scrimped too often on $5.00 ponchos from K-Mart that tear the first time you put them on, I splurged on $34.00 (each) ponchos. They may turn out to be the best purchase made specifically for this trip.

If you've checked out younger son's photo blog, then you know that there is a bridge here that is lit with colored lights on certain nights of the week. Last night was one of those nights, making it somewhat fun to walk across with the lights periodically changing color. As we were nearing the Citadel, the lightning was progressing from sheet lightning to the traditional bolt variety, and what amazing bolts they were. I dislike having expensive camera equipment exposed when it could start to rain at any moment, but it doesn't bother younger son who managed to get this shot. Younger son said he shot about a hundred photos to get one that actually showed a lightning bolt, demonstrating why digital photography can be oh so much better than film.

The photo above was actually taken outside the walls of the Citadel, and by the time we got inside the walls and were on our way to the plaza at the base of the flag tower, the rain started. By the time we were over to the side where the crowds were, the rain had picked up a bit. We didn't really notice, though, instead uttering the newly immortal line, "Holy Hell! It's an elephant!" because there was the second, further-away elephant from Monday, dressed to the nines in ceremonial regalia. We ended up standing close enough to the elephant that I was able to look straight into its eyes and could have reached out to touch it had I been so inclined. This image by younger son somewhat shows how close we were. He wasn't zooming in much at all to get this short. It goes without saying (but one always then says it when using this expression) that this was a totally awesome experience. Then the rain started coming down harder, and people took various measures to get out of it. We stood under a tree (I was with three physicists who assured me that with the flagpole and all the tall light poles around us, lightning would go for one of those rather than a comparatively shorter tree). Some folk stood under the eaves of a gift kiosk. Others, well, others took advantage of what they could to keep their cigarettes going in the rain. At one point, one of the elephant attendants to the side (both of whom ended up smoking beneath the elephant's drapes) handed a cigarette up to the person atop the elephant.

After a few more minutes the lightning intensified to the point that all the people dressed for the parade as well as many of the spectators retreated inside to the cover of the gate to the Imperial City. The elephant stayed put. We debated what to do and decided that it might not be a good idea to be so very close to a creature that could conceivably go berserk should lightning strike closer than it was, so we retreated across the plaza to huddle under the eaves of a kiosk there with some Vietnamese students. The sons stayed behind (how could I argue with younger son's logic, "But Mom, how could you beat 'killed in Vietnam by lightning-crazed, rampaging elephant' as an obituary?'"), and younger son managed to get these two shots of the elephant in the rain. While the sons watched the elephant from closer up (they did keep their distance as the photos show), we were watching the most incredible lightning show you can imagine. Both the husband and I grew up in prairie conditions, Saskatchewan for him and Montana for me, and there's something about the way lightning strikes in a flat environment that makes it so much more impressive than the lightning we have in hilly Central Virginia. One of the bolts actually seemed to bounce, striking and illuminating everything and then, a second later, striking back upward. We were also counting the time lag between the lightning and the thunder to see just how close each bolt was. We had a few that were, let's just say, definitely within one mile and probably closer than I would want to think about.

Eventually, the sons rejoined us and we jointly decided that the rain could go on forever, and as dry as our upper bodies were under the ponchos, our feet and lower legs were not going to get any wetter walking in the rain as opposed to huddling under kiosk eaves, so we headed for the hotel. The other UVa prof had come without a rain poncho, so older son gave up his since he was already pretty wet from having stayed out in the rain while younger son took the elephant photos. Walking back in the sheeting rain was an adventure in itself. Because Hue is a flat city, there were lots of low-lying places like intersections that had started to flood. At times we were walking through four to six inches of water. At one point the physicists were muttering excitedly about something they refused to share with me. They told me later that they had been discussing the fact that the last strike had been so close that the ambient electric field caused by the strike was large enough to trigger the fluorescent lights in the kiosk we were passing. They figured that I would be better off not knowing this until later, and they were probably right. When it came time to cross the river, we had our choice of two bridges. The physicists advised that we take the one we had crossed over on, because the arches would serve as lightning rods, while we would be walking on a concrete sidewalk path a bit away from the main bridge. On the other bridge, we would have been the tallest objects on the bridge.

By the time we got across the bridge, the rain was letting up, and by the time we got back to the hotel, it had basically stopped. I must admit that at that moment, I really missed the States-side option of phoning out for pizza to eat while drinking the beer in the mini-bar. Instead, we all changed into dry clothes and shoes, and went around the corner to the Why Not bar for dinner and a recap of the night's adventure. ESPN was on the TV, so we also enjoyed a spot of football (of the British variety). It was a nice way to end the evening.

If it had been a cold rain, it would have made for a totally miserable night. As it was, we found ourselves loudly laughing our way through more than one deep spot, because, well, why not laugh about it as it was happening rather than later. At one point, older son shouted out, "This is the most awesome vacation ever!" before noting almost apologetically that he did realize that the husband's vacation part of the trip has yet to start. I have to agree that between the elephant encounters and the light(ning) show, it has been a pretty darn awesome trip, and if it gets any more amazing, I may not be able to stand it.

"Holy Hell! It's an Elephant!"

2009-03-24T04:09:00.052-04:00

The husband has Mondays off, so we decided to visit the biggest tourist attraction in Hue, the Citadel and the Imperial City. One of the advantages of actually living in a place rather than visiting is not having to rush out and do everything in a very short period of time. On the way to the Citadel, we stopped at the Vietnam Airlines office and started to work out our exit from Hue and the time in transition between here and Europe. Here’s what that looks like so far. The husband gives his final exam on the morning of Saturday, April 4. Since it will be multiple choice and there are fewer than 25 students in the class, he and his teaching assistant can get the exams graded and the grades assigned early in the afternoon. We have a flight to Hanoi booked, leaving Hue at 7:00 something in the evening. The next morning, we hope to leave Hanoi for a three-day, two-night sail through Halong Bay, to include some ocean kayaking around Cat Ba island. (Cat Ba Island is one of the few remaining homes of the golden-headed langur monkey; it is believed there are only about 60 left.) We’ll get back from that on Tuesday evening and have Wednesday to spend in Hanoi. The sons have requested that the main activity being visiting Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum to see his embalmed body. Then it will be off to Siem Reap, Cambodia, to visit Angkor Wat. We managed score two rooms at the Golden Banana Bed & Breakfast that will set us back a whopping $53 per night (that’s per night for two rooms, not for each room separately). After three full days at Angkor, we’ll fly back to Ho Chi Minh City the day before our April 14 flight to Europe. Speaking of Europe, we’ve managed to score tickets to what might be the musical adventure of a lifetime, a concert by the Mothers of Invention (minus Frank Zappa, obviously) and the Trondheim, Norway symphony orchestra.

Future aside and heading back to Hue in the present, the Citadel and Imperial City are on the northern side of the Perfume River, while the university and our hotel are on the southern side. The distinction is that back in the days of the Emperor, the north side was reserved as the Imperial side, while the colonial expansion was reserved for the southern side. Even today, the southern side of the river seems a bit more European than does the northern side. Walking across the bridge can be an adventure in itself. Here, for example, is a bug that older son spotted. Its tongue is truly a wonder. Here’s a man changing a light bulb or otherwise fixing a light on one side of the bridge in the morning, and on the other side in the afternoon. Finally, here are two of the touristy dragon boats, shot from the rear so they look more like simple houseboats, heading upriver. It’s so hazy some days or at some times of days that you can’t really see the mountains in the distance, but they were quite visible that morning. The Imperial City is actually only a small part of the larger Citadel. The rest is residential with a few museums and shops thrown in. There’s a moat around the Citadel’s walls, which makes for some very nice reflections. One of the most visible landmarks of Hue is the flag tower, or Cot Co (also known as Ky Dai, “the King’s Knight”) on the southern edge. This was first put up in 1807, and is where the Viet Cong flag flew during the 1968 Tet Offensive. There are stairs leading up to the base of the tower itself, but they were blocked off. Here’s the flag tower from outside the Citadel walls, and from inside. Inside the Citadel but outside the Imperial City, there’s a display of cannon and another interestingly translated sign. As we were nearing the gate at which we would pay admission to enter the Imperial City, one of the sons looked up and realized that there was a very amazing ring around the sun. With the lens I had on my camera, I wasn’t able to get a shot of the whole ring, but older son got some pretty incredible shots that I’ll try to snag and post separately.

Ngo Mon, the main gate into the Imperial City, is basically a large building several stories high. On the top is a pavilion called the Five Phoenix Watchtower, so named because its nine roofs supposedly resemble five birds in flight when viewed from the air. Obviously, I’ll have to take their word for that.

The first building in the Imperial City, and actually the only fully restored one, is Thai Hoa Palace. The palace was constructed in 1805 and renovated in 1833. No photography is allowed inside, a rule we followed unlike many of the other tourists in there at the same time. The throne room has eighty ironwood pillars, decorated with swirling dragons and clouds. Each column was removed, repaired, and then replaced in a major restoration effort that started in 1991. The palace has its own semi-moat in front, that is populated by the largest goldfish I have ever seen. The fact that tourists can purchase a bag of food with which to feed them contributes to their size and the frenzy with which they can feed. The back of the palace opens onto a large courtyard. Golden dragons are a popular theme here. The detail in the last shot is from one of the columns shown in the photo of the back of the palace. To one side of the courtyard is a display, three parts of which are shown below. A couple of people with quilts I’ve made will know why these appealed to me. Speaking of my quilts, there were more than a few things I photographed for possible use as quilt-inspiration. There were also flowers throughout the Imperial City. There was also a lizard. There was a small gift shop behind the palace. We refreshed with some ice cream, but I didn’t see any souvenirs I couldn’t get elsewhere. There was also a small art gallery that had some interesting work. In the garden behind the gift shop and art gallery there was another small altar. The library of the Imperial City is being restored now. Some of the Imperial City grounds are basically garden now. My first thought was what were these figures—a dragon and a chicken—doing there. It made a bit more sense later, when I learned that what I thought was a chicken was actually a phoenix. I still don't know why the area in this next shot was in the Imperial City, but Dad, this one's for you. On my college summer abroad, I happened across a tennis court on the grounds of the Tower of London. Seeing this one here gave me much the same feeling of “Huh?!?” that I had then.

Here’s a view looking back at the palace from almost to the far side of the Imperial City. The garden shots were taken on what is the left side of this view; the tennis court is on the right side of this view. The Imperial City took its share of damage in the Tet Offensive. I’m not sure if that’s how this building in one of the gardens got into its current state. Nor am I sure if that’s how this building got into the state it’s in today. Perhaps this appealed to me so much because I’ve been re-reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy on this trip; it seems very much a place in which a hobbit might live. And right outside is the first thorn tree that I remember seeing, as well as a tree related to the one I showed earlier that had an electrical outlet on it. We saw the thorn tree and hobbit home as we were trying to find a side exit out of the Imperial City. We never did find one; we ended up going all the way back to Ngo Mon. But as we turned one corner, I was lagging a bit behind the men and, with my one good ear, heard older son exclaim, “Holy hell! It’s an elephant.” I looked up, a bit confused, and said, “What?” followed by my own holy variation as I saw just how close we were to, yes, an elephant. It did have a chain around one leg, but if it had wanted to break the chain, it probably could have very easily. There was also another elephant, though it was a bit further away. And so we have the title of this post as well as one of the moments we will all carry with us for the rest of our lives. We were hotter than I think we’d been at that moment (it turns out that the day of this walk was the highest temperature in Hue so far this year, a whopping 94 degrees F), and perhaps thirstier, but our brief pachyderm interaction got us revitalized for the rest of the walk. It’s also given us a catch-phrase to utter when nothing else will do. “Holy hell! It’s an elephant!”

Contest Results and A New Contest

2009-03-24T03:52:00.005-04:00

I must admit that it got won faster than I thought it would, but I still thoroughly enjoyed reading some of the amazingly creative incorrect answers that came to my e-mail.. Yes, the picture was of a wooden bottle opener. We got it on our visit to Lac Thien. Here’s what one of the guidebooks (since I tore out the Central Vietnam pages and only brought those, I can’t tell you which guidebook) has to say about Lac Thien. “Probably Hue’s friendliest and most interesting restaurant, located on the citadel side. Lac Thien is run by a deaf-mute family who communicate by sign language. The food is excellent, taking in the Hue staples, and prices remain reasonable, despite its fame. Enquire about their wooden bottle openers, and you will be given one and asked to send them photos from around the world holding it to the camera.”

In actuality, it appeared that only the father of the family was deaf-mute. He took our orders. We pointed to a menu item we wanted, he would nod, we would point to the next item, he would nod again, and so on. He never wrote anything down, but each of us got precisely what we had ordered. The meal also set an informal record for cheapness. Four people had four entrees (one each), three iced coffees, two Coke Lights (Diet Coke), three fruit shakes, and one 1.5 liter bottle of water. The bill came to a whopping 121,000 Vietnamese dong, which translates into a bit less than $7.00. The food was quite adequate in terms of both amount and tastiness.

This restaurant, like some others, somewhat caters to foreigners and lets customers leave their marks on the walls and ceilings. We were, for example, preceded by this bunch. We were also able to find some philosophical musings. Finally, younger son left his mark on one of the balcony walls. We’re already thinking of places we can take the bottle opener for a photo … Monticello, the Rotunda, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 2009 Myo Sim black belt test party, etc.

Finally, the husband and sons helped me decide just what Hue prize might be appropriate for our winner. Since he spotted a bottle opener pretty darn fast, we figure he has some experience with beverages that might use one. We also know that he occasionally complains of back trouble. Those two facts can only equal the prize being a small bottle of snake wine, which is said to help ease back pain, especially if one eats the snake after drinking the wine. I have added snake wine to the list for our next foray into the depths of Dong Ba Market.

The first contest being so much fun, I decided on this morning’s walk to have another. Since I already explained the masks women wear when biking (motor or otherwise), I can’t ask about those, but I don’t think I’ve explained what’s shown in the photo below. I may even give two prizes this time, one for a correct answer and one for the best answer in the tradition of The Washington Post’s Style Invitational humor contest. The rules are the same as before. Leave a comment here, or send the answer(s) to any of my e-mail addresses. Here's the photo.

First (and Possibly Only) Sail A-Hue Contest

2009-03-23T09:48:00.003-04:00

We had dinner at the home of the director of Hue University's Advanced Program in Physics (the program in which the husband is teaching) tonight, which doesn't really give me time to start and finish the planned post about what we did today (tentative title is "Holy Hell! That's an Elephant!"), so to kill time I thought I'd run a contest. First prize is something of my choosing (to be chosen after I know who wins, because what if I offered a female-type prize and a male won) from Hue. Winner is the first person to leave a comment or e-mail me (at any of my various e-mail addresses) correctly identifying the object shown below. It was given to the husband and me at lunch today. Each son also received one. We have been asked to take them with us and send back photos of our using them in different locales. So what do you think we'll be doing with them in the photos? If all the responses come in the form of comments here, I'll use the one that comes in first. If I get the correct answer in both comments here and separate e-mails, I'll use the date and time stamp on the e-mail or comment to determine the winner. Or, if more than one person gets it right, maybe I'll give more than one prize. After all, it's my contest, so I get to set the rules. And now let me go at least get the hellephant post started.

Randomosities Postscript

2009-03-22T08:50:00.002-04:00

I think I commented in Randomosities that women here are expected not to smoke or drink. We just returned from a banquet held to mark the end of an education conference held here today. The participants were not all physicists but they were all university teachers or administrators. As you might expect, there weren't many women there, but of the few that were there, I was the only one drinking. I also wore makeup though for me that means a bit of under-eye cream to mask the circles (which aren't as prominent since I'm getting close to eight hours of sleep a night), a bit of mascara, and some pretty natural-colored lip gloss. Still, highlighted hair, painted face ... if I'd only had some nail polish, I could have hit all the characteristics of a prostitute with the exception of the smoking bit. I pointed this out to the husband, and he indicated that he would take me as a slut (his word) any day of the week.

If You Can't Stand the Heat ...

2009-03-22T04:06:00.012-04:00

…get into the kitchen! It feels as though it may be our hottest day yet, so what did the sons and I do? Take a cooking class, of course! The class was held at the Missy Roo Restaurant just around the block from our hotel, and started with, what else, a relaxed cup of coffee. One can’t get moving too fast in this heat.

The next step was going to Dong Ba Market to purchase some of the fresh ingredients. Sad to say, we moved through the market too quickly for me to stop and take any photos, though we did learn a thing or two. As I would have guessed, the stalls indoors, under the cover of a real roof, are charged a higher rent than the stalls outside with tarps or metal sheets for roofs. We also went further into the food section of the market than we had before; this was the first time we’d seen any meat stalls. Older son commented that it put eating fish in a new light to see the fish draw its dying breath as you buy it. Younger son, meanwhile, noted that the tofu was of higher quality than at home and at about one-thirtieth the cost.

Back at the restaurant, they had everything laid out for us to start. The very first thing we did was start the stock for the Hue Beef Soup we’d be making last. Then, in the tradition of cooking shows, that pot was taken to the kitchen to simmer while we made some other things, starting with Banh Khoai (Fried Pancake). The first step was to fry the tofu, something younger son and I realized we’d been doing wrong at home. It needs more oil than we’ve been using. Then we fried the shrimp and pork. After the batter was made, the instructor cooked one pancake to show us the technique, after which I made a meat one, and younger son made a tofu one. Then older son got his turn. Since he’d seen younger son and me both flip the pancake over and have it break, he’d learned from our mistakes and came close to the instructor’s pancake in terms of finished appearance. Here’s his pancake, followed by hers. To eat the pancake, you cut two strips, put them in a bowl with some fresh greens and bean sprouts, and peanut sauce (younger son’s was made with soy sauce, while ours was made with fish sauce).

First course, eaten, we moved on to spring rolls, both fresh (Nem Chay) and fried (Nem Chien Chay). We made all of these with tofu so that we wouldn’t have to do everything twice. The first ones we made used fresh (uncooked) filling; these were the ones that would later be fried. The tricks to rolling them include getting the rice paper just wet enough and not too wet, using the right amount of filling, and positioning it just right on the rice paper, in the center at one side. Then you fold the sides in and crease them below where the filling is and, starting at the filling end, roll it all up. Then we cooked the filling for the fresh spring rolls and rolled those up. Here are the instructor and her assistant helping with the cooking. The sons worked on the fried rolls first, after which I replaced older son so that he could write down some notes. The final step was to make the sauce and eat the finished product, three fresh spring rolls and three or four fried spring rolls each.

The final dish was the Hue beef noodle soup (no Vietnamese translation given, unfortunately). The interesting part about this is that the beef was cooked in a ladle in the pot of stock. Here’s a photo of the finished soup, to which one adds greens and bean sprouts before eating. After we got back to the hotel, older son went into what he called “snake mode” to sleep and digest. None of us were particularly thrilled when the husband came back from the Hue University conference at which he spoke this morning telling us that a taxi would be here at 5:45 to take us to the conference banquet he didn’t know about until he got to the conference this morning. Needless to say, had we known about a banquet tonight, we would have done the cooking class another day. Oh well, I expect we’ll live.

P.S. If anyone wants any of the recipes, comment or email me. I can’t promise I’ll get them typed and sent immediately, and I’ll do the best I can on the instructions part to tell you what you need to know. If there’s an Asian market in your town, you will probably be able to find the specialized ingredients (rice paper, fish sauce, etc.).

Myo Sim on the Road, Parts 4 and 5

2009-03-21T09:56:00.008-04:00

I think that these two videos may complete the challenge set for older son. We went to Thuan An Beach today, which gave him the opportunity to do Am Hak on a beach and on a rock. This latter location was chosen because Am Hak translates as "crane on a rock." Here's the beach video; that's the South China Sea in the background. I hope you can hear the kiais. As for Am Hak on the rock, here's a photo to show just how far offshore the rock was. What I don't have is the photograph of the surface of the barnacle-covered, slippery-with-algae rock. That was taken using a waterproof disposable camera, so you'll just have to take our word for it that this was not the optimal surface. It also explains why this is the longest it takes older son to do Am Hak. He was being very, very careful. Presenting ... Am Hak on a rock.

And Now for Something Completely Different ... Puppies

2009-03-20T07:19:00.007-04:00

Older son has also started a blog on this trip based on his love of all things canine. At home, he stops to greet every dog he passes, but with the risk of rabies, I had to get him to promise not to do that here. Instead, he's been photographing every dog we pass, and has started to post some of those photos here. He has also shot some video although he says he's a few days away from posting it. I mentioned video of puppies in my Facebook status a couple of days ago, though, and got a request for it. So here is video of three dogs playing in the garden of a house in Hoi An. This is actually pretty fun. One dog wants to play-fight with another, and the third dog keeps getting the other two to play tug-of-war with it. This second video was shot at the Ethnic Minority Village on our DMZ tour. It's one of the village's boys playing with a puppy. Older son forgot to turn the camera off at the end, though, so there's a little snippet of a pig and her piglets at the end.

For Even More (and Better) Photos ...

2009-03-20T04:53:00.002-04:00

check out younger son's blog. He's taking his photography very seriously, with two film cameras (one for color film and one for black and white film), and a digital SLR. He's also got multiple lenses, and doesn't hesitate to use them.

Randomosities

2009-03-20T03:43:00.007-04:00

Some of these facts or stories involve or came from our guide on the DMZ Tour; others are just things I’ve noted in our time here. Probably not too many photos, but hopefully some of the stories will be entertaining and possibly even enlightening. Also, I should make the disclaimer that I have not attempted to verify any of the factual information shared by our guide, so you are free to take it or leave it. Just please don’t leave a snarky comment telling me how wrong I might be.

On the DMZ tour, our minibus stopped behind a full-sized bus at a rail crossing. To the right side of the road, in front of a long hedge, were several Vietnamese gentlemen dressed in business suits, backs to the road, obviously answering nature’s call. As they were zipping up (some after turning back to face the road), several Vietnamese women in the traditional ao dai came out from behind the bushes, straightening their garb. I guess this is what passes for a rest stop. (Speaking of ao dai, I could have a silk one custom made for a very reasonable price. Should I? Leave a comment to let me know.)

From the tour guide: The population of Vietnam is some 86 million people. Hue City has about 400,000, while the province in which Hue is located has about 1.2 million. About 75 percent of the population works in an agricultural capacity. Population control is strongly encouraged though not as rigorously as in China. Families are encouraged to have only one or two children, and a government employee who has a third child will not be promoted … ever. There is also an extra tax for having more than two children. This fits with the fact that I have only seen one pregnant woman here and only one store selling any type of maternity clothes. Interestingly, the guide made it very clear that responsibility for birth control falls with the man. As we passed fields of rubber trees, he commented on the special relationship between a man and the rubber tree, and how important the crop was to family planning. When I thought about it, most of the contraception women can use is a bit more high tech in terms of involving a physician (even for something as seemingly simple as fitting a diaphragm), whereas condoms are relatively low tech and easy to obtain.

Land mines were planted by both sides in the war and remain a large issue even today. The warnings in the guidebooks and on signs to stay on marked paths are quite valid. Mines pose a real danger agriculturally, also, as a danger to opening up new fields. We have seen a couple of places selling t-shirts to benefit the Mines Advisory Group, an organization that sends teams in to search for and disarm land mines. (I should decide if I want a t-shirt since they're $10 at the DMZ pub around the corner but 15 British pounds from the MAG website.)

I mentioned in the Good Morning, Vietnam! post about the number of cemeteries here. Much of the DMZ tour took place in Quang Tri province (the province north of the one Hue is in). There are 72 cemeteries in Quang Tri province alone, with 16,000 soldiers of both genders buried there. And while folks in the US make a big deal about the number of American soldiers still missing in action from the war, the number pales in comparison to the 300,000 Vietnamese still missing. The guide also more than once mentioned the 5,000 children born with birth defects due to the use of Agent Orange.

According to the guide, Vietnam does recognize reincarnation. If you live a good life the first time around, you will come back as a human. If you live a bad life, you’ll come back as an insect or other lower life form looked down at or even stepped upon by humans. In the twice-monthly festival to honor deceased ancestors, fake money is burned in order to be transmitted to the dead. Also burned can be paper replicas of motorbikes or other luxuries, because don’t we want our dead ancestors to live comfortable after-lives? Finally, many of the dead today are buried in the fields so that when people go there to work, they can also visit family members buried there.

Vietnamese history is one of invasion and war, which largely explains the attitude of young people being taught to defend their country. China or Mongolia invaded Vietnam three times over a period lasting 1,000 years, and tensions continue with China today. The conflict with the French lasted some 80 years, with the American War lasting a comparatively short time. Finally, the Khmer Rouge and Japanese have also invaded or threatened to invade Vietnam. In the war, call it what you will, Vietnam or American, there were basically three conditions necessary for a Viet Cong victory. These were inclement weather, favorable terrain, and harmony with the locals.

As we drove from Hue to Dong Ha on the DMZ tour, we passed multiple schools in which the entire student body appeared to be sitting outside, in front of the school building, in some sort of assembly. After we picked the guide up in Dong Ha, I asked him about this. He said that they gather in the schoolyard every Monday morning for the national anthem and an assembly. Students wear a red scarf (we’ve seen lots of these) to symbolize that they are children of Ho Chi Minh. What we think of as K-12 education starts at the age of six, and runs six days a week in Vietnam, Monday through Saturday. The months of May, June, and July are holidays. In the urban areas, schools meet for a full day. In the rural areas, children go to school in the morning but go home to help in the fields or the house during the afternoon. A national exam determines which students attend university and which attend trade school. University costs about $70 per term for tuition; living expenses and books are extra. The government does make student loans. If this sounds like a real deal, keep in mind that nationally, the average income is $30 per month. For cities, it is $50 per month. A university professor here makes $150 to $200 per month but has the added benefit of tenure from the first day on the job.

Ho Chi Minh placed a great value on education. A often-quoted Ho-ism is something along the lines of to hold the land for 10 years, plant a tree; to hold the land for 100 years, educate the children.

Since I’ve been talking education, I’ll mention here that the husband and the other UVa professor teaching here right now have been very complimentary of their students’ motivation and interest. No student has missed a class, and the husband’s classes start at 7:00 a.m. on Thursdays. The husband says that his students participate well in class, ask good questions, and correct him should he make a mistake when working a problem on the board. He notes that their English is quite good considering that some may only have had a year and a half of instruction in English. I watched a physical education class meet at the university one day and wondered how UVa students would feel about wearing a gym uniform for PE classes. The students here wear one.

Again, according to the guide, the official name of the country is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. There is one political party, the Communist Party, though only about 20 percent of the population has membership in the party. Although there is only one party, there is a mixture of politics between candidates in any election.

The principal crops grown in the highlands where much of the DMZ tour took place are rubber and coffee. In the lower areas, rice, tobacco, corn, and sweet potatoes are grown.

There are different dialects spoken in the South, the North, and the central part of the country. The guide indicated that if he were to visit Hanoi, he would have a bit of difficulty understanding and being understood.

I asked the guide what date Vietnam considers as “Independence Day,” wondering whether it would be based on 1975 when the war ended. The national day is September 2, based on September 2, 1945, which Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam to be one country. It took some 30 years for unity to come to pass. Vietnam and the US normalized relations in 1986, although the economic embargo was not totally lifted until 1992.

“Viet” is a private name, while “Nam” means “South.” At one time, the country was known as Nam Viet, but there is a province in China that shares that name. Accordingly, one of the emperors flipped the name to “Viet Nam” to make it stand out. The Vietnamese are considered to be the children of the phoenix and the raven.

Remember my comments about the driving here? I forgot to mention in that post that younger son said the driving on the trip to My Son and Hoi An reminded him of the Night Bus in Harry Potter; I would tend to agree with him. About 12,000 people die each year in auto accidents. In the US, blinking lights from an oncoming car indicates a policeman or accident ahead. Here, if an oncoming driver waves his hand out in front of him, it means that there is no police or other speed coverage ahead. Pointing down in front indicates that there is, so slow down. As for motorbikes, the guide noted that there are about 80 million for the 86 million people, though this may have been an exaggeration. He said that young men could get a motorbike license at the age of 18, but women had to wait until 19 or 20.

The age difference noted here brings up the whole issue of gender roles. Put very simply, Vietnam is a fairly if not more so sexist country, though much of it is rooted in the Asian traditions. It is quite all right for men to smoke and drink, but not so for women. Women are also expected to dress modestly (I’m treating Vietnam the same way I treated churches in Italy—knees and shoulders covered); women who color their hair and paint their face or nails are usually seen as prostitutes. The guide talked openly about prostitutes and spoke about how a man could get bored in a marriage and need some variety. The other woman on the tour asked about women getting bored in marriage, and the guide just laughed. I think that some of his comments about gender roles may actually have been intended to bait her just a bit. (Being already very aware of the way things work or are perceived here, I was keeping my mouth shut.) The hands-down favorite comment among the young men in my family was the guide’s response to a question about whether the role of women had changed in recent years. He replied that it had, saying very dryly and matter-of-factly, “Women try to be equal. They are not, but they try.”

Here’s another random but fascinating fact about life here. I don’t know if any of my traffic photos have shown people, usually women, riding motorbikes or bicycles wearing face masks, so here's one that does. My initial thought was that these were to protect against the fumes (which can get ugly at times). Women wear these to protect their skin from the sun, because white skin is a beauty ideal here. Sometimes, the face mask wraps around and covers the neck as well, leaving only the eyes visible. You will also see women wearing long, cocktail style gloves that cover their arms up to where the short sleeves of their garment end. These, too, are to protect against the sun. And when it rains? Well, the Vietnamese are enterprising people, and some of the rain ponchos are made to accommodate human and machine needs. I know the photo is blurry, but what you're supposed to see is that the poncho has a clear plastic place that lets the motorbike's headlight shine through.

While we’re on the subject of motorbikes, we did drive through one place where motorbikes are not allowed. On the way south to My Son and Hoi An, we went through a long tunnel beneath a mountain. Someone from the university said it cut more than an hour off the trip in terms of how long the road used to take to go over and around the mountain. No motorbikes are allowed in the tunnel because the minimum speed is judged to be too fast for them to maintain. Motorbikes either go up and around by the old route or wait until there are enough motorbikes to fill a flatbed truck, at which point the truck ferries them through while the drivers ride in a bus. I don’t know how much this costs, but I’ll bet it does cost since vehicles pay a toll for the tunnel.

The restaurant at which we had lunch today has as its motto “We boil all our water.” Ya gotta love that. Something perhaps not to love is that while we’re looking at banning smoking in any and all restaurants at home, many of the restaurants here list cigarettes by brand on the menu. And, yes, they do eat dogs here, and cats as well. The guide pointed out a restaurant sign we passed that indicated that they served both dog and cat. In terms of dogs, the guide noted that the way to get a dog to protect a home is to cut off its tail. The rationale is that a dog with a tail can stay warm in the wild by curling its tail over its face to keep warm at night. Without a tail, the dog has to stay closer to the house, and then will serve as an early warning system for people approaching the house.

It is amazing how clean the streets are here. Shop owners sweep the sidewalk in front of their business daily, and you see little piles of trash in the gutter awaiting the city employee who will pick them up and deposit them in the cart. Of course, before the city employee gets there, various people will squat and pick through the pile looking for anything they can use. I have even seen trash cans emptied onto the sidewalk so that people can pick through them. They are serious about recycling here, too, at least in the hotel. The maids separate the recyclables from all the other trash daily.

Finally, the folktale told by the guide about the role of the toad in weather forecasting (toads chirping signals rain): The country had suffered long from a drought, so the toad decided to go to the sky to ask the gods for rain. As he travelled to the sky, he met a crab who asked where he was going. The toad explained that he was going to the sky to ask the gods for rain. The crab said that the rains would replenish the rivers and oceans, so he would accompany the toad on his journey. On their way, the toad and the crab met other creatures, and ended up accompanied by a tiger, a bear, a fox, and a bee. When the animals got to heaven, there was a drum at the gate. The toad told the crab to get into the pool of water, the bee to fly around up high, and the other animals to hide in the forest. The toad then beat the drum at the gate. The gods looked out to see what was going on and saw the small, ugly toad beating their heavenly thunder-drum. They sent out a rooster to kill the toad, but the toad called the fox out of the forest to kill the rooster. Seeing the rooster dead, the gods sent out a dog to kill the toad, but the toad called the bear out of the woods to kill the dog. Finally, seeing both the rooster and the dog dead, the gods sent out the thunder assistant, a human armed with an axe, to kill the toad. The toad called the bee to sting the thunder assistant, who jumped into the water to get away from the bee. The toad called the crab in the water to sting the thunder assistant, who jumped out of the water to get away from the crab. Finally, the toad called the tiger to jump out of the forest and kill the thunder assistant. When the gods saw how smart the toad was, they made him a special creature with a special mission. They asked him to grind his teeth to signal them if water were ever needed on earth. This is why the toad is under the special protection of the gods and chirps loudly before it rains.

Tomorrow, we go to the beach at the mouth of the Perfume River. Sunday, the sons and I are taking a Vietnamese cooking class at a restaurant on the next block while the husband gives a talk at a physics education conference at the university. The husband is free on Monday, so we’re off to the Citadel and the Imperial City then. Right now, though, it's time to practice my number one front and side Myo Sim karate kicks. I'm making lists of things I miss and don't miss, and Myo Sim is at the top of the things I miss one.