Rainy Days and Mondays

Today is both, here in Hue, so instead of taking a morning walk beside the river, stopping for coffee (it’s pretty incredible here), and generally moseying around our new hometown for a while, the sons and I are staying in. We played Scrabble in the lobby while our rooms were cleaned, and got lots of interested looks over our shoulders. Maybe I’ll end up leaving the game here instead of taking it home to use the tiles in my creative endeavors.

Yesterday was our first full day here. The husband and I took a long walk in the morning, much like the one the sons and I were contemplating for today. We’re actually only about two blocks south of the Perfume River, which has a very nice park meandering along the side. There didn't seem to be too many people walking, as we were, but there were quite a few groups of people sitting on the grass having small picnics. The part of the park nearest to the hotel is dotted with sculptures, some of which reminded me of pieces in the Art in Place series at home.

As the morning went on, we wandered down the river, stopping at one point for the coffee mentioned above. It’s espresso served on a bed of sweetened condensed milk, with a distinct layer between the milk and the espresso. It’s served in a glass, which is brought to you sitting in a bowl of hot water. Very, very yummy. Younger son asked if we could get sweetened condensed milk at home so we could do this there. I assured him it wouldn’t be a problem and made a mental note to get him into the grocery store more often.

On the walk, we stopped at the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which presents Ho's life with a special emphasis on the time he spent in Hue (he went to high school here; we passed the school as well on our walk). The museum was an interesting experience. The front doors were wide open when we entered and paid our admission; when we left, the doors were shut and there was not a staff member anywhere. Too bad, because I had wanted to buy a set of Ho postcards for the folks at home who asked me to send them something. They also had little Ho pins that I thought would make interesting gifts. Alas, unless the sons and I go back there, you probably won’t be seeing those in your Christmas stockings.

The content of the museum was also interesting. Ho was known by multiple names throughout his life, changing them as life circumstances dictated. The displays were decorated with a series of Ho quotes, in Vietnamese and English, though the English translations could have used some serious editing. Although most of the displays in the museum were centered on the time Vietnam was under French control, there were a couple of photos of Ho presenting awards such as the one to a man for being an “American killer.” As you might have guessed, “American” was not a reference to the man’s own nationality.

One thing about walking around here is the need to dodge people who want to sell you a product or service. On the first part of the walk, right beside the river, it was people wanting to take us for a sail in a dragon boat. While we do intend to do this at some point, it wasn’t yesterday. Then, when we were walking on the sidewalk on the street side of the park, it was cyclo drivers we had to dodge. A cyclo is a cart in which a person or two can sit that is driven by a bicyclist to the rear. We tried to be polite and simply say, “No,” or shake our heads or wave them away, but at times they would follow us down the street for a block or two, continuing to press. “One hour.” “Where you from?” “Two ride here.” The sons say that they simply ignore the cyclo drivers, but the husband and I think of that as rude and try to at least refuse kindly. I may be open to changing that attitude, though, before too many more days are up.

Last night, we ate at a sidewalk café with the other professor who came over from UVa for this term. Because I was sitting at the end of the table, I was the one who got to wave off people offering to sell scrolls, note cards, prints, etc. This is something I experienced when we visited Italy, and I will say that the people here were a bit more polite than the sellers in Italy. When I said, “No, thank you, not tonight,” the person bowed slightly and left. In Italy, they would usually stay and try to talk you into buying something.

Some more images of Hue. First, if you read an earlier post, here’s the building to the right of our hotel balcony. Those are large branches between the concrete floors. I took this photo yesterday morning, and this morning, the bottom layer of branches has been removed. They were out there working early this morning, and are still at it. Perhaps I should photograph it daily as a record of our time here.

Here is one of the dragon boats on the Perfume River. The north side of the Perfume River is where the Imperial City and Citadel are.

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the street vendors were out in full force with flowers. I told the husband that, having brought me on this great trip, he did not need to get me flowers, too, but he did. Yeah, I think I'll keep him.

Here's a random street shot. I really want to get a shot sometime of someone carrying something totally outrageous on a bicycle or motorbike, like the 10- or 12-foot-long pipe a passenger was holding. The pipe rested on the seat in front of him and stuck straight up into the air. It's hard to get those shots, though, because you have to be ready to shoot when the scene whizzes by. Maybe later today, or tomorrow, or...

Time for that today's walk!

This One's for Christian...

who wondered why people would post photos of their trip food. Possibly because it's so darn prettier than what they fix at home.



These are from our first dinner in Hue, at a place recommended by the hotel clerk. It was a bit fancier than we would have chosen on our own, but we were still a bit tired and wanted something easy. Of course, finding the place was an adventure in itself, with my almost getting taken out by a bus as we tracked and backtracked through strange streets. Now that we've walked those streets in the daytime, we're getting the hang of the neighborhood.

Images of Ho Chi Minh City

I appear to be the only one awake here in Hue at 6:00 p.m. local time. To try to distract myself from hunger pains (haven't eaten since breakfast in Ho Chi Minh city), here are some shots I took there this morning.


This was right across the street from our hotel. Behind the motorbikes whizzing by is some sort of park, with a costume-clad marching band out front, playing loudly at 8:00 in the morning.


I must admit that the state of the wiring along the streets was just a bit disconcerting.


This was on a wall we walked by. Yeah, it looks like Arnold to me, too.


More wires. They were everywhere!


This wall of plants was actually quite nice.


The US has exported a lot of things, Bart Simpson among them. Interestingly, we have yet to see a Starbucks or a McDonald's here, though we did see two KFCs in Ho Chi Minh City.

The men are moving, so it's time for dinner!

I was brain dead last night...

and put my "we're here" post on my everyday blog instead of this one. I tried to copy it over here, but the brain may still be a bit fried, so the simplest thing is to read it here.

Getting There or How to Spend a Close 36 Hours with Three Other People and Still Like Them at the End

When the kids were little, I enjoyed walking with them. Their lack of height allowed them to see things on the ground or low down that I would otherwise not have seen. They haven’t lost their keen eyes as they’ve aged either; they can still spot a penny or a Euro in a parking lot a mile away. And older son spotted this oddity on the gate map of the remote terminal we flew out of at Dulles. Given that we would end up going through airport security four times in three days at four airports, this seems a not-unreasonable image with which to begin.

The British Airways flight from Dulles to Heathrow was uneventful save for some minor turbulence mid-flight. I am not by nature a calm flyer, still marveling that machines as large as a 747 can get up as high as 37,000 feet. (Once hearing a pilot for one major airline still in existence demonstrate his lack of knowledge of the Bernoulli Effect doesn’t help.) Still, I managed to sleep a bit, no doubt helped by the fact that the medicine I take nightly to help prevent migraines makes me a bit drowsy.

We actually landed at Heathrow at the precise arrival time noted on the itinerary. To accomplish this, we spent about 20 minutes killing time by making really cool squiggles on the real-time flight map viewable on the seat-back screen. What does it say about me that I found the real-time flight map and info as interesting as most of the video available to watch once I’d watched the BBC news. I’d already seen all the movies they were showing that I was at all interested in seeing.

Heathrow or, more specifically, its Terminal 5 is more than a bit of a zoo. I can honestly say that if I never go through it again I will die happy. But wait! We will go through it again on the way home. The switchback queue simply to have one’s passport and boarding pass for the connecting flight checked put Disney World to shame. Another switchback queue led to an escalator that led to still more switchbacks to go through security. We had gone through security at Dulles and had never left a secure area; still, we went through the whole procedure yet again. Shoes and jackets off, laptops out, liquids (my prescriptions and older son’s bottles of ink) into quart bags—the whole shebang. I was quite glad we had over three hours between arrival from Dulles and departure for Frankfurt.

At Frankfurt, we changed not only planes but airlines, from British Airways to Qatar Airways. We saved something like a thousand dollars per person by booking this as two separate tickets, one on each airline. Doing so meant that our baggage could not be transferred from one airline to the other, so we had to get all of our checked bags back and re-check them. We also got to traverse from one terminal to another with those five bags. This task was made easier by the fact that three of the five bags are Eagle Creek Shuffles and can be carried as backpacks. And amazingly (granted, the reader who gets out more than I do may not find this as amazing as I did), the luggage carts were engineered to be used on the escalators. The bottom was hinged to allow the front and back wheels to sit at different levels. Another triumph of German engineering?



When we got to the appropriate terminal, we had the joy of discovering that the Qatar Air ticket counter would not open until about three hours before flight time. This means that I’m typing this part of the entry at 2:30 Thursday afternoon (German time). Since the flight leaves at 10:20 p.m., that gives us another five or so hours until we can ditch the bags, go through security for the third time, and lounge at the gate, which is typically quieter than the hustle and bustle of the outer terminal. Elder son is napping, younger son is doing a crossword torn from yesterday’s Washington Post, and the husband is doing sudokus torn from the Daily Mail we snagged in London. I think I’ll go back to reading Harry Potter y la camara secreta (otherwise known as the Spanish edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). (This will let me cross another item off the list of 50 things I came up with to do in my 50th year of life. Yeah, I know I’m now a bit past that, but doing some of the things on the list took a while.)

We checked in for the next flight successfully, success being measured as they didn’t charge us for the fifth bag, the one carrying t-shirts for the students and staff in Hue and some books the husband will use in the class. The Qatar Airways office in Washington had told the husband there would be a charge of $175 per bag for more than one per person. Perhaps word hasn’t hit the Frankfurt office, and we weren’t about to ask.

Best quote of the layover in Frankfurt, one that will be appreciated most by those who know the sons up close and personal. Younger son made one of his usual threats of damage to older son’s ‘nads. My response to younger son was that he would then be responsible for any and all grandchildren, and did he really want that responsibility. His response was (and this is an exact quote), “As long as you don’t mind neither of us knowing who they are.”

And older son offers up as his best moment of the trip being able to check an item off his bucket list. Which item? That would be seeing Steve’s hair wanded for hidden weapons. On our third run through airport security, the metal detector beeped Steve. As the agent wanded him, he held Steve’s hair up and ran the wand under, over, and all around it. It turned out to be the metal on Steve’s hiking boots that set off the detector. At the same time, they had to hand inspect Steve’s bag since, again for the first time in three checks, the flute he brought with him raised a question when examined on the X-ray.

Finally, a couple of images from the Frankfurt airport. First, a certain environmental science teacher we know would love the waste receptacles we encountered at both Heathrow and Frankfurt. The Heathrow ones were actually separate bins, but the Frankfurt ones were the sleek metal shown below. How hard would it be to recycle if we had bins like these, say, on the Downtown Mall?


And for my two favorite biologists, my dad and my cousin Rich, here’s a poster for an event commemorating Darwin’s birth 200 years ago.


Two days before we left, I had lunch at Aromas Café with a friend. Our waitress overheard my telling my friend about our itinerary. “You’re flying Qatar Airways?” she asked. “They are the best airline I’ve ever flown. You’re gonna love them.” To sum up our experience so far (we’re on our second QA flight as I’m typing this), oh boy was she right. The first thing we noticed when we got on the plane was a seemingly large number of flight attendants. Next, very early in the flight, an attendant came around with warm towels. As the husband put it, that’s what the other airlines used to do on overseas flights but haven’t in a while. British Airways, at least, didn’t do it on the flight we took to start the trip. The food was absolutely superb, and Steve’s vegetarian meals came through without a hitch. Finally, whereas on British Airways only the high-rent seats had video games as part of their seat-back screen systems, on Qatar Airways even the low-rent seats had them. Our new favorite airline: Qatar Airways. When will we fly them again other than our return to Europe? Who knows, but they were certainly nice to have on this trip.

Here’s the other thing I found really neat about Qatar Airways:

This is the Mecca Pointer, an option on the real-time route program. At any point in the flight, you can see where Mecca is in relation to the plane. It probably shouldn’t surprise me that the national airline of an Islamic country would have such a thing. I just thought it really neat that it was there.

My last thought on the trip here is that the only rude people we encountered the whole way, a gentleman who pushed his way ahead of us in the security line at Doha (where we stood even though our flight was listed as “boarding”) and a couple who tried to push their way ahead of us in the check-in line for that flight were not Americans. The couple had French passports in their hands, and while I couldn’t tell about the gentleman, his wasn’t a US passport.

I posted a bit about our arrival in Ho Chi Minh City last night, in the post letting everyone know we got here. We’re now waiting for another plane, the one to Hue. It will be nice to have a home base there, someplace that may start to feel a bit like home. We all agreed, based on a long walk through Ho Chi Minh City this morning in search of a battery for the travel alarm, that we don’t really have any desire to come back here for any length of time other than to catch the plane out. There are places at which one can see the elegant colonial city it once was, but mostly it looks like a city constantly under repair or construction. Crossing a street more than once brought to mind the Seinfeld episode in which George pushed the Frogger machine across a busy street, dodging cars. Only here, it’s mostly motorbikes one dodges, with a few cars thrown in for suspense. When we get to Hue, I’ll look at the photos I shot this morning and include a few for flavor in another post.

Almost There!

We're into the home stretch here. A week from now, we'll be on a plane leaving Frankfurt, Germany for Doha, Qatar. There, we'll change planes and head to Ho Chi Minh City. Each karate or kendo class comes now with a "this is my last (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday) class for two months!" The head karate instructor has set Don the challenge of bringing back video of his doing his latest form in a jungle, on a beach, in a Viet Cong tunnel, or on a rock (the name of the form translates as "crane on a rock"). I don't know about the tunnel, but we should be able to score the other three locales.

Last week, we trekked to Washington, DC through the sleet and got our visas glued and stamped into our passports. We'll also need visas for Cambodia should we end up able to visit Angkor Wat, but all the guide books and websites say that we can get these at the airport when we land as long as we have passport photos and US dollars with us. We all have hostel cards now, and the sons have their International Student ID cards. I think the husband still needs to get the sons their adult scuba diver cards in the event we decide to try to go diving in Vietnam. It's supposed to be easy to exchange their youth cards for adult ones, but we'll see.

This morning, I sprayed two pairs of my pants, one hat, and four pairs of socks with Permethrin, an insect repellent for use on clothing. Tomorrow, I'll do another pair of pants, another hat, another few pairs of socks, and two shirts. With the exception of some time in Cambodia, we won't be in areas that offer an extremely high risk of malaria, but since mosquitos have always seemed to love me, I figured some extra protection couldn't hurt. On the recommendation of the Travel Clinic docs, we're each taking multiple tubes of 33 percent DEET and will be re-applying it often. I may actually get used to the smell by the time we're leaving in April.

A family meeting is on tap for tonight. We need to map out a general itinerary for the Norway leg of the trip so that I can visit our friendly neighborhood travel agent tomorrow and get some Eurail passes. We will definitely spend some days in Oslo, probably at the end of our time there since the husband and I will be flying back from there. We'll definitely spend some time in Trondheim where the husband has multiple cousins who also own a mountain cottage we might be able to visit, weather permitting. There are a few more days to fill up, though, so it's been suggested (yeah, by yours truly) that we take a why-the-hell-not side trip similar to the one that took us to Hyder, Alaska some years ago. Eight or nine hours by train north of Trondheim is Bodo, Norway, which offers among other things the chance to be able to say we've been north of the Arctic Circle. It's not clear that we could take advantage of some of the outdoor activities Bodo offers - glacier hiking, dog sledding, etc. - since April is a very iffy month in terms of it might be like winter or it might be like spring so who knows what we can do when then. But there's a certain attraction to being able to say that we went from the tropics of Southeast Asia to north of the Arctic Circle and, hopefully, didn't suffer too much in the process.

On the home front, we have hired neighborhood kids to walk the family dog, the job I most worried about filling. The dog is almost 13 years old and still loves a good walk almost every day, so making him sit at home for two months would not be a good thing. Some other neighborhood kids will be looking after the lawn and the garbage can that has to be rolled up a hill to the road once a week. I'm working on a list of details for my mother, who will be taking care of the animals, plants, and everything else we hold dear here. I had a friend say that when she and her husband retired and started traveling, she'd be coming to me for advice on what to do to prepare for an extended absence. Right now, my goal is to make the last couple of days here next week as calm and relaxing as possible. Stay tuned to this blog to see if I succeed.

Small Rules!

The netbooks have arrived and are, quite frankly, pretty damned sweet. Here's how mine,an Acer Apire One, compares to a standard trade paperback. They're light, too, weighing about 2.5 pounds. They'd be lighter if we had opted for ones with a much smaller solid-state drive, but we got 160GB hard drives to allow for photo storage.

After a short "name Jean's netbook" contest on Facebook, I have christened mine Pinky Tuscadero in homage to Happy Days. I must say that she is quite sweet. I took her to Florida this past weekend and got some curious and envious stares from people in airport terminals sitting there with full-sized netbooks. I think one person thought I was using a portable DVD player until they noticed I was typing. I had no problems with battery life thanks in part to younger son telling me that battery life would be longer if I toggled the wireless switch to the off position.

The closest I can come to a complaint is actually my own doing. I chose a netbook to travel light, and travel is lighter without an external mouse. I've never been a fan of touchpads, but then I've never really tried to use one. I have so far refused to introduce Pinky to a mouse; she's probably stereotypically female enough to be scared of one. It's a bit awkward at times, but I must be adapting because I found myself using the touchpad on Mr. Mac the other day even when he had his external mouse ready, willing, and able to be used.

Totally apart from netbooks, the list of things remaining to be done is getting shorter. The last two bags are ordered, along with another bottle of Permethrin, an insecticide that can be used to treat clothing. A weekend trip to Walmart or the equivalent should yield sunscreen and extra batteries for the one digital camera that doesn't have a permanent, rechargeable battery. I've put Netflix on hold as well as the Gevalia coffee delivery I used to get a new coffeemaker last fall. The gym membership is also on hold; it was handy that the husband and I are gone exactly two months. I've also started weighing various items of clothing. You laugh, I'm sure, but I'm trying to take the lightest amount of clothing possible since it appears we will be fitting 50 t-shirts into our luggage to distribute to the students and faculty at the university there. (It was going to be 75 shirts until I pointed out that the other professor going over take the 25 shirts intended for his students.) And hey! Weighing clothes enable me to say authoritatively that it may well be that your clothes and shoes can add five pounds to your weight.

Other trip points of interest ... I am taking seven books along. Harry Potter y la camera secreta (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Spanish) will go in my carry-on. In the suitcase will go used copies of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ender's Game, and American Gods. The Tolkien books and Ender are from the used bookstore and will be left behind. I also have novels written by a couple of friends on my hard drive. If I still need more to read, there's always Project Gutenberg.

Finally (for this post), we'll be heading to Washington next week to get visas stamped into our passports. We may or may not combine this with a visit to the National Zoo to cehck out the new baby gorilla. We don't all have to go; one person could take up all four passports and the fee. I've argued, though, that just in case there's a signature missing or an "i" that needs dotting or a "t" that needs crossing, we should all go. Murphy's law, ya know!