Routines

It seems we're settling into a bit of a routine here after only a couple of days. In case anyone is wondering what it's like to live in a hotel room for a month, I don't think it will be too bad, at least not here. For one thing, the sons have their own room, just across the hall area outside the elevator. For another thing, it's not the hotel we stayed in for one night in Ho Chi Minh City. To make my point, here are two shots of that room taken from corners diagonally apart. I took the first one from the corner into which the door to the room opened. The second photo I took from the corner shown in the first shot, up by the head of the bed. In the second shot, the door shown at the left is the door into the room. The middle door is the closet, and the door on the right is to the bathroom. As you can see, it was a pretty darn small room. And if you're thinking that you don't see any windows, you're correct. There weren't any. I told the husband as we were packing to leave for Hue, that our hotel room here had better (1) be bigger and (2) have a window. It won on both counts, as you'll see in a minute. I will say that having a totally interior room made for a quiet room which, given the traffic and honking in Ho CHi Minh City, is no small matter. I can, however, say that the room had a cute trash can.

So, our room here in Hue is larger. Here's a photo I took from the entry hallway, where the door to the bathroom is. That's the husband there, surveying the chaos. When I took this photo, we were still getting organized. Now that we have some clothes put into the small wardrobe, and the suitcases positioned nicely on the twin bed, it's looking pretty homey. The curtains cover picture windows or, more specifically, a sliding glass door out to a small balcony, the railing of which would never be allowed in the US given liability lawsuits.

As I said at the outset, we're settling into a bit of a routine. We get up at 6:00 and shower, and then knock on the sons' door when we're ready to head down for breakfast. They join us, which is nice. It's the first time in almost a decade that we've had five family breakfasts in a row. After breakfast, the husband leaves for the university, and the sons retreat to their room, sometimes to go back to sleep. I come to our room and organize photos from the day before or, as I am doing now, work on a blog post. In a while, the maids will have worked their way up to this floor (the fourth), and the sons and I will take the Scrabble board and tiles down to a breakfast table in the lobby for a game. It's becoming something of a spectator sport, with a different staff member watching us each day. I had planned to take the board and tiles (purchased at a thrift store) home to use in creative endeavors, but I may end up leaving them here if the staff is interested in having them.

After Scrabble and room-cleaning, we've been heading out to walk. We usually don't have a plan of where we'll go; we just make it up as we go along. Judging by my digital pedometer, we walk somewhere between five and ten miles. Lots of photography happens, as you can see here. That's younger son with the ponytail. He's carrying three cameras: the Canon digital SLR we gave him for high school graduation, my old Canon EOS film camera, and his dad's old Nikon film camera. He's shooting color film in one and black and white film in the other. I'm carrying two digital cameras, one an SLR identical to younger son's. Older son just has one digital camera but is using it to, among other things, document the dogs, street and pet, of Hue. Older son is a bit of a dog fanatic, and promising not to pet every dog he meets was a condition of his coming along given the threat of rabies.

Somewhere along the way, we will eat lunch, sometimes meeting the husband. This is made a bit harder by the fact that the sons and I do not have a cell phone. The university gave the husband one to use here, but the sons and I are unconnected. It's actually sort of nice. We have spent a bit of time in the mid-afternoon each day back here at the hotel, resting and re-hydrating before venturing closer to home in the late afternoon. We have done a bit of shopping, though there is much more to come. We eat dinner later here than we do at home, though at home I only make a "real" dinner three or four nights a week due to the martial arts schedule. We're going to bed earlier here than at home. I am at least, though the husband stayed up last night working on today's lectures. I can't remember the last time I actually was getting seven or eight hours of sleep on a regular basis. I could get very used to it.

I got an email last night from an old friend noting that Google Maps has Hue as a spot on a road, that there are no street maps given. I had already learned that, having looked for a map of Hue there myself. Here are a few more street shots to assure anyone who wonders that this is a real place, not just a dot on the map. The first is of a man carrying what looked like a load of rugs on one of the bicycle carts.
A promenade of sorts along Le Loi, one of the main streets. The river is to the left; there's a park-life strip in between the street and the river. The sign at the right edge of the photo is for a public WC, something I admit I haven't tried yet having seen the "warnings" in some of the guidebooks about carrying your own toilet paper, etc.
I took this one from the somewhat rundown Imperial Monument. In the background is what looked like a boat village. In the foreground is a woman in one of the long boats you see going up and down the river. Sometimes these seem to be carrying supplies; at other times, it looks as if people are fishing from them.
The front of the Imperial Monument ...

and a shot taken at the rear.

I told you it was somewhat rundown.

And now I'll post this, apologizing up front that the "Preview" function on Blogger is suggesting that some text might overlap some photos. I hope this won't happen on the published version, but here goes.

Walking in the Rain

When last we met, I was off on a walk with the sons, and it was a good one. We walked further down a street than we'd been before and found a huge traffic circle we had no idea was there. Then we backtracked, crossed over the Perfume River for the first time, and went to market. I had read about the Dong Ba market in the guidebooks; it's cited as one of the places to buy conical hats that have poems embedded in them that can be read when the slats of the hat are viewed in the right direction. We entered the market, though, somewhat through the back door of the open-air produce area. Now, open air plus rain all morning equals mud, which made for some fancy stepping. I didn't realize until later that older son was wearing sandals; it was only much later that he said to remind him to wear shoes when we went back. Oops! The whole thing was somewhat of an exercise in over-stimulation. On one level I just wanted to stop and stare at the displays of fruits and vegetables, listen to the haggling or chit-chat not to mention the motorbikes coming and going, and smell the different odors all tinged with the smell of wet. On the other hand, I didn't want to be intrusive, and since we were the only Westerners in there, I already felt a bit out-of-place. There may have been more Westerners in there had the weather been better. I do know that there are a lot more Westerners walking around here than I thought there would be, though not many of them are speaking English. French, German, Russian, but not too much English. I thought just for an instant about trying to buy something, preferably something I didn't recognize, but decided against it. A lot of the purchases seemed to be being done in large quantities, so for all I know this is where the cafes go to purchase produce, not single user types like me. I didn't really see any prices posted either, so making a purchase might have been a bit awkward. When we emerged from the produce market, we were out on the street. We walked down a bit in front of all sorts of colorful shopfronts, then turned down a narrow path into what was, I think, the Dong Ba market mentioned in the guidebooks. "Madame, madame!" "Madame, you like this?" "Madame, look here!" T-shirts, lanterns, a bit of silk, and even conical hats, though I couldn't tell if they were the ones with the poems. It was like a maze, and I know we saw only a small fraction of what was there. The pathways between displays were so tight that I didn't try to take any photos, again not wanting to be intrusive or too touristy. When we got back out on the street, I did shoot some photos for the incredible colors and variety of the things for sale. Here's a sampling, starting with flowers
and continuing with something whose identity I now can't figure out, but hey, it was colorful. There were also doorknobs, pottery, and my personal favorite, though not one I would ever purchase, in what looked like an apothecary shop. Yes, those are what you think they are.

After the market, we went back across the river. Younger son wanted to make sure that his film had not been fogged by any of the airport X-ray machines, so we stopped at a couple of photo places to look into developing. Alas, most of them were digital only. We finally went into the Mandarin Cafe, where the owner greeted us by asking about the camera older son was holding. Then he and younger son started discussing digital versus film, and color versus black and white, and the next thing you know younger son had been steered in the direction of a photo shop that would develop color film. The owner, Mr. Cu, is a bit of a photographer himself and shared with us several of his albums as well as the flyers for photo shows he'd had at studios in France and Italy. We also learned how he could not work from 1975 until 1990 because he had driven a firetruck for the Americans during the war. It was one of those wonderful experiences that make travel the adventure it is. Plus, the food was excellent not to mention dirt-cheap. I have told the sons not to get too used to it because when they are touring Europe they will not be able to get three coffees, one fresh fruit juice, one fruit shake, one sparkling water, one sauteed beef with rice, one fried rice with seafood, one tofu and vegetables, and one order of French fries, all together for under $9.00. And the Mandarin is actually pricier than the Stop and Go, where five adults last night ate dinner (including beer) for less than $20.00. I'm starting to ramble now, so it's time to post this and move on to other things.

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.