It has been more than a month since I posted something, which is pretty bad. Sorry.

I'm going to divide what has happened in the intervening months into two sections. Weeks and weekends. Weeks are pretty boring, because I have school. Notable exceptions to the wake up, go to class, come home routine include the following. 1) On my birthday we went out for dinner. It was sweet. I got a chocolate milkshake and split margarita pizza and a mexican chicken sandwich with Brianna. I also got apple pie and ice cream, which was shared. 2). Two days later it was Nate and Mira's birthday, so we went out to dinner again. It was cool. 3). I go to an orphanage on Sunday afternoons and 'teach kids english' which is less than efficient, but I suppose it is still meaningful/helpful, and it's something to do. 4). We went to see some documentary on Peace One Day about this british dude who for good reason failed in his attempt to be an actor, so he decided to film himself for 10 years trying to implement an international ceasefire day. In the end, he got Jude Law to do some speeches and they ended up in Afghanistan, where they got both the US and the Taliban forces to ceasefire for a day so that they could vaccinate kids against polio in areas that would normally be inaccessible because of violence. So that's a pretty phenomenal thing to have done, but it sucks that it takes 10+ years of effort to get something like that done. 5). I've started going to the gym. 6) Joe from minnesota got swine flu, but he's better now and so far no one else has gotten sick.

Weekend stuff was as always more interesting and fun. One weekend involved a CIEE trip to Wadi Hassa, which was really cool. I don't have pictures because it was a hike/swim down a canyon/river. It was pretty sweet. Our guide runs an outdoor adventure company and has climbing holds drilled onto the wall of his building. I have yet to go, which is bad. I think this was also the weekend that I went to Ajloun and Jerash with Joe. Jerash was pretty cool. Some sweet Roman ruins, including a theater where the is bagpipe player who plays about every 10 minutes to demonstrate the acoustics of the theater. We went to Ajloun to see the nature reserve which was a bit of a disappointment.

Another weekend was Wadi Mujib and Dana Nature Reserve. Both of these were really cool.

I went to Dana with Drew (from BC) and Christina, who goes to Miami Ohio, but went to Western Reserve in high school, and apparently played against Sewickley's girls soccer team...

So we met at the bus station at 8 and after figuring out what was going on and waiting for a bus to fill up we ended up in Tafilla at about 12:40. Here we hired a car to drive us to Dana and arranged for him to pick us up at 6 and take us back to Amman. It was sort of expensive, but there really aren't great transportation options on Fridays. We ended up in Dana village, which is on the North Western corner of the nature reserve. The entrance is technically on the South East side, but driving all the way around is 120 km because of the way the roads are designed. There is a trail that cuts through the whole reserve and ends at this town. So after talking to a hotel owner, we decided to just hike down this trail for 2.5 hours and then stop and turn around. It was awesome. The town is at the top of a canyon, so we walked down into the canyon for about 30 minutes and then just walked through the canyon for 2 more hours. We got back to Dana town a little early so we had hummus, which wasn't great, and then headed back to Amman.

The next day was Wadi Mujib, which is supposed to be the grand canyon of Jordan, but only in the sense that it is the natural thing that everyone goes to see. I was going with Brianna (Tufts) Maura (Gtown) and Daniella (GW) and Brianna's host brother and friends because they have cars. After planning to meet and be ready to leave at 8, we spent about 2 hours sitting on Brianna's porch waiting for her host brother to get going. They had been out at a wedding until like 6 am, so I suppose that this is understandable. We eventually got there and had a good time walking/wading/swimming up the canyon. Notable occurrences include meeting a '72 graduate of Lowell House and his daughter who plays ultimate, and attempts to push start a car that eventually resulted in pull starting it, by tying it to a truck. Which isn't all that special, except that they were pulling the car that was pull started backwards, which I thought was pretty cool.

Last weekend was a long weekend since Joe had swine flu and CIEE wanted to avoid an outbreak that could potentially result in us being asked to leave the university/country. So we had 4 days. Maura, Nate, Daniella and I went to Israel. It was cool, but we didn't plan it incredibly well because it was such short notice. But we left Thursday morning, got through the border much faster than Nate did last time (no stamps) and got to Jerusalem around 1. We dumped our stuff in a hostel and met Daniella's mom, aunt and step dad. We chatted for a bit, and then split up, the four of us heading to the wailing wall and temple mount. We saw the wailing wall, but we weren't allowed into the temple mount, which was a bummer. We walked around a bit and eventually ended up at a restaurant for dinner. Daniella was worried about what we were going to eat because she "wasn't sure if food was in your [Nate and me] traveling budget." I'm definitely proud that I travel in such a way as to get such a reputation. After dinner (I had tomato onion pizza). Nate, Maura, and I went back to the hostel, and Daniella went to stay with her family (her mom was just visiting, but there are some family members who actually live in Israel). We met a British guy who said that he was in the department of defense, but I hope not, because he was pretty a) dumb for telling us that and b). close minded about the middle east.

The next day we decided to go to Tel Aviv because it was Friday and we had no shot of getting into the temple mount on the weekend. After getting on a (clean) bus through a transportation infrastructure that worked, but was more expensive than places with dirty busses that leave whenever they are full, we ended up in Tel Aviv, to be welcomed by rain. After deciding to stay here rather than try to get to the north, we found a hostel and then went for a walk down the beach. It was still raining, so we ended up in a restaurant for about 4 hours eating a ton of food that Maura's mom paid for (apparently she just told Maura that she would pay for a nice dinner...) Then Daniella headed off to family shabat and Nate, Maura and I went back to the hotel and crashed. We got up the next morning, Nate and Maura went running, but I just went swimming because my stomach was not really happy with me (it really wasn't happy the whole time we were in Israel...) Then we went to Haifa, where we walked around, saw some Bahai gardens and ran into Maura friend from GW who is studying in Israel. Then we went back to tel Aviv and met Daniella and he family friend, a probably 60 something lady who was born in the US but moved to Israel 30 years ago and lives in Jerusalem. So she drove us back to Jerusalem and let us stay in her house. That night was halloween and we spent it eating fake M&M's jellybeans and gummy worms. The next day we went back to the old city, which is like the ones in Damascus and Allepo, but I think a little bigger. Here we ran into another group of CIEE'rs. After we talked for a little they headed to the bus station, which was a mistake, because the four of us + Drew (who decided to join us) went back to the wailing wall and got into the temple mount. It's pretty cool. Dome of the rock (the gold dome that's always on TV) was cool and there is a whole complex with a nice big courtyard and a couple mosques. I didn't really feel anything special there, but it is weird to have actually been to the place that so many people have died fighting over.

After the dome of the rock we just headed back to Amman.

I decided to try picassa for pictures this time since flickr took so long to upload before.

http://picasaweb.google.com/cbehrer/

Note: pictures of this trip and from petra, wadi rum and aqaba are on flickr. Vietnam pictures will stay on photobucket, but I decided to try something different this time. I just put up a select few (72) pictures instead of the hundreds of repeats and boring ones that I normally put up. I don't know if I will stick with flickr or not, but hopefully this link will hold a slideshow for your viewing pleasure...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43226336@N08/sets/72157622501715286/show/

So our adventure continued to Damascus on Sunday. We left Baalback on Sunday morning with the general idea that we would take a minibus to Zahle or some other bigger town farther south were we would get a service taxi to Damascus. First we found food for the day...we had bananas that we bought the night before, so we just had to pick up some freshly baked pita bread and a few snickers bars to create the greatest backpacking meal ever (adding peanut-butter, honey or nutella is a good idea if you have them). One of the guys that we met on our food quest spoke very good english (he had been to australia for an unknown amount of time long enough to make him basically fluent) and he told us that we wanted to go to Chtura to get our taxi. Other than sounding like it should be somewhere in Russia I'm not really sure what Chtura has going for it. We got dropped off by a group of maybe 15 cars/minibuses and a couple drivers. After we negotiated a price to take us all the way to Damascus we had ourselves a cab. This cab turned out to be the biggest hassle of our whole trip. We used our limited arabic and the limited english that was communally available to convey to our cab driver that we would pay him 100,000 LL (60 ish dollars) to drive us to Damascus. The critical part of the translation that we are convinced our driver understood (but later pretended that he didn't) was that we were Americans without a visa and we would probably get stopped at the border for about 5 hours. He said this was fine.

So we drive to the border to get out of lebanon, with two other syrians in the front seat and the three of us in the back, with curtained windows and the beer that he was smuggling in. Getting out of Lebanon went fine. We then drove the syrian border station (which was about a mile away) and here stuff got stupid. As expected it would take us about 5 hours to get in because the border guys had to fax our information to Damascus who then had to fax back permission for us to enter the country. We sort of knew that this would happen so we were fine with that, but our cab driver was not. He pretended that he thought we would get through in an hour, and when he realized that this wouldn't happen he wanted to leave us there (which we were fine with) but still wanted all the money (which we were not fine with). So an hour of cross language 'negotiations' occurred, involving us, some kurdish dudes, our syrian driver and his really annoying syrian friends, some lebanese guys who spoke some english, the money exchange guy who also seemed to serve as the translator and visa salesman, and just about the whole border place. Sticking points were: no we aren't going to pay you 60$ for driving us 15 minutes...you knew that we would get stuck...La, la arif, mumkin wahid sa'a, lakin la sa'a wa sa'a was sa'a wa sa'a (No, I didn't know maybe 1 hour, but not hours and hours and hours)...Na'am, nechnu natakellam sa'a wa sa'a wa sa'a (yes, we said it would be hours and hours and hours)...la (no)...well guys this is going nowhere, but he's still got our bags locked in his trunk...at one point we had an us speaking in english to a kurdish guy who spoke kurdish and english, who would then speak in kurdish to his friend who spoke kurdish and arabic, who would speak to our taxi driver who spoke arabic. It would them come back around. We got nothing done. Eventually we got our stuff out of the trunk and had to pay him about 40$ which is still highway robbery, but we did the best we could.

After all that our visa's started to get processed, which took about 4 hours, during which we ate our banana snickers bar sandwiches, listened to music, and read about our upcoming trips to egypt and turkey.

After our visa's went through everyone got really nice and friendly, which turned out to be a recurring event in Syria. We then walked across the border, which was pretty cool, and got in a bus to Damascus. This was a nice drive, and after a quick cab ride from the station we ended up at our hotel with plenty of time to spare. We stayed at Al-Rabie hotel and if you are ever in Damascus you must stay there. We slept on the roof , which was covered with a big piece of canvas, and they served nice breakfasts every morning and the staff was awesome and very helpful.

I'm not going to do Syria chronologically because I don't want to. But we ate a lot of falafel sandwiches and lemon italian ice ish stuff because it was really cheap. The old city is awesome. The mosque is amazing. The souqs are really cool. The ice cream was really good (if you'll ever go to Damascus, you know what ice cream I mean). Azez Palace is cool. Kids shot us with airsoft guns. I bought patrick and grandma presents. At one point I just put my camera on a table and recorded about 7 minutes of people just walking by on the street, which is one of the really cool aspects of Damascus that is hard to explain, but cool to experience.

We took two day trips from Damascus. One was to Palmyra, Nate, Drew and I (the general trio of the trip) were accompanied by an Australian girl that we met in our hotel. We left Damascus at about 6:30 after almost being taken to Homs because we got on the wrong bus (it was pulling out of the parking lot and everyone said it was going to Palmyra, which it was, eventually, but we were saved by a nice guy who then took us to the bus that went directly to Palmyra). There are roman ruins in Palmyra, they are pretty cool. They are the second set of pictures of ruins on the flickr site, the first being Baalback. We hiked up a hill with a castle on it that overlooked the ruins, the view was pretty sweet, and the castle was cool too.

We got a ride from some guy in a van with his kid back to the bus station and got a 2 pm bus (nicest bus I have even been on) back to Damascus. That night I think we went out to dinner with some of the cohort of 25 ciee students in Damascus at the time.

The other excursion was to Allepo. Drew decided to do a different trip, so this time it was Nate, me, Alicia and Helena. We took the night train (we couldn't really get much sleep) up to Allepo, and walked to the old city. We saw the citadel, which was cool, and walked through the souq which was awesome. Much more traditionally Syrian than the ones in Damascus. Nate and I found a great hummus place that we went to twice, but that probably made us really, really sick (later) and I bought mom and really nice christmas present. I want to keep it, but I'm not really at the point in my life where I can use it yet( how's that for a cryptic clue?), so I suppose I will have to hand it over when I get home. We spent a while just sort of sitting around in the mosque and not really doing much before deciding that we were ditching the original plan of taking the night train back and left. We wanted to get on the 3:30 train, but it was full, so we took a bus instead. When we got back to Damascus we didn't do much.

The next morning we were leaving. I met a guy who graduated from Harvard and had lived in Winthrop house, and got one of the traveling fellowships, so he had been in Tanzania and stuff for 14 months. After a bit of confusion dealing with meeting up with Daniella and getting money to pay for exit visas etc. We went to the bus station, where we were told we could get taxi's to amman. We ended up with a taxi to Irbid, where we were handed off to another taxi that took us to amman. We ate banana's and listened to music on the way back. Daniella has heard of john butler trio, which was exciting. You should listen to them if you haven't. Youtube the federation square concert, especially Ocean.

Crossing the border out of syria was a non-issue. And we got back to amman safe and sound. Just in time for me (and as I would find out later, Nate as well) to succumb to about 30 hours of uncontrollable diarrhea and a fever that was probably around 104. My host family and Jordan were semi-freaking out trying to help me however they could. Offering all sorts of remedies which I refused, advocating sleep, fluids, and ibuprofin. After 24 hours mom (the real one, not the jordanian one) told me to go to the hospital. So I went. I had a stomach parasite probably from the hummus. They gave me antibiotics. I'm all better now.

After that I had a week of school which was boring. Last night Joe (from minnesota, he's really cool) we to dinner with Joe's jordanian friend Khaled. It was cool. I had hummus, it wasn't as good as the stuff from Allepo, but I'm not sick yet, so I guess its a pretty even trade. I bought myself a folding chess/checkers/backgammon board.

Today I didn't really do anything interesting. I ran this morning, I'm really, really, really out of shape, then I spent the day reading/sort of studying/sort of wasting time/uploading photo and writing this.

It has been far too long since I posted anything, sorry. My first month in Amman was a strange time in which it felt like nothing was really happening, but it was impossible to really get anything substantive done...perhaps this is the effect of Ramadan, but it (and infrequent access to the internet) is the root cause of my having only managed a half-hearted post thus far. I will try to make up for that here, but I don't really remember what I wrote in the last post, so I may repeat myself quite a bit.

I'm living with a family in Derg Bahr (spelling?) which is a pretty well off neighborhood in south western amman. I share a bedroom with another CIEE student, Jourdan, who is from Indonesia, but goes to Wesleyan. My host parents divorced, so I live with the mother, two bothers, and a sister. Rami is the older brother (26) and he works at HSBC. Yazzan is the younger brother (22), he just graduated from music school and started work at a new job today, I'm not sure exactly what it is. While it would be weird for men that old to still be living with their parents in the US, it is pretty much how things are done here...children generally live with their parents until the get married. Leal is my host sister and she is 16.

Classes don't really feel like they have gotten going yet, perhaps because I just had a nine day break (expanded upon below), but I am taking a middle eastern studies class called america and the arabs, an international relations class about diplomacy, and two arabic classes, one fus-ha (modern standard) and one amia (how people actually talk).

The university is pretty nice, our classrooms aren't all that nice (compared to harvard, which is probably unfair) but there are trees lining the walkways and stuff.

I haven't seen a ton of Amman yet, but if you are looking for some great enlightening description of how it is different than cities in the US or europe or where ever, sorry, I don't have one. Perhaps this is because cities really aren't as different as people think they are, or perhaps I'm not very good at noticing that sort of thing. The people speak arabic, and there are signs in arabic, but there is also a ton of english and western restaurants and stuff (McDonalds and Burger king and those that you would expect, but also places like hardees and popeyes chicken). There aren't many poor people on the streets selling junk like there were in Vietnam, and there is not as much racial diversity as there is in U.S. cities so there are some differences...but mostly people drive their cars, there are stores, people seem to live mostly in apartments. It is generally hilly city that is organized around 8 circles...which would make perfect sense if they were concentric circles of increasing diameter, but they are not. They are just 8 roundabouts that happen to be on the same road (that doesn't actually go in a straight line) that runs east to west across the city.

Food has been good so far. Flavors are much stronger here than in the US...

I suppose that that's about it in terms of general summary so now I'll turn to my trip over the Eid el Fitr (end of ramadan) break. We had nine days off, but since the holiday is based on the moon, we didn't know how many days we would have off until about a week before the break, which is a bummer because I would rather have spent nine days going to Turkey so I could see everything there, but flights were ridiculously expensive, so we (me, Nate (George Washington ) and Drew (BC)) decided to go to Lebanon and syria.

We left after class on thursday and flew to Beirut. Immigration and customs were a non-issue, and we ended up at our hotel at about 10:30. After checking in we just went to a store around the corner to get water and then went to bed early. The next day we got up pretty early and went looking for a restaurant that the guy from the hotel recommended. We didn't find it, but we found a little bakery where we could get egg cheese and tomato wraps. They said that we were the first people to ever order egg and cheese together, and thought that it was a pretty strange combination. But there were a kid working there who was probably 15 or 16 and spoke some english and was helpful and fun to talk to. After breakfast we went to see the mosque, which was sweet, and then we went to Jeita grotto. You should google that to see pictures and stuff because you aren't allowed to take them while you are there, so I don't have any, but it is this huge cave that is pretty sweet, but has been turned into a pretty touristy place. We spent about an hour going through the program there, and then headed back to beirut. We had our cab drop us off across the city from our hotel and made our way leisurely back, taking in the sights (Pigeon rocks, AUB, etc) as we went. We spent a while trying to find the Roman baths, and never did, but ended up wandering through a pretty up-scale shopping district for a while. Two general notes about Beirut. 1) people have really nice cars and 2) The city is kind of strange in that there are really nice buildings and really awful buildings (while is normal), but it Beirut, there are right next to each other. They weren't segregated into nice areas and run down areas like in other major cities.

After our walk we relaxed in our hotel with a group of other CIEE students who had come, and some other travelers. Then we went out for dinner, we played backgammon and sort of drew dinner out for a while, and then just came back and went to sleep.

The next day Nate, Drew, and I went to Baalbeck. This transit was a bit of an experience. Our hotel guy said that we could catch a couple busses to get us there and drew us a little map. This led us to walk a couple blocks from our hotel and get to where we were supposed to get the first bus right as it was pulling up, so after we hurriedly made sure it was the right one, we all jumped in and headed off to meet our next bus. This transfer apparently happens under a highway overpass in who knows where Beirut, but I supposed that that is how things work in Lebanon, and everyone assured us that we were, in fact, headed to Baalback. On the way some bridge was closed so we had to take a pretty windy narrow road that back up traffic a lot because there was often barely enough room for two cars to pass each other going opposite directions.

But end up in Baalback we did, and after checking into our hotel and decided that this place was definitely real and that we should pretend that we were Canadian, we headed to the Roman ruins, which are supposed to be some of the best preserved in the world. They were pretty sweet, but also pretty hard to comprehend what we were seeing...we lazed about there for a while (Nate took a nap) before going back to our hotel and figure out dinner. We ended up going to a restaurant on the 6th floor of some building with a nice view of the ruins and had a pretty good dinner.

Then we wandered through the streets and bought some pastries at a bakery, and just took in the end of ramadan festivities, which as far as we could tell involved everyone in the tiny little town getting in their cars and driving around in circles, causing terrible traffic and a whole lot of horn blowing.

The next day we decided to go to Damascus, but I'm tired of writing right now, so I'll come back and finish this later.

I've walked down by the sea

Note: I'm now in Amman, but wrote some of this while I was still in Vietnam...the title really works for both, so it's going to be a really long post.

The previously mentioned collection of buses, trains, and boats took brought me from Sapa to Cat Ba Town in almost exactly 24 hours with only a could things worth noting.

First, my train-car-mates were much more interesting this time. One was an old vietnamese man who just went to sleep and another was a vietnamese teenager who did the same, but the other three were travelers from germany and austria. Two were beginning a 7 week trip around vietnam/cambodia/loas and the third had just joined them for Sapa and was about to head home.
We talked for a little bit, but after about 10 minutes they started talking in german, so I was lost. Then they decided that since they weren't tired, they wanted to play drinking games. At this point, I decided to go to sleep. The train pulled into Hanoi at the completely logical hour of 4 am and I started to make my way back to the backpacker alley in the old quarter. This didn't work at all. After asking four or five different people who didn't speak english for directions and being told (show/gestured etc) that non of them could even tell me where on my map I was, and also being told to go in basically completely opposite directions, I decided to give up and take a cab. I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't find my way back until the cab driver dropped me off and the street sign had a completely different name than my map did, and the absolutely huge 4 lane road that I had been walking along was nowhere on my map. Whatever. This may be a good point to make an observation about Vietnamese street names. They are all the same. Not quite literally all, but almost. According to Laura, there are only about 10 surnames in Vietnamese, and all streets are names after revolutionaries. So in every city there is a Le Loi, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Vo Thi Sau, Dien Bien Phu, Hai Ba Trung, Tran Quo Thao etc. I'm all for honoring national heroes, but a little creativity wouldn't hurt.

After booking my hostel room for Thursday I sat around waiting for my 8 am bus. After a couple hours this put me on a boat in Ha Long Bay. I had decided to use a tour company for transportation so I could see the bay, which is the premier tourist site in Vietnam and I think a world heritage sight. It's really beautiful, but it was all foggy, so I didn't take many pictures, google it. We stopped at a huge cave that was way touristed out, but still amazingly enormous.

Then back on the boat, switch to a bus, and I ended up in Cat Ba Town.
[This is as far as I got in Vietnam, I don't really have the patience to do a detailed account of the rest now, so it'll be a summary]

The next day I went deep water soloing....or climbing on the islands that come out of the sea with out ropes or anything, if you fall you land in the water. It was really hard. Most of the time I was basically just scared out of my mind. Maybe because I hadn't climbed in a while, maybe because I hadn't climbed outside a ton, probably because I'm just not that good of a climber, I didn't really do all that well and fell a lot. I think that not having climbed outside much was a big hindrance, because even while I was scared of doing moves and stuff I was totally conscious of the fact that the footholds and hand holds that I was scared of trusting were laughable good and safe compared to what I climb on in the gym at school, but I guess that's the difference that falling 30 feet into water versus falling 5 feet onto a mat will make. Whatever, it was an experience.

Then I took various boats, buses, taxi's, planes etc. back to Hanoi, then HCMC to pack everything up and then back to the states.

Two weeks at Bama's, T-creek, home and boston were spent absorbing as much of home as possible and convincing myself that going to jordan for 4.5 months was a good idea, and now I'm here.

The first few days were orientation which were unremarkable except that the first day of orientation was at the dead sea. Yes you float. The water also burned your face because its so salty. This weekend was spent in my homestay getting to know my family. A mom, 26 year old brother Rami, 20 year old other brother and 16 year old sister, and roommate from wesleyan. Nice house, nice area of town. Today was the first day of arabic class....just a get to know you sort of day.

This is becoming less and less of a nice polished entry (not that I ever write those) and more a random collection of thoughts...so I'll continue with that.

I haven't really experienced a ton yet, but mostly it seems pretty similar to the US...except the arabic language part and then ramadan fasting....There is a lot of english and a lot of american stuff....obviously McDonalds and Burger King and Starbucks....but also Popeyes and Hardees...really? Popeyes?....

It's not unbearable hot, low 80's but it's hard to be outside since we aren't allowed to eat or drink in public.

Food is different, but good so far. Very strong flavors.

Tons of American TV. We watched an old CSI episode last night.

It's weird what aspects of american culture have come here...my 20 (?) year old host brother knows all about x-hibit and pimp my ride....

Being in a foreign country makes you wonder how american's (me included) can be so ignorant of some aspects of their surroundings....the specific example I'm thinking of came when one of my host brothers asked about internet in the US. He knew exactly how fast his internet was like kb/sec. I had no clue...it's fast...I don't know the numbers....This happened with population in Vietnam....

My family has a silver toyota echo, just like yours, Beth, but it's not a stick shift.

I've been reading a lot of the fountainhead. It's really good.

Well I've been up to the Mountains

So I finished work on Friday. Thursday night after having worked in the office all Thursday wthout much to show for it, I was a little skeptical that I would get everything done before I left Saturday morning for Hanoi. But Friday I went across the street to the cafe, and either because I worked well, or because I had simply over estimated how much I had left to do, I finished everything by about 2. I read and re-read everything several times, and then headed over to the office to get my files (the 40 or so pdf's) transferred onto the network. Then I emailed Ben and Laura my final documents and left. I headed over the Ben Thanh and Pham Ngu Lao to pick up my suit and buy Devon's backpack. The backpack was really cheap, and as far as I can tell, it is real...I really don't need anymore backpacks, but there are some dueters that looks like 3000 c.u. or so for like 13$...hmmm.

I also got two more button downs and two polo's that patrick has since told me were fake. But they looked real to me.

Then I looked around for some more gifts etc. but didn't end up getting anything, and headed back to my room. I packed, both for hanoi, and the rest of my bags, and could not get to sleep. This turned out to be a major bummer that came back to bit me on saturday. My flight left at 6:30 so I got up for 4:45, after having not fallen asleep until about 12:30. I slept some on the plane, but when I got to Hanoi, I was pretty cranky. I went to the backpacker district to try to get a better handle on what I was going to do this week. I know I wanted to go to Sapa and to Cat Ba island, but the guy that I've been emailing about climbing at Cat ba hadn't really given me anything concrete, so I spent from about 9-11 figuring that stuff out. I was kinda short with they guy that I was buying tickets and stuff from, and I got pretty mad at the 5 or 6 teenagers who wanted to shine my salomon hiking shoes...I regretted this basically immediately, but I was still cranky.

Then I got an american breakfast of french toast and bacon hoping that this would improve my mood, but while I was eating I discovered that the Ho Chi Minh Mosoleum was only open from 8-11 a.m. So I missed that...bummer. Then I walked over to the lake and got the bus to the museum of ethnology, which patrick and lonely planet both said was cool.

I must have just been really cranky (it was really hot) or maybe I am just flat out not a museum person. I tried to enjoy this, and some of it was kinda interesting...reading about pottery was kinda cool, but mostly just made me want to do pottery... but overall I dno, it wasn't all that...

Then I got the bus back, which involved getting charged twice, because I wanted to ride around the whole loop so I could sit in the air conditioned bus. Bogus.

After that I sat at a cafe by the lake and read my book for a little, and then got dinner in the same coffee shop chain that I have been hanging out in HCMC because I needed to charge my ipod. Then it was off to the train station for my night train to Sapa. The beds were pretty hard, but I guess I got a decent amount of sleep. After getting to sapa at about 6 (this involved a jam packed bus from Lao Cai) and ate breakfast/dozed/read my book until about 8, when I stopped feeling like a zombie (coffee probably helped). Then I looked at the map, and decided that Sapa was pretty small, and that I didn't want to pay 50-60$ to do a guided trek. So I ended up walking about 8 km out along the road through the mountains to a waterfall. I'm not really sure why I did this, but I wanted to do something, and the exercise wasn't going to kill me. Besides being on a paved road, and the motorbikes and cars passing, it was a pretty nice walk. The water falls were pretty cool too, really touristy, but you could climb up off of the touristy path to the bottom of the highest fall. I spent probably 2 hours up there reading, just sitting, and semi-swimming (there wasn't a huge pool of water, but you could submerge yourself). I also managed to get myself sunburned. Darn.

Then I walked back to Sapa. Along the way I saw an oldish guy (late 50's to early 60's) on a bike with paniers. I asked him if he was touring all of vietnam or just out for a couple days. Turns out that his english was "very small" but that he spoke spanish. So in a 3-ish minute conversation, I (a) figured out that he was riding through most of northern Vietnam (b) told him about dad's trips and (c) realized how much spanish I have forgotten.

When I got back to Sapa town, there was some official proceeding going on the the square, so I watched that for a little bit, but then got bored since I couldn't tell what was going on. I went back to my hotel and showered, and then spent the rest of the nice wandering around the town (really small) reading my book in the square, and eating dinner. I was totally beat by about 7:15, so I went back to my room and listened to the economist for a little and fell asleep at 9.

This morning I woke up at 7, had breakfast, and then went out to explore the market and cat cat village. The prices of things here are ridiculous, to the point that I am convinced that all of this stuff is fake and I just can't tell....but like nice 250$ northface rain parkas for like 25$...

Anyways, Cat Cat Village is like a 3 km walk down the hill, and was pretty disappointing. I spend about 10 minutes sitting watching the waterfall, which was nice, but not amazing, but most of the rest of it was just little stalls with the same assortment of blankets and handbags and stuff that were sold in the main town. So I walked backup the hill and went to the little park to read my book. Some touris guy really wanted to take a picture of his daughter next to me, so he did, me sitting on the ground leaning against a tree, this girl who seemed to be the only other one to find this really weird, and a Sapa native who had come over and just stood next to me for like 10 minutes.

Then I decided to walk to the stadium to see if it was interesting...not really, but there was a man made lake there, and two little girls joined me on my walk, waiting to try to convince me to buy stuff from them. After the lake I kept walking around and found a pair of sandles for like $11. I will probably get made fun of when I get home because these are to replace my black chacos ones that are a few sizes too big and thus not all that comfortable. Then I bought mom some coasters and some braclets. There is a ton of handmade, but still mass produced woven stuff here that could be cool....skirts, pollowcases, pants, wall hangings, handbags etc. etc. etc. but its hard to tell what people would want, so sorry, but mom you got coasters, and patrick dad and devon you all get a braclet (I got 4 matching ones...if you want the 4th mom, you can have it) to go along with your presents from hcmc.

At this point, I feel like I've seen most of Sapa, so I'm back in my hotel writing this, waiting for my bus back to lao cai, to get my train back to hanoi to get my bus/boat/bus to cat ba town.

A few observations about Sapa though....it's in the mountains...this is nice...it's so much cooler...this is also nice, but led me to take too much advantage of being able to be comfortable sitting outside which resulted in sunburn....it's really touristy, just like the rest of the places I've been. This is sort of a double edged sword....it makes getting aaround really easy and cheap, but to some extent it also lessens the experience. There are literally hundred of women and girls in this 5 street town selling stuff. They are all dressed up in traditional clothes, but when they pull out cell phones and hop on motorbikes to go home it's a bit of a conflict of images....Also, my room was pretty nice...corner room with two big windows. Unfortunately the mountains have been pretty foggy so views weren't great.

Okay, so that's that, time for some peanut butter and crackers and then 24 hours of busses trains and boats that will hopefully end with some deep water soloing off cat ba island. (if you don't know what that means, I'm hoping for something like this
http://www.evolvesports.com/2006/images/es%20pontas2.jpg)

Sit Down Young Stranger and tell us where you've been.

Certainly.

Angkor Wat is incredible. Absolutely incredible. I will get to that later though, and probably not come close to doing it justice.

To finish filling in gaps and expanding on my last hasty post, the beginning of last week was just work...writing and reading where I need information to fill stuff in. There is another intern from Harvard. I don't remember her name...she's going to be a senior and will be at FETP for a month, basically right up until school starts. Anyways, Wednesday we left at about 10 in one of the FETP vans for the Mekong delta. It takes about 5 hours to get there even though its only 120 or so kilometers because there is only a two lane road that's really bad and crowded. Note here...roads and bridges are under separate departments of the government, which means that the transititions from a road onto a bridge and then back off is less that ideal. It's basically a like a kicker ( jump for skiing etc) so if your driver doesn't slow down enough before going over the bridge, you get launched into the air.

So after that drive and a ferry ride we ended up in the Mekong delta. It isn't really what I had expected before I got to Vietnam, but JP and Widha went the first week that I was here, and told me that it was not the natural expanse of rice fields and rivers that you expect, so I wasn't surprised when it was not. We met with some woman who runs a business. But the whole meeting was in Vietnamese...so I sat there sort of reading Laura's notes and trying to not look too bored. Then we checked into our hotel before dinner with some FETP alums. One of the courses was fieldmouse, which is the delta is apparently famous for...it was pretty good, but, not surprisingly, there wasn't much meat on it. Then we went out to a cafe, and not wanting to have caffiene this late, I tried iced hot chocolate, which was awesome.

The next day we met with Vo Tong Xuan, the rector of Can Tho university. He is basically pretty idolized in Vietnam. He does a lot with rice harvesting and stuff and is just really smart etc. He's pretty old too, and you can tell that he's getting a little fed up with dealing with an ineffient and illogical government etc. But he wasn't really as bitter as one would expect, or at least didn't show it. He was pretty cheerful and made jokes and stuff. And this meeting was in english, so I could follow what was going on. Sort of. I didn't really follow everything about rice production etc. But I learning a little bit about some of the questions I had on funding for research and stuff (I had these questions because I needed the answers to write, not because the subject is all that interesting).

After our meeting we went out to "put something in the stomach" and then started back to HCMC. We were giving Vo Tong Xuan a ride back because he had to interview some people who had applied to his school.

At this point my ever present self second-guessing bubbled over into a sizable existential breakdown about whether I should go to Jordan, so I spent most of Thursday and Friday thinking, reading, and emailing trying to figure that out. End result: I'm still going to Jordan.

This however meant that my original plan to go to angkor wat over the weekend fell through. This didn't really matter because Ben said I could go whenever I wanted. So I 'worked' in the cafe across the street sunday, and then Monday I headed to Cambodia. Getting to Angkor wat involves a six hour bus ride from HCMC to Phnom Penh, and then another 6 hour bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, which is about 8 km outside of angkor wat. The bummer here is that since you are crossing a border, they can't do this as a night bus, so it takes a full day to get there and a full day to get back. And then roads are awful. Bumpy as all get out.

But other than Phnom Penh, or at least the little bit that I saw, not being very nice, and the normal comedy of absolutley irrelevant border security, these bus trips yielded only two notable occurances. The first was the roadside areas where we stopped for breaks...which are absolutely overrun by little girls selling fruit. I bought some pinapple both on the way and the way back, which was good. The second occurance is just sort of the everyday life here making an impression that I want to write about. This was in Phnom Penh on the way back from Siem Reap today. And it was pretty depressing to see the looks of utter dissappointment of about 10 grown men (who had just run down the street down the street to be at the door of our bus when it stopped) when they realized that no tourists who they could drive to their hotels were getting off, and that this was just a stop where our bus driver unloaded his (I suspect semi-blackmarket) passengers of native Cambodians who he picks up on the side of the road. Pretty sad.

Okay.

ANGKOR WAT

I arrived in Siem Reap at about 8:00 pm and found my way to my hotel by a combination of walking and an unnecesarry tuk-tuk ride that only took me about half a km. After checking in and arranging my tuk-tuk throughout the park the next day (this was not totally necesarry, but I didn't realize how much the guides I read were exagerrating when they said that things were a spread out enough to make biking pretty inefficient, and the tuk-tuk ended up being very convient, and wasn't that expensive, so whatever) I went next door to the grocery store and bought oreos peanut butter bread and cereal, and then went to bed early.

The next morning I got up at 4:45 and headed to the park to watch the sun rise over angkor wat.

This seems like a good place to stop going chronologically for a bit and just write. As I said, there is now way that I am going to be able to do this place justice in writing, maybe the bajillion (slight exaggeration) pictures that I took will do a slightly better job (not exaggerating at all, I took over 800 in 13 hours) but this place is something that is only fully appreciated by experiencing it. It is without any shadow of a doubt the most amazing place that I have ever been. Out of respect to Petra, Wadi Rum, the pyramids, machu pichu or where ever else I end up going, I will reserve judgement of the coolest place ever for a while, but this is definitely up there. I also have really no idea how to go about explaining it, so I'll try a series of observations, and see where that leaves us.

First off Angkor Wat is the name that people generally use to refer to the Angkor Archeological Park. And that might not even be the official name, I don't want to look it up. But within the park, there is the specific temple of Angkor Wat, which is way more that a temple, basically a complex...it huge. At the main area there are two loops, which are each supposed to take a day or so. I got through both in 1 day, even though I was making a concious effort to go slow. The other temples are kinda far away, so I decided that I had seen everything I came to see and came home a day early, which is why I'm writing this now, and not tomorrow. Yesterday was just about perfect though, easily the most complete and amazing day of sightseeing/traveling I have every experienced, so the combination of not entirely wanting to ride for 80+ km to see just one or two more temples, saving some money, hopefully finishing my work with, and not wanting to force myself into another day of sightseeing that would tarnish my angkor experience, I'm pretty confident that coming back to hcmc today was the right decision. Anyways, I digress.

Here's a link to wikipedia's angkor page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor and there was also an article in national geographic recently, but basically, this park is the ruins of a massively awesome civilization that existed from sometime like the 9th to the 15th century or there abouts....basically like a southeast asia version of the inca's or the mayans....I don't know enough about ancient civilizations to know if that's an entirely fair comparison, but when I say temples...we are talking about like really old, absolutely freaking massive stone pyramids and stuff, not like the wooden pagoda things I've been seeing. So that is point number 1.

Point 2. Scale. This place is absolutely massive. Yes basically everything is called a temple and was. But the park is basically the remains of an entire civilization. One of the 'temples' had a population of like 12,000 (not counting the 80,000 slaves) and there are 20+ temples in the main area. Some of them sprawling complexes, some 80 meter high pyramids that you can climb up, some of them a combination of both, and some entirely different.

Point 3. Detail. The carvings etc. were amazing...and the architecture of several of the temples was just amazing. The same image thousands, if not millions of times over. Turrents that were actually sculptures of heads, and like 25 of the exact same such turret/head on one temple. The entire backwall of one temple was a mural/statue of a reclining buddha. The bas reliefs at angkor wat were particularly amazing.

Point 4. Angkor is an archeological park. At times it is an archeolgical sight, at times it is a park, at times it is truly a unification of both. Particularly Ta som temple, which is in semi rubble and being overgrown by trees and it utterly mindblowing at times.

Point 5. I took way to many pictures...I wasn't kidding about 800+ in the 13 hours that I was there. A lot of them are pretty repetetive. This is a combination of 1) my lack of photography skills and thus my resorting to the approach that "hey, if I take 50 pictures of the same sunset or sunrise, 1 or 2 have to turn out good right?" 2) my experiments with exposure etc. settings 3) the generally continuous state of awe that this place engenders. I will start the massive task of uploading these tomorrow. There is probably no need to look at all 800 individually, but I don't feel like going through and picking out which I think people should look at, so all 800 will go up provided photobucket allows it. View that as you wish.

Point 6. I am clearly absolutely failing at describing this place through words, and even now have start to lose the feeling of absolute awe that was a pretty much constant state all of yesterday. Maybe pictures will explain better. Maybe me talking about it as I show you pictures will work. But I don't think either will really compare to being there.

Point 7. At two points I stopped and took pictures of/watched hundreds of ants trekking back and for and back and forth doing whatever it is that ants do....I don't know if there is a literary term for the comparison/thoughts/ whatever of these hundreds if not thousands of ants crawling all over thousand year old buildings that were build by thousands of people in much the same mass labor sort of way. If there is, then this was the textbook definition, if not, then we need a new word.

Point 8. So this is just going to be a quick run down of the day, now that I'm done trying to describe the experience.

4:45-5:10 Get up, go downstairs to the tuk-tuk. Eat cereal as we drive through Siem Reap on the way to the park, passing lots of people on bicycles

5:15 Get the park, buy ticket, get dropped of outside the main temple.

5:15-7:30 Go inside, wander around, wait with about 400 people for the sun to rise. Start taking entirely too many pictures, after the sun has risen, go into the actual temple, which is freaking huge, become amazed by the bas reliefs and the simple scale of this place.

7:30 - 9:30 ish Get tuk-tuk-ed to Angkon Thom, spend about 2 hours wandering through 2 temples and the elepant promenade area...Bayon is sick

9:30 - 2:30 Finish the big loop and the little loop, even though I'm trying to take my time...In general constant state of awe, Ta Keo and Ta Som are the highlights

2:45 - 4:15 Go back to Angkor Wat because I don't really have anything else to do until the sun starts to go down. Take a couple more pictures, but mostly read 1984 in the 800+ year old library.

4:15-4:30 wait hoping that clouds will blow over so I can see a sunset.

4:30-5:15 clouds do not blow over, but I decided to go the temple on top of the mountain where most people watch the sunset anways. Sat up here in the rain for a little while.

5:15-6:30 Rain stops, clouds clear somewhat, I sit on the edge of the mountain top temple with Katie and her dad (she graduated from BC in 05 and works in Phnom Penh at the bank where one of my friends from harvard had an internship this, and I think, last summer (2 different friends) small world) we watch the sun set for about an hour. I take entirely too many pictures again. Not that spectacular of a sun set, but a pretty cool experience. At 6:30 we get kicked off of the temple, because they all close at sunset, but I got a few pictures of the moon rising on the other side.

6:30-10 Head back the hotel fall asleep reading 1984/watching nat'l geographic.

Then I got up early again this morning and was thwarted out of what I though would be my own private bus back to Phnom Penh by a two ladies traveling together, one from france, one from spain. As noted above I wouldn't have had my own bus, because it stops along the way and picks up native cambodians on the side of the road until it is basically full. Somehow I don't think the bus driver tells the bus agency that he does this (he probably keeps the money that he charges too), but they probably wouldn't care anyways.

So that's that. It was amazing, I can't descibe it very well in writing, I'll get the pictures up asap, and if you are ever in SE Asia, this is hands down the number 1 place I would recommend going.

edit: look what came up on my "places to see" mygoogle tab...

http://www.etravelreviews.com/angkorwat/

I'm just gonna take a minute....

and update. Blogspot has been broken recently, so I haven't gotten to post. But it is also late (well not really, but relative to when I have to wake up tomorrow it's getting there). So since my last post, which was almost exactly a week ago if I remember correctly the elusive trip the the Mekong Delta occurred. It was alright, more details in ensuring posts. But Laura has headed back to the States for a wedding, and Ben is jetting around the world for conferences and presentations, so Ben basically gave me free reign to do whatever I want for the rest of my time here. He said I can take as much time to travel as I want, and even finish writing up what I have learned when I get back to the states and just email it to him. I'm going to try to avoid that, it'd be nice to not have work hanging over my head during my two weeks at home.

So I have spent most of the last 3 days in a cafe under and american magnet hotel because they have wireless and the internet in my guesthouse is broken. I haven't gotten nearly as much work done as I should have.

Tomorrow I leave for Cambodia and Angkor Wat.

Okay, that was very rushed, because I need to go pack. I will fill everything in with more details at some later point, this was intended mainly as a reference for me to return to when I do so.