THE WORLD HAS TURNED...

You left enchanted by my intellect....

2010-07-24T07:01:00.019+07:00

or maybe you didn't....

In case it was ever unclear, inspiration for title, both of the blog and this post:

So it is now August of 2010. 8 Months after this post should have been written and almost a year after I was about to leave for Jordan. This post title brings that aspect of the blog full circle; see lyrics to "The world has turned and left me here" by Weezer.

I actually wrote a post in that hostel in Turkey on my last night after Nate had left, but the computer deleted it, and it had taken about 45 minutes to write, so I didn't feel like writing it again. Then getting home and christmas and getting ready for spring semester, and then spring semester all got in the way of telling the story of an awesome week in Turkey. This post will be different from the rest of the blog in that it will be written way after the fact; and will therefore obviously focus on the moments that really stuck with me, rather than passing amusements; it is unclear how much difference this will make.

After our last apartment dinner and goodbye's to everyone, I went home (dropped Daniela off along the way) and packed up my whole room in about 45 minutes. Then I checked everything for my flight to turkey and my flight home to the states, piled all of my big bags up in a corner and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning I said bye to Jourdan and the host family (though I would see the host fam. on the way back from Turkey) and met Nate at the Air Jordan bus station.

There is a moment here that is sticking with me. I was there first (as I have a terribly compulsive habit of getting everywhere that I'm supposed to be ridiculously early). As I waited for Nate and listened to music and thought about the semester, I got a text from Nate a minute after we had agreed on meeting saying something like "i'll be there in 2 minutes, sorry." Which jogged memories of another time when he had texted me at a bus station while he was off on a long bathroom break (really too long) saying "fine, eating." Which prompted Brianna to note that he seemed to know me very well and knew that I would be worrying. This very digressive paragraph is a longwinded way of saying that the people that I made friends with in Jordan seemed to just get me right away. Not just nate, but also brianna and daniella. Which was really cool.

Anyway, 6 month late melodramatic thoughts aside, we got to the airport, absurdly early again, (by which I mean 2 hours before our flight) but since there is relatively no one in Amman we were through security and like 10 seconds. I don't remember much of the flight, but we ended up in Istanbul. Nate and I had been talking about going to cappadocia since august (if you're reading this, at this point i've told you what cappadocia is in person, so I won't describe it yet). We both really wanted to go, so we had decided to get there right away by taking a night bus out to gerome the first night we were in turkey. We landed at about 11 am so we had some time though, since the busses didn't leave until 9 pm. We took the lightweight rail line to the bus station to buy tickets.

Turkey is way different than the rest of the middle east. While we were riding along the rail line it felt like we were somewhere in post soviet eastern europe. I've never been to post soviet eastern europe, so take that for what it's worth, but it was december, and we were on a really old train, riding through industrial areas and lots of concrete housing and stuff. It was pretty cool.

After we figured out our busses and stuff, we still had a while, so we headed into Sultanhamet; which is the main historical/tourist area of Istanbul, Aya sofia and blue mosque and all that (this is where Turkey makes sense as part of the middle east, the whole 'bridge between two continents and culture phenomena for you). We came back here after our trip to cappadocia, so i can't really remember what we did at each time, but I don't think we went into aya sofia or the blue mosque this time. We just sort of walked around and then sat down by the water for a little bit. It was cool because it was cold and wet and I felt like a real traveller.

After that we ended up back at the bus station, again really early, so I listened to NPR about Bill Clinton (fresh air courtesy of Mira). The bus ride out was pretty good, the bus was mostly empty and we actually got some sleep. We got to a station in Evshehir I think (something like that) and had to transfer at about 6 am and arrived in gerome around 7:30. We found the hostel that we had picked out, The Flinestone Hostel, checked in, had some breakfast and planned out our 2 days.

Gerome is a sweet little town. It's clearly all about tourism, but it didn't really bother me, because it's about the hiker, young people and old retired people who are actually cool and travel for the right reasons tourism. As opposed to boring ritzy rich people ad flashy tourism. Kinda like Hoa's place from Da Nang/Hoi An, this is the place where you meet the people and do the things that I want to traveling. Also, no one was there while we were for some reason.

It's a pretty tiny little town with a canal (but no water) running down the middle. It's in a valley and surrounded by the trademark Cappadocia rock formations. Above the town is Uvshivir (again, memory is leading to creative spelling here) which is a cool little mountain top place that reminded me of Weathertop (lord of the rings). But we didn't go there until the next day. Our first day we went to the open air museum. Which was a bunch of caves with really really old christian paintings and mural and artwork and stuff in them. Like 12th century cave people old. It was kinda cool, but kinda eh.

Then we continued up the hill out of town (my mental west, though I'm not sure what it really was) to hike down the rose/red valley. This hike was so cool. And I'm going to take a break now and come back and finish this later because I want to be able to do it justice, and I can feel myself getting tied of blogging.

[Edit] (7.2.2011)
1) It is now July 2011, I graduated, and this blog post is still not finished. I will hopefully do that now, drawing liberally upon an email I wrote to William Dean (frisbee freshman) a couple weeks ago, he's going to Turkey this summer.

So our hike is the rose/red valley was just down through a valley, but it was incredible, kind of a hybrid valley canyon with sandstone pires and walls all over the place, and at times a stream running through the bottom. Tunnels through sandstone that you could drive cars though, caves all over the place, that had various levels of evidence of human habitation, and then sweet fairytale esque forested areas. Awesome. We wandered our way down the valley and several times scampered up the sides and explored sandstone pires and the view. There were also just random pumpkin (I think) patches all around and some cave houses with glass windows and modern stuff, but it was super unclear if people were living there. At the end of the valley we found our way into another little town wandered through it to the huge sandstone pire natural museum thing and wandered around here for a bit. At this point we were hungry and getting cold, so we started back. Eventually we got a ride ( I think we paid for this one). The next day we clambered up and out of the gerome valley, probably not on the trail we thought we were to Uvshihir, which is the bit more ritsy tourist destination in Cappadocia from what I can tell, but it also has an awesome sandstone castle. This is the thing that reminded me of weathertop. We spent a lot of time exploring this, and watching an old man herd sheep on the hill. He was just yelling at them and hitting them with a stick and throwing clods of dirt at them to get them to do what he wanted. And he was probably about 65 and definitely fit the mold of "crotchety old man." This was definitely one of those times where you struggle to understand what it would be like to live your whole life in the places that we were visiting for 1-2 days, even though you had an example right in front of you.

Also, the view from here was incredible. Beyond my powers of description.

After spending about an hour and a half wandering around this tower, we found our way back down and realized that we hadn't really been in the real tower, which you had to pay to go into an explore. We decided that that was pretty dumb since we had just had a blast in this other side tower, so we left. We wandered down the next valley over.

My mental picture here is clear as day, though I realize it's not super clear to people reading it, so I'll try to describe. Uvshihir is up on a hill, probably about 1000 feet above Gerome, which is in one little valley. At this point we wandered down the valley to the left. The ridge connecting them had a road on top of it, and wasn't an incredibly divisive ridge, it sloped down as you went 'south' (again mental sense of direction away from Uvshihir) eventually these valley's disappear as the ridge dividing them disappears and everything opens up into a kind of plane.

So we walked down this valley until we got to the point where the ridge ended, and then started walking along a road 'west' so we could then come back up the 'Gerome' valley. We ended up getting a ride again, which was good because we were tired. Some teenager was driving a tractor pulling a huge trailer (think hay-bale ride's at halloween) and drove us back to Gerome for free. Awesome. Then chilled on a bench, ate dinner, checked out of the hotel, and sat at the bus station listening to another NPR podcast from Mira about FDR and some huge fire out west that lead to the creation of the park service something until our bus left at midnight. This bus ride was terrible. We were right next to a heater, but it was cold so we were alternative being freezing and waking up sweating. The bus was also super crowded, and stopped several times (maybe the one out did to and we just slept through it) but we were also a bit worried because there was a group of kinda young sketchy looking kids who kept looking at us and talking so we were a bit worried we would get mugged or something. But nothing happened, just lots of dirty looks exchanged.

2) I'm really upset that this is panning out such that I will not be able to use a title that I had saved up the whole time I was in Jordan, so I'll note that here: "Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople"

We then arrived back in Istanbul. Days here are in absolutely no way divided in my mind. Except the last two. So at some over the 2-3 days that Nate and I were there together we saw Aya Sofia which was absolutely stunning from the inside. The outside was incredibly cool given my tastes as well, though perhaps not as "elegant" as something like the Taj Mahal. I thought it was really cool though.

We also saw the Blue Mosque, which was more a cultural experience than anything because it was full of people coming to pray in this very special mosque, and is was clearly a huge deal for many of them to be there, but we were allowed in, no questions.

Next was the royal palace, which has been turned into a museum. The complex was cool, but I have trouble with museums. They just suck all energy and make me fall asleep. There was some incredible stuff here though if they can prove it is what they say it was. Like Prophet Mohammed's sword, and pieces of his beard, and I think David's sword, and definitely Saladin the Great's sword.

I think that was day one. Day two we took a boat up the Bosphorus, which was pretty neat to see the city from the water. We stopped at the entrance to the Black Sea and wandered around a little town up there that had a castle that was cool. I've definitely seen pictures of some of my facebook 'friends' at this castle since I got back. We ate lunch up in this town as well before heading back on the ferry to Istanbul and discussing physics. Nate and I had incredibly weird and interesting conversations this whole semester, about how we would design houses money was no object, how we would raise our kids, and in this case, how if I became some sort of crazy physics brainiac (I'm really not sure how/why we even considered this a remote possibility at this point) Nate would come to me with absurd ideas for stuff to build and do and have me be his consultant on how to make it work. When we got back, we went to the market, which was cool. Lots of bartering, a really long conversation with one young shop owner who posed the question of why we were learning arabic. Nate responded (appropriately for both of us) "We're not really sure, we had really good reasons when we came here (Middle East) in September, but now we aren't so sure..."

That was day two, the next morning Nate had to leave to get his flight back to the states, so I had one more day in Istanbul by myself. I took another ferry up to some Island and wandered around. Not terribly exciting, but I saw some cows. Then ferry back to Istanbul, bought some presents I think, and left the next morning. Light rail to Istanbul airport, flight to Amman, taxi back to the host site, shower, quick goodbye's taxi back to the airport (this taxi driver wanted me to stuff him in my suitcase and bring him back to the US with me) and again, got to the airport unreasonably early, they wouldn't let me go through security, so I just had to sit there and listen to music, and read, which I was sick of because I had been traveling for 12 hours at this point. Flight to paris (this is Christmas Eve by now). France can't design a city so that I could get from their airport to the Eiffel tower and back in a 6.5 hour layover (lame) and charged absurd amounts of money for breakfast (also lame). Flight from Paris to DC (maybe?) then to Pittsburgh, where Patrick picked me up and we drove to Bama's house in NC.

So that journey was hostel in Instanbul --> light rail to airport --> flight Istanbul to Amman --> taxi to host fam. (pick up bags) --> taxi to Amman airport --> flight to paris --> flight to D.C. --> flight to Pittsburgh --> drive to NC.

Excellent.

Thus ended my semester in Jordan, and also the end of a cumulative 26 of 28 weeks in foreign countries from the end of my sophomore year until halfway through junior year. It pretty much changed my life, which is a huge cliche, but actually did in a concrete sense in that I was pretty sure that I wanted to become fluent in Arabic and go work for the state department during my sophomore year of college, and that totally changed because of these 6 months, not because I didn't enjoy my time abroad (obviously parts were rough, but overall, good) but mostly because I found a certain incompatibility between the speed of political processes, and my desire to do stuff, and get things done. I loved learning Arabic, but struggled to see how it was an effective use of my time because so many people there are far better english speakers than I will ever be an arabic speaker. I also had issues with the fact that I was coming over as an American, who had no good appreciation of what really mattered in this part of the world etc. and was studying how people like me spent most of the past 400 years telling people in this part of the world what to do. And messing it up. I was a 20 something kid building the skills to talk about stuff, and I wanted to be building skills that would allow me to help these people do something that they weren't already more equipped than myself to do. I.E. engineering a la Jackie Stenson/Mike from winthrop, or medicine or something like that.

Since that time I haven't left the U.S. I explored different stuff in school and working, and have started to become really interested in global health and economic development. And now I will once again put those interests to the test of really experiencing them, as I am almost certainly leaving for Uganda at the end of August to do more health/development related work. Hopefully all the details and logistics work out and I really get to go, but if you've come across this post and are interested, keep your eyes peeled for posts from Uganda in two months.

My bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

2009-12-23T00:28:00.003+07:00

So thıs post was should have been wrıtten a week ago on my last nıght ın Amman, but ıt wasn't, so I'm wrıtıng ıt now from Istanbul. Therefore all of my lower case i's wıll be ı's because turkısh keyboards are wıerd and ıts a hassle to type a real one.

So. After Egypt we had 16 days ın Amman before Nate and I left for Turkey. A lot of thıs tıme was fınals and paper wrıtıng and such, whıch was borıng. There was some cool stuff though. We had a goodbye dınner for all of the bost famılıes and host kıds, whıch was cool. Also, the day after our last day of exams was campus electıon day, so for the week leadıng up to that there were campaıgns, whıch was absurd. There were more posters on campus than I have seen anywhere ın my entıre lıfe, almost every candıdate also had several larger than lıfe, lıke 20 feet by 40 feet, posters of themselves. I forgot to brıng my camera to take pıctures, but some other kıds dıd so I'll steal those at some poınt so you can see how rıdıculous ıt was.

The coolest parts by far of the last two weeks were our dınners at the apartment. After we had so much fun cookıng at thanksgıvıng we decıded to cook more. We ended up doıng ıt 2 more tımes, the fırst one Mıra dırected us ın cookıng rıdıculously good, real, ındıan food, and the second tıme was the last nıght and we made breakfast, whıch was omlettes and banana chocolate chıp apple (who knows what else) pancakes. It was a lot of fun, I chopped a lot of vegetables but unfortunately dıd not pıck up any great cookıng skılls...I'll have to get recıpes for the Indıan food from Mıra though.

After dınner we all stıll had to get home for curfews, so ıt ended rather abruptly whıch ıs a bummer. When I got home I jammed everythıng ınto my bags ın about half an hour and then made sure everythıng was ın order to go to Turkey the next mornıng. So thus ended my cıee actıvıtıes ın Jordan for the semester.

On that midnight train to....

2009-11-30T21:27:00.005+07:00

I have returned from Egypt, so I have just one more adventure remaining, though before that adventure I have the annoyances of finals and papers to deal with, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Egypt was really cool. I went into it trying to keep an open mind, but sort of expecting to hate it because it is supposed to be very crowded, hot, dirty, and full of people trying to haggle you and demanding backsheesh (tips) for things like giving you directions that you didn't ask for. But it ended up being pretty cool. Definitely dirtier and noisier and more crowded than Amman, but it felt alive and energetic, which Amman does not at times. It was a bit hotter, but our strategy of waiting until the end of november to go worked out pretty well on that front, and I didn't pay backsheesh at all, and as far as I can tell didn't get ripped off either. So Egypt.

We left Amman at 5 on the bus to the airport, our flight was delayed, and we still are pretty conservative and U.S. airport habituated with respect to when we arrive at airports, so we had about 3 hours of sitting around and reading economists articles about and an 87 year old woman from Euclid, Ohio who was fined $500 dollars and has to do 80 hours of community service for beating a baby deer to death with a shovel. Apparently Bambi is taking over suburbia. After that we had our hour long flight to Cairo (with food...I would really like someone to explain the economics of airlines to me, because all of the US ones are going bankrupt, but they offer significantly less services then all of the foreign airlines that I have been one). After we landed, we met Daniella's friend Sarah, who is studying in Cairo. Our hostel pickup was stuck in traffic, so we ended up taking a cab, and getting to our hostel at about 11:30, so we just went to sleep. The hostel was sweet though.

Friday morning we went to the train station to try to get ourselves on the sold out night train to luxor. We got tickets, and we are pretty sure that they were the ones that the train company isn't supposed to sell to tourists. After that we headed to Giza to see the pyramids. We spent most of the day there, it was pretty cool. Obviously crawling with tourists. Notable observations other than the presences of several large piles of rock: The pyramids are on a sand plateau that is basically in the middle of the city of Giza, which is a little strange, the sphinx is kinda small, egyptian kids like to get their pictures taken, you can crawl up the light shaft in the biggest pyramid. Crawling around in this shaft was the coolest part, but we also did some dips/pushups in the sarcophagus in the room at the top of the pyramid, and Daniella and I sang house at pooh corner.

After the pyramids, Joe, Nate, Drew and I went to see Coptic Cairo, which is some christian religious area, but everything was closed, so we just walked around. Then we met up with Daniella and Sarah again for dinner and then headed back to the train station to journey to Luxor. I though the train ride was fun, we had our own cabin, and I slept pretty well on the floor, but apparently no one else got a great night of sleep. Luxor was very cool. We started out at the valley of the kings. The tombs, were alright, climbing up on the hill above them and looking out at the nile and the landscape around it was cooler. After that we headed to some other ancient tomb thing that Lonely planet said was really cool. It was alright. Then we stopped quickly at the Colossi of Memnon before heading to Karnak. I had not heard of Karnak before going to Egypt, but apparently it is the largest single religious building in the world and the best sight in all of Egypt. It was really cool, there was a room with 134 massive stone pillars and stone pieces going across the tops that must have made a full roof when it was built, and if it hasn't been restored, it is amazingly impressive that those stones are still up there.

After Karnak we ate dinner overlooking the temple of Luxor. After dinner Sarah and Daniella decided that they wanted to go in, but Nate, Drew, Joe and I decided that looking at it was good enough, so we went and sat by the nile. Then back to the train station to head back to Cairo. We didn't have out own compartment this time and several Egyptians were convinced that we were in their seats ( we weren't) so we didn't get great sleep. When we got back to Cairo, Joe and and decided to get right back on a train to Alexandria, and the others went to breakfast and then garbage city in Cairo. Alexandria was kinda of cool. It would have been way cooler before all of the old stuff fell into the sea, but I like port cities and it was nice to see and smell the mediterranean. After about 2 hours in Alexandria, we got on a bus back to Cairo and headed to the Khan Al Khalali souq, where we ran into the other four again, I bought some christmas presents, and then we wandered around back to the hotel.

This morning we just woke up and headed to the airport to get out flight back. So on the whole Egypt was cool. I imagine that I would not like it as much when it is ridiculously hot though. Photo's are going up on picassa, we'll see how good the internet is today.

'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs From ten thousand lightning bugs

2009-11-14T22:55:00.004+07:00

This weekend Nate, Brianna, and I decided to return to Wadi Rum. We had planned on doing this a couple weekends ago, but then Joe got sick and a four day weekend seemed to be too good of an opportunity to pass up, so instead we went to Israel, but that may have been a mistake, because going back to Wadi Rum was awesome.

After buying food for the weekend (a jar of peanut butter, several pieces of fruit, and some bread each) thursday afternoon, we met early Friday morning and headed to the bus station. We took a bus to Wadi Musa (just outside of Petra) and from there we got a ride to the visitors center. It was in this truck that we heard the title song, which is apparently the #1 song in both the US and Canada right now, and the number 1 seller on itunes too....none of us knew this at the time and we just starting cracking up, because the lyrics are nuts.

After eating lunch while looking at the 5 pillars of wisdom, we started walking down the road to Rum village. About half way we got a ride from a nice guy who told us to make sure that we were back from our walk by 5, because the sun sets at 5:30. We clearly had no intention of doing this, but we also weren't quite sure if we were allowed to just walk out into the desert and camp, so we didn't tell him our plans. After he dropped us of, we did just that. Walking in the desert is hard, so I'm not sure how far we got, but we hiked for about 2.5 hours before we found a rock formation that looked promising and then we scrambled up and started looking for flat spots to camp. We found a couple okay ones, spent some time throwing sandstone rocks off of cliffs (they explode and make ridiculous amounts of noise), and watched a really fast sunset. Then Nate found a sweet camping spot that was much better than our other ones, and we started collecting firewood. We were all ready to fall asleep at about 7, but managed to keep ourselves awake until 9 looking at stars and sitting around the fire.

This morning we woke up and climbed around on the rocks around our campsite and watched the sunrise before walking back to rum village. After an impromptu soccer game with some kids there, we started walking back to the visitor center. Again, we got a ride about halfway which was nice because it's an annoying 2 mile walk on a road...Once we got back to village we found a truck that would drive us out to kings highway where we were supposed to be able to get busses back to Amman. Our friendly truck drivers dropped us off at a gas station, where we waited for a bus for about 10 minutes until Nate made friends with another truck driver who said he would take us back to Amman for free. Which he did. It was pretty cool to ride in the cab of one of those big trucks, and he dropped us off about 5 km south of amman, where we got a city bus back to down town and then taxi's home. So all in all, less than 20 jd's a piece for food and transportation for a camping trip to arguably the coolest place in the country. Sweet.

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

2009-11-07T01:47:00.003+07:00

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/

2009-10-02T23:34:00.002+07:00

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.

2009-09-27T17:34:00.003+07:00

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

2009-08-14T12:36:00.003+07:00

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

2009-08-10T14:32:00.002+07:00

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.

2009-08-05T20:33:00.004+07:00

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....

2009-08-02T21:55:00.002+07:00

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.

What is it good for?

2009-07-25T17:20:00.005+07:00

I decided not to go anywhere again this weekend. This was sort of a conscious decision, and sort of just happened. We're supposed to go to the Me Kong Delta to talk to people in universities, and the trip has been moved around a lot, and since I didn't know what was going on with that I couldn't really set up a trip. That's okay though because I need to rest, and this will give me a chance to pick up one more day of extra work so that I can have 4 days to go to Angkor Wat. Which is where I am right now (work, not angkor wat), it's Sunday just past noon and I am having an outrageously unproductive day. Hopefully I will be able to get something of value done before I leave, but for now I am going to revisit the past week.

I spent most of early last week filling in what I perceived as holes in what I have learned, and then on either Tuesday or Wednesday (or maybe Thursday, I can't remember) I sat down with Ben and Laura and said, alright, this is what I have found out. I can keep pursuing these various directions, but without really knowing where this paper is going and what policy recommendations you want to make I'm sort of stuck.

(Note about how they seem to do research here...rather than looking at a question and saying, okay, to figure out the answer to this, we need to research the following questions, they seem to say, okay this is a problem, the source of this problem is in some way related to how Vietnam is not doing what other successful places are doing, so our policy recommendation is going to be X (more autonomous higher education system, focus on university governance as a quality improvement mechanism etc.) we need to find some scholarly stuff and data that will convince the government to do what we tell them. This is pretty different from how I had imagined research would be done, and Widha and JP agree. But in the end it probably isn't all that wrong, because most of the problems that the Vietnamese government and society are having come from the fact that they want the develop and westernize, and be like the US and western Europe, but they don't want to listen when everyone tells that to do so they can't really have authoritarian and overly controlling governments. So the question really isn't what should be done, because its been done before, but rather, how can we convince Vietnam to do what we know needs to be done, which I guess isn't all that suprising of a realization for policy research and advocacy projects).

So the general consensus of our meeting was, as I had hoped, that I should stop reading (which has been pretty deathly boring) and begin writing down what I know. So that is what I did for most of the rest of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Or rather that is what I was supposed to do. I already had an outline, but I wasn't quite sure that I had set it up quite right, so upon Ben's suggestion I just opened a blank document and tried to just write without stopping for about an hour. This ended up giving me about 4 single spaced pages of okay stuff. Which I spent most of Thursday trying to reorganize and edit into a decent 1.5 ish page introduction. Then I found another article that I decided would be pretty important, so I read that. It was pretty disappointing, and Thursday and Friday were (like today has been) pretty unproductive.

I think it was on Thursday night that we went out for dinner because Widha is leaving (today). We went to a restaurant that Laura know, and had this interesting dish that was basically a big pot of some soup broth with a bunch of vegetables and seafood and noodles arranged on a platter around the pot. They put what I guess was sterno in the middle of the table, and put the whole contraption on top so that the broth was boiled in from of us, and the we (with guidance from our waiter) began pushing all of the stuff into the pot when it got hot enough. It was pretty good because it was kinda spicy, but I don't really like seafood so I mostly ate noodles and vegetables.

The fact that Widha is leaving is a bummer. He's the guy from Indonesia who worked for McKinsey and he is really cool. However, after the trip to Nha trang (me, Widha, and JP) and then his aborted attempt to come to Dalat with me (he got sick, bummer), he decided that he wasn't going to travel anymore, and that he was going to save up his money and suprise his wife by going back to indonesia early and taking her on a 3 week trip around the country to see their family and stuff. Now I clearly can't get mad about this, because that is the sort of thing that good husbands are supposed to do, but it means that I've been traveling on my own now, which is lamer than traveling with other people.

Yesterday I slept in as late I have since I've been here, I woke up at about 9 and stay in bed until 10. Then I ate breakfast on the roof and set out with the goals of 1). finding a bank 2). maybe buying some gifts and 3). doing the lonely planet walking tour and 4) booking my trip to Angkor Wat. I had planned on going to play frisbee since the practice had been conveniently moved to the track across the street, but it was canceled at the last minute.

On number 1). I found several banks, but they were all closed, and had some trouble finding the few that I had planned on going to. This sort of knocked out 2 and 4, but I ended up in Pham Ngu Lao to check the busses to Siem Reap anyways, and spent about an hour in Sasa cafe because it was so hot, here I tried to enjoy my 3 mango smoothies and reading catch 22.

Then I began the walking tour, but I had seen a lot of the stuff close to Pham Ngu Lao already, so it sort of began with the people's republic building, where I decided to sit on the steps and read about the history of the building. This is apparently not allowed, as a security guard came over and said, you stand up. So then I stood on the steps and read about the history for about a minute before another security guard came over and said, you go away. So I left. After confirming that a number of the places on the walking tour were infact places that I had already walked by several times, and that you were allowed inside of, I decided to go to the HCMC museum, the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. The HCMC museum was boring, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out how I have gotten to be almost 21 years old without spending a summer working at a summer camp. The Reunification palace was a bit more interesting, but not overly so. I ran into Laura there, she finds it all very interesting and has been there multiple times...but she has also spent the past several summers in Vietnam and plans to be here for the next year or so. I do not. I waited for a little bit to watch the movie about the history of Vietnam and the Palace, and promptly fell asleep about 5 minutes into it. I decided that I hadn't really missed much, so then I went to the War Remnants museum.

I'm not really sure how to describe this experience, but it is the source for the title. I sort of knew what to expect based on the Khe Sanh combat base museum and the holocaust museum that we saw in Japan...but it was still a very gruesome and pretty overwhelming experience. The museum has a couple of tanks and airplanes and stuff outside, along with a replica of a torture chamber, and the inside is just probably about 5000 pictures of the war with explanations. This got pretty overwhelming pretty fast, I read quite a few of the descriptions and looked at most of the pictures, but one can only take so much of that sort of thing. Then I left and went to the store to get a little snack so I would have some energy to go running, and tried to find the book store that I thought was across the street from our alley, I've been looking for into the wild, since there is no preview of it on google books. I did find a book store, but it was mostly Vietnamese books. So then I went back to the hotel and watched lord of the rings on youtube until it got dark and cool enough to go running.

Then I did, and a developing problem sort of reemerged and sort of solved itself briefly. The track that I go to is used by what I'm guessing are high school track teams, so it's pretty crowded (not to the extent that anyone is getting in each other's way, but it's an active place) from about 5-7:30. It's also still decently hot out then. So I normally go later, like 8:30 or 9. It's dark out at this point, but there is enough ambient light to see, and it's much cooler and less crowded, which is nice. But the security guards dog then sits in the middle of the track and barks constantly at me, and since this is the dog who almost knocked me over one of the first times I went running there, I have to make sure that I watch him. This was really annoying on Friday, so I left after just doing situps, but last night he left while I was doing pushups so I could run my 2 miles in relative peace and quite.

Also, it has been getting cooler lately. It is still ridiculously hot and humid, but not as bad as it was in June...87-89 ish rather than 92-93...

I should start working again now.

I'm gonna write you a letter, I'm gonna write you a book.

2009-07-20T18:27:00.002+07:00

a.k.a. this post is going to be epic. Perhaps it will take multiple writing sessions to finish, we shall see.

Work last week ended giving me some things to think about for my thesis. Apparently Tom Vallely (the director of the Ash institute's asia program and one of the main reasons why the school I'm working at exists) is really into pushing the state department and the fulbright program in particular to do more things like FETP and to expand the US's efforts to use our education system as a foriegn policy tool. The absolute bare bones theory behind that idea is that the US is so head and shoulders above everyone else in higher education (primary and secondary not so much, not at all actually) that almost regardless of what anyone thinks about us on any other issue, they admire our higher education system. This is useful because we can then use higher education as a way to establish a foothold in regions we would not normally be able to, and to establish relationships with and help developing countries like Vietnam (or jordan, if you are a rising junior looking for a thesis topic). You can also get more cynical, and think of it as a way for use to brainwash other people while we help to educate them, and also a way to get all of the best minds from around the world to come to the US and then try to make them stay. Anyhow, these questions of how best to use education as a soft-power mechinism in American foriegn policy is perhaps exactly what I want to write my thesis about, so that got me pretty excited Wednesday afternoon. I'll have to talk to Ben and email Tom about this.

Wednesday night I realized that it was Wednesday at about 9:30 p.m, which meant that I had to pack for my trip since I was leaving from work on Thursday. This only took about 20 minutes, which I love being able to do.

Work Thursday was pretty boring again, maybe because I couldn't really focus. I left at 3:30 and took a taxi to the airport, where I got my flight to Hue. Once in Hue I took a bus to the center of town and found my way to my hotel. The I meet a guy from Slovenia who was a red-wings fan, and an American vietnam war veteran. The Slovenia and I were thinking about booking a tour of the demiliterized zone that the veteran had gone on that day so we talked about that for a little while. We both ended up booking the tour, which took most of Friday, but we will come to that in a bit. For dinner I wandered around outside the hotel to see what I would find. I was apparently in a traveller's area, but unlike Pham Ngu Lao, this area was not really crowded and crazy. I ended up eating at a little cafe that had the best tuna sandwiches I have ever had. I ended up eating 5 in the day and a half that I was there. After dinner I just went back to the hotel and read a little bit about Sapa and then went to sleep, because the tour left at 6 a.m.

Friday morning, we got breakfast at the tour company building and then piled into a bus (a full sized one this time, which was nice) and headed north. There were supposed to be 12 stops on our tour, but I'm not sure that there were, and I don't remember the exact order, so I'll just go with what stuck out. After we took National Highway 1 (HCMC --> Hanoi) north for a while, we turned west (in Vietnam the mountains are always west and the ocean is always east) on highway 9, which runs horizontally across the country just south of the Ben Hai River and the 17th parallel, which was the dividing line between north and south vietnam during the American war. So while this area was called the demiliterized zone, it was in fact, quite militerized. We stopped at a little road side village of mountain people, which was interesting, but I don't really have any deep cross cultural thoughts to share about the experience.

Then we went to Khe Sanh combat base museum, which was cool, but understandably depressing. There were some helicopters, a crashed plan, some bombs, and some reconstructed sandbag bunkers outside, and a pretty small, but pretty interesting museum inside. It was drizzling quite a bit at this point, which was nice because it was cooler. Then we stopped at the bridge that was one of the critical pints along the HCM trail before we got lunch. After lunch we went to Vinh Moc Tunnels. These were infinitely cooler than the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels had been made as a sort of escape hatch for guerilla fighters to run into and hide when the US was bombing, but most of the time the fighters just living above ground and pretended to be regular people. Thus those tunnels are quite small (diameter wise) for two reasons. Number one, tunnels are not easy things to build, so there really is no point in making them bigger than they need to be. Secondly and more importantly, the Cu Chi tunnel network is small compared to Vinh Moc, and not that far under ground. Thus when the bombs were dropped, even if they didn't collapse the tunnels, they caused severe vibrations, which were more severe and more deadly the bigger the tunnels were.

Vinh Moc tunnels on the other hand were on the Northern side of the river/17th parallel, so they were in enemy (from a US/S. Vietnamese perspective) territory. There was orignally (and now is again) a village there, and the people in this village decided that they did not want to move to another part of Vietnam, but they were getting bombed like no other, so they moved under ground. Basically this whole village (somewhere around 100 people I think) lived under ground for about 6 years. 17 babies were born underground. Thus these tunnels were much bigger than Cu Chi, both in diameter of the physical tunnels and in size of the network of tunnels. I wondered how they got around the vibration problem that I had been told about at Cu Chi, so after I asked about 4 different people who didn't understand me I finally figured out that the network of tunnels was large enough that the people inside could figure out where the US was bombing and then all run to another part of the network of tunnels and be far enough away from the bombs to be unaffected by vibrations.

In terms of physical structure, the tunnels were just to small for me to walk through up right, so probably about 5.5 feet tall. There are 3 levels, ranging from 12 to 26 meters underground (guessing on those figures) There are tons of little rooms of to the sides, and stair cases, and an infirmary, a meeting room, and an underground well. There is also an exit down by the beach that lets you out into the tunnel of trees so that the people hiding in the tunnels could get to the ocean without being seen and then take a boat out to a little island, where they could continue on their journey of smuggling weapons etc. to the south. My journey through the tunnels was made all the more interesting by the fact that I had somehow become sandwiched in the middle of a french family with 3 daughters and they were all freaking out back and forth in french. After the tunnels we started back to Hue and crossed some important bridge over the dividing river. I spent some time talking to the guides about the lingering attitudes from the war, the Doi Moi reforms, and whether or not there was any kind of political liberalization to accompany the move away from communist economic policies (though the state still owns much of the economy).

We got back to Hue at about 6 p.m. so I went back to the tuna sandwich place and had two, and then went back to the hotel, planned out my Saturday, and watched the last hour and a half of the 3rd Bourne movie. Saturday, I went to two of the imperial tombs and say the Citadel. Neither of which mean anything to anyone reading this, so I shall explain by way of discussing the history of Hue.

Hue was the capital of Vietnam back when, I don't really know exactly, somewhere around 1500-1900 or so, it doesn't really matter exactly when. Any way, there is a pretty sweet looking Citadel in the middle of the City, moat and everything, and then another Citadel inside of the big Citadel. And inside of that Citadel, there are a bunch of temples and fancy (for their time) houses.

There is also a river running to the south of the city, along which there are 5 imperial tombs. I only went to 2 because I wanted to make sure that I had time to get back to the citadel and get my bus. They were pretty cool. The first was a big cement (but sculptured cement) tomb built on the side of a mountain. The second was more of a complex of buildings between two lakes (this one is a UNESCO World Heritage Site). It was designed to be symetrical around an axis running between the two lakes, and there were a bunch of bridges. It was also built in a sort of pine forest area.

On the whole though, the Hue historical stuff was a little dissapointing. It seemed to be very much in the middle stage between well maintained and charming ruins, which is not a good place for a tourist attraction to be. Pictures may perhaps show this better, but there was a lot of trash in some of the places, and the lawns were not well maintained, and dirt footpaths were intermingled with crumbling stone pathways and walls etc.

I ended up finishing my sight seeing in plenty of time to get my bus, which didn't leave until 2 p.m. But I had gotten up at 6 to give myself time to see everything, so the combination of me seeing most of what I wanted to see, plus being hot and tired saw me back at my hotel at 11:30 to take a shower and of course to head over to the next alley over for 2 more tuna sandwiches and an hour or so of reading the fake copy of catch 22 that I bought a couple of weeks ago. At 2 I got my bus to Da Nang, where I met a couple from Britain, and for some inexplicable reason was not cranky and frustrated even though it was a 2.5 hour bus ride with broken airconditioning in the hottest part of the day. My number 1 hypothesis for my perplexing lack of crankiness was the fact that I had rediscovered Guster on the plane to Hue and was throughly enjoying my music.

I got off the bus in Da Nang, which turned out to be a mistake. Da Nang is not the nicest city to spend time in Vietnam, which I knew. Basically there at two cities about 40 km apart in this part of central vietnam. Da Nang and Hoi An. Hoi An was a very important city in the 17 and 1800's but when technology started advancing and shipping changed from sailboats etc to mechanically powered vessels, Da Nang started to take over. This lead to Da Nang becoming a center of commerce and industry but not really culture, and Hoi An being able to maintain its history and become a quant little village like place. The per meter concentration of tailors and shoe shops and art galleries is undoubtedly the highest of any place I have ever been to. In a town which was small enough for me to walk around about 6 times in 4 hours, there are apparently 2000 tailors, I think I saw allof them. But I am getting ahead of myself again.

Why, I bet you are wondering, did I decided to stay in Da Nang, rather than Hoi An. That would be because Lonely Planet said that there was this hotel that was legendary among backpackers just outside of Da Nang. Maybe half a mile walk. This was entirely false. I walked from one end of Da Nang to the other, and this place was nowhere to be found where it was supposed to be according to my map. So I kept walking towards where people were pointing me. I ended up walking for 2.5 hours before I got fed up and took a cab the rest of the way. It was a nice walk though, most of it was along the river. The hotel ended up being 12 km south of Da Nang, along the road to Hoi An, so I would have been better off staying on the bus and having them drop me off outside the hotel. Way to go with the map lonely planet. But they are to be unquestionable forgiven, because this hotel was definitely the coolest hotel I have ever stayed in, and one of the coolest places I have been.

Accomodation wise, is was sub-par, a very small room, just a fan, no AC, and a small shower, but it only cost $5 and the atmosphere made up for it a million times over. My my taxi pulled up to the hotel where I find probably 30 backpackers sitting expectantly along two long tables. After a brief, joint-language-less gesturing session/discussion (the owner speaks english, but wasn't there) I was shown my little room and told to go back to the main patio/room for "family dinner" during which I met a bunch of backpackers from Ireland, and had Hoa's famous spring rolls, pineapple and green beans, rice, some sort of meat, mashed potatoes (the Irish lad's were excited about this).

This description is also turning out to be far less adequate than I had hoped. There really is just no other way to describe the place other than that it was everything that I have always thought, expected, and hoped that hostels would be like. There were two massive coolers full of drinks, and a book on the counter where everyone had a page and you just wrote down what you had. Some people plan to stay here for 2 days and end up staying for 10. No questions asked, whenever you decide to leave you just sit down with Hoa and show him your page in the book and you total everything up together. It is 100 yards from the beach and there are a whole bunch of surf boards just sitting against the wall in the dining area. Backgammon and cards with Hoa and fellow travellers are also a must-do activity before you leave.

So that should help set the mental picture a bit. To my specific experience, I ended up sitting with Kevin Feeney, Gus (pronounced Goos), and two other Irish travellers. Kevin and Gus were travelling with another Irish guy farther down the table (Brian) and had done one of the around the world tickets. They had been travelling for almost a year (they spent about 3 months in Sydney working) and are going home pretty soon. The two other Irish travellers were just travelling over the summer. I learned quite a bit about one of my ancestral cultures at this dinner. Mainly that quite often Irish people speak a version of English that may as well be Gaelic because no one but other Irish people can understand them. Also, and I quote "No one in the history of Ireland has ever said 'top of the morning to ya'" They do, however, most definitely say "Bob's your uncle" as in, "just take some rice, some noodles, a little bit of everything else, thrown in some soy sauce and bob's your uncle." Which is a just about perfect description of family dinner at Hoa's place.

I spent most of this conversation listening, struggling to understand parts of it, and asking questions about Kevin and Gus's trip. I did however mention that grandma and grandpa were from Ireland, and though I realized that I wasn't sure if this was correct, told them that grandma was from Scibberine and grandpa was from Cork. To whichever one of my elder relatives reads this first, was I right?

Apparently scibberine is a rough place out in the middle of nowhere, and people from Cork are "a bit touched" and convinced that Cork should overtake Dublin as the capital. This was all a ton of fun until this really annoying german guy came back with two women, and three of whom were drunk. The women went to bed pretty quickly, but then the German guy starting boring Gus and I with concerns over what he should do with his liquidity (Keven had moved down the table to play backgammon with Adel, a french girl who I would meet the next morning) so Gus and I went to sleep. The next morning I got up at 8 and had a wonderous banana pancake (not like the ones we got from SaSa Cafe patrick) this was more like a softball sized east-hill farm fritter. Then Hoa booked a taxi (really just his friend who had a car) to take me, Adel, and her travelling companion to Hoi An at 10. In the mean time I played backgammon and talked to Hoa about how best to get back to Da Nang that night to get to the airport.

So this brings us back to (or rather properly to) Hoi An. The best way that I can describe this is that it is much like Province town but on a river, thus without whale watching, and with more art galleries and clothing stores. I wandered around seeing the scattering of historical sights for about 4 hours, before I got too hot and tired. This is the sort of place that would be great to laze about for 3 or 4 days, but is not the kind of place that you want to race through in a few hours. So I headed to the outskirts of town and got a bus back towards Da Nang. I also began to quickly modify my plan for the rest of the day. I got off of the bus at Marble Mountains, which are sweet. They are these five marble mountians (who'd of thought?) that just jut straight up out of the flat area leading up to the beach. They also happen to have countless caves through out them, in which people have literally carved temples and Buddha statues into the caves. It was awesome, thus far, the combination of Marble Mountain and Hoa's place make this the first place that I would actively want to come back to if I ever return to Vietnam. After spending about 2 hours romping around on this biggest of the marble mountains, I went down, crossed the street, and according to my newly developed plan, sat myself down in Hoa's place again, where I got to take a shower (an absolute necessity at this point) read my book, and talk to another girl from Ireland about her travels. Then who should come to join me at the table, but Gus. I though that he, Kevin and Brian had left already, but it turns out that they were flying out 15 minutes before I was. So I scrapped my plan to get a motorbike to the airport in favor of sharing a taxi (again, just Hoa's friend who happened to have a car) with them to the airport. First, however, we had another family dinner, during which the four of us absolutely ravaged several plates of rice, noodles, spring rolls, pineapple and green beans, spinach, and spicy sausage like meat drenched in soy sauce. After a solid 25 minutes of eating and a few words about how much we were eating, we piled into the cab and headed to the airport. This turned out to be a 20 minute ride, and didn't even take us all the way back to where I had started walking from the day before (again, way to go with the map Lonely planet). My flight ended up getting delay which was a major bummer, so after Kevin, Brian, and Gus left I was stuck in the tiny little airport for about an hour and a half, and didn't get back to my hotel in HCMC until 12:30.

So that was the weekend. Work today was pretty boring again, mostly because I was tired and didn't have a ton of energy (I have noticed a striking correlation between me being tired and work being boring) but I did find a paragraph or so in an article about a new initiative in the higher education system in Hong Kong that is doing basically exactly what I was going to write as a policy recommendation for Vietnam, which is cool, because it seems to be working well there. Hopefully I can find more information about it tomorrow.

Major bummer at work though, they have decided to stop getting the order in lunches which messes up my maximization problem. So I got a bunch of food at the grocery store on the way home (actually not that much) but another jar of peanut butter was included. Hopefully I can make myself make it last a little bit longer this time.

Photo's will be up soon, there will be more comments on them this time, so heads up if you want to read those. Patrick tells me that my photo website is a hassle, if everyone else agrees I will look into webshots or something...let me know.

You're still probably working at a 9 to 5 pace.

2009-07-14T18:08:00.005+07:00

I wonder how bad that tastes?

Long time no post. Because not all that much interesting stuff has happened. I stayed in HCMC to work this weekend so that I could take some 3 day weekends to travel. I'm not entirely sure that I had to do that, Ben said at the beginning that I could just take some 3 day weekends, but I felt like I should make up the work. At least that's what I've been telling myself, perhaps I was just to tired and lazy to plan a trip last weekend.

Anyhow, I've still just been reading stuff. Now instead of world bank project reports, I'm wading through UNESCO and OECD books about the status of higher education in various developing countries. In pursuit of the larger question of how to design a differentiated higher education system I have been searching for the answer to the smaller question of how a country goes about preventing mission drift (if I've already written on here that I'm doing that, sorry). So far I have found that most countries start with a pretty binary system of research universities and polytechnic institutes at the higher level and then teachers and vocational colleges on the lower level. Mission drift in this situation is prevented in that the lower sectors simply don't have the capacity to do what the higher sector does, and between the two institutions in the higher sector, differentiation is assured because they are funded by completely different government entities. However, in pursuit of the liberal minded let's all get along interconnected system, people don't like this strict separation because they think it hinders cross fertilization and cooperation between disciplines and between research and learning, which is true. So then then question is how do you unify the two systems so that they can share ideas and cooperate, while at the same time preserving the differentiation that existed when they were separate, basically making sure that institutions do what they are supposed to do so that the collective output of the system meets societies needs, instead of doing what gets them the most money/prestige. (Only special places 'research universities' get to do that). Thus far I have come across two answers. In Ireland the recommendation is that they create an interconnected structure of three governing boards that all do different things but that are composed of basically the same people. In South Africa, the government decided that institutions weren't making the changes that unification was supposed to engender fast enough, so they took over.

So what about other than work.

Well Professor Rosengard was here for a week. He is this very energetic happy little guy who speaks a bunch of languages and is very interested in Indonesia. He reminds me a lot of a happy jumping around, bubbly leprechaun. But he took my nice desk (or maybe someone else new did)
but anyways, I got moved into the big room, which resulted in a sort of unspoken fight between JP and I on one side and the two Vietnamese high school girls over how high we should set the airconditioning. I usually win this because I get there first, and set it, and then no one likes to change it.

I also discovered We the Kings as I am going through the music that I took off of Liza's computer at Christmas. Skyway avenue and august is over are both good.

....Running...I haven't done it as much as I should, but I think I've done something at least every other day, and last week I finally reached my goal of 3 miles in under 21 minutes...perhaps this is not very intersting to read about, but when I'm 40 it will remind me how fat I have gotten.

Food. I solved my "maximization problem" as JP put it, where in I get a balanced diet for less than 60,000 dong a day. At least for a while. The plan involved scambled eggs on toast, oj, the lunches we get at work, bananas, almonds, and milk on the way home so that I could just buy enough to drink right away and not have to turn on my refrigerator and pay for the electricity.

I have since scrapped the almonds, because 1) Ben Thanh market is far away and 2) because I found pint jars of peanut butter for half as much as I would have paid for half a kilo of almonds. I also decided that I need a new plan to get milk, because drinking it even 4 hours before I go running hasn't really worked with my stomach.

I realize that this is probably the least facinating entry to date. Sorry.
I thought about taking pictures of my room and kitchen and work to put up so that everyone can see where I am since I didn't go anywhere this past week end, but I didn't. Maybe I will later.

I also bought my plan tickets to go see Hue/Hoi An/ Da Nang this weekend, so hopefully that is sweet.

Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

2009-07-05T17:05:00.004+07:00

This is coming a little bit earlier than expected, I'm actually still in Dalat right now, but I am totally exhausted, so I'm just waiting for my bus in my hotel. I'll probably go watch wimbledon finals in an hour though. But the past two days have been busy so I'll get right to it.

I left Ho Chi Minh city at 12:15 saturday morning, I got to watch the third set of the Roddick-Murray match with a bunch of people from Britain...

This put me in Dalat at about 5:45 or so. After it became apparent that the bus company was not going to take me in a little bus to my hotel like they said the would, I started walking. I didn't actually have any idea where I was going, because I was off of my maps. But I eventually saw a sign for Dalat Market, so I headed that way. Now on my map I set of for my hotel, which is a good bit north of the city. I ended up getting there at about 7:20 in the morning. I had intended to just ask them if I could leave some of my stuff behind the desk so I didn't have to carry it all day, but, no not at the Thien An hotel. Instead, the owner asked my to wait for twenty minutes, and then showed me to my room, even though I only had it booked for Saturday night. Then he told me to come downstairs and have breakfast (yes patrick you were right) breakfast was amazing. Passion fruit juice, which I hadn't had before, scrambled eggs, peanut butter and strawberry jam on a huge roll, pineapple, banana's, yogurt, passion fruit, and dragon fruit (I didn't have the last three) . I made myself and extra peanut butter and strawberry jam roll and threw a banana in my backpack for lunch, and set off. Dalat it pretty sweet. It was much nicer to walk around in than Nha Trang or HCMC, just because its so much cooler. The only sort of negative part is that everything is really spread out. I saw most of the sights I had picked out, Crazy House is sweet, that's what most of the pictures are of (they'll be up tomorrow night).
I was pretty tired though, probably because I hadn't slept all that well on the bus, so I stopped periodically to rest and read my book ( I had bought catch 22 and catcher and the rye the night before). During one of my breaks on a bank next to a horse pasture, a nice old vietnamese guy came to visit me and we talked for a little bit, then he asked if you could take my picture, which I was fine with, and he gave me cough drops as a souvenier (I think he thought they were candy). Then they let the horses out to walk around a little, and one of them came to visit too. After a while I decided to continue sightseeing.

But I could not for the life of me find this pagoda that I wanted to go to. I now had three different maps of the city, Lonely Planet, the one that is on my map of HCMC, and the one that the guy at the hotel gave me. They all have this pagoda being in different places, and I couldn't find it in any of them. And the area around where it is supposed to be isn't the same either. None of the maps have the same streets, nor are the ones that they have in common named the same on each map. There are some streets that actually exist that weren't on any of the maps, and some streets on the map that I couldn't find in real life. I know this place exists, because Patrick had checked it off (the one that the book says has all those paintings), and added a street to the map right next to it, but I still couldn't find it.

At this point I was dead tired and getting cranky, so I gave up and headed back to central Dalat. Ben had said that Dalat wasn't really a place where you went to go sightseeing, as much as a place where you went for the atmosphere, and should just sit in a cafe and read a book. So I did. For about 30 seconds before I fell asleep. After maybe half an hour of trying to read and falling asleep and trying to read and falling asleep, I went back to my hotel and took a shower. Then I read some more (catcher and the rye is pretty good) before I went out for dinner. I had also stopped by a tour company on the way back to figure out what I wanted to to on Sunday (today). I thought about doing their rock climbing trip, but they said that there had to be a minimum of 2 people, and no one else had signed up. So I talked to them about a hike I had thought about doing, and about the waterfalls around Dalat, and that helped me figure out my plan. But I needed a bike, so on the way back to my hotel from dinner I stopped at a bike shop, and tried to figure out if I could rent one. They guy didn't normally rent bikes, but he said he would rent me one for about $2. When I got back to my hotel though, I realized that they had bikes, and they were free (this hotel is sweet). So I planned on taking one of theirs the next day, and then fell asleep reading at probably 9:30.

Today, I got up just after 7, and got another free awesome breakfast, and packed lunch. Then I grabbed the bike, and headed north to the little village of Lat. It was about 12km, and the village is at the base of this mountain that I planned on hiking. I was a little worried about finding it, because I was again off of my maps, but the directions seems straight forward enough. I was also a little worried about what I was going to do with the bike while I was hiking since I didn't have a lock for it. Both of these worries were pretty unfounded. I had expected this mountain to sort of just be there outside of the village, however, I should have know better than to expect anything in Lonely Planet to be any less commercialized than Disney World. There was another HOLLYWOOD - esque sign on the hillside assuring me that I had in fact reached Lang Biang mountain. There was also a place to park motorbikes (and regular bikes like mine) inside the gate.

After checking my bike and buying my ticket, I asked for a trail map. Which they didn't give out, they just had a big sign with the trails, which I couldn't really read, so I just sort of headed out along the road. After about half a mile on the road, being passed about every 30 seconds by a honking roaring jeep carrying people who did not want to hike to the top of the smallest of the 3 peaks, I decided that I wanted to get off the road. There was a little trail off the side that looked promising, especially because I could hear running water, but when I looked over the edge I saw a jacuzzi and a tennis court, so I kept going. Then I found what looked like a horse trail off to the side and went for it. It was much nice in the woods, and with a combination of this horse trail, animal trails and outright bushwacking, I made my way up the mountain. After about an hour, I decided to head back to the road to make sure I was going to right way. This turned out to be a good time to make this decision. When I got back on the road, I got all angry at the jeeps passing me again, but after about 500 yards I came to the trailhead for the big peak ( a trail that thankfully was not a paved road).

It was 3 km to the peak, but it felt like longer than that. I ran into another Australian guy who seemed to be leading a group of Vietnamese middle school students along the way. The trail was pretty nice for a while, but towards the end, it got really really steep, and a little over grown. I was dripping with sweat and my legs were dead by the time I reached to summit. The views were sweet, but the summit itself was kind of a bummer. It was really hot and buggy, and there was trash everywhere, so I just took a few pictures and head back down. I had lunch in the shade where I had met the Australian guy and the kids, and head the rest of the way down. I took the road, because I didn't feel like getting all scratched up again. Back at the bottom, I rested for a little and then got back on the bike back to Dalat. It's a pretty nice bike ride through the countryside (ish) and I had planned on taking some pictures on the way back, but then it started raining, and I didn't want to get my camera wet so I just rode straight through. I got soaked, but that was okay as I had already been soaked once in sweat.

When I got back to Dalat I had planned on going to see some of the water falls and stuff, but I was pretty exhausted. I rode over to the Lake of Sighs, which is lame, and then thought about going to some falls, but decided to try to find the pagoda from yesterday again. I went all over where the maps said it should be, but still couldn't find it. Finally another nice old guy gave me directions, and I ended up finding it. It was sort of where it was supposed to be, but not really. And it was closed. bogus. A woman saw me standing at the gate looking all depressed, so she had her daughter ask me if I needed help. I said no, that I had been looking for this pagoda, but now it was closed, and she said, yes it closed everyday. Lame.

Again, exhausted, and frustrated in the same part of town as yesterday, I gave up on the waterfalls (my legs were lead at this point, and my tailbone was sore as all get out. I don't know how you got over that, dad, I know my legs would get stronger eventually, but everytime that I do any sort of bike riding, I can sit down comfortably for about a week).

I headed back to the hotel and stopped at the same place as last night for sweet and sour chicken. And that's where I am now. I gave them back the bike, and picked up my bags and wrote this out at one of the computers in the lobby. Now wimbledon is on in 5 minutes, so I'm going to go watch that before I get the bus back to HCMC.

Clearly I did not get to any waterfalls, but I'm not to upset about that. I walked to the one closest to town on Saturday, and it looked really lame. All touristy and stuff. I'm okay with some touristy stuff, but I guess I just can't stand when people make nature touristy. And Ben said that the waterfalls that he went to when he was here were not all that exciting.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2009-07-03T19:57:00.002+07:00

I've decided to change-up how I write these.
Since most of my weekdays are pretty much the same and though they are different from weekdays in the US, they really aren't interesting enough to warrant reading (or writing) basically the same thing 5 times a week. So I've decided to do posts on Monday afternoons or nights about what I did over the weekend, and then unless something extraordinary happens during the week, do a sort of highlight of the week post on Friday. Other than that you can assume that I'm getting up, walking to work, reading a whole bunch of stuff at work, walking home, hopefully going running at the track next to my guesthouse, and then reading or watching Wimbleton or soccer.

As for it being different than the US, you can also assume that on those walks I will come close to being run over by about 150 motorbikes, be asked if I want to ride on a motorbike maybe 10 times, walk along sidewalks as they are being rebuilt, walk where there should be sidewalks but right now there is just dirt, and as for running I will have to make a detour every quarter mile around the house that is in the middle of the track because whoever planned it messed up quite a bit.

So it being a Friday, highlights of the past week are in order.
1) I figured out how to get into the above mentioned track and made myself run 3 times. Today I was a little lazy and only did 2 miles, but I'm pretty happy with my times for the two times that I put in 3.
2) Professor Dapice has departed, which isn't really a highlight as much as a bummer, but is worth mentioning.
3) Last night I didn't get to go running because I walked back over the Pham Nhu Lao and planned out my trip to Dalat (for which I leave in about 3 hours).
4). I have a new assignment (and a new desk) at work. I am now looking into how countries that were once like vietnam have gone about creating a "ruthlessly" differentiate higher education system. (One in which the different piece know thier roles, ex// community colleges are focused on being the best community college they can be, and not on trying to convince someone in government that they should be upgraded to a major research university). So today I read all about Ireland.
5). Not so much a highlight, as a note to Patrick...I have started listening to the economist on my walks to and from work...I'm still not convinced that this is better than reading, I keep zoning out.

I think that's about it. I was going to go over to Pham Ngu Lao early tonight to explore and take in the backpacker community more, but that plan was steamrolled by the discover the the Federer Haas match was on, so I'm going to stop writing and actually focus on that. Dalat report (and pictures) to come Monday night.

Awake on my airplane...

2009-07-01T22:05:00.001+07:00

Photo's are now up at:

http://photobucket.com/cbehrer

It's not the most user friendly interface, though I may not have set everything up exactly right, but albums are on the left, click on them to get to photos.

Darling it's better, Down where it's wetter, Take it from me

2009-06-29T21:04:00.005+07:00

I have taken nearly a week break from writing, but most of those days were relatively uneventful, so I'll try to be concise in a recap. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were mainly just work, which was a little bit boring. Ben and Laura and trying really hard to finish up a paper that the Fulbright center has been working on for almost a year and was supposed to be done already. So we haven't really gotten a ton into doing focused work on the paper that most of my work will focus on. Mostly I just did preliminary research on that paper. Which was lame.

My two mini projects were to study the California State system for comparisons purposes, but I've finished the portion of the book I was reading that is displayed on google books and the hard copy hasn't gotten here from the US yet. So I was left to pursue the second mini project of creating a list cataloging all of the foreign investment/loans to Vietnam for education projects. I had mostly finished the World Bank's projects, but then I came across all of the Asian Development Bank projects. The ADB had several more projects, and kept much less organized records (everything was there, just not as nicely as the World Bank). Reading these project reports is really the absolute opposite of exciting...acronyms out the wazoo and meaningless progress criteria that people can say that they have met in order to justify the absurd sums of money they are wasting. Periodically Laura would ask me to help on small aspects of the paper that they are trying to finish, finding citations for little claims that someone forgot to write down the source for, checking budget numbers etc. So that was that.

Friday night Widha, JP, and I took the sleeping bus to Nha Trang a sweet beach town on the south central coast (we were actually on different busses since we bought our tickets a different times, but w/e. That's irrelevant). These busses are sweet. 3 rows of bunk beds in a regular sized bus. They clearly aren't real bunk beds, more like seats that recline almost all the way, basically the size of those generic white beack chairs, but I slept pretty well. Definitely the best I've ever slept on a bus. Photo (not taken by me, found on google) aqui.

http://www.joan-styve.net/Family2004/VNP-Large/2008%2006%2029-01%20Sleeper%20Bus.jpg

The bust ride was about 9 hours long, we left HCMC at about 8:30 and got the Nha Trang at about 6:30 the next morning. We got some breakfast (food here is even cheaper than HCMC) and then headed out to do the touristy stuff first. There were really only two big things to see, a temple with two massive Buddha statues, one of whom was sleeping, and a really only temple site, with brick temples built as early as the 7th century on a site that has been used for worship since the 2nd. However, these two cool places to go happened to be quite far outside of central Nha Trang. The first was about half an hour walk from our breakfast place, and the second was another hour walk past that. Though it was a bit cooler in Nha Trang than in HCMC, it was still quite hot, and we were pretty beat, so we took a taxi back to central Nha Trang, and got some lunch and checked into our hotel. Then we went to the beach. Widha and I swam for a little and JP took a nap.

Then Widha and I went back to the hotel to rest for a little before we walked down to one of the piers and investigated the Vin Pearl Resort, which is this gaudy amusement park/resort on one of the islands of the coast of Nha Trang. They build a massive cable car out to it, supported by huge steel towers, as well as put a HOLLYWOOD-esque VINPEARL sign on the side of one of the islands. I will post pictures soon. This was also quite a walk from our hotel, so we got the bus back. Then I watched a little bit of soccer before we went to dinner. After dinner we booked our scuba diving trip for Sunday (more below) and then went to a brewery for a little bit. At this brewery (mom, I had mint-chocolate chip ice cream) Widha expounded upon one of the more annoying aspects of nicer Vietnamese restaurants. They all have very good and very cheap food, most have a good atmosphere (this one was an open air building right on the beach, but they all, without exception, seem to have people playing music. The three problems with this being, 1) that it is way to loud, not ambience music at all, 2) they can't really sing very well in english, and 3) they all play one of the same 10 American songs.

Then we went to sleep so that we could get up early the next day. Which we did, and after breakfast (included with our rooms, and this was a nice breakfast, non of that stale cornflakes and pulpy orange juice that you get with included breakfasts in the US) we walked over to the dive shop and got the bus to the harbor.

Widha is certified, so he got to to two dives, just accompanied by a dive master, but JP and I aren't, so we had to do the try dive package, which meant that we had one dive master between the two of us, and we each got to do one dive, and one snorkeling expedition on our own (there were two dive sights, I got to dive at the first while JP snorkeled, and then we switched at the second).

It was pretty sweet. Our dive instructor was really cool. He basically just told us how everything worked and said (with a thick danish accent), "Alright, so normally on try dives I hold your tank the whole time to make sure you're okay, but with young guys like you, if I see that you are relaxed, I let you go, and we just dive." Which is basically exactly what happended. I was expected quite a bit more coddling, perhaps because I'm used to what instructors of this sort would do in the US. My dive lasted for 40 minutes, and my maximum depth was 9 meters. He took a bunch of pictures, which I just put up on facebook (they make you do all of the dumb handsignals and such) and I will also post somewhere else soon for those of you without facebook or teenage children.

At the second sight, I got to scuba dive, for which there was even less coddling. I basically just grapped my mask and the snorkle and flippers, and said, "So I can just.. go?" and yes, I could, so I jumped of the back of the boat and explored around the little island where we were diving for about half an hour. The second sight was way cooler than the first, which is kind of a bummer since I didn't get to dive at it, but also kind of not, because I could still see most of the cool stuff, and fish, snorkeling whereas at the first sight, JP said he really could not see anything from the surface.

After scuba, we went back to the restaurant where we had been eating (and drinking all of their mango juice, such that they, much to our disappointment, no longer had any mangoes). We were all pretty wiped out, so we went to the beach and read. Widha and JP went for a run, but I didn't feel like running on the sand, so I didn't. Then we went back to the hotel and took showers, before a quick pho dinner and then catching the bus back to HCMC.

I didn't sleep as well on the way back, probably a bit of a combination of bumpy roads that I don't remember from the way out, and the fact that I had gotten a little sunburned, so sleeping on my back hurt. We got back to HCMC at about 6 a.m. headed back to our guesthouses to shower and then off to work.

Today was also pretty boring, I finished the Asian Development Bank project info. But the first paper should be done. My last task today was to read the full version for typos etc. and Ben and Laura said that they are going to submit it tonight. So perhaps tomorrow, I will get more focus on the new project.

fyi...if you haven't figured it out yet, these titles are mostly coming from songs, this one was really obvious, if you don't get it, you did not have a childhood.

Everybody knows it sucks to grow up

2009-06-23T18:34:00.001+07:00

Today was one of these days...

http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20050221&name=Zits

I'm going running.

Smell, sight, taste, and sound

2009-06-22T21:13:00.003+07:00

I very much like that title, and this post is probably no where near deserving of it. I will probably come back and change it sometime soon.

Yesterday was moving day, and hopefully the beginnings of a more settled time here in HCMC.
I slept in a little bit until 9:30 (those of you know know me well may be a little surprised, those who don't can try to guess whether that's early or late...) before packing up my room in half an hour, which is an experience that I hope to be able to replicate often in the future. It happens every time that I travel, but I am again struck by the fact that even with the limited amount that I have with me, I still have things that I don't need, and I begin to wonder why all of my stuff is currently taking up most of my grandparent's basement.

Then I got a not-so-sentimental last strawberry pancake from the Sasa Cafe, paid as much for a week at the Kim hotel as I will for two at my new guesthouse, and got at cab across town. After hauling my 100 pounds of stuff up five flights of stairs I basically collapsed and tried to cool off for a couple hours reading my book. Then I decided to do something with my Sunday and headed out the Ben Tanh Market.

When I got down to the lobby and found it was raining, I almost decided to stay in, but my landlady's son told me to take one of the umbrella's hanging at the door, so I headed out.
One cool thing about rain outside of Boston and Pittsburgh is that it sometimes actually makes walking through the city more pleasant. My feet were getting soaked in my sandals, but it was a pretty cool experience to have most of the sidewalks to myself, as the army of motorbikes either sheltered themselves under awnings, or stuck to the less precarious streets.

When the downpour reached torrential proportions, I decided to step inside and sampled my first bowl of pho, which was excellent, and I will hopefully be able to find somewhere less expensive. Then I continued to the market, where I wandered around for a while, and came away with a new messanger bag (I've decided to walk to work from my new place, and a backpack is too hot) some shirts, and a present for Patrick (who reads this, so you don't get know what it is).

When I got back to my hotel, I realized that they did not provide towels, and had to go over to the grocery store to buy one. After I found the only towels there, I spent about an hour wandering around the store deciding whether or not I should buy groceries, or keep finding cheap meals and experiencing unique vietnamese foods. I suppose it was what one would call a growing up experience. My new guesthouse has a shared kitchen, so I began to try to put together cheap meals, but then I got caught up with refrigeration. I have to pay for the electricity that I use, and I have yet to find a reason to plug in my fridge, so any meal combination that I came up with requiring refrigeration incured that extra cost. So eggs for breakfast was out, cereal was out (also because Vietnamese people don't really drink milk all that much, and I can't read Vietnamese, which led me to spend about 20 minutes pondering the idea of warm milk, as well as the possibility that the refrigerated container that I was holding that looked like milk was actually half and half or whole milk or some other non-skim dairy product that I would not want to have on my cereal).

I settled for a box of imitation honey nut cheerios that turned out to be much more bland than the original. I figured that at worst I could just snack on them.

I returned to my hotel armed with my way to small towel very much ready for a shower after having walked across town and back in the thunderstorm with not much of an umbrella, only to find that there was no shower curtain. Not about to go back down the five flights of stairs, I made do without. (I got one today, and it is now hanging on a hemp line tied to the metal framing of my plaster tile bathroom ceiling).

Then I found that my internet and air-conditioning were both broken, and while the internet wasn't a huge deal, even after the coldest shower possible I was dripping in sweat, so I went to find my landlady to try to get things fixed. We tried (her husband did as well) but both were pretty clearly just not working. I did however, sleep surprisingly well spread eagle with the windows thrown open and the fan on high.

Today, I tried walking to work, which was about as hot as expected, but I think I will keep doing it. I don't really trust the bus system to be reliable, taxi's are getting to expensive with just me (the trip to work is only about 2.5 dollars, but with the other things that that money could be doing here, it's just not worth it) and the bike shop that I went to wanted a million and a half dong for a bike (A relatively neglible cost when compared to the years that my mother would lose off of her life worrying about me riding a bicycle through these streets twice a day.)

Work was pretty uneventful...more readings and spreadsheets of money wasted by the government trying to fix their education system. Lunch is very interesting now though. Professor Dapice knows a ton, and isn't shy about conversation on all sorts of things. We talked for a while today about Turkey, as well as the Iranian Revolution.

After stopping by grocery store for my shower curtain and dinner, I returned to my room to find the internet technician finishing up the repairs on my DSL cable, and my airconditioning working. After putzing around for a bit, I decided to do something and headed out for a run.

The track across the street that I was hoping to be able to run at (the one with the house in the middle of it) was closed, to I was stuck with the street. Though it probably wasn't the best of ideas given the treacherous nature of HCMC's sidewalks and the proliferation of motorbikes, I went for a GirlTalk accompanied run through the rainy semi-light evening, which was pretty awesome.

When I got back my landlady (the only one who speaks even broken English) was home and we had the brief conversation of....

- Internet good??
- Yep, the internet it working (thumbs up)
- Airconditioning good?
- Yep, aircondition good, internet good, lights good (two of my lightbulbs had been burned out) everything's good.
- Ok, I think you angry with me
- Nope, everything's good, I'm not angry.

I definitely had been last night as I spent a sweating two hours trying to figure out why my thermostat told me that it was 60 degrees when it felt like 90. But now, whether because of the run or because things are starting to become more stable and routinized, I was pretty content.

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

2009-06-20T19:37:00.005+07:00

It's been a couple of days so I'll start with a brief recap.

Thursday: At work I really got into my project since I knew what I was supposed to do now. After work, Widha and I walked back to the area where he and JP are staying and his land lady and her son took me around to see rooms in other guest houses. Then I walked home and talked to my hotel to see whether I should move. Living in the guest house is going to be much cheaper, so I decided to switch over the weekend. It turns out that the room I am in now is the 19$ room, but they are only charging me 16$ a night, so they won't give me any more of a discount. The guest house is only $230 a month plus electricity, which isn't that expensive, so it's about half as much, and it has a full bath tub and a flat screen tv...

Friday: Most of today was a frustrating struggle to exchange my traveller's checks so that I could give the guesthouse a deposit. I went to the bank close to my hotel now, but it didn't open soon enough to get to work on time. Then at work, I found looked up banks online that were close, and during lunch I walked down to where one was supposed to be, but it wasn't there, or anywhere that I could find or the people I could communicate with could point me to. So I had to go back to work, still unable to exchange traveller's checks. In the afternoon I got a little bit of work done and then looked for more banks close the fulbright center. I found a whole bunch, but a lot of the locations that google and my guide book had turned up over the past couple of days had turned out to be atm's, so I just went to sacombank's website, and it turns out that they Ho Chi Minh city headquarters is located very close to the center. So at about 3 I walked over, hoping to get back by 3:30, so that I could finish up what I wanted to get done without having to stay too late. Maybe going to the headquarters was a mistake, because it took much longer than a half an hour. I was sick of going places that wouldn't take traveller's checks though, and had to make sure that I had money to give the hotel. But anyways, when you walk in you have to take a number and then wait until they call you up...they have like 30 teller stations, and I still had to wait for 45 minutes before my number was called. And then they had to figure out how to deal with traveller's checks, which they apparently don't do all that often....But anyways, I finally got them exchanged and headed back to work for a little bit, but then I had to go to the hotel to give them they deposit. After that I met Widha, JP, Laura and two Vietnamese girls who work at the center (I really need to start remembering their names) for dinner and then we went to karaoke, which was pretty fun...fondly remembered selections include Living on a prayer (of course), tons of spanish music from JP, who apparently used to sing in a bar, Tram's vietnamese song, and the best by far... Basketcase

I suppose that that wasn't really all that brief of a recap....

But on to today...My first weekend day in Vietnam to travel around!
Was really lame.

I went to Cao Dai temple and Cu Chi tunnels with one of the tour groups. Both sounded like pretty cool places in my guidebook. Cao Dai temple (and the surrounding complex) is like the vatican for a vietnamese religion that combines Islam, Buddism, Confusianism, and Catholicism, they worship Jesus, Buddha etc. all equally, and apparently Victor Hugo is one of their saints (hence the title). They have 4 prayer services a day (which you can watch) and very extravagant temples. Cu Chi was a VC cell in southern vietnam during the war, and there are still real tunnels and stuff, and you can shoot AK47's and M16's (I wanted to, but it was way too expensive). My guide book says that it's easy to make a trip of both and that it's not all that expensive to just book a cab to both places from HCMC. Sounds pretty sweet. At least it did to me, and I had to do just a day trip today, because I have to move hotels tomorrow.

It turns out that the temple and the tunnels are about an hour apart. So instead of a quick jaunt to the north, we cram into a van for a 2.5 hour ride to the temples (of course with a stop at a factory that mass manufactures cheap toursity junk for a 45 minute "bathroom break"). The temples and the complex are pretty lame. The temples are really colorful, but pretty small, and the complex is not that much different than the rest of the country side. The prayer service was less impressive than I expected as well, mainly because there weren't all that many people praying. After about an hour outside of the van we pile back in the start back towards the tunnels (we get pulled over for speeding on the way) and stop for lunch. Then we head to the tunnels, which are pretty cool actually. It's been totally touristified, and is pretty anti-american (guerilla fighters got medals as "American Killer") but a lot of the original stuff is still intact. Then we headed back to HCMC...but it was a pretty disappointing and exhausting day, it was really humid and it just absolutely drained me, a 10 hour trip, more than 5 of which was spent in the cramped van. One positive was meeting this guy from Britain who now lives in Australia, we talked for a while about a whole bunch of stuff, which was pretty interesting. And seeing the country side was intersting, rice fields and all that, not that I really need/want to go back to see more of it, but I suppose that I should look on it as an cultural experience.

Could I have been...

2009-06-17T21:44:00.004+07:00

Wandering somewhere between Dong Khoi and Pham Ngu Lao?

Today my breakfast place had strawberries so I got their "strawberry pancake" which was a full plate sized dough thing between a crepe and pancake in thickness, with sliced pieces of strawberries put on top like pepperoni on a pizza. And it was served with a dish of chocolate sauce. It was sweet. I got a watermelon smoothie to, which wasn't so great...Their smoothies pretty unadulterated, so it was like sticking a straw in a watermelon and drinking, and I'm not the biggest watermelon fan, so I didn't think it was all that great.

After breakfast I tried to get a cab on the major road so it would be a shorter distance to work, but I couldn't, so I went back over to where I've been getting them next to the park and headed to work. Ben wasn't there in the morning (I later found out that he was in Hanoi) and Laura hadn't gotten there from Indonesia yet, so I spent the morning reading more stuff from the world bank's website about the projects they have financed in Vietnam.

I got lunch with JP (Juan Pablo) and Widha. They are about KSG students, JP is from Ecuador and Widha is from Jakarta. We went up Vo Thi Sau street and found a restaurant, where I got fried rice and eggs, which was very good. We talked a lot about sports (Widha comes to the lowell bouldering wall sometimes!) and got around to the gym that JP goes to here and the track that they went running at that runs into a house. (I would walk by this on my way home, it's literally an oval track where someone screwed up planning it, and it runs into the side of a house).

In the afternoon I met Laura, who will be running the education project with Ben. She lived in Lowell and graduated in 08, she speaks Vietnamese (not as well as Ben, but he's really good) and has been here for the past few summers. She gave me some more stuff to read, and links to the English language newspapers. So I went to read that stuff for the afternoon. Ben got back around 2 and Laura, Ben, Qui (spelling?) and I met at four to talk about the project. Qui is an M.B.A. student at the Fulbright school who will also be working on the project. I get to start by researching the California state system, because it is about the best example of a complete higher education system, from vocational and technical schools to community colleges, to state universities and up the elite research universities. Second I get to look into all of the external funding that has come to Vietnam from places like the world bank and foriegn governments for higher education.

After work I took a new path back to the hotel, I've decided to come back different ways everyday so I can see more of the city. I wanted to go to a bank to exchange my travellers checks, but it was closed by the time that I got there, so I just wandered around in the general direction of the hotel. I was looking for one of the money exchange places that I came across last night where I could exchange traveller's checks, but I couldn't find one, and all the banks were closed. Eventually, I got sick of looking for somewhere and took more money out of the ATM (lame...) hopefully I can get to a bank tomorrow so I don't get charged ridiculous atm fees....

I ended up walked around quite a bit wandering around and stopped for dinner at a restaurant where I watched the Korea Iran soccer game. I got rice and eggs again because it was so good at lunch, but it wasn't as good this time. There was a ton of rice though, so at least I'm not hungry.

Then I headed back to the hotel since it was pretty late (my wanderings/dinner had turned the trip home into almost a 3 hour jaunt, so it was pretty late).

Spain just scored a sweet goal, 1-0 over Iraq.

I've seen better days

2009-06-16T20:30:00.003+07:00

Today was pretty frustrating. Ben wasn't at the office, and Laura was supposed to come in the afternoon, but she either got delayed, or I just missed her, because I couldn't find her, and no one knew where she was. *Geez Brazil just scored again, 3 goals in 10 minutes* So I spent pretty much the whole day just googling various permutations of "higher education in vietnam" and reading whatever came up. Being bored and reading all of this stuff about education made me think a lot about my eduation. I think I need more science/math, which I have been thinking for a while, but I like most of the gov. classes that I have taken. I guess the best way to have done it would have been to spread out my gov. classes over my 4 years more, instead of getting through basically the whole major in 2 years, because now, with going abroad, I'm going to have trouble taking all of the physics/stats/math/cs classes that I want to because of prerequisites etc. But maybe when I take cs 50 and physics 15 I'll realize that I made the right choice....we'll see.

After work I took a very circuitous route back to the hotel, with the goal of finding the bookstore where Patrick bought his map and going to the bank. I didn't find the bookstore, but headed to one of the ones in lonely planet, but ended up buying a map off a street vendor instead (she may have over charged me a bit, but I still only payed like 2$). Then I found a money exchange center, and they take travellers checks, but only if you have a passport, and the hotel has my passport right now, I guess as a security measure, so I couldn't exchange money. ( I spent a lot of money today, relative to yesterday, some of that I guess is because I only ate one meal yesterday, but I think I could have spent a little less anyways, but it was only $15...)

By the end of my walk home I was pretty frustrated again. It had started to drizzle, and I got sort of turned around trying to find my hotel again, but I discovered a sort of shopping district I guess, with tons of shirts and backpacks and stuff. I'll ask Ben tomorrow if stuff is really cheap in these places because it's fake, or just because it's made here. I went back to the Sasa cafe for dinner ( I went there for breakfast this morning, it's the crepe place that patrick told me about). Their smooties are good, and my omlette this morning was good, but my sandwich tonight was pretty bad. I'll probably keep going there for breakfast, at least as long as I stay at this hotel, but I probably won't there for dinner anymore.

Final random thought.
I don't really know how blogs normally work, but this is basically going to be a journal of what I do, and what I'm thinking about. I don't know if this is going to be interesting for other people to read, but I want something to go back to to remember my time travelling. If it's boring, sorry, you don't have to read it....

All the small things

2009-06-16T20:09:00.005+07:00

Before I write about today, I have a couple of random thoughts, most of which are about the differences between HCMC and the US...

*****
There are motorbikes everywhere...without exaggerating at all, I would guess that in the two days that I have been here, I have seen more than 50,000 motorbikes.

*****
Related to above, traffic laws seem to be non-existent, red lights are optional, as is going the right direction on the road. There are pedestrian signals on some intersections, but crossing the street is more the art of using a hoard of motorbikes going parallel t0 the direction that you want to walk as a sort of moving pick to get across the street.
*****
Again related to above, the concept of "way to close" as in, "that motorbike was way to close to hitting me" is completely redefined here. Walking home today, I was on the sidewalk, which I would say was normal sized for the US, and there were two rows of motorbikes riding down the sidewalk towards me because the road was so crowded, I squeezed as close the wall as I could, and at points had to step into store doorways to avoid getting hit, it was a bit ridiculous.
*****
This is the kind of city that I could never live in for a long period of time. I always thought that I would have issues with big US cities like NYC or Boston, but they really aren't bad at all in terms of traffic, noise, cleanliness, visual appeal, etc.
*****
I'm really not sure when people here sleep. When we were driving to the hotel from the airport the first night I was here, past midnight, there were still people in the streets...like 8 year old girls doing handstands and stuff in the middle of a 4 lane road, and when I got up the next morning and headed to work at 7, there were already people everywhere, playing badminton in the parks, and all the businesses looked like they had been open for hours.
*****
At work today I was reading a lot of background about vietnam's education and in one of the reports, it said that a goal of the government was to transform vietnam's education system to entirely English based within the next 10 years, and after that to transform the rest of society to English. Whether or not that is realistic, it is an interesting subject to think about. Learning English is clearly beneficial for business and academic fields, and I think most countries are a long way away from abandoning their native languages for English, but still...
*****
Kaka just scored a sweet goal against Egypt.
*****
It's been really cloudy here for the past two days, and drizzled/intermitently poured both days. I hope it's not always like this, it was nice walking home today because it was a bit cooler, but it was still very humid, and I haven't seen the sun since Boston...
*****
Wow, Egypt just scored a sweet goal too, 8 minutes in it's already 1-1...

Here it goes again

2009-06-16T06:22:00.001+07:00

Right now it is 6:30 in the morning on my second full day in Vietnam. I left Boston Saturday morning, and through D.C. and then Tokyo ended up in Ho Chi Minh City at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday. Then I just headed to my hotel and tried to get some sleep. Monday morning I got up pretty early because I couldn't really sleep and headed to the Fulbright center to start work. I didn't really do all that much, Ben said I should just meet everyone and get a feel for the place and we would figure out exactly what I would be doing later, so I just read a little bit. We went out to lunch too which was very good. I decided to walk home to start to get a feel for HCMC and to start to learn where everything is, but it was ridiculously hot and humid, so I'm not sure if I will keep doing that.

When I got back to the hotel, I spent about 10 minutes trying to get my air conditioning to work, and when I did I just fell asleep (at about 6 p.m.). Which is why I've been up for about an hour already waiting for everything to open up so I can go get some breakfast. I'm going to try to find the crepe and smoothie place that Patrick said is around here somewhere.

That's about all for now.