Our guide was three years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. He lost a brother and a sister, and his parents lost everything because they were urban intellectuals. He looked at me. “You wear glasses,” he said, “that means you are an intellectual. You are not going to the fields, you are going to die.” …
I’d imagined Saigon in post-colonial elegance, but instead, it’s a post-industrial metropolis, a swirl of scooters driven by candy colored helmeted 19 year olds, nearly 9 million of them. I was absolutely wrong, Saigon was not the city I was looking for. The good news is that Phnom Penh absolutely is. The fine grace of …
By Your Intrepid Substitute Blogger I stood in PCC in Kirkland last Wednesday and looked at the fish. I looked at the halibut cheeks (don’t like halibut), the shrimp (my little guy decided last week he doesn’t like it any more; plus we just had it), the wild Alaskan king and sockeye (I really prefer …
Windowless hotel rooms. Icky bathrooms. The bus. Lousy air quality, including second hand smoke. All those zeroes on the currency. Unpredictable coffee. Very Hard Beds. No, I mean VERY hard. Noise pollution. Aggressive shopkeepers. Being on someone else’s schedule. That’s it for the complaining. Everyone gets to do a little bit, it’s only fair. But …
At the Cu Chi tunnels, you can see where the Viet Cong forces, working with the local people (or not, it’s not clear) dug out an extensive underground complex that reaches from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to Cambodia. You can see examples of the terrifying traps the VC built to snag the …
There’s a big mural on the back wall of one of the expat cafes in Hoi An town that’s got Bruce Lee with a big can of Coke in one hand, and on the other side, there’s a Mona Lisa wearing an iPod. In the middle, it says in big letters, “I shop, therefore I …