Cyclo Drivers - 2, Andrea&Dave - 0

We missed seeing Uncle Ho's body. We were going there first thing this morning. Out of the door, at the complex, before 8am and the crowds. We got in the wrong line and didn't check out the title on the tickets - Ho Chi Minh Museum - not Mausoleum. We should have pointed to the picture in the book, not just walked around saying, "Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh." But I'm jumping ahead now. I've missed two full days and one instance of "too tired to go out at night".

It's Saturday, 3:30 pm here. On Thursday we went to the "village" of Bat Trang. Bat Trang village has been eaten by the export shops. We walked down one little alley area and watched someone pour the slurry into molds. More interestingly, we got to meet two families which make the ceramics. Our guide, Thin, actually knew them. Apparently she, a brother and her sister-in-law had worked with them at one time. One family created pieces for internal use, another family made work for export.

During the purchase process, they served us green tea, we played with the baby, and they prepared and served me an areca nut wrapped in a betel leaf. This is what makes for those fantastic pictures of the smiling old woman with the black mouth & red lips. I bit down and the nut broke apart into a woody mass. It was a peppery taste, but I didn't want to swallow. I also didn't want to spit it out on their floor. The whole family - grandmother, husband, sisters, brothers, babies, just about died laughing. I was smiling a bit too hard and worried about drool. Luckily, there was a garbage can near by. I spit out the mass into my hand (because I dont' spit very far or very well). My spit was red, which meant I'd just made my hand & fingers red. (I always carry wipes with me when I travel, so "tragedy" was averted.

Bat Trang is down the road from Hanoi, so we actually made it out of town. The "highway" was actually wider than those we'd driven in Croatia or in the Italian alps. That said, there were more bicycles, farm stands, people walking, cows, and motorbikes than cars. The paved portion of the road was actually quite narrow - the sides eaten away into potholes and dirt. The driving was slow and comfortable. It's the dry season here. The Red river is down, and people have moved into temporary shelters to plant in the alluvial soil that's bared during this time. When the rains come, the fields will be covered and they'll move on. There's no houses allowed to be built in this planting area, however these temporary shelters exist so that people can guard their plantings. Apparently agricultural theft is common.

The temperature's dropped down to the 70's. It's been grey every day here. We did see some blue sky yestrday, but we could hear someone yell "Fake!" Good thing too because this humidity is curling my hair. There's quite a few tourists here - Indians, Germans, French, English, Australian. We all seem to be walking with a glazed look across our face, ignoring each other, as we all wander through the Old Quarter eating at the same twelve restaurants recommended by Lonely Planet. Dave & I haven't braved sitting down at one of the street vendors, but we're not the only chickens.

Yesterday, Friday, we had our cooking class. It was really quite the surprise for us. We didn't understand what we'd signed up for. It started out with Thinh and our driver picking us up at the hotel & taking us to La Verticale. There we met Didier Corlou, the chef and owner. He'd been head chef at the Sofitel Metropole before he opened up his own restaurant. I'd heard about him from the Food Network. Dave (yes, my Dave) took to him right away. The man collects spices, has a 15 year old Nuoc mam. He let us sniff his tumeric and taste his 5 spice. He took us shopping at the December 19 market (no the fat lady in the cyclo isn't me - startling resemblance though ain't it?). There we wandered the stalls while he spoke about the variety of spices and herbs in Vietnam. Dave & he talked about different kinds of preparation. We watched catfish being clubbed, squid being cleaned, ofal separated. He's interested in preparing all parts of the animal for consumption. Alot of this he learned from his wife, Mia, who's Vietnamese. She'd dropped us off & then picked us up. It was with her that we had the cooking class.

She took us back to their house. Again, we left Hanoi and crossed the Red River. This time we stopped at a "suburb" just out of Hanoi. Behind high walls, their home was the ideal of a tropical house. The first floor was one great room with huge glass doors & windows which would open up to capture the breeze. After that was a small courtyard with two different kinds of alcove and an oven. This cooking "wall" was made out of brick Both alcoves were vented with chimneys. We came to find that the one alcove which had a shelf at waist height was there to take a charcoal brazier. The other one opened up for even more cooking surface. Behind this, they had their catering kitchen. The catering kitchen had a roof and monster / professional cook stoves & wok burner & baker's area, but they weren't enclosed with walls on all sides, they were open to the air in traditional Vietnamese kitchen style. Makes a lot of sense when it's 90 degrees in February.

Mia took us through the steps to prepare what we'd been eating on the streets - bun cha with nem - the grilled pork meatballs in a sauce along with fried eggrolls. We also made a chicken wrapped in lemon leaves. The whole cooking process was very well organized, enjoyable to watch & participate in with tasty results. Yes, we brought the recipes home with us. And if you're good little girls & boys we'll prepare some for you when we get home.

The hour is up. It's time to go. No pictures due to slow connection speeds to U.S. sites.

Hanoi

is a city the way cities were meant to be: they eat strangers. It smells of charcoal and burning money. We walk in the streets with the mopeds, buses and cars now. It's amazingly clean even while women hack the nails off of pigs' feet and eels squirm in their plastic bowls. Hanoi howls and honks. It's life lived on the sidewalk. The bolts of silk and bags of buttons, zippers, sheet metal furnaces, steel pipe, silk lanterns, wrapped reams of paper, embossed invitations, candy offerings formed like flowers, three foot talk candles, all spill out onto the sidewalk. There are no lines to draw or drive between here. It's woven movement. There's chicken soup and there's charcoal braziers. Roosters run beneath the grills. You look into a doorway and see someone's bed. The brick pavement has collapsed into holes, or heaved itself with the roots of the banyan tree. There's cigarette smoke and incense. They paint their gods blue here.

We arrived here on Tuesday afternoon just fine. Our guide, Thinh Thi Le, met us at the airport. Seattle to Taipei was a 13 hour flight, then we had a 3 hour lay over. We have pictures of the Taipei airport, including the "Hello Kitty" gate. The drive into the city was uneventful, until we hit the Old Quarter. The traffic is stunning. No one stops at the red light to wait for the green in this district. Mopeds come at you down "one-way" streets. Everyone merges on a right had turn.

After we unpacked, we decided to go for a small walk to find a restaurant recommended by everyone & the guide-books. It was supposed to be "right" out of the hotel, then take a left. We found the restaurant four clover-leaf's later. We walked for nearly two hours to make the four blocks it should have taken us. The streets change their names from one shop to the next. We decided to try to follow the map, again, back to the hotel before it got dark. We should have left bread crumbs for all the good the map did us. We wandered the streets parallel & perpidicular to the one which has our hotel on it. We walked back to the restaurant for fried fish. It only took half -again the time this third trip. After dinner, we knew to keep walking when we passed the hardware street. You can build a house with what you find on the sidewalk.

We've begun to take pictures of our food, but this first night we forgot. We had the fried fish at Cha ca La Vong. They have little hot plates set at the tables. The front part of the restaurant, the part straight off the side walk, is where you pull your motorbike in. That's also where they keep their coolers. The restaurant has its whole front wall made out of glass, but this isn't a glamorous joint, it's to keep the air conditioning in. There were a few tables. We sat down at one next across from a family of six. They brought out a small skillet with the fish. They brought out a bowl of dill, a bowl of onion & cilantro, a plate of rice vermicelli, one of peanuts, one of thai peppers and a bowl of dipping sauce. They heated the skillet with the fish & oil & then placed a goodly amount in with the fish. In an empty bowl, you place a good grab of vermicelli, then put some of the onion & cilantro, peanuts, & pepper in it. Then you grab the cooked dill & fish & put that in the bowl. Then you pour the sauce over all. We don't know what the sauce was made of, but it was grey & had a frothy skin of some kind of on the top. It was more on the sweet than on the savory side. This is the only dish they serve at Cha Ca La Vong. Tast-eeee...

We walked back to the hotel through a dark Hanoi. Light flickers red because of the charcoal braziers at night on the street. I walked back to the hotel in a daze, holding on to David for balance I was so tired. There's no even pavement, or if you think there is, the next step will prove you wrong, or you run out of sidewalk & have to walk back into the street.

Yesterday Thinh took us for a walking tour through the old quarters. Once Dave & I figure out how to hook up the usb to the camera we'll try to upload pictures - or maybe those will just have to wait until we get back. We walked through the markets with someone who knew how to find our way home. We gave in to the smells, the sights, everything which was strange. We ate sugar cane from a woman who hacked the bark off with a ancient steel cleaver. The cleaver didn't gleam, it was black and she wielded it in sure strokes down the stem. Then when the stem was bare, she started shearing it into sections - her fingernails were black, but her fingers knew exactly how to move across the branch. She split the sections into half. I ate my first cane and it was clean and only a little sweet. It killed my thirst without sticking to my throat.

Thinh took us for Bun Cha - a specialty of Hanoi. This is pork grilled over one of the charcoal braziers. We walked up stairs to the private quarters of the family. Additional tables had been added, but they cleared the family table for us. Dave got pictures of this meal. It starts out like a bowl of pho with plates of vegetables around. You put your pork in the broth, add the vermicelli, a little bit of fish sauce, et viola - bun cha! Amazing pork. We've never had anything like this. I think it was marinated for at least a year it was so tender. The broth was dark and rich without being thick. It had a generous amount of pepper.

Dinner was at au Lac in the French Quarter. We took cyclos across the town - $3 and the fat lady sang. It was the perfect pace, but yes, we were riding in the front of a bicycle through metropolitan traffic. Remember: red lights do not mean "stop," they mean - get the hell merged before the bus eats the bicycle. We tapped the bus once or twice. Motorbikes flew around us like raindrops down a windshield. Hanoi is a beautiful city at night.

Pictures next time - hopefully!

Things Which Go Wrong Before and During "The Dream Trip"

Day 3 of the 5 week vacation in Italy - I sneezed & I couldn't straighten up.
head colds
sinus infections
blisters
popped ear drums b/c of aforesaid head colds while driving through the Italian alps as well as from descending airplanes after other passengers spritzed a fresh layer perfume over their otherwise travel-stinked body.
sore legs & thighs
vomiting (projectile & otherwise)

traveler's trots (including the explosive kind)

This time:

Friday evening our dog, Honey, climbed the stairs to the office. I was finishing up work. Dave had come home & was checking stuff on-line. Thirty minutes later, she's trying to stand up, but can't get out of a sitting position. Her head is canting to the left. Then her left front leg jerks up like she's going for a hand shake. Her rear right leg splays out from under her. She can't walk. We think she's having a stroke.

We took her to the emergency vet. There's a name for it, but "dizzy dog" is a simple name for something which apparently is like losing your inner ear balance. She actually spazzed out with so much force she flipped herself over. Her legs go everywhere and her head continues to twitch her to left. She won't drink, hasn't drunk since Friday. She won't eat. She's 16 1/2. She's older than our nephews.

We're headed back to the vet.

Where in the world do you want to go?

What do you want to do when you get there?

What do you expect to see?

Do you want to be in a crowd of people, or do you want to walk the streets by yourself?

Will you stop in cafes & eat or drink, or is your destination more remote than that, or are you a volksmarcher!

What's the most exotic spot you've ever been to? Did you find it tame, or exciting?


Do you like being able to read and understand the menu?

Do you enjoy driving? Riding trains? Flying in red balloons? What's the setting of your favorite tv show or book?

What strange thing, or sight, would you like to see with your own two eyes? Or smell with your own nose? What about sounds? What would you like to hear?

How does the word "pilgrimage" make you feel?

Have you ever been bored while traveling? What are your complaints about while traveling?

Do you want to sleep in the same bed every night?

Do you like meeting new people, or not?

How long would you like to stay? Not, how long can you stay, but how long would make you just a little bit homesick?
You have lots of reasons why you can't travel: kids, money, time. What's to stop you from reading, researching, planning, budgeting, thinking about how you could make it work for you?

How many times have you traveled to the same place? What are the characteristics which make you return again and again? Is it because of obligation or love? If it's love, what other place in the world would have similar characteristics?

Leave the name of a place you'd like to visit, a budget, and an obstacle you've got to visiting it.

Repetitious Blather - or How to Plan Your Own Four Week Vacation

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, the trips in 2000 & 2001 are history. This is 2009. We've taken trips since then. Until this trip to Vietnam, I've done all of our vacation planning. We took a trip to France in 2004 and another long trip (4 weeks) driving across Europe in 2006. I've only got pictures. I've never created a website. What I did create was a collage of the travel photos. I'll post a picture of that when I'm not a fried banana.

Anyways, I have no problems asking for 4 weeks off for vacation. 5 weeks is done in other countries all the time.

Travel freshens me up. Things go cock-eyed when we travel. You never know what's going to show up on your plate at your next meal, what sights you're going to see around the next corner. Have you ever walked on icy cobblestones in high-heels? How about driven a "two-lane" road which is narrow for one car through the alps? Sat down at a three hour, seven - course dinner? Smelled the scent of freshly cut Andouillette. You're not waking up in the same bed, walking the well-trod path to your bathroom. Sometimes you're lucky you can fit into the shower. Hopefully you haven't run out of your favorite shampoo while you're traveling.

So, travel is a pleasure for me. It's one of the reasons why I work.

Why do you work ?

1) Roof over head = Good Thing

2) Clothes > shivering buck nekkid in the snow

3) If Food In Belly is not null, then :)

after Maslow has been appeased then there's:

4) Paying off Student Loans

5) Paying off remodel (expensive taste not included)

6) *optional* Children (you'll be paying for that one for awhile, but you can still afford Venice!)

7) Shoes, cars, and pet food

But after that, what do you intend to do between the time that:

you are born

go to school

get a job

die

Hopefully something which seems beyond reach, like spend more time with people you like (*may we even say "love" here?) than those whose eyelashes you'd like plucked from their lids one by one until they couldn't protect their eyes from the gnats which would swarm down from the heavens to feed upon their vitreous humour.

I'll start a series of links of my favorite travel planning websites. Expedia is more expensive than most of them. My current fave is kayak. What's so great about Kayak is that they have a charting function on the prices over time (Yea! Charting!) PLUS you can put in options like +/- 3 days from your date of travel in searching for prices.

Current prices now for Seattle-London round-trip are $504. Frankfurt is also $504. Amsterdam is $604. Paris was $605 last week, but seems to have gone up in price.

For our trip to Paris in 2004, Dave & I snapped up PriceLine.com tickets for 2 on a Thursday for a Sunday flyout & 7 days in Paris. Even the customs agents were impressed. People talk & dream about a "Weekend Getaway," or "Fly To Paris" on a dime, but never do it. We did. There was no jet lag. Somehow having only a week changed some brain chemical something & I didn't poop out the first day, or the 2nd. I wasn't cranky for my nap.

I spend a lot of time researching at Trip Advisor. Sure there are a lot of sourpusses there, but it was reading about the hotel reservations which went unhonored in Vietnam that actually drove me to go to a travel agent. I was reading post after post about people showing up in Hanoi, or somewhere in Vietnam & the hotel not having their reservation, or had given it away. Uh-uh. Nope. I don't play that game. I too tired at the end of a 13 hour flight on top of a 2 hour layover & then another 2 hour flight. I'll let everyone know how my hotel reservations went from booking with a travel agent.

If they go badly, well, I do have a list of backup places I intend to go, but I'll also have someone - Exotissimo - to "call" (can you hear me now?) if I don't have a room & I'm jet-lagged.

Well....

All these pictures are from the 2004 trip to Paris

Will work for travel

This is not the first four week vacation Dave & I have been on. It's not even the second. The first long vacation he & I went on was for five weeks. That was in 2000. He & I were not yet 40. We had no children. We'd paid down our remodel. It had been 20 years since either of us had been to Europe. We were going to go & go as good as we could get.

Third day out into the five week vacation, I might have blasphemed a little bit while in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. I threw my back out ten minutes later - the kind of "throw your back out & I can't get up" kind of "threw my back out." So, lesson learned: Never blaspheme or damn the Pope while in the Vatican. Got that?

I created this website from our 5 week & 4 week trips in 2000 & 2001.

FOD

Using acronyms is part of my job description. I'm graded on it twice a year. It's deconstructed spelling; minimalism run amok, poking its thumb in Dr. Samuel Johnson's eye. Apparently, I can't do without acronyms in my non-working life, so I'll make some up here. First I'll define them, but then plan on being tested in later conversations with me. Okey doke?

Funny On Demand - FOD. Yes, worry about writing in this blog woke me up at 2am this morning (the hormone shift and hot wings weren't part of it at all).

FOD. If this is a blog requirement, it's another one I'll fail. My angst opened its trunk & unpacked. I guess it's staying awhile.

Will work for food

Sushi menus have always intimidated me. I can never remember which fish I like, or what roll I enjoyed. Is the negiri the roll in the seaweed, or just the fish flesh atop the rice? Do I use chopsticks or my fingers? Do I dunk in the soy sauce with the green stuff, or not. I break out in hives I get so nervous. Hajime Sato, owner of Mashiko's in the West Seattle Junction, makes it easy. He fixes us dinner.

We walk up to the bar and Hajime starts Dave's spider roll, after that, it's Chef's choice. I always order a masu of the Momokawa Pearl sake. The sake is served chilled in a wooden bowl (the masu) set on a small plate. The masu is overfilled so that some of the sake spills onto the plate. When you've drunk your masu down, you pour the rest of the sake from the plate back into the masu. It's like a small moment of coloring outside of the lines.

I wish I could describe dinner last night, but I can't. I don't have the vocabulary. While I'm still learning about Japanese food, I sit down & eat what's put in front of me.

I'm gonna miss dinner at Mashiko's while we're gone. I get these hankerings.

Will work for travel

Here's the calendar of our itinerary. You should be able to click on it to see where we're going to be, what we expect to be doing on any given day.

For the first time, we worked with travel professionals. Whoo-whee. They sure do write nice. It's quite easy to read their write-ups & say, "Charge it!". Of course, they never quite mention the cost unless you directly ask.

During this trip, we decided to take some private tours just to ease the getting around. We're not bicyclists. The Vietnamese don't appear to drive between the lines (and I don't think they recognize the international driver's license). Train service does not appear to be as well meshed as we've found in Europe and the idea of 8 hour bus rides is not appealing. Getting around was one of the things which we felt intimidated by during this first trip to Asia.

Our dear friend, Jacky Paillard, is a travel consultant and helped us with our planning: where we wanted to go, what we wanted to see, when we wanted to go, which direction. He arranged the bulk of where we were going to stay, what we were going to do and then turned us over to the travel company, Exotissimo, for booking. Mr. Quoc Minh Pham has been my contact with Exotissimo. Both people have been extremely patient with me & my planning, questions, and changes. I'm a compulsive reader, an internet junkie, forum / bulletin board addict, and in my past life I'm sure I was a research librarian. I've always planned my own trips, including transportation before. I was a burden to both these gentlemen, but they endured. This is Exotissimo's write-up of our itinerary. It just makes me drool to read it. They use present tense and action verbs, historical references and surprising images.

I give up

I’ve avoided working on a blog for years because if I don’t keep up my correspondence with my mother, my writing buddies or my college friends, I’m obviously not responsible enough to keep up a blog. A blog is a pet. It’s a responsibility. There are blogs I’ve read where I’ve fallen in love with the blogger’s wit, their POV, the theme, their writing style. They maintain the energy for three, four, six posts and then nothing – for four months- nothing. Then one day, a new post appears and they get seven posts up. And they stop. For a year. Or more.

Dave has pets, I don’t. I’ve refused to have a blog for the same reason. A blog must be fed and watered. If I forget to feed myself, feeding others is an even lower priority. A blog needs to have its hair brushed and toenails trimmed. I’m a walking bad hair day. So expect this: this blog will be active for a while & then a whole lot of nothing. I will have a passion for a period of time and then I’ll be curled up in a fetal position with my bankey and thumb-sucking will be my most demanding activity. I won’t care about the blog, I’ll be caring about my shattered psyche. I have no particular interest I can maintain for longer than my hair color. I will feel passionate for thirty minutes and then afterwards I’ll smoke a cigarette, roll over and fall asleep. The only promise I can promise to keep is that this will be one of “Those Blogs”, a peripatetic blog, a blog without a cause. It will be spastic, fibrillating. I make no promises as to continence, continuity, or congeniality. My commitment will be to uncommitted.

But Dave & I are about to begin another one of our trips. During our trips in the past, I’ve emailed friends and family while on the road. We’d find an internet café, or use the computer at the front desk of a hotel we were staying at, and we’d write our friends & family about our trip. My favorite were the emails which I know will arrive in people’s work inboxes on Monday mornings. It helps us savor the experience of "We're on vacation" because "You're not!"

But maintaining the email list is a nightmare. We’ve all be sold more than twice and companies no longer use names in the address, my fingers are too fat, more people have emails now & the emails bounce. Oyyy. That’s why I decided to start this “blog”. It’s easier than maintaining the distribution list. The drawback is that I’ll have to remember yet another new password.