Greetings friends, family and fans...not so much new in my life, but i do have a kick-ass apartment. so, most of this is just sweet photos from my place. Monsoon season is in full swing, so HCMC is much less the sunny tropical paradise I've grown to love; lately it resembles a warm Seattle/Norwich more than anything. Life in Ho Chi Minh continues to treat me well - I've started working a lot more, so I'm busier now than I have been for months - and I'm happier this way. Since nothing truely inspirational has occured lately, I've decided to compile [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hello hello - I've just returned from cambodia! We had a few days holiday in vietnam, and it was past time for me to get away, so I decided on cambodia. Since I came to Vietnam, I'd been hoping to visit ANgkor Wat, the world's largest religious building in the world, and one of the seven known wonders of the world!!! I'd been hoping that I'd have time to get there before my return to the states. I came here with two people I know from Saigon, but I didn't know them that well - Sam and Mel. Nonethelesss, they're good [View Full Entry]

---

---

Greetings to all...apologies for the length of time between entries - life here is not so new anymore, and thus it's difficult to feel inspired to sum it all up. That being said, there have still been a few noteworthy moments: first and foremost, my house was burgled a two weeks or so ago. We had an extreme hot spell for two weeks (actually, it's supposed to last appx two months or so, but weather's been off this year, and thus what heat we've experienced has been intense, but brief. It's already rained a few times this week, and the dry [View Full Entry]

---

---

Prologue: Hello Hello fans - I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting for so long... I have a lot to write about, and I didn't want to rush it. As some of you may remember from various emails and the like, I went on a road trip with two friends up the coast of Vietnam. This was in some ways one of the all time best things I've ever done, and in others one of the most stupid. Before I continue, I'll explain logistics a bit more, and that should shed some light onto both descriptions: I decided to drive [View Full Entry]

---

---

******WARNING******** THIS BLOG HAS SOME GRUESOME (ANIMAL-RELATED)CONTENT********THOSE WHO ARE POTENTIALLY WEAK OF HEART/STOMACH SHOULD NOT READ BEYOND THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. FURTHERMORE, DON'T LOOK AT ANY THE PHOTOS AFTER THE FIRST ONE. ********* Moving on, I went on my first road trip last week with Brian. We motorbiked to Vung Tao, a beach town 100 km from Ho Chi Minh. It took us about two hours, and was well worth it. Escaping the city was AMAZING!! The beach was pretty deserted because it was a wednesday and winter time. I brought the frisbee, so we tossed around a bit, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Greetings greetings - I'm happy to announce the arrival and departure of my first guest - my Dad!!! YAYYYYYY! So, my dad was in Hong Kong writing a case study, and he was able to come visit for a few (short) days. It was pretty sweet! I picked him up from the airport on Wednesday, showed him my place (in the flesh, as opposed to an inadequate internet posting), went for dinner at a nice restaurant, then played pool/drank some brews at one of my regular hangout spots. I have to admit, I was mildly apprehensive about driving him around on [View Full Entry]

---

---

Christmas and New Years were pretty good in Vietnam! On Christmas Eve, Marta and I delivered some presents to the neighbors (boxes of fruit). They were touched by the gesture and invited us over for a meal. It was unbelievable. First we sat on a small porch in a three room house - the porch was overflowing with broken fans, tools, light fixtures, etc. If we had been in the states, I would have associated it with a home of a meth addict - clearly that wasn't the case here. We had a very humble meal of shrimp and clams, and [View Full Entry]

---

---

I just got back from Dalat, and it was GREAT to get out of HCMC for a few days. Before I detail the sweetness of that trip, I've got to mention the wedding I went to. On Sunday (almot a week ago) I went to my first Vietnamese wedding. The woman (named Thu Ba) works for Language Corps (the organization I came with) so she invited all of us to the wedding...but she didn't stop there - I'd say there were at least 400 people at the reception! Unfortunately I didn't get to see the actual ceremony. They're generally kept small, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Ho Chi Minh was pretty quiet for a few days, until the SEA Games! The Vietnamese Football (soccer) team went the whole way to the finals, which meant that people poured into the streets to celebrate their win in the semi-finals!!! It was CRAZY!!!!!!! I was in district 7 (southern part) and traffic was not too bad until District 1, where sh**t was off the hook!!! Motorbike parades everywhere, literally thousands of people in the streets cheering, waving flags, wearing bandanas, standstill traffic, a sea of people in every direction....it took me two hours to drive home! (Usually a 15 minute [View Full Entry]

---

---

So, a little belated, but Happy Thanksgiving! We ended up having a pretty fun shin dig at our place. Brian and Joe's friend Dan is visiting from the Mekong Delta, so he and I cooked up our part of the Thanksgiving feast. Dan knows a decent amount of Vietnamese, he studied here in college, so we were able to go to a really cool market and buy fish. They were still alive when we selected them, and we watched the lady kill them (one was still alive when she started skinning it). It was slighly brutal, but that's life at the [View Full Entry]

---

---