Sunday

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I like to carry a guidebook and a phrasebook in other countries, and I normally read 1-2 books on any long flight, and I read two books a week. Add to that a few textbooks I want to donate in Cambodia and materials for Vietnam, and my carry-on is suddenly overweight even as checked baggage. My intended solution:

1. Pay $12 to download the portions I want of the Lonely Planet guides and Southeast Asian phrasebook (bonus: This gives me a version with bigger type), load the PDFs on my USB and on Google Documents, and print out the first set and the guidebook back-to-back, printing the others as I need them. Leave the guidebooks with the lovely yet dense photo pages at home for later reference. I'll carry city maps.

2. Carry one book, potentially to read and trade at an airport (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope), break out the discontinued iPod I bought at discount at the university bookstore this fall but hadn't yet opened, and buy and load several books. I bought
Mortenson and Relin: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
Karnow: Vietnam: A History
Levine: A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
Thomas: Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
Omar Khayyam: The Rubaiyat
This is around 55 hours of text, and the iPod is supposed to hold a charge for 24 hours when used for audio only. I'm sure I'll pick up some books as I travel--it has never not happened.

3. Take two books, one a heavy textbook on youth psychopathology and one a textbook on illicit drugs that I'm reviewing. Get as many of the manuals and articles as possible electronically, and have the rest FedExed directly to the university in Hanoi.

This cuts paper bulk tremendously. I'm looking forward to the part where everything I need is scanned, posted, or neatly stowed. There's quite a lot of paper flying around right now.

I'm beginning to have dreams about the trip, which may increase on Wednesday when I begin to take Malarone. Malarone is an anti-malarial medication that can cause vivid dreams and even psychosis in a small number of people, though this hasn't been my experience.

After looking more closely at the reviews of my Phnom Penh hotel, my partner Nancy noticed that although the average ratings were okay, there was a pronounced negative trend in recent reviews. I've switched hotels, but may try to get over to the old one to check it out, since it's on a list of locally-owned/greener/NGO & non-profit-related hotels being compiled by a group I'm affiliated with, and if it's become awful, we need to know.

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