Chao to all! ...So! Tomorrow at 11pm I hop on a train (the sleeper-variety with AC and 4 bunks. Lesson learned) and venture into the great wide Indochinese unknown for three weeks of mostly-unplanned vagabondary. I'll be carrying with me five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a plethora of precautionary drugs, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, March's Scientific American and National Geographic, a miscellany of other small necessities, and a mild case of weird bronchitis that set in a day or two ago (bummer). Here are things I hope to do: 1. Take a boatride through the Mekong delta in Saigon 2. Get a tan (and eat one of the famed banana splits) on the beaches of Nha Trang 3. See the sunrise over Angkor Wat 4. Spend one night in Bangkok ... read more

3. Traffic -or- Southern California Ain't Got Nuthin' on This Place Remember how I said it started raining while I was getting my haircut? Well, it didnt stop. For hours and hours. And I don't mean some namby-pamby little rain shower. I mean RAIN in the Biblical sense. As in, I was walking through lakes up to my mid-calf on my way home, and that was only the relative beginning of the storm. As in, after a while the alley outside of the school flooded so profoundly that motorbikes stalled on their way through, we moved the computers as high as we could get them and the man in the house across the way was bailing out his living room with a bowl a la Johnny Depp at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean. As ... read more

Hey Everyone! So, today I could talk about a few things I've been meaning to write about for a while, like the crazy intricacies of the Vietnamese language, or the 20-something-backpackers-in-foreign-countries subculture I experienced this past weekend for the first time, but I think I'm going to go instead with Everyday Things You Take For Granted Until They're Really Crazy and Different Somewhere Else. 1. Being Young and Female and Single -or- Thank Goodness I'm Not Wildly Promiscuous So I don't really know where to start with addressing this subject, but let's start with what I've known for a while, courtesy of Michael and my own experience: the Vietnamese are a very, VERY conservative people, especially concerning women. Certain things are just not done, or only done behind very tightly closed doors. In my understanding, it's ... read more

...Not Really My Style, But Requisite So, I figure I probably can't spend three months here without broaching the subject of the war at least once. Before I go there though, I'd just like to preface this by saying that unless a truly compelling reason for me to change my mind presents itself, this is the one and only time I intend to discuss the topic. As virtually impossible as it is for me to believe most of the time, a few decades ago this country was not the idyllic place where today I make drop-of-a-hat friends in train stations and save bits of my lunch to feed to my favorite cat on the way to my favorite park. And because many people reading these emails lived through that tumultuous era and some (although I've never ... read more

Life, the Universe, and Everything (and also Roasted Sweet Potatoes) Eventually, travel glitches mostly ironed out and free to roam around, I began to explore the tiny mountain town in which I found myself. My travel book said it had been a sort of vacation getaway for the French, who built many beautiful villas that are now being restored. The houses really were unbelievably beautiful. I've never been to Europe, but you know those pictures of tall houses with ornate balconies and broad, multi-paned stained-wood windows, close together on steep, narrow roads? It was like that. Only in rural Asia, so those houses were all hotels and those steep, narrow roads were dotted with women under big umbrellas with tourist trinkets or fruits and vegetables spread out in front of them on blankets or low tables. ... read more