Look! I flew half way across the world!
After finally getting a full night of sleep for the first
time since Thursday, I feel prepared to sit and write the next blog.
Coston picked me up from the airport the night before last
and took me to his friend Heidi’s place for the night. The house is beautiful,
and like most of the buildings on Okinawa and in the Pacific nations, made of
concrete to withstand typhoons and tsunamis.
The view form their living room.
We slept for about six hours until it was time to go back to
the airport. An hour flight later we were in Taipei, Taiwan for a overnight
layover. We left the airport and wondered the city. Taipei is an interesting place on planet earth. It smells like incense, sweet bread,
garbage, and smoke from the prayers they burn in wire cages on the sides of the
street. They are a very religious culture, and we ran into shrines who's entrances were tucked away between stores in the strip malls that you'd never have known were there if you hadn't wandered in by accident.
Incense seems to be a pretty big part of their rituals, and they use the smoke send their prayers into the sky and cleanse the body of evil or pain. We stumbled onto a bigger shrine in the middle of the city swarming with people who had just taken time out of their professional day to pray.
That night with met up with Coston's friend Annie. Annie had traveled to Vegas a few years ago and Coston had shown her around, so she was kind enough to take us for dinner at the night market and help explain to us all the food, people and customs that were just going over our head for the most part. The night market consisted of various stalls selling various goods. In the middle of the walkway people set out giant blankets covered with goods and wares, but I can only assume they were doing so illegally because when word that the cops were on their way spread up the street, they rolled everything up in the blanket, heaved it over their shoulders and hauled ass in the other direction.
Quail (possibly pigeon?) eggs at the night market.
Annie got us on the right bus and away we went to spend the night in the airport. I was exhausted and I assumed would be able to sleep anywhere, but I was wrong. The airport was freezing, someone was jackhammering into the wall for a new store that was going in, and some kind of alarm followed by a recorded Taiwanese voice was going off outside. I got about 3 hours at best. When 5 am rolled around, floods of people seemed to be suddenly released inside and we gave up. I took at shower at the AMEX club, because Coston is a member. Normally I would roll my eyes at such a thing, but when they let me get city grime off my body and then feed me delicious Dim Sum and braised pork and rice for breakfast, how can I complain?
We then flew to Ho Chi Minh City, or as it's still known to the locals, Saigon. Getting off the plane, you immediately see men in military gear patrolling the grounds. We had to sit and wait for them to process our Visas and to do so, they took our passports, which I don't mind admitting made me extremely nervous. Vietnam is still very communist and being without my documentation, even for a few minutes, brought back all the propaganda I've been fed about communist countries over the decades.
But we made it through fine and took a cab to our room, which finally had internet. The first thing Coston said when he got online was "Oh, Robin Williams died. Committed suicide." I thought he was kidding, but as we all know, he wasn't. For the rest of the day I couldn't shake how strange it was that that was the first news we get from the outside world after having landed in Vietnam. I kept hearing his voice in my head as we meandered through the city.
We visited the Vietnam War Museum, where I didn't take a lot of pictures because honestly, they were very sad and gruesome. Lost of stories about lots of people dying in very horrible ways. But I did like some of the older posters put out by different countries in support of the Vietnamese during the war.
We also got grifted, which is a first for me! The Vietnamese Dong is something like $21,172 Dong to $1 US dollar. It's basically monopoly money and it makes it really hard for me to think in terms of money. We got in a cab to take us somewhere or another, and come time to pay I just handed Coston my wad of cash to figure it out. I watched him peel off two bills both worth roughly about $23 and hand them to the guy, but suddenly he was holding two very small bills and telling us he needed more money. We both knew what we had handed him, but they guy insisted that we didn't, that the ride cost more, and that his english wasn't very good. I'm sure he had the two smaller bills ready in one hand and slipped the larger bills in his pants pocket the second we handed them over. It was pretty sly. In the end, we just paid him the extra money, which pissed Coston off but made me laugh. We were an easy target, it's true. They know how difficult it is for white people to think in terms of such large numbers when paying money.
We got a view of Saigon from one of the largest buildings in the city, and then went back to the room to crash out. We were both exhausted.
Today is our last day here, and tonight we fly to Hanoi in the northern part of the country. I'm excited. Vietnam is hot and humid and dirty and full of very nice and very opportunistic people thus far. Write more when I can lovely people.
Oh, I also got a hat.
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