Kitchen Wench

… and empties my wallet.

Today was our free day (finally), and I spent it walking around the Old Quarter nearby Hoan Kiem Lake.  This party of the city really smacks the most of Paris, with tree lined boulevards and scores of winding streets lined with tiny little shops.  Each street seems to have a different theme: knock off designer luggage, shoes, second hand clothing, paint thinner and motor parts, laquerware, lanterns, and beautiful silk handbags, scarves, and clothing. 

Everyone prefers to deal in US currency, and the deals are amazing.  Beautiful silk clothing – tailor made to fit – is something like 30-50 USD.  Scarves and bags were usually around 5 dollars.  Certainly there was a lot of junky stuff, but some definate quality items as well.  This was a pretty refreshing change from shopping in China. 

It was great fun shopping this afternoon.  I think one could purchase a wonderful wardrobe here.  It’s definately in the nicest area of the city as well.  I wish I had more time to pick this place apart, but we are flying to Beijing tomorrow. Hopefully another time.

On Tuesday, the group took a short trip to Halong Bay and Catba Island.  After a 3 hour bus ride to the pier, we took a 3-4 hour boat ride around the bay.  It was very pretty, with  jungle-covered rocks rising out of the pale turquoise water.  They even stopped the boat and some of the group changed into swim suits and dove off the side of the boat. 

After the cruise we landed at Catba Island and stayed there overnight.  This place is a little resort town, but, it’s… well, kind of crummy.  Almost no one else was on the island and they pretty much tried to charge us for every little thing possible, from beach chairs and tables to butter with your bread and milk for your coffee.  Of course it still wasn’t very expensive, but it just feels really chintzy to have the tiniest things be a charge on your dinner bill.

Speaking of motorcycles, a bunch of people rented them today and then proceeded to crash them.  Then–and this is apparently part of a big scam–the rental people tried to exort US money out of the students for some very minor damages to the bikes.  This is a fairly common scam, since they know that most people don’t know how to ride the bikes anyway. 

Another interesting twist included the discovery that the discotheque was owned by the army.  Apparently it’s how they make extra money, but they also have a monopoly on the bar scene on the island.

I know these people are struggling to make money, but frankly it feels pretty lousy to be treated like a walking twenty dollar bill.  It’s also very bad for business–I don’t think I would recommend the place to anyone after our experience. I think most of us were happy to get off the island after only a day.

I arrived in Hanoi yesterday.  It’s nothing like I expected and difficult to describe.  It’s very damp and cloudy and misty.  Land prices are extremely high, so all the buildings are very tall and decorated in a mediterranean style.  They are often in bright candy colors – oranges, yellows, greens.  But sometimes the families can only afford to decorate one side of the building, so the rest or at least half is just plain concrete on the sides or back, without windows.  It looks very strange.

There are lots of little shops and the area around the lake is very pretty.  There are a number of large old buildings, like the Metropole Hotel and the old opera house.  Everyone rides motor bikes and there are no real traffic laws to speak of, much like China.  We visited the countryside today, which is literally the outskirts of Hanoi.  The airport is in the middle of fields and fields of rice paddies. 

Photographs from Thailand are posted under my Flickr account. Being on this new Thai stomach virus diet has given me time to upload them, as well as eat all the dry bread and rice I want. Swell.

Oy, where do I begin.

We arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday and I am staying in an utterly beautiful hotel. We took an overnight train from Bangkok and I was rather impressed with how well designed the Thai trains are. They fit a lot into a very small space. Chiang Mai is very lovely as well. The humidity is not as bad, there is a sweet night market, and the city is easy to walk about. After a relaxing day in Chiang Mai, we were supposed to go on short hiking trips, except yours truly and several others contracted stomach illnesses and are staying here for the two days instead. Personally, I woke up at 5 am with my internal organs just roiling and was in too much pain to go back to sleep. I’ve been taking it easy today, trying to calm my tummy down. It still feels a bit like a quivering bowl of jelly. Consequently, I haven’t been able to each much of the local Thai cuisine; it looks very good at least.

Things have been kind of crazy on the trip – aside from a lot of moving around, we’ve had a few injuries as well. I hope everything settles down soon and I’m kind of glad to be here than on the road yet again. It’s difficult to adjust to being constantly on the move and living out of a suitcase; I think I can do it, but I forget I only arrived in this country a few days ago. (It already feels like a week.) Plus, with my body behaving in unpredictable ways, being on preset itinerary and at the whims of a large group, I feel a bit out of control of my own fate, as it were. I suppose I just need to be more Daoist or something. Well, we are visiting a Buddhist temple tomorrow; maybe it will bring me and my tummy a little more peace of mind.

After 24+ amazing hours in transit, I finally stumbled off the plane in Bangkok at about midnight last night.  It is very sprawling and sticky here, and most everything is a study in contrasts – from old style Thai teak buildings slammed up against modern apartment complexs, to the 7 children jammed in the back of a pick up truck riding down the highway past the two-story Porche dealership. 

 I’m on a program, so this morning we took our tour bus to the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha.  It was dazzling – sensory overload and a lot of sparkly bits of glass and gold covering huge structures that our tour guide described as “an upside down ice cream cone.”  The guide was pretty awesome – he had heavy accent and later claimed to have learned English off Sesame Street.  

I’m writing this from an internet cafe a few blocks from my hotel.  It’s actually air conditioned and connection is not so bad.  On the health front, the tummy is doing well, and the jet lag is not too terrible.  However, we’ve only been eating hotel food, so who’s to really say.  The hotel food isn’t bad, but I’m hoping for something more authentic soon. The fruit here is great – wonderful pineapple and dragonfruit that actually has some decent flavor (like mild kiwi).  Sadly a lot of it isn’t in season until later in the year.  Before I left my dad gave me this brochure on the “Fruit of Thailand” which is pretty hilarious, but useful too.  I would love some good pummelo and/or fresh coconut.

Tonight I’m going on a dinner cruise along the river, and a visit to Jim Thompson’s house tomorrow.  After that we’re leaving Bangkok for Chiang Mai overnight.  I’m kind of excited to get back on the good ol’ sleeper trains – I assume it will be similar to trains in China.  But on the flipside we’ve hardly seen Bangkok. Everything is such an overload the first few days anyway.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to post again – I’ll probably be out of contact a lot in Chiang Mai.  I’ll try to see if I can get photos up too, depending on how things go. This trip is definately more technologically advanced than my last one. Internet in China is spotty, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep this up.  

Well, this is a little abrupt, but tomorrow I’m flying to Thailand and will in Asia for several months.  I’ll be back on time to graduate and then start freaking out about my impending future, or complete lack thereof, as it currently stands.

I’m going to try to write about it, but we’ll see.  I just don’t know what the internet situation is going to be like, and I will be traveling quite a bit.  I’m not bringing a computer so I’ll be relying on nasty-ass smoky internet cafes which are usually filled with 13 year old boys playing Counterstrike and have slow connections as it is.  So it might be hard.  But, damnit, I am so excited to get in there and eat. 

My host has been having a ton of problems, including servers and databases going down.  Normally Dreamhost has been really great, but somehow in the process of moving everything, the configuration on my MySQL database changed, and… the long and the short of it is that broke WordPress.  And I have been too busy to fix it until now.  Expect more to come soon.  (I hope.)