Sunday, December 20, 2009


Christmas is in full swing in Ho Chi Minh City...

I have been out of China for less than 18 hours, and I am so excited to finally have access to my blog again! The Spouse and I landed in Ho Chi Minh city shortly before midnight and had a panicked tussle with the visa authorities. By the time we found our bags (flung off the baggage claim conveyor belt into the floor) and got a taxi, it was well after the middle of the night. Our driver dropped us off in what appears to be a white backpackers ghetto. With no sleeping rooms available, except in what appears to be a brothel with a really thin veneer of "hotel and restaurant" to gloss things over. Our room has high, pink, peeling walls, filthy cigarette burned carpet, and a large bronze statue of a naked woman, bold breast pointing towards the ceiling, on the side table.

Ahhh...Southeast Asia again! It's been three years, and this is a different city and a different language. It feels familiar and foreign at the same time. I miss not being able to speak the language, and my clumsy attempts to practice saying thank you are only met with eye rolls, but it's good to be back in the sticky mess of motorbikes, streetside food, haphazard construction sites, and friendly smiles from strangers.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Over a year since I have posted to this blog, and we are about to leave again, this time for China and Vietnam. We have a house sitter for the cat, notified the bank, bought hand-powered toothbrushes in lieu of our Sonicares, and secured visas. Asia calls - we've been away for too long (well, I have, at least. The Spouse was there last year, just long enough to spend a few weeks waiting out a riot in a steaming, stinking apartment in Bangkok).

We will go first to Shanghai, spend a few days there, and thn travel to Shaoxing, which was described to me by my fried Wendy Song as a small, historical village with few foreigners. This "village" has nearly a million residents and no central heating. After that we head to Saigon, and from there we have no plans. Perhaps Mui Ne, perhaps Hoi Anh...perhaps both...