Someone hacked into my Facebook account, started chat sessions with some of my friends, told them that "I" was in London, had been mugged, with no ID, no credit cards, and was in pain at an Internet cafe--could you wire some cash? My friends are not so gullible, and they must think I have a few brain cells left myself (why would John be in London for work, but not ask his workplace for help when in distress?).
So, Facebook disabled my account (for my own protection), and hasn't restored it yet. I'm hoping that Santa puts a re-activated account in my digital stocking soon.
You might have also heard about this story, though I vouch for none of its accuracy and draw your attention to its almost complete lack of verified sources.
Last weekend, a friend and I took a quick trip on a motorbike the the area around the town of Bac Ninh, just north of Hanoi. After coffee in the park for a little planning, we headed to the Ba Chua Kho temple, on a hill just the other side of the railroad tracks. It felt like the whole village, which really formed an arm off of Bac Ninh itself, was waiting for our arrival. Trying to stay assertive as we were enthusiastically encouraged to buy offerings ranging from platters of food and drink for our ancestors in the afterlife, we settled on some incense and fake paper money. The temple was beautiful, partly for its setting on a hill near a lake. But the significance wasn't so much religious as historical: the temple had been built about 1000 years ago to honor a woman, remarkable in itself. She had been a poor woman who married well, a king's brother, and when she was tasked with managing the region's farms, she set up a grain storage system for about 75 farms. While this sensible move makes most of us nod approvingly, her claim to legend was that her prudence paid off by feeding Vietnamese troops fighting off one of the waves of northern invaders.
Our second stop was in the village of Duong O - Phong Khe, just off the highway south of Bac Ninh. Around Hanoi, there are groups of traditional handicraft villages, specializing in small-scale manufacturing: pottery, weaving, paper fans, wood-carving, etc. Just as U.S. farms are rarely a little self-sustaining plot of land with cows and chickens anymore, these villages are no living history park, either: many of these villages are fighting for survival, and have industrialized their specialty, sometimes with mixed results. The paper village we visited has diversified into everything from tissues and toilet paper to big rolls of paper for fake paper money offerings. Much of the paper is recycled from waste paper, though you might not like what it does to the water. But the town is thriving, evidenced by several new homes, and must not get many Western visitors: when we parked the bike on the corner, two older gentlemen advised us to park it inside one of their houses, never asked for a fee, and found it amusing that we were taking pictures of the alley around their place. At one of the larger processors, a woman gave us a quick explanation of her 24/7 operations without us asking at all.
Click this photo (below) to go to my Picasa album (about 20 photos):
I had always pictured kayaking as a sport listed under "adventure sports," and somehow involving aligators, shark cages, and the National Geographic Channel. But on my three-day trip to a sandy island in southern Thailand, I learned that it's just a clever way to get tourists onto canoes without making it sound lame. And it was great! I met up with two friends currently working in Thailand to enjoy the beach, and then spend a day of exploring nearby rocks and islands by boat, "kayak," snorkeling (kind of), and, well, beach volleyball. The sand and waters were clean (except for those pesky little jellyfish), the hotel quiet, and the food good. I'd never really sought out beach vacations before, but after sampling one, I could be tempted by their appeal again.
Click this photo (below) to go to my Picasa album (about 20 pictures):
When I lived in Germany's most fertile neighborhood, I remember seeing children carrying lanterns in early October, and I thought it was just a precursor to Halloween, tamed down for preschoolers. I was later corrected: it was borrowed from the Asian communities living in Berlin. This year, on a warm Sat. night in early October, I got to experience the full Vietnamese version of the Harvest Moon Festival (also translated as Children's New Year and other variations) in Hanoi's Old Quarter.
Earlier in the evening/afternoon, children had been out with their candle-lit lanterns, but by the time I arrived at the entrance to the night market--a pedestrian-only shopping zone for locals and tourists on the weekends--it was completely overwhelmed with student revelers, decked out in punker wigs, lit-up devil's horns, and other off-the-shelf costumes. Noisemakers, balloons, street food, and more were all extras to the usual shoulder-to-shoulder night. A couple of the temples had programs for kids with songs, gongs, and lanterns. A few groups had the bright idea to form conga lines and race through the masses to clear a path. I eventually waded to the shores of the Old Quarter to wander home. And I never saw the moon, come to think of it.
Click this photo (below) to go to my Picasa album (about 24 pictures):
After three nights in Laos, I continued on to Chiang Mai, for some Labor Day fun with friends in northern Thailand. On Saturday, we went whitewater rafting (I only panicked once), and took it easy the rest of the time, catching up, trading work stories, and visiting local sites: the mountaintop temple Doi Suthep, the royal family's getaway--BhuBing Palace and botanical gardens, and the ancient city wall that tried to keep invaders out of this former capital of the kingdom of Lanna. Click here to see an album of about 20 photos.
In my first trip to Laos, I went to the city of Luang Prabang, a religious capital of sorts, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a reprieve from the din of Hanoi's rivers of motorbikes. Click here for photos (about 30). World Heritage status has removed the sleepy veil from this peninsular town on the muddy Mekong and Kham Rivers in central Laos, but has also protected it from highrise concrete hotels. Instead, it's a tourist-friendly, open city with dozens of Buddhist temples, deck cafes over the river, and gorgeous green tropical views from the top of Mount Phu Si, almost all accessible by bicycle or foot. Two highlights: Every morning around 6:00 a.m., monks and their novices (boys 13-19) process through town to collect alms--usually direct donations of rice and other simple foods. But Friday Sept 4 was Boun Khao Salak, a festival to honor the dead, and so, in addition, to the spartan rice, the community added candy bars, crackers, and other treats and snacks, so much that some novices' alms-collecting metal bowls were overflowing. Then, for the holiday, each household in the community took a tray loaded with steaming stews, rice, vegetables, and desserts to the temple, lining the main hall as the novices pound the giant drum. Women from the village sat out on the covered veranda around the temple while the men sat at the back, chanting, as the monks and novices filed in, sitting among all that delicious steaming food (the novices get up at 3:30a.m. for meditation, drum-pounding, and prayers/chants, no breakfast yet!). After the main service, while the monks and novices feast, the village men call out names of the deceased, written on strips of paper, to match up with gift baskets that the women are minding, each one a kind of care packet for the novices containing more treats and practical items like toothbrushes and toilet paper. The other highlight for me was taking the local ferry, a long power-canoe across the Mekong (our motor died, but we were towed by another boat before being washed too far downstream), fee $0.80. The temples there are more serene, less visited by the tourists, with views of the river, mountains, and Luang Prabang. I was wary when the monk started telling me I needed a key for the third temple, Wat Sakkalin aka Wat Tham Xieng Maen, but I followed as he led me to the temple, which was actually a cave, several stories down into the rocky hills along the Mekong, lit only by flashlight. It wasn't as ornate as the other temples, but nice and cool, and a quiet place to rest.
Short video of grounds while monks play the drums before the service:
A few weeks ago, I joined a group of other ex-pats for a field trip out to the Hanoi University of Agriculture campus for a lesson in all things related to rice in Vietnam. We started with a great presentation (complemented with samples of rice plants at various stages of growth) by a professor. And then, our geeky hunger for Wikipedia-like lists of facts and anecdotes satisfied, we were led out under blazing sun and in thick humidity to the fields to plant, transplant, harvest, thresh, and separate rice. Click here to see about 20 photos of us pretending to work like the millions of Vietnamese farm workers--a significant fraction of whom are women--who work mostly by hand to make their country a net exporter of rice.
One way I practice Vietnamese is forcing taxicab drivers into small talk which must make any ride with me seem like an eternity. But these guys are one of my main gateways to general cultural education. So, imagine how surprised I was when cab drivers consistently told me that, by arriving in Vietnam, I was one year older.
Apparently, because all good things start during lunar new year (Tet) festivities, everyone adds a notch at the beginning of the (lunar) year, instead of at their actual anniversary of birth. Several drivers from the countryside didn't even know their (solar) calendar date of birth (though, they assured me, their mothers had remembered the month and year). Some drivers didn't even know their age, but rather talked about age by using birth year instead.
These photos (click here) are a random sampling of my first couple of weeks in Hanoi. I've been lucky to arrive when the nice days of early summer have yet to turn swelteringly hot and humid. I hope the pictures can speak for themselves, but a few comments follow, though as a disclaimer, please remember that my first impressions of a place (or a job, person, trip, etc.) are invariably superficial, overly comparative to other places, and skewed toward what I read before arriving.
I love my high-rise apartment with ample space for that piano I bought, and sporting not one but two balconies overlooking not one but two lakes ringed with small shops, beer and seafood stalls, and paddleboats that look like swans. A lot of the mornings and evenings are foggy/smoggy/cloudy, but it's still pretty hot.
Nothing is far apart in Hanoi city proper, I've already crossed traffic on foot many times, taken the public buses, ridden on the back of a motorbike "taxi," and used my stuttering Vietnamese to make fun of cab drivers for getting lost.
People seem quite friendly and easy-going, even when they can't understand my mangling of the Vietnamese language. I have the luxury of continuing language courses full time for a while before starting full-time at the office. By full time I mean 24/7, which even on the most difficult days of being misunderstood by a street vendor is more entertaining than a classroom-only experience.
There's plenty of history in Vietnam and Hanoi that precedes the Communists, the Americans, or the French, and next year Hanoi will celebrate its 1000th anniversary. The old citadel isn't far and with many other parks and lakes the city is very green, which still doesn't offset the mushrooming number of motorbikes, mopeds, and other vehicles on the roads. There are sidewalks, more than I recall there ever being in Chennai, but they are inconvenient to use because they are used for motorbike parking. Tonight I saw an ice cream shop and an eyeglasses store, both drive-up/drive-through with your motorbike.
Streets are lined with shops, and similar to Chennai, you often all the shops that sell similar things on one street (houseplants, cell phones, maternity clothes, plastic flowers, bamboo products, shoes, etc.).
What a great time to be living in Washington, DC! It's hard to ignore politics working for the government. Living overseas during most of the election, I could control how much coverage of the campaigns I read/heard. But living in Washington, DC was, as one friend put it, like being in the eye of the storm: everywhere else in the country is obsessed, but in the District, which votes more overwhelmingly Democratic than almost any other part of the U.S., there's not much activity--just speculation.
The night before the election, Obama held his last campaign rally at fairgrounds in Manassas, Virginia (click here for a few photos). The drive was too short for me and some friends to miss it, and a zipcar ride and mile-long walk later, we were standing in a crowd of 100,000 Obama supporters. Besides the size, the crowd was impressive in other ways as well--it was a pretty eclectic group standing together on a chilly fall evening: black teenagers from the area, Baby Boomers in suits and ties, Hispanic parents with their kids, middle-aged white union workers, teenage Muslim girls in hijab headscarves, gay college kids, white-haired senior citizens, and so many more. Whether political or not, America is amazing because it's possible to hold a peaceful gathering with that broad spectrum of diversity.
Take that feeling of excitement from the rally, and multiply it (and the crowd size ) by about 20, and that was the feeling on the streets and in bars and restaurants the weekend of the inauguration. Crowds always have their own attitude--any sports event, block party, street protest, or summer parade takes on a life of it's own. But I had never experienced such a sustained feeling of expectation before. On Saturday night, I saw spontaneous dancing and singing at late-night food shop Ben's Chili Bowl, then half a million visitors (again, dancing and singing) at Sunday's celebration concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The 300 or so Nebraskans at the Nebraska Society's breakfast on Monday was no less exciting. (Click here for pictures)
And last, a more formal affair standing in the sub-freezing cold for the swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday (click here for frozen images). Since I live inside the zone that was car-free, I offered up my apartment as a "warming station" for friends and colleagues before walking down to the National Mall together. It was frigid but fun, standing with about 2 million people, waiting while the Marine Band played, cheering and laughing, and the Jumbotrons replayed the concert from Sunday (any reason to dance and shout is good at that temperature). But it was surreal having those waves of cheering patriots go completely silent--not for the actual swearing-in, oddly, but for the John Williams arrangement of Simple Gifts. Click below to see a video of 2 million people being quiet.
