Afghanistan revisited?

I thought I had already gone to the amputee capital of the world when I was in Kabul, but Mumbai is giving that metropolis a run for its money. As I approached Chor Bazaar, I was greeted by a triple amputee on a roller board. His one arm moved him along, and once he gathered enough velocity, he aimed himself for me and was able to wrap his one and only arm around mine. I understand why Mother Teresa spent so much time in these parts. There is heartache a plenty.

No Thank You necessary

I was out to dinner with a seemingly polite, young Indian man named Amand and he let me in on a little secret. Apparently "please" and "thank you" are considered condescending in India. I didn't believe it at first until I watched how the locals ordered their food and never used the common pleasantries. Could this be? Miss Manners must have never travelled to India. ((A note from linguist Noam Chomsky: politeness is actually built in to verb endings.))  

Welcome to Mumbai

You know you have reached Mumbai when the sounds of life are downed out by a relentless orchestra of car horns.   You know you have reached the city's vibrant center when the aroma is that of an flooded sewer. You know you are a tourist when the written cost of something is "X", but you get charged "X" plus "Y" and "Z".  But I am here in India's southern capital and couldn't be happier. Plus, on my very first night, I was approached for a massage. What I couldn't discern; however, as I stood on the sandy stretch of Chowpatty Beach, was whether I was being asked to give or receive one. In any event, I kept my hands to myself.

Things that make you go ewww ....

On the boat ride to Vung Tau, a popular beach resort south of HoChi Minh City, I stumbled upon this notice to passengers. The boat is very old and I think the English signage is a throw back to when the American War (what the call the Vietnam War) was happening. One part struck me as odd. It made me wonder if what happened in Vung Tau stayed in Vung Tau.

Green Guys

No, they are not environmentalists. They are street crossers. They assist the elderly, the young, and the tourist in negotiating HoChi Minh City’s traffic patterns. These green guys generally hang out around hotels and major points of interest in HCMC (so “tourist walking” is where the big business is), and they wear all green to indicate that they are “official.” But who are these green gods? They are from the city’s Youth Volunteer Brigade, and they know what it takes to cross the street safely. So the next time your travels take you to Saigon/HoChi Minh City, don’t let someone dressed in another color walk you across the street ... who knows where you’ll end up if you do.

Desperately Seeking Noam Chomsky

I am really trying to communicate in my version of Vietnamese. It hasn’t been going too well. A sample:
ME: (in Vietnamese) “How do you say ‘lemon’?”
Waiter: (in English) “Lemon?”
ME: (in Vietnamese) “Yes, how do you say lemon?”
Waiter: “Lemon.”

The Rice Fields

The next time you sit in front of a bowl of rice, I ask that you give a silent shout out to the people who farmed it. I tried to pretend I was one with the paddies, but the walk out through the the swampy rice stew alone tired me out. Plus there is that fear that you might stumble upon some one's ankle, hacked off in their frenzy to cut the rice down for milling. The poorer farmers do not have the electric miller that you see in these pictures; they hack down the rice and carry it to ground where they beat it with rocks to get the grains out. And the process I just explained is just one in a series. There's the planting of the seeds, the agitating of the seeds (I think that means they tease them), the milling, the husking, and the polishing (for white rice). So if you don't want to eat brown rice for health reasons, do it so that these good people have do one less thing to worry about. Oh behalf of all freelance rice farmers, I thank you.

Meet Linh

Pham Thi Thuy Linh is 13 years old and is waiting for an operation that will remove the hump from her back. She is scared of the operation, but she understands that weight needs to be taken off her spine so that she can live without pain. Most days the pain is so bad, she cannot walk. Linh is probably a victim of Agent Orange, but getting designated as such is more difficult now that the US and Vietnam have mended fences. Clearly it is not in the US’s interest to admit their wartime chemical continues to plague this country, and Vietnam doesn’t want to push the issue.
Linh was born without arms and has beautiful teeth. She is religious about her oral hygiene, and holds her toothbrush with her foot. She opens doors by using her head and chin and wears only elastic pants so that she can shimmy up and down bathroom walls to use the toilet. Linh lives in a “village” created by the Tu Du Hospital. She is one of 60 children who were born with defects and abandoned by their families. But she doesn’t want to go home even if her parents came back for her because she is happy and she loves her brothers and sisters. Linh spends most of her free time listening to pop music; she says she doesn’t dance … at least not yet.

My Chuchi Experience

Enough as been written about the Chuchi Tunnels so instead of regurgitating the history behind the vast and complex VC tunnel system, I thought I'd give you the highlights from my experience. First off, you need to understand that the Vietnamese have no problem in stating the obvious. If you are plump, you will be called “big man” or “big lady,” so hope they don’t characterize you this way. Before getting to the tunnels, everyone in my pack was lined up, and the guide went down the row pointing to people on which tunnel they could see. Tunnels have been recreated a littler wider for westerners to act like VC. Down the line they went: “big tunnel .. big tunnel .. little tunnel”; the closer they got to me, the more I wanted to be labeled “little tunnel.”
They pointed to me, sent me in with the smaller people, explained that we would be going down 8 meters into the ground and tunneling across 100 meters. There were “air holes” at 50 meters and the guide smiled and said “no problem, let’s go.” I was trying my best to remember metric conversions .. wondering how far and long would I be underground? What was this about an air hole? Does this mean I can’t breath before then? Suddenly I wanted to be fat.
The photos are of me getting in to the tunnel (you cover up with a door the way the VC did), and tunneling.

Unesco Schmunesco

Halong Bay (in the northeast of Vietnam) has been designated a UNESCO site. It is an area littered with limestone jetties/mini islands. Most of these spots have caves and through those caves there are lagoons. Parts of it are breathtaking, but then there is the part that most of the day tourists see. Gone for them are the emerald waters that Halong Bay boasts of in its brochures, instead its main part .. the one most visitors now see, is littered with junk boats which have now turned the waters into a dozen shades of brown. Ten years ago thee were 40 junk boats (flat-ish bottomed, wooden boats that chug their ways through the bay allowing visitors to overnight in a relatively tranquil state). Now there are over 400 of these boats. It is not the boats that are ruining it, but the disorganization of it all. Most of us adopt a “we want it when we want it” mentality, but that wicked side of our psyches should not be catered to. Amidst the frenzy, there is a certain amount of order. If only that order was applied to restricting of number of boats out at one time, or the locations where they could putter, this would remain a UNESCO site for much longer. Note: you can see Halong Bay in its glory if you spend two – three days there (which I recommend). The photos are of the conjestion at the docks and a more traditional Halong Bay beauty shot.

Sweat Swiper

It is summer in Vietnam and it is hot. Nevermind what you think of as hot; this is hotter .. and more humid. They don’t even dicker around with “real feel” temperatures because it would probably indicate that we are boiling. Given these circumstances, I don’t think it is shocking to admit that I sweat. Especially when I am in the jungle. Vietnamese (at least those from the northern mountains) don’t sweat. They get warm, but they don’t melt. So there I was, melting, when a young Vietnamese woman came up to me and swiped my sweat! She didn’t jar it or do anything really strange, but she came up, looked at my glistening (or is it glowing) arms, and ran her own palm along mine to draw off the sweat. She stood there looking at my body juice on her hand and I stood there thinking “she must actually think this is my body juice!” There weren’t throngs of screaming fans, or people fainting at my feet, but I kind of know how Elvis must have felt.

Ho's Great Adventure

HoChi Minh is a rock star here. People line up for hours to go through his Mausoleum (actually, it is just the Vietnamese people who have the long wait; visitors have no more than a 20 minute pause). The government has turned his house on silts, his palace and yes, the ice block in which he lies, into Hanoi’s version of Disney Land. Streets are lined with vendors hawking “I (heart) HoChi Minh” T-shirts, embroidered pillowcases of Ho at various functions, and ice cream are among the big sellers. I couldn't find any funnel cake so I guess there a limits to what you can sell in a sacred place.

2 very different Hanoi Hiltons

This has nothing to do with Paris. I promise.

The “Hanoi Hilton” aka Hoa Lo Prison (aka Maison Centrale), once home to Senator John McCain, is a tourist attraction. Kind of in the way that the Tower of London are: people like torture stories. The interesting side note to the prison is how nice they make it out to be. They show the harshness of being confined here, but when it comes to the telling of the way the soldiers of the “American War” were treated, they showed smiling soldiers, pictures of them cooking in the kitchen, pictures of them receiving presents from their families. All with the disclaimer that “they came here to kill us, but look how well we treated them.”
You would think that the last place the Hilton family would want to build a new hotel would be Hanoi. Sure there’s the name recognition, but would you want to go to a Camp Auschwitz? Right off the banks of the Red River, and next to the historic Opera, a new Hilton stands. I held my moral ground and didn’t go in. Even though there was a ladies night special.

Life is like ...

I am out in a jungle. I meet some people on a tour and follow behind. Inside the group are two English speakers, they happen to be American. They happen to live in New York, better yet, in Brooklyn. One of them looks familiar, and we begin the process of figuring out how our faces have been seen before. She mentions she is “in cheese.” I mention I love cheese. She says she works as a muckity muck at one of NYC’s greatest cheese shops. I ask whether she was ever a counter girl. I tell her I can picture her in an all white uniform with shorter hair. She nods, is contemplative, and asks me whether I like “stinky cheese.” Bull’s eye! So here in the jungle, I meet someone who 4 years ago served me up some excellent stinky cheese. Forget the box of chocolates; life is like an excellent cheese aisle.

Ling Squared

Two young girls approached me and asked whether I would mind practicing English with them (as far as I knew, my English didn’t need the work, but you can never be too overconfident). I heard the stories of people getting swindled as young girls ask innocuous questions while their counterparts pick every pocket available. I wasn’t going to be that easy, but they were so cute and young and honest looking so I agreed. After they practiced their English 101 questions (how are you, how old are you, where is the library), they loosened up and spoke of how beautiful they believe Vietnam to be .. the most beautiful country, second only to Singapore. When I asked how many times they have been to Singapore, they giggled and admitted to never being out of Vietnam.
They introduced themselves as Ling and Ling, mentioned they were both in high school, Ling #1 wanted to go into hotel hospitality, Ling #2 wanted to be a clothes designer, although she has never touched a sewing machine.
Their big reveal came when I asked them what Vietnam needed to do to compete with a Shangri-la like Singapore. Without missing a beat, they said that Hanoi needed to purge itself of the men who play chess in the streets. Now, I’ve been here less than a week, but I haven’t seen the kind of rampant street chess the Lings believe are taking their city down.

Hanoi's road rules

This is a typical street scene on a calm day. Thousands of mopeds share the road with cars, bicyclists, and the hapless tourist. Forget all you think you know about crossing the road. Don't bother looking both ways; if you wait for green, you might be waiting forever; and if you presume the pedestrian has the right of way in the cross walk, you'll do the rest of your presuming from a hospital bed. Here is the best way to cross the street: take a deep inhale, step off the curb, and walk. Walk in a direct line, walk slowly and deliberately, and walk preferably with someone larger than you acting as a shield. Once you are over, I suggest taking a taxi to cross back.

Lost With No Translation

Tokyo, Japan is reminiscent of New York City in a variety of ways. Neighborhoods are classified as the shopping, eating, drinking, dancing, etc. district, and there are subways that move people between those districts. But what it lacks is a real second language. Purists might think, “Great! All the better to get submersed in the culture!” I thought this ... for all of 10 seconds (the time it took me to be thoroughly confused when trying to buy a subway ticket).While most of the signs and instructions are in Japanese, there are key English words to sucker you in to thinking you might actually be able to get somewhere in conversation. Those key words are: Lunch, Soup, Sale, and Sexy Girls. These pictures show a typical restaurant scene: plastic food plates designed to attract customers in, and a sign with some English, but all the key details are withheld behind the Japanese word fortress.

The best advice I can give to anyone seeking time in Tokyo is to let it all just happen. Walk into that restaurant, point at anything on the menu and see what happens. For the adventure traveler, be sure to try this gastro-blindness at one of Tokyo's many sushi spots. If worse comes to worse, you can always find a sexy girl to keep you company as you pray to the porcelain God.

A 10 second voice over

This morning I hear a network newscaster report that a bomb exploded in the heart of Kabul killing 4 civilians. The next story was the latest hair style of that awful "American Idol" contestant. Granted I have opinions on each story, but the lack of information coming out of Afghanistan is quite troubling. I know I am in the huge minority, since most Americans do not know anyone who is over there, but I do, and believe I bear some responsibility to introduce you to some regular people.
Manizha is worth knowing. She is an Afghan-American who has lived all her life in Queens, New York. She moved to Kabul about six months ago to launch for a non-profit that protects women. She is well spoken and brave and put a safe life behind her to ensure Afghan women are afforded certain rights (i.e. to be educated, to not be raped, to not be forced in to marriage at age 9, etc.). Well Manizha happened to be in the car right ahead of the attacked police vehicle. She was driving alone. Her tires all blew, the rear window shattered, and blood (other people's) splattered her car. Apart from extreme shock, she is alright. And knowing her, even though just a bit, I bet she will continue to stay put and continue to do the job she set out to. I share this story with you to give you a little more information than the 10 second voiceover you might hear.

re-entry

It has been three weeks now since my return to normalcy – one of those weeks was spent warming up in the central pacific coast of Mexico .. and while a banana daiquiri was no replacement for red wine, it suited my needs nicely.
I now toil in Atlanta, a relatively benign place that has electricity, fine dining, all the red wine I could drink, and tornados …. Reconfirms my stellar ability to choose a location during the worst of its weather season.
I have yet to go to an americanized Afghan restaurant to show off my limited Dari. An ex pat once told me that the first thing he does when he arrives home, is eat at a sushi restaurant, the second is to go to an Afghan one .. he feels a sense of responsibility to speak to the transplanted afghans and tell them how life is like as many of them cannot communicate with their loved ones. This said, his dari is far superior to mine, and I fear I would only irritate people by going through my 20 minute “good morning .. how are you .. I trust Allah is taking care of your body .. thank you thank you” routine

Scar tracker

In my first week in Kabul, I had 5 new burns from poor bukhali lighting. As the weeks wore on, I became quite adept at igniting the little bastard. Positioning the wood in such a way to maximize flamage; lighting with a candle instead of a simple match (you can get your hand further in this way); and using the Afghan version of toilet paper as an accelerant (it is this stretchy paper which is probably not too good for your nether regions, but lights magically nonetheless.) This all said, the total count of bukhali burns is 12. I look at it as a free souvenir ...