Saigon kiss

Tomorrow I am taking the bus to Saigon to visit friends for a few days. Believe it or not, as of April 13 I will have been living in Cambodia for a year! I can't believe how fast it went. So in honor of my triumphant return to Saigon I thought I'd write about my first Saigon kiss.

I never got one while I was in Vietnam. I've gotten two in Phnom Penh. Motorbikes are the primary mode of transportation in both countries. Motorbike mufflers get hot. Eventually you will get careless when you get off your bike and the muffler will burn your leg.


It looks like hell but actually -- no, actually it hurts like hell too. Hydrocortisone cream helps the itching but there's no avoiding the elliptical scar that results.

Of course, girls ride motos too. I am working on a post on footwear fashions in Southeast Asia. Long story short, many girls here wear high heels all the time. My friend To, who I am writing about in another post, does not own a pair of flat shoes. There is nothing sexier than a pretty young girl wearing short shorts and high heels on a scooter. One of the many joys of life in Southeast Asia...

As a result you see shockingly pretty girls wearing the least amount of clothing allowed by law and sexy shoes to show off their long slender legs, legs which happen to have constellations of scars from muffler burns and moto accidents. And yes, as you have probably guessed, I find this sexy too.

Your friend the gecko

When I went to Belize in 2006 I stayed with a friend of a friend in Belize City. I remember getting freaked out when I saw something streak across the wall out of the corner of my eye. At least I thought I did. It was gone. But there it was! It was a lizard! In my room! I asked Monique about it. She just laughed. Geckos, as it turns out, are more common than houseflies.

If you travel in tropical regions you will see geckos everywhere. Walls, ceilings, but rarely floors, strangely enough. They're small enough to get into just about anything. In that regard they're like mice. One of the many joys of living in Baltimore -- did my sarcasm come through? -- was the constant battle against mice. And rats. You would see the telltale pellets and then go to Home Depot to buy more traps, poison, etc.

When I moved into my apartment in Phnom Penh I noticed pellets. I thought, Oh no, here we go again. Then I noticed pellets on the wall... I realized I didn't have mice, I had geckos. I'm ok with that.



Geckos don't make noise, which is nice, but they eat bugs, which is great! There is another type of lizard. I don't know what it's called in English, but it looks like a giant gecko. Maybe it is a giant gecko. They're several inches long and they do make noise. The sound is somewhere between a honk and the sound a frog makes.

Big geckos are bad, though, because they eat little geckos. The worst gecko, of course, is the one in the Geico commercials. Why does an ad for an American insurance company speak with an Australian accent?

Brown brownout

I had a funny conversation with a co-worker. He started working at my school in September, when the weather was gorgeous. Yesterday he came in around lunchtime looking a bit sweaty and disheveled. As he was mopping his brow he asked, "How long will it stay this hot?" I said, "It hasn't started to get hot yet..."

I was being a bit facetious, but not by much. After a few months of the most pleasant weather, the hot season is creeping back. Every day the temperature gets noticeably warmer. The mornings and evenings are still comfortable, but by the end of the month it will be suffocatingly hot 24/7.

I thought it only fair to warn my friend that the worst is yet to come. About three months' worth.

More and more Cambodians are using air conditioners. Unfortunately, the power grid isn't being updated to accomodate the increased demand. Brownouts are common on days when the temperature soars. Like today.

I teach six days a week so I don't go out a lot. Saturday is my big night. Sunday is Recuperation Day. I usually spend the afternoon at my favorite coffee shop, Brown, catching up on email and surfing the internet. And recuperating.

I have been here for 90 minutes. The electricity has shut down about every 10 minutes. Back home they would call BGE. Here they take a more direct approach.


Every time the power crashes one of the waiters climbs up the pole just outside my window. I can't see what he's doing but it looks like he's flipping a breaker. I could go out and look. Or I could sit inside and watch in air-conditioned comfort. Wasn't it Abraham Lincoln who said "'Tis better to sit in cool comfort and remain ignorant than step into the heat and remove all doubt?"

Service with a smile

One of the myriad differences you encounter while traveling is what passes for customer service in other cultures. I'll address restaurant service here in a different post but in the meantime I thought I'd share a funny sign I saw at a market here.

Psar Toul Tom Pong is still known to foreigners as the Russian Market, as it was known during the French colonial days. It's an enormous market where you can buy almost literally anything. It's a popular spot on the tourist trail, but also popular with locals.

Tourists love markets. I don't get it. For starters, as I've mentioned before. I hate haggling. Hate hate hate it. No matter what country you go to you see the same knockoff crap. I usually don't like the atmosphere, either. Too pushy, too high pressure. In Morocco stall owners will literally drag you into their stalls. Cambodians are more low-key. You walk through the markets and most sellers don't even acknowledge you, let alone try to block your way as they do in other countries.

Even so, it cracked me up to see the sign on this stall.


"How is our staff service?" I was tempted to call the number listed just to see who answered. Needless to say, this sort of Western touch is not common. I wonder what the Khmer writing above it says. Does it say "How is our staff service?" in Khmer? Or does it say "We put up this stupid sign because someone told us foreigners like to see this sort of thing"?

Tet

This is a post I started last year but never finished because I was gearing up for the move to Cambodia. Oh heck, I'll admit it -- I was just being lazy. I'm dusting it off because, incredibly, it's Chinese New Year again. In Vietnam it's called Tet. Actually, in English it's called Tet. In Vietnamese it's called Tết! (That's actually short for Nguyên Đán Tết, "Feast of the "First Morning".)

If Americans know anything the holiday it's because of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. On January 31, 1968, on the first day of Tet, the North Vietnamese unleashed a massive, coordinated attack on more than 100 towns and cities. The US and its allies were caught by surprise but were able to regroup and respond. Although a military defeat for the North Vietnamese the Tet Offensive did much to turn public opinion against the war in the US. You know, because before that it was going so well... It was the beginning of the end.

I have always found it fascinating that the US was caught by surprise. What sort of man would lead his troops into battle on a holiday?


This is Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's famous painting on "Washington Crossing the Delaware" to attack Trenton. He crossed the river on ... wait for it ... Christmas. Of course, you wouldn't expect the US military command to remember George Washington's first victory in the Revolutionary War...

(The flag in the painting is an anachronism. The Stars and Stripes didn't appear until 1777. Critics of the painting also like to point out that it is unlikely that Washington would have been standing in the boat, and that he is depicted as doing so merely to make him look more heroic. The eminent historian David Hackett Fischer, who I had the honor of interviewing when I was a reporter, turned that argument on its head. He said because it was so cold, and because its likely the boats weren't entirely watertight, everyone in the boat would have been standing, to avoid sitting in the icy water. What does all this have to do with this blog post? Absolutely nothing. I just wanted to namedrop. Aren't you impressed?)

Tet is the biggest holiday in Vietnam. That it is a reminder of their victory over the US is merely a happy footnote. Many (in China, Vietnam and Cambodia) celebrate the holiday by returning to their "homeland" to perform "ancestor worship", which means praying to family members who have passed away.

In Vietnam there is also a massive reverse migration, as people from the countryside pour into the cities to sell ceremonial plants. Hundreds of people invaded the park by my home and lived there for the week. I lived next to park 23/9 in Saigon. It is a beautiful park, a shockingly pleasant oasis smack bang in the middle of the crazy Phạm Ngũ Lão tourist district. It has perhaps the worst name of any park in the world, since it's just the address. I suppose it's better than, say, Adolph Hitler Memorial Park or Poop Park, but come on, you couldn't do better than that?

My adorable friend Nhan took me on a tour of the park and did her very best to explain the significance of each type of tree. A year ago when I started this post I knew the difference, but now all I can seem to remember is that each is supposed to bring some sort of luck. Nhan is a tiny girl but even so you can tell these flowers are enormous.

I am glad I made the move from Saigon to Phnom Penh. I don't miss much but I do miss my friends. I got to know her because she waited tables at the restaurant where I went for my bi-weekly pizza fix. Some of my fondest memories from Vietnam are my movie outings with Nhan.

These, I believe are lime trees.

There were literally acres of trees and flowers for sale.

The colors mean different things. I've forgotten and am too lazy to do a Google search... Some of these plants are enormous.


How on earth do you get one of these giants home? This is Vietnam. You carry it the way you carry everything else, on a motorbike.


This might look crazy to Western eyes, until you consider that I saw guys who had strapped wooden platforms across the back of their moto seats and were carrying four of these. Also for sale were various types of sculptures, made of plants. These dragons were made of some sort of gourd-like thingy.


Dragon fruits grow on trees, but not like this.


It's another sort of sculpture, with the plants and fruits all tied together. The park is always busy, but was even more so during Tet. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I think it's great how Asians (and Russians) enjoy taking photos. In the west we consider a chore. Come on, take the picture already! I love watching the elaborate choreography.

Now this is crazy

One of the downsides to living abroad is it dulls your sense of wonder. Try as you might, you become jaded. Things that were once new, unusual or just plain crazy become commonplace. I remember thinking "Holy crap, was that four people on one motorbike?" Now anything less than six people on a moto doesn't warrant so much as a glance.

Still, just about every day I see something crazy, funny, different or just plain wrong enough to remind me I'm not in Kansas anymore. Heck, I sometimes wonder if I'm still on Planet Earth. I see people doing and carrying the craziest things on motorbikes but, as I've expressed in previous posts, I rarely have the opportunity to get a picture. Even having a camera on my phone isn't enough. By the time I realize "that would make a good picture" the moment is gone.

I literally went out of my way to get this next photo. I was getting ready to turn when I saw one of the craziest things I've yet seen in Southeast Asia. I sped ahead on my motorbike, pulled over, got out my phone and waited to snap a pick. I barely made it in time.

One scam tuk-tuk drivers try to pull on tourists is charging per person. They will try to charge me $2 for a trip that would cost a Cambodian 2000 riel (50 cents). If I am with someone they will try to charge us $2 each. This is particularly funny/infuriating because it's common to see tuk-tuks carrying entire families of locals, and you known darned well they aren't paying per person. By families I mean 10, 12 or 15 people in one tuk-tuk.

How do you transport a family by tuk-tuk when one of the boys is in a wheelchair?


He is holding onto the back of the tuk-tuk as it pulls him along. If there is ever a time when this doesn't shock and horrify me, tap me on the shoulder and tell me it's time to go home.

The less jaded of you might look at the motorbike next to the tuk-tuk and wonder why the father is wearing a helmet but the mother and infant are not? I stopped wondering that a long time ago...

I am in the process of finding a new apartment, for reasons which I will detail in a future post. As you know, finding a new apartment is a time-consuming and joyless chore. Try doing it in a city where you don't speak the language! I will update the blog when the search is over. Wish me luck.

As I was saying...

In my last post I mentioned that Thailand and Cambodia occasionally exchange gunfire over a disputed temple on their shared border and that this tends to end up with a person or two lying dead on the ground.

Like this poor guy

What makes this soldier's death so outrageous is that the temple was awarded to Cambodia by an international court. There is no dispute. Why then do the Thais keep insisting that it's theirs? Allow me to honor the time-honored American tradition of greatly oversimplifying unimaginably complex issues:

It's because of rich people in Thailand with too much free time.

An article I quoted in 2008 explained Thai politics: "[M]ake no mistake that this is class warfare. But forget the usual categories of left and right. This is class war in a consumerist Theravada [Buddhist] technocracy ruled by an uneasy mish-mosh of divine kingship, a shadowy military, business interests and inherited money. It is outside Western categories."

Allow me to rehash some previous posts. There is a political group commonly referred to as the Yellow Shirts (guess why) but officially the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD). These people are ultra-nationalist, fanatically loyal to the king and, almost by definition, rich. They're like the radical right fringe dominating American politics now: People who sit around thinking of reasons to be pissed off.

One of my colleagues, who lived in Thailand for many years, said the Yellow Shirts regularly find something to protest simply to remind the government who really runs the country. They are the ones who shut down the airport in Bangkok for two weeks when I was there in November and December 2008. The protest was a ringing success. No planes left or landed at the biggest airport in Southeast Asia for two weeks. The protestors went home for one reason and one reason only: It was the king's birthday.

As I've written before the People's Alliance for Democracy's stated purpose is to take away the voting rights of poor people. I am not paraphrasing, reading between the lines or inferring sinister motives. I quoted a Yellow Shirt supporter at the time who said "Rural people have good hearts but they don't know the truth like we do in Bangkok. It is our duty to re-educate them." Yellow Shirt supporters will cheerfully express this sentiment in casual conversation with complete strangers. Like me. All you can do is smile and nod and make a graceful exit from the conversation as quickly as possible.

That the Preah Vihear temple was awarded to Cambodia drives the Yellow Shirts absolutely bonkers. Thais think of the Khmer as little better than animals. I know this because I have had conversations in Thailand with complete strangers who have told me as much. (I have had the same conversations in Vietnam.)

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is a fascinating character. I will write about him when he leaves office, which will most likely be when he dies. You see where I'm going with this...

However, Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya may have crossed the lines of civil political discourse when he said he would "use Hun Sen‘s blood to wash my feet". Usually, speaking of a foreign leader in such terms would warrant dismissal, or at least a public reprimand. But the minister was truly speaking for his people.

This poor Cambodian soldier had to die so the Thai government could appease a group of bored nouveau riche.

I realize that it appears I am putting a pro-Cambodian spin on this because I happen to live here, but I started writing about this situation before I ever came to Thailand. I was in Bangkok during the airport protest. I spent a week resting there because I seriously &%$#ed up my back while scuba diving and was in no condition to travel. When I write of conversations I had with Thais in which they talked about the protests, Cambodia, etc., I am referring to conversations I had before my first visit to Cambodia.