Vietnam Archives
March 05, 2004 - Friday
Ho Chi Minh is a Son of a Bitch
Saigon is a happenin town. I had anticipated a nice transition from the third world to the second, but this is quite a step up for a sleepy Cambodian country boy like myself. The bright neon lights, paved multi-lane highways,...
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Regrets
I did not try the spiders in Skuon (on Feb 24), though I probably should have. The bus left early in the morning and I was not in a mood to do anything but scowl out a muddy bus window....
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March 07, 2004 - Sunday
Where To
Saigon's rushing rivers of motorbikes are ok for a while but I must not become bogged down; this is a big country! My vague plan now is to take a tourist ghetto bus to Dalat on Tuesday Wednesday morning. It...
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March 08, 2004 - Monday
Some Food
It's been mentioned that I haven't written much about food. I suppose that's true; maybe food doesn't seem to fit in elegantly with surrounding tales, but all is not spiders and insects. I'm still alive and food has been there...
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Book Learning
It seems I should be able to tell something about a place by the number of book stores it can support. Saigon has a lot of large, nice, Vietnamese bookstores and soundly trounces the other big cities I've seen so...
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Commie Rats
The Cu Chi tunnels are a surprisingly nightmarish experience for a mainstream tourist attraction. Cu Chi is a suburb of Saigon near a former American military base, which was actually built there to combat the tunnels that already existed, having...
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March 09, 2004 - Tuesday
Reportage from the front
I've uploaded a lot of words and pictures. Here are some shots of Saigon. They include the border crossing, Ho Chi Minh City Museum, Cu Chi Tunnels, other buildings and scenes. One of the most interesting places was the Reunification...
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Great Firewall
Every internet shop in this city seems to be behind the same caching internet proxy. This confounds me a bit when it seems like my front page isn't being updated even though it is. I don't know why it's so...
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Cà Phé
Just when I think I'm ready to master even the most obscure or outrageous dining custom thrown my way, I'm served another mystery. Check out how they serve good coffee in Vietnam. First of all I don't quite know what...
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March 10, 2004 - Wednesday
All That You Can't Leave Behind
Those dopey-eyed dope fiends in Saigon hijacked my passport but were too stoned to tell me the ransom. An hour out of town this morning, in a Hyundai minibus, we were pointed over by the cops for a bribe or...
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March 11, 2004 - Thursday
Remember America?
Jesse found a fun web site where you can map out all the states you've been to. This should be about right for me: Cheating a bit because Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico all come from visiting the Four Corners....
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March 12, 2004 - Friday
A Dalat in the Life
In Saigon I had achieved my goal of buying a poorly counterfeited Nike baseball cap. The swoosh isn't quite the right shape and the stitching is unusually shoddy; for 60 cents, I support the little guy instead of The Man....
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Oh yeah...
My passport showed up, with lots of crazy stories to tell....
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March 13, 2004 - Saturday
Roadwork
It's too cruel that these hours and hours on a rattley bus barely move that orange line far enough to make room for another red dot. I'm in Nha Trang now because it's where the "open tour" buses from Dalat...
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March 14, 2004 - Sunday
School of the Rails
Danang's where the train goes but there's not much there, save a big airport, big bridge, and a million people. I met some english-speakers on the train and we shared a cab down to Hoi An, a town of historical...
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That's just, like, your opinion, man
Here's a timely and topical article in Salon's "Ask The Pilot" column. Non subscribers can watch an ad to get access to the whole site for a day. He had some interesting notes a few weeks (months?) ago about the...
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March 16, 2004 - Tuesday
Melbourne Women
The word ridiculously has been removed from selected verbs in the following monologue. Otherwise it would seem twice as overawed and fawning as it is. The Australians must have something going on. The guys are ____ cool dudes and the...
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March 17, 2004 - Wednesday
Asian Beer Survey Part 1
Wherever you go there's always a local beer waiting to greet you and be sampled. I've been pondering how this somehow proves a grand overarching theory of human one-ness but really all it shows is beer is easy to make...
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Eire-Nam
Looks like it's still Hoi An for Saint Patrick's Day. I was aiming to be in a bigger city for this auspicious occasion, the better to find well stocked bars and irishfolk. But since I didn't make it to My...
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March 18, 2004 - Thursday
Evening
Well St. Patrick's Day wasn't the raucous hootenanny that I anticipated. The several Australians, who were already drinking on the bus to My Son at 10AM, were nowhere to be found. It was still a fine time, the only black...
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March 20, 2004 - Saturday
How I Hate Vietnam
Vietnam is a land of wonders, sights, smells, sounds, and a hospitable, happy people. Sometimes I feel like going Barry Goldwater on their little asses. (In the 1964 Presidential campaign, Arizona Senator Goldwater advocated telling Ho Chi Minh to stop...
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March 22, 2004 - Monday
Hà Nôi
The fourteen hour overnight bus from Hué I wouldn't do again in a hurry. (overall avg speed: 28mph including two long stops) But it wasn't so bad, on balance. I decided to skip the train because hiking or driving miles...
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March 23, 2004 - Tuesday
Kneecapped Recap
Ben Franklin supposedly said New Jersey is "like a beer barrel, tapped at both ends, with all the live beer running into Philadelphia and New York". Vietnam is like that with the internet. Now at the top, in Hanoi, the...
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March 24, 2004 - Wednesday
"Please drive me to a grassy field two hours away"
I forgot all about the equinox. It seems like early spring here too but the odd thing is I came into it from summer. Even (or especially?) in the London-ish weather, Hanoi is a grand and attractive city. This is...
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It's so hard to find good help
Well that didn't work. An never showed up and I lost the card with his phone number. Someone else will receive his fifty trillion dong tomorrow. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you gotta read the previous...
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Be Shown Things
It's time for some Hanoi pictures. But no more identical vistas of mountain villages. In this group they're all winners -- views and curiosities culled from a city bursting full of them. I can't begin to list them all and...
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March 27, 2004 - Saturday
An update
I did go to Ha Nam and I'll post a long tale of it as soon as it's ready. But I was confused by the ending. Also I'm very busy, going to Halong Bay today and Laos tomorrow. And not...
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April 06, 2004 - Tuesday
Donald P. McGrane
A week and half ago in Vietnam I took care of some family business. Fourteen years before I was born, my uncle Donald McGrane was killed in Vietnam, along with three other men, when his helicopter was shot down while...
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Paul's Oriental Travelogue
Domo Arigato, Mister Roboto