Non Glib

A random blog of my travels and thoughts.

[nonglib]

Scootering

So...I haven’t been so good about doing any blogging.  Um.  Sorry about that.  I’ve been spectacularly unmotivated to write down all of my thoughts.  Also, the Internet has pretty much been crappy non-stop, so when I want to try and upload a picture or something, it doesn’t work for shit.  And, I’m spending three-four hours a day studying Vietnamese (I suspect I’ll have another blog post about that at some point) which is mentally exhausting.  I’m basically learning two languages at once - so it’s four times as hard.  Details later on that, the nuances on Vietnamese are worth a few hundred blog posts, no doubt.

In any case, I’ll break the seal and see if that helps get my creative juices flowing.  Let’s talk about...riding a scooter!

That’s a shot of my typical commute!  Yes, I drive a scooter now to school pretty much every day.  I realized I was going to need to be mobile, and although you can walk around in Saigon, it’s not the friendliest city for the pedestrian.  Taxis are cheap, but they are also slow.  Pretty much everyone rides a scooter to get around.  Sun, rain, sleet, snow, they ride through anything.  And now, so do it.

The scooter I rented was (thankfully) a fully-automatic, so your really only have to master a few things - the hand breaks, the accelerator, a blinker, and that’s about it.  Which is good, because the other 95% of your brain is switching around between “ok, straightforward” to “this is pretty amazing” to “HOLY SHIT FUCK OMG” and back again.  A few rules of the road:

The rules of the road are...at best...gentle suggestions.  Guidelines, perhaps.  There aren’t a lot of traffic lights, and although many people respect them, you can’t rely on everyone respecting them.

Every road is two-way.  Both sides of two-way roads are two-way.  Let us  suppose you entering onto a one-way street, and the turn you wish to take is 100m in the wrong direction.  In the US (and almost any western country), you turn with traffic and go around the block.  In Vietnam, you simple turn into traffic...go against traffic, and then make the turn you desire.

The rules of the road also apply to the sidewalk.  Traffic bogging you down?  Simply take your scooter on the sidewalk.  The pedestrians expect it.

You are responsible for what is in front of you.  Period.  What is behind you does not exist, so don’t worry about it.  Let us consider another example - you are turning right onto a street.  In most countries, you might stop, watch for traffic, and then go when there is a break.  Or perhaps you wait for a light?  Here...you simply go.  They will get out of your way - they see you coming (you are in front of them) so it’s their responsibility.

Any hesitation can safely be interpreted as “go ahead”.  Left turns, for example...you simple wait for the briefest of gaps, and then you and a whole swarm of motorbikes will just turn left in front of everyone.

Yellow lights are a form of hesitation - they really mean gun it and go through.  And the first four or five seconds of red lights too, because people pretty much just keep driving through the intersection.  This especially exciting because people going crosswise start to go about four or five seconds before the light, turning things into a rather interesting game of chicken to see who hesitates for whom before the newer traffic takes over the intersection.

Speaking of red lights...that’s also when you start your left turn, usually as the red light is coming to an end, when everyone tries to drive through the intersection before enough scooters and cars reach critical mass and block off the left turns.

The cars move like silent juggernauts...boulders in the stream of scooters.  Somehow they don’t cause any traffic jams.  Actually, there’s almost never a traffic jam in the New York sense - traffic always moves, it just gets a bit sluggish.  Fortunately, the scooters just go around the blockage, even if they have to ride on the sidewalk to do so!

People who ride bikes in this are just fucking crazy.

It’s really a combination of modern dance, schooling fish, and utter insanity.  You would think there’d be constant wrecks, death, and chaos.  Fortunately, people don’t drive very quickly - and once you start to do it yourself, you develop a feeling for the road and everyone’s expectations.  It’s important not to suddenly stop or change directions - you really have to trust that everyone is going to do what you expect...and keep your eyes out for when somebody telegraphs they are not going to!  Like enter the road from a blind driveway behind a van going the wrong direction.  For example.

The schooling of fish comes to mind when you watch how a swarm of bikes starts the left turn in the middle of the road, and the oncoming traffic neatly bifurcated to let the little blob through.  Everyone will continue going straight until enough of the blob has inched forward into a hesitation, when a “lead” bike will magically divert around blob, allowing that chunk of bikes to turn left, slowing all of the oncoming traffic down, until another hesitation cuts off the left turn and allows the traffic going straight to continue.

I can’t tell for sure who’s the scariest, but here’s a few I watch out for when I see them:

Men without shirts smoking cigarettes

Men without shirts with another guy on the back smoking a cigarette and holding a bag of charcoal or fish heads or anything on fire

Really shitty bikes carrying anything dorm-fridge sized or larger

Anyone carrying 20-foot lengths of conduit

Older ladies covered head to do (sun protection) - seriously, they are menaces.  And they give you stink eye as they cut you off.

Elegance.  Really.  Now here’s an extra scary part:

Yeah...Ileana riding the scooter.  I borrowed my friend’s scooter so Ileana could practice a bit with me nearby.  She did pretty well, and today she took it to the pool by herself so she could swim.  I asked her to text me to let me know whether or not she had died en route.  Fortunately, no deaths occurred, and she told me she “even made a left turn” and “got home on accident lol” so we’ll chalk that up to success.

I will try to grab a video clip of one of the more interesting intersections I plough through on a regular basis!

Just to make things a bit more somber...I did witness my first serious accident. It actually wasn’t in Saigon, it was in Nha Trang, a beach town about an hour’s flight away.  Oddly enough, it didn’t happen as a result of all this insanity, I think.  I didn’t see the exact instant of the accident, but I saw the immediate aftermath, and it looked like one scooter just veered into the wrong lane and had some sort of head-on collision with another.  They were probably each going about 15-20 km/h.  I think there may have been an old man involved too (as a pedestrian).  One person was seriously damaged and got thrown into a taxi for the hospital, presumably, and the other people had minor injuries and scrapes.  Unfortunate, and it certainly makes me take safety, such as it is, a bit more seriously.  There’s not a whole lot you can do - you’re just so exposed on these things.

Anyway, singing off for now.  Upcoming posts, assuming I stay focused:

Vancouver

Sydney

Cairns and The Great Barrier Reef

Kyoto and Tokyo

Bangkok (Oriental city, but the city don’t know what the city is getting...now that’s stuck in your head.  Hah.)

Yangon

Vietnamese

And...whatever else I am appropriately motivated to write.

I have not edited this post, so I’ll probably fix a pile of typos tomorrow after I’ve posted it.  Enjoy!

[nonglib]

Off We Go - Shortly

Ileana and I leave on our journey tonight.  Many of you have asked about how to stay in touch - we’ll be on the grid, even if we’re off the map.  The usual iMessage, email, Slack, WhatsApp, Line, and Messenger will work to get in touch with me.  As usual, email is my preference unless you have a pretty good idea what time zone we’re residing in.

Speaking of time zones, here’s the rough travel map:

6/29   Vancouver    Stop one - a little appetizer on the way to the main course. 7/2 Sydney My first trip Down Under - we'll spend a few days in Sydney before heading north to the Great Barrier Reef for some SCUBA diving. 7/13 Tokyo Ileana has been dying to visit Japan, so we'll head there and enjoy some fantastic sushi.  We'll probably take the shinkansen up to Kyoto as well. 7/21 Bangkok This will be the hub for some travel through Southeast Asia.  I haven't been to Thailand since 1993 - I'll see how much it's changed.  From there, we have a trip to Myanmar, and then I'm going to try living in Saigon for a month and learn more about the Vietnamese culture. 9/13 Tel Aviv Pretty much everyone I know from Israel has told me I must visit it - so, we are.  I look forward to learning more about Jewish, Christian, and Muslim heritage. 9/20 Helsinki Ah...Finland!  I don't know why I picked this one, except that I've never been there and it will be a nice change from the jungle and the desert. I'll probably do a side trip to Budapest and visit my old team there. 9/27 London No trip would be complete without a stop in my favorite former-EU member.  Another team visit planned here as well. 10/2 Edinburgh Last but not least, a stop-off here in future EU member Scotland.

I’ll be posting the occasional update from the road, with a few pictures and thoughts about the countries, cultures, and people we’re visiting.

Today’s humorous note - the chaos in the financial markets due to Brexit has made my trip about 15% cheaper.  Yay, chaos!

[nonglib]

Culture and War

Vietnam is a country that got the shit kicked out of it.  A lot.  Invasions from just about every country out there, it seems...culminating most recently in incursions from France and the United States.  I'm not going to say I completely understand how it all fit together.  I picked up a biography of Phun Xuan An [a book that you should definitely consider adding to your collection], and reading between the lines on that gave some context and background.  But after being treated this way, they've turned into a pretty tough bunch.  I have to wonder if China has any idea what they might be getting into, as Vietnam has come out on top of every war they’ve been involved in.  Eventually.

Back to history.  What did I learn from my books and museum visits?  Well, first of all - France as a colonial power, really sucked.  And then handed that suckiness right off to the United States, and we took that suckiness up to a new level, which culminated in the Vietnam War and what is probably the one of the saddest stories affecting two countries in the modern era.  Not that war anywhere is good, but THIS war was horrific in ways that I don't really want to imagine.

But...what to highlight?  Well - no visit would be complete without a stop at the Ho Chi Minh Museum, next to his Mausoleum, in the center of Hanoi.  It's a strange and bizarre mix of faux-modern art and sculpture, a homage to Ho Chi Minh himself, communism, and the party.  I bought the book about An in the 100% capitalist bookstore, and I have to wonder what Ho Chi Minh would think of it.  He'd either be pleased or mortified at the shrine they built to him.  My friend Ruthie fought off jetlag (she got to Hanoi the day after I did) and joined me for the tour.

I don't think the museum has been updated since about 1980...it's hilarious in some ways, and tragic in others.  Many of the quotes are from newspapers, clearly written with an appropriately revisionist propaganda agenda in mind.  On the other hand, I'm prepared to believe that at least half of it (which half?) is fairly accurate...and on whole, at least as correct as the white-washed histories everybody gets today.  Still, to see your home country referred to as "...the imperialist puppet American government..." and the "...the western fascists..." is strange to swallow, regardless of what the underlying truth might be.  Assuming anyone could even tell at this point.

Stops at the Vietnam National History museum, the Vietnam War Museum, and the Vietnam Military Museum had me museumed out.  To be honest, though, I still love these old-school buildings.  There's none of this fancy "interactive" crap that is taking over the US museums, the fancy diagrams, computer screens, and brightly colored pictures.  No, these exhibits are old-fashioned labors of love.  The museum curator, sitting down a decade or three ago, painstakingly, by hand, labeling 500 separate stone axes and arrowheads, carefully noting where they were found, and writing some drab historical context.  Everything is old, faded, and worn, mouldering down over the years, fading even in the faded light.  I find it tremendously comforting, somehow.  It even has that old library smell, distant aroma redolent of glue, and dust, and the gentle decay of paper.  You have to really WANT to learn, and I run my fingers along the cases, letting my eyes wander over the bits and pieces of information, pausing to read whatever inscription catches my fancy.

The next day, I managed to make it over the Hanoi Hilton.  Or, Hỏa Lò Prison as it's officially known.  That's famous for being John McCains' accommodations for a few years, after being fished out of a lake when his plane was shot down.  I didn't realize that it was built as a French prison for putting local rebels when they were working their way through the country.  Those French really know how to build a prison, but...sorry for any French people reading this...but seriously, WTF.  WHAT. THE. FUCK.  Even if only 25% of what's on the walls there is true, I don't get it.

Guillotines (of course; it's French), and brutal cells and conditions.  Tiger cages, where people were forced to lie down in, ankles shackled, for days or weeks at a time, being fed nothing but rice and rotted fish.  Row and row of leg irons, which apparently were full of prisoners at all times.  Anyone who rebelled, anyone who fought.  Many that simply wrote or said subversive things.  Some of the very lucky ones managed to escape through the sewers (the escape lanes have been dug up and put on display) but I have no doubt that many died in those walls.

After the Vietnamese threw the French out, the Viet Cong took over.  They seemed to have learned from the French.  There's a lot of photos there of captured Americans.  Some are being treated for their wounds, while others are shown in what look like staged photos - playing cards, basketball, gayly laughing as if it was just another tropical resort spot.  Like everything else in Vietnam, it's all been written and displayed with some boulder-sized grains of salt, but some of it is probably not completely contrived.  McCain didn't face the guillotine, at least.

The final museum I saw on my trip was in Saigon.  It was originally called something like "The American And Chinese War Atrocity Museum" but that wasn't getting the tourists in the door, so now it's the War Remnants Museum.  I don't actually know why it had Chinese in the title (maybe Americans are inclusive of the French?)

Being there was powerful.  It was the first time I cried at a museum.  Every human being should be required to visit walk through it.  The atrocities committed by one another, on one another, is painful beyond words.  The story of the war is woven together with pictures, articles, and letters from all sides.  Many of the most painful are direct from western journalists, describing all of the horrible things that the VC, the ARVN, American, and French armies were doing.  

I don't know how much made it to the newspapers and magazines, but much of it did.  600,000 TONS of bombs and weapons dropped on civilian and military targets.  Wholesale destruction of the countryside with carcinogens and napalm.  Indiscriminate acts of violence, for decades, culminating in the 70s as the US grew desperate to staunch the spread of communism.  People behaving far worse than any animals ever would.

Maybe the decision to support the south made more sense at the time to somebody, but it sure as hell makes no sense now.  One of the most difficult sections of the museum to make it through was a display of all the journalists who were killed in the Vietnam was - coming from twelve countries to do their work.  The bulk were American, but Japanese, Australian, French, Vietnamese, etc. were all represented among those killed while documenting the war.

For the photojournalists that died (and were found), their last roll of film was developed and put on display, sometimes next to the camera that took it.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for Time/Life now, based on everything that their brave reporters and editors did.  Two women were among the dead - brilliant, powerful reports in their own right, braving the same hellish conditions that the men were, embedding themselves directly with frontline troops.  There's a picture of one of them, lying in the mud, wearing her bulletproof vest, helmet, and secretary glasses, holding a camera, taking pictures of the mayhem in front of her.  Her partner took the photo of her right before she died, shot like any other soldier.

I won't even try to describe the section on Agent Orange (still killing decades later), nor the photos of people killed every year by unexploded bombs that still litter the countryside.  Go see for yourself.

Suffice to say, war truly is hell.  Has today's military has changed that tune?  Many are critical of what we do in the gulf, and the Middle East, but to compare how the military behaved in Vietnam vs. how it represents the United States today is night and day.  I'm sure that some of you will feel that I've simply been duped by the lame-stream media, and I have plenty of concerns about what we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq, rest assured, but aside from the  occasional bad apples (Abu Graib?) it seems like most of our servicemen are trying to do the right thing in spite of the maelstrom of history oriented against them.

I think I will end this blog post here.

[nonglib]

Saigon

[ A little late posting this...but, things get busy, right?  ]

OK - let me just confirm that Saigon will NEVER be Ho Chi Minh City to me.  Maybe in a few hundred years, the name change will take (Constantinople, anyone?) but for me, Saigon is the word that rolls off the tongue.

Imagine taking Hanoi and...maybe just stretching it out?  Although if you've never been to Hanoi, that's not going to help much.  Hmm.  OK - Saigon is Hanoi's older, more worldlier sister.  She moved to big city from the countryside, putting on nicer clothes and high-heeled shoes.  I would have said brother, but...Saigon.  Definitely a she.  Bigger streets...bigger buildings...definitely more western.  A different vibe, but look around a little bit, and you'll still see the same old women serving tea on the sidewalk.  Just, bigger sidewalks, so it lacks that claustrophobic intensity that Hanoi has.

This city knows how to have fun.  It stays up later, it parties louder, and it's got a much messier mix of locals, expats, and tourists to make the music go all hours of the night.  I started talking to a girl at a coffee shop who was reading something in English (apparently my accent isn't too terrible when I order coffee), and half an hour later, my new friend Phuong helped me buy a helmet off the sidewalk ($4.50) and invited me out to see the city with her.  So, I settled behind her on the bike to cruise around Saigon for the day.

We hit the main market...more coffee...fruit smoothies...played some pool (the rules are subtly different)...went to a local bookstore...ended up checking out Districts 1, 3, 5, and 6 (I think).  It was a fun, whirlwind day, and I hope I can pay forward some tour-guiding in NYC at some point soon.  She happens to be a web storyboard designer, so we talked about work a bit as well.  We finished the night enjoying a few beers at a local shop some of her friends work at...enjoying the warm night as the sun set, watching people leave work, change, and come back out to enjoy the evening.

Friday night I was on my own again, but you'll find that Saigon is a very friendly city.  A lot of the locals want to practice their English, and there's no shortage of tourists, backpackers, and expats who are happy to speak to you in a bar and tell you the next place to go check out.  I ended up at 195 Bui Vien, one of the current hot spots, looking out over the city.  From there, wandered through the street, grabbing some late-night pho, before dancing for a few hours at the aptly named Apocalypse Now - ending the world since, well...the world ended in 1975.  Suffice to say, it draws an extremely exotic and raucous crowd.  But, drinks aren't too expensive, the music's pretty good, and there's no cover to get in.

Interesting pause - at about 11:30, the music stopped for about 15 minutes.  I asked a group what was going on, and found out that it was a "professional" check.  I'm not sure exactly how they figure out who's a prostitute and who's just dressed like one...let's just say nobody there is dressed like a wallflower...but it was kinda nice to just hang out on the floor and watch everyone milling around.

In any case, the music cranked back up and I ended up bailing out, tired and smoky, at 12:30 or so.  Only a short walk back to the Caravelle to crash.  The street was filled with people in all states of inebriation, motorbikes weaving their way through the crowd, people eating in stalls and on stools, vendors selling cigarettes and shoe-shines and who knows what else.  Time for a late-night pho, of course!

So - this is going to sound a little weird, but it felt strangely comforting to be back at a night club, with cigarettes and all.  You come out reeking of smoke, but it reminded me of the scene in New York in the 90s.  It was all glam and dress up and dancing.  Not sure if that still exists anywhere else in the US or Europe, in this era of hipster cool and localvoire and legal marijuana.  Time has still stopped in Vietnam, I guess.

[nonglib]

Dining in Hanoi

Hanoi Eating

First of all, let me state that Hanoi is by far the most delicious city I have ever visited. At least, if you don’t mind eating all of your food off the street…and I literally mean, OFF THE STREET:

This gentleman is a grillmaster of Hanoi!

As with everything else in Vietnam, they cook off the street just like the fix motorbikes. Sometimes in the same square meter of space!

But boy, is that cooking tasty. There are approximately a zillion people selling food this way - much in the form of soup or noodles, served in a bowl. Sometimes it’s random things cooked and dumped over rice. The broth tends to be exquisite. Even the worst dish I had still overflowed with enough flavor to make a french chef weep. I have a feeling it’s because it’s the same broth that’s been cooking since the war ended…so it’s got the kind of richness and depth of flavor that only a decade or two of simmering in the air, redolent of life, can bring it.

Remember the picture of the meat delivery in the last blog post? There seems to be a lot of that going around; I can’t tell you how many times I saw somebody delivering a huge chunk of pork, or beef, or chicken to a waiting cook. The women deliver meat, veggies, noodles, etc. Sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorbike. It’s then chopped and prepped from those same little stools on a cutting board resting on the sidewalk, or if it’s a higher-end place, on a small plastic table. One or two big pots are involved, either over a propane burner or often a type of cast charcoal burner.

Lots of cooking is done over charcoal, actually. As you walk around town, you can see lots of the clay charcoal burners discarded (and picked up for recycling) next to the little mini-BBQ stations that people are rustling up their tasty vittles.

Even though the places go from nothing more than a chair on the sidewalk all the way up to an actual “restaurant”, with a tiny prep kitchen to go along with a few tables wedged into a space scarcely a couple of meters across, they all have a pretty similar feel, and I would qualify all of the same as the same fabulous street food that Hanoi has become noted for.

So - how do you order? Well, you sidle up, find a seat (or indicate your interest in the general area, at which point somebody will identify themselves as the proprietor and find a spot to plop you down, usually knee-to-knee with everyone else already chowing their meal). There might be a written menu - in vietnamese - but what I have been doing is just pointing to something that somebody else is eating, and they bring me that. English tends to be limited to prices and a common courtesy. You must know how to say “bia hoi”, which is the name for the local light brew that’s served with pretty much anything (say beer hoy with a bad fake British accent, and you’ll be about right).

People on top of the stool, cats underneath, please.

A BRIEF DISCUSSION ABOUT SANITATION. Actually, let’s not and just say that most of these places are not going to pass any sort of health inspection. EVER. Between the lack of refrigeration, the cooking directly on the ground, the non-potable water, the questionable mixing of utensils, etc., I would recommend accepting it as it is and noticing that it doesn’t seem to be killing any of the people eating it. It has not killed me yet, either…I haven’t even been inconvenienced, shall we say, even after eight square meals directly from the street.

Do not ever complain about the lack of space in your kitchen triangle again.

So, what have I had so far?

- Many, many bowls of phở, which is what I consider the national dish of Vietnam - thinly sliced beef, chicken, or other mystery meat, in a fantastic broth, with rice noodles - A variation on that theme, for breakfast, but lacking the broth - Several random meats and tofu, served over rice with green veggies - An amazing grilled seafood dinner, consisting of geoduck, sea snails, clam congee, and the largest two shrimp I’ve ever seen (although to be fair, this was the most expensive meal I has in Vietnam, almost $20) - Squid…just, squid. More Chinese, I would say, but tasty none-the-less

The price…ah, that, my friend, is the best part. You can eat a proper vietnamese meal for $2 without even trying hard. Add on a cà phê sữa đá to start your day off for $1, a beer or three for $0.75 a pop, and you are well on your way to three square meals for $10/day, with room left over for your $2 pack of Marlboroughs.

Phở on the way home from beer corner, my last night in Hanoi

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the coffee in more detail. I am enchanted with Vietnamese coffee. It’s a little odd to think that a coffee snob like me would be so silly as to enjoy a fine, dark, coffee mixed with condensed milk from a can (of all things)…but damn, you take that and pour it over ice, and you have the most perfect drink in creation. Women are set up everywhere, with their pail of ice, a thermos or bottle of coffee, and a can of milk to whip that up for you. I also learned that when you run out of coffee, they will bring over a bottle of tea, which you pour over the ice and then drink to mop up the last of the flavor. Yummy.

DISTRESSING SIDE NOTE - I saw a bike with a cage of cats on the back. This caused me to raise an eyebrow. I later found out that cats are a delicacy on the menu here. Along with their canine brethren. Caveat emptor.

[nonglib]

Hanoi, Old Quarter

Where to start? I guess first...I should say that it's rare that I've been so taken by a city, by a country, that I wanted to say "I love it" right away. Evan exhausted, dirty, and beaten from the trip here, I found myself wanted to head right out into the city. Coming from the airport it wasn't too spiffy, but as soon as we got into the heart of the city in the cab and headed into the Old Quarter, I found myself excited at the energy, the people, and all the stuff I wanted to try! HOWEVER...given that I'd been up 27 or 28 hours at that point, I figured it would probably be somewhat more responsible to try and sleep, as to be ready and rarin' to go the next morning. So I grabbed a quick shower and hopped into bed...where to my amazement, I was able to mostly sleep through the night. I actually was woken up by my alarm clock at 6:00 AM! Perhaps I will be able to adjust in a single day. [ At this point, I should mention that I'm back in the hotel room writing this, after a looooong day walking around Hanoi, fighting through wanted to be asleep so badly, which means I wasn't quite able to time-shift 12 hours in a single night. I suspect that if I can make it to 9:00 tonight, though, I will be largely adapted to this schedule. ] The morning, I decided to talk a walk around the Old Quarter. This is the remnants of old Hanoi...it's a warren of streets, back alleys, and all sorts of little hideaways. Like many cities, Hanoi has clusters of shopping areas. Everything is sorted into little specialty areas...and when I say specialty, I mean it. There's the fishmongers, with cockels and snails and crabs safely wrapped in cloth:

There's the vegetable market:

But then, don't forget the purveyors of cable:

The bannister booth:

Your doorknob and latches expert:

And last, but certainly not least, one of several fine Grandfather Clock cubbies:

I could go on and on...the whole ecosystem is fascinating. It's made a lot more intense by the lack of any workspace. People just set up in their 2m x 3m storefront, and then sprawl out onto the sidewalk as needed to do the work. The hardware store just sets the tools out on the ground, and everyone sits back on their heels, little stools, or just kneels to get the work done:

Keep in mind that at any second, there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of motorbikes, mixed with the occasional taxi, bicycle, or electric scooter zooming around on the street, sidewalk, etc. So trying to stroll is a challenge in and of itself, where you have to wend around a pile of scooters all parked on the sidewalk without accidentally knocking over a pot of boiling beef broth or getting clipped by a woman carrying a hundred pounds of tangerines. Let's talk about the street...and vehicles...for a moment. There's no way pictures or videos can do it justice. There are motorbikes *everywhere*:

The streets are generally pretty narrow, and whatever traffic laws may exist on the books are clearly just traffic suggestions, some sort of theoretical construct that's just not applicable. In general, the traffic flows more or less on the right side of the street, but after that - all bets are off. Most intersections have no lights, and even if they DO have lights, many scooters will just stream through. Sometimes they go in the wrong direction on the opposite side of the street...sometimes on a sidewalk, or through an alley so narrow you can barely walk through it. To add insanity to the whole thing, people carry *everything* on a scooter. Two, three, even four people. I can't tell you how many families I saw with the father driving, his toddler in his lap facing backward, his wife sitting side-saddle behind him, with heels and a skirt, and his daughter behind his wife hanging on. And helmets? HAHAHA...surely you jest. I do see the occasional topper, but it's the exception, not the rule. Today I saw a scooter with an entire painter scaffolding attached - only to be topped by another scooter driving by with a 15 foot by 6 foot mirror somehow bolted onto the side for delivery. I have no idea how he managed that. If you can imagine it on the back of a truck, imagine it on the back of a scooter. Up to and including a frigging refrigerator. I kid you not. Let us now take a brief digression into...crossing the street. Now, since there's generally an unending sea of motorbikes filling every road, you have to get used to the idea of just meandering across the street. It's how everything here really works, actually...you wait for a pretty tiny break, and then you just start walking. THE KEY...the key for everyone in the street is to just not make sudden moves. There's a phenomenal amount of trust among drivers, pedestrians, and bikes: 1. Everyone agrees to move at a similar speed. 2. Nobody spasms or freaks out - once you start moving, don't change directions quickly. 3. Relax and trust that people will make room for you. Somehow, it just works. I haven't seen a single accident, which I find to be unfathomable given the chaos. Everyone turns at speed, merges at speed, and (with a toot of the horn), scooters just pass through the intersection...at speed. I don't think I'd want to drive here, but I've gotten pretty comfortable walking. You have to commit to the whole thing, no half measures, and then somehow it just works out. More about shopping. I have been very impressed with how clean Hanoi is. I started to see that this is due to a whole system of people cleaning - not only are their some quasi-official people that do the sweeping of debris, but a whole class of women who seem to spend the day walking aroudn the city selling plates of meat, vegetables, fruit, etc:

Get your meat here! Fresh, hot meat! I don't seem to have a picture of a woman carrying the dual-basket system, but aside from selling, they also pick up anything with even the most remote chance of having recyclable value. So, under their baskets of strange looking fruits are another set of baskets which they fill with discarded wire, broken fixtures, plastic, etc. I assume they take it somewhere to get recycled where they are paid a few dong. It looks brutally hot and painful, but I guess it's a living. I bought some rather stale (but tasty) donut holes from one of them, trying not to think about the amount of dirt and debris that had been gathering on it over the day. Ah yes...dirt..debris...pollution. Hanoi is a city redolent of odor and noise. The humidity is high, and that makes for what *could* be a horrible miasma. And maybe sometimes it is, but somehow the heady mix of motorbike fumes and hot boiling pots of pho and incense from the temples and ozone from the guy arcwelding in the street all add up to an amazing potpourri that just smells alive. I can see why many people have fallen in love with the people and the culture that engenders all of this after a visit. I can't say it in any other way...the residents of Hanoi are intensely practical - friendly, focused, and just making it one day after another. I haven't been particularly harassed like I've been in other countries with the same kind of manic intensity, like Cairo. It's much cleaner and well taken care of than, say, poor countries in Central America. Even though there's essentially no regulation (and somebody coming from any orderly country in the western world might find this really tough to digest), it looks like there's always somebody willing to help fix a motorbike, or make some pho, or set up shop selling red and orange twine. Just be thankful you're not supporting Vietnam Telecom, because that would be a REAL challenge:

More tomorrow! Off to see Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum tomorrow, and I'll chat about some of the history I've managed to run into here. D.

[nonglib]

A sample of the traffic at one of the larger intersections in the city.

[nonglib]

On Time Zone Changes

It’s my first trip back to Asia in 19 years. I’m fortunate enough to be able to attach a vacation to a business trip, and heading to Vietnam for a week before making stops in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo to visit the offices there. I was originally planning to take a family member or two with me, but as it turned out, everybody ended up with separate plans. Dyson is off to Nicaragua for a school trip, and Ileana and Jen are holding the fort in NYC (although I think there will be a side trip from there at some point.) It’s Spring Break / Passover / Easter vacation, so a good time for everyone to be traveling somewhere.

I’m currently sitting in the Cathay lounge, overlooking the sprawl of the Hong Kong airport.

There’s still a ton of construction going on here - what looks to be an entirely new terminal wing being built. I didn’t have the best view out the window on the way in (one of those pesky engines in the way), not to mention the pollution in the air, but you could see barges and cranes and machinery everywhere on the way in.

When I was traveling back and forth to Tokyo last century, I got pretty good at time-shifting. Tokyo is a rather brutal 14 hour hop forward from NYC, and I always remember the second day being the tough one. This trip is worse, in some ways - 16 hour direct flight to Hong Kong, followed by a three-hour layover and another two hours to Hanoi. The time change is 12 hours, and my current plan is just to power through and try to make it to 7:30 or 8:00 PM local time before crashing hard and trying not to wake up before 4:00 in the morning.

Cathay is a nice airline to fly. Comfortable seats, friendly stewardesses, and movies. Lots of movies. It made it easy to NOT take a nap, catching up on:

- Easy A - The Grandmaster - Frozen - The Dish - Catching Fire - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I’m pretty sure I watched at least two more movies, but they’re starting to blur together. Actually, my body thinks it’s 4:00 in the morning, so EVERYTHING is starting to blur together. Another four or five hours to go before I can hit the sack.

I suppose I can go out and watch the sun rise before enjoying a breakfast of pho in the street near a fish market. Not having to go to work right away is nice also…I can actually show up in the office all adjusted and ready for action instead of staggering around, coming directly off the flight and heading into the office like some do.

More when I have a chance to stroll around the city. I can hardly wait! In the meantime, one more espresso and then off to catch my next flight.

D.

[nonglib]

Bienvenidos a El Salvador!

It's been a while since I've updated the blog here...but I finally took another trip somewhere nifty, so I'm dusting off the ivories so I can talk about my most recent trek...to the Central American Paradise of El Salvador!  I was looking for a relatively nearby place we hadn't visited before that spoke only Spanish, and a reasonably cheap flight showed up to San Salvador.  So off we went!

Our start was not as auspicious as one might have hoped.  We got up early to head to the airport on Saturday.  Unfortunately, as always, certain people (who I shall not name to protect the guilty) were running a little slow, and we didn't get to the train as quickly as I would have hoped.  But NYC public transit was running well, so we made it from our door to the check-in counter in under an hour.  Not bad for getting all the way out to JFK.

I was a little worried at the line and the fact that it wasn't moving.  We were there at about 8:00, and the flight was going to close at 8:20 if we weren't checked in, so I snuck up to one of the counters and asked if we could check in there so we could run off to the gate.

Cue ominous music.

The snow of the last few days had wreaked havoc on the schedule, and we found out that we had been involuntarily bumped from the flight, even though we had confirmed seats.  And not just us...there were a dozen travelers that Avianca (TACA) had bumped from flights in their desperation to get people that had been stuck in JFK for 24 hours or more.  So, I had a limited amount of sympathy, but...

Cue hopeful music.

...I discovered that our ticket tariff meant that they had to pay a pretty stiff penalty...in cash...for bumping us.  And since making lemonade out of lemons is a generally good policy for life (particularly when you can be flexible), it turned out not to be so bad - I took the kids to Spa Castle for the day, and Jen went home to take a nap.  We got rebooked on the 3:55 AM flight to San Salvador, and they even gave us $60 worth of food vouchers so we could get a snack.  All in all, a big win!

So, we returned to the airport at 2:00 AM or so for try #2.  The flight took off on schedule, and we landed in San Salvador, zoomed through customs (let's hear it for not checking bags!) and stepped into the hot sun to find our ride to the hotel in the Department of La Libertad, on the Pacific coast, about 30 minutes from the airport.  There was a little mix-up with the contact from the hotel (not a surprise, I suppose, given our flight changes) but the tourist police are extremely helpful, and one of them let me borrow a cell phone to call the hotel and get hooked up with a minivan for the trip to the coast.

Usually I do a fair amount of research for my travels, but in this case, I didn't have time to do much of anything.  I figured we'd be spending most of our time on the beach in a relatively touristy area, but I didn't even know what the currency was!  It turns out they've adopted the greenback, so one less thing to worry about.

El Salvador is one of the more prosperous countries in Central America.  And by "prosperous", I really mean “not quite desperately poor".  4th on the list after Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize (really?) the average yearly wage is just under $4,000 a year.  On the drive from the airport, we saw all of the typical  trappings of households barely scraping by.  Lots of women washing laundry (and their kids) in the stream, and ramshackle huts held together with baling wire and random bits of wood scavenged from building sites, roofs that might be considered suggestive at best.

Most of the wealth in the country tends to be heavily skewed to the cities and the tourist areas, leaving the 42% that struggle in rural areas mostly on their own when it comes to infrastructure and education.  I tend to associate poverty with garbage - I don't know why, exactly, but the sides of the road are just strewn with refuse - plastic, papers, old tires, whatever didn't make it to the dump, I guess.  It's kinda sad.  El Salvador isn't really known like it’s neighbors for cultural or natural beauty, and part of the reason might be the abuse the countryside seems to take.

When I told people we were going to El Salvador, most of them asked me if I was worried that it was really dangerous - the "murder capital of the world", not too far in the distant past.  The government has made big strides in making it a lot safer here - a 40% drop in crime, and the murder title has been passed to Honduras and Guatemala, where the gang violence still makes life rather cheap.  In short - be careful and stay aware, but as long as you’re not active in a drug cartel, you’re going to be left alone.

We're staying in a tiny little tourist area, in a pretty nice hotel called Casa de Mar on the north end of the Playa El Sunzal beach.  El Salvador is pretty unusual in that it has black-sand beaches.  The rocks grind down to make a grey-black sand that's soft and firm.  And the surfing...this is supposed to be one of the "top 10" areas to surf in the world.  I don't know enough about surfing, but in watching the waves the first two days, I saw a lot of people getting great rides, more than I've seen in many other places, and right out from our hotel on the point!

There's not a whole lot to do here OTHER than surf, that's for sure.  Beach and pool...roast in the sun...the stroll to "town" is about 10 minutes on the beach, and it's a very typical little beach hamlet that you might envision in a Central American country.  There's about five or six nice hotels on the beach, a couple of private clubs with their pavilions facing the water, and then one main road heading inland with the typical mix of tiny grocers, a handful of bars and restaurants, some swimwear and surf schools, and...that's about it.  Everything looks somewhat beat up, but people seem pretty happy.

Who comes to this place?  Well...mostly surfers.  Almost exclusively surfers.  There's a bunch of hostels and rooms for rent - everything from $5/night (no hot water and a shared room) up through nicer places with kitchens and private balconies before you get to the luxury hotels at an astronomical $150/night.  A surprising number of women surfers also...at times, the mix seems almost even which isn't something I've typically seen at other beaches.  And people come from all over.  Americans seem to be in the minority, which is nice, and I'm practicing lots of Spanish (which was part of the whole point of going here!)

The food is quite tasty.  El Salvador has a plato typico - flat grilled chicken, with beans and rice.  Also, something called pupusa, which is a super-thick corn tortilla, usually fried and served with the meal - or sometimes stuffed with cheese and a meal all by itself.  The Pilsener and Suprema beers are pretty good too...more body and taste than the rather bland Imperial of Cost Rica, for example.

After spending a few days bumming around on the beach, swimming in the gigantic waves, getting in some outstanding body surfing, eating too much food, and generally behaving as one normally does on vacation, we took a hike to some caves that a tourist we met at the hotel told us about.

I hadn't read about them anywhere when I was browsing on the tubes the first day, reading about the area…but they are quite impressive!  It's an easy 20 minute stroll south.  You have to go at low tide, because the ocean washes into the caverns - they are filled with bats and sand and are gigantic.  We had them mostly to ourselves, and explored all of them, wandering back and forth and thinking what it would be like to stay in a cave while the ocean came in.  I suppose you could get trapped in one, eventually smashed against the walls of the cave by waves (if the tide is high enough).  Or, maybe you could just pack a picnic basket, find a shelf to hang out in, and spend six or seven hours enjoying the surf in the darkness before the tide went out enough to walk back to your hotel…

We did see a fair number of strangely abandoned resorts (or ex-resorts).  One of them appeared to be under a little bit of reconstruction, and it had a pool down on the waterline, filled with salt water and murk, that must have been pretty nifty in the day - even if now it's rusty and mouldering.  Imagine, strolling down from your cabana, out to the pool, ocean waves crashing up against the edge:

We did the full walk down the beach, past El Sunzal, the morning we left.  The next couple of beaches over were a lot more local - no tourists or surfing.  Really long, shallow, sand, and almost bathtub warm water.  I grabbed a shaved ice on our six-mile round trip, made in the traditional way, hand shaved, with fruit-flavored syrups and some sweetened, condensed milk.  Delicious, although you go into diabetic shock if you eat it too quickly.  And SO HOT…absolutely brutal in the sun, but a quick dip in the ocean cures almost all ills.

The trip back home was pretty uneventful…if a shocking switch from picture-perfect beach weather to ugly winter snow!

Back to the grind.

D.

[nonglib]

Chicks and Keets

And glorious sunrises.

Life on the farm is starting to settle down, a little bit. At least, we're getting used to the rhythm.  Jessica continues to do all of the heavy lifting on the garden, the chicks, the tractor, etc.  I'm mostly trying to get everything else organized, point us in the right direction, and (the critical factor) raising money for this entire operation!

The chicks are approaching two weeks old, now.  The kids put together a couple of perches for them to start testing out:

And they worked just fine.  They are starting to fly - enough such that I'm think I need to get a screen built for the door pretty soon, and Phil really needs to get started on their coop!  Pretty soon, they'll be escaping their netting and going nuts in the brooder house.

Here's a picture of their setup:

You can see their feathers really starting to appear.  We've lifted the brooder up a good three inches now, so they have room to run around.  And run around they do...so far, no signs of picking or any other woes.  Even better, we have a 100% success rate!  One chick arrived DOA, but otherwise we haven't lost one.  That's great news, and we are hopeful that our luck will continue to hold.

Today, we also got our first (and probably only) batch of guinea hens:

They areso cute- even cuter than the kittens and chicks, I must say.  They are a little smaller (about two-thirds the size of the chicks).  I put my camera down so I could get a nice picture.  One of them managed to fall asleep with his head in the food tray (haha).  We had to get a special waterer, as you don't want them to get chilled when they fall into the water.  Which they inevitably do.

Guinea hens are valued for their role as guards (they are very noisy when invaders come into the farm), and help reduce predator impact on chickens.  They also are excellent at eating all sorts of bugs, and will not destroy a garden through their scratching.  As a matter of fact, many guinea hen keepers like to keep their guineas running through the garden regularly to eat the many pests that like to hang out.

Unlike chickens, they should be trained to come when you call them, sit on your shoulder, and otherwise be generally very sociable with humans.  We'll see how it goes...I got a variety pack of 30, and they may not all like the winter weather so much!

That's all for today.  Farmer Dave signing off.

[nonglib]

Farmer Dave and Jessica

Since I'm done traveling, at least for the foreseeable future, I need to come up with a new name for this blog.  I think I'm going to have to rename it "adventures in farming".  Or maybe "adventures in the world of food".  The slow-motion launch of The Food Cycle is starting to pick up steam...having just closed on Wednesday (yesterday), we're finally moving ahead with very first phase of the project while Phil and the rest of the team scour Brooklyn for the perfect location to place our brewing and distilling facilities.

It was an amicable closing.  We get along well with the former owners.  A cooler of beer, champagne, and wine was present for the signing of the papers.  I'm told that's relatively unusual.  I guess I'm pretty sociable, and we have a lot to learn about the buildings and the land from Chad and Jean, who've spent the last 25 years of their life putting the place together.

I'll be talking a lot more about the pieces of the project, but the first thing that Jessica did (with a bit of help from me) to plant some test tomatoes from Bump Nursery, located up near Nyack, New York, and planting them.  Ken, the owner, has been a long-time organic farmer who grows tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and a myriad of other vegetables from seed for his many happy customers.

His selection of seedlings is outstanding.  Abraham Lincolns, Sweet Millions, Black Prince, Radiator Charlie - the names are varied and amusing.  He has over twenty varieties of heirlooms, and a couple of interesting hybrids.  Not to mention a couple of pretty nifty innovations to do growing with small greenhouses that require minimal heating so he can have plants ready to go when the soil is finally ready.  We're going to shamelessly imitate his better ideas as we go along, and hopefully refine them.

As we're new to farming, and the farm itself hasn't done any sort of high-density growing for many years, we don't know what to expect from the soil.  We ended up taking 72 plants - 18 different varieties, four plants each.  We may try to propagate some seeds (if the plants support that) and eventually move some cuttings into the first greenhouse.  We'll see how it goes - lots to learn.  Here we've got two different types of support - the traditional fence, and the traditional cages:

Based on what works best, we'll figure on doing more of that next year as we develop the list of crops to grow.

In the meantime...get ready for an awesome selection of tomatoes in about three months.  These plants could produce upwards of 500 pounds of tomatoes, depending on the weather and yield!

Next...putting together a test aquaponics setup.  And sending out the business plan.

D.

[nonglib]

Not Constantinople

Nope.  It's called Istanbul now.  And, in the same way the monolith was full of stars...it's full of cats.  Seriously - it puts Rome to shame!

I've wanted to go visit Turkey for a long time.  Istanbul is one of the great capitals of the world, the bridge between East and West, a (somewhat) secular island in a Islamic world.  After Egypt, I wasn't sure exactly what it was going to be like.  Were we going to be surrounded by burqas?  Mosques?  Religious crazies?

As it turns out...no, yes, and no.  Istanbul is a modern, cosmopolitan city that was a pleasure to arrive at.  If anything, it felt as European as Spain or France.  The airport is modern, clean, and seemed to be well run.  We zoomed through customs, and our driver was waiting right there to zip us through to the apartment I'd found on the edge of the Sultanhamet district (in the old city).  We had a beautiful, sunny day...and everyone was out enjoying the weather:

Well...maybe not all the way out (this has to win the award for "best child care facility ever)...and yes, there were a few head scarfs, but for the most part, strolling around the hills of the neighborhood was fun, filled with restaurants (with slightly annoying touts), shops, and sights of all different types.

The next morning, we decided to get up and try out the metro, not quite knowing how "big" the city actually was.  As we discovered, the main part of the old city isn't actually all that big - you can walk across it in about 25-30 minutes, and over the Golden Horn via the Galata bridge, up to the Galata tower, in another 15.  But the metro was also cheap, quick, and clean.  We popped over to the Dolmabahçe palace, which was listed as a "crowd favorite", if not a true historical relic.  Alas...not so many pictures were allowed inside, but here's the "side gate":

Yes...it's opulent.  Beyond opulent, it's insane.  The whole thing was built as a single project over 13 years, commissioned by Sultan Abdülmecit in 1843, because he'd gotten somewhat bored with the previous palace (more on that below).  It cost about 35 tons of gold, or something on the order of $1B in today's money.  They put that to good use, making 285 rooms, 46 halls, 6 Turkish baths, and 68 toilets.  Over 45,000 square meters, covered with 14 tons of gold leaf, Baccarat crystal staircases, mahogany floors, marble stairs...it was crazy gorgeous.  The main meeting room of the Sultan (no women allowed) was a ballroom that you could fit a cathedral into, with the largest chandelier in the world. 

Alas, it got under a hundred years of "palace" use - Ataturk stayed there when he was in Istanbul, and that's where he died in 1938.  We got to see his room on the tour, where the clock was set to 9:05 (time of his death).  He's a revered as a hero in Turkey for many reasons, most of all for building Turkey back up from a basket case after being crushed in World War I, modernizing the country, and looking towards Europe as opposed to the Middle East.

I didn't know it, but Turkish used to be written with Arabic writing until it was Romanisized as part of the process.  As a result, it's pretty easy to read and pronounce Turkish, a boon for foreign visitors.  Lots of people speak English as well, although visitors tend to be from Europe much more often than the United States.  We were generally mistaken for Australian...which was an honor.

The next day I was picking up my friend Davida, who was going to hang out with us!  After she arrived at the airport and got settled, we did some more exploring.

One of the coolest and most unusual things we saw was the Basilica Cistern, or Yerebatan Sarayı (note the cool "ı" without a dot, pronounced as "uh", I think), which is an enormous water chamber that was built in 532 by Emperor Constantinople himself.  Well...OK, he didn't build it himself, 7,000 slaves did, but you know what I mean.

The amazing part is that it's just sitting there under a big chunk of the city.  It's not filled with water anymore, or used as a cistern at all.  But there are hundreds of these cisterns underground in the city, and ancient wells used to be there that people could drop buckets down to bring up water.  The water itself came into the city via grand aqueducts, given Constantinople clean, fresh, and plentiful water.

In any case - the cistern has hundreds of stone columns still standing, most of which are unadorned, but two of them have Medusa heads, which most scholars think were "reused" from older Roman ruins.  Even stranger...one is sideways and the other is upside-down:

Go figure.

The cistern itself is dimly lit, and somewhat spooky to walk around in.  To add to the atmosphere, there was some sort of art installation of a sea monster.  The monster itself was incredibly lame, but the sounds they piped in for it were cool.  Well worth a stroll:

One of the other cool things we walk through were two of the major markets.  One was the Spice Market, and the other was the Grand Bazaar.  Ileana got a cool leather jacked at the Grand Bizarre:

No wait...she didn't get that one, she got the black one.  The Grand Bazaar was the first indoor malls...built in 1460, something like 300,000 people visit it each day.  3,000 or so stores and 61 narrow streets.  It's crazy, at times, but shopkeepers don't harass you as much as in other countries (ahem, Egypt) so the experience is a lot more enjoyable.

The Spice Market was a lot more crowded - but also had tons of cool shops:

I don't quite understand how one is supposed to pick between the 200 different shops within a stone's throw that all sell the same things.  When we wanted to buy Ileana's jacket, we pretty much just walked into one store that had a cool jacket hanging up.  Was it better or worse than any other?

I have no idea.

Other markets abound, too - there's at least two grand fish markets:

They have sump pumps that pull water from the Bosphorous or the Golden Horn and run it over the fish continuously to keep them cold and fresh.  Istanbul is a huge seafood capital, given the strategic location between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.  YUMMY.  We had an incredibly tasty, fresh, and cheap fish sandwich from a street vendor right on the water.

Did I mention the cats?

As for monuments...wow.  So many, one doesn't even know where to start.  Churches, converted to mosques.  Mosques, converted to museums.  Palaces.  History, everywhere.  Jen and the kids were starting to whine a bit about all the damn antiquity they were being forced to see.

The Hagia Sophia falls into the first category - an amazing Byzantium church, built around 532 (with perhaps some reconstruction at various times), that was converted to a mosque in 1437.  It's got a miracle glory hole, known as the "crying column":

If you stick your finger in, and it comes out wet, your wish will be granted.  Ew.

Some pretty hilarious characters did interior decoration (there are a ton of beautiful mosaics that were covered up when it was converted to a mosque, and uncovered when it made the transition to a museum).  Here's the modern "picture with a rock star" poster, of Empress Zoe (11th century), with her latest husband and her buddy Christ.  Rumor has it she scraped off her husband three times when she remarried - the last one only survives because she died first.

A more traditional museum we hit was the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam.  It sounds a little dry (and it was, in places), but it had a pretty cool accounting of all the math and science that the Ottoman empire was responsible for preserving.  It turns out that while the Europeans were pontificating to the pope, dying of the plague, and otherwise destroying everything that the Greeks had discovered, the Turks were in an intellectual renaissance of discovery and preservation.

Of course, it didn't take, the tables were ultimately turned, but still - we owe a debt to that civilization that a lot of this was preserved, rather than destroyed.  The link between Istanbul and Venice (where the Renaissance we all learned about in school started) is clear.

Here's a nifty distillation system for rose water - steam was pumped in the middle, and roses were in all of the flask.  The rose oils distilled out and condensed in each one to be collected and combined:

Did I mention the cats?

Istanbul has a gorgeous skyline - this picture's from the Topkapı Palace grounds.  That's the original palace that was built in the mid 1400s, until it was abandoned for their fancy new digs.  In the distance, you can see the Galata Tower, and lots of thin minarets for the muezzin to announce the call to prayer.

Of course, no trip would be complete without trying out a narghile - I had wanted to try one out in Cairo, but never got around to it.  For the record, it was awesome:

The tobacco is seasoned and mild, the charcoal used to heat it is apple wood, and the water has a touch of anise, and maybe something else.  It was relaxing and divine.  And terrible for you - kids, don't start.  But once a year...hmm....

Did I mention the cats?

We were just about antiquitied out, but we soldered on to hit the Kariye Müzesi, another church-turned-mosque, with some of the greatest mosaics of the era:

In many of them, the work was so detailed that you couldn't even make out individual tiles.  Truly a masterpiece, and one well worth seeing.  It was quite a bit off the beaten path, too - we took a ferry that zig-zagged across the Golden Horn, and then walked for about half an hour to see it.

On the way back, we stopped by the old city wall, too - still standing, and providing a gorgeous view of Istanbul:

Of course, we hit some of the more modern events, too.  Dyson wanted to check out the "Dolphinarium", where you could swim with the fishes (in the mammalian sense).  We weren't quite sure what to expect, but we hailed a cab and headed out.  It turns out to be super-cool - a relatively new facility where you could watch animal shows.  And, unlike that US, where all these pesky lawyers scare institutions into keeping people well away from anything more dangerous than a hangnail, we got to get up and personal with the animals:

That beluga whale did this trick about 40 times for anyone that wanted a picture; $5 for the photo (AWESOME).

The walrus trainer danced the tango with his partner:

And also taught her how to cop a quick feel:

Davida reports that walruses smell very fishy.  Unfortunately, the dolphin swimming was already booked, but Dyson seemed pretty pleased with what he did get to see.

I think this photo really catches the juxtaposition of culture that is Istanbul - mosque on one side, dolphinarium on the other:

We had a full day, though - after the Dolphinarium we went to Miniatürk, one of the more bizarre places I've been.  Inside the park were careful reconstructions of just about every building and monument of importance in Turkey - all done to the same scale:

You didn't have to travel anywhere - you could see the famed Blue Mosque, walk across the Bophorous Bridge, view the Ataturk Airport...pretty much everything:

You could even work out your inner Godzilla:

I'm glad we went, because we got to get a feel of the sites that we missed on the trip - Pamukkale in particular.  In any case, it's pretty cool, and well worth a visit.

We had time for one more diversion:

The lawyers were missing for this, too...no speed governors on the go-carts!!!  We were zipping around that track, scary fast.  There were several pretty exciting smashups, including one where a guy smashed his car into the barrier after missing a turn (bloodying his nose), and then Dyson couldn't stop in time and slammed into him.  Well worth the $15 for our six minutes on the track.

We did manage to make it out of Istanbul once, to a quiet non-touristy town of Yalova, on the Asian side.  There's not much there except for some natural hotsprings, in the nearby hamlet of Termal.  There's five historical bathhouses, including this one, the Kurşunlu Fin Bath:

That's a lead-covered roof, and the bath itself was built sometime after 300 AD.  Fortunately, it's gotten some renovations since then.  The whole place was pretty neat because it's completely off the tourist radar.  The town wasn't even listed in Let's Go Turkey, and it's clear that they didn't get a lot of foreigners there.  That clearly helped keep things cheap, and it was really authentic.

The water inside was hot - the water comes out at 65°C, and I don't think they cooled it down very much!  But like any other Turkish bath, there were bunches of marble basins to wash yourself.  Unlike most other Turkish baths, this one was mixed, so we could all hang out together.  I really enjoyed the temperatures, but everyone else had varying degrees of difficulty adapting to it.  There were fountains inside where you could drink the water, which is known for it's healing properties.  Frankly, it just gave me mild intestinal distress.

After the baths, we strolled around the grounds.  There was a stream that ran warm from the water, and you could give yourself a somewhat stinky facial:

We did two of the tourist baths in Istanbul, also.  Davida and I did the somewhat typical (but gorgeous) Çemberlitaş Hamam, located right by the apartment.  They were pushy for tips, but the scrub was good.  You can see some pictures here, but I wasn't allowed to take any (for obvious reasons).

Even better was the mixed hamam, located near the Süleymaniye mosque.  Davida, Ileana, and I went - it's a bit odd to be exfoliated, washed, and massaged by a strange man, but the experience is blissful and you come out feeling remarkably clean, refreshed, and relaxed.  The dead skin comes off in sheets.  Very touristy (in the sense that locals don't go there) but I don't care - it was wonderful.  And beautiful, of course...Sultan Süleymaniye himself had it built in 1557 and was a regular visitor (there's a plaque identifying where he got his washing).  It's impressive to think that this hamam has been in continuous operation for 450 years.

Did I mention the cats?

We had a nice time...now, on to the last bits of our European tour!  BARCELONA!

D.

[nonglib]

Franschhoek

Just a little post about our last few days in Cape Town...before I talk about our week in Italy!

My previous posts have all been about these over-the-top experiences and places.  The wine country of Cape Town doesn't deserve the same superlatives.  It gets an entirely different set of more subtle, sublime adjectives.

We drove up, heading up through Stellenbosch, where we saw our friend Sandra the week before, and then along a set of smaller roads through to the little village.  It's nestled in a little valley with the mountains in the backdrop.  Before getting any wine, though, we decided to check out a little national park with some trails, Mont Rochelle.  We stopped in town to pay our $5 for the permit, and drove up to the top of the pass and set off on a pretty little two-hour stroll along the shorter loop trail:

The "vista" loop, as it was named, has glorious views towards the reservoir on one side, and the wine valley on the other:

The land still looks pretty similar to the area closer the coast - no trees at all (except for some scrubby ones in a few of the valleys).  Known as fynbos, it refers to this low scrub bush, which is an incredibly diverse ecosystem entirely limited to this little cape area.  Over 9,000 species have been identified, over two-thirds of which only live in this region.  To give you a comparison, the Netherlands, which is almost as large, hosts only a measly 1,200 species, none of which are endemic to the area.  Table Mountain alone has over 2,000 plants and animals on its slopes.

We saw some of the fauna, as well - including a couple of these cool lizards:

After our hike, lots of biltong (which is a South African beef jerky that we ate entirely too much of), we started our tour.  We managed to make it through only two wineries before I was feeling too wobbly to continue further (Jen never mastered the "drive on the wrong side with a standard transmission" technique, alas).

The kids got to amuse themselves with a Jenga-clone, and strolling through the vineyards to play with the dogs and look at the grapes:

The wines were all pretty good, but the second vineyard, Mont Rochelle Vineyards, was outstanding.  Given that almost none of them were over $8, with many under $4, the price to quality ratio was excellent.  I don't think I tasted a bad wine in the bunch...I would have bought a case of one of them and shipped them home if the shipping wasn't going to be three times the cost of the wine.  Can't complain about the view from the tasting room/restaurant either....

Meanwhile, back at the beaches on Sunday...we went back to Clifton 4th Beach for Ultimate, only to find that they were evicted by a lifeguard contest and had to stroll over about 200 meters to Clifton 2nd Beach. But what a day they picked! This picture probably doesn't show it, but the combination of the tide and a storm somewhere, they had three-meter surf, crashing more or less directly on shore:

This beach ended up getting almost washed away by the big waves - this beach is about 25% of what it was when we got there four hours earlier:

The kids took advantage of the neat wave effects to fight it out on the sandbar:

It was a lot of fun - although if you fell in the water, it was pretty much instant hypothermia, with the bitterly cold southern currents putting the water temperature at about 50 degrees...not something you want to spend a lot of time swimming in.  Even if you are a crazy lifeguard trying to pilot your ocean kayak onto the beach through said waves.

The last beach was stopped at was the St. James Tidal Pool, on the False Bay side, which was much warmer - more like 70 degrees, so you could actually swim in it.  They've constructed a little tide pool right next to the beach that you can swim in and enjoy a little bit of shelter from the waves:

That's me and Dyson walking on the walls, which you can dive off of into the tide pool (don't dive the other way, onto the rocks and coral).  Eventually we had to stop, though, because the waves that were topping the wall were finally strong enough to knock you off in an uncontrolled fashion.  The beach was only about two meters wide, though, so as the tide came in we finally had to abandon the sand and head back

Cape Town gave us a lovely good-bye, rolling out the famed "tablecloth", the clouds which fountain over the top of the mountain and keep it covered much of the year:

I look forward to another visit sometime....

David.

[nonglib]

you guys should go to the poles for the equinox

Haha.  We should, but it's a little inconvenient from where we are now (much closer to the equator in Istanbul).

[nonglib]

Roma

I've been fairly quiet on the posting front, for the last week. Being stuck in Cape Town was nice enough (if you have to be stuck, it's a fabulous place for it), but after a while, you start to get a little nervous about getting your passports returned to you. Fortunately, that all turned out well, although the non-trip to India was the most expensive and inconvenient non-trip I've ever taken. I am trying not to let the actions (or lack thereof) from the consulate in Johannesburg color my perspective of the entire country; I'll try to visit in a few years.

In any case...where was I? Ah yes - Rome!

There are few places where I have felt as instantly comfortable as I have here. On this trip, the only place I can think of that comes close is Lima, followed by Cape Town. So far, Rome fits me like a glove. I've only been here a day and a half, and we'll see if that feeling persists, but thus far I have enjoyed every minute of being here.

This morning, I got up early and strolled around a bit...Rome is not a city that rouses itself before 9:00, as far as I can see. The center is quiet...not very many cars on the labrynth of streets and paths that wend their way through the area. The air has a bit of chill, as the sun hasn't risen high enough to reach the streets. Just a series of impressions, as I walk from Piazza Campo de' Fiori to Piazza Navona.

A lone cafe worker, shop doors open wide, mopping and putting tables into the street to get ready for the day's custom;

Three workman replacing the cobblestones which were carefully saved while repairing an underground pipe;

The vendors in the piazza, laying out the fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, cheese, and spices out on tables;

A woman strolling to the office, trendy coat and bag, enjoying a morning cigarette and the peace and quiet of her commute.

I placed Ultimate yesterday, with my fellow player Alice (on a three-month internship here in Rome), and we ran into another New Yorker who plays in Brooklyn - the small world of disc players is grand. We all went out for wine afterwards, and Simone, one of the regulars there, forwarded me a list of "must sees" for those interested in stepping a bit off the tourist track. Plus, directions for the game on Tuesday night.

We have four more days here to enjoy the city before hopping on the train to Venice. I'll do another travelogue after I've been able to see some sights - including more underground notes.

D.

[nonglib]

Cape Town

Ah...South Africa.  Depending on your age, when somebody mentions the name, you might think of apartheid and racial discrimination.  Or, you might think of Nelson Mandela and the triumphant rise of human forgiveness.  Either way, it's far, far, away from everywhere, so when I realized that it was only a short three-hour trip from Tanzania, I decided that we should take a detour and check out Cape Town.

This has turned out to be a wise decision.  Cape Town is a beautiful, cosmopolitan city - blessed with gorgeous scenery and California weather.  And no Californians...it's blissful.  One can hardly believe that this city is in Africa, but it is...a delightful combination of Dutch, English, and African cultures, all mixed together on the cape peninsula on the southern tip of South Africa.

I found us a little apartment to rent in the Waterfront area, which is in Greenpoint (yes - there's a Greenpoint here, and it's has certain similarities to the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, including an outstanding coffee roaster called Truth Coffee).  The main landmark of Cape Town rises over 1,000m in the background of the area:

That's Table Mountain, and we'll be climbing it on Tuesday or Wednesday.  The clouds that sometimes come over the top are affectionately referred to "The Tablecloth".  Haha.  Actually, we've had very few clouds here; the weather really does feel like San Francisco in the summer...sunny, but with a nice cool air.

The Waterfront is a big revitalization project, to take what are currently working docks and integrate in culture, restaurants, and shopping.  It's pretty neat - you can walk around the area and see things like a ship in dry dock:

...while you're sipping wine and eating some tasty food.  The shopping center is a cool mix of stores, many of which I've never heard of (and no GAP!!!)  There's also a really nice aquarium with the biggest eel I've ever seen:

and a really neat "Nemo" tank that you can sit inside of:

On Thursday, we decided to take a trek out to the southern tip of the cape...the famous Cape of Good Hope, where the oceans meet.  More on that in a moment.  On the way there, we stopped at Boulders Beach, which is known for a colony of African Penguins that have set up shop.  We weren't exactly sure how to find them...but as it turned out:

The penguins first showed up in 1982...a single mated pair arrived.  Although they didn't successfully raise any chicks, that started the onslaught, and within a few years, there were hundreds.  The changes in fishing and water temperatures has had the penguins moving around, looking for good places to raise their young, and the no-take fishing area (allowing the recovery of anchovy and other fish) made the beach a great area for the penguins to nest.

This was a bit hard on the many people living there.  Fortunately, a public/private partnership formed, which eventually turned into a national park, and I think everyone is pretty happy.  There's a couple of viewing platforms, and you can just go on the beach itself and hang out with the penguins!

On the way down, before we got to the penguins, we ran into this guy:

I'm not sure what exactly it is - maybe a Nick Park impression of a chipmunk, but whatever it is, I get the feeling it could strip the flesh off a horse in under thirty seconds.  We gave it a wide berth.

Boulders Beach...appropriately named...is quite gorgeous:

You can clamber around the boulders, climb, and swim in the frigid water.  It's a great place, but you have to be careful of the penguins.  You don't want to surprise them.  They give a pretty nasty bite.  If you get to close, they start to tilt their head back and forth.  This guy was guarding the path we needed to walk along:

I did not get to tape a killer penguin attack.  They are lying everywhere now, and there's around 2,000 breeding pairs in the area.  The mother lays two eggs each season - the first one usually gets all of the food, though, so 90% of the time the second chick dies of starvation before the first one is kicked out.  If the second one survives long enough, he gets his chance to bulk up too.  The penguins are monogamous over a number of seasons, and generally go back to the same nesting area.  They're pretty cute - here's one resting on an egg.  I think this one is in a bad place, though...too low on the beach:

After the penguins and lunch, we headed south to the famous Cape Point and Cape of Good Hope.  Here's the Cape of Good Hope:

Somehow, I thought it would be bigger - you see the label on the maps in school, and you imagine this giant promontory, out in the ocean, with treacherous shoals, huge waves, and giant squid.

Alas, it's a little bitty rock sticking out in the ocean.  It is pretty treacherous, though - you can take a walk around the point, and there's over twenty-two known wrecks just in this area.  Even more annoying, it's not even the real meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans - that's 150km to the east, at Cape Agulhas.  But the different temperatures and currents of the two oceans cause all of the wild water that does make it so dangerous.

We did a decent amount of hiking in the national park - including a hike down to Dias Beach.  This wonderful white-sand beach has incredibly rough surf and frigid water.  We had it all to ourselves after hiking down:

On the way back, we were sitting on the cliffs at the bottom of the cape, and I saw an outtake from a Steven King horror movie:

Yes...those are bugs.  They were flowing like a wave over the rocks, escaping the tide.  Talk about getting the willies - it was wild!  Some of the rocks were completely covered with them, literally millions of roly-polies (or pillbugs?)  Whatever they were, it was pretty freaky.

On the drive around the national park, we'd seen a number of signs about the baboons that live there.  They are fairly unique, as baboons go - they're the only primates (other than man) who regularly eat seafood.  The signs warn you to keep your windows rolled up and not to feed them.

As we were driving out, we came up on a few cars that were stopped, and we saw two people on the side of the road - along with a family of baboons.  We couldn't figure out why the people had gotten out of their car; it seemed dangerous.  But once we got a bit closer, we could see what was going on:

There were two baboons in their car!  One of them was leaning on the horn.  Dyson took this picture (windows ROLLED UP) as we drove by.  I hope the baboons got bored and left at some point.  I have no idea how they hopped in, but I'm guessing that the couple pulled over with the windows open to take a picture, and one of them hopped up on the window looking for food.  I would imagine that scared them enough to jump out of the car...and the rest is history, as they say.

The end of the drive took us up the Atlantic coast (we drove in on the False Bay side), and through Chapman Peak drive, a nifty, narrow road carved into the side of the mountain:

It's a toll road, but well worth the $4 we paid for the trip.  It's a truly beautiful trek around, and I think we'll head back over to a few of the towns (particularly Hoet Bay) and do some exploration and eating of seafood.

Yesterday, we took a trip up to the wine country - I met a friend at Ultimate on Monday night, and she told us she'd show us around Stellenbosch, which is one of the largest wine areas of South Africa.  But first - we stopped at the West Cape Ostrich Farm:

It was only about 45 minutes, but we got a tour, an introduction to the birds, and then we got to feed them and even hold the chicks!  Dyson's supporting one that's only a week old.  They look like little hedgehogs from the top, but after about two years, they reach maturity.

At the end of the tour, you get to "ride" an ostrich:

OK...you get to sit on one.  The ASPCA took exception to the riding policy, so now they put the ostrich in a little dock and you can sit on top of it and pose.  They are large birds...and warm, with soft feathers and a nice personality.  While feeding them, they nip at your fingers, but not hard enough to do any damage.

Fun fact number one - their eyes are more than three times the size of their brains.  Fun fact number two - if you are being attacked by an angry ostrich, just lie down flat with your head down.  When they defend themselves, they kick up and out, and that's dangerous because they are very strong.  But if you are on the ground, all they can do is jump on you, and they just don't weigh enough to do any real damage.

After grabbing lunch at a really nice market, and a substantial amount of "tasting" at a local vineyard with our host, Sandra, and her friends:

we headed over to the Spier winery, which also has a little wild animal preserve.  It turns out that some of the animals aren't so wild:

Yes, that's a cheetah.  After a safari, this was about the only way we could get closer to the animals.  Most of the animals have been raised from birth in captivity, so they are adjusted to that life and could never live in the wild.  The money raised is used to support conservation projects in South Africa.

The kids, of course, had a blast with all of this:

One more week here.  That's time to climb Table Mountain, see the Botanical Gardens, and maybe drive up to another wine area for tastings.  We'll see how energetic we are.  Today we visited Clifton Beach for Ultimate - only eight of us showed up, including the kids, but we played for a couple of hours, and even got filmed by an Indian TV station for a little segment on South Africa they were doing.

One more African blog, I think, then off to India!

D.

[nonglib]

How did it feel seeing a live pack of lions?

It was pretty amazing.  They don't care about you at all...we were only a couple of meters away in one case, and the lions were just lying there, doing their thing.  They are big.  Really big - one swipe of a paw would take your arm off.  Clearly, they are the top of the food chain and nobody messes with them.