Over and Out

Back to the ol USA. What a trip in more ways than one. The showers are so luxurious, my bed is so soft, and the grocery stores are massive. I really hope people appreciate everything they have here because we really do have more than many people could ever imagine. My experience abroad was more than life-changing, it was soul-changing. It changed the whole paradigm that I look at the world with. It changed the way I appreciate things and apprecaite people. It gave me new life goals and helped me learn so much about myself. The people of Thailand are the happiest group of people I have ever met. I will definitely try as hard as I can in the future to do everything I can for these people and give them back as much as they have given me.

Top 10 things I learned in Thailand:

1. Mormons can surprise you with their open-mindedness.

2. Toilets that you can sit on should be considered a luxury, not to mention ones that actually flush.

3. The ugliest fruits taste the best.

4. Beautiful music can be made with just a leaf and a drum.

5. High fives cross cultural barriers.

6. Newborn babies are purple and waxy.

7. There is nothing more gratifying than helping children.

8. Dogs with mange are just as loveable.

9. Amy's clothes double as great sweatrags after I've had a day out in the sun...but only when she's still wearing them.

10. It's never too late to find a passion.

"She woke me up daily, don't need no Starbucks"

So this is it people. I'm in Hong Kong right now waiting for my flight back. Let me get you up to speed. Our last night in Cambodia we went to a "club" (really just a restaurant) to see some traditional Cambodian dancing. It was awesome, they dressed like peacocks. My kind of dancing. The next day we left at 7 am on a bus for Bangkok. It was a long drive to the border (about 5 hours) and they would randomly stop off at places so we could eat but they were such random places that definitely had some sort of affiliation with the bus company. We went through passport control with no problems and then got into a minivan to drive the rest of the 6 hours to Bangkok. Ashley got put on a different van than Amy and I so we had to explain to the driver that we needed to get her. Luckily the van she was in got a flat tire so we had to pick them up anyway. The guy in the passenger seat of the van was from California and changed his shirt four times on the way. Back and forth..odd. He also would not stop bitching about the bus on the way over/the minivan. He told us literally about five times about how he should have just paid $25 to get a taxi. He was talking to someone on the phone telling them about how the trip was a "nightmare" and the company we were using was totally unreliable. A little melodramatic..who knew California people were so high maintenence (lolzzz). I watched Good Will Hunting in the van on the way over (and didn't even get carsick!) and afterward when I took out the headphones I could hear a guy's headphones playing so loud. I turned to Amy and said "Amy, you know what this is...Kid Cudi!" So we used his obnoxious loud music as a radio and sang and danced (seat dancing which is basically wiggling and flailing your arms right?) to Persuit of Happiness and Memories. We also looked right at him as we did it to see if he would maybe get a clue and turn it down...nope. Well we had a sweet night in Bangkok. It was nice to be back in Thailand where we can actually speak a bit of the language. We went to the night market in Bangkok and Ashley and I finally tried mango sticky rice which we've been meaning to have since we've been here. I'm definitely going to miss sticky rice. We spent the rest of the night watching random clips on youtube and organizing our stuff.

We got up at 4:30 am to leave for the airport at 5 (since Amy and Ashley both had flights at 8.) Not sure if I've mentioned this but Amy and I have a song. Yes, "our song" like married/old people (same thing right? mehehe...unless you're mormon I guess) have. It's "baby" by Justin Beiber. We've danced to it in so many places this summer. The empty dancefloor in Phi Phi, the beach at the full moon party, a couple of restaurants when it comes on the tv, and countless bus rides. We sort of have no shame about it now. So for a last hurrah we played it at the airport on my laptop to have one last dance sesh. We even got a few spectators who stopped to watch. Ashley and I walked Amy to passport control since her flight was first. The line was really long so we stood with her until we couldn't go any further and stopped to hug her. It was literally less than five seconds before people started pushing past us. One man said "do that somewhere else" as he walked past. So I told him "you're a bitter old man sir." I've definitely become more of an asshole this trip I guess. But he was old...and bitter. At least I didn't call him bald right? Well after saying bye to Ashley I chilled in the Bangkok airport for seven and a half hours. I had just enough baht left to buy a cup of noodles and some mentos (score!) and I mostly just read...and slept. Unfortunately my calculator broke so I couldn't do any physics. Well I got on the plane to Hong Kong only to discover that my headphones didn't work. It was a long, boring flight but I managed to pick some up at the Hong Kong airport just now. Yee. Oh you know those toursity promotional videos airplanes play when you touch down for landing? Well they were playing one about Hong Kong and showing how much fun tourists were having. They showed three different tourists all having a blast and doing their crazy tourist antics. There was a guy and his son from England, a cute, young Japanese couple and...a man from SAN JOSE, CA! Whaaaaaat??? I swear, life is seriously so weird. I know I keep saying it but stuff like that has been happening a lot recently. Anyway I don't have any new pictures so I'm just going to post pictures from the trip archives of random cute babies to spice up the blog. Enjoy.

Stay tuned for my deep, reflective post about how this whole experience changed my life. I might even show my soft side.

"She just had a baby...but it's already dead"

Wow. Alright so Siem Reap is great. The temples here are beautiful. They were built in the 12th century and I feel like I'm another world. Yesterday we went out all day looking at and exploring the temples. Our tuk-tuk driver is the coolest guy ever. His name is Bun and he brought us to see his friend because "she really wants to meet you because I tell her you are all very beautiful." So he brought us and the first thing he told us was that she had a baby and we all "awwwww-ed" and then he threw in there that it died. Very odd thing to say but I guess it's not weird here. There are little Cambodian kids that follow you around at the temples and try to sell you stuff. Well, I'm a sucker because I bought so much random crap. I can explain. One girl asked "where you from" and when I said America she started spitting out all these facts about America that many Americans probably don't even know. I asked her what the capital of California was and she said Sacramento so I had to buy some bracelets from her because she was so smart! The boy I bought from was teaching me how to play this little bamboo musical instrument and he was really nice so I bought a flute from him. At the last temple we went to there were no other people but these little Cambodian boys started playing with us and running around in the temples with us. Definitely my favorite temple of the day because they were so cute and fun. After exploring the temples all day Amy and I went to the night market and on the way back these little children were pulling on us. A skinny little boy was asking me to buy him milk and how can I say no to that? So I went into the grocery store and he led me to the baby formula aisle and I said "but this is for babies" and he said "yes for a baby." It was $10 so I was hesitant because that's probably the most expensive thing I've bought here but I don't want a baby to be hungry and what's $10 to me? A movie? So I bought him the formula and he was so happy and giggled! Then as we were walking out there were other people with babies asking for milk and I told them I couldn't buy anymore and this one 15-year old boy holding a baby started swearing at me and saying "Not for my fucking baby you fucking lady??!" I was so pissed but then I just realized...he's the one with the hungry baby, he has a right to be frustrated. Oh by the way I'm not sure if I talked about this already but everything is in US dollars here. You can only get dollars out of the atm but there's no coin-age. They give you Khmer reil instead of change. Same same. (ps "same same" means same in Thai, Vietnamese and Laos. Pretty easy to remember yeah?)

Well anyway today we woke up at 4 am and headed to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise. It was incredible. We've basically been exploring all day so I'll just post pictures because I can't even explain. Headed back to Bangkok tomorrow. Last stop before home. So weird.

"Do I really have to pee in that thing?"

We spent yesterday in Phnom Phenh, Cambodia. We got up at 7 am to head to the killing fields. In case you don't know, the killing fields are where the Khmer Rouge killed over 1.7 million people under the Pol Pot Regime. Horrible to say the least. There were still peices of clothing in the ground washing up from the rain even though it has been 30 years since the killings happened. There were mass graves of people, there was a tree that they hit babies against to kill them..absolutely nuts. Ammunition was precious back then so they had to kill people in other ways, usually hitting them with blunt objects like shovels, hoes, and sometimes bamboo sticks. There was a temple with the skulls stacked up in in probably 50 feet tall (but as my father says I'm bad at estimating.) The clothing coming up through the ground was the weirdest for me. Weirder than the bones and teeth. It makes the victims so much more human.

After that we went to the S-21 prison which is where the Khmer Rouge kept the prisoners before they were brought to the killing fields. It was three stories with the bottom story full of small cells made out of brick. If you held your arms out you could touch both sides. Many of them still had blood on the floor. The top two floors were where they kept the people chained up together all laying down in a row like sardines. One prisoner said he couldn't walk after that (one of the seven prisoners that actually survived.) Now they use the top two rooms as displays for their torture devices. I won't go into detail but it was horrible. They also had barbed wire around the outside of the building to prevent prisoners from jumping off and commiting suicide. I ended up buying a book from a guy with no legs outside about the Pol Pot regime (even though it was obviously a photocopied book but hey..hey had no legs, how could I resist?) Oh that reminds me. When we pulled up in front of the prison I got off the tuk-tuk and a Cambodian guy said to me "hello! wow you so dark you look like you're asian!" Then he asked me for a handshake but pulled me in and kissed both of my cheeks coming dangerously close to my mouth but he was so funny. Everyone is a lot friendlier here than anywhere I've been since Thailand.

After we headed back and had lunch we hit up the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. Asian architecture is definitely the coolest kind. It's so intricate and creative with how all of the pieces fit and flow together. We also visited the National Museum which told a bit of history of all of southeast asia. My favorite thing in that museum were the accounts from different people about their lives in SE Asia. There was a rice farmer, a fisherman, a weaver, etc. After this we caught a bus to Siem Reap and got in around 1 am last night. The bus had tiny munchkin bathrooms. You had to squat to get through the door and it was a tiny tiny room with a squatter toilet so it was difficult. Especially on a bumpy bus. I straped on my headlamp and braved it though. Ashley and I also played MASH on the way over there. For any males who aren't familiar with MASH it's a game you play when you're like eight that determines who you're going to marry, what job you'll have, where you'll live, etc. Then when we were done with that we played med-school MASH which determined your specialty, how many malpractice suits, how much debt you're in etc. THEN we played homeless person MASH and my life kind of turned out the best in that one (in med-school MASH I had a million dollars of debt). In homeless person MASH I made 1,000 dollars a day, the drug I was addicted to was ecstacy, and my imaginary friend was a cool lumberjack guy I could hike with named Rodney. Oh and my last shower was yesterday. Sounds good to me. But anyway here we are in Siem Reap. This is the part of the trip I've been waiting for. We're going to the Angkor Wat temples today. Google them and you'll see what I mean. The definition of epic.

"I hate having to worry about motos running me over when I'm on the sidewalk"

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. Ah Ho Chi Minh City..or Saigon if you will. This place is huge. Very huge. You can keep driving for half an hour and the buildings don't get any smaller and the amount of people never dwindles down. There are people everywhere, most with face masks on. You can't walk on the sidewalk without bumping into people and sometimes it's even hard to avoid the motos on the sidewalk. The telephone wires look like some sort of valance that would hang above the window in some artsy person's studio in New York. They're fat bundles drooping from the wooden posts and they look like they could pull it down. So yes, we pulled off our changed flight without a hitch and arrived in Saigon at 10:30 am. The first thing we did was go to the War Remnants Museum. It is a museum documenting the travesties of the "American War." There is no way I could have felt worse about the Vietnam War. Another picture of a blown up baby or one more quote from a US Army general talking about how we should blow them all up could not have even had an effect on me. It was awful. I felt like such an asshole in there. There was only a small section about the protests in the US, very very small, and other than that it was just pictures of people being tortured, towns that had been bombed, babies crying, etc. I'm glad we only had an hour and a half in there because man, that was rough to look at.

By the way, I should mention we've been telling everyone we're Canadian while we're here (I'm from Victoria) so that we don't get scammed by people. It's funny how different the responses are from people when you tell them you're from the US versus Canada.

After the museum we headed to the market to meet up with the people from the cooking class we signed up for. We walked through the market with them and they explained what the fruits and vegetables and grains were and how you could use them whilst cooking. Then we drove to the Saigon Culinary Arts Center and learned about the traditional Vietnamese cookingware and how they store their food. They use a lot of clay pots and woven mats. We cooked a three course meal starting with 1) salad rolls (like spring rolls but not fried and rolled in rice paper) and the sauce to dip them in 2) tomato and egg soup (probably my favorite thing on the menu, it's a traditional dish that they can eat in times of low crop yeilds) 3) rice and carmalized pork. It was so good. I'm definitely making all this stuff when I get home. I also learned how to make roses out of tomatoes. An important life skill if there ever was one. When we were finished they gave us a quiz and when we answered the questions correctly we got our culinary institute diploma. We rocked that meal. I'm fit for the domestic life now.

Once we got back to the hostel we headed right back out for the night market (which they seem to have in every town/city we've been to). We had to escape death a few times along the way and it ended up being kind of lame compared to the other ones we've been to. It has been really cool to see Vietnam up close and personal. I always just thought of it as a place we fought a war in but it's so much more. It's full of cute old people and places to eat that only have one thing on the menu and busy streets with neon signs. I can't say it's a place I would ever want to live but I'm really glad I saw it. However, tomorrow is another day, another country. Bring it on Cambodia.

"Your flight has been changed back to 8:30 pm"

So..hmm..life has thrown another crazy curveball at us. We're currently in Danang instead of Ho Chi Minh City where we should be because the airport told us our flight was delayed until midnight (rather than at 8:30 pm) and then at around 8:30pm when we got back to our hostel Amy saw she had another email that basically said "just kidding." So we went to the airport anyway to see if there was another flight and the place was basically closed down. We managed to find a guy from Vietnam Airlines and he called the Jetstar manager for us. I talked to the Jetstar guy on the phone and explained the situation and he's letting us go on the flight to Ho Chi Minh city tomorrow morning at 8:30. Anyway the Vietnam Airlines guy was like "oh yeah by the way I'm the owner of a hotel" so he brought us to some random hotel..no wait his taxi driver did. The owner made us use his taxi driver rather than the one we already had and we agreed on the price of 70,000 dong total. When we got there though the meter said 31,000 so I said "no we're only paying 31,000" and this guy got furious. He said there was an "airport tax" and man, I had to yell at him and he ended up dropping the 1,000 d bill on the ground and walking away. Bleh. So now that I've explained the current situation I'll explain our day in Hoi An. We got up and went to a dress fitting for Amy since she got a dress made for her and all and after that we decided since we're in Vietnam we had to get pedicures. So we did and the girls there were really funny. One of them is an english teacher. We explored the town a bit more and basically had fittings to go to for various people every other hour. I got a really awesome winter jacket made for me. It's lime green with purple lining inside. Ballin. I kind of started to feel like a hollywood sleazebag though since I was getting clothes made for me and a pedicure. So yeah we walked around the town a lot and looked at the river which was nice and brown from the rainy season. There are so many old ladies with fruit and those cone-shaped hats that ask you to take their picture and then try to get you to pay them. This whole country is kind of like one giant scam; you always have to be on your guard. But there are also some really great, friendly people, don't get me wrong. So that's where I am in life right now.. it's been an interesting day. I've been the angriest I've ever been so far this trip but we've also laughed the most today than we have so far. Amy and I were comparing foreheads for an unecessarily long time both claiming that we have the smaller forehead. Ashley judged for us (Amy won)...(but that's only because her widow's peak counted as her hairline...just so you know). I could go on about all the weird stuff we've been laughing about but I would just be sitting here typing and chuckling and you people reading this (I love you all by the way) would just shake your heads...or have a blank stare on your face (which you probably have right now. Gotcha!) Okay we might be venturing out right now depending on the level of sketchiness. Over and out.

"Hey guys instead of wandering around do you want to just get the fuck out of this city?"

Okay, Vietnam is nuts. Straight up nuts. So we left Laos yesterday morning and met an Irish dude at our hostel who was also headed to Vietnam so we went with him to the airport. When we were waiting for the flight I was talking with the guy (Daniel) and you know how when I'm really excited my voice gets louder and louder? Well I was really excited about something or another and an asian dad came up to me and told me to "turn down the volume." Then a french dude turned to Ashley and was like "thank god he did that, she was so loud." Guess he didn't know Ashley was with me. Whoops. My bad. Anyway so we took a flight to Hanoi, Vietnam which was only about an hour and then we had to get our visas. We got really confused and ended up standing in the wrong line for about half an hour. Needless to say, Daniel wasn't waiting on the other side when we finally finished up. From there we took a taxi to the Old Quarter and...wowowow. This is where nuts comes in. Driving here is an absolute shit show. We actually hit a guy on a moto and I'm surprised we didn't hit more than one guy. There is absolutely NO order on the streets here and it is jam packed with cars, motos, bikes and pedestrians. Anyway so the driver dropped us off and we had to walk the rest of the way to the train station which took about an hour and a moto nicked Amy on the leg. We were going to walk around a bit once we bought our ticket but after this journey all we wanted to do was get on that train and get out.

At the train station a Vietnamese girl leaned over and showed me her phone. It said "Where are you from?" She had a translator on her phone so we talked for a bit and she taught me some Vietnamese. I used what she taught me to talk to the guy checking tickets and he was so impressed. Then he wrote down something on a paper and had me say it to him...so I did. Then he leaned in to kiss me. When I asked someone what it said later of course it said "Can I kiss you?" My newest pick up line for the Vietnamese boyzz.

We got on the sleeper train at 11 pm and it was small rooms with three-tier beds. Ashley was feeling very claustophobic so I let her have my bed because it was on the second tier and then I just shared a bed with Amy on the second tier. and we put our stuff on the top bunk. We got into Danang at 1:15 pm today and as soon as we walked out we were swarmed with taxi drivers grabbing us and trying to get us to go with them. Once again...nuts. We found a taxi and went to the Marble Mountains which is a beautiful place with huge marble sculptures and large marble steps leading you up the mountain. The view was amazing. It was right next to the beach and it looked like Santa Cruz to me. After that we got to our hostel and...WOW. We have a private room and..hot showers! The life of luxury! Now we're going to hit up a tailors in a bit because you can't go to Vietnam without getting a custom made outfit. So I hear. Oh and a sidenote..the currency is hilarious. 18,000 Dong per USD.