Sitting on a white sand beach, watching the sun set into the calm blue ocean, palm trees overhead, is a wonderful way to spend any day, even x-mas. I did miss my family but Michelle was there and Jen, and some friends we had meet along the way. It was difficult to find presents on the little island. There was beer, of course. But I was hoping to buy something a little more personal and permanent for Michelle. I had to wander off for the afternoon in search for presents. I came across a tiny flea market. Two families had setup some goods on a blue tarp. There I found nail polish. I then bought an anklet for a Thai women hawking jewelry on the beach. I also wondered into the one air conditioned store and found, to my delight, boxes of firecrackers. I ended up buying a brick, not for Michelle but for me to shoot off on New Years.

Subject: Christmas Day

Date: December 25, 2000

Hey mom (and everyone else)-

Glad everyone likes their prezzies. I will be sending more as the year goes on, in probably the same way (heaps of prezzies sent to one address, and y’all can sort them out as time progresses). It’s very expensive to send stuff so that’s why. Today is the day after x-mas. We had a nice x-mas, Charlie and I exchanged gifts from this tiny island we are living on (I got red sparkly nail polish and an anklet, he got some goggles and some flip-flops!!) We put them under our paper-cut-out tree. Then we sat on the beach, watched an amazing sunset and had dinner at our favorite restaurant with some kiwi friends we met, one is originally Thai, so we got to ask her all sorts of stupid questions about Thai culture and she also taught us to count, and, of course, how to say all the Thai dirty words. It was really fun.

The sunsets here are amazing, so much so that I am starting to take them for granted! We are staying right on the beach front, so the ocean and sunset can be seen from our porch, it’s beautiful. We got a deal on the front bungalow because we are staying for so long (2 weeks) and it only costs $12 per night! We’ve been swimming in the ocean and snorkeling, and beach-sitting for the last week or so, and we plan on continuing this rigorous schedule of relaxation for another week.

A few days ago, we rented a scooter and drove around the entire island. I practiced a few times by myself and then had Charlie hop on the back! It was great until this huge mud puddle. Charlie said “just go right through, don’t worry” and of course I went right through and then we promptly and unceremoniously fell over. It was very surreal, neither one of us screamed or said anything, the bike just tipped and we tipped with it. I have a nice bruise on my shin and some lacerations on my elbow, but other than that, I was fine. But as we were driving back, I was smart enough to walk the bike through that mud puddle, but came upon another one soon after, and got freaked out (”mud puddle equals pain, mud puddle bad, don’t like mud puddle” my mind said) so I basically freaked out and began GASSING the bike (because the accelerator is on the handlebar, but I forgot and just kept GRIPPING!!!) Charlie’s in the back saying calmly “just let go of the accelerator, take your hand off the accelerator, NOW”, but of course I mistake that for “grip the handlebars with all your might, don’t let go for anything in the world. not even chocolate or baby puppies” So I was able to avoid the puddle, but we wound up on the side of the road between the hard dirt and some bushes. My hand is still on the accelerator, gripping, the wheels are spinning, but the bike has long since stopped moving. I ended up getting my ass burned on the pipe, and I felt a bit shaky after dump #2, but once again, we emerged from the wreckage just fine. As for the bike, we asked a nice Thai man along the way of we could use his hose, we washed it off and turned it back in with nary a scratch! So that’s enough excitement for a few days.

We are going to Bangkok in about one week to meet Christa and then will be off to Malaysia and Singapore. Having good times, miss y’all and hope all is well!

Love Michelle

Still in Vietnam. Reading through what Michelle wrote, it seems like we had an okay time. But for some reason Vietnam was my least favorite country. Probably the rain and the tours. The one thing I really enjoyed was the monkeys. Even if they were caged or chained. I could usually persuade the owner to let me play with the monkey. This usually involved having the monkey pick nits out of my hair, while I did the same for the monkey. The monkeys where starved for physical attention. Sad.

Subject: Ahhh…I love the smell of fish sauce in the morning

Date: December 11, 2000

Greetings from Vietnam, where women wear matching top n’ bottom pajamas all day long, where ear cleaning is an entirely public affair (using this long copper wand thing), where crossing the street is an extreme sport, where nodding the head and smiling actually means “No Way”, and where caged animals (bears, birds, monkeys, snakes) are de rigueur. Oh yeah and where fish sauce is made. Most of Southern Vietnam smells of fish sauce, which is evidently made from toe jam, belly button scum and bat guano, with some fish parts thrown in.

Today is our last day in Vietnam, and Charlie and I have mixed feelings. We’ve been here for 3 weeks now, and we haven’t really gone far from Saigon. I suppose we sort of lost our momentum because of crappy weather and being sick. First we spent about 5 days in Saigon, getting our visas extended, then we went on a 3 days tour of the Mekong Delta, then we came back to Saigon, then I got sick and I stayed in the hotel for a few days in Saigon trying to recover, then we went to the fishing village of Mui Ne to see some huge sand dunes, then it pissed rain for 4 days straight while we twiddled our thumbs at the beach resort, where the main attraction was a 4 month old monkey named “Tony Blair” tied up to a chair. Needless to say, we were all on suicide watch, including Tony. After that, we separated ways with Jen, and Charlie and I went to Dalat, which is a town in the central highlands of Vietnam, popular among Vietnamese tourists. The air was nice and the weather was lovely, and cool. We walked around the lake and noticed that even though it’s like 75 degrees there, people were literally wearing snow outfits, complete with full head wraps and ski boots. I guess it’s the coldest place in Vietnam, but it felt like Oakland on a warm day to us. We decided, after Dalat, to go back to Thailand so we could spend my birthday and Christmas on a beach, instead of in central Vietnam, where the weather is crap due to a typhoon off the coast of the Philippines.

I’m a little disappointed that we aren’t going to northern Vietnam, but not disappointed enough to actually go.

Some cultural differences worth noting about Vietnam are that people have no social taboos against touching other people—especially hairy westerners like ourselves. I have been amicably grabbed, slapped, pinched, pushed, prodded and poked. Charlie gets a lot of arm hair pulling (cuz people aren’t so hairy here, they can’t believe it’s real), and I shaved my head so everyone wants to feel my scalp. Also, people seem to work so hard here, hustling their butts off to drum up some business. Selling shit is not the calm affair that it is in the States. Walking down the street is like walking a capitalism gauntlet, with business people trying to get you to ride in their cyclo, eat in their restaurant, or buy their handicrafts. Also, as soon as westerners enter a cafe, the proprietors tend to crank up the loud 80’s tunes, for our benefit. Thanks! Because of this I always have bad 80’s tunes in my head, usually of the “easy listening” genre. Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello”, Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind”, Air Supply’s entire oeuvre. I must say I really miss music, and it was quite a mistake to not bring any listening device along on the trip, because we are subjected to cafe tunes which are typically the aforementioned hits, or Vietnamese pop, which is basically the same as the aforementioned hits, only in Vietnamese. We were lucky enough to witness two non-fatal traffic accidents, one that we were actually involved in. Talk about fascinating! Basically, whoever is bloodiest or whose vehicle suffers the most damage gets paid money. Everyone stands around in the street arguing (amicably) until someone gets paid off. No one calls the police because then the payer must pay them off too. Payment can be paid in local currency (Vietnamese dong), US dollars or whatever goods happen to be involved in the accident (in one case that we saw, a bag of rice was the preferred payment). No one cares whose fault it was, or what really happened, they just look around at the damages and come to an agreement about which party is worse off. Our accident was deemed our fault because we were not bloody, and we had to pay about $4 to fix the damage to the taxi we were in.

Most of the people we met were warm and friendly and loved practicing their English with us and were more than willing to help us with our Vietnamese. The sentiment we heard most was Vietnamese people’s forgiveness about what happened during the war, that they are hopeful for future relations with the US, and they do not dwell on the losses they suffered. Many people in the south also want to go to the US to visit family members, but can’t get a visa, or don’t have the money. I know sentiment in the north would be different and from talking to people I learned that Vietnam is still quite divided, despite the united image it conveys to the rest of the world.

This place comes in second, after Uzbekistan, in terms of being vastly different, culturally speaking. First off, there’s the whole communist thing going on. But after talking with some locals, I found that it’s actually a socialist republic. People still have to pay for health care, education, etc. The economy seems pretty capitalistic in big cities like Ho Chi Minh and Bill Clinton just visited a few weeks ago, so things are loosening up politically and economically. There are literally TWO Americans traveling here—me and Charlie. All other tourists are from England and Australia. I like the place ok.

That’s it for now. Hope you are all well!
Michelle

Vietnam was my least favorite country during our trip. I’m not sure why, probably the endless rain, the guided tours, the rat infested zoo and the chained-up baby monkey dressed in a smock named Tony Blair. But there were a couple of fun experiences for Michelle, Jen and I. Sliding down the waterslides with thousands of Vietnamese school children staring, crawling through the Cuchi Tunnels drenched in sweat, throwing trash into the delta like the locals, and the fender-bender that Michelle writes about below.

Subject: Mekong Was Fun, Now We are Moving On…

Date: December 4, 2000

Hi everyone-
We just got back from our 3 day trip in the Mekong Delta, it was pretty fun, but will probably not go on another “guided tour” (more about that later…). Anyway, we are fine (despite my nasty cold) and we will be moving out of Saigon and on to the sand dunes of Mui Ne, which is up the coast a bit. Not sure how long we will be there, but will probably stay a while to recover from the pollution of Ho Chi Mihn City (or “the Ho” as we like to call it).

We got in a little fender-bender in a taxi today, but we are all just fine and dandy, but are so ready to get away from all the hubbub of Saigon. Of course, we had to pay someone off because the police are corrupt here, and the entire process was actually worth the $4 it cost to fix the door of the taxi. Basically, if someone gets in a car accident here, the two parties argue on the street until one party tires of arguing and decides to pay. Calling the police is completely out of the question. Luckily, the woman who runs our guesthouse is wonderful and we called her and she came to the accident right away and got our fine reduced from $8 to $4 (I know, I know, it’s nothing but when you are trying to live on 15 dollars a day, and have no income, it really adds up!), and she was able to translate for us. We bought her flowers as a thank you gift. The best part about it was that they could care less about “our side of the story”. It’s not like in the states, where all parties involved get to testify. Our friend Tan simply rode her scooter to the site, said hello to us and began talking to the taxi driver and trying to lower our fines. Ok, so I gotta go. We will probably not have access to email for a few weeks.

Hope all is well,
Michelle & Charlie

Phnom Penh smelled of guns. A distinctly US odor. Growing up with quasi-hippie parents, you’d think I wouldn’t have access to guns but I shot BB guns, pellet guns and the occasional twenty-two. Most experiences with guns weren’t good. From my uncle shooting a helpless robin traumatizing me when I was 7, to my friend Mike Larsen shooting a herring down at the creek next to the high-school tennis courts making me fell guilty for years, to my friend Jimmy Guerrero bringing a handgun to my college dorm when he visited for a week making me paranoid of getting expelled.

Guns pervade the US psyche and environment. You can smell it everywhere here. And that’s the odor that hit my nose when we stepped off the plane in Phnom Penh. Within in the day of arrival, I was offered to shoot an AK-47. I could ride out with some guys to an empty field and shoot away. It was rumored for a few hundred dollars you could shoot a grenade launcher at cow, something I was tempted to do. Besides war, when else can you shoot a grenade launcher at a cow?

Michelle also tuned into the gun vibe that permeates Phnom Penh and didn’t like it.

Subject: Thanksgiving Greetings from the Developing World

Date: November 22, 2000

Hi Everyone-
It’s me again. I just realized that it was practically Thanksgiving! So I thought I should send something to wish you all a good time. Eat some traditional TG fare for me (losta gravy and cranberry sauce on that turkey, please). I like Phnom Penh a lot more than I did 2 days ago. Today we went to the Tuol Seng Holocaust Museum, which is basically a high school turned death-camp used by the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. We topped it off with a visit to the Killing Fields, where all of the people held and tortured in Tuol Seng were sent to die. Needless to say, I am feeling very sad and depressed about human suffering. It’s so hard to believe that during this genocide in Cambodia, I was spending my days in a safe little elementary school in Nor. Cal., talking Holly Hobby and Sesame Street. Anyway, looking into the faces of the people here, it’s hard to imagine the horror of what happened or that it could even happen at all. At least 1 million people were killed, but estimates are that it was more like 3 million. So, very sad today, and we are leaving to Saigon tomorrow.

I will be glad to leave Phnom Penh, but like I mentioned before, it’s not as bad as I had originally thought. We moved to a new guesthouse in a better part of town and we all feel much better now. The developing world is so interesting, especially here because PP is a city of 1 million, yet there are very few paved roads, and no high-rises, or other city markers. No freeways, either. People either live in their businesses or they live in small, open front shacks where they do everything outside (wash, pick lice out of kids hair, pee n’poo, eat, sleep in hammocks, wash vegetables, cook, chop meat, etc.) I discovered a fascinating outdoor beauty parlor yesterday while walking around. Men and women literally set up small beauty shops in a field (men barbers, women manicurists). They bring their own equipment (mirrors, nail stuff, chairs, water) and just get down to business.

The markets here are pretty grisly. Chickens, tied down but still alive, pig heads (decorated with their own tail in their mouths), fish slopping out of their shallow water pan (half dead, of course), slabs of bloody beef (smells really bloody), blood just about everywhere. I always vow that I won’t eat meat when I leave, but once I smell bacon or fried chicken I am back on the meat wagon. Again, there is a seediness that pervades this place. In Thailand, you could wander off the tourist circuit and have a great time. Here, there are either places where tourists and ex-pats go, and there are places where they don’t go and the difference is pretty obvious. So we’ve been spending a lot of money at the ex-pat restaurants and bars. I gather from what I have read and my own observations that this place is a lawless city, where the cops moonlight as bandits, pedophilia runs rampant, and guns are welcomed. They call it “the Wild East” so I can see why a lot of creepy guys who like guns and kiddie-porn wind up here.

Anyway, hope this does not bring you down. On a lighter note, I got a massage today from a blind woman. There is a place here called Seeing Hands Massage and it’s an organization that trains blind people in massage and the profits go to the blind and disabled. On a heavier note, there are thousands of people in Cambodia who have lost limbs due to land mines. I’m assuming that the blind people may have been land mine victims as well, but not sure. Anyway, I miss all yall and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. Remember to savor the flavor of American food. I’ll be thinking of you!

Love, Michelle