Category: Uncategorized

Since Posterous is closing down on
April 30th we had to do something. For our Posterous friends who need
to do the same, we went with a SquareSpace account which yes, costs
money. But Posterous just taught us that you get what you pay for and it
isn’t horribly expensive. Also, it allows you to register a domain for
free – so instead of having to use thisisourblog.squarespace.com (which
also works) we can use thisisourblog.net.

Also, SquareSpace allows you to (supposedly) import your old Posterous account. I’m still working on that part though…

We tried to get our phone fixed today (no luck — the employee who speaks English won’t be back until Monday) and ran across this university campus.  Interestingly, these buildings are from the 70s and 80s.

Cassie sent us an article about this while we were in Vietnam and it quickly rose to the top of our to-do list.  There are about 17-18 cats that live in this cafe.  

We couldn’t resist taking a picture of this… not sure what kind of statement they were making…

HCMC/Saigon was an interesting contrast to Hanoi.  It was more modern, cleaner, and easier to walk through due to wider and less crowded sidewalks.  As the guidebooks will tell you, it also doesn’t have the same kind of charm that Hanoi has (fewer trees, fewer older buildings).  The pictures below show an example of the interesting contrasts within the city:  the first shows people eating on the streets and a fancy coffee shop in the background and the second shows a building that appears to have been built by the french in front of a run-down building, in front of a new high-rise.

Art Museum.  The first painting depicts the effects of Agent Orange.  Most of the museums we went to had nationalistic and anti-American rhetoric.  Many of them, also, openly communicated the pain and destruction the “American War” caused.  Agent Orange was part of that pain and destruction that effects both adults and children’s lives today–and something the U.S. government and people have never paid reparations for.

These were a couple of my favorite spots.  The video is of a Buddhist pagoda.  Somehow we snuck in during lunch hours when we weren’t supposed to be there, so we were practically the only people there.  It was a lovely spot among the trees, where you could hear the crazy traffic down below. This was also the spot where in 1963 Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, left from to burn himself to death on a nearby street corner to protest the persecution of Buddhist monks by the South Vietnamese government.  The next place we visited was the corner where the self-immolation occurred.  There’s a beautiful space devoted to him.  In the pictures below I’ve included a photograph of the self-immolation so you can compare it with the monument to him.

More shots of Ho Chi Minh City:

I love the ocean and this was an excellent spot because at high tide, the waves came right up to where we were staying and we could hear them crashing all night.  Our 2-day visit was also timed perfectly because we were both sick and it was a wonderful place to recover.

We spent most of our time outside reading.  Ahh…

I’m still trying to come to terms with how I feel about this part of our trip.  Ultimately, our 2-day visit to Ha Long Bay was full of contrasts:  it was both breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly ugly. The limestone islands that spring out of the bay were truly magnificent, but the whole experience left me feeling like nothing more than a consumer–and an irresponsible one at that.  

Part of the problem was that to view the bay, you pretty much have to join an organized tour, so you are herded from place to place by people who go through the same routine every day. The other part of the problem is that 40% of all foreign tourists in Vietnam go to Ha Long Bay.  That’s about a million and a half people a year.  And we’re all killing the place.  As Bill Hayton writes in Vietnam: Rising Dragon, “Ha Long’s beauty endures but beneath the surface it’s dying.”  Mangrove forests have been stripped from the coast.  That, along with the effects of coal mining in the area, has filled rivers, streams, and the bay with coal dust, killing the corals and sea life that once flourished there. What’s more, the boats on Ha Long Bay are supposed to unload their passengers’ “toilet waste” when they return to shore, but only the most expensive cruse ships have the necessary technology to do so. So, insteady, they empty it into the bay.  And, as Hayton puts it, we were all sailing around on “the shit of a million and half boat passengers a year.”  

As you’ll see in the pictures below, the views were amazing and it was truly an exceptional experience to sit on top of our boat and look out over the misty sea as the sun went down.  But if I could change one part of our trip to Vietnam, I would choose to not contribute to the destruction of this magical place.