Gahd

I am bored. The ocean is still blue. My work is finished. My lunch was 6 apples. Thank god we are getting an afternoon on land (honolulu) tomorrow...my brain is turning into silly putty! a thanksgiving picnic on the beach is planned, as is a hording of food at some grocery store for the next 9-day stretch (this one including finals! yaaaaay!) between here and Costa Rica. Costa Rica looks like it will be a grand finale, we rented a 3-house villa thing with a pool and waterfall right next to the beach and it is quite inexpensive--plus I bet they have AMAZING food that will slake my thirst for mexican food. It is getting bad---food took up all of my dreams last night! I woke up chewing my hair. Being in America will be a strange sensation tomorrow--not having to speak slowly and with my hands so people will understand me, being able to read the signs...and probably a lot of fat people. Japan i think has 6 fat people in total, and I only saw about 3. I don't know how a country with the most delicious food possible does it, but they do, and I give them a standing ovation (in my mind). Still waiting on those food emails!
-Kelsey

Music

Soundtrack to Travel the World:
Here are some songs I would never have survived being at sea without:

Cecilia by Simon and Garfunkel: this song was always a good one when I was feeling tired of being on the ship, missing land or just wanting to see my friends.

Lake Michigan by Rogue Wave: this song, first of all, is exquisitely crafted. It just gradually gets prettier and prettier and, in my mind, glitters like the sun off the sea on a warm day.

Snail Garden by Black Moth Super Rainbow: this band never fails to tickle the furrows of my brain with multi-colored mastery. Sublime!

Simple Twist of Fate by Bob Dylan: Nothing Bob does ever fails me, but this song seems to capture the beautiful transience of this trip.

Ed is a Portal by Akron/Family: A rollicking good time, one I put on when I feel like celebrating everything!

Asleep for Days by Blitzen Trapper: The title describes what traveling for 3 and a half months makes me want to be.

There is no There by the Books: Makes me feel like someone is cleaning my soul with soft little cotton pads doused in liquid love. The Books are divine providence, I might as well put their entire discography on here.

Robots Got No Cadence or Balance by Prefuse 73: A dreamy little piano groove with electronic blips and ‘oooh’ ‘eeeh’ ‘aahs’ and a really sweet wall of beautiful violin strokes. Awesome.

Trudi by Donovan: This is a foxy jam, not really related lyrically to the trip at all, but Donovan never fails to lift my spirits when my cave—I mean room--- feels too small.

Fall in a River by Badly Drawn Boy: This one sounds like a troop of bohemian musicians dancing out of a mossy green forest at dusk. I miss trees so I listen to this when I want to climb one.

Blue Ridge Mountains by Fleet Foxes: Reminds me of Nicholas and is about traveling. And the band is just plain perfect!

Forever by Working for A Nuclear Free City: I’m using it on my slideshow when I get back—it is perfect for processing a flood of memories and images of wildly different things.  Plus it has a sitar, which is always two points in my book.

Secrets of the Sea by Billy Bragg and Wilco: A happy ditty that strums away the clouds.

Cabin Fever by the Brian Jonestown Massacre: This will probably play a lot in the next few weeks. Being on the sea is tiring (and a bit maddening), especially with only a day in Hawaii and 3 in Costa Rica to break it up until home!

We Sleep in the Ocean by the Cloud Room: Talks about escaping and traveling—connection?

My Yoke is Heavy by Daniel Johnston: my favorite song in the whole world. It was stuck in my head all of Tokyo and I was so glad. It makes me so happy!!! Just find a way to listen to it because it is genius.

Third World Lover by DJ Shadow: An Indian-spiced instrumental piece of ear candy.

Suddenly Everything has Changed by The Flaming Lips: because it has (but maybe not so suddenly)

Bombooji by Gong: I miss hippies, and this is my substitute.

Insects Don’t Eat Bananas by Joan of Arc: Short, badly sung, and about monkeys= fabulous.

Fool That I Am by Kula Shaker: For the more wistful of my days.

Food Fantasies

Breakfast:
3 gallons of coffee (real coffee...not the syrupy poison on the ship)
1 vat of vanilla yogurt
17 bags of craisins & granola
1 omelet with peppers, onions, pepper jack cheese and a whole bottle of salsa
An entire orange tree’s worth of fresh-squeezed orange juice

Lunch:
1 bean and cheese burrito (daschund-sized)
1 cask of horchata
Red Hot Blues chips
Fruit, fruit, fruit until I can eat no more!!!

Dinner:
1 baked potato with sour cream, green onions, butter and pepper
1 veggie burger (with 12 patties) with avocado, lettuce, onions and wasabi mayonnaise
Grilled and marinated vegetables (Dad style)
Pink Lemonade
MORE FRUIT!!!!!!!!

The food on the ship has gone beyond redundancy into being just plain revolting. I feel like I am in the great siege of Paris and they have opened up the zoos and started mincing baboons  and filleting zebras for lack of anything appetizing or edible left. The little cubes of cheese that used to trigger at least partial taste bud satisfaction are now nowhere to be seen, and the brief few days where they had varieties of tea other than British Dog Slobber, are long gone. I have resorted to fooling my body into thinking it is full with lettuce and going to bed early to ignore my pleading stomach. Trail mix dances through my brain, taunting me with its salty, crunchy elusiveness, and anyone who dares speak of Mexican or Thai food is risking being mauled. Honolulu’s supermarkets will be empty by the time I am done with them! I will be home so soon (25 days as of today) that I can stand it…at least for now. If anyone wants to send me lengthy emails describing every taste, aroma and texture of their favorite meal, I will nourish my brain at least in that way. I’m not even kidding, getting an email like that would at least provide some sustenance! Keep those emails coming, people! I’m still alive over here on the Pacific and want to know how you are doing!

Japanfatuation

Whoever doesn’t believe in love at first sight needs to go to Tokyo…they will be exposed as the fraudulent non-believers that they are! Japan!! Japan!!!! My toes wiggle and my eyelashes bat coquettishly at the mere mention of the place. Not only did the album ‘The Lemon of Pink’ by the Books (a savagely good cd) synchronize perfectly with my entry into the country, but I finally was able to understand the language (to a degree), and the earth’s rotation graciously volunteered to incarnadine the fingertips of all the trees and send brisk whispers through the streets, with the smell of rice cooking and tea brewing at the fringe of every chilly gust. I can’t get this place out of my head. First of all, they have realized the blatant superiority of green tea as a flavor. Kit kats, ice cream, liquor, you name it and they have it green tea flavored. Also, TOFU! I ate tofu ice cream, a tofu latte, tofu in soup that, all hyperbole aside, kept a dopey grin on my face for 3 hours after its consumption. Even thinking about biting into that heavenly rectangle of wonder gets me salivating. The first day I set foot, in Kobe, the weather was sublime, and a group of about 15 kids and I hopped on the train to Kyoto for a field trip-esque excursion with my global studies teacher. We wandered around some Buddhist and Zen temples, visited a garden and a shrine, and padded through a mossy green forest and marveled silently at the majesty of the changing leaves. Mitzi’s mom, who is living in Tokyo at the moment, came and met us and we went out to dinner---I ate the aforementioned tofu that day, enough said. That night me and my ‘posse’ went out to caper through the streets of Kobe. I drew a very well-rendered inebriated octopus on the wall of this bar called ‘Sonic’, and requested songs from the DJ that were just too obscure, and was mildly disappointed. The subway closes at midnight and I was out past then, so my friend Brian and I had to get a taxi. For some reason, I always forget the word for boat (fune) and mix it up with the word for winter (fuyu), so here I am at 2 in the morning asking a very perplexed and very amused taxi driver to take me to the “big winter”…but I made it back safe and sound, to wake up the next morning and go OSAKA! So much color, so much style, so much noise and youth! Mitzi took us to a Mexican restaurant (one of the many foods I am craving with mounting agony) and we all were in throes of gustatory passion for the 2 hours we sat there and basically licked our plates clean. My group of friends has gotten to the point where we basically just eat each other’s food and just ask out of habit, so arms were crisscrossed and forks colliding like crazy in our dimly lit corner of the El Pancho restaurant. Jim and Rob’s is getting some serious income as soon as I get back into Ojai, that is for sure. I miss Mexican food like CRAZY!! So after El Pancho, we walked around the city for a bit, visiting a very pricey vintage/”thrift” store and taking pictures in this photo booth that was bejeweled and pink and sparkly and just ohhh so me! People watching in Japan is amazing. Everyone here has the coolest outfits, I don’t think I saw one person who didn’t look like they had planned their ensemble the night before. 5 different patterns and a kaleidoscopic color scheme seems to be the general rule for fashion, but they manage to make it work. Meaningless English phrases also seem to be a favorite. I bought a T-shirt that says “Kick Out! STUPID GLORY DAYS!” on it. I plan on wearing it weekly, if not more! Then from Osaka, we went to Kyoto, where we met Mitzi’s mom.
        Kyoto, lamentably, was only viewed at night and on a soggy, gray morning. We walked through the metro station (I won’t even go into the transportation system here…it should make the U.S. pale with embarrassment) and got dinner at a little restaurant where we all sat on the floor and they came out with giant egg omelets and slapped them on the sizzling black surface that took up the center of our table and kept the food piping hot the whole meal! We slept in a ryokan, a tatami-matted, narrow-staircased, paper-walled traditional Japanese inn. They kept green tea constantly at our reach, and boy did I drink a lot of it. I fell asleep really early, to a badly-dubbed Mission Impossible in Japanese. Woken up by the clicks of women’s high heels outside our inn (the tiniest sounds came through those walls), we all got up and fetched breakfast and then boarded the sleek, playpus-headed Shinkansen, or bullet train, to Tokyo!! Soaring through the country side, I mentally ran up every hill and leapt at every low-lying cloud, knowing that I would soon be on the water for almost 20 days, with only a hurried Thanksgiving in tourist-clogged Honolulu to break up the monotony. Arriving in Tokyo, the sun was listless and only let a few rays weakly seep through the grey clouds. This may have been why my visit to the Harajuku district (of which Gwen Stefani so colorfully sings) was mostly fruitless—only a smattering of furry costumes and gothic regalia, but still enough to make it worthwhile. After a tofu burger and some miso soup, we went to Shibuya station, where flashing comic billboards and neon signs lit up the sky like the aurora borealis above the endless herds of humans crossing the streets. The weird thing about Tokyo is that even when it seems like there are two thousand people in one tiny little square, it is still silent. Put the same amount of New Yorkers or Indians or French in the same situation and it would be bedlam! Everywhere I went the Japanese were so polite and self-contained, which was an interesting contrast to their off-the-wall style and adoration of gaudy, self-aggrandizing Western media. That night we went to this club called Gaspanic, where drinks were painfully overpriced, but I got to boogie the night away with a Japanese man in what looked like a plumber’s one-piece suit, and his companion, an arm-swinging black man in striped overalls. We got back (Chris, Scott, Emily and  I) to the subways on the very last run, at midnight, and returned to our hostel. The lightning fast internet was heaven for Chris and I—we stayed up until 3 in the morning talking to friends and uploading pictures and freaking out about how rad Tokyo was.
        The next day was THE BEST DAY OF MY ENTIRE LIFE. I woke up to the sun (oh glorious golden orb of joy!!) at 7 in the morning, and felt it in my every limb that things were going to be perfect. I got a cup of coffee downstairs with the hostel owners, showered (towels cost money so I used my purple bandana instead), and everyone eventually got up and we rented BICYCLES!! Mine was orange and had a basket AND a bell…I was so in love. We had to wait around for Mitzi, Drew and Kristin to get to our side of Tokyo from Mitzi’s mom’s, so we rode around the bicycle rental place ringing our bells and “Top of the morning to you”-ing, probably giving the owner a headache and causing considerable confusion amongst the Japanese businesspeople. Once everyone was together, we flew through the streets of Tokyo, a perfect temperate day with frayed clouds lacing the horizon and the wind making rusty whirlwinds of fall leaves on the sidewalks. A forty-five minute stop at a supermarket with about thirty aisles of everything I love and more gleeful bicycle cruising led us to a gazebo type structure at the edge of a park, where we all parked our bikes, sat down, and unpacked our exploding grocery bags of sushi and chips and mochi and banana chips and enormous (the size of grapefruits) Fuji apples and other delectable snacks and just sat and feasted. First of all, riding bicycles is probably one of my favorite things in the world to do. The fact that I did it in Tokyo, during fall, on a beautiful day, and then got to eat the best sushi and eat real Fuji apples that haven’t been frozen and ruined in a cruise-ship freezer for months…I was in heaven. Every time I hear bicycle bells from now on, my eyes will glaze over and I will probably be in a nostalgic reverie for a few hours. And the day wasn’t even half over! After consuming my weight in sweetened rice and tofu, we pedaled around more, stopping at a really eclectic flea market and a little souvenir boulevard, then went back to the hostel. After a cat nap and some general laying about, we hopped on our bicycles again, and rode, bells-a-jingling, across town to a karaoke bar. We got our own private room and ‘Happy!’ Beers and sang at the top of our lungs for hours. I was really surprised, they had Radiohead and Peter, Bjorn and John, and Bjork and quite a bit of non-mainstream music. We all thought the walls were soundproof, so we just sang as loud and as ear-piercingly as we could, but (this I discovered several days later), you could hear everything in the hallway! So what I thought was a private, one-on-one screaming of ‘Ocean Avenue’ with Chris was heard by all of Tokyo!
So my conclusion is this: I love Japan. I LOVE JAPAN. Marry me, oh land of tofu and chopsticks and hello kitty!!! Why did I ever leave you?!

Hello Panda!

Me on the Ship Deck 5

Looks like a pottery barn ad....*Hong Kong*

The Water Cube!

Me coming out of a flower pot i guess..

Halloween

Me as Beatrice Kiddo from Kill Bill!

The Great Wall

The Birds Nest!

Nihao Ma!

China---the fun part. Here we go. First of all, Hong Kong is way too expensive to even write about, ad the reason  why I ate chili pepper flakes and a coke for my only meal there. I went up to Victoria’s peak and got an enchanting view of the city with Scott, then we went to a stupid market where they sold the same thing in every stall, but I bought a T-shirt and fulfilled my T-shirt-from-every-country quota The view of Hong Kong at night from our boat was really really beautiful though, and they had this crazy laser light show on the skyscrapers which I watched from the ship. The next day I woke up and pilfered the nearby mall’s free internet for two hours, then hopped in a taxi to the bus station with Vin and his friends (soon to be mine too) Alissa, Kasie and Nina. The bus people freaked us out and told us we were going to miss our flight so we were all on edge during the bus and taxi ride to the airport, and we climbed onto the plane 5 minutes before the gates closed—one of many close calls I have experienced on this trip. The plane ride was amusing. They played a hilarious silent film with cross-dressing Chinese men and women with big long magical braids, and I almost laughed until coconut milk spewed out of my nose. When we got to Beijing, getting a taxi was exasperating. They spoke little to no English to our complete ignorance of any Chinese, and our request to stuff 5 people in one taxi was rudely denied. We got to our hostel, the 1 Hai Inn, after awkwardly wandering down the wrong dark, deserted street with wispy bearded Chinese men on bicycles and white cats curled up on street corners. I LOVE HOSTELS. I could have lived in this one, the people were so nice, the fruit plate was so delicious, and they had free internet! We had our own little 6 person dorm with a bathroom and big comforters and a TV (which we didn’t watch except for a 5 minute clip of a chubby Chinese boy battling a group of middle-aged women). We spent a majority of the night watching our favorite Youtube videos (Look up “The Tree” “Mother’s Day”, “My Son is Gay”, “Jackie and Debra”, or “The Phone Call” to see how we were talking the ENTIRE trip) and cackling gleefully, to the utter befuddlement of our kind hosts. At 2 in the morning, Vin and I went out to find an ATM and ended up in a noisy little restaurant where we ordered tea (using a ridiculous form of sign language) and stifled our amusement at being the only English-speaking people in the entire establishment. This one debonair-looking Chinese man sat at the table next to us, an amused gaze fixed askance at us, with his plate of food untouched in front of his folded hands for the entire time we were there. We felt like quite a spectacle.
 The next day we woke up early and were greeted by the lovely Rita, our tour guide for the next two days. She packed us in a big white van and we drove to the Olympic monuments, where we took the greatest group photographs in the history of group photographs (I will try and put it up soon). Even though all I watched of the Olympic games was synchronized diving, seeing the water cube and bird’s nest still set my heart all a-flutter! After that we visited the 13 Ming tombs, an impressive display of imperial extravagance and architecture. Vin and  I crawled all over the elephant statues and the girls and I fawned over adorable panda-hat wearing toddlers and Rita wowed us with her unending historical wisdom. We proceeded to a Chinese restaurant, where the menu provided enough laughs for the entire week (‘Spiced Jews Ear’ was a favorite of mine).. I really have taken a shine to the use of lazy Susans in this country, they were in every restaurant I ate at and made everything so streamlined---no “Pass the Salt” or “Gimme the chicken” to interrupt the delicious taste of my ‘Hemp-Exploded the Bean Curd’! After gorging myself on awfully-translated Chinese food, Tito (the name we affectionately gave our van driver) took us to the Great Wall. What  a structure! My art history teacher says the Chinese find it to be pure qi, life force,. I see what they mean. It is magnificent, striking, an endless crackle of stone lightning on the mountainside. Climbing onto it I felt through my heels the ripple of history, and even though it was practically vertical, I climbed it with vigor and exhilaration. We managed to catch the sunset over the misty mountains, then climbed down to have dumplings and vegetables and bottle upon bottle of Tsingtao beer with the tour guide and a Chinese family. Lord knows how I managed to climb up the tiny little stairs of the wall, but being up there at night was magical. The stars were made even more sharp and bright with the freezing cold, and the moon dusted the sides of the wall with silvery light.
Waking up the next morning, I was as chipper as a robin, and I scampered all over our guard tower taking photos of my meusli and bananas and the sunrise and the crazy tour guides jogging. It was absolutely arctic out, I am surprised I didn’t get frostbitten. Eight kilometers and about 7,000 burnt calories later, I had seen quite a bit of the Great Wall. That thing is STEEP. My legs are still sore 4 days later. It is really really amazing though, my favorite thing I have seen all semester. I could have walked it for weeks and not gotten tired of it. We got lunch at a little café with Tito and Rita, then headed back to the airport and got on our flight to Shanghai. The last day in Shanghai we went to the zoo and saw a giant panda!! The most adorable animal on Earth. They are only active 2% of the day, and we were lucky enough to see one gallop around his cage. The rest of the zoo was pretty depressing, people throwing cigarettes at hippos and feeding monkeys potato chips…no fun. But that night we saw the Shanghai acrobatics show, an impressive performance of agility, flexibility and card-flicking.
Now I am on the boat, and it is rocking like crazy. My drawers are opening and slamming shut, my alarm clock is falling all over the floor, and my stomach is sloshing and gurgling in disapproval. We arrive in Kobe, Japan tomorrow, sadly the last port that really counts. My plans so far are a Ryokan (traditional Japanese Bed and Breakfast sort of thing) in Kyoto the second night, then 2 nights in a hostel in Tokyo, and we will meet the ship in Yokohama on the last day. My friend Mitzi has family in Tokyo, so I look forward to meeting them and cavorting through the streets of the city. I send everyone my love and affection from the turbulent seas!

China pt. 1

China…was a very challenging port. Not only was the language barrier significantly difficult, but I also had to hike an extremely steep great wall after a night of scorpion wine, go 3 days without a shower or change of socks, and confront mortality. The first two were really not bad, but the last was awful and sad. My friend Vin’s roommate was killed by a drunk driver the first night in Hong Kong. It was a real blow to my group in Beijing, because Vin was with us and we had to deal with that on top of trying to navigate our way through an often-frustrating, largely confusing country. I almost don’t want to go into details about Kurt, because it is just so heartbreaking. Someone so young, with friends and family back home who were so eagerly waiting for his return have to settle for one too early and too shocking than I can even fathom. I keep denying to myself that I won’t ever run into him in the hallway or joke around in Vin’s room at 3 in the morning, but the reality keeps piercing through my shield of avoidance and it is like a freezing waterfall on my heart. I wish there was some way I could fly back in time and push him out of the way, delay him leaving the ship by a few seconds, anything. Things like this just make me think the world is completely unfair—why did the driver live and Kurt not? Who deserves such heartache? I have to throw my hands up at the end of the day because to even try to put this incident within a moral framework is wholly futile. The existentialists and I have something in common at the moment in finding this all just absurd. I have to write about the fun China stuff later because to put it right after this would just be peculiar.

Nam Nam Nam Nam Nam

11/4/08

HELLO! Wow, Vietnam has already come and gone. Time is sure accelerating as we scud across the sea back home. Ho Chi Minh city was positively dreamy. The streets were streaming with motorbikes and women in triangle hats and smartly dressed young professionals, there were scrumptious whiffs of noodles and Vietnamese coffee and tropical fruits off every street corner, and everything was so very inexpensive (although confusing, with a dollar at 16,000 Vietnamese Dong). The first day, I woke up early and got in my neon running shorts and slung my camera around my neck and sat on a deck chair and watched as we sluggishly moved up the Saigon river. The water was the color of celadon glaze—a light olive green that reflected the clouds so beautifully! It is very humid there, but not the same knee-buckling heavy heat of India. Thanks to the most wonderful JOEY BUI (who I hope reads this to see how appreciative I am), I had been in correspondence with Chau Tran, a friend of his from the city who he had known from when he lived there before coming to Villanova (wow, it is so strange to even think of Villanova…so little time has passed since I graduated but such monumental change has occurred!) and I met her the first day. She took Vin and I around, getting Vin an ear-piercing suit (a jacket, vest, bow tie, and pants…all plaid) tailored and ordering lotus root salad and juice made from a magical fruit (not beans) that I forget the name of and being an all-around champion! After that, I went back to the ship and met up with Chris and Kristin and we went to Chris’mom’s hotel and I was exposed to American television for the first time in 2 months and I do not miss it AT ALL. I didn’t think I was going to miss it and now I am even more firmly convinced that I don’t ever need to watch it again. 
Then it was off to Apocalypse Now, an over-loud bar where I abandoned the dance floor after 3 minutes of toe-tapping to go and shimmy with a moustachioed octogenarian over by the pool tables while everyone else bumped and ground. The next day I woke up early and set out for a day on my own in Saigon. I visited the modern art museum, bought presents for people, found 12 dollar diesel jeans (which I am wearing now after 3 laundry-less weeks), and chomped on enormous purple grapes I bought from a crouching old woman on the street corner (with no intestinal repercussions!). That night was Halloween, so I donned my Uma Thurman garb and was picked up with my friend Justin by Chau’s friend in his BMW and taken to an ultra-sophisticated lounge, Xu for mojitos and scintillating cultural conversation. I felt like a celebrity or something, the place was definitely cooler than me…its bathroom was cooler than me! It had these trendy little chains hanging in the doorway and saucy music spritzing out of the speakers and mirrors everywhere! It looked like all the expatriate’s teenage children were regulars there, because music I actually knew was playing and someone was in the sweetest Rubik’s cube costume I’ve ever seen! We went to a bar, appropriately called Lush, where Chau was lovely enough to order me not one, but TWO plates of Vietnamese fruits…which I am pretty sure I ate all of, including the garnishes and napkins. It was so good. I got home around 3 or 4 and went right to bed. I met up with Chris and Kristin the next morning to go to the Cu Chi tunnels about an hour and a half away from the city center. Chris’s mom came with us (a big group of parents came to Vietnam on SAS Parents Trips or independently to meet up halfway with their kids…I kept hoping I would see my mom and dad on the docks when we pulled in!) and we crawled around in the tunnels (a bat almost flew in my mouth, it was really great!) and scurried through the hot, green forest and were absolutely exhausted after about an hour. Those holes are SMALL. Maybe I just need to steer clear of the breakfast buffet, but I commend the Vietnamese people for their compactness! The next day I went around the city on my own again, and visited the War Remnants museum. There were the most horrendous photos of war victims and tiger cages, next to awful testimony from journalists and Vietnamese townspeople, and being alone made me feel it even more strongly. Seeing the war from the other side, without an American textbook filter, was very profound. I felt sick to my stomach after leaving, knowing that people can inflict such horrible suffering on other people for so long, regardless of whatever seemingly valiant ideals they were fighting for.
       I bought a phone card to call my parents and was happy to talk to my dad, but a bit dismayed to miss my mom, who had left for the bay area. I also talked to Nick for like 3 and a half minutes, until my phone card was depleted of Dong. It was so nice to hear familiar voices after such an exhausting morning. I went to a tailor and got a crazy dress made out of this purple cotton fabric with off-white piping and it looks like an airline steward’s retro outfit mated with a thrift store housewife’s dress and I dig it. That night I met up with Chau again, and went to a hookah bar with her friend, then got this stuff called sweet soup at a mall. It was so very delicious…like creamed corn but with coconut milk and tapioca balls, all seasoned with…delight!!!!! My stomach was doing cartwheels and blushing all night long. I went to Chau’s the next day and had Pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup that I doused in chili sauce, kiwi bubble tea, and Vietnamese coffee, which made the back of her motorbike sag a little bit when I got on again! We hung out at her house, jumping in the pool and nibbling on another magical mystery fruit, and then came back to the city and picked up Vin. He mailed an enormous package back home, I bought a screamingly orange duffel bag and some big DVD collections for people, and then Chau took me to her mom’s friend’s salon where I got a manicure for 3 bucks that makes my fingernails look like the sky! I have clouds on all my fingers and suns on my thumbs and it is just grand. We had to say goodbye to that wonderful wonderful city that night, and I was so sad to leave Chau after 3 days. She was so gracious and fun and welcoming, and I can’t wait to see her again!
Hong Kong is in 1 day, and we find out via CNN radio broadcasts who the new president is. WOWEE!!!

Me in Kuala Lumpur