Job Hunt Rant/Best (Worst) of Craigslist

"This is a non paying job, but this is prefect for someone studying jounalism or has a deep passion for sports."

No, this is the perfect job for someone who does not like money. Do you like sports? Do you dislike paying your rent? If you answered "yes!", we have an oportunity for you!

It only makes me appreciate sarcasm like this more:

"Need a Brain Surgery Intern ASAP! I have just been diagnosed with a brain tumor and the doctor says that I only have 3 months to live unless I have brain surgery. This is an unpaid operation, but you will receive credit and snacks while you are operating. This is a good way to build up your resume by networking with others who need free surgery. If you do a good job, and I live, this may lead to future PAID surgeries! If you have your own surgery tools and anesthesia, that is a plus and you move to the front of the line.

Please respond with a link to all of the operations that you have performed, transcripts from the universities that you attended, and a copy of your MCAT scores. Please only respond if you are SERIOUS. You must be a team player and have your own car."

Hanoi Wrap Up

I'm back at home in NorCal, sitting in the comfort of my old room with a healthy dose of jetlag keeping me up. I promise I'm actually going through all my 1,300+ pictures (curse you, 2GB memory card), editing them and working them down into a reasonable number for an online album. It will go up soon, or eventually. In the meantime, you can enjoy stories of our last 3 days in Vietnam.

Haisun and I only really had one full day in Hanoi, and we packed in as much sightseeing as we could. In fact, we saw so much the only reason I have now to go back to Hanoi is to eat. (That is no insignificant reason, you must know.) We saw: the Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple that was the first National University of Vietnam; The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum (from the outside, since "Uncle Ho" is in Moscow for maintenance); The Ho Chi Minh Museum which is quite propagandistic and rather abstract at times and would have made a lot more sense if I knew more about Vietnam's revolutionary history; the One Pillar Pagoda, which was much smaller than we thought it would be; Hoa Lo Prison Museum, a.k.a the infamous Hanoi Hilton (more on that later); Ngoc Son Temple, which is on a wee island in the middle of a lake; and, finally, after dinner, a water puppetry show. If I ever felt we were taking it easy with the sightseeing in the rest of our trip we certainly made up for it that day.

Most of the sights were just visually interesting, but Hoa Lo is an interesting testament to what my dad calls "writing your own history." The site was originally a ceramics-producing village, taken over by the French and turned into a prison during colonial times. A majority of the museum focuses on the cruelty of French colonial rule, poor prison conditions at the time, and Vietnam's revolutionary leaders and thinkers who were imprisoned and/or killed by the French. These parts of the museum and spookily lit, with unfinished walls, original cells intact, and a dramatically lit guillotine. Then there's a couple clean, nicely lit rooms that mention, oh yes, I do believe we had some Americans come visit this one time. Well, they weren't visitors, they were CRIMINALS, shot down and arrested by 'the army and people of Vietnam'. But we treated them really well, in fact everything was up to Geneva Convention standards, see they even got to celebrate Christmas! And even if we couldn't treat them as well as they should have been we had a poor economy at the time because we were BEING BOMBED and we didn't sign the Geneva Convention anyway. Without the buttons to push to drop their bombs, the imperialists no longer had a purpose in life, so we taught them how to do things -- simple things any Vietnamese child knows how to do. (I kid you not, that last sentence is pretty much verbatim from a video at the museum.)

Walking out of the museum, I couldn't help but think, "Huh. I don't think that's quite how it happened..." Wikipedia sums it up pretty well, and I'll spare the nasty details here. Basically, the American POWs were tortured in order to force them to produce statements saying they were being treated really well. Oh, irony.

Anyway, our next two days were spent on a cheap-as-chips tour of Halong Bay. We opted for "Standard" instead of "Deluxe" or "Premier", but really it was substandard. Don't get me wrong, Halong Bay is gorgeous, I had fun when we went kayaking, and I find cruises kind of boring anyway, but the trip itself was pretty craptastic. All of us tourists on the boat bonded over the misery, and became fast friends. When we got back to Hanoi we swapped tales of our steerage class -- sorry, standard class -- tours with other travellers. Them: "Oh my god, and breakfast! That was just unbelievable -- the one egg and the giant pile of stale bread with just jam and butter!" Us: "You got JAM?!" (We got margarine.) It rained a lot, drinks on the boat were expensive, there was one light bulb on the deck, two of the girls couldn't sleep in their room because it was full of giant cockroaches, we were hungry a lot, and the crew ate a better breakfast than us (fried rice > stale bread and an egg). And then I left my nice rain jacked on the bus coming back. Grr.

It kind of sucked that the worst two days of our trip happened right at the end, but it probably made it easier to climb onto that plane in Hanoi on the 15th. The trip as a whole was amazing and I wish I'd had twice as long to spend in the area. Now back to real life...

Hanoi is an anagram of Hoi An

We have just a few more days in Vietnam before I go home: Today in Hanoi, and then the next two in Halong Bay. But let me catch you up on our trip in Vietnam so far.

We spent a couple of days in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, seeing the few sights around there. It's a crazy, intense, dirty, underdeveloped city. I tried to imagine it was once great and stately, but it's in such disrepair it's hard to picture. We saw some of the memorials/museums dedicated to the genocide, which were educational but horribly depressing. The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek were an execution site out of town, and the Tuol Sleng Museum was an old torture and interrogation prison. I'll talk more about those in a later post.

After Phnom Penh it was onto Vietnam. We trucked straight through the border and Saigon, heading straight to the lovely beach town of Mui Ne for a bit of chill out time. It was great to have just a couple days to relax at the beach right in the middle of our trip (and after crazy Cambodia). The beach was gorgeous, and we also ended up renting a scooter to see some of the nearby sand dunes, of which there were both red and white. Renting a scooter/motorbike in Vietnam is only for the experienced or the foolhardy. You can guess which one we were. Still, it was fun, and we didn't crash!

From Mui Ne we traveled 17 hours by bus up to Hoi An, on the central coast. Hoi An is an old trading port that was active until the French colonialists came in and moved the port to Danang, which is about an hour north by car. The old town of Hoi An is cute and sweet, and clearly a big tourist draw. It's very nice, but there's not a lot of sights to see, so we spent a lot of our time wandering the little lanes and alleys and eating a lot, which was great because Hoi An is known for its food as well. We skipped out on seeing the Cham ruins at My Son because it was so hot while we were there, and sitting in the sun on the back of a motorbike for an hour just didn't sound like fun. Plus we're sort of ruins-ed out after Angkor Wat and we need SOMETHING to see when we come back.

And now we're in Hanoi. We caught a flight up here yesterday rather than endure another looooong and overnight bus journey again -- we would've arrived just a few hours ago this morning instead of having yesterday afternoon and evening to explore. I like Hanoi already, and so does Haisun. It feels like we're finally in real Vietnam, after the beach paradise of Mui Ne and tourist-focused Hoi An. We spent yesterday evening walking around the Old Quarter, eating food from stalls and drinking bia hoi -- basically a cup of cheap beer from a keg -- on little plastic stools on the sidewalk. Think like really cheap beer garden.

Anyway, time to get started on our adventures for today!

Pictures!

Ayuthaya: Wat Phra Si Sanphet

Koh Chang: Lonely Beach

Siem Reap: Angkor Wat

Phnom Penh: Royal Palace

3 Days at Angkor Wat

Haisun and I are leaving early tomorrow morning for the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, after 3 days and 4 nights in Siem Reap. I have to confess I really like Cambodia so far, so we'll see how things hold up during our next two days in the country. On the 5th we go to Vietnam, to hit up Mui Ne, Hoi An, Hanoi, and Halong Bay.

For the last three days we have been traveling by bike or tuk tuk to various temples and ruins of Angkor. Our first day was Angkor Wat itself, most of Angkor Thom, Ta Keo, and Ta Phrom. Ta Phrom, which looks like it's straight out of Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones, was probably my favorite of all. The rainforest has started to dramatically reclaim the temple, with trees growing through the structures and moss covered ruins everywhere. For day two we took a tuk tuk to the further out Kbal Spean with the River of a Thousand Lingas (a beautiful carved riverbed, 2km into the jungle) and the pinkish sandstone temple Banteay Srei. Banteay Srei and The Bayon in Angkor Thom tie for second, as both are really beautiful, with Banteay Srei's intricate carvings and The Bayon's impressive 216 faces of the king. Today (day 3) we headed out on bikes again to Preah Khan, one of the largest complexes and somewhat similar to Ta Phrom in jungley-ness, and saw the Terrace of the Elephants and Terrace of the Leper King at Angkor Thom. Whew.

That's enough ruins and temples for us for now. We're planning on going the educational route in Phnom Penh and visiting some museums on the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian history and art. I've really enjoyed our stay in Siem Reap, though, and very glad we rented bikes two of the days to get around. The countryside here is really beautiful, and it's great to see it a little bit slower than speeding by on a tuk tuk. We've witnessed some gorgeous sunsets and a thousand other amazing sights. (You'll see when I post the pictures...)