Really crappy start to Hanoi, unfortunately. I got off the bus and pushed past the hotel touts, set off walking to find a hotel from a list of guidebook recommendations. Like anything, though, when you're actually looking for them, you can't find one. Hanoi doesn't have a backpacker ghetto like Bangkok, Saigon, and many other cities do. After a long time - it was about 6am, and I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since the afternoon before - I found a hotel, but it was booked full. It was a really nice street, though, and although the hotel next door wasn't listed in any of the guidebooks, it looked okay. So I went in, checked the price, and went up to have a look at the room. $10, included hot water and a/c. Seemed fine, so I handed over my passport (that's the check-in procedure in Vietnam) and agreed to stay.

Ugh. Mistake. There was no remote for the a/c, so I called the front desk. The creep explained that there was an extra charge if I wanted to use the a/c. (He suddenly had this smarmy "I gotcha" thing going on.) I told him we agreed on $10 and I'd pay $10 or I was leaving. He brought up his register book and was pointing to lists of people who'd paid the extra charge, as if that meant something. I told him to give me my passport. Finally, he backed down and said he'd waive the a/c fee. He handed over the remote to the a/c (and the television). I went back up.

So, of course, the a/c didn't actually work, and for good measure, the television was making a loud buzzing sound on every channel, and there was grime all over the bathroom, table, and chair, which in my sleepy state I'd failed to investigate. I flipped out, went downstairs and told him to give me my passport. He said I had to pay for half a day's use of the room. I refused, and we argued. But he had my passport locked in a safe, so there was nothing I could do. That handing over the passport thing sucks, because it eliminates all leverage that you, the guest, have. I knew from walking around that there weren't any police in the neighborhood, and unlike Thailand, where the Tourist Police are the toughest cops in the country and all of the hotels are terrified of them, the police in Vietnam don't care about tourists. I told him he had to give me working a/c and television or it was in legal violation of our agreement, and the police would pay attention to that. (Bluff on my part, but it basically worked.) It took that loser more than half an hour to go from room to room in that dump to find a working television, to find a room with (barely) working a/c, and to bring the television in there. I went to sleep, furious, and made a reservation for tomorrow at the recommended hotel down the street. When I left for the day, I did have the good fortune to run into five backpackers who were about to walk in there, and told them to stay away. So that helped my mood.

(ED: In retrospect, I should have just given him the $5. I had lost perspective by then.)

The other hotel is very nice, though. I think tomorrow will be a better day. I'll go see the embalmed Ho Chi Minh in a glass case, making the second Communist leader-in-a-box I've seen (after Lenin in Moscow), and in the afternoon, I have a ticket to Water Puppet theater, which everyone loves. The day after that is kayaking and sleeping on a boat in Ha Long Bay, supposedly the natural wonder of Vietnam, and then back to Hanoi for a night before the flight to Bangkok on Thursday.

(This internet cafe is a dirty hole in the wall and reeks of cigarettes, but it's like 20 cents an hour!)

I had a random brief conversation with a Vietnamese guy who said he was from Wisconsin a few days ago. I like how, in America, nobody is necessarily a foreigner - anybody can be from anywhere.

(You know what else is awesome about America? Everybody gets charged the same price for things. Even though the "foreigner price" is rarely very expensive here, it's usually double or triple the "local price", for everything from food to tickets to museums and historical monuments. We'd never do that at home.)

I'm at the nicer hotel now. Check-out from the dump was easy enough. They wanted to pull a trick with the minibar (e.g. charge me for drinks that were supposedly missing), but I saw it coming and told them I'd taken photos of the minibar right after I checked in and right after I checked out, so they let that one lie. (Kind of funny, though - drinks in minibars in Vietnam are cheaper than they are on the street. I think they're unfamiliar with the concept.) I'm paying way more for this hotel than any other on the trip - $17 - but that does include a good buffet breakfast, a palatial room, and open-the-front-door-for-you service. (Also laundry. I was at the end of my shirts.)

Couldn't get in to see the Ho Chi Minh Box, though, as the mausoleum is apparently closed on Mondays. (Lonely Planet = wrong on this one.) So I'll have to check that out early Thursday morning before I fly back to Bangkok. The water puppet theater was dope, as I'd thought it would be. I have a couple of good videos. I couldn't follow the story, but I doubt anyone in the audience could. (Seemed to be about how some fish are hard to catch, and dragons spit water at each other except for times when they spit fireworks instead, and there were some boats, and a giant turtle.)

Tomorrow night, I'm sleeping on a boat on Ha Long Bay, so I don't think I'll be able to check in.

I'm back in Hanoi, catching the flight back to Bangkok this afternoon. It was a beautiful old wooden junk, very comfortable - we sailed for a few hours, and then set anchor at sea, surrounded by small islands, like the scales on the back of a dragon ("long" means "dragon"), and slept.

(ED: more news from the Western world: a friend wrote to me about the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, which had just happened.)

I hadn't heard about the college shooting - I was away from television and the internet for a few days. There are a couple of Asian English-language news channels at my current hotel, though, and they're covering it extensively. A lot of the coverage seems to be about whether Asian students in the US are going to suffer some kind of backlash as a result. Personally, I'm more concerned about what this will mean for creative writing students. They have it hard enough already.

I'm off to see the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh this morning, allowing me to check off the #3 spot on the Dead Communist Leaders In Boxes list. (I can't say when I'll be able to get to China for #2, though.)

You raise a great point about Kim Il-Sung. I did some research, and he is apparently on view in Pyongyang; also, there are apparently only four Dead-Leaders-in-Boxes in total. (I read a great book by the son of the guy who came up with the process to embalm Lenin. I think he said that a lot of those Eastern Bloc dictator fuck-heads went for the embalming, too, but as the upkeep was expensive and everyone hates those guys now, they were allowed to rot. Stalin got the leader-in-a-box treatment too - Google around and you can find a supremely creepy spy photo of him lying next to Lenin. But then they buried his ass in concrete.)

So Lenin is tops-in-a-box, and Mao is second, but there's room for debate about who's third. The personality cult around Kim Il-Sung is more intense than Ho Chi Minh's, who is beloved but is portrayed as a folksy grandfather in his own country, not a living god. And Kim gets extra points because his country is still communist, whereas Vietnam has quietly gone proto-capitalist like China. But Ho has the iconography of the war behind him, which is of incalculable value, and he gets more visitors because he's not in fucking Pyongyang. So I'd give the third spot to Ho, but I'd be interested in your opinion.

Ho's tomb, by the way, was nearly identical to Lenin's. It's grey on the outside and doesn't have the same pyramid shape, but inside, the design is exactly the same, and they're both bathed in this eerie rose-colored light. Russians still handle the corpse-maintenance for them, so maybe they did the design, too. Both men are short, kind of waxy, and appear to be sleeping with a mild discomfort.

You're right about the way history plays out, and how plans at the time don't necessarily account for it. In all of the talk about the domino effect, nobody seems to have considered that communism simply doesn't work as an economic philosophy, and that - much moreso than a war - would be what kept it from taking over the world. Vietnam and Laos were among the poorest countries in the world (Laos still is) until they started moving back toward capitalism. North Korea probably spends 25% of its GDP on the Kim Il Sung box. Obviously, there are other reasons for Cambodia's ongoing struggles, but their economy was completely erased by communism. Nobody embraces that which does not work. And that which is simple and obvious now completely escaped the grand theorists of the past.

Not that anyone told Natan Sharansky and his book club.

Orangutans go ape for iPads, gorillas not so much

Now the orangutans' keeper, Trish Khan, lets the orangutans play with the iPad about twice a week. The orangutans are not allowed to hold it because they are so strong that they would probably wind up cracking it in half. Khan holds it up to their cages and allows them to interact with it."

I think it is absolutely critical that we learn how every kind of ape feels about the iPad.

Also, in case anybody was concerned, the elderly chimpanzee named Cheeta who starred in the Tarzan movies and died last week was not the elderly chimpanzee named Cheeta who starred in the Tarzan movies and became the world's greatest living painter. That was a different elderly chimpanzee named Cheeta who starred in the Tarzan movies. (In a sense, if we can indulge in some post-modernism here, it seems that every elderly chimpanzee named Cheeta starred in the Tarzan movies.)

Instead of painting, this particular chimpanzee seems to have dedicated his retirement to throwing poop, and far be it from me to suggest that is anything other than a totally worthwhile pursuit. Certainly more useful than anything I've been up to lately.

Happy New Year!

Crappy bus ride last night. They subsidize the cost of these (cheap) tickets, as I think I mentioned, by getting kick-backs from restaurant stops along the way and the hotel they drop you off at. (You don't have to stay there, but since it's 5:30am and you want to stumble into a real bed, you tend to be amenable to the first decent room on offer.) Last night, they did a 45 minute restaurant stop at 11:30pm. Everyone had been asleep by then, and falling asleep had taken a lot of work in those chairs. So, having to wake up for a "break" put the mood of a mute riot in the air. Everyone ignored the restaurant, of course. There was a ferocious mutual sulk between the passengers and the restauranteurs.

I'm in Hue now, about four hours north of Hoi An, still around the center of Vietnam. I didn't have internet access last night. The hotel shut everything off at 10:30pm. I was cranky as hell this morning, because the girls at the hotel offered to call the bus company and arrange for a pickup at the hotel, which was nice - but they screwed up the time. It was an 8:00am bus, and they told me the bus would pick me up at the hotel at 7:50am. Fair enough. But they actually meant 7:15am, so I couldn't shower or get dressed or eat or pack properly (because I didn't know about the error until 7:10am). And I was annoyed, because the bus station was five minutes away - why in the hell would I want to be picked up 45 minutes early for a bus station that I could walk to within five minutes? They didn't even manage to properly confirm the seat - me and the other two travelers from the hotel had to take the hotel's van to the bus station anyway, where we were the last people on the bus, and I squeezed in next to a laser-printer box in the only seat that was left. (Seats are supposed to be assigned.)

Not a fascinating story, I admit, but I had to tell it because it irritated me. All things considered, though, that's about the worst travel problem I've had in my month-plus trip, so I'm doing fine. The bus ride was two hours quicker than expected, even with an unnecessary 15 minute stop and a stop to change a tire (!) after about an hour.

I need to find a hotel in Hue. It's raining, which is revolutionary. Part of the reason I'm ahead of schedule on this trip is that I haven't lost any time to weather - it rained the very first morning I was in Bangkok, while I was sleeping, and nothing but sun ever since. It's nice to see the rain.

I'll be here for a couple of days, and then a fourteen hour bus ride to Hanoi. (Oh, my poor, poor ass.)

You're my only email tonight; I'm exhausted, and I'll probably fall asleep right after I write this. Today was sort of emblematic of the whole trip through Vietnam: hours of annoyance with a handful of moments that made it all worthwhile (mostly).

I did a tour of the former DMZ (demilitarized zone), the area that was supposed to be a buffer between North and South Vietnam, and which inevitably wound up having the most fighting.

Unfortunately, it's one of those places that you can't really go by yourself - you have to go with a tour group - and there were 34 people (not including the driver) in 30 seats, so you can imagine how comfortable that was. The bus was a rattle-trap. (It finally broke down about a mile away from our hotel at the end of the day, so I walked the rest of the way back.) And when you get that many strangers crushed in so closely together, inevitably, tempers flare. My temper was fine - I spaced out with my iPod most of the time - but there were a bunch of Israelis who were really, really loud and kept ignoring requests from the rest of the bus to keep their voices down, so there wound up being a shouting match over it. (One of the Israelis compared the bus to Nazi Germany, which is how you know things have gotten weird.)

But in the midst of all that ass-pain, sweat (barely functional a/c, of course) and ill will, there were acres of achingly gorgeous rice paddies - you've never seen such green - and another trip through man-made tunnels, these ones big enough to walk through without squatting, and unlike the first set of tunnels, near Saigon, when we visited these ones, we skipped the "museum" and spent the whole time clambering through the tunnels. It was claustrophobic as hell and totally cool. Finally emerging into overcast daylight to see the South China Sea was a beautiful sight.

(ED: A friend in the U.S. emailed to let me know that Kurt Vonnegut had died.)

I'm glad I heard it from you. I'm at a hotel in Vietnam, near the former DMZ, and there is a maniacal Vietnamese four-year old running around behind me. I don't think he was going to bring it up.

Yeah, I miss the man, and I can feel the shape of his absence from the world.

We'll hold a memorial ceremony on the site of the old Evanston Barnes and Noble at the end of the month. I'll bring the mustard gas; please bring the roses.

Tomorrow, I'll check out the Imperial Citadel (this was the old capital of Vietnam) and then catch the 5pm bus to Hanoi.

Let me tell you, I am committed to breakfast like a tofu scramble. I just show up every now and then with a random blend of spices and various ingredients that suggest other ingredients without arriving at them completely. Well, here's the latest serving.

I got married in November. Since then, pretty much everyone I have met, from friends to receptionists, has begun a conversation by asking how married life is treating me. I was initially tired of answering that question, but then I came to see it as a means of spreading absurd, slanderous lies that will eventually make their way back to K., my wife, and outrage her. (She is at her most adorable when she is outraged; poor woman.) But for you, I reserve the truth. Married life is not so different from co-habitating, or co-habitating with a mortgage, except in two critical respects: we are not saving money for anything in particular, and I find way more lint in my belly button than I did back then. This latter development is particularly bizarre, because my weight has not changed at all since the wedding, and while I have bought new undershirts since then, they are tight and white, almost certainly not capable of generating lint in these quantities.

Hence, I think it is only reasonable to assume that my wife is planting lint in my belly button while I sleep, in accordance with some bizarre pagan mind-control ritual that she learned while growing up in the suburbs. This is why I was always warned about suburban women.

It's January 2011, and I am still publishing this nonsense.

If you are like me, you are often barely paying attention to the world around you, but you snap to attention whenever there is a monkey. For much of the summer, these commercials were running on television, and I could not figure out what they were for, because I was never paying attention for the first twenty seconds. I would usually become aware as this chimp in a white sequined Evel Knievel jumpsuit strode into the upper left-hand corner of the frame, which was otherwise filled by parked cars. The announcer would say, "Oh, wait...there's a monkey." The chimp would press down the switch on one of those boxes commonly associated with dynamite, and glitter would rain down on the cars. Possibly the last couple of seconds would explain what the commercial was for, but I was always agog, and never able to capture that information.

It was very confusing. (It has been a confusing summer. I have a beard?) I kept searching Google for things like "ape with explosive device" and "chimpanzee glitter bomb anarchy" and found nothing useful at all.

Then it got fucking weird because the chimp became invisible. The same commercial was running, but now the announcer would say "Oh, wait...there's an invisible monkey." And the jumpsuit would come striding out there, but there was nobody in it.

It was around this time that I sent out all those inquiries about where NASA is with regard to a moon base, because I have had it with life on Earth if chimpanzee glitter bomb anarchy has gone into stealth mode. (If you are reading this from NASA, fuck you for not returning my emails. See if I write back next time you're losing sleep over whether some asteroid really does look like Sean Connery.)

Well, anyway, good news, sort of, because the chimp did not disappear on its own — it was disappeared by PETA.

(LA Times) On Dodge's website they explained how after just two e-mails alerting them about the mistreatment that animals often suffer in order to make commercials, they decided to change their spot. They wrote how they were unaware about the bad practices that some animals endure to be trained for ads. "We were saddened to learn this, and in the spirit of Dodge we wanted to take action. We decided to take the spot off the air, and we stopped a full-page newspaper spread from running. Dodge is firmly committed to never using great apes in our advertisements again. We released a new commercial. The footage is identical, only this time you won't see Suzie."

PETA let us know that they were happy with the "invisible monkey."

That link has video of both versions of the commercial, which as it turns out is for some trucks.

I understand PETA's reasoning — abusive training practices, social isolation, and all that. Bad stuff. Lord knows I don't enjoy being in show business, shame to subject chimps to this nonsense. Keeping apes out of advertising is good for chimps in general, but a bit rough for Suzie in specific, as she is now unemployed and will have to find some other line of work. (Perhaps in an office.) You can prevent other chimps from being trained, but you can't prevent Suzie from having been trained.

What fills the space? What do you see when you see an invisible monkey?

If you are like me, you often wonder what monkeys would do in various situations, but you also wonder what specific monkeys are up to these days, ones you haven't seen or heard about in a while. I had some inkling that the chimp from MVP: Most Valuable Primate and MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate had a new series coming out on HBO, but it turns out that's actually Steve Buscemi, so I was pleased to learn that, instead, the chimp has a cushy retirement ahead of him.

(Oakland Tribune) Before they started swinging from ropes and munching on popcorn and raisins at the Oakland Zoo, Bernie and Eddie had careers in television and movies.

Bernie, 16, and Eddie, 20, have over the past few months been integrated with Oakland's one male and four females. Eddie has become the peacekeeper in the group; Bernie had a little trouble with the lone male, Moses, at the beginning; the two now seem to be warming up to each other, zoo officials said.

It sounds like there might have been a fabricated biting incident, but it's all sorted out now.

(Obviously, we don't talk about MXP: Most Xtreme Primate on this website. It is non-canonical. Don't even bring it up.)

So here's hoping Suzie has a pension plan, and has not borrowed against her pension for more glitter bombs. I know how tempting that is.

(AP) North Korea appears to have added Facebook to the social networking sites it recently joined to ramp up its propaganda war against South Korea and the U.S.

Its profile picture is of the Three Charters for National Reunification Memorial Tower, a 100-foot (30-meter) monument in Pyongyang that "reflects the strong will of the 70 million Korean people to achieve the reunification of the country with their concerted effort," according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

I assume this is the account in question, but it's a fan page, not a profile, suggesting that the poor bastard in charge of North Korea's social media presence wised up and converted the profile into a fan page, possibly in response to his entire family being sent to labor camps. Of course, if you look at the fan page, said poor bastard is probably at a labor camp too, as the wall has been overrun with photos like this.

He was probably pretty happy to get transferred from the Department of Agriculture, which is widely known as the worst job in North Korea because if Kim Jong Il's fatherly love is not fertilizing the crops then it is your fault. But, as it turns out, running social media for the Hermit Kingdom is a mook's game, too.

(Like soccer. Bad scene, everybody's fault.)

I'm in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, as it's now officially named). The trip from Cambodia was easy and about four hours less than I was expecting. Usually, these bus companies make up for the low ticket price by getting a commission from unnecessary stops at restaurants along the way (and a hotel at the end), but that didn't happen with this one. And there was virtually no line at the border.

The main Thailand / Cambodia border crossing is a widely-renowned shithole, but the Cambodia / Vietnam border was easy. Immigration at land crossings are interesting, compared to airports. There's usually just one guy, and he is the king of that little kingdom. There are no laws except those which he chooses to recognize. The guy at the Vietnam crossing, for example, was standing next to the 'No Smoking' sign with a cigarette. (At an airport, if some immigration official went off the rails, you could take a step back and appeal to someone in another line, and there's probably a manager on the premises as well.)

It costs $20 to get a visa into Cambodia. The federal government posted a sign with the cost at the border office, which frustrates the border officials, because in the past, they could charge whatever they wanted, and it's not like you had somewhere else you could go. Now, they try to get you to pay in Thai money instead - 1000 baht, which works out to close to $30 - and then they can keep the extra $10. I met a couple of indie kids from Omaha, so we did that leg of the trip together, and we all insisted on paying the proper $20, so the immigrations guy stewed and told us "it's longtime three hours", even though there was nobody else there, although he hinted we could expedite the whole thing with an extra 100 baht apiece. The weather wasn't bad, so we just sat and waited, and reveled as more travelers arrived and refused to pay the extra fee. (Only two people folded - they got theirs in three minutes.) Finally, after two hours or so, somebody brought the immigration guy's lunch, so he handed out our visas so he could eat in peace.

Vietnam was different - the visa was paid for before we hit the border, so it was just a process of checking them in and then getting bags x-rayed (although not pockets or body, leading me to wonder what the point was) and then heading onward. The Cambodian and Vietnamese visas are both full-page stickers (with stamps on the preceding page). I only have three blank pairs of pages left. I've been living well!

I'm happy here so far. The internet connection is all right, and cheap; food was fine, and cheap as well. The hotel room is probably the nicest I've had thus far, and my first since Bangkok to have hot water (although no pool, which the Bangkok one did have). It costs $10 or 160,000 dong a night. I have five currencies in my wallet right now. Again, I must be living well. (You would not believe how old and scummy the Cambodian paper bills are. It's awesome.) The best thing about Vietnam is that the words for "thank you" are pronounced "come on". I really enjoy that.

Going to the Cu Chi tunnels tomorrow. They are meant for people much shorter than me.

I fired an AK-47 today. I'd been satisfied after the M-16 episode in Cambodia, but there was this clearing near the tunnels where they were selling bullets for about $1.30 apiece (minimum purchase five), and I suddenly felt two things:

1. Gratitude, because I'd been going through these jungles where actual combat took place, and the sound of those machine guns in the distance had added a big chunk of verisimilitude to the whole experience;
2. Scholarly duty, because during the war, Americans used M-16s, and the Vietcong used AK-47s, so I thought this would help me see both sides. (They both made my shoulder hurt.)

So I bought five bullets and put them to use. As it turns out, firing the AK-47 was very loud (no headphones provided), kicked pretty hard against my shoulder (same as the M-16), and jammed up every couple of shots (unlike the M-16). I didn't get a target sheet, so I don't know how my accuracy compared.

All in all, I understand G.I. Joe and Cobra a little better now.

Anyway, I'm done with guns now, unless someone offers me a rocket launcher for, say, under $10 a pop. (I may go as high as $15, but you have to start these negotiations low.) A few years ago, when Cambodia was way, way out of control, you could get a combo deal on a cow and a shell for a rocket launcher - you blow up the cow, the locals get to keep the meat. Now, Cambodia is only way out of control, so there is no blowing up of cows, as far as I could tell. (Not that I would have!)

It's funny to read you saying that there are "rumors floating around". I'm sure none of them involve me in the Vietnam jungle firing off Soviet assault rifles. It is a fine thing when the truth of one's life is stranger than the fiction by such a margin.

My legs are in trouble, sad to say. Those tunnels were not meant for me. (That was the whole point of why they built them that way, actually.) The long bus rides haven't been doing them any favors either, I guess. But we're invincible until we're 30, right? I thought that was the biological deal. I'm assuming I'll be better when I wake up. Tomorrow I'm going to try to tackle Saigon itself, and then the day after that, I'm off to the Mekong Delta (big river) and probably out of contact for a couple of days.

I haven't written much about my own reaction to all of this for two reasons. One is training as a writer - when doing sociological field research, we were always supposed to take tons of notes, ideally, immediately thereafter - professors had wild statistics like that you lose 65% of the detail of an experience by the next day. I think that's true, actually, although maybe not to that extent - but once you form your emotional reaction to an experience, you do start discarding the things that don't contribute directly to the narrative of that reaction. So if you want a rich story, get all of the details down first, and figure out what you think about them later - there's always time for that. Admittedly, while I know that's a good idea, I'm totally undisciplined about taking proper notes. I wish I would. But, yeah, the first time you hear about something from me, you just hear the details. I am the invisible voyager in the things I do.

Also, when you're alone for this long, a silence does come over you, and you get used to observing things and storing them away for later instead of reacting to them right there and then. I like stumbling across my own reaction to places I've been, sometimes a few months later - it comes as a surprise, but that's one of the things I like about travel, discovering the shape the experience has taken in my memory.

So there's that.

The morning trip was to the head temple of Cao Dai, a religion (12 million followers, mostly Vietnamese) which is a mish-mash of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, but also has a strong Catholic influence (Jesus was floating above the altar, a notch below Buddha, right next to Confucius), floating eyeballs (like on the back of the dollar bill), and holds Victor Hugo (French author of Les Miserables) as one of its Three Major Saints, with Thomas Jefferson as one of the minor saints.

The temple was totally surreal. I got to see about twenty minutes of their mass, which was mostly just chanting and bowing. Unfortunately, nobody was really on hand to explain any of it. It's a serious religion, but I don't think I've ever been in a stranger building. It was a brief but exhilarating experience. I have high hopes for those photos.

The afternoon was the tunnels. I was disappointed there, overall. The place was definitely for real - the Vietnamese army still trains around there - but as a visitor, there was way too much being led around (above-ground) and being shown cheap models and mannequins, and not enough independent wandering. (Although, as I said, 100 meters in those pitch-black tunnels had my legs fucked.)

We had to sit through a video beforehand that would have been hysterically funny if a friend were along - think those clumsy, heavily-narrated black-and-white WWII newsreel clips about heroic GIs smashing Nazi Germany, but swap Vietnamese villagers for the GIs and "Americans" for Nazi Germany. "American Killer Hero!" chirped the Vietnamese Troy McClure over an image of a short, smiling woman in one of those pointy hats. "She is three times American Killer Hero." The woman smiles and waves.

If you're alone, that's just funny (and vaguely offensive), but if you have a friend to award "American Killer Hero!" for the rest of the day, it becomes a great day.

Let's see. About helmets on motorbikes - my hired driver for Angkor Wat had a helmet for me, although he wasn't wearing one himself. Otherwise, no, for those cross-town taxi-moto rides, nobody involved had a helmet on. I don't think anyone can really afford them, to be honest. It is interesting how much of the traffic in all three countries has been motorbikes, though. Bangkok is rich enough to have a fair number of cars, but everywhere else has been almost exclusively motorbikes. One of the moto drivers in Phnom Penh nearly shit himself when he heard that I used to have a car. (They also had a really out-sized understanding of how much money a teacher makes, but then, so did the Japanese.)

The driver, by the way, immediately started laying out a payment plan whereby, that very day, I would buy him one of those cycles with the carts attached to the back (doubles the fares you can charge) and he would have my investment paid off within ten months. He'd gone through the month-by-month returns for the whole ten months before I could stop him.

I've been in cities, mostly, I guess - although there's a vast difference between the wealth of a city in Thailand and one in Cambodia. (I'm hesitant to bring Vietnam into the comparison, because I haven't been around enough yet.) Even Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, was fairly beat up - like the ghetto of a rust-belt town like Detroit or Cleveland. Staying overnight in the Thai border town was pretty interesting - very, very dusty, small lizards wandering in and out of the hotel room - and I did get to some small villages in Cambodia, because my driver was keen to take me around. They've had internet cafes everywhere because it's a way to make money. You can have ox-carts and cracked pavement outside, but tourists have money and tourists want internet, so you get the internet before you upgrade from ox-cart to pick-up truck.

I had a really ugly experience with a cyclo driver in Saigon. When we met, he broke out a big notebook full of positive comments from people who'd taken tours with him in the past - it should have raised a red flag that none of the comments were from later than spring '03, but I went ahead with it anyway, because I didn't know where the hell I was going, and he seemed friendly. (And I'd had such a great time with my driver in Angkor.)

He drove for a way, long enough to get me out of familiar territory and to a deserted side street, and then pulled over and asked for payment (plus tip plus "extra help") up front because he'd borrowed some money and he needed to pay it back right then or something bad would happen. He was getting freaked out and on the verge of panic and violence. I kept my cool, stayed firm and defused the situation, but it was nasty.

I should go. Here's hoping my legs allow me to stand up from this chair.

(I'm aware that the nature of the event changed years ago, but there's a part of me that's still 14 and cannot fathom why the Soup Nazi from "Seinfeld" is at ComiCon.)

Here is a letter I have never received:

Dear clever man on the Internet,

I am directing a production of Hamlet, and I need to come up with a daring new interpretation of the play. I do not have time to alter the text, so I need something that uses all of the original words, but is still daring and new. The Shakespeare in the Park guys are doing a production of Othello that's either set in the water reclamation district or a gourmet kitchen (they haven't decided which), so they have reserved all of the modern dress in town, and the other theater is doing Macbeth set in a salsa dancing class, so there is no modern dress for me to use. As you can see, then, my options are quite limited. (Obviously, doing the play as it was written is not an option, as the other directors will laugh at me.) Please give me a daring new interpretation of Hamlet that nobody has ever done before. I will do nothing whatsoever for you in return.

Sincerely,
A famous cutting-edge director

I am happy to oblige. Here are the five words you need:

"Hamlet is cool with it."

In this daring new interpretation, Hamlet has always liked Claudius, and is happy to see his mother get together with him. Shame about Dad, of course, but what are you going to do? The appearance of the ghost serves to reinforce the point that nothing can bring Hamlet down. Everyone enjoys his incessant gibberish; it is a nice pick-me-up, what with all of the death lately. Various of Hamlet's college friends — Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern — are summoned to the palace to enjoy Hamlet's goofy antics. (During the "to be or not to be" speech, he is making a silly monkey face and trying to decide whether his monkey impression is ready to go, or whether he should practice it some more.)

The text will support you in all of this. Actors may have to say certain lines in a sarcastic tone of voice, or wink as they speak. But people do that sort of thing.

The Murder of Gonzago is enacted in order to let Claudius know that even if he had killed the king, which everyone knows he'd never actually do, it would be fine, because Hamlet likes him that much. Hamlet is giving Claudius a thumbs up throughout all of this.

Ophelia is a cat. She is in heat and goes a bit weird as a result. Polonius is also a cat. Hamlet inadvertently knocks the window open by recklessly stabbing through the curtain, and Polonius escapes through the window. Everyone is sad about that. Ophelia gets neutered and will not stop messing around with her stitches. She must be put to sleep, and everyone is sad about that as well. But Hamlet and Laertes hold a terrifically exciting fencing exhibition, and everyone is roused from their lethargy. They share a drink.

Fortinbras is carrying Polonius as he arrives. (Polonius was up in a tree.) The entire court is pretending to be dead in order to surprise Fortinbras, little suspecting that he has a surprise for them.

(I will not have to explain why we allowed the climate on Earth to get all fucked up; that will be a topic for our children, mainly, the generation for whom there is not yet a sufficient body of cartoons in which this weather and its consequences are commonplace. Our grandchildren will find talk of old weather patterns odd and mildly interesting, like our own grandparents and milkmen and ice deliveries and nickelodeons, as long as we do not go on too long about it.)

No, it is my grandchildren to whom I will have to justify our family's failure to own any portion of an interplanetary mining concern. (Possibly some portion of what remains of my 401(k) will be invested in one, several layers of involvement away from my awareness, just as today.) My grandchildren will wonder how this boundless source of wealth could not have been obvious to me. They'll know that the first space mining flight was followed by others almost immediately, and from there it never stopped — the oil and gold rushes will provide some basis of comparison, in the sense that nobody will remember how many people struck out or died in accidents, only that it resulted in the likes of John D. Rockefeller.

(But it will be a rush without violence; we will be too fragile in outer space to attack each other, and by the time we have grown secure enough for that sort of thing, we will have learned to be civilized about it.)

My grandchildren will say that we could have been rich; they will not be angry about it (they will be, after all, good kids and fond of me, as I am well-suited to grandfatherhood), just puzzled that I had what will appear to them a clear and simple choice when I was a young man: to mine in outer space and become rich, or to not mine in outer space and keep fucking around in offices — and my decision was apparently to keep fucking around in offices.

I will sigh and tell my grandchildren that someone had to stay behind and fight off all the polar bears; those things were mean.

(Right. Well, I brought Milt into this world, and I can take him out again if he's distracting you. Now Milt has gone to live with a nice farm family, where he plays in the field all day long, but it is too far away for you to visit.)

Now you are only concerned with me, and not Milt.

I want to get back to the story of this intense phone call. You could tell this was serious business, because only one button separated you from speaking to an operator, and there was no hold time. A middle-aged lady answered, sounding very much like a woman who worked in the principal's office at school, and, somewhat brightly at first with an undertone of disappointment, asked why I wanted to cancel. I expected a few sales pitches and offers to stay on at a reduced rate, much like I received when I signed up for freecreditreport.com for the sole purpose of blaming my cancellation on that fucking band, but she went a different way.

"You realize you're giving up instant credit alerts," she said, proceeding to rattle off a long list of other features, in ascending order of intensity and critical importance to my well-being.

"Yes, I do," I said.

There was a long pause, and then she said, "Good luck to you," in a tone of disgust and unambiguous forecast of my imminent demise; the moment at which the woman in the principal's office, who has known you since you were a little one, long before you began smoking crack at recess, has finally given up on you.

"Uh, thanks," I said, a bit too surprised to hang up. There was an even longer pause, during which I wondered if the phone call was over. Finally, she spoke.

"Is there anything else?" she said, still disgusted. (I've soiled myself, she implies.)

"No," I said. "So I'm cancelled, then."

"Yes," she said, and hung up.

I was bewildered, and then went on with my day.

We are renewing efforts to fix the comments — or, more accurately, I am renewing my sweet-talk toward Kurt, and Kurt is renewing his efforts to fix them. Thank you, Kurt.

"Manute Bol Goes to Heaven" (from 2002)
All posts tagged "Manute Bol"

Bangkok

I'm in Bangkok. I arrived last night around 1am, and it was 83 degrees outside. Mercifully, it rained early this morning, but the temperature is on the way back up. I am going to be an expert on sweat.

Wish you were here. I'm staying around the corner from the famed Khao San Road, which was a gibbering backpacker chaos at 2am (when I showed up). My backpacks are way, way smaller than anyone else's. It would be good to have you along - not only for the company, but also because probably fewer Thai dudes would be asking me if I wan' lady, boom-boom? (Probably.)

Best pad thai I've ever had, for breakfast: seventy-five cents. Also, there is to be a t-shirt buying frenzy at some point. Among the best shirts I've ever seen for $3-$5.

Still having a good time, although I was probably on the verge of heat stroke yesterday. Bottled water is cheap; I've gone through a ton of it. I meant to take a taxi from my guesthouse to the Grand Palace but, in the process of trying to get clear from the taxi touts who hang out by the guesthouses, accidentally found myself halfway there. So I walked the rest of the way.

I wound up in the National Museum first, which was probably a mistake. It was reasonably interesting (and gigantic - like twenty buildings), but the heat was increasing, and I was already starting to get worn out by the time I finished there.

An amusing phenomenon, as long as you know about it in advance: there are guys who hang out a couple blocks from every major tourist attraction, and they try to start a friendly conversation ("Hey, where are you from?") and then ask where you're going, and then tell you it's closed today (I heard "today is a Buddhist holiday" three times, "the monks need to pray in the morning" once, "your clothes not right" once, and total gibberish to the effect that only Thais could go in once, and a few more who I just ignored), but they could take you on a sightseeing tour...and if you agree, you wind up going to a minor temple somewhere and then to a shop (silk, tailor, jewelry) that has paid them a commission to bring you in. I'd read about it in advance, so it wasn't any bother, just kind of ridiculous. Are they not aware of each other?

The bit about my clothes did have an element of truth, although not in the way the guy meant it - at the Grand Palace, they supply you with long nylon sweatpants to pull over your shorts. Apparently, shorts are disrespectful, but nylon sweatpants are devout. I felt hyper-gross by the time I finished walking around there.

Saw a temple called Wat Pho yesterday afternoon, which has the world's largest reclining Buddha. It's gold, and it was indeed rather large. Probably longer than the one in Nara, although the one in Nara seemed thicker and heavier.

The temple itself was massive, lots of fascinating little statues and giant, basically un-photograph-able structures. (I tried, anyway.) Also took a long boat ride through the canals, with all of those river houses on stilts - some elegant, some barely standing.

Chase strives to piss me off. I'm in Bangkok right now. Last night, from the airport, I withdrew 4000 Baht (which Chase exchanged as $118.29 plus a $3 service charge). I needed to make another withdrawal tonight, but suddenly I can't access my account. (Each of the different Thai bank ATMs gives a slightly different oblique explanation).

I'm assuming this was some stupid fraud flag they threw up. (One withdrawal from Thailand? That's normal. Two withdrawals from Thailand? That's obviously fraud.) Chase Online isn't any help. Please call them (1-800-935-9935 said the site) and ask them why I can't access my account. (The account number is at the bottom of my checks.) If they need information for verification, email me back and let me know what they want. If you can find a tactful way to express that they've really pissed off their customer, you might do that, too, but only after account access has been restored...

Thanks. (Was having a good time until this.)

Sorted. The guy at this internet cafe let me use his phone. Being one of the few white guys who's speaking Thai has its advantages. The Chase guy was a bit of a pissant, and I was none too thrilled about announcing my debit card number, last-four-digits, etc out loud in a public internet cafe, but it's done now. I had to complete the call within six minutes - we agreed 10 baht / minute, and I was down to my last 60 baht - and got it done in three. I had to give the Chase guy the exact date I'm returning to the USA. Never had to do this with Japan, but I guess they don't consider that a high fraud-risk country.

Anyway, back to having fun!

By the way, if you wan' lady boom-boom, I've already met about two hundred guys who would like nothing more than to provide directions to said lady (and corresponding boom-boom). There are, it must be said, certain differences between Evanston and Bangkok.

Today, I'm going to go shopping - see if I can find some new shoes, maybe some new shorts and pants - and then tomorrow I'll probably take off for Lopburi, where I expect I can see some monkeys. Needless to say, exciting.

(ED: In fact, I went to the Bridge on the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi instead, and then to the Tiger Temple, but don't appear to have mentioned it in any emails.)

I had a minor crisis two nights ago, when my bank suddenly put a freeze on my checking account. One withdrawal from Thailand (made at the airport) was cool, as far as they were concerned, but two meant fraud. So I had to get my mother to call them to confirm that's what they did, and then make an international call to tell them to take off the hold. It wasn't a major crisis - I have plenty of US dollars that I'm saving for later in the trip - but still, being in a foreign country with no money is one of those experiences...

I spent the morning training at a muay thai (Thai boxing) gym. I can barely lift my arms, but they don't have to go too far to hit the keys.

There are Family Marts in Bangkok. They have no Crunky ice cream, though.

I went bowling at the mall and although I only hovered around a 150, the whole place was in awe of me. Apparently, nobody in Thailand ever breaks 100.

Out of time on this machine. Hope to hear from you soon.