It was just before 6am when the tuk tuk we’d arranged the night before arrived.  We’d been waiting in the lobby with our bags.  I tossed them in and asked him to take us to the bus station.

We didn’t expect Phonsavanh to be so cold in the morning.  It must have been close to freezing and we were wearing shorts and sandals.  We never went over 30kph, but the tuk tuk was open to the elements and our teeth were chattering when we arrived at the bus station on the outskirts of town.

We showed our tickets and shoved our bags underneath the bus.  Oksana climbed aboard to claim our seats while I looked over the snacks at the station kiosks.  I started up a conversation with the only other tourists in sight.  Derek and Paulien were from the Netherlands and had just traveled through all the same places we’d been, going all the way back to Phuket, in Thailand.  When I asked them if they were going to Vietnam, too, they looked relieved.  It always feels good when you get independent verification about the bus you’re about to get on.

Shortly we were underway, but our driver took us on a tour of Phonsavanh before pointing us in the direction of Vietnam.  By the time we’d arrived at the border, I’d read a few chapters of my dog-eared copy of Kitchen Confidential and watched a movie on my iPhone.

The Laotian side was nothing more than a concrete corridor with a row of windows along one side.  Unaware of the protocol, Derek, Paulien, Oksana and I neglected to add our passports to the stack from our bus, so we were the last to get our exit stamps.  Bringing up the rear, we hefted our bags and hiked across the border.

The immigration office on the Vietnamese side was a different beast altogether.  High-ceilinged and full of echoes, we gawked a bit when we entered.  Instead of the loops and swirls of Laotian, the signage was written in a Roman-derived alphabet. The plentiful and peculiar accent marks were the only clue that one should not pronounce them without first learning more about the language.

Beyond the tall glass doors, a long counter sat in the sunlight.  As we entered, an official behind the desk pointed to a waiting area with rows of airport-style plastic chairs.  I set my bags down in front of one, turned back, and raised my eyebrows.  Here?

He gave a curt nod, made a stamping gesture with his hand, and beckoned me over.  Derek and I walked all four of our passports over.  As soon as they were on his desk, he shoo’d us away.  We walked back to our seats.

Fifteen minutes later, Derek asked if they were just trying to make us sweat.  I wasn’t worried.  Everyone else from our bus was sitting off to the left and they hadn’t received their passports back yet, either.

With nothing to do but wait, I examined the border control station.  The building itself wasn’t falling apart, but neither had it been maintained.  Up near the ceiling, a patch of mold had grown to enormous proportions.  It was as if the jungle outside was reclaiming its territory and had established a beachhead by boring a hole through the wall.

I dropped my gaze to observe the three men behind the desk.  In contrast to the state of the building, their uniforms were immaculate.  Medals, epaulettes, and rank insignia burst with vibrant color.  Creases were crisp, boots shined with a mirror finish, and even the hair beneath their smart peaked caps were cut and parted with military precision.  While I was watching them, the most dour and serious looking one of them all caught my eye.  He snapped his head to the left, summoning me to the counter.  I glanced at my traveling companions, widened my eyes in surprise, and got up.

The officer held my eyes as I approached.  When I reached him, I didn’t know what to say – didn’t even know if he even spoke English.  I simply raised my eyebrows questioningly.

He slid an old piece of paper across the desk.  It had been folded and refolded many times, the edges worn away.  It took me a moment to make out the handwriting, “Would you like to exchange some Laotian Kip for Vietnamese Dong?”

I looked up from the piece of paper.  He raised a single eyebrow.  The corners of my mouth may have twitched, but I held in the smile.  “What exchange rate?” I asked.

He pulled the piece of paper back below the level of the counter and walked over to one of his coworkers.  I waited while they conferred.  He came back, flipped the paper upside down, and wrote, “10,000k = 20,000d.”  It should have been 25,000.  I nodded once, held up my index finger, and returned to my seat to confer with the others.

Derek and Paulein had no Laotian kip left at all, so they were out.  Oksana and I had spent most of the rest of ours loading up on bus snacks, but I did still have 30,000 kip in my pocket.  Normally, we rankle at being cheated on the exchange rate – especially at border crossings, where scams abound – but 30,000 kip is less than four dollars and, well, who knows?  We still hadn’t received our passports back and exchanging some money under the table might just help grease the skids.

I walked back up to the counter and slid the money across.  He counted it out and returned to his fellow officer.  If he was disappointed with how little we had to exchange, it didn’t show.  He came back and handed me 60,000 dong.  I counted it, nodded, and returned to my seat.

A few minutes later, everyone was beckoned to the counter to receive their freshly-stamped passports.  We shouldered our bags again and walked out the other side of the building.  Our bus driver was waiting there for us.

That 60,000 dong didn’t last very long, but it ended up being useful.  We couldn’t find an ATM at our first rest stop in Vietnam, but we were still able to buy a Coke and to pay for a restroom with it.

Transportation

When we crossed the border from Laos to Vietnam, I hadn’t expected to see much of a difference from the road, but there were a couple things that were immediately apparent.

Speed

First, our speed dropped considerably (and in Laos, we weren’t going that fast to begin with!)  The mountain roads in Vietnam, at least on our route, were not in bad shape at all.  Twisty, yes, but they were well-paved and often had guard rails or earthen mounds around some of the more dangerous curves.

Still, the bus slowed to a crawl.  I’d be surprised if our average speed from the border, all the way to Vinh, was any more than 30 miles-per-hour (50kph.)  Much of the reason for this was two-fold.  Narrow roads – that is to say, no passing lanes – and a plethora of scooters.  Scooter drivers did their best to keep to the shoulder, but to pass them, our bus still had to wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic.

Every bus we took in Vietnam arrived late.  Hours late.  It didn’t matter if it was supposed to be a three-hour bus ride or an eleven-hour bus ride; it got to the point where I would mentally prepare myself by doubling whatever travel time was quoted.

Scooters

The second thing I noticed when we crossed the border into Vietnam was, of course, the scooters.  Vietnam is renowned for the number of motorbikes on the road, but up in the mountains, there didn’t seem to be many more than in Laos.  The way they were used, however…

I can’t believe how much a Vietnamese can pile onto a scooter!  I saw contraptions that strapped together stacks of boxes, starting from the rear wheel and climbing up both sides until they towered over the driver.  I saw families of 4 and 5 on the same moped.  I saw some scooters loaded down so heavily that they could only be balanced while moving forward.  Unbelievable as it may sound, scooters are the moving trucks of Vietnam!

Later, in Hanoi and Saigon, the scooters flowed like a river down every street.  There were very few stoplights, and fewer crosswalks still, so if you wanted to walk anywhere, you quickly had to learn how to cross the street.

You can’t wait for a gap in the traffic; with 20 million scooters in Vietnam, there are no gaps in the traffic.  Looking both ways before crossing is useless because as soon as you look away, you can bet another motorcycle will be coming along.  To cross a street in Vietnam, you have to put your trust in the drivers.

It’s simple, really.  So simple, in fact, that I honestly do think you could cross a busy street in Vietnam while blindfolded.  You might still die of a heart attack, but I doubt you’d be hit…

The trick is to just go slow.  You can step off the curve at any time, but you want to be facing into traffic.  Start walking slowly across the street – don’t move in fits and starts, trying to avoid the dozens of scooters going past – just move at a steady pace.  Like magic, the traffic will part around you.

When you reach the middle, simply turn your head to face the traffic coming from the opposite direction; you don’t even need to stop.  Scooters will be zipping by, a foot to your left and a foot to your right, at all times, but as long as you don’t make any surprise movements, the drivers will see you coming and move to avoid hitting you.

I would love to get a birds-eye view of a person crossing a busy Vietnamese street.  I think it would look like rolling a boulder across a river.

Oksana and I rented a scooter in Laos, but we weren’t about to in Vietnam.  The idea of navigating through all that traffic scared the hell out of me.  As scary as it seemed to me, I’m confident that your typical Vietnamese driver would be just as terrified to drive in the United States.  Our rigid rules of the road allow us to drive at much higher speeds and putting them on a Los Angeles freeway at 80 miles-per-hour is likely just as frightening for them as riding in the middle of a hundred scooters is for us.

Sleeper buses

When I heard some of the buses in Vietnam being called “sleeper buses,” I assumed they’d be like the ones we had in Peru, Argentina, and Chile.  There, they were called semi-cama and cama total, semi-bed and full-bed, depending on how far back the seats reclined.

Even though we were traveling during the day, we found ourselves hustled onto a sleeper bus for our trip from Vinh to Hanoi.  Imagine our surprise when we discovered that it was full of bunk beds!  There were three rows of beds stacked above one another.  Oksana was berated at the door because she didn’t take her shoes off before heading down one of the two aisles…

The seats themselves were more like lawn chair recliners than bus seats.  There was no way to put your feet on the floor. In fact the only way to bend your knees at all was to fold your legs and point them up in the air.  The seats were comfortable enough, I suppose, if you’re lucky enough to be shorter than my 5-foot, 12-inch frame.  I couldn’t stretch my legs out for the entire duration of the (double-what-was-quoted) bus ride.

Horns

Vietnam has the most annoying horns I’ve ever heard, and after traveling through 30 countries, that’s really saying something!  There’s one custom job in particular that grated on my nerves every time I heard it.  Try to imagine a fast staccato bleating that starts out loud, and over the course of three or four seconds, fades away to nothing.  BAAA-DAAA-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa.

Because the rules of the road are very loose, and drivers are always jockeying for position, the horns are constantly blaring.  “I’m on your left: BAAA-DAAA-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa.”  “I’m going to pass now: BAAA-DAAA-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa.”  “My taxi is yellow: BAAA-DAAA-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa-daaa.”

Surgical Masks

All over Southeast Asia, you’ll see people wearing surgical masks as they go about their business.  I always assumed it had something to do with an illness – either the person was sick and was doing their selfless part to keep from spreading it, or perhaps they had a touch of hypochondria and worried about catching a bug themselves.  With such a dense population in the cities (not to mention a possible lack of medicine or health care), it seemed a reasonable explanation.

After seeing so many street sweepers, traffic cops, and scooter owners with them, however, I now think it may just be a way to protect the lungs from rampant air pollution from all that exhaust.

Then again, for all I know, it could be an allergen-filter.  Call it the Southeast Asian’s Claritin.

Language

We got into a huge argument with a taxi driver in Vinh.  We asked our hotel to call us a taxi and tell him to take us (Derek, Paulien, Oksana and I) to the bus station.  Everything was going great until we drove right past the bus station.  I tried to tell him, “Um, hey, that’s where we wanted to go,” and he just smiled and nodded.  We all figured it had something to do with one-way streets; maybe he had to throw a U-turn at the light before he could pull into the station.  We knew something was wrong by the time we were another mile or two down the road.  We were all grumbling, but he was still oblivious to our mood when he pulled into the train station.

“No.  No.  Not here.  Bus station.  Bus.”  I was sitting up in the passenger seat, so it fell to me to try to communicate where we wanted to go.  “Bus!  Bus!”  Nowhere else in the world had a taxi driver failed to understand the word ‘bus!’

Lucky for us, a bus drove by and he finally got the message when all four of us started pointing and shouting.  He drove us back to the bus station.

When we finally arrived, however, he demanded the fare on the meter.  Oh, that pissed us off.  I had pointed out the bus station as we went by and he’d ignored me.  We were all giving him signals of confusion and displeasure on the way to the train station, too.  We started to argue about the payment.

We got nowhere.  We couldn’t understand him and he couldn’t understand us.  Actually, that’s not altogether true.  We were able to understand that the receptionist at the hotel told him to take us to the train station, but he wouldn’t understand that we only wanted to pay what the meter had said when we first passed the bus station.

Now, granted, understanding someone who’s speaking a foreign language is a learned skill – it’s a lot like playing charades.  But dammit, he was a taxi driver!  He should have had plenty of practice!  It was like he was willfully ignoring our gestures, not to mention the simple words we were saying.  Oksana was already out of the car, waiting in the rain, when we realized we were vehemently arguing over all of three dollars.  Split two ways.  Paulein and I paid up and slammed his doors on our way out.

I wasn’t mad at him for not understanding us.  I was mad at him for not trying to.

Vietnam was often like that.  People were very hard to understand, more so than in any other country we visited.  It probably comes down to the fact that English was not a language that was really pursued until about 20 years ago (when the Soviet Union fell and Vietnam lost its communist support.)

Any person over the age of 50 or 60 in Vietnam has certainly seen a lot of changes to secondary languages in the country.  From Chinese, to French, to Russian, to English.

Because the U.S. occupied the south for so long, English fluency is often higher in Saigon.  Both hostels we stayed at had receptionists who could hold a conversation.   I asked the girl at the second where she learned her English and she told me, “At the park.”  Turns out she wanted to learn English, so she went to the park every day and talked to tourists.  Not a single formal lesson.  At first, she didn’t understand a word.  That was a year or so ago.  Now she can carry on a conversation about any topic you like.  I was very impressed; perhaps more so because her English was damn near the best I heard in Southeast Asia.

The exception that proves, the rule, I guess.

One morning in Hanoi, I found myself reading about the Vietnamese language in a Lonely Planet guide.  There were too many cool bits that I wanted to share, so rather than trying to summarize, I thought I’d quote a paragraph or seven [boldface is mine]:

The Latin-based quốc ngử script, widely used since WWI, was developed in the 17th century by Alexandre Rhodes […] Quốc ngử served to undermine the position of Mandarin officials, whose power was based on traditional scholarship, [Chinese and Chinese-derivative] scripts that were largely inaccessible to the masses.

The Vietnamese treat every syllable as an independent word, so ‘Saigon’ is spelt ‘Sai Gon’ and ‘Vietnam’ is written as ‘Viet Nam’. Foreigners aren’t too comfortable with this system — we prefer to read ‘London’ rather than Lon Don. This leads to the notion that Vietnamese is a ‘monosyllabic language’, where every syllable represents an independent word. This idea appears to hark back to the Chinese writing system, where every syllable is represented by an independent character and each character is treated as a meaningful word in its own right. In reality, Vietnamese appears to be polysyllabic, like English. However, writing systems do influence people’s perceptions of their own language, so the Vietnamese themselves will insist that their language is monosyllabic — it’s a debate probably not worth pursuing.

PRONUNCIATION

Most of the names of the letters of the quốc ngử alphabet are pronounced like the letters of the French alphabet. Dictionaries are alphabetised as in English except that each vowel/tone combination is treated as a different letter.

Most of the consonants of the Romanised Vietnamese alphabet are pronounced more or less as they are in English with a few exceptions. Vietnamese doesn’t use the English letters ‘f’, ‘j’, ‘w’ and ‘z’.

TONES

The hardest part of studying Vietnamese for Westerners is learning to differentiate between the tones. There are six tones in spoken Vietnamese. Thus, every syllable in Vietnamese can be pronounced six different ways. For example, depending on the tones, the word ma can be read to mean ‘phantom’, ‘but’, ‘mother’, ‘rice seedling’, ‘tomb’ or ‘horse’.

The six tones of spoken Vietnamese are represented by five diacritical marks in the written language (the first tone is left unmarked). These should not be confused with the four other diacritical marks that are used to indicate special consonants and vowels.

The following examples show the six different tone representations:

~Lonely Planet Vietnam, 9^th Edition

Scams

One night in Luang Prabang, we were going over our Vietnam plans in a bar.  An American couple overheard and decided to share with us their recent experiences in the country.  To hear them tell it, they were scammed at every opportunity.  Eventually, they got fed up, cut their trip short, and fled back to Laos, even though it cost them a couple hundred dollars extra to do so.  They had horror stories about being taken for a ride in Halong Bay, about being sold bus tickets that only took them half way to their destinations, and about being short-changed with every monetary transaction.  Their story was bad enough to make us seriously consider skipping Vietnam altogether.

Fortunately, I bounced that idea off my Facebook friends, and many of them wrote back about the wonderful experiences they’d had in the country.   It was enough to convince us to go, though you can bet we went in with our eyes wide open.

We ended up pleasantly surprised (although that may only have been because we went in expecting it to be as bad as Egypt.)  We did notice a lot of the penny ante bullshit that comes with being a tourist.  Inflated prices, cab drivers taking the long way around, those sorts of things.  We may have paid a bit more than we should have from time to time, but I don’t think we were ever outright scammed.  (That taxi incident in Vinh really was an honest mistake.)

Of course, after traveling for a year, Oksana are I were seasoned travelers.  We knew a two-day Halong Bay cruise could be had for under $50 each, but after hearing what that American couple had to put up with, we opted to pay a $120 “non-negotiable” price for a set tour from our hotel.  (I put “non-negotiable” in quotes because we actually got them to knock $10 off the price – matching a cheaper tour we wanted that was already booked – but they made us promise not to tell anyone.)

I don’t know.  That couple back in Luang Prabang could have been naive, too trusting, or just had a run of extremely bad luck.  Yes, I’d say you have to be more careful with your money in Vietnam than in the rest of Southeast Asia, but that doesn’t mean every single person you meet will try to scam you.  Maybe just every other one.

Restaurants

Many of the low-end restaurants on the streets of Hanoi and Saigon are almost literally in the streets.  Dozens of low tables and tiny stools crowd out onto the sidewalks and, sometimes, even out beyond the curbs.  At lunch and dinner time, every available seat is taken as customers hunch over the tables, eating with their knees folded up near their armpits because they’re sitting so low to the ground.  Makes me wonder what the dining room furniture in a typical Vietnamese home looks like.

Some of the more touristy outdoor bars and cafés, especially in Saigon, had all their seats facing the road.  I noticed the same thing in parts of Egypt, though I don’t think I commented on it when writing about that country.  I think it’s a pretty cool idea in a place with busy street life.  What better way to pass the time than by drinking a beer and watching the world go by?

Shells and Seeds and Garbage

In the first Vietnamese town we came to across the border, we entered a restaurant looking for a bathroom.  The place was completely empty at midday, but there were still saw piles and piles of discarded sunflower seed shells on the floor.  They weren’t scattered all over the place, but rather heaped up, three or four mounds to a table.  It was obvious that people had been cracking them open and dropping them on the floor.

We saw similar behavior again and again.  Mounds of peanut shells in this bar, mountains of napkins and inedible soup flavorings in the gutter next to that outdoor café.  I even noticed a driver tossing orange seeds into the aisle of his own bus.  It seemed as though it was socially acceptable to discard any part of your dining waste on the floor, presumable to be swept up, all at once, at the end of the evening.

Check Please!

In South America, after you ask for the check in a restaurant, the waiter will gladly let you keep your table for the rest of the day.  In fact, once he’s delivered the bill to your table, you’ll have to call him over again, just to pay.  There’s never any pressure to turn the table around for the next customer.

In Vietnam, it felt like the exact opposite.  If you asked for the bill, they’d bring it to you… and then wait.  While you look it over to make sure it’s correct, they stand next to your table.  While you discuss it with your partner, they listen in.  While you dig out your money, they watch you fish around in your wallet.  It felt very rude to me.

Passports

I never know what to do with my passport while exploring another country.  Leave it in the hotel or carry it with me as I walk around?  Risk having it stolen or risk not having it on hand if and when a police officer demands to see my identification?  I usually opt to leave it in my hotel room and try to remember to carry a color copy with me at all times (though I’ve yet to have any official ask for it on the street.)

In Vietnam, more often than not, the hotel confiscates your passport upon check in and won’t release it until you check out.  I assume this is so you won’t be tempted to steal from the mini-bar or leave without paying.  Relinquishing my passport to into someone else’s care, no matter if it’s officially the right thing to do, always makes me feel uncomfortable.  If they lose it, I’m the one that’s screwed.

Property Taxes

Vietnamese buildings, at least in the cities, are very tall and narrow.  Alleyways are dense with doorways and every street is crowded with addresses.  More than once a guide or driver tried to impress upon us how incredibly high the taxes were on their properties, as though such a thing were worth bragging about.

The funny thing is that the government taxes a building’s square footage (or, I suppose, its square meterage), but only for the bottom floor.  No matter how tall the building gets, the government gathers no extra income in taxes for that property.  This encourages everyone to buy a small plot of land and build upwards (and that encourages the government to tax the ground plots much higher than if they were to measure the square footage of the building’s livable area.)  For those reasons, the property tax in Vietnam is comparable to some of the wealthier cities around the world (but the construction costs are likely still much, much lower.)

Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City is officially the new name of the South Vietnam city of Saigon.  Only, no one but bureaucrats call it that.  Everyone else still calls it Saigon.

Internet

Looking back, there are not a lot of differences in internet connectivity throughout the developing nations we traveled through.  Oh, sure, in some countries it costs more, in others it’s slow enough to make you want to pull your hair out, but for the most part, they’re all wifi connections.

I noticed two things that were different in Vietnam.

One, Facebook was blocked on the national level.  Or at least I think it was.  I was able to get around the block by using a proxy server, but then later noticed I was sometimes getting through without setting up the proxy first.  Was my computer remembering my settings somehow?  Was it simply a DNS issue (since I was also using Google’s DNS numbers?)  I don’t really know.

Two, there were an awful lot of open wifi signals.  More than I’ve seen in years.  Pretty much every other hostel or cafe with internet access operated with a wide-open, unsecured wifi hotspot.  Tells me two things: 1) Broadband internet plans are not likely capped, and 2) There hasn’t been any widespread abuse of other people’s networks.  Yet.

Babies

More than once, I saw people walking up to and fondling another person’s newborn baby.  Like, at the market, a mother’s standing with her baby, and a stranger just comes right up and says (presumably), “Oh, he’s just so cute!” while reaching into the stroller to pinch his cheeks.

Now, maybe every incident I saw just happened to between family members – I don’t speak the language, I can’t say for sure – but it didn’t seem that way to me.  It seemed like people were much less protective of their babies’ personal space than we Americans are.

Can you imagine letting a stranger in line at the supermarket coo at your baby while stroking his or her hair?  Yeah, no.  I don’t think so.

Quang Gánh

I remember the unexpected surprise I felt upon realizing that the women of South Africa balanced and carried things on their heads.  When I saw them, I remembered pictures from long-forgotten filmstrips seen in elementary school.  I had a similar reaction to women carrying things on the streets of Vietnam.

Quang Gánh, I guess, is what you call those twin baskets or scales that hang from a flexible piece of wood balanced on the shoulder.  I’d seen the same in Laos, of course, but seeing a Vietnamese woman carrying one, complete with the conical white hat, made me realize that all those movie stereotypes are there for a reason.

As with the head-carrying in Africa,as well as in the U.S. with our backpacks, the Vietnamese manage to balance all sorts of things on their swinging scales.  You’ll see fruit vendors with oranges stacked in a perfect pyramid on one side, bunches of bananas counter-weighting the other.  Often times, a cook pot or barbeque would sit on one end while the ingredients for it would be on the other.  In any case, business women of all sorts could set their rig down on any sidewalk and instantly set up shop.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Laos
2. Thoughts on Thailand
3. Thoughts on Egypt

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

Our second infographic took longer than I thought to compile and layout, but if you take a look, you’ll see why.  9 different devices (2 iPhones, if  you were wondering), created over 95,000 files that were backed up to 3 different hard drives.  Almost 60,000 photos taken on this trip and more than 5,000 video files!  If I’m going to share this stuff with you all over the coming year — and that’s the plan — then I guess I have my work cut out for me!

Make sure to click on the image above to see a larger version.

No related posts.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

View the same video in high-definition (720p) on Youtube.

This one is long overdue.

To kick off our round-the-world trip, Oksana and I started by driving across the U.S. in our Jeep.  Her brother and sister-in-law joined us from Russia for a good part of that road trip.  While we were in North Carolina, visiting my family, we thought it would be a great idea to show them the Newbold-White House, an historically significant home that just happened to be a part of our family history, as well.

The Newbold-White House is the oldest brick house in North Carolina. It was built in 1730 by a Quaker family.  It passed through many hands over the years until my great grandmother’s family bought it in 1903.  My grandmother, Jean Newbold Griffin – the star of the video above – was born in that house in 1924.  Almost fifty years later, in 1973, she sold the house and property to a preservation society.  Now it’s open to the public.

I got to talking with my grandfather about taking a trip out to the farm.  He set up an appointment with Glenda Maynard, the site manager at the Newbold-White House.

My plan was to sit down with my grandmother and interview her about the house.  What she remembers about it, how she felt about it being restored and put on display, what it means to her now, those sorts of things.  Unfortunately, at 85 years old, she had just been hit by a medical double-whammy. While in the hospital with a case of life-threatening pneumonia, she had also had a heart attack.  She hadn’t yet fully recovered by the time we visited and it was obvious that she had slowed down both physically and mentally.

Oksana and I took Andrey and Natasha out to the house on July 31^st (2010.) There, Glenda gave us a tour of the house and land.  She was imparted a ton of historical information about the Newbold-White House, as well as details of its restoration, but unfortunately wouldn’t give me permission to record her.  I was left with a lot of audio from her lecture, but half the time Oksana was translating Russian over the top of it (and the other half of it was about things that happened a couple centuries before my grandmother’s time.)

Later, once Oksana’s relatives had returned to Russia, we bided our time and waited for “a good day” to interview my grandmother.  We didn’t get the opportunity until September 22^nd.   (We set up on the back porch of our cottage in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks. Believe it or not, even with the traffic and wind noise, that was the quietest place available to us.)  We had a good talk and I heard a lot of great stories about what it was like to grow up in rural North Carolina in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. 

(Watching the footage now, I’m amazed at how well she has recovered.  Her short term memory has come back, she’s able to walk on her on again, and most importantly, she’s sped back up – she no longer speaks as slowly as she did in this video.  She actually recovered so well that she was kicked off Hospice care! )

When I sat down to edit everything together, I realized I didn’t have enough of any one thing.  None of the historical audio matched up with my grandmother’s stories.  The house, too, had been restored to the condition it was in shortly after being built.  The home my grandmother was born into had more “modern” amenities.  On top of all that, I didn’t shoot near enough cover footage when we were out on the farm…

While I could listen to my grandmother’s stories all day, without context, I doubt anyone else would find them engaging.  With the exception of an anecdote or two, I trimmed all that out and kept only her comments about the house itself.  I then stretched what footage I had to illustrate what she was talking about.  Despite all its technical shortcomings, the ending of this video never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Love you, Mema!

If you ever find yourself in Eastern North Carolina, do yourself a favor:  Head on over to Hertford and check out the Newbold-White House.  Give yourself an hour or two to explore the house, wander down to the river, or just sit under a big tree and watch the day go by.  When you’re ready to move on, stop in at Capitan Bob’s (next to the stoplight, just after the big bridge – Can’t miss it!) and treat yourself to some of the best North Carolina-style BBQ you’ll ever have!

Read more about the Newbold-White House on the Perquimins County Restoration Association’s website.

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The following is a transcript of the above video for Google’s benefit (ignore it, watch the video instead!)

The Newbold-White House was built in 1730. It’s the oldest brick house in North Carolina.  They have proof of that.  It’s the most beautiful house in the world.

Postcard Valet
Travel Podcast
Episode 19 – The Newbold-White House

Joshua… somebody built it himself and the only way you could get to his land was by boat.  He was a Quaker, we think.  Many, many, many, many families lived there.  And it ended up with mama and daddy owning the house and the land.  Mother was Nita White and she married John Henry Newbold and I was born in the Great Hall.  That’s what they call it now; it was dining room then.

It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  And we had a wide open view of fields.

It was always cool because the brick wall was so thick.  And the bricks were made at the Newbold House.  Up on the hill, they found clay so they could make these large bricks.  And they did the Fleming Bond – that’s the gray, half of a brick showing and then a whole… and when you go out there, you’ll recognize it.  It’s a little bit different from all-red brick.

We had a bathroom put in.  A real bathroom!  When I was 10 years old, mother raised turkeys for a year to get $100 to have plumbing put in for her girls.  A Delco pump – so we wouldn’t have to have an outhouse.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, with the fireplace from the living room going into the bedroom.  I could fly up those steps!  And Nita – my sister and I – shared a room.  And we had a featherbed, but it was dormer windows all the way across the top.

And the closet was showing brick.  When you opened the closet door – which is still there! – you see a part of a brick wall.  That was my closet and when I went to the Naval Academy, to the Ring Dance, my evening dress smelled liked apple brandy because one of my grandfathers used to store apple brandy up there that he made and one keg exploded one time.  So, all the evening dresses and clothes smelled like apple brandy – just a little bit!

I think they grew grain back in the olden days.  My family grew cotton, peanuts, and soy beans.  It was a very comfortable home and it was unique and it was charming.  Oh, yes!  I could have lived out there and raised pheasants.  Edward would have been very happy, but it was… it was just too much country for me.  I had been out in the Navy and in the world then and I didn’t want to live out in the country… even though I loved it.

It was home to me.  It was mine.  It was my home.  It’ll always belong to me!

–

Postcard Valet: Episode 19
The Newbold-White House

Postcard Valet is a Travel Podcast by Arlo and Oksana Midgett

31 July 2011
Hertford, North Carolina

Special thanks to my grandparents:
Jean Newbold Griffin
and
W.E. Griffin Jr.

Thanks to
Glenda Mayard
at the
Perquimins County Restoration Association
http://www.perquimansrestoration.org

All footage
© 2011 Arlo Midgett
www.postcardvalet.com

If you enjoyed watching this, the best thanks you can give us is to show it to someone else!

–

I have another question about the Newbold-White House.  What did you call it before it was called the “Newbold-White House?”

Home.

Just home?  It wasn’t called the “Newbold Farm” or anything like that?

Home.

What’s your favorite memory there?

Daddy.

–

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Related posts:

1. PV018: The Good Time Resort
2. PV017: Diving in Zanzibar
3. PV014: Salar de Uyuni

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

I’ll admit that I knew hardly anything about Laos before entering the country.  Our friend, Wendy, did the initial planning for the trip – she was the one that picked the border crossing so we could take a two-day trip down the Mekong River (which was half awesome and half horrible and the latter was not her fault.)

Going into a country without knowing much about it is a lot like watching a movie without seeing the trailer first.  Knowing what you’re in for doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll enjoy it any more or less.  I’m happy to say I enjoyed our time in Laos and, even though we were only there eight days, I learned a lot more about the country that I thought I would.

Pronunciation

Okay, first off, it’s “Lao” not “Laos.”  The French added the ‘s’ during their Indochina occupation and it’s silent besides.

The people are Lao, the country is Lao.  Technically, Laotians call their country “Muang Lao,” or “Pathet Lao,” both of which translate to “Lao Country.”  When the French came along, they united three separate Lao kingdoms and so it sort of made sense (in their language) to pluralize the name of the new territory.

Thanks, Wikipedia!

Language

As I mentioned when I wrote about Thailand, at least one part of Laos speaks a language very similar to the Northern Thai dialect.  Honestly, if they can speak across the border with 90% understanding, you can bet I wasn’t going to be able to pick out the differences.  Seemed exactly the same to me.

Although… come to think of it, I did notice some spelling differences.  Take the Thai word for city: Chiang.  We encountered it all the time in Thailand. Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chiang Khong.  It took me a too long to realize that in Laos, “Xiang” meant the same thing.

In fact, there seem to be a lot more ‘X’s in Laotian place names.  I’m guessing that’s an indication of a heavy Chinese influence.  Interesting that, even though “Chiang” and “Xiang” are pronounced quite similarly, the difference is great enough to penetrate their English-language spellings.

The written language in Laos is, I believe, different than that of Thailand.  I could be wrong.  Both just look like a bunch of swirls to me.

Conservative Culture

Laos is up front about their people’s conservative nature.  Even at a small border crossing in Northern Thailand, there were posters printed up and taped to the immigration office’s concrete pillars.  I wish I’d taken photos of them.

Other than the expected “drug use is illegal,” as well as the unexpected “women can’t touch monks,” I remember taking note of two things that could conceivably have been a cause for concern.  The first was in relation to appropriate dress and basically came down to “don’t show a lot of skin,” though it stood out to me because it showed a foreigner going for a swim in his swim trunks.  There are waterfall tours, so I could see doing that.  The second had to do with personal displays of affection.  While not illegal, it is extremely rude to kiss or hug in public.

Furthermore, I learned that it was illegal for a foreigner to have sexual relations – or even to stay in the same room – with a Laotian.  The penalties for getting caught could include jail terms and stiff fines, but in reality of a quick police shakedown is more likely.  We heard stories of Laotian girls picking up tourists at a bar, going back to his hotel, and then texting a contact once inside.  A few minutes later, the police are barging in, handing collecting “fines” from both the tourist and the hotel proprietor.

While their conservatism cuts down on the rampant sex tourism that neighboring Thailand has become known for, denying sexual relations between Laotians and foreigners, on the surface, seems like blatant racism to me.  That, and the fact that Laos had the only immigration form in all our travels that asked us to list our race, makes the country appear quite intolerant.

Now, that said, while people in Laos seemed a little less forthcoming with their smiles than people in Thailand, I found them no less friendly.

Before we move on, a word about those posters at customs:

I noticed them posted at other tourist-centric places, too, like the Plain of Jars in Phonsavanh.  At first glance, each poster looked like a 6-panel comic strip.  It was only after reading the captions that you would realize these were “Do Not” posters.  Do not climb on the Jars.  Do not litter.  Do not leave the trail.

In every one, a clueless tourist – obvious from his or her pale skin and skimpy attire – would be engaged in some egregious behavior.  But here’s the interesting part:  Unlike most other “Do Not” signs, there were no red slashes through the image instructing you not to do what the tourist was doing.  I didn’t think much of it at first – there were, after all, English captions beneath each frame that explained the rules being illustrated.  But on the Plain of Jars poster, the last frame was labeled “Support community based tourism to protect the Plain of Jars by buying local products and services.”  Hey, that’s not a “Do Not!”  That’s a “Do!”

Looking back over all the cartoons in the series, I realized I’d missed something subtle before.  Instead of using a red slash, each cartoon had a local showing shock and dismay at the behavior of the tourist.  Except in the last frame.  There, all the locals were all drawn smiling at the (still clueless) tourist as he purchased some fine local products and services…

To me, compared to a big red diagonal line, it was a subtle message, but knowing what I know now about Laotian culture, I can see that the shock drawn on the cartoon locals’ faces was just as blatant, for them, as a big red slash is for us.

Saving Face

Saving face is a difficult concept to distill down to just a single sentence.  It’s a little bit like honor, a little bit of not rocking the boat, it’s a tacit approval of little white lies.  As a Westerner, it’s incredibly hard to wrap your mind around the scope of saving face, because it extends to every single social interaction you can have.

An example we heard from an Australian guy who opened a pub in Luang Prabang:

He has some electrical work that needs to be done, so he asks his Laotian employees if they know anyone with the appropriate trade skills.  One of them recommends his friend or family member.  The owner interviews the guy, asks him if he’s worked with wiring before.  He says he has, plenty of times.  So he hires him and, on the first day, the owner watches over his shoulder as he gets started.  Within minutes he realizes the guy has literally no idea what he’s doing.  If he lets him continue, there’s a very good chance he’ll be electrocuted.  The owner confronts the guy, starts arguing with him in front of his other employees. “Why did you tell me you knew what you were doing?” The Laotian guy starts to cry…

If I were to try to define it in one sentence: “Saving face is doing everything possible to avoid a situation in which someone else may become embarrassed.”

In the case of the Australian pub owner, he embarrassed both the new guy and his other employees (or at least the one that recommended the new guy.)  A Laotian boss would have handled the situation very differently.  He may have said something like, “You know what? I just realized that this project does not need to be done right. Why don’t you go home and I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”  Of course, he’d never call him back – everyone involved would know he wouldn’t call him back – but at least the guy wouldn’t leave embarrassed.

In our time in Laos, I can only think of two situations in which we ran up against the saving face thing. (Well, two situations where we were aware of it, anyway.)

The first was harmless enough.  Often people in hostels and such would tell us that the prices were higher because we were visiting during the high season. We knew that to be one of those little white lies and told them so.  As soon as we let on that we were better informed than the average tourist, they would give a tiny smile and begin to negotiate the price downward.

The second was more disgusting.  Picture this:  We’re crammed into a minivan, shoulder-to-shoulder with 11 other tourists and one local, on the way from Luang Prabang to Phonsavanh.  Between the two towns is nothing but twisting mountain roads and our driver is dead set on getting to Phonsavanh as quickly as possible.  It’s like a roller coaster, only more dangerous.  We’re rocking side-to-side, looking over the edge of guardrail-less roads, for hours on end.

At one point, I smelled Thai food.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the local guy in the very back seat got motion sick and, well, juggled his cashew chicken, if you know what I mean.

The reason I didn’t realize he had tossed his cookies was because he didn’t say anything about it.  He just leaned over, puked half on his lap and half down between the seat and the side panel.  Didn’t ask to stop, didn’t attempt to clean it up.  I’m 99% sure he was thinking, “If I pretend that didn’t happen, maybe everyone else will, too.”

Except that, no, it did happen and now we’re driving a vomit-comet though the mountains.  At the next stop, the Italian couple sitting next to him tried to convince him to clean himself up.  He just smiled and pretended the language barrier was the reason he couldn’t understand them.

The rest of us started leaning on the driver, since he spoke some English.  When he realized what had happened, he laughed.  “Not my problem!”  He actually said that.

Because the Italians weren’t actually doing anything and the Laotian guy was still diligently pretending it hadn’t happened at all, Oksana was the one that finally got fed up and got out of the van.  She opened up the rear hatchback and discovered that one of the German tourist’s backpacks had caught a piece of the Laotian’s stomach contents.  While they cleaned that up, Oksana bullied the driver into finding her some clean water and rags (he literally pulled someone’s clothes off a clothesline where they were drying!)  Other tourists passed back some wet wipes and plastic bags for the cleanup.  Oksana, complaining loudly the whole time, managed to splash or wipe away the worst of the mess.

Of course, once we were back on the road, the Laotian guy let loose again.  This time, however, we had him loaded up with plastic bags and sat him near an open window.  Unfortunately, he was sitting next to the German girl and the sights and sounds and smells were too much for her.  She lost her groceries a couple times, too.

Fun ride.

Motion Sickness

I wish I could tell you that was an isolated incident.  It’s probably safe to say that someone upchucked on every bus ride we took through Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.  The only reason I can’t say for sure is because I tried my best not to find out.

Seriously, what’s up with Southeast Asians and motion sickness?  Our experiences, combined with anecdotal evidence from other tourists, seem to indicate a huge problem.  What could possibly be going on?  Is it a question of “nature vs nurture?”

Could it be that, as children, very few Southeast Asians get accustomed to riding in automobiles, and therefore never develop a learned immunity to motion sickness?  We certainly get our practice in the States’ car culture.  The vast majority of us are in car seats before we’re a year old (whereas they’re much more likely to have ridden on a scooter!)  I could see a case being made that “X amount of hours spent in a car before your Y birthday can have a significant impact on your susceptibility to motion sickness.”

Or is it possible that there’s a physiological difference?  Do Southeast Asians have some sort of genetically-inherited inner ear problem?  A stronger gag reflex?  Collapsible stomachs?

More importantly, if they know they’re susceptible to motion sickness, why the hell do they eat huge lunches at the rest stops, sit next to windows that don’t open, and not have the foresight to have a convenient bag at hand?  Those are the questions I really want answered!

Oh, that’s right. Can’t ask. Saving face.

Transportation and the Postal Service

We only took one bus ride while we were in Laos, from Phonsavanh to Vinh, in Vietnam.  The rest of our traveling was done by boat or minivan.  I mention that, because I’m not sure what I saw on this particular bus ride can be considered normal.

We climbed aboard fairly early and the bus departed around 6:30 or 7 in the morning.  Oksana and I sat up front, right behind the driver, so we saw everyone that came on or got off the bus.  The first thing we noticed was a well-dressed woman sitting next to us.  She had a huge stack of U.S. currency in her hand and an office furniture catalog in the other.  No idea what that was about; maybe she was picking things up in Vietnam that are hard to find in Laos.

It took us a good hour and a half to get out of Phonsavanh, which would make you laugh if you knew how small the town really is.  We drove all over the place, picking people up, dropping kids off at school, things like that.  A teenager with an AK47 slung over his shoulder hopped on and casually sat down in the back.  He smiled and waved to people he knew; no one batted an eye.  Same with the woman that brought her caged songbird.

After awhile, we speculated that the bus was actually being used as a postal delivery vehicle.  Not only were people constantly getting on and off, but the storage compartments underneath the bus (where our backpacks were stowed) were being opened and closed at every stop.  Thankfully, all that ended once we reached the outskirts of town.

Tractors

I don’t know what to call these things, but we saw them all over the place.  They’re basically tractor engines balanced on two wheels.  Handlebars – for lack of a better term – reach a long way back to where the operator sits.  They look, for all the world, like a two-wheeled tractor or perhaps a riding lawn mower cut in half.

At first, I couldn’t tell what they were really for.  Most every one I saw was on the street, hitched up to a makeshift wagon or trailer.  People were using them as actual tractors (albeit ones you steered from 10 feet back), just not in the fields.

It wasn’t until I passed a showroom full of new ones that I started to get an idea of how they were meant to be used.  The wheels on the showroom models weren’t rubber at all, they were more like big, plastic paddlewheels.  Rice paddies, that’s my guess.

I know next to nothing about rice cultivation or harvesting, but when I pictured a guy standing behind one of those two-wheeled tractors with the long handlebars in his grip, it reminded me of the way they used to stand behind a water buffalo yoked to a plow.

Used to?  Or still do?  We saw plenty of that action later in Vietnam.

Weather

We weren’t in Laos long enough to really get a feel for the weather, but most days were hot, hazy, and humid.  It rained on occasion, but you could go most days without spotting a single cloud in the sky.

The haziness, while making for some great sunsets, puzzled me.  Where did it come from?  Was it simply humidity (doubtful), or could it have been smoke from some monstrous fire?  Could the rumored pollution from the large cities in Vietnam and China possible reach as far as Luang Prabang?  Wish I knew.

Economy

The Laotian economy, while steadily improving, is still decidedly that of a developing nation.  If I remember correctly, we were getting about 8,000 kip to the dollar.

Because it’s such an unimportant currency on the international market, it’s not easy to get kip anywhere other than in Laos or along its borders.  Leaving the country with a lot of local currency in your pocket is a great way to have a lot of local currency for a souvenir – it’s not easy to exchange it back into dollars.

I noticed that high ticket items in Laos always had their prices in Thai baht.  Makes sense that they wouldn’t want to lose out to the exchange rate when selling cameras, memory cards, and other such things.

The people of Laos must have been dealing with this for a long time.  Everyone that handled money could quickly do the conversions between kip, Thai baht, and U.S. dollars on the fly.  And not just one to the other, either.  You could pay in dollars and they could hand you back mixed change, say 50 baht and 2500 kip, without even thinking about it.

No idea how they keep on top of the daily exchange rate, though!

Pharmacies

Or lack thereof.

We didn’t go out looking for a pharmacy or anything – we weren’t sick while we were in Laos.  I bring them up because they were notable by their absence.  Oksana and I had become so used to seeing pharmacies on every other corner, in every other country, that we found it surprising it’s not the same in Laos.

I do know that the life expectancy in Laos isn’t that high… could it be because they don’t have access to proven medications?  Maybe.  Missing pharmacies could just mean that they use a different system.  Maybe people get their over-the-counter and prescription medication straight from the doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital.

Bread

After Thailand, where we couldn’t find a bakery to save our lives, Laos’ baked goods were a delight.  We noticed bakeries in the first small towns we visited along the Mekong River, but it wasn’t until we reached Luang Prabang that I started going crazy for bread.

There was a touristy café along the main street in town that we would stop in every morning.  They would have a table set up on the sidewalk and it was always filled with tiny loaves of bread.  Banana bread, orange bread, coconut, mango, chocolate, apple, cinnamon.  I experimented a bit, but always came back to banana bread.  It was so good and the little loaves were just big enough to make a decent breakfast.

Better still, any unsold loaves would go on sale in the evening at the night market.  Every night, I made a point to stop by and pick up some bread to go.

I wasn’t in the country long enough to really get a handle on Laotian cuisine, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t altogether different from Thailand’s or Vietnam’s.  The bread stood out, though.  I wonder if that’s a holdover from the French occupation, too.

Bathrooms

For the life of me, I can’t imagine why we haven’t seen this before in our travels:  In Laos, the toilet paper holders have closable plastic covers!  Why?  Well, because most of the hostel bathrooms still have those faucets-built-right-into-the-wall style showers.  Without a shower curtain, water gets all over the tile bathroom and you’re shit-out-of-luck (literally) if you forget to put your toilet paper somewhere high and dry.

Not so in Laos!  The toilet paper always stays nice and dry when it’s housed in that little plastic container.

Generally speaking, the toilets in all the private bathrooms we encountered were “normal” in Laos, too.  That is to say, they weren’t squat-type toilets.  One weird thing was that there was a small bucket with a handle on it, sort of like a giant ladle, near every toilet.

We didn’t realize what they were for until we saw something similar in the public restrooms.  It seems that flush plumbing is more a luxury than a staple and, even though there may be a toilet in the restroom, it may not be hooked up to a running water supply.  In that case, there would often be a huge barrel – or sometimes a chest-high, cement box built into the wall! – full of clean water inside the bathroom.  Floating on top of these cisterns would be a little plastic bucket.  That’s your flush.

Seemed strange to me.  Most times they had a faucet directly above the barrels so that it could easily be refilled.  If you’ve already got plumbing to the faucet… why not hook it up to the toilet?

Curfew

Laos has a curfew; the entire country closes down at midnight.  I don’t know if it’s legally a curfew – as in a “you’ll be arrested for being out on the street after midnight” curfew – or just a law that says everything (restaurants, bars, etc.) has to close down at 11:30pm.  Whatever the case, it seems pretty strict and makes for some quiet nights.

Realistically, this didn’t affect us very much.  We’re not into the clubbing scene, and besides, we tried to get up super early to see the alms ceremony in Luang Prabang.  I was under the impression that there was at least one bar (and a bowling alley!) just outside the city limits where tourists could go to get their Gremlin on.

Don’t feed ‘em after midnight?  Gremlins?  See where I was going with that?  Nevermind.

Most, if not all, of the hotels and hostels respect the curfew, whether it’s an actual law or not.  There were many signs letting you know that the doors or gates would be locked promptly at midnight.  I’m quite sure that since the 1990s, when Laos was opened up to tourism, that hostel workers have been learning firsthand what a curfew means to a drunken backpacker.  It means that their key is replaced by loud knocking and shouting, that’s all.

The Secret War

Everyone knows about America and its Vietnam War.  Not everyone knows that America also attacked Laos.  Officially, Laos was considered a neutral country and both Vietnam and the United States of America were going against the Geneva Conference of 1954 by conducting their warfare within its borders.

From the mid-60s to the mid-70s, the North Vietnamese used the eastern part of Laos to bypass the front lines of combat (the demilitarized zone.)  They would move soldiers and machinery down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos, to stage military actions against South Vietnam.  In an effort to prevent this, the United States Air Force bombed the shit out of Laos.

The numbers boggle the mind.  260 million bombs, 2 million tons of ammunition.  It was estimated that, on average, a bomb was dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. The U.S. used more ordnance on Laos in that decade than the all the ordnance dropped during World War II combined.

Up to 30% of that ordnance – roughly 80 million bombs – failed to explode on impact.  They’re still going off today.  Since the war officially ended, there have been an estimated 12,000 casualties from Unexploded Ordnance (UXOs.)  In 2006 alone, 59 people (and who knows how many livestock) were injured or killed by weapons that were used in a war 30 years gone. ¹

I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up in a country with such dangers.  We visited a site called the Plain of Jars and the safety information scared the hell out of me.  At the entrance to the park was a sign that showed how colored concrete markers – red on the outside, white on the inside – were used on the trails throughout the park:

White: indicates areas where sub-surface UXO clearance has occurred
Red: Indicates areas where UXO has only been removed from the surface
YOU ARE ADVISED TO STAY BETWEEN THE WHITE MARKERS

Another sign explained the extent to which the site had been readied for tourists.  The highlights were:

Clearance Statistics

• Area Sub-surface Cleared: 24,375 sqm
• Area Visually Searched: 225,000 sqm
• Vegetation Cut: 218,328 sqm
• UXOs Found / Destroyed: 127
• Scrap found: 31,814 pieces

You know what that tells me?  That tells me that 200,625 square meters – over 2 million square feet or roughly 50 acres – could still have unexploded ordinance just below the surface!  As we walked through the park, always heeding the ALL CAPS suggestion to STAY BETWEEN THE WHITE MARKERS, we observed numerous craters, each about 20 feet across by a dozen feet or so deep.  Sobering reminders of what the countryside (not to mention this ancient and unique burial site) endured not-so-long ago.

I kid you not, this actually happened:  While we were standing on the top of a hill, discussing how such an impoverished country could deal with a legacy like this, we heard a big rolling boom from across the countryside that went on to echo off the hills.  Just a car backfiring?  Or maybe a cow stepped in the wrong place just became hamburger.  Maybe it was someone’s child.

How the hell do parents raise their kids in an environment like that?  Do they teach them to fear stepping off a trusted path in the same way we raise our kids to look both ways before crossing the street?

God, it’s depressing.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Vietnam
2. Thoughts on Thailand
3. Thoughts on Chile

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

View the same video in high-definition (1080p) on Youtube.

When we were planning our trip to Thailand last September, we knew we were going to stay awhile.  After traveling across four continents, we were ready for a break and our plan was to rent an apartment for the month of October. We had new two goals in mind: Resting and relaxing.

We asked our Facebook friends and Twitter followers for recommendations.  “If you had a month to spend in Thailand, where would you stay?”  We got all the answers you might expect: Party in Phuket, stay cheap in Bangkok, visit the temples in Chiang Mai.  After our downtime, we would go on to tour all of Thailand, so our ideal location for October would be a quiet, out-of-the-way place with a solid internet connection.  Perhaps one of those picturesque islands with the white sand beaches, plentiful coconuts, and some snorkeling hot spots…

We read up on the suggestions we’d received: Koh Phi Phi, Koh Lanta, Phang-nga, Koh Samui.  Advice from my ex-girlfriend had me worried.  She told me that, years before, she’d passed up Phang-nga (too touristy) for Koh Tao.  There, she had found a quiet spot on the back of the island where she could relax and interact with the locals, but still take in a little SCUBA diving if she felt like it.

But Koh Tao isn’t like that anymore.  She told us that since she visited, the island has developed into yet another tourist hotspot with ATMs and 7-Elevens on every other corner.

The Thailand of yesterday sounded just like what we were looking for, but I wondered if we’d even be able to find it.  We did, but not until much later…

We took the easy way out and spent our month in Karon Beach, on Phuket.  It wasn’t the island getaway we’d imagined, but it was cheap and we had our internet access.  Come November, though, we were ready to hit the road again.

We traveled with friends up into Laos, then parted ways and traveled through Vietnam and Cambodia on our own.  We were in Siem Reap, visiting the temples around Angkor Wat, when we sat down to plan out the last few weeks of our round-the-world journey.  I wanted to see Kuala Lumpur and Singapore before flying to Australia.  Oksana petitioned for one last week of beach time.  Once again, we found ourselves pouring over a map of Thailand, looking for the perfect island getaway.

And then, a funny thing happened.  I was skimming updates in a travel blogger’s Facebook group when I came across something another blogger had posted.  She wanted to know if anyone was interested in managing a Thai island resort for a year.  She went on to explain that the owners wanted to embark on a round-the-world trip of their own and needed to find someone to run their business while they were away.

I didn’t think much of it at first.  In fact, I didn’t even mention it to Oksana until the following day because managing a resort just wasn’t something I thought we’d be interested in.  But then I started thinking.  We were planning to spend a year working in Australia… why not Thailand instead?  And since we had to pass through Thailand again on our way to Malaysia…

When Opportunity is knocking, one should at least open the door to see who’s there.

I sent an email to the blogger and explained our situation.  Probably not interested, but since we were in the area, we thought we should at least get some more information.  I got a quick reply. She was forwarding our contact information, along with six or seven others’, to the resort owners.  It would be up to them if they wanted to get in touch.

They did, just a day or two later.  Would you like to come inside, Opportunity?

Yodying and Kerstin, the owners of the resort, jumped at the chance to invite us to stay with them on Koh Mak Island.  Since we were at the end of our round-the-world trip, they wanted to ask us about our travels.  Not much was said about managing the resort, but I got the feeling they would be evaluating us while we were there.

The best part was that Koh Mak was right across the Cambodian border.  We wouldn’t have to travel far.

I sent a reply, telling them to expect us the next day.  Unfortunately, a slow border crossing and two confusing bus connections meant that we arrived at the dock just after the last ferry to Koh Mak had departed.  We made it as far as the island of Koh Chang and overnighted there.

The next morning, we caught a speedboat to Koh Mak.  The weather was beautiful and the water calm; it took us less than 30 minutes to get there.  Normally, someone would have been at the dock to greet us, but hadn’t arrived when we said we would.  We hopped on a songthaew, and the driver took us up a small hill and dropped us off in front of the Good Time Resort.

We hadn’t done a lot of research, so we didn’t quite know what to expect.  Was it going to be a Hilton-like concrete high-rise or a palm-frond bungalow on the beach?  Neither, it turned out.  The Good Time Resort was perfect for us.

The resort itself is made up of houses and villas spread around a hilltop that was still old-growth jungle less than ten years ago.  Instead of clear-cutting the vegetation to make room for villas, paths, and swimming pool, they managed to landscape around the most scenic trees and fronds.  Now, each accommodation feels like it resides in its own secluded patch of jungle.  Reading a book on your private patio, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re all alone even at the height of high season.

Although the resort is rustic by 5-star resort standards, it seemed luxurious to us after the backpacker hostels we’d become accustomed to.  There was a television and DVD player in every room (with a huge library of movies to choose from on rainy days) as well as fans and air conditioning.  The biggest hardship was having to walk up to the resort’s restaurant to pick up a wifi signal (which is no hardship at all if you’re looking to “unplug!”)

Once we settled in, we set about exploring the rest of the island.

Koh Mak is tiny – only 10km long by 5km wide – and shaped sort of like a cross.  From the top of the hill, we could walk down any of three different roads, two of which led straight down to the calm, clear water.  Oksana and I made it a goal to go snorkeling in the every day.

The rest of the island was nothing short of a tropical paradise.  Driving or walking along one of the very few roads, you’ll likely see just two things: Rubber trees and coconut palms.  Everything on Koh Mak has been owned by one large, extended family for generations and while many members of the family support themselves with tourism now, fully 70% of the island is still covered with coconut and rubber plantations.

The family has no intention of opening the island up to foreign investors.  No Hiltons or Sheratons buying up valuable beachfront property.  No McDonald’s or Starbucks setting up shop next to the tiny restaurants and seafood shacks down near the shore.

No ATMs, no 7-Elevens.  We’d found our Thailand of yesterday.

Our “three or four days” at the Good Time Resort turned into a week.  We slept in every morning, went swimming during the day, and brainstormed with Yodying and Kerstin over dinner each night about how they could improve business.  Oksana ended up rewriting the bedside binders that reside in every room and I shot and edited a promotional video for their resort.

View the same video in high-definition (720p) on Youtube.

Time went by too quickly (as it always does when you’re enjoying yourself) and before we were ready, it was time to go.  We had a plane to catch in Bangkok (as well as a tourist visa set to expire.)

I wish I could tell you we were going back to Koh Mak later this year to manage the resort for Yodying and Kerstin when they set off on their own round-the-world trip, but the timing’s just not right for us.  By the time they’ll be ready to leave, we’ll have been on the road for close to two-and-a-half years.

However, that’s not to say we won’t see Yodying and Kerstin again.  The next time we’re in the market for a “relaxing” vacation, we’ll find our way back to Koh Mak and the Good Time Resort!

Are you a backpacker traveling around Southeast Asia?  Want to extend your holiday by six weeks or more?  The Good Time Resort could use your help during the high season (February to the end of May!)  In exchange for help around the resort and restaurant, they’re willing to offer free room and board, plus a little pocket change, to the right candidate.  If you’re interested, either let me know or get in touch with Yodying directly through the Good Time Resort website.  (Couples also welcome to apply.)

The following is a transcript of the above video for Google’s benefit (ignore it, watch the video instead!)

Postcard Valet
Travel Podcast
Episode 018
The Good Time Resort

So, my first time to come to Koh Mak was in 1998 and I was traveling with a woman from Germany and she was used to traveling around the world. And she told me, “I know a spot which is really nice in Thailand and it’s unexplored right now.”  So I told her, “Okay! Next year, we will go.”

Good Time Resort
Koh Mak

My name is Kerstin Clausenius.  Together with my husband, I’m running the Good Time Resort on Koh Mak in Thailand.

So we have around 25 houses.  Every house has a special setup.  So, we have 1-floor houses, 2- or 3-floor houses, depending on the guest request. And… yeah, most of the time the big houses are rented by families or friends.  They like to share a house and they like to stay together, but they also like their privacy.

In Good Time Resort, we are running a full-service, Thai-style restaurant. We are serving breakfast here as a buffet and you can also get lunch and dinner.

One thing is for sure: Koh Mak is not a mass-tourism destination, so if you are expecting things going on like in Pattaya or Phuket, you will not feel comfortable with Koh Mak.  Koh Mak is more or less like Koh Samui, twenty years before – very quiet and very laid back.  And it is a good destination for somebody who is just trying finding a place for relaxing.

So the water conditions on Koh Mak are not good for surfing, because the water is very shallow and calm, this is a good thing for families with small kids, but the visibility is most of the time very good for snorkeling and diving.

So you can reach Koh Mak via airplane.  You fly in to Trat airport.  Or you can just take a minibus or bus from Bangkok.  The buses leave from the Ekkamai and Morchit bus station, or we can organize a private transfer for you.

So if you take a bus or car, the driving time will be around 4 hours… and the speedboat will need 45 minutes to take you to the island.

You can also do… a real island hopping means you start in, like for example, in Koh Chang, go to Koh Mak and then go to Koh Kut.  So, which is already three islands and which will cover one week or ten days of your holiday.

We hope when guests are leaving Good Time Resort that they are really relaxed and… yeah, found the hideaway they might look for!

Postcard Valet: Episode 18
The Good Time Resort

Postcard Valet is a Travel Podcast by Arlo & Oksana Midgett

December 2011
Koh Mak, Thailand

Thanks to Kerstin Clausenius &
Yodying Sudhdihanakul

Good Time Resort
Koh Mak, Thailand
www.goodtime-resort.com

All footage
© 2011 Arlo Midgett
www.postcardvalet.com

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Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Thailand
2. PV014: Salar de Uyuni
3. PV017: Diving in Zanzibar

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

We waited over a month to do our McDonald’s video for Thailand, knowing that if we did, we’d be able to wrangle our friends into trying it with us after they arrived.  That was a long time to wait to try a Samuari Pork Burger, let me tell you!  Was it worth the wait?  You’ll have to watch the video to find out…

Not much to say about Thai McDonald’s that we don’t already say in the video.  I will say that it’s darn difficult to find cover footage for editing when you’re shooting five people with one camera.  See if you can may spot any editing tricks I might have used to avoid a jump cut!

Thanks again to Wendy, Dusty, and Sarah for helping out (we certainly wouldn’t have tried so many things without them!)  We’ll eventually see them one more time when I put together a video about our shared experience at a Thai cooking school.  In the meantime, be sure to read about their take on Thailand on their blog, Roam the Planet!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Thailand
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Argentina
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

Out of all the countries we visited on our trip around the world, Thailand was the one in which we spent the most time. 61 days, over two visits.  It has since gone down on our list of places we want to return to someday, but when we first arrived, we were not impressed.

We had been traveling fairly quickly ever since Africa and by October we were both ready for a break.  While we were still in Russia, we planned out the last three months of our trip.  In order to conserve money – we had just officially gone over our travel budget – we wanted to find a place to sit down and rest for a while.  I sent out a request on Facebook and Twitter and asked our friends and followers for their recommendations in Thailand.

We received a lot of good advice, but ultimately had a hard time taking advantage of it because we were set on a month-long rental.  We checked Craigslist and various vacation rental websites, but the vast majority of listings were only available in the largest cities or most touristy areas.  We debated traveling out to the remote islands until we found a place to our liking, but ultimately took the easy way out.  We spent just a couple days in Bangkok, recuperating from our jet lag, before flying to Phuket and following up on some leads there.

The first place we stopped was in party central, Patong.  I can’t even remember why we chose that town, because foam-party nightclubs, seedy massage parlors, and plentiful weed are not on our list of travel necessities.  Nevertheless, Oksana found us a cheap hotel away from the beach, and we stayed there a week.

Prices were low, as October is still officially the off-season.  And no wonder – it rained hard just about every day we were in Patong.  That didn’t bother me especially much because I had just come down with my first cold since leaving home almost a year and a half before.  For the next week, all I wanted to do was lie in bed and sleep.  Easier to do during the day – night were miserable… at least until I visited the pharmacist, a real life anime character, who prescribed me some heavy sleeping pills.

Unfortunately, just as I was about to get over my cold, Oksana picked it up.  Most of our month off was spent battling head and chest colds.

Eventually, we left the Starbucks and McDonald’s behind by moving just four kilometers down the island to Karon Beach.  The oceanfront was prettier, the tourists more family oriented, and both of those things suited us just fine.  For about $19 per night, we stayed in a huge hotel room, venturing out once a day to the pool or to place an order at the on-site restaurant.  We caught up on some internet stuff, rested our travel-worn feet, and worked on our tans.

Prices went up on November 1^st with the official start of the high season, but we didn’t mind.  Our friends from Roam the Planet were due to arrive any day and, with our batteries recharged, we were ready to hit the road again.

Because of the record flooding that was going on in central Thailand during our stay, we didn’t get to see as much of the country as I’d hoped.  Most of the things I noticed about Thailand came from the few places we did spend some time: Bangkok, Phuket, the Phi Phi islands, Chiang Mai, and Koh Mak.

Hello!

“Have you showered yet today?”

That’s apparently a colloquial greeting in Thailand.  Kind of like, “Hey, how’s it going?”  When our host in Koh Mak told me that, I had to get the full story.  How in the world does “Have you showered yet today?” mean “Hello?”

He explained that it’s very hot and humid in most parts of Thailand and when welcoming someone into your home, it’s considered polite to offer them the opportunity to freshen up before socializing.

That makes sense, I suppose.  Definitely more than “How’s it hanging?” or “What’s up?”

Bowing

You’ve probably seen the typical Thai greeting, or wai, in movies or on television at some point.  Palms together, prayer-like, accompanied by a short bow.  Not knowing what was socially expected of me, I usually just nodded my head in response and said “thank you” or “hello,” whichever seemed more appropriate at the time.

Reading up on it now, I see that there’s a lot of room for nuance in the gesture.  How close the hands are to the face, how deep the bow goes.  I guess if you’re being polite, you’re also supposed to perform a wai when asking permission to leave someone’s house.  All these unspoken rules remind me of the warning to never point your foot at another person.  Just another peculiarity of the Thai culture.

As an American uninitiated to their culture, I something think I must have been the equivalent of man swaggering down the street, middle fingers raised to shoulder height, belching and farting at everyone that passed.

Dancing

Can you picture a traditional Thai dance?  The slow, undulating movements of colorful and elegantly dressed women?  The lithe and gentle movements from the wrist and elbow, the tips of the fingers lightly touching and forming intricate shapes?  I think of it as a “hand dance,” though I doubt that’s what it’s called.

We were discussing this dance with a couple from Oxford who happened to be traveling on the same bus one day.  Zissy (I think her name was; wish we’d exchanged contact info!) wondered aloud if the slow and meticulous dance could be a result of their living in a hot climate.  It wouldn’t take much to work up an unsightly sweat in Thailand.

What a fascinating idea!  We started comparing other cultures’ traditional dances.  Do colder climates have more energetic dances in order to raise the body temperature?  I couldn’t help but think back to a cold night on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, where our entire Spanish class was pulled into a scene straight out of National Geographic.  While the Quechua men got drunk and played their instruments, the women cut loose and dragged us onto the darkened city hall, their makeshift dance floor.  Their dances were all energetic skipping in woven formations while legs and arms pumped up and down.  The musicians must have been jamming – I swear each song lasted at least 15 minutes.  We were dying from the altitude.

Anyway, I think Zissy might be on to something.  There’s got to be a doctoral dance thesis in there for someone.

Photography

I learned to travel at the same time I learned to take pictures.  I bought my first 35mm SLR just before going to Ecuador, which was essentially just my second trip out of the country.  In hindsight, I regret that my eye for composition developed in Latin American countries.  Why?  Because I learned not to point my camera at people.

In most of Latin America – South America especially – it’s considered rude to take someone’s photo without asking.  I can understand why.  If you’re a photogenic, traditionally-dressed Peruvian living in, say, Cusco, you’re going to have a lens shoved in your face every day of your life.  It’s like being famous – stalked by paparazzi! – without any of the perks.

So as I was learning to use a real camera, my subjects were ruins and landscapes.  I always felt guilty when I tried to take market photos and saw all the vendors turn their heads and hide behind upraised arms.  Sure, I could buy something from them first, or give them a “tip,” but I wouldn’t capture anything spontaneous or candid if I did.

In Thailand, I noticed, everyone liked having their picture taken!  At the Festival of Lights, we’d get right up close with our cameras and they would actually stop what they were doing and pose for us.  As we walked alongside a parade, you could tell the participants on the floats would actively seek photographers out.  They’d lock eyes with you, through the viewfinder, and then nod and smile after you lowered the camera.  It was a novelty for me.

(Oksana, by the way, is much better at people photography than I.  I would guess that she took most of the people photos you’ll find in our photo albums.)

Language

Let’s get this out of the way right now: There’s no standardized way to spell Thai words with the Roman alphabet, but place names with a “ph” in them are most definitely not pronounced with an English “F” sound.  The “h” in “Phuket” is pronounced as a tiny puff of air, hardly said at all:  “Pahoo-KET.”  So, no, you can’t have much fun with the name of that island. Don’t worry.  We’ll always have Koh Phi Phi.

I thought it would be Africa or Eastern Europe that would have tripped us up, but Thailand was the first country in which we really had difficulty communicating.  Just like anywhere else, there are plenty of people who speak English circling around the tourism industry.  It was when we left that protective bubble that we were in trouble.

In the Thai language, simple, monosyllabic words can be have different meanings depending on the tone in which they are said.  The five basic tones are easy to remember.  They are rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus, and demissus.  Ha ha, just kidding!  They’re also called mid, low, falling, high and rising.

Think of it this way:  The word “mai” can mean either “wood,” “silk,” “burn,” “new,” or “not,” depending on how you pitch your voice when you pronounce it.  I remember a story my uncle told me about learning the language in a classroom (he lived in Thailand for a couple years in the early 70s.)  His whole class was driven crazy by a single, tone-deaf student endlessly repeating the instructor’s words in a flat monotone.  Thai would be hard (for me) to learn.  I can hear the different tones; I just can’t keep them straight in my head.

If you’re at all interested (and like having your mind blow), watch the first minute of this video on Youtube (decide for yourself if you want to continue after that; it only gets more confusing as you go!)
Thai Language Lessons: Tone Rules Explained

In all honesty, it was even difficult for me to speak English with Thai people.  For one thing, it was almost literally impossible for them to pronounce my name.

“Arlo.”

“Aaah-ro?”

“No.  Ar. Lo.”

“Arrrooo?”

“Close.  Ahr. Lho.”

“Allll rrrro?”

“Okay, sure.  Let’s move on.”

(I didn’t take offense; I couldn’t pronounce their names, either.)

Just listening to the musicality of the language, it seems to me that Thai is all about the vowels.  Words flow into sentences very smoothly and consonants are rarely harsh or abrupt.   Because our own languages influence how we learn others (which is why practically everyone has an accent when they speak in a foreign language), Thai people can be especially difficult for an American to understand, even when they’re speaking English.

I once stopped in at an airport McCafé to grab some drinks to take to the gate with us.  I asked for a mango tea and a caramel macchiato.  The girl behind the counter looked up and asked, “Aaah oh eye?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aaah oh eye?” she repeated.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  I looked quizzically at the other girl standing behind the counter.

“Aaah oh eye?” they said in exasperated unison.  “The macchiato. You want it aaah or eye?”

“Oh, ‘iced!’  Yes, I’d like it iced please!”  Hot or iced.  I was blushing in embarrassment as I paid for the drinks.

Apparently, this is a common problem.  The next time I tried to order something in a McDonald’s, they slid a big, plastic, picture menu across the counter and asked me to point and what I wanted.

The only other interesting tidbit I have about the language is that people in northern Thailand are able to speak with people from Laos.  I asked the woman who ran our hostel in Chiang Khong if it was the same language.  She said it wasn’t, but explained that Northern Thai (there are four distinct Thai dialects) is about 90% the same as Laotian… or at least the Laotian dialect they speak right across the border.

“Wat,” did you say?

I always thought the word “wat” meant “temple” in Thai.  Turns out, it means “school.”  Which makes sense, when you consider all those temples are actually monasteries.

I don’t know much about Buddhism, monks, or wats, but I enjoyed taking pictures of those monasteries.  The architecture Thais use in their places of worship is so colorful and ornate!  Plus there are dragons and elephants and demon warriors!

Food

How can I write about Thailand and not mention Thai food?  Looking over my notes, it’s surprising how many things fall into that category.

I assume most people are already familiar with Thai food.  I’ll just say that I was surprised how much better it can be in the country itself.  When their curries and soups are made with fresh local ingredients, it’s like everything I had before was a shadow of what it could have been.  Plates are cheap (though portions are small by American standards) and we tried everything from seafood to chicken to pork and beef.  Overall, Thailand is a delicious country in which to find oneself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everything is good…

Oyster Sauce

What exactly is oyster sauce? It’s on every table in Thailand.  Is it for oysters or made from oysters?  You know what?  Either way, it’s not for me.

Mayonnaise

There’s not a lot of mayo in Thai food, but we were living there for a month and there were certain things we stocked up on.  One was mayonnaise, or whatever that creamy white stuff they call mayonnaise is over there.  Sorry, but mayo shouldn’t be sweet.

Dyed Food

When we first arrived in Thailand, both Oksana and I noticed some unnaturally bright and colored foods in the markets.  Inky wet fruit that looked like it would stain your clothes, candy-green mussels spread out on ice, eggs and lettuce that were a shade of green I’ve never seen in nature before.

At first, I would have sworn up and down that they’d been dyed to make them look more appealing on display, but after two months in the country and seeing the same colors in different cities, I’m starting to wonder if that might not be the case.  Who knows?  Maybe the colors are just brighter over there!

Fruit

I thought the jungles of South America had the best, most exotic fruit in the world.  I was wrong.

What fun we had touring the fruit markets of Thailand!  Our favorite fruit there, hands down, was rambutan.  I’d never seen it before a trip to Ecuador a couple years ago and introduced Oksana to it in Zanzibar last year, where they called it mshokishoki.  The red and yellow fruits are covered with soft spines and contain a seed inside, surrounded by sweet white flesh.  You pop them open, eat the flesh and spit out the seed.  Rambutan are nature’s gummi bears.

Oksana sampled everything.  There were dragonfruit, which was kind of bland, but looked like cookies and cream flavored ice cream on the inside.  Tamarind grew in long pea-pods, but dry and brown like a giant, segmented peanut.  Inside were sticky red seeds surrounded by a network of ropy red veins reminiscent of that alien fungus in the latest War of the World’s remake.  Lycee was like rambutan’s less flamboyant sister, while Longan fruit was its dull, earthy brother.  And of course, there’s durian, which smells as bad as you’ve heard, but actually tastes better than you’d expect.  Kind of like a citrusy-banana-y kind of thing.  I never tried sugar apples nor purple mangosteen, but Oksana said they were both good, too.

Bananas, pineapples, papayas, coconuts, mangos, guava, melons, jackfruit, oranges, pomelos, starfruit (carambola), and strawberries: Thailand also has all the things we’re already familiar with.  It’s a fruit-lover’s paradise!

Bread

Throughout our travels, Oksana and I have made it a habit to seek out decent bakeries.  I enjoy stopping by in the morning and grabbing a quick and inexpensive breakfast to go.  At some point we realized that we hadn’t come across a single bakery in Thailand.

I’m sure they exist, but it’s rather surprising how little Thais use bread in their cuisine.  I got to wondering why that is and realized that it probably has something to do with rice.

When we flew into Bangkok, I remember looking out the window and seeing nothing but miles and miles of flat land, endless fields filled with nothing but water and rice. Seeing all that stagnant water, I couldn’t help but think about snakes and mosquitoes and how we skipped our Japanese Encephalitis vaccinations.  I wondered why Thailand didn’t raise a less water-intensive grain…

…and then I realized I had it the wrong way around.  The heavy monsoon rains that hit Thailand every year mean that rice is the only thing they can grow.  So maybe a lack of wheat is one reason they don’t have much bread in Thailand.  Or it may just be that all the noodles they eat fulfill the same dietary requirements.  At any rate, we wouldn’t find a decent bakery again until Laos.

Drinks

The drinks in Thailand – the soft drinks and juices and such – are amazing.  I don’t know what they are, but they’re amazing.

The cooler section in the stores are filled with dozens (if not hundreds) of varieties of drinks.  I wish I could tell you what they all were, but often they didn’t have any English on the label.  Those that did were often meaningless.  “The Original Soy Peptide: Peptein!”  What do you suppose that tastes like?

Oksana and I experimented a bit the first month we were there, but when our friends arrived, we recruited them into sampling some of the crazier stuff with us.  We recorded a video of the drinking game we played.

Aphrodisiacs

If, despite the ubiquitous prostitutes, go-go bars, and seedy erotic massage parlors, you somehow missed the fact that Thailand was a sexually liberal country, all you’d need to do is check out the coolers in the local grocery stores.  Sprinkled in among all those crazy Thai drinks are a huge variety of liquid aphrodisiacs.  Granted, many of them are probably just energy drinks marketed toward a different crowd, but still.  Would you want to be seen sipping on a tiny vial of something called “Hang Foreplay?”

Straws

Every time you buy a drink at the store, whether it’s a soda or a juice or an iced coffee, the cashier will hand you a straw.  They have tons of them up by the counter.  Makes me wonder about the sanitary condition of the lids – we definitely found a few cans of Diet Coke with crud smeared all over the top.  We felt safe drinking from the plastic bottles, however.

Beer

Thailand doesn’t have a lot of variety in its beer.  You’ve basically got three big brands to choose from: Chang, Singha, and Leo.  To me, a micro-brew only kind of guy, they all taste about the same.  Bad, that is to say.  Except that, on a really hot day, and when the beer is really cold, they somehow transcend their badness and become pretty good.

But that’s neither here nor there. What surprised me about beer in Thailand is that they often serve it over ice.  That’s just weird.

Service

When Oksana and I ate out together, I’d say there was a 50/50 chance we’d be served at the same time.  When we ate out with our friends, it never happened.  In Thailand, they serve food when it’s ready and the cook doesn’t make much of an effort to time the dishes so they hit the plates at the same time.  This often resulted in four hungry people waiting for the last person to be served while pointedly ignoring the delicious, cooling food in front of them.

Eventually we made a pact. Forget being polite; eat when you’re served.  Besides, Thai food is meant to be shared around the table anyway.

Cinemas

I’ve been in some good movie theaters in my time, but nothing like they have in Bangkok.  I’d trade every Cineplex and IMAX I’ve ever been in to have a good Thai theater near my home.  They’re amazing.

Oksana and I only had the opportunity for one high-end cinema experience, when we watched Contagion in a Nokia-sponsored “Ultra Screen” in Bangkok.  It cost us $45 USD just for just the two tickets, but that was okay, because it was almost a religious experience.

First, we were given the option to relax in a comfortable lounge where an usher promised to escort us to our seats just before the previews and commercials ended.  Our seats were leather recliners paired off and separated from the other 20 seats in the room by a semi-circular divider.  There were even pillows and blankets, if we wanted to get more comfortable.

One thing you have to do in a Thai cinema, however, is rise for the national anthem that plays as a music video just before the movie begins.  “Long live the king!”

I get the impression that Thais really get the cinema experience, too.  They’re very respectful during the movie.  They don’t talk or use their cell phones.  Hate to say it, but I think I value their cinema culture even more than the U.S.’s.

May be a good thing we don’t have many theaters like that in the States, though.  I’d blow my paycheck every weekend.

Shoes

Everyone takes their shoes off when they go inside.  Everyone.

Surprisingly, even the hotels and hostels we stayed at contained two pairs of flip-flops so no one would have to walk around barefoot.  In that respect, it was a lot like Russian homes.

But in Thailand, they take it to extremes.  All of the temples (sorry, wats), as well as most of the smaller businesses – dentists, doctors, offices, dive shops – request that you to leave your shoes at the door.  Fortunately, restaurants and supermarkets had no such rules.

“No shirt, shoes(!), no service!”

Fingernails

In Thailand, it’s not uncommon to see a man with a pinky fingernail grown out to ridiculous lengths.  Having grown up in the 80s, all I could think was “cocaine user.”  That couldn’t be it, though.

Turns out, it’s most likely a symbol of social status.  People who have to do hard, physical labor for a living are not able to grow their fingernails out.  If, on the other hand, you have a nice white collar job (or whatever the equivalent is over there), then I guess a well-manicured pinky nail is something you can devote your time to maintaining.

That and, the internet tells me, they’re good for extracting boogers and earwax.

Personal Safety

There are plenty of rundown neighborhoods in Thailand, but Oksana and I never felt threatened walking through them.  After awhile, we lost a bit of our street paranoia because we just didn’t feel like we were ever in danger there.  Granted, there are plenty of places in the seedier parts of Bangkok or Pattaya where stupid or drunk tourists are involuntarily separated from their money, but we didn’t frequent those places.

The biggest crowd we ever wiggled through was during the Festival of Lights in Chiang Mai.  It was chaos.  Five of us spent two or three hours wandered around the river, most of our attention focused on our cameras settings.  I worried about my backpack, constantly being bumped and nudged, and my shorts’ pockets filled with wallet, iPhone, and GPS.  Nothing was lost.  We discussed it later and decided that none of us felt like there were any pickpockets lurking around at all.  Except for the fireworks exploding around us, the whole night felt quite safe.

(We also realized that hardly anyone was drinking!  A huge, city-wide celebration and only a handful of obnoxious British hooligans to spoil the mood.)

Transportation

Traffic, in many ways, was different in Thailand, but there were some similarities to the way we do things in America.

First thing you notice is that they drive on the left.  (Well, I guess that would be the first time you’d notice if you were coming straight from the U.S.  After 31 countries, we’re thoroughly confused.  I can no longer remember which countries drive on which side of the road.)  The second thing you notice is that the direction of travel is really only a suggestion.  We saw plenty of people nonchalantly steering their scooters into oncoming traffic.

Traffic in Bangkok is predictably bad.  Often the best way to get around is on a tuktuk, or motorcycle taxi, if only because they can sometimes weave between the cars and buses.  In an effort to alleviate traffic, Bangkok has built up miles and miles of giant cement overpasses.  Huge, eight-lane freeways act as arteries into the city.  Rush hour is so bad, they actually change the direction of travel on these freeways throughout the day!  In the morning, lighted signs indicate that most of those eight lanes are one-way streets into the city.  In the evening, they flip them around so that there are more avenues out to the suburbs.  I have no idea what you’re supposed to do if you’re driving down a lane when it switches!

Our first hotel, the Amari Atrium, was like most other large businesses in Bangkok and had hired a man with an orange safety vest to stand at the end of the driveway.  His job was to step out into the street with one of those lighted, handheld, airport-runway batons, blow his whistle, and stop traffic for anyone needing to leave the hotel.  Otherwise, you’d never get out.

Scooter Culture

Outside Bangkok, scooters rule the road.  There are thousands of small-engine motorbikes in Thailand and a culture has sprung up around them.

Lots of people conduct their businesses from motorcycles.  We saw all manner of creative examples (like the cable company motorcycle with a 12-foot bamboo ladder strapped to the sidecar), but by far the most popular were the food carts.  At first glance, they could be a simple tin shack or canvas tent with a kitchen-counter-top flat area, complete with charcoal grill for cooking or displaying whatever they had to sell.  Above their heads might be some shelving or a sign with the business name.  Look closely, though, and you’d invariably find the whole thing was welded onto a scooter.  They’d simply drive up to a curb for the dinner rush, then drive back home after selling off a few hundred kabobs or pancakes.

Most gas stations in Thailand are small mom-and-pop businesses and they can be found on practically every street corner.  A “big” enterprise might be two fifty-gallon drums hooked up to a manual pump.  The gasoline is pumped up into a clear cylinder so that you can measure the amount before it’s drained into your gas tank.  Seeing them in operation, with the Mountain Dew-yellow tinge to the liquid, reminded me how infrequently you actually see gasoline in the States.

With a scooter, sometimes all you need is a single liter of petrol.  Most of the smaller “gas stations” were nothing more than a set of shelves propped up outside a convenience store or someone’s house.  Rows of 1-liter glass bottles line the shelves with a big, bold price printed above: “Gasoline! 40 baht!”  Driving by, you could almost be forgiven for thinking they were Corona ads.

Highways

With all the differences, I found it surprising that the highways in Thailand were like their counterparts in the United States.  The roads were in good repair, making it possible to keep speeds up.  Sometimes there were toll booths along the way.  Some big gas stations along the way had restaurants, convenience stores, and even separate (free!) public bathroom structures.

But just when you begin to marvel at how things are like you remember them, all the little differences remind you that you’re still in a foreign country.  The “gas” that’s being pumped into the tanks is actually natural gas.  They have a vacuum seal on the nozzle for safety, but even so, it’s against regulations for you to stay in the vehicle while they refuel.  Our minivan driver, more often than not, wandered around the convenience store and bathrooms with the rest of us while we waited.  When the station attendant was finished, he would jump in and move the driver’s van out of the way for the next vehicle in line.  I can’t imagine people in the States being comfortable with that.

Hotels

I guess because tourists tend to leave the air conditioner running when they leave their rooms, most hotels in Thailand have little credit card-like slots next to the light switch by the door.  Usually you get a card (or thick slab of plastic) attached to your key ring and the first thing you do when you open your door is slide that card into the slot.  Otherwise, no electricity.

We went on to see these in practically every hotel and hostel in Southeast Asia.  I guess saving money on electricity is very important in those countries.

I get why they do it, but it’s still annoying. I’m the kind of guy that always turns off the lights.  If we’re going out all day, I’m okay turning off the AC, too, but when you need to head out into the heat of the day for just a half hour?  It’s nice to come back to a cool room.

There were also times I wanted to leave my computer on (to upload photos, for instance), but 10 seconds after you remove the key ring, all power to the room is cut off.  It was frustrating enough at times that we started to experiment by putting other things into the slot.  Who would have thought a Costco membership card would be useful in Thailand?

Franchises

If you ever look around your neighborhood and think, “Where have all the 7-Elevens gone?” well, the answer is Thailand.  There are 7-Eleven franchises everywhere.  Like the joke about finding competing Starbucks directly across the street from each other, we routinely saw 7-Elevens placed the same way.

I was surprised, too, to see the franchise image is mostly unchanged over there.  Big selling points were hot dogs, Slurpees, and cheap morning coffee.  Many drinks were spread among half a dozen different cooler cases (including beer and wine.)  About the only thing that was really different, I’d say, is that they devoted one whole aisle just to Ramen and Cup o’ Noodles.

Oh, and all the chip flavors were like “Spicy Crab Seaweed.”  That ain’t American.

(In fact, I just learned 7-Eleven isn’t American, either!  In 1991, a Japanese corporation took a controlling interest in the franchise.)

Also, besides the ever-present McDonald’s, KFC, and Subway, Thailand also has a bunch of Sizzlers (of all things!)

Copy Culture

This idea, which I’m calling “copy culture” for now, isn’t specific to Thailand.  The idea has been percolating in my head for awhile now and it just started to coalesce while we were there.

In Chiang Mai, a vendor set up shop in the Sunday market.  A sign above their cart proclaimed “ONLY banana wrap in Sunday market! Accept no imitations!”  There was an air of desperation about it, as though the proprietor were saying, “I had the idea first!  It’s not fair!  That other guy stole my recipe!”

Let me paint you another picture, before I get to my point:  Walking down the street in Patong, we came across a store selling paintings.  Obviously, this was an “artist-in-residence” or “artist-as-owner” sort of place, not an art gallery.  There were large, frameless canvases covering every vertical surface.  The usual Thai themes of sunsets, palm trees, and tigers were represented, but the piece that catches the eye is a painting of Heath Ledger, as the Joker, with his head out the driver’s side window of a speeding police car.  It was a scene from The Dark Knight.

Okay, nothing too weird about that.  It was a competent painting; someone might buy it. Heath’s former agent, perhaps.  We continued on down the sidewalk.

The next store was also a painting shop.  And the next, and the next, and the next.  All the way down the block, small stores filled with dozens of paintings.

You want to know what every single one of them had?  A painting of Heath Ledger, as the Joker, driving a police car with his head out the window.

It’s like one guy got tired of painting tigers and decided to work on a passion project… and it sold!  All his jealous artist competitors said, “Well, I can do that!”  So they all paused their DVD players in the same place and got to work.

You see the same thing with trinket and souvenir vendors all over the world.  How many stalls sell the exact same crap as the one right next to them?  Why is it that every tagua nut store has the same few animal carvings?  How is it that the exact same pottery can be found for sale all over East Africa?  It’s because someone became successful and everyone else is trying to recapture the magic.

Two things about the painting shop tableau jump out at me.

Firstly, entrepreneurship.  I remember a professor once gave our business class a scenario to think about.  “Let’s say a guy opens up a hot dog stand on in the middle of a long stretch of beach,” he began.  “He’s immediately successful, and you decide there’s room for some healthy competition.  Where do you set up your hot dog stand?”

He gave us a minute to think about it.  “Place it at either end of the beach,” most of us thought.  “But which end?”

Neither, it turns out.  We should have set up our shop exactly adjacent to his hot dog stand.  Why?  Let’s say you set up at the far end of the beach, thinking you’ll get half the beach’s business, right?  Well, not exactly.  Take the case of the hungry customer that’s in the exact mid-point between both hot dog stands.  He should be the only indecisive customer, as he has to walk the same distance in either direction to buy himself a dog.  Theoretically, everyone on one side of him will come to your shop – because it’s closer – but everyone on the other side of him will go to your competitor, because his shop is closer.

Better to set up shop right next to original hot dog stand.  That way, at least everyone on one side of the beach will encounter your stand first.

Is that why developing nations always have a “shoe street,” a “muffler street,” and a “gallery street?”  At first blush, it seems like sound reasoning.  If you set up shop next to your competitor, you could capture half his business.  But what happens when there are seven competitors in the same location?  Shouldn’t you then think of moving across town, capturing that whole market for yourself?

While we’re still on the subject of entrepreneurship… In the U.S., we’re taught that we can make a name for ourselves – get rich, climb the social ladder! – if only we can come up with the next great idea.  Maybe we can invent that one niche product that no one else has thought of, yet everyone needs.  The ShamWow, the Snuggie.  Red Bull or Twitter.  If our ideas are unique and we’re the first ones to market, we’ve got it made!

I don’t think most American’s first reaction to someone else’s success is to copy it for themselves.  I think our first reaction is more along the lines of, “Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.”  It seems to me that perhaps the Thai attitude is more along the lines of, “I’m pretty sure I can do that better than he can.”

Which brings us to the second thought I had: Copyright.

The U.S. has some of the most stringent copyright laws in the world.  We value our intellectual property so much that we have made the unauthorized duplication of digital media a criminal act.  How much of an impact – good or bad – has copyright law had on our businesses?

• People don’t make a living selling bootleg DVDs and software in the U.S.  It’s big business in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
• People don’t sell paintings of scenes from movies (at least not on a large scale), lest they be sued into financial oblivion.  Artists don’t have to worry about that in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
• Artists and inventors in the U.S. set their sights on patenting and securing their ideas, to ensure a lifetime of royalty payments.  I wonder if Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia even have patent offices.

Personally, I think some aspects of our copyright system are hopelessly broken.  I respect the idea that artists and businessmen should be able to control their intellectual works; in fact, I think the protections we afford them are vital to their ability to profit from it.  That banana-wrap vendor in Chiang Mai: What legal recourse did he have?  None.

On the other hand, I disagree that Disney should be able to sue someone 70 years down the road for using one of their cartoons in a Youtube video.  Or that shadow corporations should be able to buy up software patents and make a killing suing Silicon Valley startups out of business.

But does that mean the developing world has the right of it?  No, I don’t think so.  I don’t know how a society pulls itself up out of the “copy culture” mentality and replaces it with a rule- and regulation-heavy entrepreneurial culture, but that might just be one of the (many) things that has to change in order for it to become a first world nation.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Thailand
2. Thoughts on Laos
3. Thoughts on Vietnam

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

View the same video in high-definition (720p) on Youtube.

• 00:00 – Introduction and Rules
• 03:52 – The Reveal
• 06:31 – First Round
• 16:23 – Second Round
• 26:22 – Credits and a Dare

The first time I walked into a 7/11 in Thailand, the sheer number of drinks in the coolers blew my mind.  There were dozens of brands and flavors and I because couldn’t make heads or tails of their swirly writing, I had no idea what most of them were.  I wanted to try them all…! but with my luck, I knew I’d end up with something like “Shrimp-Mussel Juice.”  Sampling a random drink in Thailand would be like Russian Roulette, only my taste buds would be at stake.

Knowing that our friends were on the way, Oksana and I decided to wait for them before playing “Thai Roulette.”  I mentioned the idea to Wendy and Dusty (from Roam the Planet) and their friend Sarah.  They were game!

We decided to film the whole thing, because it seemed like it might be entertaining for you to watch us taste all these mystery drinks and because  Wendy and Dusty had just brought us a new point-and-shoot camera (to replace our ailing Panasonic Lumix.)  It was a Sony TX10, which boasts 1080p video.  Since they had the exact same model, we shot with both cameras to see if the footage would match well in editing.  It was also a good test for me, to find out if our new camera could double as a camcorder in a pinch.  (Answer: No. You can read my thoughts on that after the jump.)

During one of our first meals together, I laid out the ground rules for the little drinking game I’d created in my head.   Then we hit the stores, buying our drinks in secret, and then revealed them to each other later that evening.  Unfortunately, when we did, it was raining outside our hotel and the cameras picked up a lot of street noise while we were recording.

This video turned out much longer than I expected — close to half an hour!  Now, I could spend many more hours whittling it down to just the funniest parts, but that goes against my self-imposed guidelines for these “Postcard Valet Extra” videos.  (Also, it sounds like a lot of work!)  So I left pretty much everything in, including some awkward jump cuts and blurry video.  On the plus side, if you stick it out, you’ll get to see every little grimace as we sample 10 crazy Thai drinks.  If half an hour is too much of a commitment, feel free to use the time markers above to jump to the section that sounds most interesting.

The Sony TX10

There are some things about the Sony TX10′s video recording that I liked, but for the most part, color me unimpressed.  I do like that you can zoom in while recording — that’s a feature we missed on our old Panasonic Lumix TZ5.  On the other hand, the start-up time is terrible and the auto focus is all over the place.  It’s quite nice to have a small camera that can track a subject that moves toward or away from the camera, but in my experience, this model has trouble staying locked onto subjects and, as you can see in the video, the focus tends to roam while you’re recording.

The audio recording isn’t that great, either.  Both cameras we used picked up the background whine and amplified it.  At least you can still hear what people are saying.

After a few months with the TX10, I have to say I’m mostly unimpressed.  I will admit that I found one fantastic use for it, however.  Slap a mini-GorillaPod on the sucker, drop it to the bottom of the ocean while snorkeling (it’s waterproof to about 16 ft), and you can get some fantastic video!

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in The Kingdom of Jordan
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Turkey

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

You always feel like you’re getting short-changed when you’re only in a country for a day or two.  We had only 17 hours to spend in Dubai, but I’m surprised how much we got to see and do.  We wandered two gigantic malls, went snow skiing, walked the base of the world’s tallest building, road around the city on a tour bus, and of course we ate at McDonald’s for lunch!

Most of the menu in Dubai’s McDonald’s was the normal fare;  the stuff that wasn’t was almost exclusively vegetarian.  We tried the Veggie Burger, spring rolls, and a McPuff!  I could have trimmed this video down a little more — it’s one of the longer McDonald’s videos we’ve made — but there are a couple funny moments that I just didn’t want to cut out.  (Plus there’s a bit of background on that whole Orbitz fiasco thing we went through.  I forgot that by this point, we still weren’t sure if we were going to get reimbursed for our new plane tickets; we eventually did!)

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Finland
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

At the end of September, we went through a huge fiasco with Orbitz that completely changed our travel plans.  Months before, we had purchased tickets to fly from Moscow to Bangkok by way of Sri Lanka.  The day before our flight, we learned that it had been rescheduled and we’d already missed it.  Fortunately, we managed to iron everything out with Orbitz, but not before we had to purchase a second set of airline tickets at the last minute.  Our new flight plan included a 17-hour layover in Dubai.

I never expected to travel to the United Arab Emirates and the only thing I knew about Dubai was that it was the most “Westernized” of the cities in the Middle East.  We had zero time to research, but I was still excited.  If nothing else, I’d get to see the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formally the Burj Dubai!)

The Weekend

Friday is Sunday in Dubai.  Or something like that.  I’ve since read that Thursday and Friday used to be the Arab world’s weekend, but in Dubai that’s officially shifted over to Friday and Saturday.  All I know for sure is that getting around on a Friday morning is problematic.

We arrived at the Dubai International Airport, around 5:30am, on a redeye flight from Moscow.  Even after we’d taken the time to figure out the immigration process (no visa needed for U.S. citizens – at least not for those that just want to spend a day wandering the city!) and passed our bags through customs, it was still too early to go anywhere.  We used the time to caffeine up at a café, repacked our day bags and left our bigger packs with the Left Luggage desk, and then set about figuring out how we could get into the city.

We found an information desk and asked.  The easiest way, they said, was to take the Dubai Metro… but it was closed until 1pm today on account of it being Friday.  Okay, then.  What’s the next cheapest option?  The bus… but they don’t accept cash and you can’t buy a pass because, well, it’s Friday.  The only thing left was an expensive taxi.  We eventually paid a woman wearing a silk burka and pink leather racing gloves to take us to the Emirates Mall in her taxi… but only after killing several more hours in the airport – the mall didn’t open until 10am on  Friday!

Language

We had only ever visited two other Arabic countries in our travels – Egypt and Jordan – so, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we arrived in Dubai.  It wasn’t too much trouble communicating in those other countries, but that was only because we were always on the tourist path and tourism attracts English-speakers.  Still, there were often times when we tried to ask someone for directions or how much an item cost and we were completely unable to converse with them.

Dubai surprised us in that practically everyone we came across spoke English.  Not only that, but their English was good.  Taxi drivers, store clerks, waitresses – everyone we talked to spoke our language.  I was especially impressed with the supermarket cashiers (a position that typically doesn’t employ bilingual staff!)  They would glace up at the next patron and take their best guess on which language to open with.  If you replied in a different language, they would seamlessly shift.  We got a “Hello, did you find everything okay, today?”

English speakers in Dubai still had an accent, but it was slight.  They must begin learning English at a young age.  I’d be curious to learn more about their early schooling (public or private?) at least with respect to languages.

It’s no wonder Dubai is the most well-known Arabic city in the Western world.  By speaking and conducting their business in English, they’ve made traveling there much more accessible for us.

Wealth & Shopping

The wealth on display in Dubai is staggering.  The Burj Khalifa dominates the skyline, but there are half a dozen other famous buildings and landmarks that were designed and built as a testament to just having enough money to do so.  That same concept applies to shopping.

Good God (I mean Allah!), you have no idea.

Shopping malls are a staple now in the United States.  Every community has one and they’re known for putting mom and pop shops out of business.  Seeing the old market mentality struggle to fit into the new strip-mall architecture in Russia, I realized that most countries’ malls aspire to U.S. standards.

American malls should aspire to Dubai’s.

We started out at the Mall of the Emirates, where we wandered through the electronics stores and shot our McDonald’s video in the food court.  After walking from one end to the other to see what movies might be playing at the cinema (which we skipped, though I wish I could have justified the $40 ticket prices to try out the VOX Gold cinema!), we decided to go skiing.  On snow.  In the mall.  While it was 100 degrees outside.

The mall was immense, easily the biggest I’d ever set foot in.  At least until later that afternoon.  At 12 million square feet, the Dubai Mall, which we visited next, is the world’s largest.

We walked through The Dubai Mall on our way to the base of the Burj Khalifa.  If not for the distinctly airport-like direction signs located at every corner, we never would have found our way through.  Having informational displays with the maps at the entrance is not enough.  By the time you’ve walked a half-kilometer toward your destination, you’ve been distracted enough by the dazzle of shops (and, say, a full-size, world-class aquarium!) to forget where you were going.

Oksana and I didn’t do too much shopping while we were there, though I did pick up a reasonably-priced USB3 cable for one of my hard drives.  I enjoyed wandering through the electronics stores there.  Dubai not only has good prices – UAE was the first country we visited where things like laptops, hard drives, and iPads have prices comparable to those in the U.S. – but they also had every newfangled gadget you can imagine.  800mm lenses for you Canon or Nikon DSLR?  Unboxed and put on view.  Dyson bladeless fans?  On display and rotating.  The thinnest of thin flatscreen TVs?  In 3D demo mode, perfectly positioned in front of a comfy couch.

The malls weren’t necessarily where the greatest excesses were to be found, either.  There are “hypermarkets” in Dubai.  We had time to visit one.  Imagine a Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy and an immense grocery store under one roof.  I’m not even kidding; that’s exactly what they’re like.

At the base of the Burj Khalifa, there’s an ATM that dispenses gold.  That’s right, gold!  Put in your PIN, empty your savings account, and walk away with your choice of gold coins or actual nuggets.  99.9% pure, 10-day, money-back guarantee, try not to spend it all in one place!

You know how some people are thrilled to pass through the duty free shops in the airport so they can load up on fancy alcohol or expensive chocolate?  In the Dubai International Airport, they advertise duty-free cars! I have no idea how that works. They most certainly are not going to meet you at the gate with your purchase…

Morality

Dubai might well be the most Westernized city in the Arabic world, but it’s still very conservative by our standards.  The most obvious sign is the number of women walking around in burkas, but if you look, you’ll see other indications.  On the brochure for the mall, there was a section on appropriate behavior.  No kissing.  No public displays of affection.  No clothes that reveal either knees or shoulders.  To be fair, the women wearing skimpy attire – tourists, mostly – did not seem to be judged on their attire.

Speaking of gender, there’s obviously a huge divide between men and women in the United Arab Emirates that’s far too complex for me to grasp after just one day’s visit.  I did see two hints of the inequality with my own eyes, however.  First, the light rail that serves as the Dubai Metro had one full car completely reserved for women and children (we only noticed the small sticker on the door after Oksana and I were prevented from stepping into it by a kind security guard.)

Second, there’s something going on with the “family taxis,” which I didn’t quite understand.  When we were trying to leave the airport Friday morning, we were told we had to take a family taxi at a slightly higher cost.  I wasn’t clear if this was because it was the only taxi available at the time or if it was because Oksana and I were a couple.  At any rate, a little cursory research seems to indicate that there’s now a whole fleet of female-taxi drivers that are a big hit with women (and children) who need to travel without a male escort.

It’s depressing to think that the women of the UAE feel they need a service like that, but on the other hand, it’s good to see Dubai making some inroads into equaling the sexes.

The Burj Khalifa

We didn’t get a chance to ascend to the observation deck of the world’s largest building, and I now regret wasting so much time in the malls.  When we realized the Burj Khalifa’s line was too long, we decided to walk around its base instead.  It’s difficult to put into words how beautiful, daring, and amazing that building is.  It’s hard to wrap your head around the scale even when you’re standing at the base, at least until you look around and see all the other “tiny” skyscrapers clustered around it.

Seeing the Burj Khalifa up close was the highlight of my day in Dubai.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
2. Thoughts on Egypt
3. Thoughts on Russia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

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The third Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, made the ruins of Petra, in the Kingdom of Jordan, famous.  I’ll admit that the imagery in that movie – namely the huge architectural façade carved out of the face of a sandstone cliff – inspired me to travel there when we found ourselves in the Middle East.

While Petra’s Treasury (or “Al Khazneh,” as it’s known in Arabic) is the most famous monument in the park, I actually found other parts to be more interesting.  The colors of the rock inside the Urn Tomb were much brighter and had intricate veins throughout, while the biggest and most impressive rock-cut temple, the Monestary, stood at the top of a long stone staircase that rivals anything on the Inca Trail.  The Siq, though… The Siq was my favorite part of Petra.

“Siq” is an Arabic word meaning “shaft,” and what an impressive shaft it is!  Beginning at roughly the entrance to the park, it winds gently downward almost a full mile before opening directly in front of the Treasury.  Except for perhaps an hour or two during midday, the sun never touches the bottom and while the rocky walls towering above you are aglow with sunlight, the floor is below is nice and cool.

The walls of the Siq were pulled apart by geologic activity and the lower sections have been worn smooth by countless flash floods.  Part of the restoration of Petra was building a new dam to hold the waters back.  Without the dam, the Siq would be a very dangerous place to be during one of the rare rainy days in that part of Jordan.

Taking a good photo in this natural canyon is more difficult than you might imagine.  During the day, the sky and upper walls are incredibly bright while the bottom lies in shadow.  Expose for the lower walls and the top will be totally blown out.  During the golden hours of sunrise and sunset, the sun is at such an extreme angle that it barely illuminates the edges of the cliffs 600 feet above your head.  Without illumination, those rich golden colors in the wall seem dull and grey.  Sunrise and sunset are usually the best times to take pictures of landscapes, but canyons only benefit from that soft lighting when they’re running exactly east-to-west.

Looking over my Siq photos, I found a few with compositions that I really liked, where the wall’s curves snaked through the photo’s third lines and created interesting shapes with light and shadow.  Unfortunately, the best of those had the sun directly overhead, rendering the floor of the Siq as nothing more than a hard white line.  The sky is blown out in this photo, but it’s such a small element of the overall composition that it doesn’t even matter.  The walls are beautiful, just as I remember them.  I love the lone janitor with his bucket, too, about to go around the corner.  Without him, we wouldn’t have the proper sense of scale.

Canon 5D Mark II
Date: 11:34am, 3 August 2011
Focal Length: 24mm
Shutter: 1/50 sec
Aperture: F/4
Exposure: -1.3 step
Flash: No
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Auto levels, minor saturation increase

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Jordan

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

The first time I traveled to Russia was in 2006.  Oksana and I split our time between Moscow and St. Petersburg, because while she is originally from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in the Far East, her family happened to be spending time in the big city.  Her brother, Andrey, played host and seemed to have an all-day itinerary planned for us every day we were there.  We were exhausted by the end of our “vacation,” but looking back through our photos, I’m amazed at all the things we got to see and do in just three weeks.

I always felt guilty for not writing much about our first trip through Russia.  Even way back then, I had a mental list of things to write about for one of these “Thoughts On” blog entries.  When we crossed the border into Russia again last September, my notes were already full of half-remembered items that I jotted down on the bus from Estonia.

Russia

Asking “What is Russia like?” is like asking “What is the United States of America like?”  How do you answer that?  When a country spans most of a continent, has citizens from every socioeconomic background, as well as a history dating back thousands of years, you can’t just sum it up in one or two sentences.

I’ve seen two of the biggest, most prestigious cities in Russia, a couple larger cities in the east, and passed through many a rural town on the rail line between St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.  About the only thing I know for sure is that Russia isn’t easily summed up.

I can tell you, however, that there’s a strange dichotomy when Russians think about their own country.  On the one hand, there’s the feeling that Russia is the greatest country on the planet.  Mention that you’ve been to the world’s largest lake and they’ll tell you that Russia has the world’s deepest.  Describe to them how something is done in the States and they’ll explain to you why the Russian method is better.

Then there’s the flip side.  A Russian who has traveled outside their country can’t help but see how bad their own roads are upon returning.  Engage them in conversations about why their tax dollars aren’t being used to repair said roads and they’ll complain bitterly about how the high level politicians are pocketing billions of dollars and what money is level over is being funneled by the government into Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Even as they complain about how bad things can get in Russia, though, they manage to maintain a sense of “Only in Russia” pride.  After an eight-hour day spent driving less than 30 kph on truly horrible roads, Oksana’s brother said to me, “Now you can say you’ve seen real Russian roads!”  I wasn’t impressed, but then I hadn’t applied for my tourist visa in the hopes of seeing spectacular potholes.

Later, there was a strikingly similar incident when we pulled into a parking lot behind an old concrete apartment building.  “Now this is the real Russia,” he said in almost the exact same way.  “This building hasn’t had maintenance done on it since the day it was built!”  It didn’t seem like I was supposed to be impressed because it was still standing.  It was more of a “Can you believe what we have to put up with?” vibe.

I think this patriotic feeling of superiority come from Soviet times, when Russia was a superpower vying for a lead role on the world stage.  Even then, living in Russia wasn’t necessarily better than living in any other country, but the Soviet propaganda was intense and citizens were told daily that their country was the best in the world.

I don’t mean that to sound derogatory, either.  We Americans suffered through the same media-delivered, government-sanctioned news during the Cold War.  Most every American growing up from the 40s onward probably still thinks the U.S. of A. is the greatest country on the planet, too.  And now, with the political divide between the left and right so wide, as well as congressional approval ratings at a 235-year low, I think it’s safe to say that we Americans have the very same love/hate relationship with our own country.

Women

I have a theory that there are only two types of women in Russia.  Supermodels and babushkas.  Walking the streets of Moscow, that’s all you ever seem to see.  We were there during a heat wave and all the teens-to-twenty-somethings were dressed in the skimpiest of clothing, showing off their long limbs and rail-thin frames.  Older, matronly types often sported the thick, square bodies I associate with Russian grandmothers.  All they’d need to complete the look is a thick shawl over their shoulders and a bandana tied down over their hair.  Some actually had them.

Of course, the women of Russia come in every shape and size, but much like a nation with a tiny middle class, the extremes get all the attention.  I found myself wondering why the younger women were generally so thin, while the older women so stocky.  Is the courting process so competitive that women have to look like supermodels in order to attract a mate?  (Maybe! Wikipedia says the ratio of males to females is .86/1. That’s a huge disparity.)  Once married, do they quit the fight and let their waistlines go?  Does the butterfly spin a cocoon and emerge a fat caterpillar?

Another thing I learned while studying these supermodel types (yes, studying! But I’ll have you know that my wife was the one pointing out the best examples!) was that “thin” does not necessarily mean “fit,” or even “healthy.”  Seems obvious to me now, but I think that my impression of body types has been affected by living in the States.  More often than not, when an American woman is that thin, she got that way by working hard at the gym.  “Thin,” in the case of Ms. America, usually comes with strength and some obvious muscle tone, which, if we’re being honest here, I find more attractive than heroin chic (no surprise, considering that I’m talking about my cultural norms here.)  I have the sad suspicion that much of the thinness in Russia comes from anorexic and/or bulimic tendencies.

You can also see many – many! – examples of plastic surgery on the streets of Moscow.  Enhanced breasts, Botoxed foreheads, duck lips.  “Beauty” can be bought, apparently, in the motherland.

We worry about how fashion supermodels and Photoshopped celebrities on magazine covers are making young women in American dangerously image conscious.  If you want to see that taken to its logical extreme, I’ll bet you can find it on the Moscow nightclub scene.

Semi-Unisex Bathrooms

I noticed a few public bathrooms that were almost, but not quite, unisex.  They shared a common washing area with sinks and mirrors, but the men and women went into different attached rooms to find the toilet stalls.

Not a big deal, really, and also a pretty good space-saving idea.  Still, I bet it screws with certain social dynamics.  I doubt the women hang out and gossip while putting on their makeup if any old guy can eavesdrop while standing in front of the urinal.

Smiling

Oksana and I have a running joke when we take part in her family photos.  “Wait!” I say to her. “Is this photo going to be Russian- or American-style?”  Meaning: “Do we smile or look deadly serious?”

Having been with Oksana over 10 years now, it’s nothing new to me.  Russians just don’t smile when posing for photos, whereas in the US, we’re trained to say “cheese” because the word tugs up the corners of our mouths and we can maintain the last syllable for as long as we need to smile.

When I met new family members in Irkutsk this time around, I was momentarily taken aback by how friendly they all seemed.  Big hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and excited ramblings I didn’t understand but ones which Oksana was happy to translate.  Why is this so surprising? I wondered.  Then it hit me: These were the people I’d seen countless times in photos and I’d unconsciously formed an opinion about them based solely on the way they gazed, stern and stiff-backed, into the camera lens.

It only takes one walk in a major metropolitan area to realize that Russians don’t casually smile at strangers on the street, either.  I have a distinctly American habit of unconsciously nodded my head or smiling at someone when I make eye contact.  In Russia, I never got anything back.

When Oksana’s brother visited us last year in the States, he noticed the difference, too.  Why was everyone smiling at him?  We talked over our differences in expectations and each learned something new about the other’s culture.  For example, he learned that Americans are courteous to strangers while I learned that when an American smiles at someone on the streets of Moscow, the Russian is most likely thinking, “Who let the village idiot wander free?”

Heating

Many (most?) people in Russia heat their homes with hot water.  That, in itself, isn’t all that special; it’s how they do it that intrigued me.

In the cities, it’s the municipality that supplies the hot water.  There’s a huge network of giant pipes that move the water all over the city.  It’s a closed circuit that eventually leads back to a steam plant – a huge factory that does nothing more than heat water and force it into the system.

The pipes enter practically every building within the city limits and the heat from uninsulated pipes (radiators) is what keeps everyone’s living space toasty warm throughout some extremely cold winters.  A side benefit is that they never have to wait for the water to warm up in their showers!

There are, of course, some problems with a system such as this.  In the warmer summer months, they often take the system offline for repairs, meaning people have to have backup hot water tanks if they want warm showers.  Also, there are outages – a broken pipe somewhere in the city or, God forbid, a steam explosion at the plant, can take out the whole system.  I can’t imagine how dangerous something like that could be to the population in the dead of winter (I suppose no more than an extended power outage in Alaska.) Not only does a shutdown put the primary method of heating for most people at risk, if it’s not quickly fixed, the whole citywide network of pipes could conceivably freeze and burst.

Shoes

You know how some people in the States ask you to remove your shoes when you come into their homes?  Maybe it’s just the circles I frequented when growing up, but I always thought that was the exception to the norm.  Not in Russia.  Everyone takes off their shoes when they enter a home.

When we take off our shoes in the States, it’s usually perfectly acceptable to walk around the house wearing socks.  (If not, no one has ever said anything to me about it!)  In Russia, that’s not normal.  There’s always an extra pair of slippers by the door for visitors.

Personally, I never took them up on their offer – seems weird to me to put my feet into a shoe that other people have worn.  Oksana cautioned me that my socks would end up getting dirty, but that’s why we wear socks, right?  So our feet don’t get dirty?

The slippers-for-guests thing in Russia must be deeply ingrained.  In the airport security line, they have to remove their shoes and send them through the x-ray machine, just like we do.  However, people are not expected to walk through the body scanner in their socks.  Right by the belt is a huge barrel full of disposable elastic booties for the 10 steps it takes to get to the other side.

Once again, I opted not to wear them.  If everyone was wearing booties, I figured that stretch of carpet was the cleanest section of floor in the airport!

Alcohol

All those rumors and stereotypes about how much Russians like to drink?  Totally true.

I can remember the first meal I shared with Oksana’s family, when they came to Juneau for our wedding.  Her father poured each of us a shot of vodka to toast our union.  I hardly drank at all back then, but I thought it would be impolite to refuse.  We had a second round to toast… I don’t know what. Their safe flight to the States?  I cut myself off after the third shot, when we toasted the freshness of the salad.

I can’t keep up and I don’t even try.

Once, when we were out on the town in St. Petersburg, our friend, Andrey, kept refilling my drink after I’d already achieved a more-than-sufficient buzz.  We were talking iPhones and travel apps, so I decided to show him the Translate part of the Google app.  (Not to go too far off topic, but have you played with this app yet? We’re this close to having Star Trek universal translators, people!)  I hit the microphone button, spoke into the phone like I was making a normal call: “Please, no more drinks. I’m already drunk!” I checked to make sure that the voice-to-text recognition worked (it did, perfectly) and hit the translate button.  A second or two later, the text changed to Cyrillic, so I hit the speaker button and a computery monotone spoke the Russian words out loud.  He laughed, and I was off the hook, drinking-wise, for the rest of the night.

Over the years, Oksana’s brother has scaled back his drinking offers, but I enjoyed having evening meals with him at his home in Kamchatka this time.  Rather than vodka, he’s more interested in cognacs and he was eager to show off the local beers, too.  I just wish we’d visited shortly after our stay in Argentina.  With all the wine we consumed there, my alcohol tolerance had been at an all-time high!

Another obvious difference between Russia and the U.S. on the drinking front is how often you see people who are completely wasted walking down the street.  I’m used to seeing falling-down drunks when the bars close back home, but you can spot them any time after sunset on a Friday or Saturday in Russia.  The drinking age is lower in Russia; that probably has something to do with it.  There’s nothing stopping kids right out of high school from drinking past their limits.  Also, no open container laws.  It’s perfectly acceptable to stroll down the street with a big ol’ forty or a bottle of vodka.

I shudder to think what the drunk-driving accident statistics are like.  On that front, at least, it sounds like they have zero tolerance laws in place.  If you’re pulled over with any alcohol in your system, you’re busted.  No leeway like we have with a .08 blood-alcohol or anything.  If the breathalyzer registers anything, your license is automatically suspended.

Finally, one last note on alcohol in Russia: They sell beer in plastic bottles.  We can debate the merits of aluminum cans vs. glass bottles, but plastic?  That’s just wrong.

Water

Oksana and I have gotten used to bottled water.  We’ve done so much traveling that we can’t keep up with which cities do and don’t have safe drinking water.  I did notice that many homes in Russia had two faucets built into the kitchen sink, though.  The skinny one with the thin stream was for drinking, while the big one was for washing dishes and the like.

Wonder if that has something to do with the endlessly-recycled hot water system?

Bread

Russian like their rye bread.  While staying with Oksana’s family, we went to get a new loaf every other day or so.  Meals always had a stack of sliced bread sitting nearby to go with just about anything: Soup, pasta…maybe even more bread.

Admittedly, this could just be an Oksana-family quirk, but I noticed that for most meals, many items were just spread out on the table and you were expected to grab what you wanted, sort of “tapas style.”  Breakfast usually had two or three different kinds of cold-cut meats or salamis, cheeses, bread (of course), and yogurt or cottage cheese.  Also, the idea of using two pieces of bread for a sandwich is foreign over there.  They like theirs open-faced.

Platonic Tomatoes

I’ve seen a lot of good tomatoes in my life – at the supermarket, growing in my grandfather’s garden – but none like they had for sale on the street next to a random metro exit in the middle of Moscow.  A taut skin, with an even Pantone 199 Red, stretched almost to the size of a grapefruit and perfectly round.  The flesh parted for a sharp knife with no loss of juice and the taste… the taste was so sweet!  You know that old debate on whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables?  When you bite into one of Russia’s finest, you’ll know that they’re a fruit.  You’ll want to eat them like apples!

We picked the perfect time to visit Kamchatka, too, as her brother was busy harvesting all the ripening vegetables from his giant greenhouse.  Every night we devoured a huge bowl of salad, made from fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers pulled from the garden that afternoon.

In fact, this is a staple of Russian life.  It seems like everyone from the lower-middle class on up has a summer home, or dacha, where they retreat from the city during the hotter summer months and grow endless amounts of fruit, vegetables, and berries for a fall harvest.  Anything that isn’t eaten on the spot is pickled, or jammed, or in some other way preserved for the winter.   Oksana’s brother was no exception; his dacha just happened to be on the same property as his house.

Eating

While we were in Bulgaria, we stayed with one of Oksana’s friends who was living with her babushka.  There were on an extended summer vacation and had fallen into a set routine.  The grandmother took it upon herself to make sure there were heaps of food on the table every day at 8am, noon, and 5pm.

During our travels, Oksana and I had fallen into a routine of our own.  A typical day would see us eating a large breakfast (if it was included at our hostel), skipping lunch, and then having a late dinner.  Sometimes, if we slept in, we’d skip both breakfast and dinner, letting a big lunch and a snack suffice.  Come to think of it, our eating “routine” was probably not having a routine.

At any rate, three big meals a day were more than we could handle, especially considering how we were being fed.  It took me a while to realize that Babushka made multiple courses for each meal.  She would leave the second simmering on the stove.  I’d load my plate up with all the food on the table and eat my fill… but the second my plate was clear, Babushka would be up and filling it again with the main course.  And naturally, I had to be polite…

Americans and Russian families both seem to a “you have to eat” mentality, but they’re different in execution.  Parents pile American kids’ plates high and demand they “clean their plate.”  In Russia, there may not be as much food on the plate initially, but it will always be refilled.

Superstitions

Living with a Russian, I’ve learned a few new superstitions.  Never kiss in a doorway.  Before leaving home on a trip, take a moment to sit down on the couch.  If you have to return because you forgot something, be sure to catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror.

I totally don’t understand any of those.

I learned a few others while we were visiting this time around, mostly having to do with “cold.”  Don’t drink cold liquids before going to bed.  Don’t sit on a cold floor.  Always wear slippers indoors; don’t ever let your feet get cold or wet.

Also, it’s unlucky to pass a funeral procession.

It makes all sorts of sense that Russians would worry about cold weather.  We all know what Siberia can be like in the winter and superstitions are, at heart, there to warn us away from things that might do us harm.  It’s bad luck to walk under a ladder… because there’s probably someone working on it and they could drop a bucket on your head.  It’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors… because you’re more likely to put someone’s eye out or knock over a lamp.  It’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path… because, well hell, I have no idea.

Oksana and I discussed all the Russian cold-superstitions we could think of and we eventually agreed that they’re not any more based on reality than the black cat thing.  You can’t get a urinary tract infection from sitting on a cold floor, anymore than you can come down with a cold from going outside without your coat on, getting your feet wet, or having a glass of water before bed.

But still.  When you consider that these superstitions were probably created hundreds of years ago, long before modern medicine established that sickness is caused by viruses and bacteria, you can take them for what they are: Common sense and cautionary advice.

I still don’t know why I can’t kiss my wife in a doorway, though.

Tea Culture

Russia is big on tea.  And not the bag-with-the-dangly-string kind we’re used to seeing in the States.  More often than not, they brew the real stuff, dried tea leaves of all different kinds, and filter them out in the teapot as they pour.  You can plan on having hot tea for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Or rather, I should say, you should plan to have tea after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Russians rarely have anything to drink while eating their meals.  They save theeir tea for after and claim it aids in digestion.

More superstition?  Maybe that irrational distrust of cold is why Russians drink so much hot tea.  That seems right to me – you should see the way Oksana’s family looks at me when I crack open a can of Diet Coke for breakfast.

Camouflage

We toured a big chunk of the remote Kamchatka peninsula with Oksana’s brother.  He took us to the hot springs, to a geothermic field with geysers, up volcanoes, to the ocean, and fishing in the rivers.  We saw a lot of outdoorsmen along the way and, almost to a person (including Andrey himself!), they were dressed in camo.

I guess what surprised me was not so much that they were dressed in camouflage, but that I never saw an orange safety vest.  Camo is made for blending in, which is perfect for hunting when you need to sit in a blind waiting for a deer, but it’s also dangerous.  In the U.S., enough people have been shot wearing camo that it’s pretty much expected that everyone will wears orange during hunting season.  Considering how many Russians drink while out in the bush, I’d cover myself in orange from head to toe.  And maybe strap a pair of those disposable air-horns on my shoes, too.

I’m guessing all this camouflage-as-an-outdoor-fashion-statement comes from the military.  In Russia, everyone has to put in a couple years of service when they turn 18.  Even if they don’t get to keep their gear when they get out, the camouflage patterns are so familiar by then that they probably wouldn’t think of buying anything else.

Metro

What does it say about my childhood that the first real experience I had with a metro was in Moscow?  (Hint: It says I grew up in small-town Alaska.)  Thinking back, I guess I commuted a time or two on the Mexico City metro before we visited to Russia, but because I was mostly following other people in our group there, it didn’t leave as big an impression on me.  We used the metro every day in Moscow and I quickly became familiar with it.

Technically, the metro system as a whole is quite impressive.  Most stations are underground – the deepest is over 275 feet deep! – and long escalators are used to ferry people down to the platforms.  During peak hours, the trains are never more than a few minutes apart and above every tunnel are digital readouts telling you when the next is due to arrive.

The Moscow Metro isn’t only an incredible feat of engineering and a testament to efficient management; it’s also a work of art.  Each station has its own theme.  You might arrive at one stop strung with old chandeliers, make a connection to another with polished marble floors, then get off at a station with walls tiled with intricate mosaics.

I could spend an entire vacation exploring the Moscow metro, just learning about and photographing the different stations.  I’ve been on many more metros since our first trip to Russia, and some of them have been quite good, but none of them compare to Moscow’s.

Driving in the Far East

We’ve traveled through so many countries at this point in the trip that I’d have a genuinely hard time telling you which ones drive on the left and which ones drive on the right.  It’s best for me, at this point, to simply look both ways before crossing any street, lest I be clobbered by a car driving in a lane I wasn’t expecting it to be in.

But Russians share the same side of the road with us in the U.S.  The right side of the road!

Things get a little crazy once you get to Siberia, though.  (In fact, things are crazy enough in Moscow and St. Petersburg.  Think “Los Angeles” with less respect for the rules and more traffic jams.)  Near Lake Baikal, they still drive on the right side of the road, but three out of four vehicles have their steering wheels on the right side of the car, as well.  Think about that for a minute.  It’s as if 75% of the population is driving U.S. Post Office delivery vehicles.

Why?  Well, it’s because Siberia is surrounded by Asian car markets.  Japan, Korea, China… importing from these countries is cheap, so they can have their pick, but most of the automotive manufacturers are saving their best work for the cars they drive in their home markets.  They export inferior vehicles to markets where they drive on the right.  When faced with an either-or decision between quality and steering wheel placement, apparently three-quarters of Russians prefer quality.

With some effort, a driver can make most of the necessary adjustments.  It’s not all that hard to retrain your brain to shift gears with your left hand or to mentally swap the turn signal with the windshield wipers.  You could overcome those muscle memories with an afternoon of practice.  What you can’t overcome – ever! – is the fear that wells up inside you when you decide to pass another car on the road.

Think about this for a second.  You’re behind a big semi; it’s going too slow on a two-lane rural road.  You decide you want to pass it, so you start to inch toward the oncoming lane to see around him… but wait!  You’re driving on the right side of the car, so that means you have to maneuver your whole car into the oncoming lane before you can see around the semi!

There are probably all sorts of infrastructure problems that arise when there isn’t a standardized driver’s side of the car, too.  I noticed at least one.  Ticket dispensers at the entrance to paid-parking lots had to be placed on both sides of the car, because they can’t be sure which window was going to be rolled down.

The roads in the Far East are terrible, too.  There’s one major thoroughfare through Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy that’s in decent repair – four lanes, two in each direction – but that’s only because the president came through a few years ago and was appalled by the conditions.  I guess he was able to channel some money toward PK once he returned to Moscow.  While we were there in September, they were repaving some side streets and one or two roads out of town, as well, because he’s due for another visit soon.

Driving anywhere outside of the city can be pretty rough.  Lots of dirt roads with huge potholes reduce your speed to almost nothing.  Everyone has an SUV; it’s the only reliable way to get around.  It’s not so bad when you take the time to negotiate all the bumps and holes, but even so, after three or four hours of driving on roads like that, your neck is sore and your nerves are shot.  Winter’s much better.  People just drive on the snow.

One last thing about the frustration of driving in PK.  The main road has two lanes in each direction, but it can take forever to drive from one end of town to the other.  First off, there is no bus lane, or even bus stops, so big buses are constantly blocking the right-hand lane while picking up or dropping off passengers.  Second, there’s no left-hand turn lane at the stoplights, so whenever a car is waiting to turn left on a solid green, it’s also blocking one entire lane.  These two events often coincide to bring everything to a standstill.  If they had the same rules against excessive lane changing as they do in the States, no one would ever get anywhere at all!

How important do you think roads are in the economic development process, by the way?  I got to thinking about that as we sat in a PK traffic jam for an hour or two.  It seems to me that paving roads and maintaining them might be one of the best values for a country’s tax dollars.  I couldn’t help but think about how much business wasn’t being done while all those cars sat bumper to bumper, not to mention how much time is wasted when you can only drive 30 KPH because everything but the main avenue has reverted back to dirt roads with lake-sized, water-filled potholes.

Driving Licenses

One day, while we were driving back from the Mutnovka geothermic field on the top of a volcano in Kamchatka, we came across a police officer on the side of the road.  He had obviously pulled over another car (his patrol car was parked behind it) and its two occupants were standing with him alongside the road.

As we approached, he took a step out into the road and motioned for Oksana’s brother to pull over.  After we’d stopped, he approached the driver’s side window and asked Oksana and Andrey to accompany him for a minute.  I, of course, had no idea what was going on.  Oksana told me to sit tight; they’d be right back.

I watched through the windshield as the officer explained something to them and then they all bent down over some papers spread over the hood of the car.  Andrey and Oksana signed some stuff, got back in the car, and we drove off.  “What was that all about?” I asked.

Oksana told me that the couple had been pulled over for speeding – excessively so.  Because of that, the officer was issuing them a ticket, probably involving a fine or a court date or some such thing.  To insure that they would show up to pay their fine, he was revoking the driver’s license.  As long as they showed up and paid their fine on time, he’d get his license back.  If he didn’t, the next time he was pulled over, he’d be arrested.

Oksana and Andrey were needed as witnesses.  They put down their names and contact information, verifying that this cop was revoking that guy’s driver’s license.  The only reason we were pulled over was because we happened to be the first car to come along.

I can’t imagine something like this working in the U.S.  The only way a police officer can confiscate your I.D. is if they arrest you, and they’re not going to do that for a common speeding ticket.

Seems like this is a Russian system of checks and balances to me.  A judicial workaround to combat corruption.  Consider what might happen if the cop didn’t revoke the license.  What would guarantee that the driver would show up at court in a society where he could bribe his way out of such proceedings?  On the other hand, imagine if cops weren’t required to obtain a third party witness to the confiscation?  Corrupt officers could simply take the license and demand a large bribe if the driver wanted it back.

Law and Order

I saw Law and Order: Criminal Intent on TV while we were in Russia, or rather, I saw, “Закон и порядок. Преступный умысел.”  It wasn’t just a dubbed version of the American show.  This was a whole new show, with Russian writers, directors, and actors.

I couldn’t understand anything that was happening, except… well, I knew when the scene changed.  It had the exact same chung-chung sound effect.

Oksana never sat down and watched an episode, so I didn’t get an answer to the first question I had about the series.  They presumably follow cases through the criminal and judicial system, like they do on the U.S. show, but do they address the things that are uniquely Russian or do they simply rehash plots and scenarios from the American version?  For instance, do they address or gloss over the obvious corruption in the system?

That would make for some fascinating television, but I could also see how the “ripped from the headlines” feel of the Law and Order franchise could draw the wrong kind of attention from some very powerful and dangerous Russian authorities.

Language Tangent

As I was writing about Law and Order, Oksana and I were just discussing the show’s Russian name.  Apparently Wikipedia calls it “Law and Order: Criminal Mind,” which is an inaccurate translation.  Oksana said she could understand why someone could make that mistake, though.  The Russian words for “mind” and “intent” come from the same root.

How interesting! I thought.  The word they use for the thinking part of the brain is related to intent.  There’s something almost poetic about that.

It got me thinking about the same words in English.  We say, “mind your manners,” or “mind your parents.”  What does “mind” mean when we use it as a verb?  It means, “to pay attention to.”  Attention. Intention?  Intent!

I love puzzling out languages!

Speaking of languages, the United States always gets a bad rap because the vast majority of Americans only speak English.  After traveling through 25 countries or so and seeing the majority of them with thoroughly bilingual cultures, Russia surprised me by also being almost aggressively monolingual.

Maybe it’s a superpower thing.  “Our country is so big and important, we don’t need to learn how to speak your language; you need to learn to speak ours!”

Also, I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this (being married to a Russian girl these past 8 years), but Russians speak mostly with their lips.

(I think the only reason I noticed was because of all the time I spent as a fifth wheel in dinner conversations.  You still look at people when they talk, even if you can’t understand what they’re saying, and I found myself observing the manner in which Oksana’s family and friends spoke.)

The way Russians speak with their mouths almost closed, made me think of some videos I’ve seen online in which people dissect accents.  There’s a placement element to speaking in an accent where you “move” the voice around your mouth.  Some accents sit way in the back, by the throat.  Some you try to move up toward your nose.  Russian, apparently, sits out on the tip of your lips.

Russians famously have a difficult time with our “th” sound, where the tongue slips through the teeth for just an instant.  I wonder if every sound in the Russian language can be made with the teeth clenched shut.

American Movies

Speaking of American entertainment, I’ve noticed that Russia has a unique way of dubbing, well, everything.  Normally when you dub a movie, you kill the original audio track completely and have new actors give voice to the characters in their own language.  In Russia, they do use new voice actors, but they don’t remove the original audio track.  This is exactly as irritating as you’d think. It sounds like two people talking at the same time, in different languages.

We sometimes see the same thing being done to news broadcasts or on the radio when someone is being interviewed in a foreign language.  They begin speaking, in Spanish, say, and then the editor lowers their volume and has an interpreter come in and speak over them in English.  It’s a useful trick when you want to establish that the original speaker is a foreigner.  It’s completely annoying when a whole movie is needlessly done the same way.

Oksana said they’ve done it this way for as long as she can remember.  Everyone accepts it; it seems like a cultural idiosyncrasy at this point.  I wonder why they do it this way, though.  What’s wrong with subtitles?  Is it because the literacy rate is (or was) too low for most people to understand them?  Can it be that Russians read slower for some reason and can’t keep up with them?  Or is it simply that the Hollywood movies that were originally dubbed into Russian weren’t done with the original edits?  That is to say, maybe there weren’t able to remove the original, English audio track without also removing the sound effects and music as well, so they just dubbed right over the top of it all in Russian.  And then, once everyone got used to it being done this way, it just became a thing.

At any rate, Russia has its own very successful movie industry where everything is produced in Russian.  I happened to catch an action movie where some American soldiers were obviously the bad guys.  When those Americans spoke English, even then, they dubbed audible Russian over the top of their lines so the Russian audience would know what was being said.  No subtitles at all.

Two other notes about Russian movies:  Yes, Americans are always the bad guys.  And now, after having seen a couple movies with Russian actors playing Americans and royally butchering the accent, I finally have sympathy for Oksana and all those times she’s listened to American actors faking their way through their Russian characters’ lines.  So painful it can’t help but rip you right out of the movie!

Customer Service

I’ve told Oksana I wouldn’t mind living in Russia for a time, so that I could learn the language through immersion.  She tells me that’s never going to happen; she has no interest in living there again.

It’s not the country that would bother her.  It’s the business world.  If we move there, she would have to get a job, and working in such a messed up system would drive her crazy.

Partly, it’s because she’s an accountant.  She hates that Russian businesses keep two different books: One with the numbers to show the government for tax purposes, and one that has the real numbers related to the business.  It’s an open secret; everyone does it – everyone has to do it.  An honest business can’t compete in a corrupt market.

The other thing Oksana hates is the customer service – or lack thereof.  This is something that has probably been improving since communism gave way to capitalism back in the 90s, but it’s still a long way from U.S. standards.  No one’s going to get fired for treating customers poorly in Russia.

To be clear, it’s not just the fact that a few jilted customer leave angry after a transaction.  Let’s face it – that still happens in the States all the time.  The problem in Russia is at the institutional level.  Problems with the way customers are handled by a business actually slow the business down.

An example:  When we were at the train station in St. Petersburg, buying our tickets for the Trans-Siberian Railroad, we stood in line at the counter.  While we were waiting, people would appear out of nowhere, cut to the front of the line, and the person behind the counter would stop what they were doing and service them instead of those of us who had been waiting patiently.  This happened two or three times and people were getting seriously angry.

Turns out, it’s policy for employees to help customers who are purchasing tickets for the trains that are departing soonest.  These people were justified in queue-hopping because they’d waited until the last possible minute to purchase their tickets.  Some people gamed the system, knowing they’d never have to wait in line at all, if only they wait until the “10 minutes to departure” announcement for their train.

Logically, this makes some sense: If those customers had to wait in line, they’d probably miss their train and the company is out a sale.  But from a customer service standpoint, it’s idiotic.  The employees are always being yelled at – both by the people who are in a rush and by the people who are waiting patiently.  If they simply banned line-cutting altogether, then everyone would accept that they need to get there early and the whole process of ticket sales would be much more orderly.

Another example: When we were flying out of Irkutsk, Oksana’s check-in bag weighed in at 21.5 kilos.  The airline attendant behind the counter wanted to charge her an extra $25 (or whatever), but Oksana wouldn’t have it.  We held up the line as we pulled stuff out of the bag until it dropped to 20 kilos.  It took some time, too.  Our packs are stuffed from the top, down.

Oksana muttered some things under her breath at the woman, but she just sat there and waited.  As far as she was concerned, she got a 5 minute break from helping customers and she didn’t care a bit that the people behind us were going to be more irritated when they reached her.

After checking in, we still had a few hours before we needed to be at the gate, so before we went through security, Oksana dug out her iPhone and checked the airlines’ regulations on overweight bags.  She discovered that the limit was 23 kilos, not 20!

She marched right back up to the counter and asked the woman why she’d made her take items out of her bag if it was under the limit.  Her response?  It was Oksana’s fault.  It’s the passenger’s responsibility to know that the airline-stated limit is 23 kilos!

(Talking it over later, we decided that this might better fit in the “corruption” instead of the “bad customer service” category.  I’m pretty sure she planned to pocket the oversize baggage fee.)

Shopping

Moscow, of course, is now a modern capitalist metropolis.  Change the language and you would have a hard time telling it apart from New York or Los Angeles.  The shopping there was the same as any other big city in the world.

Out in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, though, I noticed something peculiar.  While malls have begun to pop up all over the city, they’re different on the inside than we’re used to in the States.

Instead of having large department stores and franchise businesses, most malls in the Russian Far East are still stuck with the old market mentality.  Think “cell phone accessory kiosks,” on a mall-wide scale.  Instead of having Wal-Mart and McDonald’s move into the mall and wipe out the all the mom-and-pop operations in town, it’s like all the mom-and-pops just picked up and moved their tiny businesses inside the mall!

Even some of the supermarkets are stuck in this mode of thinking.  On the outside, a supermarket may look just like a Safeway or a Winn Dixie, but when you go in, you realize that each aisle has its own vendor.  Rather than fill your cart with what you want and pay for things near the exit, you instead only put them into your cart after they’ve been paid for.  Because there’s more than one business under the roof, there may be three delis, two butchers, and five bakeries inside the same supermarket.  Buying a package of M&Ms isn’t a straight-forward process, either. You’d do yourself a favor by shopping around, because they might be cheaper the next aisle over!

That said, you can see that they might be leaving the market stall model behind.  Another supermarket conducts business in the traditional way (However, with tiny shops placed side-by-side along the entire perimeter, it appears that they just can’t quite let go of the old market mentality.)  Also, there’s a Cinnabon in one of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy’s malls, too.  Their sticky-sweet cinnamon buns herald future changes, I have no doubt!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Thailand
2. Thoughts on Estonia
3. Thoughts on Jordan

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments |

Click to enlarge!

Throughout our round-the-world travels, Oksana and I managed to record a whole lot of data pertaining to our trip.  There were certain things we updated every single day (my journal, our travel budget, our GPS track) and some things that we recorded on a less frequent basis (number of buses, trains, planes, etc.)  While it almost became too much to keep up with at the end of a year and a half — I’m still catching up on our GPS page! — we saw it through and now have a huge amount of raw data to examine.  Personally, I find it fascinating to dig into this stuff and I can’t wait to see what it tells us!

• What was our least expensive country?
•  How many photos did we take?
•  How many miles did we cover?
•  How many hours did we spend on buses?
• How much money did we spend?

On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that last one…

In the coming weeks and months, as we parse this data for our own curiosity, I’ll be sharing it on our website.  But looking at spreadsheets and numbers probably isn’t fun for you, so I’m going to do my best to present it in a way that’s easier to digest.  I created this first infographic — which we tried to limit to simply time and place – with this in mind.  Hopefully it’ll be the first of many.

Make sure you see the full-size version!

No related posts.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

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We only had one day in Dubai, a 17-hour layover between Moscow and Bangkok.  Oksana and I left our bags at the airport and spent the day in the city.  We explored Dubai’s insane malls, giant hypermarkets, went skiing indoors, and tried (but failed) to ascend the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.

Late in the afternoon, we decided to give the Big Bus Tours company a try.  They run a “hop on, hop off” bus that we, despite the sky-high price they were asking, thought would be a good way to see the city sights.  It wasn’t.  They happily sold us two tickets (for a total of $120 US dollars!) at 3:30pm, failing to mention their buses only run until 5pm.

We chose our seats on the second level of the open-air, double-decker bus and put in our earphones so we could hear the guided audio tour.  We both pulled our cameras out of our bags at the same time and, to our horror (and shame, because we should have known better as Alaskans), watched every glass surface on them instantly fog.  Not only had our cameras been inside a cool, air conditioned mall for the last few hours, they’d also been with us when we went skiing.  By pulling them out of our bags, we’d effectively raised their temperature almost 70 degrees less than 5 seconds.

The air in Dubai is surprisingly humid and after half an hour of frustration, I worried that the inner elements of my lens would never defrost.  Our first few photos were ridiculously blurry.  Finally, by the time we pulled up to the third or fourth gigantic mall on the bus’s loop, the sun had done its job.  My camera was ready to take some pictures again.

When the bus pulled out again, we were the only ones left on the top level.  After 5 minutes or so, we realized that the guided tour was no longer playing through our headphones…

We forgot our worries when the bus pulled onto the highway.  There, in the distance, was the Dubai skyline with the sun sinking into the humid haze behind it.  Oksana and I moved to the opposite side of the bus, leaned over the rail, and tried to frame a photo – any photo – without a telephone pole or an electrical wire in it.

Of the dozens we shot, the one you see above is my favorite.

When we sat back down, we knew something was wrong.  No audio guide and we were moving further and further from the city.  Neither Oksana nor I wanted to go down and ask the driver if we’d stupidly missed the last stop, but of course, eventually we had to.  I walked down when he pulled off at a gas station – the lower half of the bus was also empty – and caught up to him at the pump.

“Um, is the tour over?” I asked.

He looked at me, shocked. “You were on the bus?”

“Yes, upstairs.”

“The tour ended at five! You were not supposed to stay!” He sighed. “Where did you planning to go?” His English wasn’t perfect.

I gave him the name of the mall where we bought the tickets because I knew it had a metro station nearby that would lead us to the airport.  He drove us back as soon as he finished filling up the tank.

I felt guilty, but hey, he should have checked his own bus at the last stop, right?  There was even a security camera on the upper deck, pointed right at us!

Canon 5D Mark II
Date: 5:38pm, 30 September 2011
Focal Length: 82mm
Shutter: 1/8000 sec
Aperture: F/4
Exposure: -1 step
Flash: No
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Minor rotate and crop, Slight crushing of blacks with Levels

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

Going to McDonald’s in Russia was almost and afterthought for us.  We spent our first week or so in St. Petersburg without stopping by one, and then, a day or two before we were set to hop on a train to Irkutsk, we realized that we might not get another chance.  I wasn’t sure there was a McDonald’s in Irkutsk, but I knew for sure there wasn’t going to be on on Kamchatka.  We’d already eaten at a Russian McDonald’s in 2006, so it wasn’t like missing it this time would bother me.  Still, we weren’t making videos back then…

So, while we were on our way to buy a new pair of hard drives, we decided to stop off for lunch.  I remembered to bring the video camera, but it turns out I forgot to bring a battery for the microphone.  The on camera mic did well enough, even if it did pick up a bit too much traffic noise.

Couple notes about the video:  I guess we finally found an acceptable answer for why all the McDonald’s managers have been so adamant about us not taking photos.  Copyright infringement, which I think is a pretty silly excuse in this case, is a party line I could see the franchise enforcing.  At least it’s an answer; we usually don’t even get that.

We never did go seeking the rumored “fake McDonald’s of Russia.  Would have been fun to order a Big Mec, or whatever, and see how close it was to the real deal.  Next time!  Also, as you may have figured out from watching the video, we didn’t “get” the Chicken Shake because we didn’t find the curry powder until after we’d finished eating.  I guess you’re supposed to pour that in the bag with the chicken and shake it all around.  Maybe they even have different flavors.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Finland
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Bulgaria

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