WARNING: This man is considered "shoed" and dangerous!
Above, Prof. Fred, Marlene, and Janet enjoy Breakfast in Bangkok.
Breakfast was like a reunion. The Phuket gang was back, and everyone else was there. Above, from left to right are Dave, Pete, Andy and Aaron, They're in my EMBA group. Below are Heidi and Aimee from the Fellowes. Pete and I had been on a team with Aimee during one of our mixed sessions. We negotiated with indigenous people in a role-play case study. ooooooooooooo. Yes, it was exciting.
Yes, that's a Porsche Cayenne. There are several decent cars in the area, but this Phnom Penh seemed rather impoverished in large part. Yet, the party has a nice car.
It seemed that this was the case in both countries--the people with the power controlled the wealth and had access to more opportunity. Not surprising, but more blatant than I expected to see.
Back to Friday in Vietnam. We had an evening flight, but we set up a day that included Vietnam War history and tours. We'd been warned to expect a different perspective. J and C went along for the tour as well.
We all rode together in a van with Huy as our guide. Before we hit the Vietnam War stuff, we did a Saigon tour which included a stop at Notre Dame and the Central Post Office. The Church was really pretty, but needs a lot of work. As we've found with a lot of landmarks here, there was restoration under way. Tourism is becoming more and more important to the economies here, and fixing the points of interest is very much part of the plan to increase tourism. They have collection boxes at a lot of these places asking you to donate.
We may have done one other thing, but then we went on the War Museum. The war in Viet Name is called a war of American aggression. It's important for you to remember who's writing the history--the "victorious" group who wants to be sure that we're not painted to be all that great and that the war was unnecessary and evil.
The museum had an array of weaponry, as you would expect, and a lot of pictures that made us look pretty bad. Of course, remember the source....
From there, it was on to Cu Chi tunnel, which was a network of tunnels in the hills that the VC used to confuse and hide from the US troops. Very primitive and very amazing. Hard to fathom how they thought of these things, except that in the beginning they were used to avoid being "enslaved" by Michelin rubber company and later they were used and expanded during the war. These tunnels were something else. Very well thought out and planned.
So from there it was farewell to our friends J and C and onward to the airport, where we boarded a plane for Thailand. You saw my first post when we arrived here, and now I'm almost caught up.
I've missed breakfast the last two days, so I'm going to go do that now.
Here are links to the VN pics one last time:
http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/VietNam
http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/RiverTripFromCambodiaToVietNam
Motorcycles and the like rule the roost, as I've already pointed out. Wait until you see the pics from Saigon.
I took this picture as we nosed in to the dock at the sanctuary. There's a village there, and the people who live in the village sometimes take a bird or two for themselves. The pics from this stop include the white and black blobs (my cell camera just didn't cut it for these pics). I will be uploading some new pics from John and Jeff at some point this week. Also, see the picks of the little kid in the orange shirt. He followed us around there.
The spiral staircase and the rusted out railings were attached to the 20-25 ft high observation deck. Sketchy and a little unnerving. But, not as bad as the monkey bridges, which are basically not for monkeys but for humans are are one bamboo pole wide with one bamboo pole to hold on to and they cross the river. Pics of these bridges are at the picasa site.
We went from the sanctuary to the village where we'd spend the night in a banana leaf and bamboo hut on the water. See the pics of John and Jeff on the deck.
It was in this village that I think I had the best time. Fresh chilis, jackfruit, coconuts, lichi, rambotan, mangroves, etc, were all over the place. Oh, bananas too. Everywhere.
But the best thing was the kids. See the pics of the little girls. They wanted us to take their pictures so that they could then look at the pics on our cameras/phones. They (and the little boys) all called out in the same way..."hello, hello, hello" It was so melodical.
They were so gentle, these kids. Their hands on my arm felt like birds' feet. Sounds a little corny I guess, but I was touched by this for some reason. You can see pics of John showing them pictures he'd just taken of them. We also learned they wanted candy, so we stopped in a store, (a little hut on the path), and bought some for them. Then, we had it for all the kids who called out to us.
The village was a combo of literal huts, nice houses, corrugated tin shacks, and some amalgams of all of the above. However, one thing was for sure, they all had tvs. LOL! some had no doors, but had tvs.
The village was basically a dirt path that has houses and shacks on it; as noted, the store was about a 10x15 (if that) bamboo and tin room, about 5 feet off the path.
The host family fed us an awesome meal--we made our own spring rolls from rice noodle and various ingredients, and tons of fresh chilis. I was on fire, and the hosts all thought i was crazy. I ate way too many peppers, but it was GREAT.
I had my best night's sleep of the trip so far there, probably 7 1/2 hours. i woke up 4:30-5ish, and soon thereafter the roosters started crowing and the fishermen started leaving for their day on the water, which made a lot of noise. At 7 a.m., the loudspeaker in the village started calling out the Voice of the People, the government's news and propaganda service. You have no choice, you must listen.
We ate some french bread, butter and jelly in the morning, which is ironic because the guide had encouraged us to have a big breakfast since we'd be getting to lunch late that day. However, we didn't have much of an option.
Oh, and the coffee in VN, while really great, is not a good situation. I like buckets of coffee, and here, you get thimbles. And it takes a long time to fill that thimble. God, I would love to see a Starbucks, or anything like that. I've seen two in Bangkok, both at night, so I haven't indulged, because I am hardly sleeping as it is.
So, we departed our hosts and moved onward down the river, going to the floating market. It was neat, and you can see the the boats advertised what they sold by hanging it from a pole on their boat. At this point, we realized some of the boats we'd heard at 5 a.m. were actually going to sell fruit, etc, at the floating market, a giant collection of boats selling and buying products. There were also vendors selling sodas and waters. I bought a water from the mom of the kid in the picture who's making change. He pulled that wad of cash out of his shirt after she took my dong (Oh, another joke there. It's bad enough that now the poeple here in Thailand are joking about it. And we're MBA students. What the...?).
Well, once again, I'm exhausted and just can't stay up much longer. I'm almost done with Vietnam (next post will be last), and then on to Thailand, which has been great but also which by the time I'm blogging it I fear it will be in the rear view mirror.
But, I have to be up and at a meeting at 7:30 a.m., and we have lunch at the United Nations after that, then on to the Jewelry factory.
This is a pic from the bar...note the waitress' less than pleased posture.
I took lots of other pictures, and they don't yet have comments. We left at 7 a.m. for a floating fish farm, which we reached by water. I am amazed at how self-sufficient and efficient the entrepreneurs are here. I think that it's a good explanation of why Asian entrepreneurs succeed in the U.S. They work they're asses off, and they don't waste any time or effort.
It was explained by Huy that this has not been a great year for the fish farmers. They do not export a lot of their fish, which are kind of like bass, because the Australians and Americans do not like them. However, we didn't quite elicit the true reason that it's been a bad year. Perhaps it was a hint to give a tip.
There was also a guy in shorts that was diving below the deck and breathing through a tube that was coming out of an air compressor and that he was holding in his mouth. They made their own fish food, and you'll see pictures of the way we crossed from one part of the fish farm to the other.
This was also where the people lived, as is the usual. Note that in one of the videos, I pause on a temple (a small homage to the Buddha and assorted gods of the river). It's basically a shelf on which incense is burned, candles are lit, and flowers are placed.
This was the start of a long day, but now I'm running way late. I have to shower, eat and be on the bus in 25 minutes--some things never change. I find lots of things to keep me off task.
There are tons of pics that you can see at the link, but they're not in order. I'd like to wait to link to them until they are more ordered, but that's not going to happen. I have to get in the shower, as we are on our way today to Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Siam.
http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/VietNam
I'll fill in the blanks on this day (Thursday) later. I'm slowly catching up.
After cave pagoda, we went to our hotel, the Chau Phat. It was nice. I was surprised at how nice it was (it wasn't anything like an intercontinental, but it wasn't the Roll-On-Inn, either). We cleaned up, and then we went to meet J and C for dinner at a place called Bay Bong. Here's a good pic of Jeff clarifying the bill--as a good finance guy always does:
This was the beginning of a crazy week. I have so much to tell, but it's midnight here, and I'm very beat. The things that we did and saw were really something else, and you'll see them too when I post the link tomorrow.
See ya!
