This junk was at the Museum of Ethnology. Just looking at it makes me want to sail 'round the world a la Contiki.

Here's a pretty good photo of some of us on the bus going to Ho Hoan Kiem about a week ago. The only time you can ever get a seat on the bus is after 8 pm, and also any time after your 60th birthday.

Sean, Steffanie and I skipped class one day to explore a local beer garden. The Tre Vang bia hoi at 246B Khuat Duy Tien street is a hidden treasure. The staff were the friendliest I've encountered here - and they even sold me a shirt for 2 USD.

Oolrait Safarit

When I was in Finland a few weeks ago my uncle took me to an adventure school where he brings groups to teach them how to ride ATVs, have paintball wars, go flyfishing, and do other things that have been found to grow hair on the chests of men and women alike. It's essentially a deluxe ropes course for the purpose of building team cohesion among coworkers and other groups.

He took me through some pretty hairy forests on ATVs but when I had the chance to do the paintballing I felt that I would interfere with the group that he was tutoring in the art of paintball warfare. He didn't push the point - I think it's because he thought that I have some kind of moral hang up about guns. I really wanted to do it but I just thought that the language barrier would be too high for me to offer any substantial help to the teams.

In any event, the webpage is pretty gnarly - except it's in Finnish so I only know every third or fourth word.

Karaoke on Saturday night after bia hoi.

A parade on Sunday created some serious traffic problems in Hanoi.

Some typical Hanoian architecture: a hodge podge of brick boxes thrown together.

Much of our group at Ho Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi.

This is the Hanoi Opera House in the French Quarter. Supposedly its a replica of the Paris Opera House - just smaller.

Mmm...fido. Thanh Xuan, the district of our university is renowned for its thit cho (dog meat).

What passes for pizza in Vietnam.

Apocalypse Now

Two nights ago our group went to a club called Apocalypse Now, obviously themed after Coppola's movie about the Vietnam War. The club itself was on the smaller side.

The music was far too loud and the bass was up way too high. The music itself was a standard club mix of trance and house music. They didn't touch the hip-hop or R&B until the last four or five songs of the night when it was just us Americans left there. It would be nice if we could here a little more variety from the DJs here, but I guess that will come with time as Hanoi gets more integrated into the world music scene.

The layout had as many problems as the music. Tables and stools were hardly ergonomically designed. It was as if the chairs and tables were specifically designed to force us to dance. Although it was a Saturday night, there wasn't really enough space in the club for the number of people there. Considering that the club had just recently moved from another location, this shows an astounding lack of planning on the part of the management. The dance floor was jam packed and dancers spilled over into the eating/drinking areas. Drinks were spilled and chairs were overturned by flailing arms and legs.

The Apocalypse Now theme wasn't really that obvious from the decor; a couple of movie posters were framed and a fake helicopter poked out of the wall but, by and large, it looked like any other club in any country.

The drinks were about 30,000 dong (2 USD) a piece - not bad but not great, either. They had a limited selection of beers. Fewer imports than I'd like to see at a club with the reputation of Apocalypse.

On the plus side, the patrons were mostly locals; there were no discernable sex tourists like there were at the New Century club that we visited last weekend. Also, there were enough waiters that we never really had to wait for food or drinks. There was a lot of security waiting to break up fights. Security was key to making this club a civilized place, hospitable to the local gay scene - something that doesn't exist in a lot of clubs in the US. Unfortunately, the security stopped at the threshold and one of our girls was assaulted by one of the locals (who was probably the kid of a corrupt official or factory owner) that run with impugnity here. A couple of police officers standing nearby did absolutely nothing to stop the physical assaule. This is what (mostly) sets Vietnam into the third world column, this matter-of-fact corruption that pervades all level of government. Thankfully, Vietnam appears to be working on reforming their governance from the local to the national level in order to gain the confidence of international investors.

As if the assault incident weren't enough our evening took a turn for the worse. Some of us were hungry enough to look for a pho shop or a bia hoi in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, everything closes early in Vietnam and we had to walk about a kilometer before we found anything. Finally we found a bia hoi open. It was on a road on an incline that branched off from the main boulevard. As we walked up the road on the incline, a motorbike came up pretty quickly from behind us. Simultaneously, another bike rounded the bend in the road in front of us at about forty miles and hour. The bike from behind was passing us on the right as the one coming from in front made it to where we were on the road. He was going way too fast and he didn't expect there to be traffic at that point in the road. The bike in front swerved to avoid the bike that was passing us but he wasn't able to turn quickly enough and he knicked the bike as he passed. At normal speeds eveything would have been fine but the impact was a lot worse because he was going so quickly. The speeder fell off of his bike about fifteen feet behind the group and the woman who had been passing us was thrown sideways onto the ground. As her bike fell it actually toppled on top of the leg of one of the guys in our group.

The woman appeared to have broken her wrist or her arm. The speeding man appeared to have some abdominal injurie and may have broken some ribs. A crowd from the bia hoi came out to help and pretty soon there were about twenty people trying to figure out what to do. The speeder was pretty drunk according to one of the guys in our group who was standing near him. One of the women who came out began blaming us for taking up too much of the street and causing the accident. They were just trying to figure out someone to pin the blame and the hospital bills on - rich Americans are as good as anyone else. We high-tailed it out of there at this turn of events. We got a couple of taxis right down the street and took it back to our dorm.

What's really scary about that whole incident is that there is a high likelyhood that if the speeding motorbik had not smacked that woman he would have plowed into our group and could have hurt or killed us. Although the whole incident was pretty grisly, it could have been much worse. One of us could have been seriously injured or killed. I guess these are the unseen risks of living in a quickly industrializing country with shortages of street space and policing and a glut of motorbikes.

Hanoi ... he's so hot right now!

After arriving in Vietnam on August the 14th, the education abroad program (EAP) group from the UC has had a whirlwind couple of weeks. We arrived in Hanoi in the midmorning on Sunday. We met our program director Gerard in the terminal at the airport and changed money there.

Noi Bai International Airport itself made a striking impression on me as my first point of contact with Vietnam. Immediately I noticed that the tarmac was veined with cracks and fissures, green with weeds growing out of the ground beneath the cement. It gave me the sense that the jungle was moving in, trying to reclaim its lost land from this foreign, inorganic installation. Ducking out of the plane (as I am forced to fit my 6'4" frame through doors made for normal sized people) the first people I saw were Vietnamese military soldiers with pea green uniforms and red trimmed hats. These men are part of the same army that was fighting desperately against Americans of my father's generation - and just more than thirty years ago. It was only about 10 years ago that the US and Vietnam had no official diplomatic relations, and there I was smiling and being greeted at the doorstep of the country. We passed through customs and passport inspection with no problems except for the expected language barrier for those of us who don't speak any Vietnamese. We were waived through the customs despite having filled out our declaration forms incorrectly (thanks to Vietglish translations). The officer looked at us - knew we were no trouble and just waived us through. That simple. There was less bureaucracy getting into this supposedly backwards, communist country than there is getting through the US customs and declarations barriers.

When we finally left the air-conditioned terminal we felt the full effect of the oppressive heat and humidity. Vietnam has heat and humidity that is unheard o fin California. I wasn't really prepared for how hot and muggy it was. We hopped on the bus and rolled towards our new home of the next four months. The views out the windows of the bus were amazing for me, having spent my whole life in the Bay Area and never really having gotten out of the country tha tmuch at all. Unhelmeted Vietnamese families whizzed by, four to a motorscooter. Construction spreads into the suburbs of Hanoi. Small houses for farmers and workers, huge houses for the owners of industry and (probably) party leaders. People casually cross freeways on foot. Vietnam appears to be leaping from the third world to the first thanks to the indomitable work ethic and unbreakable spirit of the Vietnamese people and the opening of the country to FDI and less fettered domestic and international commerce.

After dropping our stuff off at the dorms we all went out to dinner together. We had an incredible meal at a restaurant on the top of a Hanoi roof. The food was great - the people were better. This was the first time we could sit down and talk to each other. People gradually came out of their shells as the shots of rice alcohol kept coming out of the kitchen. The group is really cohesive and everyone has something to contribute to the whole. Granted, I'm a very easy going person, but I can honestly say that I genuinely like and enjoy the company of every person in our group. Even now, two weeks after the program began, we still haven't really splintered. I see the first signs of cohesive groups being formed around central elements of lifestyle like comfortability with partying and drinking and academic intensity, but luckily these cleavages are largely cross-cutting. None of the roommate situations have presented problems yet either - thankfully.

Speaking of roommates: Gerard had us pick our roomies largely blindly. We had all known each other for a few hours at most and we were picking our roommates for the next four months. Better than the random assignment in the dorms but shy of ideal. However, my roommate situation couldn't have gone any better. My roommate, Sean, is a fun-loving, Berkeleyite who is extremely considerate and respectful of me as a roommate. We differ on political viewpoints (he is a staunchly conservative Republican) although I think that we can learn a lot from each other. It's good for me to get out of the echo chamber of one-sided Berkeley political discussions. Plus, we share a love of country, music, and booze that bridges most of the cultural gap. I think, god willing, we'll be friends for a long time after the program ends in December.

Over the next few days, Gerard took us to visit a number of restaurants that showcased the best cuisine that Hanoi has to offer. Everywhere we went there was great food, cheap booze and lots of fun. We toured the area around Ho Hoan Kiem (lake of the returned sword), which is the heart of the city, the French administrative quarter south of the lake and some of the Vietnamese shopping district to the north of the lake. Hanoi is a charming city that has something to offer everyone. It has clubs for young people, museums for fogeys and academics, lakes and picturesque scenery and architecture for artsy types, food for gastronomic conneiseurs, and lots and lots of shopping for, well, women.

Some of the UC group at our local bia hoi (beer garden) in Thanh Xuan, Hanoi.

Me, Tan and Christine at a snake restaurant in Hanoi taking shots of rice alcohol mixed with snake blood and a snake heart - yummy.

One of the more interesting exhibits at the VIetnam Museum of Ethnology

Catching my flight at SFO

DJ, John, Dave and Dom a few days before I left for Vietnam

Wrapping Up Loose Ends - and Fraying Some New Ones

It looks kind of bad that my last posting was four months ago but I guess that's what happens over finals and the summer. I'll recap my last four months in a few thousand words.

I went through the most intensive preparation for exams that I have ever had to go through. All of my classes we're a lot of fun and I learned a tremendous amount about aspects of the world that really interest me. I wrote three final papers (one in a group). For international law I wrote about the viability of independent ethnic enclaves instead of federal states with tenuous balances between minority rights and unified government. For California politics my group wrote a paper on the governor's proposal to shift state employees to a defined contribution retirement plan and its short term and long term implications, etc. For Vietnamese history I wrote about the Vietnam War's legacy on the Vietnamese diaspora in Australian and the US and these two groups' differences.

When all of the exams and papers were over I stumbled out of school, as John Darnielle puts it, like a hostage out of a hijacked plane. I went home to nurse my wounds. During the end of the semester me and my girlfriend of many years went our separate ways. For the first time in about five years I felt like I was alone in the world once again. In retrospect, breaking up was the best thing for each of us - and I have no regrets at this point - but it was a very difficult time in my life. I was blessed with emotional and physical freedom for the first time in years, but only at the cost of losing my best friend and lover. A tough trade off. As per her request we didn't talk after deciding to break up. I didn't like the idea but I couldn't exactly force her to talk with me. Since breaking up we've exchanged a few emails but they sound forced on her end and I try to remain cautious and circumspect in my correspondence with her. We broke up on favorable circumstances but only after three years of trying to sustain a long distance relationship had sapped the love and energy from my heart. I don't know if there's a future for us ... but I don't think there's one for us unless we both change as people. I need more confidence in myself and I need to learn not to take for granted those that I love. My feeling is that she may need to better manage the way that her emotions affect her own life and those around her. I guess that last thing I can say about our ill-fated relationship is that we had become very different people by the end of our relationship compared to the people that we were at the beginning, which tells me that we may change in the future and our paths might someday cross again, hopefully with better results.

I tried to relax for a few weeks before going back to the job that I quit and the beginning of the spring semester. I was getting slightly depressed with no real way to spend my time, and more importantly I was dirt poor and living off of the goodwill of my parents. I worked for a few weeks and then my mother convinced me to go on a three week seminar in Kiljava, Finland that would get me back in touch with my Finnish roots. The program was run out of a hotel outside of Helsinki that is owned by the largest union in Finland. Every summer, about thirty young people of Finnish descent come from all over the world to attend lectures on Finnish culture, learn Finnish language and be Finnish together. I met a number of incredible people from all over the world and had a great time being Finnish. My understanding of the language improved slightly but I do feel that I understand the country and the people more than before the program.

Following the Kiljava seminar I came home for a week to work again. Then I flew to Colorado to visit my grandparents and my father who had moved to Colorado for a jab just a few months later. I spent a lot of that weekend driving around the state with my dad. We saw a lot of beautiful places. I even got to see the molybdenum mine where he worked as a miner when he was in his twenties.

When I got back to the Bay Area I had only a couple of weeks left before I was set to depart for a semester in Vietnam. I've always wanted to get out of the Bay Area since I've lived there continuously for the last 21 years. College was my best opportunity to get out but I passed it up on the basis of money and the comfort of being closer to home. Since then I've kicked myself for not going to U Chicago or UCLA. My life would have been very different if I'd taken either of those opportunities. So I felt that studying abroad would be the best option for me to get out and really get to know another part of the world. I've always been interested in Southeast Asia and Vietnam is one of the only options in SE Asia that we have through the UC education abroad program. Singapore is too expensive for my tastes and Thailand didn't have the same relevance to my interest in American history and political science as Vietnam does.

The paperwork and bureaucracy were absolutely mind numbing but I got it all of my ducks in a row to come out here. Those last couple of weeks were crazy with running around and getting vaccinations, paying for my ticket at the last minute, getting my visa at the last minute and the whole thing. On the last day I had a gathering with some friends at my generous friend Oscar's house. Everyone came to see me off and off I went with my buddies John and Jim to the airport. My mom even came out to say goodbye.

As the 747 lifted off the ground I could feel my life changing. My summer had been a great one, despite my break-up with the ex. I made friends from all over the world and had a great time in Finland. Me and my friend Zoe became regulars at a local pub in Kensington. I played poker with some of my best buddies from college and high school. And I met a few wonderful ladies along the way. It couldn't have been a better summer.

But it was the last summer of my adolescence. By cutting ties with my girlfriend I had closed the door on the last thing that was really tying me to the past - childhood, being a teen, high school. Symbolically, they started tearing down my high school just before I left for Vietnam. They said that it was seismically unsafe and that new facilities were needed. My adolescence was being torn down figuratively and literally.

Coming to Vietnam to study is the beginning of a new chapter in my life. As college comes to an end, I am finally letting go of high school and ready to face becoming an adult. Within the next few months I have to get a job or at least figure out what I am going to do after college. I hate to be melodramatic but I am at a junction in the road where I can't go ack and I have no idea which way is "the right way". Maybe that's it - there is no right way. That's the most exciting and anxiety producing part of this period in a young person's life; there are no road maps, no gas station attendants, no mom and pop convenience stores - there's only you and the wide open road.