Andy & Tara's World

Flashback: First Day in Ghana

2011-08-29T13:54:00.004-04:00

The blog lives!

Andy and I have finally wrapped up our domestic travels (check out the "Where Have We Been?" column on the right if you'd like to know, uh, where we have been this summer) and made it back to New York...just in time for Hurricane Irene! Luckily, my parents' house was not flooded, which means that the meager remains of our worldly possessions are still intact.

Anyway, as we take breaks from looking for jobs, we hope to bring you a last few blog entries here, reflecting on our round-the-world experience and offering some final advice to those of you out there who are considering doing this one day.

Here's a brief entry to get things (re)started. I wrote this 250-word essay for a funny-travel-story contest sponsored by Budget Travel magazine...but then decided not to submit it, because apparently they take ownership of your writing and photo submission, even if you don't win, which means I would have to pay them if I wanted to publish them later in a book or something. Bah. But now that means you get to read it for free!

First Day in Ghana

Every time we go over a bump, the goats scream.

My husband and I are bouncing down the road in rural Ghana in a crowded minibus. Our hips dig into our neighbors’, our shoulders jostle for space, and everyone’s sweating—especially me and Andy, who failed in our mission to get window seats and are now cut off from even the tiniest breeze.

Bump. Bahhhhh!

Most of the passengers came to the station that afternoon with a few bags, like us, but one brought a dozen goats. With the driver’s help, he strapped several to the luggage rack up top, then started shoving goats inside, under the seats.

Now every time we hit a bump—about every 10 seconds, or just long enough for your brain to start recovering from the noise—the goats get jostled and bleat bloody murder. A year into our round-the-world honeymoon, Andy and I thought that we were used to sharing public transport with livestock (they don’t call them “chicken buses” in Central America for nothing!), but this is taking it to a whole new level.

Hog-tied and stuffed into a dark space, the inside goats protest loudest, but it’s the roof goats who take the ultimate revenge. A man at the end of our row, trying to get more shoulder room, has his torso hanging halfway out the bus when a stream of yellow liquid runs off the roof and hits him on the arm. Suddenly, we’re glad we didn’t get those window seats.

Obsessions of Asia

2011-07-15T20:55:00.001-04:00

We are woefully behind on posting since we came back to the United States. Despite having almost constant access to computers and the Internet, we have focused our time on seeing family and friends. Even for me, it is hard to say, "Mom, I know you haven't seen me for two years, but I just have to get those Obsessions posts done..."

So, without anymore excuses, here come Asia's obsessions:

India- Spitting. An easy one. The average Indian might spit 1200 times per day. And we aren't talking about small little bits of spittle. We're talking about pieces of lung the size of a fist. Sure, lots of Indians also have a paan habit (think chewing tobacco, but different ingredients that also happen to make one's spit Kool-Aid red), but even those that don't chew still spit. And before the spitting comes a noise that sounds like the regurgitation of a cow. Wait, most Indians don't eat cow, so a goat. Like hawking up a goat.

Sri Lanka- Water tanks. What is a water tank you ask? Well, I'm going to tell you even if you didn't ask. A water tank is a man made lake. Sri Lanka has a lot of areas that are at altitude and are very wet for part of the year, but very dry for the rest of the year. So, starting a thousand years ago or more, digging giant water pits became the prerequisite for growing any large city that wasn't on the sea. And they did it with gusto. Some of the cities have dozens of lakes that are far larger than many dammed lakes in the US, and they were all dug out by hand. Or maybe with hands and a rock and maybe a chisel, but you get the point. Good job, ancient Sri Lankans!

Malaysia- Tourism posters. If all the Asian countries were elementary school students, Malaysia would get the "Tries Hardest" certificate at the end of the year. Not only are tourism posters in nearly every window of Malaysia, they are in nearly every hotel and vaguely related travel business everywhere in Asia. They must have printed millions of them. And that makes it even sadder that more people don't visit Malaysia, which really is a spectacular country.

Singapore- Rules. Singapore has rules for everything. And fines for not following most of them. The list of fines in the subway cars was as long as my arm. (We especially appreciated that one of the highest fines was for bringing the smelly durian fruit on the train.) If you like to conform, consider moving to Singapore. If you have ever voted Libertarian or are a card carrying member of the Tea Party, consider vacationing somewhere other than Singapore.

Indonesia- Cats without tails. Didn't see that one coming, did you? We saw hundreds of cats in Indonesia and every one of them had some or all of its tail missing. We can only assume that people think they should not have tails and take it upon themselves to cut off the tails with whatever sharp instrument is laying around when they see a cat with tail intact. We thought that we might see this in other countries, but it was really just Indonesia.

Thailand- 7-Eleven. Think of all the 7-Elevens you have ever seen. Multiply that number by 100. That is how many 7-Elevens are on the average block in Thailand. It used to be a joke in New York that Starbucks would often have locations right across the street from one another. 7-Eleven in Thailand might regularly have three stores on a block. I don't understand how they stay in business, especially since they are more expensive than most Thai businesses, but they all seem the thrive. Since I love Slurpees, I thank the Thai people for making cheap Slurpees available everywhere.

Burma (Myanmar)- Gold leaf. I had never heard of someone's job being to hammer gold until it was gold leaf. In Burma, that ranks as one of the most popular jobs. Where does all that gold leaf go? Buddhists in Burma buy the gold leaf and then rub it onto the Buddha statues (or anything else that they believe should be gold) at the Buddhist temples. This keeps everything bright and shiny. Oh, I should point out that only men are allowed to do this. Women aren't allowed to touch the Buddha statues, but can buy some gold leaf and have a manly man rub it onto the Buddha.

Cambodia- Angkor Wat. It seems sort of lame to be obsessed with your biggest tourist attraction, but Cambodia unquestionably is. It adorns the flag, half the stores in the country are named for it, and it inspired enough awe that even Pol Pot didn't destroy it. And Pol Pot destroyed just about everything in Cambodia.

Vietnam- Motor scooters. The average person in Vietnam has 3.2 motor scooters. Approximately. Through a quantum trick, they ride all of them simultaneously. So, while Vietnam has only 80 million people, 250 million people ply the roads on motor scooters at any given time. And most of those 250 million are going down the road that you want to cross. The streets of the large cities look like a moped convention.

Laos- Fruit shakes. I try to find something deeper than a food for country obsessions, but fruit shakes made with fruit, condensed milk, sugar, and ice are what hold the country of Laos together and makes the whole country so friendly. That's pure speculation, but locals and tourists alike can be found drinking delicious and cheap shakes all over the country, and we were certainly fans. For those who are not feeling happy enough after a regular shake, many places seem to offer "happy" shakes, which come with whatever drugs they happen to have in stock (pot in most places).

China- Crotchless pants. No, China isn't turning into 1980s New York. Any child under the age of three in China wears pants with a giant slit down the crotch and no underwear underneath. This allows them to go to the bathroom anytime and anywhere they like. And I do mean anytime and anywhere. Let's say the kid is waiting in a busy ticket line inside the train station with the parent and needs to go to the bathroom--that's what those pants are for. Number one or number two? Doesn't matter. Does the parent clean it up? No. It stays there for others to step in. While China seems likely to take over the world one day, we hope they get rid of crotchless pants prior to that.

Mongolia- Chengis Khan. Yeah, I thought it was Genghis Khan, too, but not in Mongolia. This founder of the Mongol Empire is known for uniting the nomads of Mongolia, declaring war on anything that moved, killing about a bajillion people, and creating the beginning of the largest empire the world has ever known. That, of course, makes him the hero of Mongolia. Based on our experience, I don't see the second coming of the Mongol Empire anytime soon.

There you have it: the obsessions of Asia. Disagree with us? Too bad. Write your own blog. Or leave us nasty comments about how we disparaged your country. That's why our home address isn't on the blog. Well, that and we don't have a home yet...

From Rupees to Rupiah: Financing Asia

2011-06-27T01:34:00.001-04:00

All through our travels, people told us how cheap Asia would be...and, looking forward to bringing down our average daily budget, we hoped that they were right. Luckily, they were!

Here are the numbers by country. In case you forgot how we do this, these numbers are for two people, including visa costs and all costs on the ground (and in the air if we took internal flights). Sometimes we also include the cost of a flight into the country if that was the only way to get there.

India: $53 per day. Visas cost $74 each at the embassy in Istanbul. India is one of the cheapest countries we've been to, so staying there for five weeks did wonders for our financial (if not gastrointestinal) health. Hotel rooms ranged from $10-$25 depending on level of comfort (except in Mumbai, where it's hard to find a double for less than $50); restaurant meals could usually be had for a buck or two, and street food for pennies; and train transport in sleeper class cost less than a hotel. Not getting ripped off on cabs and tourist excursions required some negotiating.

Sri Lanka: $80 per day (including flight from Chennai, India, which costs about $120 per ticket; $53 per day without flight). No visa fees. Sri Lanka's hotels and food were a little more expensive than India's, but it made up for it with what is possibly the world's cheapest public transport on a $-per-hour basis. If you plan to visit more than two historic sites in the "Cultural Triangle" area, getting a pass can save you $25 or more.

Malaysia: $47 per day. No visas. Some travelers complain about Malaysia being pricey, but as it turns out, the only traveler item that is really expensive in (Muslim-majority) Malaysia is beer! As long as you don't drink much, the country is terrific value, especially considering how developed it is. Air-con double rooms with shared (but very clean, hot-water) bathrooms cost $10-$15, and delicious, cheap street food abounds. Transport is a little pricier than some Asian countries, but you usually get comfortable, AC buses on smooth roads. We stuck to the peninsula this time and didn't do any fancy tourist excursions, but our memories of our previous trip to Borneo are that prices were very reasonable there, too.

Singapore: $111 per day. No visas. We only spent two days in Singapore, so this is kind of skewed, but it's certainly one of the most developed and expensive countries in Southeast Asia. Most of the cheaper hotels are in the red light district, where we found a decent private room for $35 a night. Public transport, museums, and restaurants are comparable to Western prices, but taxis (which are metered, hallelujah!) and street or food court foods are relatively cheap.

Indonesia: $102 per day. One-month visas on arrival at the airport cost $25 each. Indonesia was surprisingly expensive, though that's largely because we did a lot of pricey activities like SCUBA diving, chartering a boat to Krakatau volcano, and a few other organized tours. No-frills internal flights between the islands were a pretty good deal, usually less than $50 one-way and could be booked just a day or two before. Buses and trains on the ground varied a lot in price and quality. Hotel rooms for $10-$15 could be found, but were usually pretty disgusting; if we wanted cleanliness and AC, we usually had to pay at least $25. Cheap street food could be found in most places, though not so much in touristy Bali, where we usually had to shell out for real restaurants.

Thailand: $83 per day. No visa fees. Considering how many touristy activities we did in Thailand (diving, elephant training camp, etc.), this is a great average. Hotel and transport standards are pretty high, but competition for the tourist buck keeps prices low. Markets selling cheap local food are pretty easy to find, and even fancy restaurants are probably cheaper than the Thai restaurants you find at home. Just try not to get robbed, which could certainly send your costs soaring!

Myanmar: $77 per day. Visas cost $27 each in Bangkok. This average includes flights into and out of Yangon from Bangkok ($130 each roundtrip), which accounted for one-third of our expenditures there. Once you're on the ground, Myanmar (Burma) is super cheap in all categories, though its rough roads, ancient vehicles, and power cuts often made it feel more like traveling in sub-Saharan Africa than Southeast Asia.

Cambodia: $53 per day. Visas cost $20 each at the border. Cambodia is excellent value. $11 a night got us rooms with bathroom, AC, and sat TV in both Siem Riep and Phnom Penn, the two most touristed cities in the country. Markets and restaurants offer cheap food; bus transport and tourist site admissions are pretty reasonable. If we had stayed longer, or ventured out to less touristy places, it probably would have been even cheaper, but even so, Cambodia was one of the cheapest destinations on our trip.

Vietnam: $66 per day. Visas cost $45 each in Phnom Penn, Cambodia. Vietnam's one of those countries that feels more expensive than it is, probably because people are trying to rip you off almost continuously. But we did manage to stay in some pretty nice hotel rooms and eat decent food for not a lot of money. Trains cost more than buses but are much nicer (which isn't the same as saying that they're actually nice!), especially for overnight travel. Halong Bay overnight cruises can be an especially good deal for a decently swanky experience...provided your boat doesn't sink in the night, of course.

Laos: $57 per day. Visas cost $40 each at the border. Laos is pretty poor, so the roads and buses aren't always the nicest, but hotels were quite comfortable, food was inexpensive, activities like kayaking were very reasonable, and prices overall about as cheap as could be.

China: $92 per day. Visas cost $160 each in Vientiane, Laos--the most expensive of our entire trip. (They are about $100 less expensive for non-Americans, though.) Yunnan province, in southwestern China, was incredibly inexpensive; with $10 hotel rooms and cheap bus rides, it cost no more than Laos, where we had just come from. As we moved east and to the bigger cities, things got more expensive, though you could always find cheap and tasty food, even in Beijing. In general, China didn't feel overpriced considering the good quality of rooms, trains, and food that we got, and some tourist attractions, like the Forbidden City, were surprisingly reasonable.

Mongolia: $121 per day. No visas needed for Americans, though most nationalities need one. This number is high because we spent 6 of our 8 days in the country on a private jeep tour of the Gobi. If we'd managed to find a couple of other travelers to share the tour with, costs would have been halved. Otherwise, the country's pretty budget-friendly: In Ulaan Bataar, the capital, a hostel room with breakfast, Internet, and shared bath cost $15; there were expensive restaurants and cheap local-food canteens to choose from; and the 15-hour train from the China border cost around $9 for seats, or $25 for sleeper berths.

So, Asia had a few expensive countries, but was mostly pretty cheap for us. Hope that this post was slightly helpful to you if you're planning to backpack through Asia. If you have any questions, leave a comment and we'll do our best to get back to you!

Porking Up with Eastern European Food

2011-06-25T10:54:00.000-04:00

We will now amalgamate foods of our last few countries (Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Poland) because, try as we might, we were unable to eat enough foods in the short time we visited to have enough pictures for separate posts. As always, we ate almost as much as is humanly possible to bring you, our loyal readers, the best of foreign foods. Let's see what we ate.

For breakfast in Budapest, we bought a drinkable yogurt and cheesy bread for Tara and pink balls for me. Tara liked the yogurt but thought that the cheesy bread was dry. The pink balls turned out to be these weird iced rum cake things. I didn't hate them as much as most rum cakes, but they were not good. They looked so nice, though.
Budapest has a marzipan museum. I hate marzipan, but it turns out that marzipan is also an excellent building material. Here's Tara wishing that she could eat this 100% marzipan Hungarian princess. Despite my dislike of marzipan, I told them it was okay when they asked to make a marzipan statue of me...
Goulash comes in many forms, but the key ingredients are beef, vegetables, and lots of paprika. As with chili in America, Hungarians take their goulash very seriously and many have closely guarded recipes that they claim are the best. This one seemed basic but good.
Like the rest of Eastern Europe, Hungary loves bacon and bacon-like products. This pork chop with potatoes came topped with a bacon-fat starburst. No idea what it is actually called, but it is just fried bacon fat cut into a fun floral shape. We'll call it a bloomin' bacon. You thought the bloomin' onion was the least healthy dish on the planet, but now the bloomin' bacon is here!
This Hungarian ratatouille with sausage was not very memorable for me (probably because it was Tara's meal). I just asked her and she said it tasted of paprika and was a bit spicy. So, I'm sure that you can just taste it based on that description.
Slovakia has its own version of string cheese, which is made from sheep's milk and is smoked. It is called udene. Because it is cheese, it is gross. However, if I were to eat cheese, smoked cheese that tastes a bit like bacon (supposedly) is the way that I would go.
I don't remember what this fried potato bread is called, but they cover it in garlic, butter, optional cheese (no thanks), and optional sour cream (no thanks, again). It was sort of like fried dough without the sugar. An excellent snack.
Slovakia likes its heavy dumplings, and I like them, too. Here are some served with onions, pork, and some other stuff. Very good. Internet research seems to indicate that it is maybe called strapacky. Good name.
Tara had the cheese version, called bryndzove lausky, which is like a Slovakian mac and cheese. That means it uses sheep cheese and is gross. Tara, however, really liked it. The bacon-like stuff on top looked good to me.
This is called Christmas soup, or kapustnica. It has a whole bunch of ingredients, but the keys are sauerkraut, mushrooms, pork, and whatever else is laying around. Pretty good, but it didn't make me suddenly dream of Christmas.
Slovakia has its own soda, called Kofola, from Communist times when Coke wasn't allowed. It is apparently still far more popular than Coke and Pepsi. A bit like lightly carbonated, anise-flavored root beer, it is a very unique taste. Good, but I don't think that I could drink it all the time.
This delicious potato-batter fried pork was stuffed with butter and bacon. Very healthy and tasty.
Fried cheese cutlets? They have too much cheese in Slovakia. Our friend, Peter, loves these, but with my dislike of cheese and Tara's dislike of stringy, melted cheese, we both took a pass.
Apparently, it is perfectly acceptable in Slovakia to have a "sweet dinner", where you order sweet crepes or some other normally desserty item for dinner. This almost overcomes the love of cheese. Fortunately, I am not easily influenced by cultural pressures, so I happily eat "sweet dinner" often no matter the country.
From a previous trip to Vienna, I remembered having amazing sausages on the street. This bratwurst and currywurst (complete with heaps of curry powder) were indeed great, but they also cost about $4 each, which is pricey.
Peanut butter wafers are a popular snack in Slovakia. Our friends were kind enough to get us some for our long train trip to Vienna. Well, it was an hour, but Tara gets hungry easily.
Vienna has ice cream everywhere. Possibly as much as Rome, and certainly more than anywhere in the US. The most famous is probably Zanoni & Zanoni, pictured below. Very good, though we had some even more delicious cinnamon ice cream while in Bratislava.
Upon our arrival in Poland, we were surprised to find them selling bagel-like breads that looked a lot like Turkish simit. Tara bought a cheesy one while I bought a round thing covered in a sweet-looking icing. Neither was great. Thus ended our experimentation with Polish pastries. Why can't Europeans make good pastries? I suspect it is because they won't take advice from Americans.
While we were walking through the streets of Krakow, they were giving away free energy drinks. I had never tried an energy drink. (I normally have more than enough energy or am asleep. I'm binary that way.) The first sip was good and had a slightly grape soda-like taste. The second drink tasted like grape soda with a bit of pee in it. By the end of the can, it tasted like pee with
some poison added. And it did nothing for my energy levels.

Tara ate this mushroom and barley soup (or maybe some other grain since Tara doesn't really like barley) at a restaurant in Krakow. It was pretty good, but not amazing.We liked this sign for "Jewish Caviar", which is apparently chopped chicken liver. Not sure how that is at all similar to caviar, but it was advertised all over Krakow.
Let the pierogies begin! We tried several types and styles. These giant, buckwheat-filled pierogies were almost like small empanadas. Very different than we expected when ordering, but good.
I got some pork and dumplings that proved even better than the giant empanadas. The dumplings were almost like gnocchi.

We went to a restaurant in Warsaw specializing in pierogies (Zapiecek was the name, I think). We ordered some meat pierogies fried in bacon grease that were amazing, and some more ordinary mushroom ones that were served with butter. If we were to do it again, I think we would have ordered more fried in bacon grease.
This Polish pear yogurt was the last crazy yogurt for Tara for the trip. She thought it was a decent way to end her around-the-world yogurt trial.
The ice cream in Poland (and a few other countries in Eastern Europe) is often served in this fashion. I am a fan of very, very tall ice cream. In Poland, it sometimes tastes like frozen butter frosting from a cake, which is not a bad thing.
Europeans may not understand pastries, but Americans could learn a lot from Europeans when it comes to sausages. Take the lowly hot dog, for instance. This Polish hot dog would surely generate fewer jokes than the standard American hot dogs if this is what was being served on the street in New York.
Well, it appears that this brings us to the end of our final foreign food post. We are happy to have brought you foods from around the world for the last couple of years, and hope to continue to bring you updates from time to time. Thanks for reading!

Four Days, Four Countries: The Race Through Eastern Europe

2011-06-24T09:00:00.001-04:00

Some people, when contemplating the final week of a two-year, round-the-world trip, might choose to go somewhere quiet, where they could take a little time to reflect on their travels and relax before rejoining the "real world."

Some people who are not Andy and Tara, of course.

We rolled across the Romania-Hungary border in the middle of the night on May 27, ready to embark on a whirlwind tour of Eastern European cities that would put us in four new countries over the next four days...not to mention empty our money belts of those pesky Euros we'd been carrying around since our early-2010 visit to Spain!

Our first destination was Budapest, capital of Hungary and a beautiful city. It was pretty much flattened in World War II, so most of the sights we saw had been heavily reconstructed, but carefully so as to preserve the historic feel.

When we heard that the main square was called Heroes' Square, we assumed that it was a tribute to resistance fighters fallen in WW2 or something. Wrong! It celebrates 1,000 years of Magyar conquest of Hungarian lands.

Behind Heroes' Square is a lake and a castle. The lake had a fun art exhibition consisting of floating cars and furniture and even a half-submerged house. We think it was installed to encourage people to rent canoes and paddle out to take a closer look.

Budapest is home to the second-largest Jewish synagogue in the world (the largest is in New York). Built in the 1850s, the Dohany Street synagogue is definitely the most ornate synagogue I've ever been to. It turns out that the architect was not Jewish, and that the building has some similarities to churches (like pulpits and an organ). It managed to avoid complete destruction during WW2, in part because the Nazis moved in and made it a local base.

The ark, organ, and Moorish-style dome of the synagogue. A non-Jew is hired to play the organ on the Sabbath.
Let's jump religions now and head over to St. Stephen's Basilica, Budapest's main Roman Catholic church. It houses a relic that may or may not be the 1,000-year-old hand of St. Stephen. The best thing about this relic is that you can put about 1 euro's worth of coins in a box to light up the hand for two minutes. We waited for someone else to do this before taking this picture.
The Hungarian Parliament is one of Europe's largest and prettiest. We heard that the inside is very impressive, too, but tours are really expensive (unless you are an EU citizen, in which case they are free).
The most fun fact about Budapest, in my opinion, is that it actually consists of two cities divided by the Danube river...and the names of those cities are Buda and Pest. The train station, most hotels, and many tourist attractions are in Pest, but the biggest castle and some nice churches are over in Buda, which you can see below.
The Matthias Church in Buda.
Only three hours from Budapest is Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Luckily, our friend Anna and her fiance Peter happen to be living there this year, and invited us to come stay. Our first stop with them was their local market, where we got to try all sorts of Slovakian delicacies, like these giant fried breads, that we'll write about in the next food post.
Here we are with Anna and Pete outside of Bratislava Castle. Andy was in Bratislava a few years ago, when the castle was gray and open to the public. Now it's white and closed for renovations. Like most of the castles in Budapest, the inside is used as a museum when it's open.
It seems that the rest of our Slovakia pictures are of food, which makes sense, since we spent most of our time in Bratislava eating. One day, we would like to go back and see the castle-filled countryside. Meanwhile, it was time to press on to Vienna, Austria, just an hour away by train.

Downtown Vienna is filled with impressively gorgeous old buildings, like the opera house.
Hanging out outside the opera house, and on this music-note-landscaped lawn, and pretty much everywhere else tourists go, are touts dressed like Mozart, trying to sell tickets to overpriced classical music concerts (where the musicians also perform in period dress). Much as Andy and I hate being harassed by touts, you kind of have to love a city where said touts wear wigs and tights and push high culture!
Vienna has an endless number of museums to choose from, but with limited time and budget, we chose the Albertina Palace, which combines art exhibits with 19th-century Habsburg staterooms. The exhibitions included excellent ones on the Blue Rider group (incl. Kandinsky, Klee, and the wonderfully freaky Alfred Kubin) and American pop artist Mel Ramos, and the staterooms looked like a mini-Versailles.
Vienna also has lots of churches to choose from. I forget the name of this one, but you can see we had a beautiful day for wandering.
Vienna's main cathedral, like Budapest's, is St. Stephen's. It may look like just another church from the outside...
...but the inside is psychedellic! (This is not just the effect of the stained glass windows--they're cheating with some colored lights.)
My favorite thing about Austria was all those funny German signs.
Hee hee.

On a less funny note, we grumblingly boarded the overnight train to Krakow, Poland, that night for our most expensive train ride ever. Over $100 per person for sleeping berths in an old, cramped, 6-person compartment. (For comparison, we spent less money on five weeks of train travel around India, including six overnight trips.) Welcome back to Western pricing!

The next morning, determined not to raise our spirits even a little, we headed straight to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps outside of Krakow. Though I have read and watched a fair amount of material about such camps in my lifetime, nothing quite prepares you for actually visiting one. (Possibly disturbing pictures to follow.)

You begin your tour by walking through the main gate to Auschwitz. The German over the gate translates to "work will set you free," which is total crap, since all the Nazis tried to do in this camp was work the prisoners to death, if they didn't just gas them outright upon arrival.
Many of the buildings at Auschwitz have been turned into small museums. Some of the most affecting displays are piles of personal possessions collected by the Nazis from incoming prisoners who were sent to the gas chambers. Piles of eyeglasses and shoes--adults', and heartbreakingly, hundreds of childrens'--are upsetting, but the items that affected me most were the collections of shaving brushes and shoe-polishing tins, because they really show how much many of the prisoners believed, until the last possible moment, that they were merely being resettled and heading for a new life where such everyday items would be needed.
I didn't expect Auschwitz to be so green. It's always harsh winter in all the movies, isn't it? But in springtime, 70 years later, the rows of trees and brick barracks buildings look almost peaceful and pleasant.

Until you take a step inside the gas chambers. They would actually paint these over after every round of gassing so that new prisoners being herded inside wouldn't get freaked out by scratchings and bloodstains from the previous victims.

The crematorium ovens were usually found adjacent to the gas chambers for the speediest disposal of the thousands of bodies. These machine-like aspects of the camps, and the amount of detailed planning the Nazis put into making them efficient, is unbelievably disturbing when you're standing in the middle of it.
Around three kilometers from Auschwitz--which was largely a work camp--is Birkenau, which was much larger and basically designed to kill people as quickly as possible. Special railroad tracks were built to bring cattle cars full of people directly into the camp.
If you've seen movies featuring Auschwitz-Birkenau, you may recognize the train-station layout, which you can see from above from the watchtower, though it was much greener at our visit than I'd ever imagined.
Over 1 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 90% of them Jews. Gypsies, Poles, and many others were brutalized and killed there, too. It's a staggering, mind-boggling legacy. I was glad to see so many people visiting and learning about the history on the day we were there. Sadly, as our previous visits to equally horrifying memorials in Rwanda and Cambodia showed, it seems that the world has not quite learned its lesson yet about preventing genocide.

A person could be forgiven for wanting a drink back in Krakow after a day at the camps. If I ever open my own bar, I am totally naming it the Alkohole.
Krakow has a cute old city that largely escaped destruction in World War II. This cathedral towers high above the main square.
Though Krakow's Jewish population is much diminished now, it still has many old synagogues that you can visit. This one has uncovered some very old murals of prayers in Hebrew on the walls.
We treated ourselves to a nice dinner in a froufy dining room off the main square. Krakow is full of tourists, but we were the only diners that night.

The next day, it was off to Warsaw, the capital of Poland and--thanks to it having the cheapest flight route back to New York of any Eastern European city--the last destination of our very long trip. Skies were blue and the sun toasted us as we explored the heavily rebuilt old town (Warsaw was not as lucky as Krakow in WW2).
Pope John Paul II came from Poland and is still extremely popular there, as effigies and pictures in people's windows prove. I thought that this was a statue of him, but actually it's a different Polish Catholic figure, Cardinal Wyszyński, whom many want to see canonized. Bottom line: Catholicism is a big deal in Poland.
Most of the Eastern European cities we visited had cute little street trams, and Warsaw was no exception. We hopped on one once, and it took us so long to figure out what the system was for paying the fare that we reached our stop and got off before we ever paid it. Thanks for the free ride, Warsaw!
Here I am with the Vistula River, which bisects Warsaw. Guess it wasn't cool enough to be on the Danube like Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, so it had to settle for a river that rhymes with connective tissue disease.

In addition for the awards for "free-est tram ride" and "best pierogi," Warsaw wins the award for "gayest statue we've ever seen in a Catholic church."
Short story: In Europe, hotels are very expensive, so Andy and I had been staying in dorms, where we still often paid $15-$20 each for a bed. The hostel where we stayed in Warsaw was at the top end of this range, but at least our room of six beds seemed clean and orderly when we stopped by in the morning to drop our luggage off. Unfortunately, when we returned in the afternoon, we found the rest of the beds in our room taken by teenagers on a field trip who had spilled soda and chips all over the floor and, despite many signs warning of an over-$100 fee for doing so, were smoking in the room.

Feeling an overwhelming sense of we-are-too-old-to-be-dealing-with-this-s**t, Andy and I marched straight to the front desk and tattled hard on those kids. They got in trouble with their teacher and fined for the smoking, and...we got upgraded to a private room! After weeks of communal living, it was a nice way to spend our final sleep on the road. OK, so we had to check our backs for possibly-homicidal teenagers every time we went down the hall to the bathroom, but other than that, it was a peaceful night.

The next afternoon, we boarded our flight to Reykjavik. Yup, the cheapest route home was via Iceland--sadly, not on a fancy, smorgasbord-serving Scandinavian airline, but on a no-frills, no-food, no-water-even-though-you-had-to-dump-yours-out-at-security airline called Iceland Express.

We only had one hour to make our connection, and were not-so-secretly hoping to miss it and be "forced" to spend a night in Iceland. Unfortunately, about half our flight from Poland was bound for New York, and they held the connecting plane. At least I had time to refill our bottles with pure Icelandic tap water in the snyrtingar before boarding flight #2.

I'm not sure that everyone's luggage made it onto the second flight, but we carried everything on, just like we had on our very first flight ...

(Portrait of two backpacks--Caribbean Airlines flight from New York to Trinidad, June 30, 2009)

(Same two backpacks, 74 countries later--Iceland Express flight Reykjavik to New York, June 1, 2011)
(Huh, I just realized that we were in seat 19 for both of those flights. How weird is that?)

So, amazingly, our backpacks made it all the way around the world...and so did our marriage. Look, still smiling!

We're back in the USA now, but that doesn't mean that we're finished blogging. We've still got some food to bring you, and several financial updates and obsessions posts...and hopefully, at some point, we'll reflect on our travels and bring you some deep thoughts (or at least best-of lists). Plus, we plan to travel around the states some this summer, so we may bust out the camera and work up some posts about the attractions of, say, Minneapolis and Denver, if our adoring fans demand it. So feel free to adore and demand in your comments below!

What would Dracula eat?

2011-06-07T11:13:00.002-04:00

Before Dracula was a vampire, maybe he was a human. So, what would he have eaten? Seems like an important historical study that we are about to undertake.

Moldova doesn't seem to have a rich food heritage, though I'm sure we'll get comments from some Moldovan telling me that I'm an idiot. In any case, they do have a popular chain called Andy's Pizza, which seemed like a good place to go for someone named Andy.
The pizza was actually decent and quite affordable. We found no other food in Moldova apart from a small supermarket and some ice cream in the park.
Romania doesn't have a ton of street food, but you often see things that look like this. Unfortunately, it turned out to be filled with melted cheese, which neither of us likes. And, really, even the fried wasn't so good. We suggest avoiding them even though locals seem to love them.
These apple cinnamon cookies were some of the stranger cookies that I've ever had. I felt as though I was eating an everlasting gob stopper from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it kept changing tastes. It started as a butter cookie, then artificial sweetener, then apple, then a Red Hot candy, then artificial sweetener again.
Tara had this walnut yogurt that I think was mediocre, but nothing spectacular. The container looks nice, though. I give the packaging an 8 out of 10.
In Bucharest, we went to a Romanian restaurant where we tried some traditional sausage and a white bean dip (which Tara was happy to find closely resembled a hummus). The sausage was pretty good, but won't make a list of the world's top ten sausages or anything.
I got a mix of grilled meats and some sauteed potatoes. It was so-so. Tara got the cabbage wrapped ground meat with polenta. Tara's dishes were really good.
In Brashov, we went to another traditional restaurant that was even better than the one in Bucharest. The appetizer platter has some cheeses that I didn't try (but that were apparently very salty), pork cracklings, sausage, and "bacon" (really just the fat from the bacon). We had to explain to the girl with whom we were eating exactly what a crackling is, and, surprisingly, she kept eating them even after the explanation.
Tara got some sausages with beans and polenta. The beans were a lot like baked beans. The sausages were sausages.
Romania loves bacon. We love bacon. Therefore, we love Romania. Or something like that. I got the bacon-wrapped sirloin tips in a honey sauce. They were excellent. Maybe we will try to make them. Or maybe we will just wrap everything in bacon.
Kraft makes this pineapple filled chocolate in Romania. It was pretty good and served as our dinner on a couple of train trips.
Lastly, we found these donuts on the street. They were pretty good. Not sure if these are common since we only found them in one small town, but they were fried, sweet, and cheap, which is sort of like the food trifecta. Had they only had ice cream...
Romania's love of pork, especially bacon, is one that fortunately continued for the next few countries. It raises the food rating for Romania significantly. We were a bit sad to leave without eating more, but that was often the case on our travels. The food is not light, but it is tasty.

Romania Mania! (And the Moldblog)

2011-06-06T10:00:00.001-04:00

If you look at a map, it looks like you should be able to get from southern Ukraine to coastal Romania directly, no problem. Wrong! All roads (well, all legitimate ones with public transit and border-crossing facilities, at least) lead through Moldova.

If you're wondering who, what, or where is Moldova, you're not the only one. If I made a list of "countries I didn't know existed until this year," well, this former USSR republic would probably have been pretty near the top. Small, landlocked, and the poorest country in Europe in terms of GDP, it's not exactly a big holiday destination. We only knew one person who had ever visited Moldova...so, naturally, we decided to become the second and third tourists in the country's brief history.

Getting a bus ticket from Yalta to the Moldovan capital of Chisinau was easier said than done. Except it wasn't easily said, either. Turns out you pronounce it "Kee-shee-now," which is not even a little bit close to what we were saying, and since we didn't know how to spell it in Cyrillic...well, let's just say it was a challenging purchase to complete.

But we got the tickets and, a 20-hour bus ride later, we were in Moldova and happily reading Roman-alphabet signs again. Moldovan language is the same as Romanian, which itself looks like someone threw Spanish, French, Italian, and one of the Slavic languages into a blender and kind of sounds that way, too.

Speaking of reading signs, these ads for Moldova's main cell phone provider are all over Chisinau. You know, right next to the Moldbank and the Moldmarket. Tee hee hee!
Chisinau's main cathedral had the best religious neon light display we'd seen since the Buddhist temples of Burma.
Here's the cathedral from the outside. I suppose it is one of Chisinau's top sights.
And here is Chisinau's other top sight, a teeny weeny Arc de Triomphe. Not big enough to straddle the main avenue, it has to make do with lording over a sidewalk.
And...that's it for Moldova! We only spent about 10 hours there, which is about 8.5 more hours than we knew what to do with. We sat in a park for a while, we ate a few ice creams. Andy got a Moldhaircut. But the people were very nice (and spoke a lot more English than people did in Ukraine!), and Chisinau was a surprisingly well-developed and pleasant little city. The countryside we passed on the bus and train looked quite nice, too. Perhaps the poorest country in Europe is still a lot better off than the poorest countries of most other continents?

The overnight train to Romania was fun for two reasons. First, thanks to low demand, we got a compartment all to ourselves in the old-school, wood-paneled, lace-curtained train. Second, we got to stop at the border to have the cars jacked up and the undercarriages replaced because the track width in Europe is different from the one used in the former Soviet countries.
Romania! Land of castles, Gypsies, and Dracula! We began our adventures in Bucharest (Bucuresti in Romanian), which is OK for a day, but not where I'd advise you to spend the bulk of your Romanian vacation. There are some nice old buildings around the main square.
And an obelisk stabbing a meteorite or something.
Bucharest is home to the Palace of Parliament, which is, as our friend Andrew put it, "the world's second largest building, built by bonkers dictator Ceaucescu in the 1980s." Though apparently it's not large enough to hold multiple tour groups at once; when we showed up, tours were already sold out until the next afternoon, so we didn't get to go inside.
Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, was a Romanian prince in the 1400s and the inspiration for Dracula. Statues of him and his fine mustache are found all over Romania.
On to Transylvania! Romania got much more beautiful once we got out of the big city. Our next destination was Brasov, which has a beautiful old town and great mountainous scenery all around.

The St. Nicholas Romanian Orthodox church, also home of the first school in Romania, dates from the 1400s. It was right down the street from our hostel.
We took a lovely hike from Brasov to the nearby skiing town. Yes, that's right, we hiked alone in the woods of Transylvania and were not attacked by vampires! (Or if we were, they modified our memories and we don't remember it...)
Strada Sforii in Brasov claims to be Europe's narrowest street. What criteria distinguishes an alley from a street, we wonder?
There are lots of castles in Transylvania. Sadly, we only had time to visit one. We chose Peles Castle, which is not so old (it was built in the late 1800s), but is famed for being the most extravagant inside. Sadly, you have to pay $15 to take pictures inside, so you'll just have to settle for the exterior and imagine the lavish, carved-wood ceilings and French-, Italian-, and Turkish-themed rooms within.
Our last stop in Romania was Sighisoara, a small town containing an even smaller medieval walled city. There is not a whole lot to do there, but it's a cute place to spend a day.

The clocktower guards the entrance to the old town. Nice views from the top, too.
What do you do when you have two sides of a building to decorate, but only one deer head? This, apparently.
Mike requested a picture of Andy doing his best Dracula impression, so here you go. We didn't get to Bran Castle (known as "Dracula's Castle" because it is scary-looking, not because Vlad ever lived there), but this actually is outside of Vlad's birthplace (now a restaurant) in Sighisoara.
Romania was a fun country in which to spend five days. I bet it would have been even more fun to spend 10 days! The major tourist towns can feel kind of, well, touristy, but mostly in a cute way. We really wanted to get out to the Danube Delta area around Tulcea and do some birdwatching, but we just ran out of time. Brasov was a good base for taking day trips around Transylvania. If you're traveling through Romania and are pressed for time, I'd recommend focusing on the beautiful countryside and maybe skipping Bucharest.

Soaked in Butter Sauce: Ukrainian Food

2011-05-29T11:24:00.000-04:00

If a person could marry a Ukranian chain restaurant, I would become a bigamist and enter wedded bliss with Puzata Hata. That is how much I love it. Writing this now, hundreds of miles away in Romania, my heart aches with loss and longing for the borscht, the meatballs, and the dumplings (oh, God, the dumplings!) of my left-behind love. Andy says it's delayed-response artery-clogging from all the butter sauce and sour cream, but he's just jealous.

It doesn't look like much in the picture, but everything we ate at this cafeteria-style restaurant (which has several branches around Kiev) was utterly scrumptious. From top left: delicious meatballs, crispy on the outside and soft inside; yummy borscht (a beet-and-onion-based soup that my grandmother used to eat at home and I never thought I liked until I got to Ukraine); the best dumplings on earth, varenyky, filled with the same tasty meat as the balls and scooped out of a steaming pot of butter sauce; and some sauteed potatoes, also buttery.

We went back every night and tried a few other dishes, like potato and cherry varenyky and several other meaty balls, but in my opinion, the meat varenyky and these meatballs were the best dishes. Plus, the prices were really reasonable and the surroundings were quite stylish for a cafeteria. So if you are ever in Kiev, please do yourself a favor and have a few plates at your nearest Puzata Hata. And please beg them to open up a branch in New York. I may start an online petition...

OK, on to other foods of Ukraine, which are a lot less exciting. These bacon potato chips tasted vaguely smoky, but were otherwise unremarkable.
M&Ms come in three standard flavors in Ukraine: plain, peanut, and...this one. We couldn't read the package, so we just bought it to try. Turns out to be hazelnut. I thought they were good, Andy thought they were gross. Europeans definitely get a lot more hazelnut-flavored candies than we do in America.
McFoxy is the local McDonald's knockoff (although Ukraine has McDonald's, too). Their menus are basically identical (Kids can get a FoxyBox instead of Happy Meal)...except that McFoxy also sells these unidentified fried balls. We tried an order and they turn out to have processed chicken inside, kind of like a nugget. Not so good.
Ukraine has cherry nectar! Ah, my long-lost love from Turkey (if I could marry a TetraPak beverage...). Not nearly as many brands are available as in Turkey, but this one was pretty good.
Cherry drinkable yogurt. It was OK. Eastern Europe has a lot of yogurt brands, but none have wowed me so far.
Blinis are the Ukranian version of crepes, often served with some fruit jam for dessert. Good stuff.
I finally got to try Chicken Kiev...not in Kiev, but in Yalta. Turns out that the breading is sweet, so it's kind of like chicken in a donut. That squirts hot butter sauce when you slice into it. Ukranians love their butter sauce, and I am not complaining about this.
Smaller dumplings called pelmini are also popular in Ukraine, and when we had a kitchen in Yalta, we cooked up some frozen ones that we found on sale at the grocery store. How much is a bag of on-sale frozen potato pelmini in Ukraine? Around 40 cents US. We used to get on-sale frozen pierogies in the states for $1 and thought that was an amazing deal until we got these.
In our world travels, we have seen ice cream in many forms, but never in a frozen sausage until Ukraine! Convenient for slicing...not so convenient for saving for later, so we just had to eat it all in one go. Cherry flavor, of course. Hooray for a country that loves cherries as much as I do!
Last shot from a restaurant in Yalta--Andy's beef tenderloin, which came in a kind of vegetable soup, and some pelmini (not as cheap as the ones we cooked ourselves). It was all OK, but it was no Puzata Hata meal. They need to open a Yalta branch!
I had really low expectations for Ukranian food, so I was seriously pleasantly surprised at how many tasty dishes I ended up eating. And I was happy with all the cherry products, too. Who knew Ukraine was a hot culinary destination? Go now, and bring me back some dumplings.

Crimea River: Ukraine

2011-05-28T04:50:00.002-04:00

Ukraine is a country that may not want to be like Russia, but that has too strong of a Russian influence to escape it quickly. Since Americans can't get Russian visas in Asia (I'll spare you the details), we leap-frogged over Russia straight to Ukraine. Ukraine had to serve as the closest we would get to the heart of the Soviet Union. The country served to show us how little Russian I actually speak (basically, none) and how little we knew about Chernobyl (basically, none).

How do you know that you have reached the former Soviet Union? If you find yourself on a plane with a flight attendant who looks like this, you have probably reached the Soviet Union. If the man standing behind her looks like this man, you have definitely reached the former Soviet Union.
Ukraine, like Russia, has tons of Russian Orthodox churches that have had a resurgence in popularity since the fall of the Soviet Union. Strangely, we saw many places selling these gold tops for your cathedral. Can you buy one of these for your house? Apparently.
This is the primary church in the Lavra Monastery of Kiev, which is most famous for mummified monks buried in catacombs underground. Unfortunately, the monks are heavily shrouded and no more than a few dried arms can be seen. Just as unfortunately, no pictures are allowed of the monks, so this church is as close as you'll get in this post.
Easter eggs are very popular in Ukraine. Since it was recently Easter, the church still has an Easter egg sculpture outside. No chocolate bunnies in sight, though.
It happened to be some kind of saint day while we were visiting, and tons of people were out to celebrate. Here is the processional.
Here is our favorite of the priests. Part leprechaun, part hippie, part priest.
The monastery follows in the footsteps of Gregor Mendel and has a lot of crazy flowers. Maybe they actually breed them or maybe they just get them from the landscapers, but many are really beautiful. Here are some crazy colored pansies.
And here is a nicely fringed tulip.
Overlooking the city of Kiev is this very shiny statue representing the Motherland. It seems like they should get it a job as the spokesperson for a shiny watch brand. Forget your celebrity spokespeople, Rolex, and switch to something that looks like a giant watch for your spokesperson.
Inside the Saint Sofia Church in Kiev, no photos are allowed, and they had people watching us everywhere. However, the woman let us take a photo of this piece of art that is the size of a huge wall and is created using thousands of Easter eggs, each of which is individually decorated. It is based on one of the murals that appears in the church from the 1200s. Again, no chocolate Reese's bunnies in sight.
Saint Michael's Church was rebuilt in 2000 after the Communists decided to destroy it at some point in the past. The new one is very nice from the outside. The inside is a bit crowded with murals and icons everywhere, but most Russian Orthodox churches have too much bling inside for my tastes.
We made it to one classical music concert in Kiev. The full Philharmonic wasn't playing while we were there, but we caught a piano/violin concert in the Philharmonic hall. We bought the cheapest possible tickets for $3, which worked out well when only about 20 people showed up for the concert and they moved us to the center of the third row.
At the Chernobyl Museum, we learned a bit more about the tragedy of Chernobyl. Thousands died and are still dying from being exposed to radiation. The craziest part is that the facility was still active until 2000. We thought they had closed it since they no longer let people live within 20 miles of the place, but apparently it was still okay for people to work there. Also, you can take a tour to the still very radioactive area if you pay enough money (about $150). This didn't sound like the smartest idea to us.
St. Andrew's Church is another famous church of Kiev. It was closed for repairs when we were there, but still looked nice from the outside. Glad to see that they are keeping my namesake church in good repair.
The subways of Kiev are very Soviet. They are deep, deep underground and have escalators that are so long that you can't see the top when you get on at the bottom. The escalators move about twice as fast as US escalators. We saw many people sitting down for the ride, though making out seemed to be the most popular pastime.
Tara with Mikhail Bulgakov, author of Master and Margarita, a rather good (and sometimes strange) book about Russia and the devil. You've probably never heard of it, but it is very famous for Russian speakers. Go read it. Or see if there is a movie, but I think it would be pretty tough to film.
In WWII, 100,000 Ukrainians, mostly Jews, were killed in a park outside Kiev. This is the only memorial that now exists to those killed. Depressing.
From Kiev, we journeyed to the Crimea. After getting off of our train, we took the "longest trolleybus in the world" to Yalta. A trolleybus apparently means that a normal bus connects to power lines overhead. No tracks, but it can't get too far from the lines overhead or the cable disconnects, which happened a few times on our three hour trip.
In Yalta, we rented an apartment from a little old lady at the bus station. The first place she showed us was nice, but had only one tiny bed located in the kitchen. We were confused and surprised when the second that she showed us was exactly what we wanted.
Yalta is located on the Black Sea. It becomes a big tourist destination during the summer, but we were there before things got too crazy. Lots of flowers in bloom for springtime.
Yalta still has a very nice Lenin statue. He used to look out towards the harbor, but now looks upon the McDonald's that has been built between him and the harbor. He told me that he prefers the ice cream from McDonald's, but his friends look down upon him for going to this bastion of capitalism for his ice cream.
A dolphin! I swear! We could see dolphins swimming from our view above on the cliff, but this was as close of a picture as we could get. Dolphins would be easier to photograph if they stayed in the air. Maybe some kites could be attached to their backs?
The cable car up the mountain outside Yalta. The second part is so steep that you transfer to a second cable car that goes at a steeper incline. The swaying of the car made Tara motion sick.
The view from the top of the mountain gives a good perspective on the town. That sea doesn't look black to me. We are renaming it the Blue Sea. Come to think of it, why is that name not taken?
Yalta was home to the peace talks that ended World War II in Europe. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin carved up Germany and other parts of Europe in this palace over several days in 1945. The palace had originally belonged to the Romanovs, but they were killed a few years after its completion.
This was the dining room in the original palace and became the main meeting room where all the important meetings occurred at the Yalta conference.
After trying to lose her hat at least a dozen times, Tara has finally lost her baseball cap. This means that she had to be creative when we out for a hike in the sun. She created this stylish new look, which is sure to catch on the world over.
While walking down a path, we found dozens of these worms hanging on nearly invisible threads blocking our way. No idea why they hang like this, sometimes 20 or 30 feet off of branches. My best guess is that they are actually crazy blood-sucking monsters and wait to latch on to passing people, but it didn't seem to want to eat Tara when I tried to attach it to her.
That brings us to the conclusion of Ukraine. Despite some language barriers (no one in Ukraine speaks English), we had a good time visiting and were there for a beautiful part of Spring. We hopefully won't glow in the dark after being so close to Chernobyl.

Nuttin' but Mutton: Mongolian Food

2011-05-26T04:47:00.002-04:00

Mongolia may be huge geographically, but it has the food variation of...well, something without a lot of variation. Food all over the country consists of mutton, mutton, mutton, and camel. And a bit of wheat thrown in for good measure. That will make this a short post, which makes my job easy. That should make us both happy.

At the surprisingly well-stocked store in the town where we got stuck for a day, they had very good Russian-style ice cream that is just in a cone with a piece of paper over it. The best ice cream we had had in many months. And by reading this picture, you can practice your Mongolian--written in Cyrillic and sometimes borrowing a word, it generally doesn't sound a bit like Russian.
This picture includes most of what they eat in Mongolia. The dumplings are called buuz, and are generally filled with a rather strong-tasting mutton. And with a lot more meat than any dumpling that I've ever had. The fried things taste like they look and are filled with mutton. (We also had one filled with vegetables, but our tour guide acted like that was crazy when we told her.) The drink is "tea." Tea or milk tea in Mongolia consists of watered down milk (often from a camel and sometimes a goat if you are in the Gobi), with salt and a tiny hint of tea. We actually didn't think it had any tea at all until we saw people making it and they would throw about a teaspoon of tea leaves into a gallon of the tea.
We did find cheap strawberry nectar and yogurt (made from actual cow's milk). Both were good, but not great. Neither is typical Mongolian food, but Ulaan Bataar has a lot of good supermarkets. We aren't sure who eats all the stuff since we only saw actual Mongolians eating about four things.
And here is the best of the four things that Mongolians eat. These are fresh noodles with mutton, but the mutton brings down the excellent noodles. They taste like Amish-style egg noodles, though I don't think they have egg. Tara liked them so much that she has sworn to start making fresh noodles all the time. I approve.
Our tour guide in the Gobi bought us this grape juice that has chunks of aloe gel in it, sort of like drinking a bubble tea. It was strange at first, but we grew to like have chunks of jelly in our grape juice.
Here we are forced to repeat foods. In this photo, Tara is trying the fried, meat-filled pancakes from a different place. That's all this restaurant served. It is often the case with "restaurants" in the Gobi that they only serve one dish. And they never prepare anything (sometimes including buying the supplies) until you have ordered.
When you're visiting families in a yurt, they will often pass around a bone with some mutton meat. The first time this happen, Tara and I stared quizzically at one another until we saw people cutting off bits to put in their "tea." And sometimes they just pop a bit into their mouths.
This is my mutton in tea. I can't say that I suggest adding mutton to your tea, but it was a novelty.
Also served along with tea are these donut things. They are fried bread items that last longer than actual bread in the harsh desert. They aren't sweet, but they are often served mixed with sugar cubes like this. It makes a better tea time snack than mutton on a bone.
We asked our guide if it was possible to try camel meat. Luckily, we were staying the very next day with a family that makes its living raising camels. They had some dry camel meat that we tried by itself and then added to our soup for the evening. It has a very strong gamey taste. I thought it was edible, but Tara thought it was bad. One-humped camel wins the camel-tasting contest, though.
And in our last picture, Tara poses proudly with her horse meat. She was very disappointed that we couldn't find horse at any restaurants, but then we found some packaged horse at the grocery store. It is pretty good. Not like any meat we've had before, but we would eat it again. Yeehaw!
Eight days in Mongolia, and that's all we ate. Well, we ate more, but it was just the stuff pictured repeatedly. And we had Indian food one night, but that didn't qualify as Mongolian. The food was better than we expected based upon warnings that we had received, but it was just as limited as we had heard.

One last thing. Mongolia now has a couple of Mongolian barbecue buffets, but they American-owned. Sadly, while the concept may be based on how they cooked food in Mongolia hundreds of years ago, the idea now only exists in practice in very expensive American-owned restaurants.

Go Be in the Gobi: Mongolia

2011-05-25T09:58:00.001-04:00

The first challenge we faced regarding Mongolia was getting there from China. If you look at a map--but not our blog map, which you may have noticed, is kind of broken--you will see that China and Mongolia are both huge and share a very long border, but it turns out that there are not so many official land border-crossing points. (This baffled me at first, but now that I have been there, I understand--it's because Mongolia has no roads.)

Anyway, direct flights from Beijing to Mongolia's capital, Ulaan Baatar, are super expensive, and direct trains only go on Tuesday and Wednesday--not so convenient if you really want to go on a Friday or Saturday. There is an "overnight" bus from Beijing to the border, but it gets in at 3AM (ugh). There is a (real) overnight train to another city in Inner Mongolia (China's part of the Mongolian plateau), from which you can then take a six-hour bus ride to the border during the day. We were planning to do that, but when we turned up at the station in Beijing five days in advance to buy tickets, we learned that those trains were already sold out. Gah!

So we took the one daily flight that goes from Beijing to Erlian, the border town on the Chinese side. Since it was a domestic flight, it was much more affordable than a flight into Mongolia. Problems solved, eh?

Not quite. We left Beijing in lovely spring weather, but when we landed in Erlian, it was 2 degrees Celsius and snowing out. In the terminal, I made a 10-minute detour into the bathroom to change into warmer clothes...and caused us to miss the only shuttle bus into town. (Turns out that Erlian airport is not quite the busiest in China--it only gets two flights a day.)

So, Andy and I found ourselves stuck at the airport, 25 kilometers from town, surrounded by non-English-speaking airport staff whose response to our every question about buses and taxis was to giggle. Finally, someone managed to communicate to us that we should sit down and wait for 10 minutes. Two hours later, someone finally gave us a lift into town--a surreal ride through flat, flat grassland dotted with huge dinosaur statues, a tribute to the many dinosaur remains that have been found in the area.

The driver kindly dropped us at the bus station and refused to take any money from us, and we were still in plenty of time to catch the cross-border bus at 1PM, so things seemed to be looking up. We spent our last few yuan on a tasty lunch and met a great pair of Dutch travelers, Niels and Bonnie, who were heading to Mongolia on the same bus. We made so much noise talking to each other that the Chinese customs people at the border came and shushed us all twice. But they stamped us out, and Mongolia stamped us in, and hooray, we were in the little border town of Zamin Uud, Mongolia!

But the fun with transport just never ends. We all headed straight for the train station, which was a total mass of confusion, not helped at all by frequent-break-taking reservation agents and blatantly queue-jumping Mongolians. It took us an hour of shoving and fighting to get to the front of the line, only to learn that the overnight train that night to Ulaan Baatar was sold out. We were stranded again.

Thanks to Niels's persistence, we managed to score tickets for the following day, then began the round of local hotels, most of which were full or very expensive. We ended up in one of the dumpier places we've stayed on our whole trip, but at least it was cheap and the family running it was friendly. Then it was off to see the, um, sights of Zamin Uud. Which are:

A camel statue (two humps!)...
...and people playing pool on outdoor tables in the main square.
That's it! You have now seen every sight of consequence in Zamin Uud, Mongolia. So cancel that trip, you don't have to go yourself. Lucky you!

We killed 24 hours, mostly playing cards with our Dutch friends in a vaguely Soviet-feeling restaurant on the square, complete with surly waitresses in miniskirts and high-laced boots. Every few hours we ordered food like gulash and schnitzel from the Cyrillic-only menu (Andy's Russian-reading skills finally come in handy!) and marveled at how very quickly things had changed since China, just a few miles behind us.

Here we are with Bonnie and Niels that evening, finally ready to get on the train. (Note the beautiful blue sky--the weather had drastically improved.)
Mongolians really like to party, and an overnight train, we quickly learned, is as good a place as any to have a good time. Our car-mates were up until the wee hours, playing cards and talking and laughing. But they were also really nice to us. When the train rolled past this man out with his horse and his camel, they made sure to beckon me and Andy (the only tourists in that section) over to the window to see it. Our first Bactrian camel of Mongolia!
Ulaan Baatar felt SO cosmopolitan compared to Zamin Uud (and compared to anywhere else we'd go in the country over the next week). I'm pretty sure it's the only place in the country with pavement. One-quarter of all Mongolians live there (about one million people), and it's growing quickly. Super-modern new buildings are going up all over the place, like this one that manages to look like a vagina and a phallus at the same time.
Chinggis Khan (formerly known as Genghis, at least to me), was responsible for Mongolia taking over half the world a few centuries ago, and his bronze statue on the main square is appropriately girthy.
For a taste of some more traditional architecture, here is one of Mongolia's most important Buddhist sites, the Gandan monastery, looming high over the edge of downtown.

Mongolia is huge (19th biggest country in the world, but lowest population density after Greenland and the Falklands) and we only had time to visit a small chunk of it, so we chose to explore one of earth's harshest climates: the Gobi desert. (Which, our guide quickly informed us, is actually redundant, as "Gobi" means "desert" in Mongolian.)

We signed up for six-day tour, which we were quickly made to understand would involve countless hours of off-roading in an old Russian jeep, three mutton-based meals a day, and absolutely no prospect of a shower for the entire trip. Bring it on!

We had hoped to find other travelers to share the cost with us, but as it turns out, most people actually want to go even longer without a shower, and we couldn't find anyone else who wanted to do less than nine days in the Gobi. So, it would just be me, Andy, a guide, and a driver--really, enough unshowered people for one car, wouldn't you say?

We hit the road, and the road quickly ended outside of Ulaan Baatar, so we hit the dirt. Luckily, we didn't hit these big, beautiful birds--cranes, methinks? (Sabrina?) We saw them in pairs somewhat regularly in the desert.

Here is our jeep on day one, when it was still behaving pretty well. Our super-cheerful driver (the man never stopped smiling!) ended up taking the whole engine apart a few days later while we were hiking. He kept the car running quite impressively the whole time.
The Gobi really surprised us with its many varied landscapes. Some impressive rock formations on day one.
Those dark skies in the distance may mean storms are coming, but we get a rainbow, too!
Our first night in the desert was spent in the village of Erdene Dalai--"the biggest town in the province," according to our guide. This translates to a handful of houses and yurts (round, felt tents--called gers in Mongolian), a school, a few shops, and one pretty monastery in the rocky sand.
No running water anywhere in the Gobi, so toilets are all squat-style outhouses.
This is what a gas station looks like in the Gobi.
Andy really wanted to experience a sandstorm, and secretly hoped that we might get caught in one at some point. He got his wish on day two--luckily, we were near our destination and it was over by the next morning. Still, the howling wind was crazy, and sand seemed to get through every crevice in the jeep. I found the whole experience slightly less romantic than the sandstorm in The English Patient--luckily, we were not trapped in the jeep overnight like Ralph and Kristen were!
On night two, and every subsequent night of the trip, we got to sleep in a ger. Hooray! The outsides are very plain, but Mongolians like to decorate the insides with lots of bright colors. The centerpiece of every ger is the stove, which either burns wood or animal poop, depending on which fuel source is more locally available.
Sleeping in a ger was fun for novelty, but not exactly the most restful experience ever. The stoves tend to make the tent roastingly hot for a while, but then they peter out while you're sleeping so you wake up freezing. And the beds in Gobi ger camps may just be the hardest in the entire world. Five nights was definitely enough for me.

Anyway, we thought our goggles had seen the last of their action when we left the ocean behind, but we didn't realize how handy they'd be when you have to go to the outhouse during a sandstorm!
Sandstorm all calmed by sunrise the next morning. Even in low-wind conditions, though, the Gobi was still freezing.
We were still all bundled up later that morning for our visit to Bayanzag, a beautiful area of canyons where many important dinosaur remains have been discovered, including the best ones in the New York Natural History Museum!
That day, the landscape changed again as we drove south past the Gobi's largest mountain range. Suddenly, we were in rolling green hills. Well, green-ish. But it looked like Ireland after where we'd come from!
The Yol Valley was probably the prettiest destination on our Gobi tour. We hiked to a crazy frozen waterfall (while our driver was taking the car apart back at the ger camp).
Purple flowers! Moss! Life in the desert!
The area is plant-rich enough to support many herded animals (sheep, goats, cows, camels)...and horses of many colors.

I may have taken a walk over some of these hills. And I may have spun around and sang "The hills are alive...with the sound of muuuusic!" once or twice. I mean, who knows what may have happened?
The crazy nine-day tour group was at the same camp as us that night, and our guides got us together for a traditional Mongolian game night. When our guide told us we'd be playing a game called "animal ankle," we imagined some kind of crazy charades- or perhaps tag-like experience involving grabbing people's ankles. Nope. Mongolians are herders, so we probably should have known that the game would involves actual animal ankles--or at least ankle bones.

It turns out that a sheep or goat ankle bone has four distinct sides, so you can toss like a die, leading to hours of fun as you "roll" ankle bones to learn whether your playing piece (also an ankle bone) will advance along the long wall (made of, you guessed it, more ankle bones) and win the horse-race. A very popular game among Mongolians of all ages to pass time during the long winter months.
This baby girl at the ger camp was obsessed with cars. The only sound any of us ever heard come out of her mouth was a car noise, and she constantly held up her hands and begged anyone who was getting into a jeep to lift her in, too. Someone let her "drive" at the steering wheel and she was the happiest camper ever, and she screamed bloody murder when she had to get out. I see an exciting profession of cross-Gobi jeep driving in her future!
Speaking of babies, omigod, omigod, 100 baby goats!!
Yeah, we finally hit baby season somewhere. Baby camels are also cute, as are baby sheep, but they're skittish and not as willing to be snuggled by strangers as friendly baby goats!

A bit less exciting than baby goats, unless you are Andy, is this lizard.
All these animals were spotted near the sand dunes we visited after Yol Valley. We didn't make it out to Khongor, the biggest sand dunes in the Gobi, but these were good enough to climb around on for an hour while our guide rustled up some more mutton for our lunch.
After the dunes, it was finally time to ride some camels!
The verdict is in: Two-humped (Bactrian) camels are more comfortable than their one-humped (Dromedary) cousins. We actually showed the camel-owners at this ger camp our photos from riding Dromedaries in Mauritania, and they thought it was hilarious that anyone would try to balance a saddle on the top of a camel's hump like that.
Spring is shaving time for the camels, so that their owners can sell their fur to make all those lovely, expensive camel-hair coats we like in the west. I asked a shaved camel to pose next to an unshaved one for contrast, and he kindly obliged. I didn't tell him that I think he looks ridiculous, kind of like a vulture with his baldy head and neck poking out from that still-fluffy back...
How do you shave a camel, you ask? First you get it to kneel down, then you knock it over on its side and quickly hog-tie its feet. Then, usually while someone else is sitting on its head, you go to work on its nether regions with a scissor. Easy-peasy! Unfortunately, this photo is not sound-enabled, so you cannot hear this camel's screams of, um, pleasure as this process is carried out.
We were back near Bayanzag to ride the camels, and took advantage of the nonsandstormy weather that day to walk out to the dinosaur-rich rocks again. Unfortunately, we did not succeed in our mission to discover an andyandtarasaurus.
Day five. Ruined monastery in the middle of nowhere. During Soviet-friendly, communist times, Mongolia destroyed a lot of religious buildings and put a lot of monks to death. These days, its a much freer place politically and religiously.
Most of the herd animals you see grazing in the Gobi belong to someone, but there are wild black-tailed gazelles (kind of like deer), which we would spot from time to time. They run away from the jeep FAST.
Back in rather flat, pretty dry territory--broken up here by some more ruins and a bit of water, which has attracted a horseman.
Our last major stop was Baga Gazarin Chuluu, also known as "the rocks." Basically, some fun rock formations that reminded us a little bit of the pancake rocks in New Zealand.
I thought this one looked like a face and had to go honk its nose.
Nifty, water-conserving desert plant. Nice shot, Andy!
On our last day, we passed by a slightly salty lake that attracted a lot of birds. Here are some more of our crane-like friends.
That appears to be all I've got for pictures from Mongolia. We spent one more night in Ulaan Bataar (and took some much-needed showers!) and then hopped an early flight to Moscow, where we would connect to Kiev, Ukraine. We were a little bit nervous to take such a long flight on an airline (MIAT Mongolian) we'd never heard of before, but luckily they were code-sharing with a bigger, better-known airline--Russia's famously safe Aeroflot! (I jest, I jest. Aeroflot has quite a good safety record these days, and the flights were completely professional.)

While I was excited to be heading to Europe, I was definitely also sad to leave Mongolia behind. The Gobi had stunning scenery, welcoming people, and lots of fun animals to play with and ride--it was totally worth all the bumps and the dirt and the cold, cold nights to see. It was also really different from the rest of Asia in cuisine, language, and culture--in many ways it felt more akin to Russia than to China--and made an interesting bridge as we headed toward a couple of former USSR republics.

I would have loved to have seen some other parts of Mongolia--there are famous lakes, and national parks with the last of the wild horses, and plenty more Gobi that we didn't get to. I think that there will definitely be a next time.

Food of China

2011-05-22T09:52:00.001-04:00

Food in the rest of China continued to impress us. Writing about what we ate will make me hungry, but I'll give it a try.

As most New Yorkers know from Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown, Shanghai has "soup dumplings"--dumplings that are filled with meat and broth. What Joe's Shanghai didn't teach us is that they also come in a fried variety. We ordered 20 of them for dinner one night and the cashier thought that she was missing something in the language barrier. We assured her that I would eat that many, though.
What's that fried bread have in it? Don't know, but we'll try one. Oh, something green! That's good.
In China, Lay's come in blueberry. Much better than they sound. We bought them several times. Furthermore, I liked that in the ingredients, they list "Breezy Blueberry Flavoring," as though that tells me everything I could ever want to know about the content of the chips.
Happy Lemon is a drink chain in China that sells bubble teas and the like. Some of their combinations (like the ones with "rock cheese") were terrible. Some were almost potable. Tara and Brooke liked most of them.
Soup abounds in China. This one seems to have some pork, some tofu, and some green stuff. Oh, and some tasty glass noodles. Looks good.
Ever wonder what Chinese people eat for breakfast? If they were staying in our hotel, they ate this. Lacking in sugar, but not bad. Some steamed bread, some fried bread, some wonton soup, some rice porridge (with do flavor), and some pickled beets. Oh, and a hard-boiled egg.
Tara and Brooke taste the bean filled cakes that we bought on the street. We saw a long line at a little food stall, so, in true Communist fashion, we got in it. Luckily, the man in front of us spoke some English and told us that some had red beans and some had soy beans. Red bean was better.
At the Uigher restaurant, we got this sesame beef that tasted a fair bit like roast beef. Fortunately, Brooke spent half the dinner dancing on stage, so Tara and I were able to eat much of it.
Do I look like a pirate in this picture of lamb kababs? No. Was I trying to? Yes. Instead, let's pretend that I poked myself in the eye while eating meat straight off the skewer in a very manly fashion.
More wonderful noodles. Almost all the noodles that we ordered in China were different, and all were excellent. These were the longest noodles that I have ever seen. I slurped one for five minutes straight. Just like a cartoon. Come to think of it, I normally look like a cartoon when eating.
In Chengdu, we asked our hotel for an authentic Sichuan hotpot experience. They delivered. The place was with locals, many of the men without shirts and some of the tables with an extra seat for their dogs. Tara looks scared in this picture because she is. We ordered vegetables, duck tongue, pork belly, some kind of beef, and shrimp. But it is the hot pot itself that is a killer. Sichuan spice combines a hot pepper with a numbing pepper. This creates a really strange sensation in your mouth that is similar to eating Oragel. None of our intestines thanked us for it. Oh, and duck tongue has very little meat or taste, sadly.
Here is the actual hotpot. The boiling stuff in the middle is duck broth. No spice. The outside ring is filled with oil and crazy Sichuan spice. The whole thing is heated to about six thousand degrees Celsius to cook your food (and your eyelashes, if you aren't careful).
Where Chinese people are hiking, there are cucumber sellers. Not my idea of a wonderful treat, but Brooke enjoyed this one in an entirely non-suggestive manner. Right, like you can even hold a giant cucumber in a non-suggestive manner.
At the Panda Reserve, they let you try the special bread that they feed to the pandas for extra nutrition (since their normal bamboo diet provides them with just about nothing). This bread tastes like burnt grass with bran added, but Tara really liked it. She ate several.
This is what Americans would call kungpao chicken. It tastes a lot different in China, but I can see the resemblence. It does have the crazy spice that numbs, though, which made Tara believe that she was having a stroke or some other equally bad problem.
Fresh chrysanthemum tea has some flowers and berries floating in the top with some sugar in the bottom. Add hot water and you have something that people pay a lot of money for. So, run outside now, grab a flower, and add sugar and hot water. You will save yourself the money.
This dish was made of mushrooms and was amazing. That's all we can tell you. The menu was entirely in Chinese and we pointed to this one randomly.
My jasmine green tea would have been excellent had I been able to steal the sugar from Tara's chrysantemum tea. Chinese people don't drink sugar in green tea, though, so they had no understanding of my problem. I suggest carrying a lot of sugar with you in China.
On the streets of Xian, Tara found a woman selling fresh noodles with some cucumber and sauce on top. She thought they were the best noodles that she had ever had. After a couple of helpings, we almost had to pay a taxi to take us back the next day, but her fear of missing our flight was just slightly greater than her desire to eat more of these.
Next to the noodle vendor was a man selling these. What are those? I ate one, but am not qualified to say. I think pork, but I think parts of the pig that I don't want to know about are somehow involved.
Anything that looks like a popsicle is hard for me to pass up. This one turned out to be a somewhat sweet rice concoction molded around a chopstick. And maybe with some beans. I couldn't really tell.
Tara liked her flower and hot water mix so much that she tried to buy some bottled chrysanthemum tea at the store. We failed this time and ended up with jasmine, but we eventually figured out which flower picture was the right one.
In the Xian Muslim district, they sell this soup that is noodles, mutton, broth, and bits of a very dense bread that is almost like dumplings. I thought it would be gross, but it was actually very good. Especially since it was cold and a bit rainy. We also tried "Ice Peak", which turned out to be an orange Fanta knock-off.
The streets of the Muslim quarter reminded us of the Middle East at night. Date and dried fruit sellers everywhere.
Tara found this sesame bread that tasted very much like the simit of Turkey (or like a sesame bagel if you are American, which is probably more likely than you being Turkish and knowing what simit tastes like).
We saw some expensive tea for sale, but we opted for the really cheap juice that everyone had for sale. This was probably a mistake. We'll call it water with mixed-fruit syrup.
This reminded us of the sweet, bean-filled pastries of Shanghai, so we bought one. It was a bit sweet, but not very good.
Xian is famous for its peanut butter candy. And rightfully so. It is pounded into many thin layers and breaks in your mouth like a wonderful peanut butter phylo dough.
We broke down the next day (with some peer pressure from Brooke to just spend the 75 cents for a drink that might not taste like urine) and bought the fruity tea for sale everywhere in Xian. It was a bit fruity and a bit tea-y, but probably not worth the money.
This is donkey. That's right--donkey. The texture was like beef tongue. The taste was like...well...ass. Hahahahaha! Sure, you probably saw that coming, but it's still funny. It was actually not bad. Tara loved it enough to look for it on other menus, though we never found it.
These sweets looked almost Indian, and tasted like soft pretzels soaked in sugar water. They were better than that description makes them sound.
These noodles were the size of sheets. I could have used one noodle to cover my bed for sleeping.
Almond juice tastes like marzipan, which I loathe. Tara, however, loves marzipan and likes this drink. I think Chinese people drink it only in hopes that they can replace the girl on the front as the lightest-skinned Chinese person on earth.
When frantically searching for dinner one night, we ducked into a tiny restaurant in an alley and ended up with an amazing feast. Pictured are dumplings, sausage, really interesting glass noodles, shredded and fried potatoes, and a bitter melon omelet. Tara and I hate omelets, but Brooke loved it.
Fresh yogurt. Yum. Just kidding. Fresh yogurt is just as bad as packaged yogurt, but at least you can return the clay packaging, which they probably then just throw out instead of reusing.
Our fanciest dinner of China was to a Peking duck restaurant.
This was as hard as a rock, but at least it was sweet. I only broke a couple of my teeth eating it. No one else seemed interested in having some.
Back to the duck meal! After we paid a crazy amount for the duck, the restaurant was kind enough to throw in this snazzy fruit plate for free. My favorite part was the steaming dry ice. It didn't taste as good as the fruit, though.
And what was the best part of the duck? The brain! I was the only one willing to try it. It tasted like mush. Mushed mush. No other discernible taste.
China has Dairy Queen! A lot of Dairy Queens, as it turns out. They are expensive, but we still went to a lot of them. Hooray for Blizzards!
China has even more strange packaged meat products than Dairy Queens. This one was a pork product. I ate most of it, but can't tell you any more information than that. Oh, and it was slightly spicy.
What goes well with two Snickers? A battery, of course! This two pack with an extra battery was cheaper than just buying two Snickers. Who was I to resist this marketing gimmick? I bought two.
From the restaurant that brought us the donkey comes this pork belly. It was pretty good, but looks less appetizing than any pork belly that I had ever eaten.
And last of all is the food that we bought right at the Mongolian border in northern China. The food there is not quite Mongolian, but not quite normal Chinese. We had some rice noodles with unknown meat, unknown yellow vegetable, and cucumbers. It was very good. Then, off to Mongolia.
The food of China was amazing diverse. Almost all of it was good enough that we would happily eat it again (except for maybe the hotpot). Tara has already started a mental list of foods to eat the next time that she visits China. Had we known what food would be like in the countries to come, we would have tried to cart freeze dried dumplings out of China with us.

Clay Soldiers, Stone Walls: Xi'an and Beijing

2011-05-19T02:00:00.001-04:00

From Chengdu, we headed north to Xi'an, which doesn't look so far away on the map but still takes 18 hours by train to reach. Brooke's cold was getting worse, so when we reached our hostel, she took a rest while Andy and I headed out to see the monuments and meet the locals.
The symbol of Xi'an is the Big Goose Pagoda. It doesn't really look like a goose to me, but it certainly was big. Unfortunately, they also charge a big admission fee, so we just admired it from the outside.
Xi'an, like some other Chinese cities, has a drum tower and a bell tower. The bells used to be rung in the morning to wake everyone up, while the drums were beaten at sunset to tell everyone to go to bed. Both are illuminated at night these days and are very attractive (here's the drum tower).

The next day, we all headed about an hour out of town to see Xi'an's top attraction, the Terracotta Army. Known as one of the greatest archaeological finds in the world, it consists of thousands of 2,000-year-old terra cotta soldiers and horses, all built to guard an emperor's mausoleum. They were buried with the emperor, and only discovered again in 1974.

The soldiers have amazing detail. Here's a kneeling archer. His wooden weapon has long since rotted away, but you can still admire his elaborately scultped clothes, hairdo, facial expression, etc.
The details just get more amazing the closer you look at the figures.
Of course, not every soldier is in perfect condition. A lot have lost their heads over the years, probably thanks to invaders who desecrated the tomb.
A few horse-drawn carriages are in impressively good shape, though. These even have a bit of their original paint still visible.
There are three main excavation pits you can visit. All are still actively being dug through by archaologists, so you can see the unrestored state in which they find some of the statues.
We saved Pit 1, the biggest pit, for last. It's the size of an airplane hangar and is filled with regiments of soldiers. This is just a small area from that pit.
Back in Xi'an city, we had enough time to explore the famous Muslim Quarter. The real highlight was the delicious food specialties that the local Hui Muslims make, but we also visited the mosque, which impressively combined Chinese- and Arabian-style architecture. Though the Chinese style really is dominant.

The mosque's minaret, or call-to-prayer tower, had this sign outside of it. It took us all several readings to realize that it's trying to say "Retrospection Tower," not "Retard Inspection Tower."

Our last stop in China was many people's first destination--the capital, Beijing! We spent four days there and could easily have spent several more, as there is so much to see there. I was kind of expecting a dirty, traffic-choked, tourist-cluttered megalopolis, but was quite pleasantly surprised to instead find a city with many trees and parks and old neighborhoods called Hutongs, which were full of tiny, winding streets, traditional homes, and more bicycles than cars.

Our first major activity was going to an acrobatics show, where young acrobats blew us and a large auditorium full of (mostly Chinese) tourists away with their tricks. Andy got a few shots in of the tightrope girl and the contortionists before an usher noticed and pointed to the large no cameras sign...

A street in Beijing near our hostel, decked out with lanterns for the dining crowds.
The next day, it was off to visit Tianamen Square--apparently the world's largest public square--and the Forbidden City. First we popped by Mao's mausoleum on the square, thereby completing Andy's trifecta of pickled communist leaders viewed (he's seen Lenin, Ho Chi Min, and now Mao). No cameras allowed inside, but here's the mausoleum from the square.
Mao's likeness graces the entrance to the Forbidden City. Here Andy and I add our likenesses to sweeten the image.
The Forbidden City was constructed in the 1400s by the Ming Dynasty and housed the Chinese royal families and their attendants for centuries. Commoners were not allowed, but now for less than $10 a person, anyone can go in. It was really crowded when we visited, so we kind of wished that maybe they'd decided to forbid just a few more people...

Anyway, you proceed through a series of impressive gates, like this one. Many are heavily restored to have that slick, built-yesterday that so many historical sites in China sport these days...
You can get an audioguide in an impressive number of languages. I searched in vain for Pig-Latin, but apparently the only fake, made-up language you can get is Esperanto.
Many structures in the Forbidden City have little animals on the roofs to protect them. The more animals, the more important the building.
A Tara, a building, and a huge friggin' crowd.
Nice cauldron! These held water to help put out fires--necessary, since all the buildings are made of wood. Ironically, when the water froze in the winter, attendants had to light a fire each day to thaw it...and hope that fire didn't spread to the buildings and necessitate the water's use!
When a dragon and a turtle mate, this is what you get.
The City has a fun museum of fancy clocks from Europe and China from the 18th and 19th centuries. The best one has this animatronic figure who writes calligraphy using real ink and parchment at specified times.
This sign is such a lie. The toilets at the Forbidden City were your standard dirty, paperless squats. Don't be fooled!
The next day, it was off to the Great Wall of China. We skipped the more touristy and restored sections and went straight to Jinshanling, which is farther from Beijing, more in its original state, and set in beautiful countryside. Construction in this part began in the 1300s (though some parts of the wall are older than that). We highly recommend visiting this section of the wall, which was one of the highlights of China for all of us.
We shared a car to the wall and explored it with Virginie and Pierre-Louis, a fantastic couple from France. How often do you get to learn dirty French cabaret songs while hiking along a beautiful ancient monument?
We have so many pictures of the wall, but we'll wrap it up with this one. The weather was a bit overcast, but that made our hike cooler and made the surroundings more atmospheric. I didn't know that the terrain the wall was built on was so hilly--it was quite a workout just to hike along it, so I can see now how, combined with the natural landscape, it helped keep invaders at bay.
On our way back into the city, we stopped for photos at the Bird's Nest stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics. I bet it looks even neater when it gets illuminated at night.
Our hostel was located right next to the Lama Temple, the most important Tibetan Buddhist temple outside of Tibet. It has some nice dog/dragon statues...
And a few awesome blue demons. Nice skull hat! I'm still not clear on the role of these demons in Buddhism, though...
Here is my namesake, the bodhavista Tara! She is enlightened, but stays on earth to help other people reach Nirvana. You know, just like I do.
The highlight of this temple is the 18-meter (60-foot) Buddha, carved out of a single piece of sandalwood. Add it to the list of enormous Buddhas that we've paid to see in Asia.
While Brooke bravely rented a bike and explored the Hutongs, Andy and I went to the not-so-impressive Beijing Natural History Museum. Though you can't say it was a total bust, because he got to climb inside a big plastic uterus. Yes, that's what you think it is swimming towards him along the floor.
Near that museum is the Temple of Heaven, a nifty round Taoist Temple from the 1400s, set in a lovely park.
That was our last major stop in Beijing. That night, Brooke headed back to Shanghai to catch her flight home, and the next morning, Andy and I flew to the Mongolian border to cross and continue our Asian adventures in that country.

Before we came to China, I was so concerned about the language barrier, the food, the crowds, and the pollution, but I have to say that it was one of the most pleasantly surprising countries we have been to on this long trip. Amazing eats, good public transportation, friendlier people than I'd ever expected, lots of English signage, and so many interesting and beautiful sights to see. So if you're thinking of taking a trip to Asia, I'd strongly urge you to check out China. I'm looking forward to heading back and exploring a few more corners of this fascinating country myself.

PANDAS! And less cute places: Shanghai and Chengdu

2011-05-17T10:59:00.000-04:00

After Yunnan, we spent 36 hours on a train to get to Shanghai. It was our longest ride yet, but was surprisingly comfortable. Arriving in Shanghai at 5am on a Sunday is a bit like getting into Manhattan at 5am. No one is up yet and the entire downtown has a strange, deserted feel to it. After having some problems finding a hotel room, we ended up in a rather questionable hotel, though it was central and we could see many very nice hotels from our window. Then we were off to see a few sights before meeting Tara's sister, Brooke, at the airport.

Here is the Bund at night. Shanghai was home to many foreigners in the past, with each major country controlling part of the city. The British section along the river, with the main street called the Bund, is home to many of the oldest buildings in Shanghai. Also some of the least Chinese-looking.
After successfully locating Brooke at the airport and getting in a fight with our hotel because we weren't supposed to have three people in our room (they were technically in the right, but who would have thought that the dirtbag hotel would enforce such a rule? Had she been a prostitute, we are fairly certain that she could have stayed for free), we moved to a better hotel and went to explore the Pudong section of town across the river. A fellow traveller had tipped us off a few weeks earlier that the bathrooms in the World Financial Tower are really amazing. Tara and Brooke spent about a half hour in the bathroom playing with the high-tech toilets.
Tara and Brooke then decided (well, Brooke decided and peer-pressured Tara) that they would do a jumping picture. After about 20 shots, I gave up on ever getting them to jump at the same time. Here's the best that I got.
We visited a famous temple in Shanghai that turned out to be much more touristy than expected. It was here, however, that I was introduced to the word rockery. You pile up a bunch of rocks and then maybe add some cement and you have a rockery. They really like rockeries in China. In New York, the pigeons would really like them, too.
The Jing'An temple is a famous monastery and temple right in the middle of Shanghai. It was originally built in the 1500s, but appears to have been almost entirely rebuilt about five minutes before we arrived. That is often the case with China's historical sites. It still looks nice, though.
China has exercise equipment everywhere. At first, this seemed like a good idea for America, but it isn't like Americans would use them, so it would just be a waste of money. The best machine was similar to log rolling. Tara has captured me falling off it in this action shot. Putting these in parks in America would have the same result as hiding very sharp swords all over the playground. Brooke seems to be better balanced on her machine.
We sought out a Uigher restaurant for dinner. The Uigher are a Muslim ethnic group in Western China with a reputation as very friendly and with very different food. About 10 seconds after arriving, they tried to pull us all on stage to learn their traditional dance. Tara and I fled. Brooke, being a professional dancer, danced with them for maybe 15 minutes. Then they asked her to perform some ballet for them--solo. So, she did. Despite my hopes that this would lead to free food for the table, she received only their appreciation.
The Pudong business district gets lit up like a Christmas tree at night. A gaudy Christmas tree. Lights go out at 10pm, though, which we discovered about one minute after this picture was taken.
From Shanghai, it was off to Chengdu. The superfast bullet train got us there in just 16 hours. We were then off to the "village" of Leshan (only a couple hundred thousand people) to see a really big Buddha. Built in the 800s along the river, it was meant to appease the river and make it less turbulent. Amusingly, all the rock that fell into the river from the construction did end up calming the waters. It is the "largest carved stone Buddha" in the world. Nearly every big Buddha statue has an equally ridiculous title, but it is really big. Tara is either trying to wink in this picture or is developing a droopy eye.
Just next to the Buddha is a beautiful bridge over the river to a monastery. If you could get rid of the apartment buildings in the background, it would be just about what China might have been like 500 years ago. Or at least just about what movies about China that are set 500 years ago look like.
From the Buddha's feet, he looks even bigger. The holes in him were actually put there as a drainage system. I wonder: if you pee on the Buddha's head, will it spit the water out at the bottom?
The next day, we decided to hike Mount Qingcheng, one of the sacred Taoist mountains outside of Chengdu. Taoism and Buddhism both have several sacred mountains scattered around China. My guess is that most are as much of a tourist magnet as this one, but the signs claimed that the air is purer and healthier here, so at least our lungs got a break. A few nice views existed, though the top of the mountain was closed for construction. They forgot to mention that when we bought our tickets.
Many urinals in China have funny messages. Apparently, Chinese men aren't very good at hitting the urinal. And every Chinese person wants to be civilized.
This sign was a bit more difficult to understand. Let us know if you understand it. I know what all the words mean, but then you put them together and I am confused.
The main square in Chengdu gets lit up at night in a tasteful Vegas style. The hotels and office buildings suddenly al look like Casinos.
Looking over the glitz of the square is Mao himself! Hello, Mao!
Ever wonder what your poop would look like if you just ate bamboo all day? No, neither had I, but here's the answer that a panda gave.
The Panda Reserve in Chengdu has more pandas than anywhere else in the world. Something like 100 of them, of all ages (except for newborns at the moment, which are born in July and August). Here are two of last year's cubs trying hard to get mom to play.
We didn't know it, but pandas can climb. Adults aren't so good, but the young ones really like to climb trees. It probably takes 3 days of eating bamboo to have enough energy to climb a tree.
The reserve also has red pandas, which aren't really related to pandas, but are nearly as endangered. Only about 5000 left in the wild.
Tara swears some of the pandas were guys just sitting around in panda costumes. We learned at the panda center that in addition to only eating bamboo, pandas don't like each other (even to mate), and that mother pandas have no idea what to do with their babies. We saw video footage of a mother trying to swat its new baby out of its enclosure because it was scared every time the baby cried. Makes us think that panda survival isn't so likely and also to wonder how they made it this long.
Back in Chengdu proper, Tara and I explored the May 1 (Labor Day) celebrations. About 30 different acts were set up in the park, all right next to each other. Each tried to blare their music the loudest (some with live music), so you had grannies waltzing to techno next to women performing classical dance next to men singing Chinese opera. It was amusing to hear all the sounds blending.
After the cacaphony of sounds, we sought refuge in this traditional tea house. You can read about our tea in the next food article.
Shanghai and Chengdu were both impressively developed cities. We didn't really know what China would be like, but it was far more orderly, clean, and developed than India, for instance. Coming up next is the remainder of our time in China. Don't miss it!

Yakking it up in Yunnan

2011-05-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

Fluffy warm bread. Goat cheese. Fresh cherries. French-fried potatoes. Hot porridge. Cool yogurt in a glass bottle. This is Chinese food? Welcome to Yunnan!

But, but...I don't like Chinese food! Or, at least, I thought I didn't. I definitely don't like the Chinese food you get in America, with its limp vegetables, rogue shellfish, and too-salty, too-viscous sauces. So, as our bus rolled across the Laos border and into Yunnan province, I worried. Would I find anything to eat? Or would I end up crawling bashfully into McDonald's at the end of each day, desperate for nourishment?

That's a negative on the McDonald's (though I did have a tasty yak burger in the mountain town of Shangri-la). Chinese food in China, it turns out, is approximately 100 million times more delicious than any Chinese food I've ever had in the West. It varies enormously from region to region, so maybe we just visited all the right regions, but I never had a meal I didn't like. In fact, many meals I loved. And what better place for this love affair to start than Yunnan, the most beautiful corner of China?

Our first stop over the Laos border was Mengla, a small city where our bus paused for an hour so everyone could find dinner. We only had about $3 of Chinese money from changing our leftover Lao cash at the border, and couldn't find an ATM, but luckily there was plenty of cheap food available. At a restaurant with a picture menu, we pointed to what looked like your standard noodles with pork and peppers. Turns out that that guy in the corner stretching a handful of dough was making the noodles fresh! First surprisingly delicious meal of China.

Breakfast on the street the next morning in Kunming--steamed pork-filled buns, or pao. Pao seems to be the one snack you can find pretty much anywhere in China, and it fills you up nicely when you've only got 75 cents to your name (yup, still can't find an ATM).
Finally cashed up, we find an old lady on another street selling these fruits. Free sampling is popular in China, and she lets us taste. They taste like cherries, my favorite! When I ask her how much they cost, using my best memorized Chinese phrasing, she gives me a price per kilo. "But," Andy whispers, "She doesn't have a scale." As if on cue, she pulls an ancient-looking, one-handed scale out of her shirt and weighs my bag of fruits on it. That is the last time we will underestimate old Chinese ladies, especially when commerce is involved.
Our first foray into a Chinese supermarket (OK, technically it's a French supermarket, Carrefour, but they're all over China and sell live frogs and turtles in the seafood section, so I think they now count as honorary Chinese) yields the following goodies: very cheap ice cream, fresh-soybean-flavored yogurt, and a cake. Only the cake is good, but it's all in the name of experimentation!This Kunming restaurant had really tasty-looking food, but no English menu. We must have looked pretty pathetic hanging around the entrance, because the staff went and found the manager, who spoke a little English and shepherded us through the ordering process. I ended up with a delicious cold-noodle salad with peanuts, turkey meat, lightly-cooked veggies, and a not-at-all gloopy sauce, while Andy ended up with a slightly less exciting noodle soup.
On to mountain-ringed Lijiang, where the minority Naxi people cook up treats that might seem more at home in Switzerland than China. Here's a typical breakfast of corn porridge and sweet fried Naxi-style bread.
Second trip to a supermarket yields coconut sandwich "cookies" (more like two Ritz crackers with coconut cream between them--not bad, actually), blueberry "ice cream" wafers (either blueberries taste like orange in China, or they messed the packaging up), and knockoff Oreos that tasted like burnt cookies with margarine filling. Maybe we should stick with the fresh food.
Ah, that's better. Warm, fluffy, Lijiang-style bread--not as dense as the Naxi-style, but still nicely greased. Beats the cold on a chilly April morning.
More supermarket experiments. Very cheap buns, which turn out to have nothing in them, and some unexciting veggie-filled dumplings on the left. On the right, a pink boxed drink that turns out to be peach yogurt (yum), and...walnut milk, which is delicious! Perhaps our grocery-store luck is changing.
The nice thing about eating at a night market is that you can just point to stuff and then see if your purchase taste as good as it looked. That thing on the right turns out to be made of fried potato and is kind of like a very crunchy Swiss rosti. The thing on the left is just what it looks like...a ball of sweet goo on sticks. I let Andy eat most of that one.
Here is a boat filled with sticky rice from the same night market. We are both looking at this picture now and can't remember for the life of us what the white things were.
Burned by the fake Oreos, we spring for real ones, which cost about three times as much. Asia has the most fun Oreo flavors--this time, it's green tea ice cream. Well, fun in theory, anyway. Like the blueberry ice cream ones we got in Indonesia, these taste kind of like menthol.
Yak's milk yogurt is sold all around Lijiang in lovely little glass bottles. You poke a straw in the lid, drink up, then return your bottle to the vendor for reuse. Environmentally friendly and delicious! (Well, I guess it'd be more friendly without the straw, but in China, free straws seem to be something of a national right. Shopkeepers were always foisting them on me. Apparently, if a lip touches a beverage bottle in China, the world will end.)
A few vendors were selling this weird-looking stuff out on the street in Lijiang. They let us taste it, and we determined that it is some perversion of honey. Perhaps honey that was buried in the ground until it crystalized? Or honey that was exposed to a chemical spill? All we know is that it comes in two shades--crazy yellow and crazy orange--and that, though tempted, we didn't buy any.
"Across the bridge noodles" are a Yunnanese specialty. They are made by dropping very thin slices of raw meat, an egg, and some greens and noodles into broth so scalding that it immediately cooks the meat. The story behind the name is that a woman had to bring lunch across a bridge to her scholar-husband every day, and this version was his favorite. When we move back to the States, I am going to get Andy to bring scalding-hot broth across a bridge to me every day at work--maybe the George Washington.
Some more Yunnanese specialties: sauteed potatoes (yum) and grilled yak on a stick, both of which you dip in a fantastically tasty, red-peppery spice mixture. If you don't know what a yak looks like, you can look at Andy's last post to see pictures of live ones (this here's the dead-ish version).
Speaking of dead, here are some skewered eel fetuses!
Hahaha, gotcha--those were mushrooms, not eel fetuses. What kind of barbarians do you think we are? Yunnan is known for its various and tasty fungi, and grilled up and dusted with that magical red spice mixture, these were very tasty.

I'm pretty sure that these dried and sugared disks are hawthorn fruit, which we later learned is also a popular street snack in Beijing. They're pretty good, and can stand in for pepperoni if you are making a candy pizza.
Mystery meat from a Lijiang restaurant. Maybe yak? Neither of us can remember what this was, but you can bet that we dipped it in that spicy red powder you see in the corner.
Same restaurant--this one was some kind of smoked pork. Very delicious.
Final dish from that dinner: fried goat cheese! Another Naxi specialty. I was surprised when it came with a little bowl of sugar for dipping, and even more surprised when dipping the cheese in the sugar improved it considerably. Those Naxi are on to something.
The magical Yunnanese seasoning that makes everything delicious. Where can I buy this stuff?

I took myself out to dinner while Andy was hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge. Since he had the camera, he told me to make sure to draw a picture of anything interesting I ate. My rice noodles with yak meat weren't so exciting, but this tasty coconut drink I had sure was!
How was I to know that you can find this drink all over China, and that we'd be able to take a picture of it the very next day?
On to Shangri-la, and a harder drink. Chinese beer is pretty weak, with only around 3% alcohol, meaning that even a wimp like me can down a giant bottle without getting too drunk.
Giant yak-burgers all around! Strangely, yak sometimes tasted like beef to us (as in this burger), but sometimes was much more like chicken (like in those kebabs earlier). Either different cuts of yak taste very different, or some of the meat we ate was counterfeit yak. But if it wasn't yak...hm, I don't like to think too far in this direction.
In case you were too lazy to click over to Andy's post, here's a picture of live yak and not-so-live yak together. Supermarkets in Yunnan sell about 20 different varieties of vacuum-packed dried yak (say that five times fast), and since we can't read Chinese, we could only decide which one to buy by package color. Red was pretty good.
We will call this dish "lunch-stop pork," because we had it twice at different roadside eateries on the long bus rides from Shangri-la to Deqin and back. The pork is cooked in a lot of spicy oil with a bunch of green peppers and is insanely delicious.
Our lovely Tibetan driver to the Mingyong Glacier took us to his house after for walnuts and Tibetan barley whiskey. You may conclude from the size of this jug that Tibetans drink quite a lot of it. He smirkingly poured us each a large teacupful and sat back to watch (he still had to drive us home) what would transpire. Andy passed, of course, so the honor of the team rested with me as I drained my cup o'booze. I thought I was holding it together pretty well until I started to lose feeling in all my limbs back in the car...
Felai Si, the small village we stayed in outside of Deqin, has no supermarkets, so we were forced to continue our packaged-goods experimentation at the local minimart. Thumbs up for the peanut milk in a can; thumbs down for these brown things, which turned out not to be chocolate (but what were they??).
This dessert sounded so good on the menu: honey guilin paste. Turned out to be slightly bitter jello tricked with some dark runny honey. Even that description makes it sound better than it was.
Breakfast options in Deqin were rather limited, but Andy did manage to find a bakery selling this unique pastry filled with sweet whipped cream and topped with spicy pork floss. Well, it was better than the honey guilin paste.
Back in Shangri-la, we decided to have an all-out yakfest. There was slice yak rib meat...
...and yak steak frites. A big shout-out to all the yaks of Yunnan for feeding us so well during our stay there.
The next day began with porridge on the square in Shangri-la.
It continued with a sugary peach drink for Andy and some drinkable red date yogurt for me. Understandably, this is a much more popular flavor than the soybean one I had in Kunming.
Little round walnut cakes, made by machines that squirt batter into waffle-iron-like, semispherical molds, are popular in Shangri-la and Lijiang. The finished product is probably better when served hot (ours weren't).
Amazing French fries on the street in Shangri-la, dusted copiously with magical Yunnan seasoning. Lunch is served!
Back in Kunming, Andy buys snacks for the 36-hour train ride to Shanghai. Sadly, these sticky-rice triangles looked more fun than they tasted.
I leave you now with a shot of the classic Chinese sleeper-train food: Instant noodles! Every car is equipped with a hot (scalding, more like) water dispenser that people use to make their instant soups for meals. Bringing our own noodles on board, we thought we'd fit right in, but it turns out that most Chinese people like the ones that come in their own cardboard bowl and gave us some very strange looks for eating ours out of Tupperware. Ah, well--it's not like we were going to blend, anyway.
I was sad to leave Yunnan, where I liked the food so much more than I had expected to...but whole new regions of Chinese cuisine awaited me. As our train sped east, I was no longer afraid of the meals to come, but hungry.

I Love Yu, nnan!

2011-05-08T18:31:00.002-04:00

China is a strange world. Far more developed than the surrounding countries, but with the occasional throwback to another, older time. Still, we liked the country a lot more than we expected to. Since it seems likely that China will complete its economic purchase of the US within our lives, this cheered us up about our possible future as Chinese citizens. We started our tour in Yunnan, which is in the mountainous southwest, just next to Tibet. It is a beautiful, fairytale land where the rivers flow with water rather than acid and the sky is blue rather than a nearly perpetual gray. Let's see some photos.

We took a 24-hour sleeper bus from Laos to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. It turned out to be a very decent trip. The people were nice to us and for most of the trip we were next to a Chinese engineer helping to build an airport in Laos who spoke passable English. And unlike the Vietnam buses, I almost fit into these beds.Arriving in Kunming from Laos was similar to crossing from Tijuana to San Diego, I suspect. China has huge buildings and glass everywhere. And more designer stores than we could have begun to count.
In the big cities, most signs are in English as well as Chinese. In Beijing and Shanghai, most are in proper English, but smaller cities have a shortage of English speakers. This one has some important tips on what to check if the ATM doesn't dispense your cash.
Our first overnight stop in Yunnan was in Lijiang, a city of 60,000 that has about 12 million Chinese tourists on any day and maybe 6 Western tourists. The people at our small hotel were really, really nice and they gave us a room with this snazzy cow blanket. Plus an electric blanket.
Almost all of Lijiang looked like this street. Very cute, but so much has been built up that it is difficult to tell the old, historic buildings from the new. The city still has lots of the ethnic Naxi people, though. Pronounced Nashi, and Tara gets angry if you call them Nazis.
We liked this sign. We aren't sure whether this means to buy less or not to yell at the vendors or what.
We aren't sure, but we think the Chinese government "strongly encourages" the Naxi to dance in the square a couple of times each day. Maybe they pay them, maybe they don't burn their houses down. Not sure which.
Lijiang is famous for its views of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The morning we arrived, the views were beautiful. By the afternoon, everything was cloudy. The mountain in the background is Jade Dragon, and it is beautiful when you can see it.
Tara loves cherries, but now she can say that she loves cherry blossoms, too. It was spring across Yunnan despite sometimes also snowing.
Tara made a friend with this other tourist. China has far more internal tourism than anywhere we've been on our trip except for Europe and the US.
Too bad because sometimes I like to nap on the grass. Then it could have been Andy napping on napping grass.
Overlooking Lijiang, it would be tough to pick out your own house if you lived in the city.
Next stop: Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the most famous hikes in China. Tara decided to sit out the two days of mountainous terrain. The Yangtze River flows through the deep gorge.
This is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain from the side (and through a bit of haze). You can see better where it gets its name. Does look a bit like the scales of a dragon.
While hiking, I found this beetle who was nice enough to pose for a photo. He was less enthusiastic when I tried to pick him up.
This lizard wasn't even crazy about a photo, let alone picking him up.
I had excellent weather for my hike, which is apparently often not the case. Glad that the skies cooperated.
A rooster, a man, a canyon wall. What more could you want in a photo?
Maybe some baby goats staring at you quizzically.
The myth of Tiger Leaping Gorge is apparently that a tiger leaped across the river to eat a deer. This seemed much more plausible than that it leaped from the top of one side of the gorge to the top of the other, which is what I originally thought. So, I tried the leap to see if it was possible. I made it, but I doubt that a tiger could have.
People often wonder if anyone talks to us while we are traveling. Given how we probably smell sometimes, it is a fair question. Here, however, is proof that we make friends. We were having dinner in Shangri-la with friends we had made in Tiger Leaping Gorge (on the right), and we met a group of Americans, so we all had a nice evening together. Then we went back to our quiet hotel to discover that it was right next to a thumping disco. Awesome...
The views from Shangri-la are really nice.
And Shangri-la has what might be the world's largest prayer wheel. Tibetan Buddhists believe that each time you spin the wheel, it is like saying the prayer on the wheel. It follows that if you fill the wheel with a couple of million prayers, each time you turn it is like saying a couple of million prayers. So, Tara and I said our several million prayers and all seemed to go well for at least a few hours.
Our hotel in Deqin had a giant picture window into the bathroom. I drew Tara this pig on the fogged glass while showering. The window was not as funny when certain other bathroom activities were necessary.
Deqin is right on the border with Tibet. We didn't have the time or money to go to Tibet on this trip, so we had to made do. However, the area was beautiful. And full of Tibetans, so we got some of the Tibetan experience.
Mingyong National Park just outside of Deqin has a hike up the mountain to see Mingyong Glacier. It is lined with prayer flags hung by Buddhist pilgrims. The mountain from which the glacier descends is one of the sacred mountains for Tibetan Buddhists.
The sunny day brought out a lizard friend. He ignored the nearby snow.
Here is the glacier coming down from the mountain. This is one of the faster moving glaciers on Earth, moving about five feet on a good day, so we stayed off of it.
But here we are with the glacier and a whole lot of prayer flags.
Our Tibetan driver took us by his house to meet his family and then plied Tara with a tea cup full of barley whiskey that made her rather tipsy.
When we were walking around the little village we stayed in outside Deqin, some old women thought we were lost and looking for the nice local Buddhist temple, so they started pointing the way to go. Not having a clue what they wanted, we followed their directions and ended up at a Buddhist temple surrounded by prayer wheels. Spin them all and you will have done 1/100,000th the work that we did by spinning one giant wheel.
The Tibetan representation of Buddha takes many forms, but none of them are anything like the representations in other parts of Asia.
Yaks are everywhere in Yunnan. Most of them look like this, which we are fairly sure is actually a yak-cow cross. If you want to know how they taste, Tara will tell you in the food post.
Ever seen a hairier donkey? I didn't think so.
This is sunrise over the mountains. On cloudless days, the pictures are amazing, but only a few days each year are cloudless.
Going back through Shangri-la, we stayed somewhere without a disco next door, but the courtyard did have this guy. I'm no taxidermist, but I'll guess that the person who preserved this "thing" wasn't one, either.
Shangri-la is home to a massive monastery. They have, unfortunately, turned it into a huge tourist attraction. We are happy to report that you can simply walk clockwise around the ticket office and keep on walking without paying the ridiculous tourist fees.
Inside the monastery, we found some young monks (monkeys is the correct term, I think) playing basketball. Not what we expected. Didn't seem like all that meditation had made them any better, but an NBA team getting a monk to play for them would be a good PR move.
A giant white yak outside the tourist entrance had a sign declaring him the "only wizarding yak in Asia." We didn't see him do any magic, but he does look like the steed of a wizard.
At a monastery in Kunming, the turtle pond had this cute couple. The small one seemed to have cataracts, so the big one apparently took pity on him.
Chinese sleeping trains are a bit expensive, but very nice. We spent 36 hours on this one, which took us away from Yunnan and to Shanghai.
Yunnan was one of the most beautiful places in Southeast Asia. Plus, the people were some of the most friendly. Plus, it is about half the price of Eastern China. Plus, they have yaks. What more reason could you need to go? And I should add that Tara really, really, really loves Yunnan. She wants everyone to know that. So go there.

Laos Food: No Louse to Eat--Only Termites

2011-04-28T09:07:00.001-04:00

It probably won't come as a surprise that the food of Laos is a mixture of that found in the surrounding countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Many of the dishes come out as completely original, though. Let's see what we ate.

Grilled chicken and sausage is very popular in Laos. The chicken is really good and the sausages range from excellent to not-so-sure-what's-inside. Everything in Laos comes with sticky rice, which is a different kind of rice that they soak in water and then steam to make it all stick together. This makes it very easy to pick up huge chunks in your hand and gnaw on it.
Our first day in Laos, I bought these glutinous mixtures at a local market. It might best be described as coconut jello that has separated into different layers so that the top is more coconuty and the bottom is more sweet.
While we were spending a few hours in the back of a pickup truck, some people ran up to the truck selling food at a stop (common in Laos). One of the women was selling flattened bananas grilled with red seasoning, so I had to try them. The seasoning turned out to be sweet, and I was happy to devour them. Tara thought they were a bit too sweet.
The closest thing Laos has to a national dish is called laap. It consists of meat (or fish) steamed in a banana leaf with herbs and leaves and then served as a salad of sorts. Because it is both hard to make and popular with tourists, it is overpriced. Tastes decent, though.
I was at the early morning market one day and was hungry. I bought a leaf that I believed was filled with steamed, ready-to-eat laap. Sadly, when I unrolled it, I discovered that it was ready-to-steam and had not been cooked. A week later, I saw another tourist do exactly the same thing. He had already bought it before I could warn him.
Also at the morning market, I found an assortment of bugs. The highly amused locals were happy to let me try a few while they laughed. The lower left ones are termite larvae, which don't have much taste, but have a rubbery covering. The ones on the lower right are nice-sized beetles, which are very nice with some seasoning, though they have a bit of an acidic aftertaste.
We rarely put things on the blog that we haven't eaten, but we couldn't bring ourselves to eat these popular grilled frogs. I have eaten frog legs a couple of times and don't love them, so it seemed a waste of a perfectly good hopper to order one. That and I wasn't sure what to do with the intestines.
Beerlao supposedly has a 99% marketshare in Laos. It was created with the help of German brewers and is widely considered the best beer in Asia. Tara agrees based on her tastings, but it comes in big 22 ounce bottles, which is just about enough to prevent Tara from walking.
Iced Ovaltine is really popular in Laos. It is on almost every menu. I associate Ovaltine with really old people, but there are no really old people in Laos, so I guess it is for people like Tara after all.
The banh mi in Laos was strangely much better than the banh mi in Vietnam. It had at least 15 types of pork on it, some vegetables, and some hot sauce. And they are much cheaper than Vietnam. And did I mention that it has 15 types of pork? Or at least it seemed that way.
Laos imports lots of fake Pocky from Thailand. Pocky is a great concept, but normally disappointing. This blackcurrant flavor was pretty good.
Another Laos specialty is sticky rice patties that are fried and then grilled. Sort of a fried rice nugget. Tara hated it, saying that it tasted like egg. I didn't love it, but decent for ten cents.
Tara really loved this local pineapple yogurt. She tried a few other flavors that she didn't think were as good. As always, I thought it looked bad despite my love of pineapple.
Sticky rice comes in these wicker baskets. At one restaurant, the sticky rice was really expensive, so when the people from the table behind us left, I grabbed their huge chunk of rice like this. Because I didn't want the waiter to see that I had a huge chunk of rice from the other table, I held it in my hand under the table for the duration of the meal, eating chunks of it when I could.
This pho-inspired beef soup was better than most of the pho in Vietnam. It had a crazy combination of herbs, leaves, and flavors. The sausage was also good, but didn't have the crazy, unidentifiable flavor combinations of the soup.
Tara and another yogurt. Borrrring. She loved this one, too. I tried to suck the apple strudel flavor from the bottom without getting the yogurt, but it didn't work.
Another Thai import to Laos, these peanuts had been coated and fried in coconut oil. Not as sweet as expected, but pretty good. A slight improvement on the original design of the peanut, though the original is pretty darn good.
What is this? We weren't sure, either. They didn't seem to object when we wrapped a bit of everything in some of the bigger leaves (which we later saw women picking from the local trees), then dipped the pork-noodle-vegetable-herb-leaf combination in the fish sauce that is everywhere in Asia (and that doesn't actually taste fishy despite coming from an old, rotting fish, I think).
This rice porridge, sort of like congee, was so hot that it fogged my camera as I took the picture. The fresh scallions and dried garlic seem strange for breakfast, but sweet breakfast is a foreign concept in most of Asia. I took this in stride by eating both a local breakfast and a sweet breakfast most days.
The size of this soup made Tara's head look like a joke. We saw small children hiding their whole bodies behind these soups they were so big. I saw an elephant walk behind one and disappear. It was just big enough to hid my fat stomach until I ate all the soup and my stomach expanded to be seen once more.
Sticky rice desserts are hit-or-miss in Asia. They can be amazing, but many Asians don't love sweets, so they sometimes turn out to be salty, fermenty, or otherwise disgusty. Fortunely, we found an amazing sweets cart in Vientiane (the capital) that sold us some nice treats. Unfortunately, the woman pushed her cart away as soon as she sold these to us and was never seen or heard from again. At least not by us.
If you order pork meatballs in Laos, you should expect to get something that looks like this, which looks more like something that Hanibal Lecter might eat than meatballs. They tasted much better than they looked, though the texture was about as bad as it looks.
From a distance, we thought we saw people selling huge quantities of fried bacon. It turned out to be fried bananas, but the bananas seemed to have been treated to make them a bit pliable and far more delicious than normal banana chips, though still somewhat less delicious than fried bacon.
Bread fruit trees, a relative of the durian but with a much better taste, grow the giant fruits right out the side of the trunk. They can grow to be much, much bigger than my head, and my head is pretty big...
Sweet sticky rice is sometimes eaten for breakfast, though mostly it is found in touristy areas. We had a couple of versions in Luang Prabang, and it makes for a tasty breakfast. It takes about three bites to fill Tara for hours, making it similar to Elven bread.Laos really, really likes its fruit shakes. You can find them almost everywhere, and they are enjoyed by locals and tourists alike. Fruit is mixed with sugar, ice, condensed milk, and sometimes other sweet liquids before being blended. We averaged about four per day. Each.At the night market in Luang Prabang, one woman made these eggroll like things by putting a layer of rice milk on a steamer to create a wrapper and then filling it with mushrooms and vegetables. She was really popular and we sat there one night while she made 100 of these things, which took maybe 40 minutes. She sold those for something like $5. Not exactly a high profit business.Also popular in Luang Prabang were buffets were you pay $1.25 and can put as much food on your plate as you can fit. They didn't know what hit them--we have experience in similar schemes and I can now pile a plate three feet high without spilling a thing. Other tourists were oogling my handiwork.Most of the food in Laos was not ground-breaking, but most of it was also quite good. Especially outside the touristy areas. Apart from the very good fruit shakes, we probably won't remember any of the individual dishes for long, but the country left a positive impression on our taste buds.

Putting Laos on the Map

2011-04-26T09:59:00.000-04:00

Hey, you know that message about how we can't post from China? Just kidding! Through the dual miracles of getting a hotel room with its own computer (a first, and probably last, for this trip) and Andy rooting out a free VPN service, we are slowly, temporarily back on Blogger. Hooray!

So, straight from my shower, here I am to tell you about our recent travels through Laos.
OK, maybe that isn't me. Maybe it's a lady we met in a southbound truck on our first day in Laos. But she and I are both clearly fans of the bath-towel headdress.

Right, so, Laos. If you had asked me to find it on a map a couple of years ago, I probably would have started looking for an island somewhere in the South Pacific (you know, right between those other tropical-sounding countries, Mali and Malawi). As it turns out, Laos is a landlocked nation (just like, um, Mali and Malawi!) in Southeast Asia, sandwiched between Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. Economically, it is rather poor, and physically it is very beautiful...kind of like your two favorite travel bloggers.

After many days of gray skies and cold weather in Vietnam, Andy and I were eager to find some sun, so, after crossing the border, we headed straight for Si Phan Don in southern Laos. This area of the Mekong River delta, also known as the "4,000 Islands," does a pretty good impression of tropical paradadise for a non-beach.
We stayed on Don Khong, one of the bigger, but less touristed islands, and commenced relaxing. No TV, no Internet, lots of fruit shakes. This frog tried to share Andy's shake one night, but skedaddled when Andy threatened to turn him into jugo de rana.

On day 2, I actually suggested we rent bicycles (!) and then rode minewithout mishap (!!) around the island's one paved road to see the lovely green rice-paddies and their resident muddy cows. On day 3, we signed up for a kayaking trip that brought us first to a set of waterfalls that are supposed to "catch" the spirits of dead people and animals as they float downstream on the Mekong. Hardy little kayakers are we! While eating lunch on a rock in the middle of the river, we were lucky enough to spot some rare Irrawaddy river dolphins breaching a little way off. Knowing from experience how hard it is to get a picture of dolphins, we didn't even bother trying, so you'll have to take our word for it.

We visited another impressive set of spirit-catching waterfalls on the way back to town. Waterfalls are easier to photograph than dolphins, so, here you are.
At the falls, Andy snapped a photo of Asian tourists snapping a photo with me. So far, people in Southeast Asia seem to want pictures with us far less than people in India did, but it still happens occasionally.
Any more relaxing would have put Andy out of his mind, so we packed ourselves off to the capital of Laos, Vientiane. Our mode of travel was overnight bus--the kind with horizontal quasi-beds just about long enough to fit a midget that is popular in SE Asia--but in Laos, these sleeper buses are configured with "double" beds rather than singles. This was OK for me and Andy, since we are a couple, but the solo Kiwi traveler behind us was not so lucky and ended up spending most of his night trying not to tangle limbs with the random Laotian man he was assigned to share with! So, if you ever find yourself travel on your own through Laos, you may want to pay double for your own bed on a sleeper bus...or, better yet, stick to traveling during the day.

Vientiane ain't bad. It's got some sights, like the Patuxai monument that was built out of American concrete that was supposed to be used to construct a new runway at the airport. (C'mon, who needs to fly when you can take a snuggly double-bedded sleeper bus?)
Who wouldn't like to have a national monument that is "like a monster of concrete"?
There is also the COPE Visitor Center, where you can learn all about the horrors of unexploded ordinance (another American "gift" that keeps on giving in the form of deaths and lost limbs as bombs are stumbled upon in Laotian fields decades after the Vietnam war). The center provides free prosthetics, medical treatments, and occupational therapy for victims of UXOs and traffic accidents, people born with deformities, and basically anyone who needs their help. The museum is actually quite interesting to visit, and the organization is totally worth supporting if you'd like to send a donation their way.
The golden Pha That Luang is Laos's most famous monument. It's not quite as big or grand as Burma's Shwedagon Pagoda, but still manages to give off pretty good glare in the sun.
This older stupa, That Dam, apparently used to be covered in gold, too, until marauding Thais stole its outer layer in the 1800s.
This stone Buddha lives on a pillow at the Wat Si Muang temple. Apparently, if you lift him off his pillow three times, your wish will come true. Andy wished that he would be allowed to stop lifting the Buddha because it was so heavy, and what do you know, his prayer was answered!
That temple also had a copy of the Emerald Buddha, which lived in Laos for a while between stints in Thailand. They let you get a lot closer to this one than they do to the real one in Bangkok, so here's a nice close-up for you. He appears to be wearing his summer outfit.
Buddhist shrines can get a little busy. We especially like the zebras.
What temple visit would be complete without a few whacks on the gong?
A remote part of Laos is famous for having fields full of giant stone jars of unknown origin. One has been moved to Vientiane, so we visited it instead of spending several days getting out to see the others. (Google "Plain of Jars" if you'd like to see more.)
Sometimes, when you feel like you just can't possibly get excited about yet another Buddha statue, you notice that this one has giant nipples.
Our next destination was Vang Vieng, equally known for its beautiful limestone karst scenery and its drinking/drugs scene. I'll let you guess which aspect Andy and I came for...
Here's the sign marking the trail we ascend'ed to get that last shot. It was a steep climb, and only the promise of relaxing in a "gungle shadow kept me going.
We did some more kayaking in Vang Vieng, and stopped off at a cave temple to pay our respects to yet more Buddhas. The bell at this temple was made of an old war rocket. Scrap metal from old bombs is actually quite valuable to Laos's poor, and hunting for it is a big reason why so many people continue to get hurt by UXOs.
While we kayaked down the river, most people choose to float in inner tubes, stopping off at riverside bars along the way. Many of these bars, to lure in tubers, have attractions like huge water slides, Tarzan rope swings, and mini-zip lines. Yup--drunk (and often high) people + dangerous stunts + deep water = ...a great time? A liability nightmare? I don't know, but I'm frankly shocked that more people don't die there each year.

Anyway, Andy thanked all the drunk people for subisidizing this free activity for him and went off a giant water slide. Whee!
Obviously, there was no way in hell I was going off it. That must just be a girl who has the same bathing suit as me or something.
(Though if I WERE to have gone off that water slide, I might advise future patrons not to hit the water ass-first. That seems like it would hurt. For, like, several days after.)

From Vang Vieng, we headed back to Vientiane to pick up our passports, newly visa'd up by the People's Republic of China. A momentous occasion, as this was the last visa we'd need for this trip, since all of the countries we plan to hit after China are visa-free for Americans. No more embassy visits, halleluyah! I think we've visited 20 in the past two years, and bought visas at just as many borders and airports... Our final destintation in Laos was the northern town of Luang Prabang, which is sort of Laos's version of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Both towns have lots of monastaries. Both have day trips available to waterfalls and elephant camps. Both have big, tourist-oriented night markets. Both even have their own eponymous styles of sausage! So, maybe we would have found LP more exciting if we hadn't already been to CM, but still, it was a pleasant place to spend a couple of days before heading into China.

Luang Prabang has a former royal enclosure that you can visit. No photos are allowed inside, but the grounds are nice.

This amazing azalea bush had climbed a huge tree at LP's most famous monastery, Wat Xieng Thong.
The monastery's main building dates from the 1500s and is famous for its low-sweeping roofs...
...andmosaics of local life on the sides of the buildings.

This dragon-headed chariot, for carrying urns filled with the ashes of the royal family, is not too shabby, either.

What kind of flower is this? I like.
What kind of caterpillar is this? I like, too!
Amazingly, we did not kayak in Luang Prabang, though the Mekong constantly beckoned us for a third paddling adventure...
As you may have gathered by now, I enjoy purple flowers.

Not far from Luang Prabang is a park filled with waterfalls and natural pools. A pretty (though popular with tourists) excursion.
One of the bigger drops.
Laos may be short on "big" sights, but if you're looking for somewhere to take it slow, get out into some beautiful nature, and drink a lot of tasty fruit shakes, I can hardly think of a better place. The people are lovely, the costs are low, and it's hard to find anything to get too stressed about. As a break between frenetic Vietnam and the coming challenges of China, it was definitely the right country at the right time for me. It might even be my favorite country in Southeast Asia. In any case, our first visit definitely put Laos on my mental map.

Where the heck ARE these guys!?

2011-04-20T19:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,

Hello from China...where Blogger is blocked. Facebook, too. Julie has agreed to post this note for us to let you know that we probably won't have any new posts up until sometime in May (assuming that Blogger is available in Mongolia!). Hopefully, we'll be able to get some posts up about our time in Laos and China quickly then.

In case you were curious, we're planning to return to the States in June, so our trip is winding down. But we're going to try to squeeze in as many countries as we can before then, so make sure to check back in May!

Tara & Andy

Vietnam II: Like the War, Vietnam Posts Keep Going...

2011-04-11T06:05:00.000-04:00

From Hanoi, we made our way to the beautiful Halong Bay. When Vietnam decided to allow foreigners, this was the first place opened. Good call--we were never even close to getting hit by a motorbike while cruising around the bay. And it has caves, allowing the tourist to pretend to be pirates living in the caves.

The entire, massive bay is filled with huge limestone pinnacles rising from the sea. Almost all of them have ridiculous Vietnamese names after whatever shape some fisherman, surely high at the time, thought they resembled. Then the French came along, who were just experiencing opium for the first time, it seems, and gave most of them even more ridiculous names. I don't know the names of the ones in the picture, but probably something like Shark Island, One-Humped Camel Island, and Fluffy Cloud Island.
Our boat was nice. Here we are on the top deck, staring out at the cloudy skies. Except when it was dark, this was the sky color for the entire two-and-a-half days that we visited Halong Bay. At least it wasn't from pollution, which is probably why the skies of most Southeast Asian cities are gray.
The islands are full of caves, created when the limestone is eaten away by water in the rainy season. They are quite impressive, especially with the added mood lighting.
But we were far from alone in the Bay. Thousands of boats ply the waters with people on cruises. Still quieter than most of Vietnam, though.
This cave had what our guide referred to as a "pointed finger", though he couldn't say it without laughing.
The bay is filled with floating villages. Most are fisherman or fish farmers. With the introduction of tourism, they now paddle boats around selling cookies, candy, and drinks at egregious prices. I love floating villages, though I have a tough time understanding why anyone would stay in one.
Our boat had some late night "squid fishing" in which you bob a shiny green thing with hooks up and down and hope that a squid attacks. Maybe because our boat was surrounded by similar boats and because the boats park there every night, we saw only one squid that was about two inches long and which had no interest in my shiny green thing. Julie and I did make friends with a funny French guy, though, and friendly, funny French guys are rare enough that it was worth it.
Part of our trip was a two hour bike ride. When the tour was sold to us, we understood it more as an optional half hour bike ride, so Tara wasn't thrilled to find out she would have to spend two hours on a bike. However, she did a terrific job. It turns out that if you give her a tiny bike that has no gears that she has to change, she is quite capable of riding it. She prefers that it come with a basket and bell.
Many of the islands have beautiful inlets like this one. I'm sure that the one day per year when the sun comes out, this would be even more beautiful.
The people in the floating islands raise fish, oysters, crabs, lobsters, and children by putting them in baskets and letting them float in the ocean for months at a time. Okay, a bit less time for the children.
Our accommodation for the second night in Halong Bay was on a nice, deserted island. When the tide went out, the beach stretched almost to the next island. I did go for a quick swim to find the phone that our guide had dropped off the dock, but it was too cold to swim much.
Back in Hanoi, we went to see a water puppet show. Vietnamese water puppets are apparently famous the world over, though I had never heard of them despite living in the world. They were meant to be used in flooded rice paddies or fancy indoor pools. The puppets are controlled though a bunch of strings going through long bamboo poles. The motion isn't so impressive, but the range of motions available through a string in a bamboo pole is.
This old flag tower in Hanoi might be one of the few things not blown to pieces by the Americans in the war.
The North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, now lies at rest in this massive mausoleum. He visits Russia for a few months each year, where they inject him with the newest in chemicals developed for their own, beloved Lenin. Fortunately, he was seeing visitors while we were there, so we waited in the incredibly long line and surrendered our cameras in order to see him. We are happy to report that he looks pretty good for a guy who died 40 years ago.
It Vietnam, different types of police wear different silly outfits. I personally like the bright green, which we think is army, but this shot will let you choose which silly outfit is your personal favorite.
This crystal clear lake in the center of Hanoi is said to house a massive, almost extinct species of turtle. We never saw him. Or anything else alive in the lake other than algae.
Ho Chi Minh had a "House of the People" built in which to live. It is sort of a modern version of a house on stilts that is popular though out Southeast Asia. Sure, his offices were in the palace next door, but he was a better communist than most.
From Hanoi, we had to leave Julie behind and continue to Hue. We forgot to take a picture of the bus to Hue, but it had tiny sleeping pods that were about a foot across and four feet long, where I was supposed to comfortably sleep all night. Right. The tourist agency had sworn that it was a tourist bus and all the beds were long enough. Don't ever believe a Vietnamese tour agent. Ever. In any case, I was awoken in the night by a Vietnamese woman trying to open the nearby bathroom door. I woke up just in time to see her give up and pee on the floor outside the bathroom. An amazing trip.

In Hue, we saw some nice lizards dancing in a jar. They appear to be doing the Horah.
I don't have enough pictures of it, but nearly anyone who is rural or poor in Vietnam wears the stereotypical cone hat. They would be more impactful if the sun ever came out.
Hue has the tallest flag tower in Vietnam. Nearly everything in Hue was leveled during the war, so it is safe to assume this was rebuilt even though it still looks old.
Hue was a former capital and they have rebuilt some of the old palace grounds that were destroyed in the war. In combining old with new, this dragon seems to be making a call in a London-style phone booth.
I found the giant turtle that we couldn't find in the lake, though he was moving even more slowly than most turtles.
The palace has a lot of giant cauldrons that tell the stories of former kings. And that are used by witches at night.
We found the frog-lion creature repository! What a jackpot! Some are even gold. Gotta get me one of those.
From Hue, we took a bus to Laos, so this brings us to the end of our Vietnam trip. Vietnam is an interesting place for an American to visit and it has a few beautiful locations, but it is not for the weak. Dealing with people in Vietnam is exhausting. We probably won't be headed back anytime soon.

How Now Cau Lau?: Foods of Vietnam

2011-04-09T20:39:00.003-04:00

Hello, Andy and Tara's World readers! Long time listener, first time caller. I'm Julie, college friend of Tara and Andy and their traveling companion in Vietnam. I'm honored to bring you the foods of Vietnam!

Ironically, this post actually begins with foods of Pennsylvania: a Reester Bunny, a bag of smoked almonds, and those cardamom sandwich cookies that I know Tara likes because I read it on this blog! I was excited when I found them at Rice and Spice in Emmaus, PA, but it turns out they make my throat itch. (TMI?) So I brought the unopened package for Tara.

These foodstuffs were gone in about no time flat, so it was on to the native victuals. Vietnam has this great passionfruit-peach-kiwi yogurt in cups. 5500 dong = 25 cents.

Day one in Ho Chi Minh city, and I was hellbent on trying pho, the beef (and sometimes chicken) noodle soup that is more or less the national dish of Vietnam. They eat it for breakfast, so we did too. Nom nom nom.

After pho, we walked around HCMC, which was the only place in Vietnam we experienced warmth. Happily, with that warmth comes fun fruity drinks. This one has all kinds of jazz - jelly bits and beans and coconut milk. I couldn't quite bring myself to try it.

But here I am, quite content with my sugarcane juice with strawberry. My bliss was only slightly diminished when Andy pointed out that this and many juices of Vietnam contain sweetened condensed milk.

Our first lunch in HCMC was at a restaurant hugely hyped in Lonely Planet. I found the food kind of meh. On the left below, we have various porky meat products with a pile of noodles and herbs. The dark bit on the right was like a brain teaser - Tara and Andy kept nibbling and debating whether it was fruit or meat. When you can't tell the difference, that's not good. I was invited to try, but I declined. On the right is my papaya salad, which was nasty. NASTY. It had an herb on top we came to revile. I have since learned it is called "fish mint." I believe it. Gross. The papaya itself was hard and flavorless. Fail.

The bright spot for me was the nem ran, fried pork spring rolls that you wrap up in lettuce, stuff in some herbs, and dunk it in nuoc cham, delicious fish sauce dip.

Andy got this grilled pork, which he says was yum.

Andy and I shared these banana-based desserts we found for sale from a street vendor. I am nowhere near the fried banana expert that Andy is, but I was impressed. If it was for sale on my block, I would eat this every morning.

Welcome to the foods of Hoi An! Introducing cau lau, the signature noodle dish of the city. The noodles must be made with water from one specific well in town, so you can't get this anywhere else. (I have an eyebrow arched at this idea, but let's suspend disbelief.) Cau lau is chewy noodles with herbs, roast pork slices, crunchy noodles fried in pork fat, and magic secret sauce. Highly enjoyable.

I love all the herbs for sale in Southeast Asia. These ladies are selling their greens at the central market in Hoi An.

Our first evening's meal was at Cafe 43, a restaurant beloved by peoples on the internet. This is some pork dish called something like "fried salted pork"

Vietnam is home to bia hoi, a freshly made beer that is crazy cheap. I think this was maybe 15 cents. I don't drink beer, but Tara took one for the team in the name of food research:

On the left is another Hoi An well water specialty, "white rose," which is shrimpy filling inside rice paper noodles. Not bad, but nothing to "Dear mom" about. On the right is chicken with lemongrass and chili. Now that was pretty slammin. Enough to make us want to return the next day for a cooking class! More on that later. First we must eat more.

Tara also got a stuffed squid.

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of reverence for the next dish. (Dramatic pause.) We sat down by little tables next to the river and ordered the two most delicious things we ate in Vietnam. The first, below, is pork freshly grilled on hot coals. You take one of those rice papers, put in a piece of pork, some herbs, maybe a squeeze of lime, make a little wrap, and dunk it into the mystery sauce. So good. So worth $2.50.

These are won tons, or as they are spelled in Hoi An, huyanh thanhs. (Or something like that.) It's probably shrimp, pork, veg, and brown sauce on a fried chip. My theory on unidentified foods that look delicious - don't ask too many questions.

Lest you think the Vietnamese don't eat dessert (although it doesn't seem like they eat a lot of dessert), we bring you che bap. This industrious lady carries her restaurant on her back, plunking down wherever customers happen to be. Che bap is a sweet soup with corn and rice and gloopiness.

I think Andy saw this next dessert and took its size as a challenge. The ingredients are rice, sugar, and sesame seeds for garnish. Full stop. It's the densest thing you can imagine. I think it weighed two pounds. Someone told us you can keep this thing for ages and eat it a little at a time, which is good because you would not want to eat a lot at a time. I did not want to eat beyond the first bite.

No discussion of Vietnamese food would be complete without mention of ca phe sua da, delicious Vietnamese iced coffee. It's like a shot of espresso with sweetened condensed milk. Here it is, posing with my passionfruit mousse cake and radioactive cherry.

Here's me looking peevish while chopping lemongrass at our Cafe 43 cooking class. For $7.50 each, we got a private cooking lesson and an enormous lunch, made up of everything we cooked.

This is the chicken with chili and lemongrass, cooked by our own elfin hands. I have since made it at home, but my 99 cent lemongrass from the Asian grocery tasted like nothing. I guess I will be resigned to good memories!

Our curry chicken is made with milk and curry powder. Cow's milk in Asia?! Weird.

The owner of Cafe 43 thought it was hysterical that we wanted to learn how to make pineapple shakes. "So simple," she laughed. It's pineapple, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk. Yes sir, may we please have another?

Goodbye, Hoi An. Hello, Hanoi. These are what I call "street rolls." Got em on the street. Don't know what's in em. The protein was kind of chewy. We elected not to think about it, but I am guessing it was jellyfish. Oh well. Dunk it in enough fish sauce and you won't have to think about it...

This next dish was from a restaurant that specialized in exotic animals. I don't remember what it was, because it was Andy's and I didn't want to eat it. Maybe water buffalo or elk or gnu... Ok let's say gnu, because gnu is a funny word.

Tara had some kind of ribs with garlic.

We also went to a posh little ice cream shop where every dish was presented just so. At my insistence, we shared the giant 20 flavors plate. What an experience! There was hardly a flavor that wasn't amazing. We oohed and ahhed our way through the plate. I enjoyed pistachio, chili chocolate, cinnamon, and also all of it. I don't think you could find a more expensive ice cream entree in all of Vietnam. It was $10. I would like another one right now.

Here again is pork wrap stuff, but this time you dunk it in a brothy stuff and eat it with noodles. Pretty good.

I kept waking up at 6am, at least three hours before Tara and Andy. Stupid roosters. One day I ventured out and got this noodle soup for breakfast. It had funky chicken in it, which I picked out. I added a great chili sauce and some lime.

I kind of grimace when I see this next photo. I wanted to see what corn gummy candy tasted like. Andy tried it first and said, "Kind of tastes like buttered popcorn jelly bellies." That's when I knew I wouldn't like it. And I didn't. It started out as My Quynh, but quickly became Andy's Quynh.

This is fried corn, which may not come as a surprise to you. I don't remember anything else about it.

I leave you with photos of food that was purchased after I left Vietnam. So I am going to make up fantastical facts about it. This is ribbons of pure bliss, topped with nirvana herb, spice of delight, eggs of paradise, and just to class up the joint, it is served in a plastic bag.

This food looks like it was pre-digested. Mmmm yummy.

Our time together on the blog has drawn to a close. It was a fun trip, and like you, I miss these guys. Looking forward to seeing them soon in the U.S.!

Vietnam, Part 1: South to North

2011-04-09T09:07:00.000-04:00

Vietnam is a country that--like India--travelers seem to either love or hate, no middle ground. We'd spoken to several people in both camps (the lovers and the haters) before we got there, so we tried to go in with our openest minds and most neutral expectations and see how the country struck us.

After obtaining our visas at the Vietnamese embassy in Cambodia (Vietnam is one of the only countries in Southeast Asia that makes you get a visa in advance, rather than selling them at the border or not requiring one at all), we took a bus to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, in the country's far south.

HCMC is Vietnam's biggest city... and its most motorcycle-crazy, too. This picture actually looks kind of tame compared to some of the traffic we saw there, but it's the best I've got.
We got off the bus and managed to cross the street successfully (no small feat!) so that we could head into a narrow alleyway and find a guesthouse. (Apparently, that's where all the budget accommodation lives--at least there's less traffic.) Anyway, here's the room that $18 scored us in Ho Chi Minh City--fridge, sat TV, and Internet included. The mattresses were hard, but not too bad otherwise.

Why did we need the extra bed? Because Julie was flying in to join us! Somehow, we convinced our friend Julie to spend the bulk of her year's vacation time backpacking through Vietnam with us. She arrived in HCMC right on schedule, just three flights and 20-something hours after leaving home, and even brought me Lush shampoo and Reese's products from back home. Hooray for Julie!
A good night's sleep later, and we were off to see the sights of Ho Chi Minh City. As it turns out, there aren't so many. We headed for the Reunification Palace, formerly the official residence of the president of South Vietnam (until Northern forces sent a tank through the gates and "reunified" the country.) Somehow, the fact that it was built before communism took over didn't seem to make the architectural choices any less communist-inspired...

Inside, our tour guide let us all know that we were free to photograph Uncle Ho...I mean, this revered bust of communist visionary Ho Chi Minh. It seemed like we'd be letting him down if we passed on this opportunity, so, photo taken.
The palace's interior design has been left pretty much intact since the 1960s and practically looks like a film set. Many rooms looked quite dated, but I thought this one was pretty. Most of the furniture and art in it is lacquered, so since I can't remember what it was used for, I'm going to call it the Lacquer Room. (Actually, I just did some googling, and it's the "Credentials Room"--where foreign visitors presented their credentials to the president. Of course.)
The only other really exciting thing we did in HCMC was get some great massages. (Well, Julie and I did--hooray for having another girl to travel with!) What's so exciting about massages, you ask? Oh, not much...except that they were given by the blind! Yup, the Ho Chi Minh Blind Association trains people to become masseurs so that they can have a skill with which to support themselves. The environs are not so posh, but the massages we got were quite good, and at $3 an hour, have to be among the cheapest massages in the world.

I expected that the massages would be Thai-style, in which you leave most of your clothes on, but actually they were more Swedish-style oil massages. So, how does a blind woman who doesn't speak your language communicate to you that, oops, you actually need to take your shirt and bra off? I'll just leave it to your imagination. And no point waiting for her to leave the room while you finish the disrobing she started--I mean, it's not like she can actually see you naked, right?

That night, we bade the far south adieu and hopped on an overnight (and half the next day) train to Danang, about halfway "up" the country. I managed to sleep for around 12 hours (those massages really take a lot out of me!), but Andy kindly took some shots of the countryside so he could later show me what I'd missed.

Once we were off the train, we engaged a taxi to drive us to Hoi An, a historic town about 45 minutes from Danang. After some haggling with the driver, we all agreed on a price and happily hopped in the car, excited that our long journey was finally almost over.

But the driver had other ideas. About halfway to Hoi An, basically in the middle of nowhere, he demanded more money than the fare we'd agreed to. When we refused to pay it, he pulled the car over to the side of the road, turned it off, sat back, and crossed his arms. Sweet!

Clearly, he didn't know who he was dealing with. We sat him out. And after about 10 minutes--when he finally realized that Andy was not doodling idly on that piece of paper, but writing down his name and taxi license number--he caved. Mumbling, "I'm sorry," and confirming that the original price was now OK with him, he turned the car back on and drove us the rest of the way to Hoi An. Victory for the tourists! Shockingly, this jerk did not get a tip from us.

We were ready to relax in Hoi An, but it turned out that Hoi An wasn't quite ready for us. It seems we had arrived on the eve of an international choir competition, and almost every hotel in town was completely booked out. It took two hours to find what we're pretty sure was the last room in town--thanks to Andy, who ultimately went off searching on his own while Julie and I sat with the bags. Finally, we were settled.

After dinner, we poked around town a bit. Full of historic buildings, cute bridges, and about 10 tourists for every Vietnamese person you see, Hoi An is, as Andy dubbed it, kind of like "Vietnam Epcot Center." But, pretty, especially when lit up at night.

Hoi An is also the number one place in Vietnam to get made-to-order clothes, and having a new work wardrobe tailor-made was Julie's modest mission while in town. Andy and I tagged along for the ride, and I ended up getting a couple of dresses made myself (when in Hoi An, you know...). Hoi An is filled with shops that look like this one, with sample clothes displayed on mannequins and endless fabrics to choose from--almost all of which are, of course, "Thai silk" (i.e. polyester).
When not shopping, we took in some historic sites, like the Japanese Bridge...
...and this traditional wooden house, which has a neat altar suspended from its ceiling. Amazingly, the family that lives in this house moves all of its furniture up to the second floor during the rainy season each year, when the first floor floods. They have a trap door in the ceiling of the first floor through which they move the larger items.
While Julie browsed in a button shop, Andy made friends with a gigantic beetle. Despite threatening the poor creature with the hideous insides of his mouth, Andy ultimately let it go.
Wow, an actual Vietnamese person on the streets of Hoi An! The pole-balancing-two-baskets is a popular, human-powered conveyance for all sorts of items in Vietnam.
Rawrrr, I'm a dragon! I'm leading the parade that opens the international choir festival, featuring teams from all over Southeast Asia! And one from Estonia! You'd better start singing, or I'll eat you! Rawrrr!
Hoi An was touristy, but it had some terrific food (which Julie will write about in the food post!)--we even took a cooking class, which Julie will write about, too. Also, in the process of taking that class and having clothes made, we got to know some real Vietnamese people, which was nice. But, time to move on.

Another taxi (no extortion this time!) and train ride (same class, same price as the first train we'd taken, but for some reason, far smaller, harder, dirtier berths...plus a bonus pair of live roosters in a crate outside our compartment door who started crowing at dawn and didn't stop for hours) later and we were in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam and largest city in the north.

Hanoi has almost as much crazy motorcycle traffic as Ho Chi Minh City. And, when we arrived there, it was really cold. But it also had some interesting sights to take in, and a lot of lakes dotted throughout the city. And you can't drive a motorcycle on a lake! So, there was a little respite from the urban craziness there.

Our first stop was the Temple of Literature, a temple dating from the early 1000s, dedicated to Confucianism and scholarship. The best students got their names inscribed on a turtle-supported stela, like this one. Is that incentive to study hard, or what?
Many nice substructures in the temple grounds. I can't remember what this one was for, but it's pretty, no?
Instead of our usual temple statues of the Buddha, here we get a nice statue of Confucius, complete with beard. I knew nothing about Confucianism before visiting this temple, but now, thanks to its informative signs, I know next to nothing.
You aren't allowed to ring the giant bell outside the Temple of Literature, but no one says you can't hug it!
In fact, this local man actively encouraged Andy to get inside the bell. Once inside, Andy had a religious experience and now says he needs to eat nothing but ice cream to survive and will never wear a coat again. Wait a minute...
Since we hadn't gone out of our way to see much Vietnam War (or American War, as it is called in Vietnam) stuff yet, we made a visit to the Hoa Lo prison, a.k.a. the "Hanoi Hilton." This is where American POWs, including John McCain, were held during the war. It has now been turned into a museum.
The few cells preserved for display were pretty grim. Most of the displays in the museum were about how the French abused the Vietnamese who were held at the prison during colonial times, but then there are a couple of propaganda-filled rooms that document how wonderfully the American "guests" were treated when they were held there. If they are to be believed, it was tennis games and Christmas dinner every day, and of course no torture, not ever! America certainly committed its share of atrocities in the war, but these displays were pretty laughable in their one-sidedness.
And what prison would be complete without a gift shop? Nothing like touring a prison to put me in the mood to buy a laughing Buddha.

This brings me to the end of my allotted portion of Vietnam to write about. I don't want to throw out too many spoilers, but can a nation that provides you with your worst taxi ride and your worst bus ride (that tale still to come) in 60 countries possibly redeem itself? Stay tuned to find out.

Crickets and other Cambodian snacks

2011-04-07T08:54:00.001-04:00

First sign you're in a new country: New Fanta flavors! We bought this can right on the Thailand-Cambodia border. My aversion to all things lychee didn't allow me to sample it, but Andy says it tasted pretty authentic. Luckily, there were better beverages to try. Dragonfruit shake, anyone?

Cambodia has many Thailand-influenced curries, but pumpkin curry seems to be its own delicious concoction. Next Halloween, I plan to turn my jack-o-lantern's innards into this dish!

On the road to the Angkor Temples, outside of Siem Reap, Andy bought some UFOs (unidentified fried objects) from a lady with a cart. They had sesame seeds on the outside and...nothing on the inside. Ah, well. At least they were still fried.

Speaking of fried, here are some nice fried noodles. Except, look again--those aren't noodles, they are strips of ginger! Chicken with ginger, Cambodian-style...i.e., insanely heavy on the ginger. Not that we're complaining.

A fruit vendor outside of one of the Angkor temples lured us over with songs of sweet, cheap pineapples...but was also selling this fruit that we had never seen before. As soon as we showed the slightest bit of interest in it, she was cutting one up for us to taste. It's called a "milk fruit," and it didn't taste like milk to us, but it was a sweet and tasty little fruit all the same. I mean, how could something so purple be bad?

These scallion-filled dumplings, steamed and lightly fried, then bathed in a sweet sauce and topped with a chili sauce, were perhaps our favorite street food in Siem Reap. The cart selling them was so mobile, though, that the guy had packed up and moved two blocks away before we even finished eating these two dumplings. I guess Andy smelled particularly bad that day.

Another Cambodian specialty is fish "amok," likely so-called because the fish all swim amok trying to avoid being made into it. In the tourist hotspot of Siem Reap, they'll make it with any meat you like (or make it vegetarian), so Andy got the chicken version. Coconut milk and lemongrass are its main features, and the banana-leaf bowl is traditional.

Picture menus are popular in Siem Reap, and by picture menu, I don't mean a laminated card with little thumbnails of each dish. I mean an enormous photo album with 4x6 photographs stuck in and hand-written labels for every one. Which one is prettier, the banana shake, or the pineapple one?Also popular in Siem Reap is Cambodia barbecue--kind of like Korean barbecue if you've had that before. Thin slices of raw meat are delivered to your table, then you cook them yourself on a gas-powered hot pot...after you've lubricated said pot with a huge slice of pork fat, of course. You also spread greens and noodles around the edges and pour on hot broth to boil them while your meat is cooking. I kind of overcooked my squid, but it was a fun experience.

Far funner, though, were our many visits to the Blue Pumpkin ice cream chain, which has several branches in Siem Reap and Phnom Penn. If their cinnamon-speculos isn't the best ice cream flavors in Asia, I'll eat my foot...after dipping it in a tub of cinnamon-speculos, of course. Their tropical fruit flavors and peanut ice cream are also awesome...but not the caramel-cashew! It is bitter and nasty. Also, you can eat their ice cream in a bed, adding to the fun.

The Blue Pumpkin was a little too chi-chi and expensive for Andy's taste. I guess he'd rather eat fried bugs out on the street. Crickets, to be exact. You know, everyone's favorite bus snack! Andy says they tasted like corn nuts--slightly oily from the frying and with a bit of salt added to enhance that, um, crickety flavor. But he drew the line at eating beetles. Not because that would be too gross or anything--just because they were too expensive. (Sneak preview: They're cheaper in Laos!)

Only slightly less frightening to me than the vermin snacks was Cambodia's other indigenous Fanta flavor, "sarsi"...which turned out to be root beer, my other least favorite soda flavor! Andy enjoyed it, though. And in our quest to try novel flavors of ice cream as well as soda, we also bought a tub of "sugar palm" ice cream which tasted like...sugar.

Here's a dinner that Andy ordered at a little local place in Phnom Penh. I forget what the main course was, something chickeny, but I'll just point out that it came with an entire pot of rice! Cambodians love their rice, and would never think of making you pay extra for it, like restaurants sometimes do in Thailand.

Here's another interesting flavor of ice cream that you find a lot in Southeast Asia--taro, or yam. I like it mostly because it is purple, but also because it is a vegetable, and how many vegetable ice creams do you know?

Another sweet item that you can find in many places in Asia is bubble tea, which is fun to drink because it has huge tapioca pearls that you suck up through a big straw. I think it's most popular in Taiwan, but we're not going to Taiwan, so I got some in a mall in Cambodia. The "tea" itself is basically just sugar and food coloring--you drink it mainly for the texture and the sugar rush, I think.

French-bread-based sandwiches are popular throughout the former French colonies of Southeast Asia. Vietnam's banh mi is probably the most famous, but the version I got in Phnom Penh, filled with ground pork, was pretty good. Less good was the bonus sliced, Spam-like processed ham product I got served on the side...

Back to Andy's favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant, the one that gives you a pot of rice with your meal...even if that meal is a noodle dish!

The bagful of random fried things in Phnom Penh turned out to be tastier than its cousin in Siem Reap. Some of these shapes were hollow, but others had vegetables in them.

I'll wrap things up with a shot of me at the riverfront in Phnom Penh enjoying a 50-cent Angkor beer. I thought this was the cheapest beer ever, but clearly I hadn't been to Vietnam yet... So, I guess I was less adventurous than Andy was when it came to the critter-munching and exotic-Fanta-flavor appreciation, but good curries and ice creams and smoothies and beer kept me nourished well enough in Cambodia. Bottom line: Cambodia--at least in its tourist hotspots--has enough chic restaurants AND cheap street markets to ensure that every traveler finds plenty of food to his liking.

Cambodia: What's Wat at Angkor Wat

2011-04-05T10:33:00.002-04:00

Before going to Cambodia, we knew that Angkor Wat is there (though I can't really pretend that I knew what Angkor Wat is--just that it is big) and that the country was somehow involved with the Khmer Rouge, who were bad people in some way. We got some details on those two points, but you understand most of Cambodia once you know more about those things.

Angkor Wat is actually a single temple--the largest temple--in a huge complex of temples and religious buildings that stretches many miles. The temple is apparently the world's largest religious building (take that, St. Peter's). It is well preserved, but has also had tons of work done on it during the 900 years of its existence, so it is best photographed when you can only see the silhouette without the repair work being done.
Right after the sun started to rise, we ran inside while the crowds were blinding themselves staring at the sun. We were rewarded by being the only ones inside for a few minutes. The lobby (I'm not really up on proper temple terminology) has a bunch of pools that are now empty. And Tara was all ready to go for a swim.
A lot of Angkor looks like this--restored to a point that you don't expect the building to fall down, but missing a lot of the fine detail that you can see it once had. Fairly certain that you could get a nice discount by pointing out this wear and tear to the realtor if you wanted to buy the place.
Each of the four sides has massive bas relief carvings. The most famous is this one: The Churning of the Oceans. To make a very, very long story short, the good guys and the bad guys make the waves of the ocean by pulling back and forth on a giant snake in a huge tug of war match. This theme appears a lot in Hindu (and, therefore, Buddhist) mythology.
All the tourists get driven around in the nice moto-rickshaws that get attached to motorcycles. Because the drivers just sit there for hours waiting on their passengers at many sites, this driver wins my respect for stringing up a hammock and sleeping anytime he thought it would be more than 10 minutes before his passengers returned.
One of the temples in the complex had scenes from everyday life in the 1200s. Our favorite had a line of animals that they ate at the time and a giant tapir was part of that line. Right between the pig and the duck. Who doesn't enjoy a bit of giant tapir?
One of the kings wanted his subjects to know that he was always watching, so he erected a huge temple with his staring gaze peering out everywhere. Several other buildings have just a few of his face, but what remains of Bayon has faces everywhere. I plan to start putting up huge stone pillars of my face just as soon as we have a house.
The "Elephant Terrace" is like a long, giant porch without a house. It is decorated mostly by elephants, such as these. You can imagine how much more amazing they would have been before the erosion.
The steps all have carved elephants as well. We have never seen an elephant trunk more than a couple of hundred years old, so these have certainly been restored. Really, never use elephant trunks to decorate something that you want to last. It is one of our key takeaways from our travels.
Much of Angkor Wat has not been restored at all. At those temples, the views out the remaining windows look something like this. Makes me realize that being an archeologist ranks as one of the most boring jobs on earth.
Many temples have trees like this one growing from them. This one is nicely placed right over the door. If I bought a castle, could I get a tree like this installed over the door? Who would I call to do that?
This lizard looks like he is praying to me. He must be a Buddhist who wasn't very good in the last life and got reincarnated as a lizard. Now he comes to pray at Angkor Wat every day.
A lot of the ruins look like this one. The structure has been restored, but none of the artwork, so it still looks a lot like a heap of bricks. On the plus side, you can climb all over them without worry. And the government can easily hide nuclear missiles inside for easy launch. Or maybe I'm the only one who thinks it looks like missile silos.
This is Tara in our chariot for the day. We love that the back part just attaches to the driver's motorcycle. This is the most common form of taxi in Cambodia, but we haven't seen a contraption quite like it anywhere else. This driver ranks as one of the most honest transportation providers in the entire world. I don't know his name, but look for the guy who looks like him if you are at Angkor Wat and need a driver...
Angkor Wat is very nice in the morning, but becomes a sauna by late morning. Even this lizard seems to have gotten a terrible sunburn.
For every kid who loves to toss the helicopter seeds from a sugar maple into the air, a trip to Cambodia is in order. They have trees everywhere that produce these massive toys. You toss it into the air and it whirls down like a helicopter. It's not an exaggeration to say that we threw hundreds of them.
This is supposedly the most famous tree at Angkor Wat. I surmised this mostly from the line of about 50 people who wanted their picture next to this tree. This temple is sometimes called the Indiana Jones Temple. If Indiana Jones had hundreds of tourists meandering around when he went into the Temple of Doom...
Angkor Wat, the temple, is surrounded by a massive moat and outer walls. The worlds of religion and defense are almost always related in Southeast Asia. Luckily, Buddhist and Hindus seem quite happy to conquer each other and just use the temples for their own peace-seeking religious beliefs.
Siem Reap, the tourist city next to Angkor Wat that has about 15 tourists for ever Cambodian, is filled with fish spas. You pay a dollar or two, then stick your feet into a pool of ferocious fish that try to eat your feet. Apparently, one person started this in the city and it was popular, so now every store seems to have one.
The one we visited had your choice of ravenous fish or killer fish. Tara went with just the ravenous ones while I went straight to the killer fish. For a dollar, we sat for 20 minutes as they ripped dead flesh from our feet. Sometimes it tickles, sometimes it hurts. Our feet were very soft for at least the next couple of hours. Value to my feet: none. Value of the experience: way more than a dollar.
Tara really appreciated all the Fish Massage signs, which are all something like this one. Because the idea is copied, the signs are also nearly exact replicas of the place next door. Tara's favorite part is that it is funny and happy, though a few of the signs actually say it will make you funny and happy, which is better.
Queue depressing music. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge came to power, led by Pol Pot. He proceeded to kill 2 million people in four years, which was a huge percentage of the population. He killed anyone. Essentially a death lottery. Another few years in power and he would have surely killed everyone but himself. Not surprisingly, the US supported him. Good job, us. Here is the inside of a cell at the notorious S-21 prison. Something like four people survived of the thousands who went through. This cell was mostly used for high ranking officials while they tortured them on the never-ending witch hunt that was the Khmer Rouge regime.
Standard prisoners got something more along the lines of these hastily constructed boxes. Oh, and I forgot to mention that this prison was a school before. They got rid of all the schools, though, so it isn't like it was being used. Pol Pot's great plan was that if Cambodia returned to an illiterate, agricultural society, it would rule the world. A shame that he never knew Kim Jong-Il, as it sounds like they could have been friends.
Cambodia has a lot of skulls. If you need a cheap human skull for some reason, I suggest trying Cambodia first.
Yet, Phnom Penh has a very nice Independence Monument. Most of the country seems in much better shape now.
Most of the S-21 prisoners, along with many others, were killed in the now famous Killing Fields. They have erected a memorial there.
Filled with human skulls.
You think that's depressing? Here's the tree where the guards would taking turns swinging kids and babies by their feet and bashing their heads open against the tree. It's a fair question to ask who could do such a thing, but most have said that their entire families would have been tortured and killed in various ways had they not. They may be right.
On a happier note, the country seems to be on a slightly better path now and many expats now call Phnom Pehn home. Lots of new buildings and parks seem to line the river. Let's hope that genocide does not reappear soon. And that if it does, the US intervenes on the right side this time.
Cambodia does supposedly have some attractions that aren't Angkor Wat or genocide-related, but I can't really name them. The people are generally very friendly, and we had a nice stay. We just hope the country continues to recover from years of misery.

Myanmar Food: Pass the Noodles!

2011-03-17T10:29:00.001-04:00

We had ever only had Burmese food at the two New York Burmese restaurants. It always seemed like a fusion of Indian, Chinese, Thai, and other Asian tastes, and that proved to be true. What we did not expect is just how strong the Chinese influence was, with much more of the food in Myanmar being Chinese-esque than expected. Myanmar also has many, many noodle dishes, almost all of which were delicious as long as they weren't served in fish broth.

As soon as we found a hotel room, we started walking down the street to sample the delicious looking street food that we had seen on our way to the hotel. A few feet from our door, we found a boy-man with a bunch of noodles under a net. How sanitary! (Well, compared to many countries, at least.) So, we ordered some of whatever he was selling. He took handfuls of each type of noodles, what appeared to be tofu strips, cabbage, crispy fried things, and tons of spices and sauces, threw them in a bowl, and mixed them up.
This was the result. An amazing mixed noodle concoction. We ate many during our time in Yangon.

Shortly after, we saw a woman with a huge bowl of white stuff, another of green goo, and a loaf of bread. We ordered one. We got a bowl of coconut milk with different jellies and a slice of bread. The slice of soggy bread was really weird, but it was otherwise good.
Wondering where the random fried things might be? Seek no more. From the first random fried thing woman, we bought a fried vegetable thing, a fried donut thing, and a fried potato thing. They came with some nice spicy soy sauce and all were pretty good.
A different noodle dish that tasted completely different than the mixed noodles, but was also amazingly good. You will note the chopsticks--in Myanmar, you almost always get a spoon, a fork, and chopsticks.
Fried dumplings with vegetables are popular at the night market.
So are these things, which might be egg or might be tofu. They didn't have much flavor. I don't suggest them. Use your stomach space on more noodles!
In Myanmar, everyone eats at tiny kid tables. It is really funny. Sometimes you see an actual kid eating at one and laugh because the kid fits at the table unlike everyone else. In this picture, you can also see that every table has a pot of tea, which is free for customers at almost all restaurants. You can't see that it's bad tea, but you can take my word for it.
What's that sticky, gloopy thing? We didn't know, either, but it turned out to be coconut, sugar, and other stuff turned into a decent desserty item.
The shaved ice/snow cone variant in Myanmar comes with jellies and peanuts. The peanuts are a really great addition that should be added around the world. Are you listening world? Put peanuts on your snow cones!
Steamed sweet rice with banana. We didn't know what it was until I ordered one. As often happened in Myanmar, I just asked for one assuming the guy spoke no English, then he told us what it was in English. He added coconut to the top, then I asked if I could add some of the stuff that looked like sugar. He said sure, but looked at me strangely, as he knew it was salt, not sugar. Even with salt, it wasn't bad.
Myanmar has its own brand of cookies! Tara says they tasted like Lemon Pledge. I liked the cookies, so maybe I should try some Pledge.
We really liked both the use of Donald Duck to market this ice cream and the name of the ice cream: Wa-Ha-Ha. It sounds so evil. I tried some other ice cream that looked similar, and it turned out to be durian flavored, which many people would say is evil.
We did not actually try these sheets of fried fish, but they look too amazing not to photograph. If I wanted to eat small, aquarium fish like these, I would want them deep fried, though.
Myanmar has its own brand of fruit drinks since no American or European company does business with the country. The passion fruit juice was good.
This noodle dish from the Mandalay night market had a coconut broth with chicken and was terrific. Every place in Myanmar seems to make its own distinct noodle dishes.
This dried pork and chili dish was spicy, but nothing like Thai spicy.
At a bus stop in the middle of no where, I hopped off and a woman was selling fried things. I immediately ordered one. Another tourist asked what it was and I told him to wait a minute and I would find out. They turned out to be filled with sweet coconut and were amazing. We ordered many more, but never saw them elsewhere in the country.
The breakfast noodle dish is called mohingo. It had noodles, hot sauce, bean powder, meat, and other stuff, which you mix together before eating. Very good, though at this point some people may think Myanmar has too many noodles.
Tara ordered a potato curry, and this is what she got. Can't say they skimped on the potatoes. It was good, but she had to give some of the potatoes to me.
What will happen if you take some of all of this stuff, put it in a pot, and cook it? Will those blue noodles turn everything blue? Let's find out.
Most of the blue tint is sadly lost in the cooking, but it does make a wonderful meal. The seasoning is amazing, though the picture can't convey that.
Not so amazing is the fermented tea leaves (and sometimes fermented other things) that are very popular in Myanmar. In some cases, a couple of bites could probably make you drunk. In other cases, a couple of bites might bring back your dinner. Terrible, really. Sorry, Myanmar, but your really struck out on the creation.
Maybe these giant things were shrimp crackers. Maybe not. They didn't taste fishy, but did taste like giant shrimp crackers. We mostly bought it because it was huge. If I ever start a food company, everything will be bigger than my head.
These potato-leek puffs were good, but did not pass the bigger-than-my-head test.
We had seen these fried donut things often, but it was disappointingly plain. The fried bread with sugar on the right was much better and we had more of those at other times.
Only when we hiked to the worthless Golden Rock did we find frozen popsicles in a bag like in Africa. Strangely, they add a bit of salt in Myanmar. Probably to help hydrate you in the hot sun, but I prefer my popsicles without the salt.

Some greens and bamboo shoots. Not the best, but not bad. Things like this are often served as side dishes to the main dish in real restaurants. Since we mostly ate on the street, we didn't sample that many.

Myanmar has a lot of little stands with a vat of boiling pork broth where you can boil your choice of pig parts. Well, unless you want actual meat, then you are out of luck. Liver, lung, intestine, and snout are all easy enough.
That wraps up food. Myanmar has the most noodle variety of any place we have ever been. Many of the dishes look similar, but taste completely different. Beyond that, they have some good meat stew-like curries, and then eat a lot of Chinese-style fried rice and noodles. We really enjoyed eating in Myanmar, though Tara was a bit sick of noodles by the end. I never tire of noodles, but won't miss the fish broth that is often served.