Crash Boot

So we have this thing called plunja - long story, has nothing to do with toilets, was named by an Australian. It's actually a platform with a little dive tower and a waterslide. As things tend to do here it got blown away by the wind - despite its moorings to a cement block so heavy not even Einstein could lift it. It's been a small speck on the opposite side of the lake (the parking space usually reserved for our stray inflatable things, water trampoline, giant inflatable triangle, etc) for over a week. I took it upon myself yesterday morning to go get it. Hilarity ensued.

I got in the crashboat, a little aluminum job with 15 or less hp, and zipped over to inspect the problem. The lake was glass, the fall trees reflecting a palate of peas, corn and carrots, and the sky a blue dome. This was going to be a deceivingly perfect day. There was only one other occupant on the lake. A man, older than dirt, in a little paint-flaked red crashboat, with about 5 horsepower, and a fishing rod. He was a speck on the other side of the lake too. Like plunja, he grew as I drew nearer. I skipped across the lake, tied up the boat to plunja, and climbed aboard the platform to see if I could hoist up the anchor. The old man was a little less than half a kilometre away, but I could see him coming about, slow as ever. After a few minutes of failed attempts at pulling the block up off the lake floor I quickly climbed in my boat, for on this calm morning I could hear the little red tin tub puttering toward me from a distance, the sound carried so well. Why do cottagers feel the need to nose about in everyone else's business? Don't we all come to this lake for solitude? I pulled the motor to a start,

and with a roar that disrupted everyone's morning, drowned out his little engine and sped away without looking back. I needed some pulleys for this problem.

Since the old man's routine was to go back and forth, trolling for fish in a 1 kilometre line he'd drift to and fro along, by the time I got back with my rescue gear he was on his way back in the other direction, where he was before. About 15 minutes of trying various systems of mechanical advantage proved useless to me, only buying the old fisherman time to reach the apex of his linear orbit and slowly gravitate back toward my position. Time was of the essence. I took my pulley system apart and opted to drag the anchor instead, after all, the wind brought it here didn't it? (Didn't it?).

I rigged a line from plunja to the back of my crashboat, using a retired climbing rope and some carabiners, and attempted to take off. Pulling something square and heavy with a little powerboat like this causes a speed wobble so slow you may not know you're speed wobbling. It takes about 2 minutes to reach the apex of one curve before you pendulously swing back the other way. Sometimes you feel like you're going backwards or sideways (because you are) as the momentum of you pulling the load right finally kicks in as you want to go left, and you get pulled right just a while longer. This means that crossing a lake involves a hilarious, convoluted and haphazard path, much like you might see on level one million of the game nibbles, or what is now more popularly known as snake on some cell phones. Needless to say I wasn't going anywhere fast, and after several attempts to take off and getting swung sideways at the mercy of the stuck anchor, I finally ground to a start (that's right, you don't always have to grind to a halt).

The old man was closing on me. It was like two steam rollers on a collision course. Old as he was, it became clear after some time that he apparently didn't have the life experience (or he'd lost it somewhere) to know that I couldn't make rapid (or indeed any) adjustments to my course. For the time being, my boat was pointing left, imparting momentum (this takes minutes, as I mentioned) while I was asking it to turn right. The old man drew nearer. Puttering along, pulling his fishing line, sliding ever closer, his face began to resolve itself. And resolved it was. Resolved to cross paths with me, whether or not it killed him, the creases beside his nose deep, his eyes beady behind his fisherman's glasses, and his mouth fixed into a determined scowl. I was going to have to talk to him. Once he was just over a boat length away, it seemed that a collision was imminent. . . in about five minutes. I waved him across my bow and declared factually "You might want to go around."

The rest of his face stayed fixed, including his beady eyes, as only his mouth moved. Though I couldn't hear what he said over the growl of my little Mercury outboard, I could tell it was a disgruntled gruntle. His course stayed as fixed as his facial features. I focused again on my goal across the blue glassy lake - the camp was so far away, shimmering elusively. I waved at him again, gesturing an offer of possible directions. Really any 270 of a possible 360 degrees would have avoided a collision, but he had only one in mind. He spoke again, louder this time "You turn your boat."

"Sorry, I can't"

"Just turn your boat!" (the distance is shrinking between us, but his voice is getting louder)

"The rope is pulling on me, I don't have a lot of control here"

The man swings his boat about, his trolling line in tow, and in so doing reluctantly concedes that mechanics has, after all, got the last word here.

Just then mechanics rears its ugly head, and all the momentum I've been loading into the system trying to go right kicks in, and the load swings the other way, and now I am behind the old man, chasing him involuntarily, like a possessed tortoise chasing a confused snapping turtle. Because the system works just so, it is at this point in my sinuous journey back to camp that my velocity is at its peak, and I can actually catch the old man up as he turns away in an evasive maneouver that will take about thirty seconds. He's puttering away skeptically, glancing back, clearly worried about his fishing line which is now swinging dangerously close to my boat. My emotions are mixed. Part of me appreciates the delightful irony of what is happening here, and has a real appetite for the comedy of the characters involved. Part of me wants to get the hell back to camp. My racing mind is interrupted by a cry.

"My line's caught on your boat!"

"What?" I need to buy myself time to think about this. His back-woods accent grows thicker with the rising helplessness of his anger."

"M'line's caught'n'yer boot!"

Now I'm angry, I can't believe this. Two men, out on a lake, a big lake, and we have to have this argument.

"Are you serious right now!?" I yell over the motor. Grimacing in frustration, I look behind me to asses the situation. The black line disappears under water a few feet away from my vessel, and plunges into the dangerous depths of a whirring motor blade, and aluminum hull, and a tight line pulling what is at least a thousand pounds of moving load that will keep moving regardless of whether or not I stop. I look back at him. I look back down at the situation. Back at him.

"Welp, looks like you'll have to cut it." And this really sets him off.

"LIKE HELL!" He yells at me, but with that old man accent so it sounds more like "LIKE HAIL!" did everyone used to talk like this?

I spread my free arm out, the other clutching the throttle and offer "It's a huge lake, you could've gone anywhere!"

"Gruntle gruntle"

"I don't know what to tell you, I can't reach down there and fix it for you."

"Gruntle gruntle - YOU CUT YOUR FUCKIN' LINE!"

I laugh, shaking my head in disbelief and twist the throttle a little further from turtle and a little closer to rabbit, trying both to drown him out and to outrun him, but my load is going to swing back the other way any minute now. The old man is caught, neither of us knows where, but he has caught something he never bargained for. Now he reluctantly follows, and I can almost hear the seagulls laughing as they look down and see a guy in a boat towing a water slide towing a guy in a boat. He has to gun it to save his line, and I couldn't care less, I need to leave. I hear him yelling as the line pays out and he slips into the sonic oblivion of my motor, and at this point I'm giggling to myself. When I look back again I can't tell if the line's broken or not, but it looks an awful lot as though he'd somehow gotten his lure back. When I'm a safe distance away I switch the orientation of my crashboat so I'm pulling backwards now, eliminating the pendulum effect and so allowing me to virtually speed back to camp at a neck-breaking 5 knots or so. I also have to stop to cut the anchor free. It got caught and took me about 5 minutes to realize I wasn't moving because it was snagged (there aren't any reference points in the middle of a lake except the bubbles from your motor). And I didn't make the kind of exit from the situation that should be followed by an encore. I had to go. By the time I got to tying the behemoth of a floating wooden playground up to our docks, I was laughing to myself, and I started to realize that maybe there is an argument for god, because how do you explain that full tallboy of Creemore I found floating ice cold in the bottom of the crashboat when I got in it this morning?

Somebody knew I was going to need it.

Hmm, well I didn't know patchouli was in the mint family. . .

Christ on a crabcake. My hands smell like patchouli. My good friend Chad used to call it mossman smell, cause apparently the Mossman action figure (remember He-Man? Remember Mossman?) http://www.mwctoys.com/images/MOSSMAN.jpg there he is if you forgot. Yeah apparently they laced him with patchouli. I can't confirm this personally, but Yank used to call the same smell 'He-Man heads' cause he thought as a child that He-Man's head smelled like that. So I'm a firm believer that the action figures were associated in some way with patchouli. I never smell it on the action figures since I don't own any, nor do I remember ever having owned them, so these days when I want my fix of the trustafarian tramp serum (thanks Urban Dictionary) I have to go to the crafts store downtown. It's a Harmony Crafts, so they think that they can recreate the entire asian continent in one store. Fake recycled parchment scrolls with Japanese characters that probably say "Roundeye pay big Yen for stupid proverb.", Scented candles that smell like soap, which hippies don't coincidenctally use, but do burn. Buddhas carved out of maple and poplar and other north american woods, and don't forget djembes (yeah Africa's in there too) made of synthetic goat skin and various woods, none of which grow in Africa. There's also silk imported from china but with Indian patterns on it, and various geological samples which have probably been imported from Bancroft, Ontario or Squamish, BC at the furthest - polished in tumblers and tagged with little paper lies about cleansing blood, calming your soul, aligning your chakras, focusing your chi, or giving you that perfect bowel movement of which you have been in pursuit since your adolescence. To me they look like Malachite, Hematite, Turqoise, Sodalite, etc, but to some people they're maaaagiiic. Why was I in there? I have a magic pendant I had made by a little magic Vietnamese man in a magical city called Ha Noi, and the cotton string it hangs on was frazzled, so I needed to replace it. The more down to earth place around the corner on Carden St moved a long time ago, which I guess is the way of the world, since they probably picked up some bad karma somewhere admitting to themselves that they were a bead store and that's exactly what they were. See in Harmony Crafts when you walk in there's a sign that says "Don't dwell on reality, it will only keep you from greatness." This must be the secret to why they're still standing. I wanted to interrupt the little conversation on auras the sales clerk/shaman medicine woman was having with the other customer and ask her if she's ever heard of irony, or inherently flawed logic, but I thought better of it. She sounded too enlightened for me. Probably she ignored me the whole time in the store cause she could see my black aura. So that philosophy sums up why the store's still standing, but what summed up the store itself was a t shirt at the back among the overpriced organic saris fed to elephants with coffee beans and spinach and washed in camel piss. It was a black t-shirt that said only "Bangkok City" And I thought 'there's your problem right there.' I spent an afternoon in Bangkok once. It was nice. Really affluent near the airport, roadsigns and pavement that look just like ours, except with Khmer next to the roman script. Khaosan Road had delicious food, lots of smiles, didn't really get a sense of the hookers and blow that the city is famous for. . . Now though it was a rich experience, however short, I felt no need to come home with a t shirt. I think I might bring home a t shirt for every 2 months I spend in a place. What would possess some asshole to buy one at Harmony Crafts? Why would the place even sell this? One simple answer. It's a retail store that capitalises entirely on appearances, which, ironically, is the thing they're trying to teach you matters least. Forget about reality, just meditate. Don't focus on the real, it will keep you from being great. Here, pat this buddha on the head, light these incense sticks, snort this line of patchouli, buy a t shirt that bears the name of a far east capital city that if you'd been to, you might have brought your own t shirt back from for a fraction of the price, or maybe even just let it dwell in your memory, after all talking about it or advertising it on a t shirt might bring it into the realm of the physical, which would prevent it from greatness.

Why am I so angry? I'm asking you as well as myself. . . Honestly it's the conversation I was listening to while I was in there. I have been in that store 100 times since high school. Sometimes they have stuff I want, and I don't mind the relaxed alternative vibe usually. It was the cleavage touting hippy that was talking to a lady in there. I overheard her say "Sometimes you get a real aura of a helping nurturing person from someone and I get that from you." She also said "yeah this stone is used for treating addiction." Want more?

"I took a course over the holidays and yeah, I treated a bunch of people and by the end I was totally exahusted, like I took away all their negative energy and just held onto it myself."

And by this time I was standing at the check out with my little roll of $7.00 cotton string looking through my bills trying to get exact change so I could slam it on the glass counter, and leave the store under the cloak of my black aura, but alas, I only had a $10. Finally she came over with the customer, who was bitching about work while sipping a tim horton's coffee "Oh it's an hour and a half drive to kitchener where I work, an an hour and a half back, and I'm surrounded by so much negativity, and last week some guy stabbed me in the eye cause my voice was so annoying so I planted explosives in his car, but he's my neighbor so it ended up killing my cat when she was over there taking a shit on his lawn and that made my aura even darker, bla bla bla." And finally as the clerk/eastern herbal holistic health mystic is closing the transaction, she says in the most detached insincere teenage high school girl voice that her thirty year old cleavage can muster "yeahhhhh. . .I know. Well all I can say is that all my positive energy is with you." And then to seal that lie completely with a little taste of the real and tangible, money exchanged hands and the coffee sipping lady walked out, no doubt feeling healed.

Now skeptic as I am, I can't help but realise the two of them felt a lot better after all that, so maybe those rocks work after all. I on the other hand, was full of negative energy from SOMEWHERE, and I just didn't know what to do with it. . .

until now. So there you go, pass it on to someone else, cause I feel a whole lot better. Or maybe if you've mastered the art of channeling it you can fire it into space for some poor soul in limbo to pick up so it can get reincarnated with it as the next great leader of an anti-human revolution. . . or a snake or something.

Either way, I need to go wash this patchouli off my hands, it's making me crazy.

***

The first shot is from New Delhi, India, I thought this was a golden moment to demonstrate reality versus stereotype. Yeah it's a Buddhist monk with camcorder. The second shot is the terrifying dirt bikes the police ride around Bangkok. Reality, it tends to get in the way of greatness, let me say it one more time. Is there a greater way to subconsciously reveal a latent dissatisfaction with your life?

Wake up and smell the ground beef.

This is the last place you want to go for political rants (or maybe it isn't, but it should be) but what's happening in the states right now is equivalent to millions of people saying they'd rather have access to a filet mignon worth $100, even if all they'll ever have in their pockets is $5, rather than be given a free hamburger. And I just can't keep it to myself anymore.

Now let's not petend, in the words of Joe Biden, this is a "big fuckin' deal". I watched The Hour last night and Strombo busted him saying that in Obama's ear before he announced the bill, which is another reason I love those two right now. Anyway, this is a big deal, and I'm well aware it can only happen in small steps, and I really believe what we're seeing is the first stepping stone in a long road of progress. All that aside, if I could be cynical for a moment, I have to bring up this hilarious example of Danny Williams (is that it, Williams?) the Nefoundland Premier going to the states for his heart operation. Whether or not he could have gotten the care in Canada is neither here nor there. No one would right-mindedly argue that Canada has more surgical skill on the whole than the states. We've all heard of the brain drain. However, from a mathematical standpoint the whole thing is hilarious. You have an example of ONE GUY. You've heard of ONE GUY (there's 33,000,000 of us) ever going to the states for major health care. Not that there aren't more examples, but to hang on one should actually work against your argument shouldn't it? Remember that 33,000,000 - 1 = 29,999,999 Canadians staying in Canada to receive Canadian health care. Why? Because just like the Americans we can't afford American health care. Most of us are cool with that. Anyway, most of the people in charge of this are folks who can afford those high quality surgeons, and the fact that the country doesn't just hold a referendum and ask the actual victims of this setup what they want is silly anyway. . . but I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about that population of folks, and they know they're out there, who can't afford the filet mignon, but are making fun of us Canadians eating our free burgers. You know what? This might just be a burger what I'm eating here, but it will keep me alive a lot longer than that five bucks you have in your pocket, so wake up and smell the burgers, you can't afford that filet mignon anyway.

Seriously, imagine for a moment that the american people were not hippos, and that the politicians were not riding on their backs, and that the filet mignon health care they (the politicians) enjoy was not a carrot on a string being dangled in front of the poor hippos' faces. Imagine that. What would happen with no carrot on the string? The first thing would be the hippo would buck off the senator. The next thing would be for the hippo to add the senator to a long list of hippo related casualties that humans can be so proud of. The final thing would be for the hippo to unfocus those tired near sighted eyes and realise that if he hadn't been focussing on that unattainable carrot for so long he'd have seen the free burgers lying all over the ground around him. Tell me you wouldn't punish a burger if you were starving.

I could've written all that a lot more eloquently, but I didn't care to. Just wanted to get the point across. So stop judging my syntax in your head.

ps It's hard to tell but that school bus is completely stuck.

I'm hungry now.

Cats in zero G

Let's ignore the fact that you and I both thought this blog was dead (hell it probably is) and thank some Eastern European spammer for posting the first comment in like seven months and sparking some inspiration. Refer to comment on: http://stuffhappenseveryday.blogspot.com/2006/11/who-is-yank-character-profile.html

***

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Wow. And to you sir I say

Thanks.

I can tell you are author and weight loss expert. You must be a master of English, or at least Russian or Polish, judging by your omission of definite articles such as "a" and "the". Also, your extraordinary spelling of the word 'habit' shows a particular penchant for the unconventional and cutting edge. You are a leader of a desperately sought reform of the English language. Also, I am impressed with your intuition! How did you know I'm not serious enough about my health? Thanks for this. Never mind the fact that I'm Canadian, I still identify closely with the over 90% of obese Americans you speak of. Anyway, you're right, I don't want to undergo difficult weightloss program, but I'm also afraid of chemical treatments, such as the acai berry. I guess that leaves your last option, the colon cleanse. If I could presume to judge you for a moment I'd say this is the option you picked. I say that because if I shoved a tube of hot soap water up my ass and captured the ensuing response in a bucket I'd end up with an email remarkably like the one you sent me.

Asshat.

Maybe I'll start writing in here again and see what happens. Did anyone read this? PS, I fixed the commenting issue, so it should work now. ie, comments can be left. Let's face it, if I never got any comments this blog would have ended after I posted a picture of a dead squirrel. Which was the first picture.

Ass? Hole in the ground? Who knows?

So I'm back - apparently. I was riding a horse in Mongolia for a month, of which I was the owner, and then I was pulled out of my nomad environment, where we ate the intestines of freshly killed goats and added solid cream to our yogourt and drank vodka in the morning, and I was calluosly transported back to Canada, where I now reside. Yank and I haven't seen each other in a couple of years, but he's here, and we are weezing internet from the U of G library, wondering how we got this age and where all our friends went. The stomach cramps have stopped, and now the only mongolian souvenirs I have are ones I paid for and voluntarily brought/snuck back here. Apparently I'm supposed to find a job and there's some kind of recession going on here? I feel like I was rudely awoken and now i'm stumbling, bleary eyed, through what everyone is trying to convince me is reality, and all I know is there's bunch of people I haven't seen in awhile that I need to see, and if you're reading this you're probably on this list. That is all for now.

Some people's children

Sometimes you see something and you wonder who raised that person. When you have this though there is an expression we use in English: "Some people's children."

Well I've never been one for sentimentality, but yes I have. So here I sit in front of my open window, rain misting me from the monsoon which comes as it pleases, as it pleases now. The ceiling fan whips lethargically around as breezes that can't decide where they want to go try to pull maps and silk wall hangings off the plaster that lines the walls of the flat. The stalwart Ho Chi Minh clings steadfastly to his post with no sign of relent, as always. It's dark and the occasional rumble gently rattles the shutters, and I'm thinking about the chapter of Viet Nam and how it's coming to a close, though I've only read about a hundred pages of the book, and the book is like about 6 bibles, 2 Qu'rans and a Torah long. Every day I realise how much more there is to learn about this place. Talk about keeping you on your toes. Yesterday I saw something which had very little to do with Viet Nam, and a lot to do with the west, and it bothered me. I guess that statement is false, it has a lot to do with Viet Nam now that it happened. There is a guy who is my neighbour. Not in the sense that we know each other, but when I stand on my balcony and he stands on his, we're at roughly the same altitude, though our buildings aren't joined. I don't really talk to other foreigners here unless unless they address me, so I don't know his deal, but I have a lot of ideas. Here it's common to see men that look about 80-90. They have no shirts on and you can see every rib, even in the middle of their chest, and the skin hangs from their limbs, once tightly stretched over the muscles of their youth. Tatoos of serial numbers or AK-47's are not uncommon on the leathery skin of these hardened souls that have seen more wars in one lifetime than 3 generations of North Americans. One evening as I sat out eating my dinner, I saw my neighbour's figure in the dusk as he sauntered out to his balcony, and I thought he was one such man. Days later I saw him come out again in the daylight and I saw his face, and it was the face of a blue-eyed westerner. This build on a westerner is not something you see around here or anywhere outside a hospital really. His face said that his body was 80 but his mind was probably in it's 30's. I could only think he must be dying. The conclusion might sound strange, but Viet Nam is not expensive to live in, and if he was starving he certainly wouldn't be paying 300 a month for rent. Then I thought he must be sick, but then why is he not in the hospital, why is he walking around? That rules out acute illness. You lose that much weight quickly and you're already dead. That leaves chronic illness, and I can't think of anything reversible that does that to you, so my conclusion was dying. His eyes have the shiny look of someone who is old beyond his years. Some mornings in traffic I see him crossing the street as I tear past on the way to school. He moves with surprising spryness, I can't figure him out. You just can't look like that and be healthy. Yesterday I sat at a joint that serves one of my favourite dishes, and the squat stool I was on had me right out on the sidewalk, and through the forest of legs I saw him coming my way. I was wearing sunglasses so I studied him discreetly, wondering and wondering. As a woman on a motorbike (in a sea of motorbikes) approached and passed him, he, without changing pace or expression, swung his closed fist behind him in a backhand and struck her right in the back. She was too busy steadying the bike from the blow to turn her head, but after she did that she looked behind her, clearly hurt and puzzled, trying to figure out who did that and why. He was walking right toward me and I timidly looked down into my bowl like I hadn't seen anything, because his jaw was set in such angry determination that I thought for sure if I stared him down the next one was coming my way, and thoughts of the cops not giving a shit who started it after I damaged his frail bones were racing through my head. I didn't want to get suckerpunched. The woman picked up a young girl, turned her bike around and rode back toward me, but the man had ducked into the alley behind me where we both live. I know not everything in life makes sense, or has a moral or reason, but I find it comforting to allocate these things, however imaginary, to most things that happen around me, but this. . . what was I supposed to do? I wanted to tell the woman I know where he lives, but she was gone in the endless stream by the time I'd decided that might be a good idea. Embarassed and the only witness to this, I finished my meal, paid, and walked home confused and feeling like a sheep. Some things are just sad. Some things are based on such a lack of understanding and empathy that they are too far gone to address. A moment like that changes two people forever. As the person that hit a stranger for no apparent reason, you become the kind of person that does that. As the person that gets hit you cannot help but equate his race with that kind of behaviour. That is an awful thing, because I don't look the same to that woman as I would have five minutes before, but when I see her I see the warm welcome that every Viet I've ever met has given me. How awful that is.

I'm going to try to see Viet Nam a little more before I leave. I am free of english classes next week. But not free of these little whippersnappers, who I teach on weekends. They're really rowdy until you give them something on paper to do, and then they turn into these guys. So, in a different light, these too are some people's children.

Today I got a good lesson on how hard westerners really get ripped around here. For most things I know the going rate and can usually get a good price, but for things you never see anyone else buy, like laptops or guitars, look out. I won't bore you with the details but I got a huge run around today trying to sell both of those items, and then ended with the best price being less than half of what I paid for the laptop a month ago and about a third the price of the guitar. Still worth it but OUCH! The Viets are so quick to tell you how much you overpaid by and how little they would have sold that item to you for if ONLY you'd come to see them, but when they're the ones selling, holy crap. Made me think of a counter scam for if I ever live in a city like this again: Grab a friend's item, say you want a guitar, borrow a friend's, go into a store and pretend you want to sell it, and when they say "Oh no no, too expensive, I sell same same guita fo only two hunned thousan." Then you say really? And offer to buy it, then you have that store on lockdown, cause once you break that barrier they never rip you off again. In a matter of weeks/days you could have a cheap source for batteries, computers, DVDs, musical shit, T shirts, you name it. If anyone ever needs this advice I hope you can use it. So this week I'm going to try to hit the north of Viet Nam, but that will be pretty tight since it's an overnight train ride away considering things need to work like clockwork when I'm actually in Ha Noi to make sure I get off smooth with not too much funny money in my pocket, but enough money. The bank, the pawn shop (read money exchange), the used laptop shop, my work, etc. Yikes, the tension is building. Then on Sunday, it's operation Red Hero. That's what Ulaanbaatar means, and that is the capital of Mongolia. It will be sad to take all the things off these walls and pack my bags again, but that is life on the road, and this is the home strech isn't it. . .

So this might be the last Viet Nam entry. Thanks Viet Nam, it's been real.

cảm ơn, và tạm biệt. . .

Hello? Pensacola?

Come in, Pensacola? I had this line from Contact in my head from this morning. Well it's still the morning. Kate and I were talking about getting 2 way radios so we could communicate, and we were debating which ones to get. Well we finally decided not to go with the bargain basement ones, because in the words of kate she didn't want to be stuck in the desert sending out futile transmissions having the only function still working on the walkie be the dead battery alert. And then I thought "Hello? Pensacola?" And then there was a joke about prime numbers, and if you haven't seen Contact I'm sorry and I'll stop now. So why were we talking about 2 way radios, and what's this about a desert? Surely Viet Nam doesn't even have a desert. No you're right, Kate's not even in Viet Nam, she's in Kuala Lumpur right now I think. Anyway the guy that lived in this little flat before me left a few things on the wall, which I like. The first one is a picture of Ho Chi Minh, which is awesome because it feels like every vietnamese living room and half the offices because of that. The second thing is a world map, which is awesome because when I am bored I look at it and just marvel at some of the countries I've never heard of and their crazy flags. Tuvalu, I'd never heard of Tuvalu. In one of these staring contests with the magna carta I laid eyes on Mongolia, and in a flash of "wait a minute, this could be my chance" (We've all had places we've 'always' wanted to visit). It was one of those "well I am sort of in the neighbourhood" moments. So then I thought, Mongolia is big and empty, I don't really want to go there by myself. I mean travelling alone is great because you are mobile and get into hilarious situations, but I was in NZ and it's small and empty, so I thought big and empty. . . companion. Not surprisingly Kate was into it, she's usually up for the most dangerous, worst sounding ideas either of us can come up with, and this is a little above riding 400 km on a motor bike along the coast of Viet Nam in one day - to get a ripped shirt back. Also this will make up for that idea we had about buying a boat and sailing/motoring 2000k down the Viet Nam coast. . . which is, I don't know if I told you this, highly illegal. Anyway Mongolia, self guided horse trek, asian steppe, mutton for breakfast lunch and dinner, yogourt, hard cheese, broken temples, grid references, topographical maps, water filter, gps, strange language, new alphabet, and yes of course: 2 way radio. Now this is happening.

After Mongolia it's home to Canada, for both of us actually, so we can be bitter, asleep, laughing or drunk at the same time on the flights home, whatever makes the situation more tolerable, each flight is different really. This shit is starting up on the 19th, so until then I'm running small missions around Ha Noi, gearing up for the trip and seeing things around the city I live in at the same time. Also trying to organize pay from the school I teach at and all that, since I'm pretty sure mongolia is NOT going to exchange Viet Nam Dong for Tugriks. ugh. So I have to find greenbacks in this town. Frogskins, as it were. And those are a BITCH to find in Ha Noi, let me tell you. I know where to get them now, but the exchange rate sucks, since it's whatever the little old lady behind the jewellery counter decides. What do you mean got to my bank? You think MY bank, ANZ, Australia New Zealand Bank, reputable international bank that is is, will give ME, their customer with a bank account, my OWN money in american currency? Don't make me laugh! I tried to get $30 out of them for my mongolian visa fee and they were like "oooohhh, no no no, we cannot give you American money, only take." Why? "Because you could take your passport and money and go to other country and. . " and then she did this little motion of someone running amok, presumably this is me running amok with $30 USD in some other country. I just wanted to yell at her and say SO WHAT!? I live in Canada, in what country am I going to go to with my CRAZY thirty dollars? I could cross the border and run amok in America, now that would really be crazy! But I didn't say that because of 2 reasons. The first reason is that there's no need to be mean to someone like that in their own country, even if the policy manager a million steps above their head, or their government, deserves it. The second reason was that this is a bank that ran a promotion where if I kept more than 2,000,000 VND in my account until june 23 I'd be eligible to win half a kilo of gold. Solid gold. Only in Asia. Also they did sucker me into that deal, and I did not win, so we're both idiots and I'm in no position to yell.

So yeah, all in the name of the Mongol empire. It's big out there, and it's pretty empty, but I'm sure there are others out there wer'll run into, I mean they've gotta be out there, "cause if we're alone, well that's an awful waste of space." Contact? ANYONE?