A Shipshape Thanksgiving

My dad spent a couple of unremarkable years in the US Navy in the late 1950s. The Eisenhower Recession was in full swing when he graduated high school in 1958 and he didn’t have any plans or money to go to college so his choices were to find some kind of menial job or enlist and he figured the Navy would be more interesting.

It probably was, though it wasn’t something he particularly talked about much afterward. It wasn’t traumatic, but it wasn’t all that big of a deal to him. He was a radioman on the USS Tutuila, a small-engine repair ship, and he served his time and then left when his enlistment was up. He had shore leave in Cuba before Castro took over, saw the Northern Lights out in the Atlantic, and never learned to swim because he figured if the ship went down in the middle of the ocean where would he go?

He spent Thanksgiving 1958 aboard ship, which probably didn’t sit quite right with him but so it goes. For a man who stood 6’2” and never weighed more than 190lbs in his life he had a healthy respect for Thanksgiving meals and before my parents were married he would routinely go to my mother’s family for a full dinner before returning home to another one with his mother. Having only one Thanksgiving meal – and US Navy chow at that – probably wasn’t his idea of the best way to spend the holiday.

But you have to be glad for what you have. That’s the point of the holiday, after all. And he saved the little program that the ship printed out for the day, so it must have been at least that good.

It’s been a long time since then. Both of my parents and all of my grandparents are gone now, and the USS Tutuila – sold to Taiwan in 1974 – was scrapped decades ago.

But it’s still Thanksgiving, and that has to count for something.

Thanksgiving has slowly become one of my favorite holidays as I have gotten older, mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that doesn’t want us to ask for more. It just asks that we be glad for what we have.

This can be a difficult task in these parlous times, as the future darkens and the past recedes into memory, but it is no less important even so.

I am glad for the life I have. I like my job, Kim likes hers, and between us those jobs provide for all that we need and a good chunk of what we want – the key, of course, being not to have wants that are too excessive. We have a snug house that is big enough for everything we want to do in it. We’re basically healthy, within the parameters for our age. And, most importantly, we have family and friends who make our world better.

Oliver and Lauren are home for the holiday, and the house is back to its full capacity. We’ll have Thanksgiving dinner at Rory and Amy’s house along with most of Kim’s side of the family. Lauren’s new boyfriend will be with us. Friday I’m going to make lasagna because I can. Saturday will depend on the weather, but Sunday will be Friendsgiving, when we’ll have another big Thanksgiving dinner and this one we’ll share with those of Lauren and Oliver’s friends who can join us.

I am thankful for the life I lead.

I am thankful for the people in it – for my family and my friends, both near and far.

And that is enough.

Thirty

I’ve been married for half my life now.

Thirty years ago today – what was then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which has long been our default day to celebrate – Kim and I got married here in Our Little Town. We wrote most of the service ourselves, blending our different traditions together into something that said the things we thought it should say. There were family and friends there to witness, and afterward we had a very nice party to celebrate.

Since then we’ve lived our lives well.

We bought a house. We made careers and friends. We celebrated. We traveled. We watched a parade of animals pass through our lives. And most importantly we raised two strong, independent children who became good, interesting adults.

It’s been quite a run.

Through it all, at the center of it, there we were, two people making a life together.

We celebrate these things when we have time for them. Last night we went out to dinner. At some point we’ll plan some traveling. Not sure where, but we’ll go. And this week Oliver and Lauren will come home for the holiday. There will be good food and good company and if there is any better way to celebrate an anniversary I couldn’t tell you what it would be.

Here’s to the first thirty years, and may the next thirty be just as lovely.

Happy anniversary to us!

Let There Be Lights

We’ve lived much of the past few months as if our entire physical lives were covered by one big warranty that expired on Memorial Day.

I had to replace my Water-Pik, the tires on my car, and the blinds on multiple windows. We have a new water softener – a necessity in a place that gets its water filtered through a thousand feet of limestone bedrock – and all of the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom has been flushed out. I’ve put in four showerheads since the spring semester ended, though the latest one seems to be working just fine. I managed to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, much to my surprise, and Kim fixed both of the toilets we own. In October our microwave died a noisy but mercifully abrupt and self-contained death and now we have a new one that is deeper but about half as tall so we can cook things that are wide but not high. Last week the control panel on the oven decided not to let us turn the oven off for a while but we’ve known that it was possessed since we bought it – it would periodically emit loud beeping noises and briefly show 666 on the clock face before returning to the usual display and I’m genuinely not making that up – so it really didn’t surprise us much. The appliance guy is coming to fix that next week, though whether he brings screwdrivers or a crucifix will be interesting. Could be both! Why not both. A book I purchased turned out to have printing errors that repeated some paragraphs and deleted others and while Amazon (politely) told me to pound sand the publisher was more reasonable about it and I may have a replacement next week if all goes well.

The cat is still in good shape, as far as we know, and that has to count for something.

My goal when it comes to home repair projects is always to pay other people to fix things, as I have a difficult and unfriendly relationship with the physical world and I dislike those projects with a consuming and deeply immature passion. I know other people enjoy such things but to me they’re just dentistry – probably good for me in the long run, but unpleasant experiences nonetheless. Plus, if I pay someone with actual expertise there is always the possibility that they will be done correctly.

This is often more of an aspiration than a practical reality, though, so all too often I have to put on my Homeowner Hat and try to figure out what exactly the instructions for this project mean in real terms and how I can actually carry them out without injuring either myself, the people around me, or the thing I’m trying to fix. More and more these days I wish I were more of a drinking man, but so it goes.

Last weekend I ended up doing not one but actually two of these home repair projects, both of which involved putting in new light fixtures. Getting this done was, as always in these cases, problematic, but so far nothing has burned down and I’m going to call that a win on points.

On Saturday I replaced the light fixture on the outside of the garage.

We’d had a friend install one when he put in the garage door openers a quarter century ago, and it served us well for a long time. But the plastic housings had gotten so old and brittle that when I went to put up the usual string of overhead lights that we do every summer – tying one end to the side of the garage, running it over to the awning over the back door and then back to that light fixture – one of the two swiveling light housings just snapped off. The other one still worked, so I figured I’d get to it after I took the overhead lights down, and that finally happened a few weeks ago.

The new fixture is actually pretty nice. It’s got two LED paddles that never need to be replaced and which you can rotate to point pretty much any direction you want, which is all I was looking for, and it installed with only the standard minimum amount of confusion and profanity. It works pretty well and it’s really bright.

What I didn’t realize was there is also an LED ring around the base – a strip about half an inch wide running around a circular base that has a diameter of about eight inches – that lights up at dusk and then stays on the entire night until the sun is well and truly risen. It’s a low, warm light so it’s not like we’re landing planes here, but I’m still not convinced it’s something I want.

Unfortunately, this is the default setting and the only way to change that is to download an app onto my phone, set up an account, and then use that to control the light. I need to log into my garage light, in other words. This is not the future I wanted.

I haven’t decided whether I want to go through that or just live with the nightlight feature. We’ll see.

On Sunday I replaced the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom.

The old one had been there for long enough that it was starting to thump and whinge whenever we turned it on, and we could never quite be bothered to find matching light bulbs for it so it had four differently-shaped bulbs in it as well as one empty socket that pointed directly at our heads in bed and gave us too much glare so we took the bulb out. Plus the paddles were very long, and every time I forgot they were there and tried to put on a shirt I’d end up punching one. The new fixture looks like a roomba. It’s got an LED ring around it that's maybe three fingers wide, and in the center it has some short but high-velocity fan blades that put out a fair amount of wind.

This project took slightly more than the standard amount of confusion and profanity to install, as well as an emergency trip to the hardware store to deal with the fact that the ceiling box was half an inch too small for the fixture so I needed to get an adapter.

The light has a lot of different settings. You can vary the brightness, from Expensive Restaurant Dim to Airport Runway Bright. You can also shade it from cool to warm. And, it turns out, it has a Disco Night setting where the light will cycle through colors ranging from blood red to deep blue to vibrantly green, with occasional stops at white light just long enough to keep your eyes from adjusting to the darker colors.

We found out about the Disco Night setting by accident – there’s a button on the little remote that came with the light and Kim was playing around with it to see what would happen – and now we’re stuck with it. We cannot turn it off. The remote will no longer talk to the light for some reason, and there are no controls whatsoever on the light itself. The only way you can control it, other than turning it off completely with the wall switch, is through the remote.

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s not an app.

So right now that is unusable and we’re waiting to find a time where their service center is open and we are not actually at work.

At some point we will just get oil lanterns and be done with it.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Coming Home

All good things must come to an end, and as the summer started to turn toward autumn and graduate classes loomed on the horizon, so too did Lauren’s grand tour wind down.

This took a bit, since the temptation to stay in Southeast Asia was strong and the intransigence of the travel company that she’d been working with made rebooking her flight home inordinately more complicated than it needed to be. They eventually refunded about half of her money for a flight that didn’t work out – a long and hard-fought battle that ended sometime in October – and Lauren found another flight to Chicago that would arrive from the west on August 26, more than ten weeks after she’d left O’Hare headed east.

She and Shai traveled from Siem Reap back to Phnom Penh and said their goodbyes, and then Lauren flew off to Taiwan where she had a fairly lengthy layover before her connecting flight. This, it turned out, was not the problem it might have been in most airports around the world as the good people of Taipei understood the assignment when it came to airports.

“Taipei airport has lapped Stockholm Arlanda” Lauren reported from the scene. “Each gate is themed, bathrooms are immaculate (heated seats, multiple kinds of bidets); food is amazing and cheap; food court is themed like a Chinese village.” On top of that the wifi was free and faster than at home and – perhaps the greatest thing of all – there were outlets pretty much everywhere. You can’t ask for much more than that out of an airport.

Also, for some reason, sarsaparilla is very popular in Taiwan and sold pretty much everywhere in the Taipei airport. I don’t remember the last time I saw it here in the US, but if you’ve got a hankerin’ for some, partner, the place to go for a cold, refreshing sarsaparilla is not some sepia-toned Old West saloon but a vending machine in the Departures area of Taiwan’s biggest airport. It’s a strange old world, it is.

So hats off to the Taiwanese for sticking the landing (and takeoff) here.

One of the wonders of the modern age is the fact that with a simple app on your phone you can track pretty much any flight in the world. This never fails to amaze me, particularly as a historian who spends a fair amount of time in my classes emphasizing how slowly everything moved prior to about the early 1800s. For most of human history we lived in a three mile per hour world, where nothing – not people, not goods, and not information – moved faster than that over any appreciable distance. That’s the walking speed of the average adult. That’s how fast a horse moves over long distances. That’s the speed of a sailing ship. 3mph. 5kph. That’s how it was from the first time our species evolved out of whatever preceded it right up to the invention of the steam locomotive in the early 1800s.

Now? I can pull out the tiny little computer in my pocket that masquerades as a phone even though nobody uses it as one, tap on an even tinier icon on the screen, squint a bit, and follow a traveler flying high above the Pacific Ocean at hundreds of miles per hour, and I can do it in real time.

Amazing.

If you have never picked someone up at O’Hare, it’s an experience. They do the best they can to make it work, but a) it’s one of the busiest airports in the world and there is no arrival time you can choose that will not have you grinding your way through traffic to get where you want to go, and b) everything within an hour of the airport is under construction and has been since they rebuilt the city after the Great Fire.

Nevertheless, I successfully found my way to the cell phone lot and settled in. Lauren’s flight landed. Customs were cleared and bags picked up and eventually I found her waiting outside of the Arrivals area and we headed back to Wisconsin, stopping only to get some direly unhealthy American roadside food along the way because welcome home, weary traveler! 

There are a few postscripts to this story.

For one, when we asked Lauren what she wanted for her first dinner after arriving back home she immediately replied “Mexican!” and this is absolutely correct. The rest of the world beyond Mexico and its neighbors, for all of its culinary marvels, is sorely lacking in quality Mexican food whereas we here in Our Little Town have not only all of the finest chain restaurants in America but also some surprisingly good real Mexican food.

For another, now that she was back in the Land of In-Network Insurance Coverage – a uniquely and disturbingly American concept – Lauren went to the local Urgent Care to have her fingers looked at. Apparently she became the star of the Urgent Care as people there were fascinated by the story of how she ended up in this condition. It’s probably not a story they’ve heard much here in Our Little Town in Wisconsin. Her fingers continue to heal.

She also got reacquainted with the cat, who was glad to see her. Midgie is always glad to see her people.

Lauren’s flight landed almost exactly a week before her classes were scheduled to start and I sort of expected her to sleep for most of that week before heading up to campus, but it is easy to forget the recuperative powers of the young when you are no longer part of that demographic and she went back to campus after only a couple of days. Not long after that Arden came to visit and they had a good time together rattling around Main Campus University. They also came down to see us and share a meal and we got to hear more of the stories that way. It was a lovely evening.

And finally, not long after Lauren went back to her apartment near campus, I went up as well and we did a major Costco resupply run since groceries were probably not something that she’d had much time to acquire in those intervening days. On the way back to her apartment we decided to stop for lunch at a Thai restaurant, and it turns out that the owners are from Chang Mai so they had a good time talking with Lauren and hearing her experiences in their hometown. It was really good food, too.

The world is a big and exciting place but it can be very small and welcoming as well.

It is good to travel, to see and experience new things. It is good to come home. It will be good to travel again.

Welcome home, Lauren.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Cambodia

Cambodia wasn’t on Lauren’s original plan for this trip, but it ended up being one of her favorite countries. This is particularly noteworthy given how her time there started.

She and Shai took a bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, beating her Vietnamese visa’s expiration by mere hours, and their first day there passed pretty uneventfully. They had another hostel friend with them, and they went out a bit and explored the city and the surrounding area. She ate a lot of fish amok and lok lak beef while she was in Cambodia, both of which she reported as being very good. I tried to make lok lak beef in September and I have to say that even though it wasn’t what you’d get in Cambodia it was really tasty, and when I sent a photo of it to Lauren she said it looked like it was at least within hailing distance of the real thing, so now I have a project.

Not all of the food in Cambodia was a hit, though. Toward the end of Lauren’s time in that country she and Shai made their way to Siem Reap and were cruising through a market looking for something to eat when they found what appeared to be hard boiled eggs for sale. Lauren bought one and quickly discovered that looks were deceiving and there was a fully-formed duck embryo inside. This probably would not have come as a surprise to a native Cambodian, but it did for Lauren.

At some point even the most adventurous soul will discover their limits, and this turned out to be one of Lauren’s. I asked her what she did once she made this discovery and she said, “Looked sad, then disposed.” And you know, I get that.

Lauren’s second day in Phnom Penh was something of a challenge.

The first thing you need to know about this challenge is that while she was in Vietnam Lauren took the opportunity to get her nails done, and it has to be said that they did a very good job of it. Probably too good, as events would prove. But they looked nice and that has to count for something.

The second thing that you need to know is that Lauren, Shai, and their other hostel friend went to a small playground in Phnom Penh and were having fun on the equipment when Lauren fell and got her hand caught in something on the way down, the end result of that being that she mostly ripped off two of the new nails from her right hand. And because the nails she had done in Vietnam were glued on there good and tight they ended up taking her real nails and a good chunk of the nail bed with them.

Fortunately Shai managed to procure a tuk-tuk ambulance to take them to a nearby clinic, where Lauren got to experience Cambodian medicine firsthand.

The first thing the doctor asked her was whether she was up to date on her tetanus shots, as he couldn’t really vouch for the safety of any of the equipment that way. A quick look at MyChart proved unproductive as it didn’t really want to work in Cambodia, so Lauren checked with Kim – Cambodia is 12 hours ahead of Wisconsin and the timing worked out well that way – who reported that yes, she was. She was thus cleared to have the doctor use his finest medical equipment (a pair of pliers) to remove the nails completely.

There were two issues with this.

First, one of Lauren’s inheritances from my side of the family is a fairly strong resistance to anesthesia. If you’re going to numb us up or knock us out you need to give us about half again the dose and wait about twice as long for it to kick in, otherwise you might as well not bother. This is not a concept that Lauren was able to get across to the doctor in that moment, and that meant that Lauren essentially went through the procedure raw. “I understand why they use this as a torture method,” she told us later. 

After it was all over and she was telling us the full story – always the safest time to pass along stories like this – she said, “I miss American medicine; I woulda been put down like a damn dog and given opiods. All I got was a bill and Tylenol.” Fortunately Shai stayed with her the whole time and was a comfort in time of need, which is a very good thing to say about someone. He also helped her change the bandages for the rest of their time in Cambodia – a delicate procedure, and a further sign of good character.

The second issue was that the process of removing the two nails was sufficiently heinous that the doctor actually fainted halfway through and Lauren got to see the nurses drag him out, feet scraping the floor, into the hallway until he revived. It all worked out in the end, but at the time that cannot have been reassuring.

But she got through it all sufficiently well that she was able to negotiate the bill down by about 50% before leaving. The whole thing – which in the US probably would have cost more than my car – ended up being about $200 all told, and pretty soon they were back in a tuk-tuk heading toward the hostel. She spent the rest of the trip giving little “V for Victory!” signs to everyone, and that’s just how it goes.

They didn’t stay too long in Phnom Penh after that. Their main goal in Cambodia was to get up to Siem Reap, a little over 300km away, where the temples of Angkor Wat are located. 

Angkor Wat basically translates as “City of Temples,” and it is one of the most astonishing places on earth. The temple complex dates back to the 12th century CE, and at one time it had a population of about 800,000 people – bigger than London and Rome combined at the time. Everywhere you look there are temples, all set in an impossibly gorgeous location. Lauren and Shai bought a three-day pass to the place knowing full well that this wouldn’t nearly be enough time to explore it all, but they gave it their best shot.

You’re allowed to get pretty much right up onto many of the temples, apparently, and they’re amazing to see up close.

And if you’re lucky, there will be rainbows.

It took me a bit to figure out the trick to this photo, though in hindsight it probably shouldn’t have. Pay attention to the carved figure to the left of Lauren and suddenly it all makes sense. History is supposed to be fun, after all.

It has to be said that no matter where you go in this world, however many oceans and time zones you put between here and there, you cannot escape Wisconsin. Not fully. We’re everywhere.

There’s more to do in Siem Reap than the temples, though, and Lauren and Shai spent some time at the APOPO Visitor Center.

One of the things that most Americans forget these days is that the American war in Southeast Asia was not confined to Vietnam. It spilled over into neutral Laos, for example, and it very much encompassed Cambodia – a country that was also not officially part of the war but on which the US dropped millions of bombs anyway. The 1970 protest at Kent State that ended with the Ohio National Guard panicking and randomly shooting four people to death was a response to US attacks in Cambodia, not Vietnam. 

When I teach the Vietnam War in my classes I make a point of discussing this and it always comes as news to my students, most of whom honestly don’t know about the war in Vietnam either since it ended more than thirty years before they were born and was something that their grandparents’ generation did. Spreading the war into Cambodia was a deliberate policy formulated by the Nixon administration – particularly by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger – to try to pressure North Vietnam into ending the war, and it worked about as well as you’d think such a bizarre idea would work, which is to say not at all.

The bombings, overt actions by American troops and covert operations carried out by the United States were so intense and excessive that they destabilized Cambodia enough to lead to the Khmer Rouge taking over in 1975 and if you’ve ever seen the old movie The Killing Fields you know what a bunch of raging sociopaths the Khmer Rouge were. Fully a third of the Cambodian population were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge and the responsibility for that ultimately rests with the United States. This is something that Americans should know, but don’t. The ones who do know understand what it means to be incandescent with rage at the actions of one’s own government even decades after the fact, or at least they should be. Ultimately it took an invasion by Vietnam in 1979 to get rid of them.

One of the consequences of all of this is that Cambodia is littered with old land mines and unexploded munitions that continue to kill people even today. The folks at APOPO train African pouched rats to detect landmines and other unexploded ordinance in ways that are safer, faster, more efficient and more effective than having human beings do that job, and they’ve since expanded their operations around the world. They’re also expanding into training the rats to help detect tuberculosis in human patients. They’re a worthwhile group, in other words, and their Visitor Center is just a quick ride from downtown Siem Reap. If you go they’ll let you pet the retired rats they have on site.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos on her travels and I enjoyed seeing every single one of them. It’s hard to choose a favorite out of all of them, but I think this one might be it. It was taken somewhere near Siem Reap, and I think it captures something about both Lauren and the trip as a whole that I really love.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Vietnam

After leaving Pai, Lauren and Arden first went to Bangkok and then flew to Hanoi where they stayed only a day before heading north on a sleeper bus to Ha Giang. Lauren ended taking quite a few sleeper buses during the rest of her time in southeast Asia because they’re more flexible than flights and can take you directly to where you want to be without having to worry about getting out of the airport. They are also nicer than the equivalent buses here in the US, and it ended up working out pretty well for her.

These sleeper buses also provide wifi, which meant that during this journey Lauren and I could trade enough messages to sort out the final bit of the debit card saga. Not long after I walked out our credit union thinking that everything was settled I got a phone call from their fraud hotline regarding my new instant debit card for Lauren’s account, part of which was easy to resolve simply by putting the travel memo on the card so she could keep using her own money while abroad, and part of which took a bit to figure out. They sent me a list of charges made in Vietnam ranging from $2600 to $8760, and it took Lauren a moment to realize that a) yes those were actually her charges, but b) the units were not US dollars but instead Vietnamese dong. There were roughly 26,000 VND to 1 USD this summer and somehow the bank statement had divided that by a hundred when converting to dollars (probably because the idea of the USD being worth 26,000 of anything is a bit far-fetched these days), and when you did the math it worked out that the actual charges Lauren had made ranged from $10 to $33. This made a lot more sense and it accurately reflected the charges that she could see on the credit union’s app on her phone, so we declared the mystery solved and I called the credit union back to explain it to them. They were happy to hear it.

I will pass lightly over the fact that the Vietnamese currency is called the “dong” because I try not to be a middle schooler about things no matter how funny that would be sometimes. False cognates are a thing, y’all.

Ha Giang is way up in the very northern end of Vietnam, hard by China, and Lauren and Arden’s plan was to take a motorcycle tour of the area. Motorcycles are generally how you get around in that part of the world, apparently – Lauren would spend most of the next month traveling that way through one place or another. They’re faster than walking, more convenient than buses, and in the narrow, often crowded streets of southeast Asia they’re a whole lot easier to get around on than cars. As for Ha Giang in particular, Lauren and Arden had signed on to a group tour and once everyone had collected at the starting point they were off. The tour company people would drive the motorcycles and each person in the tour group would ride sitting behind their driver. This meant that they could enjoy the scenery and not have to worry about navigating the twisting, looping roads through the mountains themselves. 

And such scenery there was! I confess that as a historian and a homebody my only real familiarity with Vietnam prior to this came from studying the American war there and you don’t get much of a sense of what the country is really like that way. Vietnam is stunningly beautiful, and the landscapes that they rode through are simply astonishing. I’ve never seen mountains shaped like that before, or valleys like that. 

And just to give you a sense of how far north they were in Vietnam, when Lauren sent us the photo below she let us know that across that valley was China. That’s way up there.

It’s hard to see in that photo, but if you look carefully in the breaks in the greenery there are buildings. You lose a lot of the sense of scale with pictures like this, and when it snaps back into place it kind of takes your breath a bit.

As with any good tour route there were stops along the way for people to take their photos in front of the splendor of the scenery, and Lauren and Arden took advantage of those because who wouldn’t? It was kind of spectacular that way.

They’d stop for other things as well, of course. Local musicians by the side of the road, for example.

Or waterfalls.

Perhaps the best thing that they stopped for, at least as far as stories go, happened in one of the little villages that the tour cycled through, where Lauren ended up helping a local farmer butcher a chicken.

Lauren spent many years in the 4H Poultry Project here in Our Little Town, raising her own chickens and turkeys. This is a process that starts with tiny little chicks and – at least with the turkeys – ends with Thanksgiving dinners in the freezer. We kept the chickens at our friend Lois’ barn, just outside of town, and every year Lois would have a chicken-butchering festival so Lauren was familiar with the process. She did say that the farmer’s daughter (at the top of the picture) was surprised that an American tourist would pitch in like that, but perhaps that’s all to the good. People remember helpful people, after all.

The farmer and his daughter were not the only people Lauren and Arden met on this trip. It was a pretty big tour group with people from all over the world, and they bonded pretty well together, often over meals.

One of the group was a New Zealander named Lucy who shared our surname – when our ancestors came storming out of the Scottish Highlands they scattered all over the globe and sometimes it is nice to run into a clan member, however distantly related.

It was a good group of people, and they had a lovely time together.

This was also where Lauren met Shai, who would end up playing a reasonably large role in the story as it went forward. He started out as someone on the motorcycle tour, graduated to friend, then became a traveling companion and now seems to be rather more than that, though the fact that he lives half a world away does complicate things somewhat. We’ll see. It is possible that we might get to meet him over Thanksgiving if plans work out and we’re looking forward to that.

After the tour Lauren returned to Hanoi for a few days to have a look around that city. It’s been rebuilt considerably since the United States tried to destroy it half a century ago. I went to college in the 1980s, at a time when the cultural fissures of the Vietnam War were fresh and you could still get an argument going just by bringing it up in conversation. The war didn’t seem justified to me then, and the more I learn about it as a historian the more that gut feeling gets confirmed by larger facts. I remember my dad and I talking about it one night back then. My dad was a Navy veteran who grew up working class in a single-parent home in Philadelphia, voted for Goldwater, and had some friends who served over there, notably his best friend Jack. It was a conversation that covered a lot of ground – he blamed the French for suckering the US into the war in the first place, for example – and at the end of it he paused and, from the perspective of a decade after the war ended, said, “Sometimes I think the protesters got it right.” It was a simple, quiet statement, but a profound one in context. He never got a chance to go over to visit the place, but I think he’d have been deeply happy to see Lauren do so, in part because of the experiences she would have there but in part also because it would mean that perhaps things would be better now.

In any event, there’s a lot to do in Hanoi. Sometimes that meant just wandering around and seeing the sights of a bustling city going about its own business.

And sometimes it meant just hanging out by the hostel or wherever.

When the heat index routinely gets up to around 44C (112F), hanging out is a good option. I suspect that the main thing keeping Lauren from moving to Vietnam is the heat, because otherwise she really loved it there.

One night she and Arden found an underground drag show that turned out to be a lot of fun, by all reports.

A while ago I recommended that Lauren read one of Anthony Bourdain’s books because he was a traveler in the way that Lauren is becoming, and he was particularly good at immersing himself in the culture of wherever he happened to be, eating the street food and the meals served at local hole in the wall restaurants and genuinely being interested in the people in front of him, not as props but as people. One of the most well-known things that Bourdain did in his travels was visit Hanoi, go to a small restaurant there, and share a meal with then-President Obama.

Naturally Lauren went there too.

She said it was really good, though she liked most of the food in southeast Asia so it may just have been that.

Arden flew home somewhere around this point, as she had planned to do all along. That had been Lauren’s plan as well, but as noted earlier that deadline got extended and for the rest of the trip it was Lauren, Shai, and an assortment of hostel friends here and there, and at some point they went to Ninh Binh, about 100km south of Hanoi. If you go to Ninh Binh, get the chicken at the night market. It was the best Lauren had all trip.

There’s a lot to do in Ninh Binh, most of which seems to involve water in some way. Lauren and Shai hung out on the waterfront and went on a boat tour of a cave as well. 

What impressed me about the photo below, aside from how much stuff Lauren is carrying and how happy she looks doing so, is the visible density of insects flying around. It’s a whole other world.

There were a lot of Italian travelers in Ninh Binh for some reason – there were never very many Americans – and at one point they all converged on a karaoke bar and I suppose that’s just one of those experiences that you really have to go through first-hand in order to understand fully.

The next stop in Vietnam was Hoi An, which is in the middle of the country, about a twelve-hour bus ride from Hanoi, and Lauren and Shai spent a few days exploring the place. Vietnamese script has a pile of diacritics and other little markings attached to the characters so if you actually look at Hoi An on a Vietnamese sign it looks a lot more prickly, which in turn means that my puny English version is kind of lacking. But it gets the point across and that will have to do.

As you would expect of someone in my family, food played a bit part of this exploration. What can I say? We’re a group that enjoys a good meal in good company. There is nothing in this world better than that, and the ability to find that joy in far flung places is a talent not to be underestimated. There are a lot of ways to do that, when you get right down to it.

You can go to the marketplace, sign up for a cooking class, and enjoy the fruits of your foraging and labors.

Or you could let someone else do the cooking and enjoy the fruits of their foraging and labor, which has its merits after all. They found another Bourdain restaurant in Hoi An and enjoyed that.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also have some of the best barbecue of your life out on the streets of Hoi An. The streets get largely shut down at night as the vendors kind of take over, and everyone ends up sitting on these tiny little plastic stools and enjoying the food and atmosphere. A local woman showed them the proper procedure for how to get everything and for the princely sum of two USD for five skewers of great food they had a wonderful night.

Of course, not everything has to revolve around food, as much as this always comes as a surprise to me personally. Sometimes you can do other things, and Hoi An had cave temples to explore as well.

And boats to ride, for those inclined.

The thing about all of these places is that they are lovely but very hot, and after a while Lauren and Shai decided that they’d had enough of 42C days, so they found a sleeper bus and went to Da Lat, another twelve hours south in the general direction of Ho Chi Minh City but up in the mountains and therefore comparatively cooler. It’s a very French-colonial sort of place in appearance, but – like most places – with its own charms.

High up on the list of any place’s charms are, of course, cats. You can’t go wrong with cats.

The thing about Vietnam, though, is that they are very strict about their visas. You do not want to overstay your visa in Vietnam if you ever want to return to the country, and the Lauren’s return trip to the US ended up being pushed about a week or so after her Vietnamese visa expired. This meant that Lauren and Shai had to find a new Bonus Country to spend some time in – a hardship, really, don’t you know – and that turned out to be Cambodia. But first they had to get there.

They left Da Lat and took a bus to Ho Chi Minh City, where they had a short bit of time to spend before another sleeper bus left, mere hours before Lauren’s visa expired. It’s busy city.

They decided to spend some time at the big war museum there before they left, getting the Vietnamese perspective on “The American War,” which presumably is different from the French War that ended in 1954 and that the United States, in its folly, decided to continue. I found this photo particularly poignant, if you know the backstory.

When WWII ended and the Japanese were expelled from Vietnam, there was a ceremony jointly held by Vietnamese and American forces to celebrate. Vietnamese and American officials shared a stage and gave speeches quoting the Declaration of Independence, as above. An American air group did a flyby overhead. A brass band played The Star-Spangled Banner. It was to be the beginning of an age of cooperation. And two decades later the US was mired in an unwinnable war in a place it had no business being in at all, a war that devastated Vietnam and which reverberates today. Sometimes all you can do is accept the bitter irony of it all.

It's worth knowing their perspective on it all, though. It happened in their country, after all.

Getting a visa into Cambodia was a lot simpler than getting one for Vietnam – a simple fee, payable in USD (which you can get there, apparently), a bit of paperwork, and there you go.

And then it was on to the next bus, on to the next adventure.