Tien Chiu

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Hoi An, leaving for Hue in a day or two

So, I spent yesterday touring the local area on motorbike, covering about 140-160 km total. on the back of a motorbike, in the rain, that’s quite an experience–fortunately i had the sense to bring a dry set of clothes, and a rain poncho.

We started out in the morning, when I got out of my hotel to discover that it was raining lightly. So we had some coffee while waiting for the rain to slow, then set off…on the way out of town, we passed the most amazing motorcycle I’d ever seen. It had clearly been tarred and feathered, with live chickens. at least a hundred of them. on one motorbike. layers and layers of chickens, arranged in overlapping shingled rows, hanging from their feet, draped over the back seat of the motorcycle like the world’s biggest rubber-chicken display (they were even bungeed down–the motorcycle must have been four feet wide with all the chickens on it). I was just preparing to risk sudden death and my digital camera for a photo, when we passed the motorcycle and I noticed the handlebars were also festooned with chickens. Damn, I wish I’d gotten a photo.

Shortly after this we stopped for a break, and while I was standing around I heard a bus come quacking by. I was naturally intrigued by this, since buses don’t normally quack, so I poked my nose out–the entire top of the bus was covered in ducks. (apparently the bus has been tarred and feathered by the same perpetrator. 😉 ) anyway, poultry are a very important (and common) vehicle decoration item around here. I think we should introduce this back home…just imagine eighteen-wheelers roaring by with live chickens dangling from the mirrors and a duck on the rearview mirror. puts those mudflaps with naked girls to shame!

(No, I’m not seriusly suggesting it. it would be terribly inhumane to the animals, after all. but, around here, animal welfare/rights isn’t a big issue–where you don’t have human rights, animal rights aren’t much of a concern.)

actually, I think some of my friends need to have their cars decorated with chickens. I’ll have to think carefully about this.

moving along…we went out and looked at a lake (very dull, in the rain) and also at a silkweaving village. at the lake, they had two monkeys in very small cages–I felt sorry for them, especially after I got a little too close and one of them grabbed my poncho, ripped off a piece, and tried eating it–obviously very hungry. (Side note: with wild monkeys, don’t get too close. they do grab things, and they also bite–very nasty.) So I fed them my leftover lunch; one was a red-faced monkey and quite fussy, preferring tomatoes and onions to the noodles (a fruit-eater, i think). the other was some sort of longer-limbed monkey (lemur?) and very greedy, grabbing at the noodles double-fisted and devouring everything. I took pictures of both, but because of the bars on the cage they realy didn’t come out. (I was not getting my camera within arm’s reach.) pretty cool, though.

The Vietnamese countryside is very beautiful, primarily rice paddies filled with water, with farmers in cute conical hats plowing the mud with yoked-up water buffalo. water buffalo calves follow their mothers–i’d never really thought about baby water buffalo before. They’re very cute, if anything the color of mud with big horns can be called cute. i saw some farmers plowing, some transplanting rice seedlings, some out weeding. individual rice paddies are quite small, maybe 30×60 feet–don’t know if farmers own multiple ones.

My guide turns out not to have been a vietnam vet, but a mechanic in the support crew–after the U.S. pulled out, he spent four years in a “reeducation camp”. (One of his two best friends committed suicide there.) He says it was very hard after the war, but it’s better now–though I gather there’s still a lot of discrimination against the South Vietnamese, and a lot of division between north and south. He’s got two daughters, one 16 and one 18, and a sister who’s an international tae kwon do champion (gold medalist) and teaches it in a nearby village.

I haven’t worked out yet who doesn’t like who. I’ve found everyone to be extraordinarily friendly, but I was told (by my guide) that the South vietnamese really don’t like Chinese (because they’re communist) and that about 50% of North Vietnamese don’t really like Americans. He actually told one group of people i was Japanese, for that reason. I’ve given up on sorting out who loves/hates america and who loves/hates china and for what reasons–the ideology gaps between south vietnamese, north vietnamese, private and individual, is more than I’ll be able to sort out in two weeks. In any event, it doesn’t affect me–everyone’s very curious about other countries, and I find people staring at me a lot. In general, people here think I’m Vietnamese.

this keyboard is driving me up the wall (definitely third world–it misses keys, sticks keys, changes at random to completely unfamiliar layouts, and so on) so i’m going to end this here. tomorrow I may go off to look at villages, and may head off to hue–haven’t decided yet. from there I’ll probably head over to Hanoi, and then either catch a plane to Vientiane, laos or try a land entry to laos. haven’t decided yet…

oh yeah–the guide, while showing me the lake, mentioned that the government had built it in the last three years or so by requiring everyone in the area to work for one month a year on it, unpaid. no wonder the government’s not too popular around here, despite the regular propaganda. (apparently there are three tv stations, and each of them plays the same propaganda loop in repeat, so at any given time you can see Uncle Ho (Chi Minh) repeating his declaration of independence, at least three times an hour, on each station.) the cops apparently don’t hassle westerners much, but often shake down the locals for fines. fortunately, I’m obviously overseas vietnamese, hence a foreigner, at least where the cops are concerned.

Tien

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Met South Vietnamese vet; going touring tomorrow

First, it appears the Rathole Tradition of hotels is continuing for a third night: the current hotel turns out to be windowless (or rather, they have a window, and even have curtains for it, but it opens onto a blank concrete wall), damp, and musty. Unfortunately there are no better rooms and probably no drier ones in town: it’s winter, which is the rainy season here, and it’s been drizzling on and off all day. So the relative humidity is 100%; moss and plants grow plentifully (and picturesquely) on the roofs, and hotel mattressses are damp and unpleasant. I’m hoping that running the air conditioner will help with this, but I have my dark doubts. If it’s really bad tonight, I may try switching hotels tomorrow.

(Yes, I realize you don’t really care about how badly I’m suffering. But *I* do, and since I’m writing this I see no reason why you shouldn’t suffer right along with me. Friends share, right? 😉 )

I suppose this is also the time to point out that the hot water heater doesn’t actually produce enough hot water for a really good bath. *sigh* No, I’m not whining, I’m…well, okay, I’m whining. At least it’s not a concrete slab with straw mat and spiders; it could be worse, I could be back at the monastery. (I am not eating gruel for breakfast, either. 😉 )

At any rate, I have now walked all around Hoi An, about four or five times in fact (it’s a *very* small town). About half the shops are tailor shops–if and when I need a new wardrobe I’m coming out here! Prices are *very* low, and unlike Thailand, the tailors aren’t all conniving thieves. Which is to say, the fiber content is actually what they say it is, at least as far as I can tell. I’m having two pairs of silk-blend culottes (very wide-legged pants/split skirt) and a blouse custom-made, all for $41.

I’m also having a Vietnamese ao dai made for me. The ao dai is a uniquely Vietnamese invention, and very beautiful. Take a very tight sheath dress–like the Chinese cheong sam–made in shimmering silk brocade. (The silk is woven with warp and weft in different colors, in a brocade weave, but is very lightweight–so the overall effect is a supple, iridescent silk brocade that practically floats.)

Split the floaty brocade sheath dress up the sides to the waist, and wear it over a pair of lightweight silk pants. That’s an ao dai, and it looks stunning. What I’ll do with one I have absolutely no idea, but at $22 for the entire outfit (including silk outerrobe) how can you go wrong? I picked a very pretty blue/fuschia brocade, with white pants. I’ll pick it up tomorrow, and see if I can get a photo.

(The seamstress, incidentally, was shamefacedly gleeful that she had actually managed to charge some poor soul $35 (can you imagine that!) for the same outfit. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it would have cost at least five times that in the U.S..)

At any rate, having spent a pleasantly ruinous day shopping, I stopped by a tour outfit to see if there were any interesting day tours. It turns out that they have a tour to a silkweaving village! and to some other nicely scenic areas–but as soon as the guy found out I was American, he got very excited and really really wanted to take me on a tour himself. He used to work for the U.S. Navy–which I think means he was working for the South Vietnamese army during the war–and wants to know all about what it’s like in America, he loves talking to Americans. I’m dying to know what the war was like from the Vietnamese perspective, so I think this is really cool. Tomorrow morning he’s picking me up and taking me off for a motorbike tour of the silkweaving village and the Marble Mountains. Cost is “very expensive”–$20 for the entire day. Hey, I’ll pay it.

So anyway, I’d better get back to tonight’s very pretty, damp musty rathole, and see if I can get some sleep. I’m amazed how well I’ve been doing on no sleep, but this just can’t last forever.

Tien

P.S. An amusing aside–at the tailor’s, I ran into a very interesting Kiwi (New Zealander) and started up a conversation…it turns out that his sister-in-law is one of the ten best body painters in Holland (?), and her style is almost exactly the same as Richard’s! The world is very very small…so I got his card, and will be emailing him a link to Richard’s website, and perhaps I can introduce the two of them to each other. I am seriously starting to believe that everyone in the world is a secret body painter. 😉

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Hello from Hoi An!

Well, here I am in Hoi An, Vietnam. I arrived here this morning via a very modern MD-82, much to the relief of–well, most of my body, which was not looking forward to more jouncing along awful roads.

Airports are really cool. They have these X-ray scanning things that you put your luggage into, and then take them out again on the other side; and they have these weird blank metal doorframes that you walk through. (Some long-lost portion of my mind wants to call them “metal detectors”. 😉 ) They have people who take small pieces of paper and hand you back other small pieces of paper and eventually put you on a shuttle to this big silver thing with wings, which you get into, and after some gobbledygook in Vietnamese and English about what to do in the event of an emergency, the big silver thing takes off and gets you out of Ho Chi Minh City. You breathe a vast sigh of relief.

After a brief period during which they secretly shuffle around all the background scenery (you don’t *really* think you’re traveling, do you? 😉 ), the big silver thing “lands” in a place called Danang, an industrial city almost exactly halfway up the Vietnamese coast. A taxi–$12 at the tourist stand but only $3.50 after haggling with a local driver–turns you out into Hoi An, a delightfully quiet, cool, and picturesque town utterly unlike Ho Chi Minh City. You are delighted at this, especially when your hotel turns out to feature a bathtub, REAL hot water heater, and some very nice, real wooden furniture, tile floor, A/C, etc.–all for $16/night. (Really $20/night, but by now you know that the rack rate is bargainable if you’re staying a few days. 😉 )

At any rate, I’m now in Hoi An, which is a lovely little town filled with pretty French-Vietnamese architecture, silk/paper lanterns, Chinese paintings, modern watercolors, a small but picturesque market, and a nice Japanese bridge where local fishermen unload their catch in the early mornings. In short, it’s a tourist trap, but a very nice one; more of a place to kick back and relax than a hyperaggressive Club Med. It’s a curious combination of Eastern and European, and definitely shows a lot of French influence.

(The French, if you missed the first chapter, “colonized” both Vietnam and Cambodia. There’s a rather funny section in the guidebook where they talk about the last emperor of Vietnam–he was basically a playboy who spent most of his time in Europe, and when the revolution came voluntarily stepped down (he wasn’t going to get killed for a throne, since he was busy running around with a Vietnamese mistress and some expensive French call girls). The French insisted that he resume his throne, he refused, and actually hid from the French in cinemas, cabarets, and casinos for some years before they caught him and shipped him back out to Vietnam to be emperor. He stepped down almost immediately and fled back to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life as a thoroughly dissipated playboy. A rather amusing sidelight on the whole colonial history/revolution thing.)

Incidentally, my guidebook says the French are/were trying to keep French the unofficial second language of Cambodia, providing foreign aid in exchange for having all classes, etc. taught in French. If so, they wasted their money (sorry Herve 😉 )–there are a few signs in French/English, but no one speaks it except very old people. (I am of course relieved by this, since I speak English fine but my French started out atrocious and has gotten worse.)

However, the French did thankfully leave some of their cuisine behind–you can buy excellent French bread all over both Cambodia and Vietnam, for next to nothing. (In Cambodia it was 12.5 cents per baguette; in Vietnam, I think it’s about half that.) This makes both Cambodia and Vietnam a great place to go foraging–a couple baguettes, some cheese, some fruit from the market, and you’re set for the day. Much easier than trying to carry a bag of noodles around.

(The Vietnamese reputedly have a saying: “The Americans left us Coke, but the French left us poetry.” This strikes me as *almost* a reasonable summary of America’s cultural contributions to the world, but they left out Baywatch. 😉 )

At any rate, I am thoroughly exhausted–last night’s hotel turned out to be a real rathole as well, so I haven’t gotten more than eight hours of sleep in two days & am correspondingly exhausted. (Last night’s hotel was a fan room, which looked OK, but turned out to be 90+ degrees and very stuffy–impossible to sleep.) So I’m going off to take a nap, after which I’ll walk around the town a bit more. It’s a very nice small town and much much cooler than HCMC, being 500 miles further north–subjectively, about 70 degrees and humid. (My internal thermometer has recalibrated for the tropics, so I’m not sure how warm it actually is.)

I’m going to try renting a bicycle and exploring a bit later–actually considering some distance cycling, it’s supposed to be a good way to see the area, and it’ll be a good way to find out just how horribly my quads have degenerated. I think if I can get some distance cycling in now, I might not be in such bad shape when get back the U.S. and start retraining. Besides, it’s a great excuse to wear one of those cute Vietnamese pointy hats. Gotta keep the sun off, after all. 😉

(Hmm…maybe I should glue one of those to my helmet for AIDS Lifecycle. But I think it’d clash with the go-go-girl bikini top and pink tutu…oh, decisions. 😉 )

off to fall over,

Tien

P.S. Vietnam, unlike Cambodia, is a great place to be an Asian-American solo female traveler; in fact the best place so far, since people are very clear on the idea of Asian-American (the idea doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere–you’re just a funny kind of Asian). I suspect this is because a lot of Vietnamese want to emigrate to the U.S., or have siblings who did–so they “get” the concept. Regardless, being of Asian descent here means you’re one of the family, rather than an easy mark. I am WAY relieved; Cambodia was really stressful.

Btw, dont’ take my experience with Cambodia as typical; European tourists, including solo female travelers I’ve met, have reported Cambodians to be “very friendly” and really loved the place. I don’t understand this one bit, given my experience, but apparently they don’t hassle non-Asian women. So if you aren’t one, you might well have a better time of it than I did.

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more thoughts on Vietnam

Today is Christmas, and I’ve been thinking about forgiveness. I visited the War Remnants Museum today (formerly the American War Crimes Museum) and it makes me awed–and humbled–that the Vietnamese have basically forgiven (and now welcome) Americans. To Americans, it’s the war where 50,000 U.S. soldiers died. But to the Vietnamese, it’s the war where *three million* Vietnamese died. Half a million Vietnamese have birth defects related to the spraying of Agent Orange, most of the infrastructure was destroyed, and their ecology wrecked–60% of the mangrove forests and 25% of the forest cover destroyed with Agent Orange. Up until 1993, the U.S. effectively impeded rebuilding by blocking access to international funds.

As far as I know, we’ve never apologized (or offered reparations) for any of it–despite a general consensus that the war was a mistake, and that we should never have been there. In the U.S., if you hear about the Vietnam War, it’s either mistreatment of POWs or our several thousand MIAs–well, after the war, *three hundred thousand* Vietnamese were MIAs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Vietnamese hated us; they certainly have cause. We should never have been there; they suffered ten or twenty times as much as the U.S. did; and they’re still suffering for it now.

And yet they’re past all that. In fact, they’re extremely friendly to Americans, and quite curious about the U.S.. I try to imagine the U.S.’s response to losing three million Americans, and the word “carpet bombing” comes to mind. Comparing our behavior lately with the Vietnamese, I can’t help wondering if perhaps we as a Christian country aren’t perhaps a little short on Christian forgiveness. If we’d had done to us what we did to the Vietnamese, I don’t think we’d rest until we’d conquered the offending country and obliterated any trace of potential threat (that’s what we’ve historically done, and are about to try in Iraq); it amazes me that they’re willing to let the past be. I don’t think we, as a country, could do it.

Cambodia is the same; astonishingly, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, many of the KR demobilized, went home, and started tilling the rice fields. At the Tuol Sleng Museum, I thought one of the most amazing displays was a series of photos taken of former S-21 guards and workers, who have gone back to village life and are working as rice farmers, carpenters, etc. It’s not that there wasn’t a lot of bitterness, or a lot of hatred. There was (and is). But in large part the former Khmer Rouge and the Cambodians who suffered under them are living together peacefully, and the country has largely put the affair in the past–which frankly amazes me, after only twenty years. I think this is in large part because of their Buddhist faith, which teaches nonviolence and karmic redemption. “An eye for an eye” just isn’t a part of their culture, as it is ours.

This, of course, causes other problems (I didn’t say it was entirely positive). One of the reasons corruption is so common in Asian countries is because the culture as a whole isn’t into social crusades–very inclined to let things go, and trust karma to punish wrongdoers. “Sin” here is a purely individual concept; each person has to live with the consequences of their actions. Christianity is fundamentally rooted in a war between good and evil–God, an independent entity, punishes sinners/fights Satan, and Christians are obliged to join God in that war. (Thus, the American emphasis on “justice” and our tendency to take off on self-righteous crusades).

Buddhism is totally different–it doesn’t recognize the existence of sin at all, only actions and consequences. If you do X, Y naturally happens; no interventionist deity is involved, it’s a law of nature. If you sin, you suffer, much as if you drop a pen, it falls to the floor.

(Side note: Buddhists have a very interesting “take” on the Book of Genesis. It makes perfect sense to them, but as a Buddhist parable: Adam started out with nirvana, but once he ate of the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil–i.e., came up with the *concept* of good/bad, he created desire, thus suffering, and was cast out of the Garden of Eden (nirvana), entirely as a consequence of his actions. The concept of God as an active entity during any of this just doesn’t seem to cross their minds, though; the Fall was the creation of the *idea* of good and evil, not disobedience to God.

I found this utterly fascinating; it’s interesting how one religion looks at (and misinterprets) another. For example, Wat Suan Mok mentioned that Christianity also includes the idea of eliminating the self, noting that the cross is symbolically an “I” with a line through it, i.e. crossed-out “I”, “no self”. I found this neat because it’s so utterly logical (to a Buddhist), and so utterly wrong. Makes me seriously wonder whether one culture is ever equipped to comment on another. (You are hereby warned that any of the cultural interpretations I’ve made may be, and probably are, every bit as wildly inaccurate. This will not prevent me from making them, however. 😉 ))

At any rate, Buddhism also emphasizes impermanence, calmness, and letting go of worldly passions, which undoubtedly contributes to this unexpected forgiveness as well. I can’t help wishing that the U.S., as a country, were a little more inclined in that direction. Lately we’ve had an alarming tendency to embark on crusades, without (IMO) serious thought about consequences or our membership in the world community. I look at the situation in Iraq and think–on many different levels–“Oh no…not another Vietnam. Please, not again.”

(Probably the worst thing I saw in the War Remnants Museum wasn’t anything to do with weaponry, at least not directly: it was the photos of deformed children, the results of widespread dioxin use. There was a jar with two preserved, dead fetuses/babies: one had a horribly deformed head–misshapen, with one of the eyes was missing–and equally deformed body. The other was a pair of mangled, conjoined Siamese twins. One photo was of a man, with normal size head, no more than two feet tall; his arms and legs deformed into bizarre, stringy curves; his tiny back horribly hunchbacked, with a big protuberance from his chest in front (as big as the hump on his back). One of the captions said there were half a million dioxin deformations in Vietnam, as a result of the Agent Orange. And they’ve still forgiven us. The mind reels.)

I’m not in any way suggesting, incidentally, that the situation in Iraq is simple (or that there weren’t justifications for our being in Vietnam, either). I’m also not anti-American at all; being the daughter of immigrants, I’m quite aware that there are plenty of worse places to live. (I could have grown up in China; I’m very glad to be an American.)

But I don’t think the U.S. is perfect, and I don’t we had any real understanding of what we were getting ourselves into/the moral aspects of what we were doing in Vietnam. (I frankly think we still haven’t really confronted the moral responsibility for our actions in the Vietnam war.) I think in a very similar way, we don’t understand, and haven’t thought about, what we’re about to do in Iraq. Among other things, “an eye for an eye” is very much part of the Muslim faith–very unlike Buddhism. i don’t think we’ve really considered this; I think we’re letting ourselves in for decades of terrorism and war, in exchange for ousting someone who isn’t–currently–a serious threat. But I hope I’m wrong.

On another tangent, this one to do with propaganda–I thought it was very odd that the Cambodian government is effectively trying to close Tuol Sleng. They’ve withdrawn financial support from it, so the museum doesn’t have money to preserve the documents–so says the museum flier–or to keep up the buildings, either. But it turns out that Tuol Sleng was initially used as a propaganda tool by the Vietnamese, to justify their invasion and occupation of Cambodia (the Cambodians welcomed them as saviors–the Khmer Rouge were that bad), so I suspect that’s part of it. (There are also a lot of former Khmer Rouge in the current government, which may be more important.)

At any rate, justice vs. moving on and exaggerating atrocities as propaganda are very much themes in both Cambodia and Vietnam; the War Remnants Museum started out as the American War Crimes Museum, for example. (It also used to contain anti-Chinese exhibits until they normalized relations with China.) Now that relations are normalized and the countries are friends again, it’s a reasonably balanced exhibit IMO; it’s funny how history changes over time, isn’t it?)

Anyway, my apologies for the rambling–I seem to have conjoined three different (and probably very good) essays into a single piece of incoherent mush. This is largely because I got almost no sleep last night and got badly dehydrated while running around today (some people have no sense whatsoever 😉 )–so I’m not in any way up to par. So I’m off to get dinner and catch up on sleep, hopefully to remedy this. 😉

Tomorrow at 6am I catch a flight north to Danang (in central Vietnam), from which I’ll catch a bus south to Hoi An. After that last bus ride, I decided that I’ve had it with long-distance ground travel in the Third World; it’s OK for short hops, but not for long hauls. (Average speed seems to be about 10-15 mph; so covering 100 miles literally takes all day. I’ve finally abandoned my Western assumption that ground travel averages 50-60 mph; here, that kind of speed is purely a pipe dream.)

So I will be flying from southern Vietnam to Hoi An, then doing the short ground hop from Hoi An to Hue, most likely by train–the scenery’s supposed to be *gorgeous*. After that I’m not sure–I may fly north to Hanoi and then fly from Hanoi to Vientiane, Laos; or I may be brave and try a land crossing into Laos. Most of it depends on what I find there.

enough rambling–off for food, then sleep. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll drop you an email from central Vietnam. 😉

Tien

P.S. The Vietnamese–at least the ones I’ve dealt with so far–are extremely friendly, and wonderful to deal with; quite a change from Cambodia. Despite a horrible beginning (which I still want to write up later–it’s a great story), I’ve really enjoyed Vietnam so far. hoping it continues…!

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Hello from Ho Chi Minh City!

…and I hope you all are having a much merrier Christmas than I am. Yesterday’s “four-hour boat trip” turned into a 13-hour nightmare–well, actually, up until we arrived, it was only 13 hours of standard Third World travel (I’ll write more about that later). After we arrived at 2am, though, we spent half an hour tramping up endless steps (with 40-lb pack, thank you very much) trying to find a hotel room that would please my temporary traveling companions. (I have since jettisoned them.)

Finally we found one place that suited them, a very-expensive-for-the-location hotel that turned out to be too noisy to sleep (right on the main road). I put in earplugs at 5am, only to discover at 6am that I had an east-facing window with paper-thin curtain, so I still couldn’t sleep (too much light). So finally I got up, packed my bags, and am now popping into travel agents to get me OUT of this godforsaken city. I want to get somewhere quiet where I can unwind and relax, and it ain’t gonna happen here. I am definitely not up to another 11 hours on a bus, so I am taking the next flight out to ANYWHERE. I think.

In this case “anywhere” is most likely Hue, Hanoi, or Nha Tranh, but I’m not sure where yet. Hue is in Central Vietnam, and will probably be my final destination since it’s near the Lao border crossing. Hanoi is (reputedly) a great arts and cultural center, but it’s also all the way on the other side of Vietnam–so I would have to fly 1700 km (1000 miles?) to get there and then travel another 500 miles to get to Hue and the border crossing. Nha Tranh is a beach town about a third of the way between HCMC and Hue. It’s reputed to have one or two good diving sites, so it might not be the worst of places to unwind.

Nonetheless, I’m crabby and in a vicious temper this morning. I hope I don’t get hassled by any moto drivers, because if I do, there’s going to be blood on the floor. At the moment, anyone who gets in my way is going to get their head ripped off and shoved someplace bloody unfortunate. Hopefully, I’ll get breakfast and a plane ticket before that happens.

Anyway, I wish you all a very merry Christmas, and hope yours is going better than mine…I saw some very interesting sights on the way into Vietnam, I’ll write more about them later, once I’ve had a chance to relax and unwind. (Hopefully elsewhere!)

Tien