No people or animals were harmed in the making of these photographs.

So it was brought to my attention that one of my previous posts was a bit alarming in its wording. I was talking about the day I went to the Bookworm and then to a cafe afterwards to "sniper shoot justice ladies walking from the balcony." let me explain...

For my photography course, one of our assignments was to take pictures of these women who carry stuff around in these hanging baskets on a yoke. My professor described them as looking like lady justice with her balance scales, and the name just stuck. I was shooting photos of justice ladies from a second story balcony with a zoom lens, in what I have been calling a "sniper shot."

No people or animals were harmed in the making of these photographs.

Blog undates! Yes! Finally!

hey everyone,

Here is what I have been up to since I last posted here, back in Saigon. Sorry about that. I have published this in a few installments in an attempt to organize the stories. But I may have just made it confusing to people who aren't me...

I leave Vietnam in less than a week so am busy finishing everything up here. Then I am going to Shanghai, China to visit my cousin Helene and her family.

Today we went to visit Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Creepiest thing I have ever seen. They have him preserved in a glass coffin and on display. So we all walked through the room and saw Uncle Ho, in the flesh. And we visited the museum which told a lot about his life but also a lot about the communist movements, here in Vietnam and abroad. It was really interesting but they also had a lot of things like "This is the stone Ho Chi Minh used to scrub off the terrestrial leeches when he went walking through the forest." It is strange to me how they have kept all of these little things from Ho's life. I was thinking about this and at internship as I was editing a long article about Ho Chi Minh's family. As I was reading it, I was taken aback a few times from how they talk about his family being "patriots" and fighting to change the government. It just seemed backward. But then I had an epiphany: the way the Vietnamese feel about the war in the last half century and about Ho Chi Minh, is comparable to how we, as Americans, feel about our Revolutionary War and the founding fathers.

And now I am finishing up final projects and studying for my Vietnamese exam.

See y'all soon,
love,
Maggie

MELA Real in the Angkor 2009 Nov 26-29

Eliza, Lily, Alaina and I went to Cambodia for Thanksgiving. We have a friend from Union who gradutated 2 years ago and now is working for an NGO in Siem Reap. And we wanted to see Angkor Wat.

Thanksgiving day, we flew in and so got to have a veritable feast of Khmer food for our Thanksgiving dinner. We had amok, and lok lak, and curry and this traditional Khmer soup. Everything was amazing! Then the next day we got up really early to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. The hotel we stayed at, Encore Angkor, was so fantastic and they arranged a car for us. Our driver was the greatest ever! We didn't have a solid idea of which temples we wanted to see each day and he suggested really great itineraries and was funny and helped us find places for lunch when we said we wanted to eat traditional Khmer foods.

So after we saw the sun rise, we had breakfast. Then went out the the temples. Bayon, Bapuon, Elephant Terrace, Leper King Terrace, Royal Palace (all these are actually part of Angkor Thom), Ta Keo, and Ta Prohm. We ate lunch, then saw Angkor Wat. Day two we saw: Banteay Srei, East Mebon, Neak Pean, and Preah Khan.

I liked Angkor Wat, of course. The bas-reliefs were everything they have been made out to be. My favorite part of this temple though was much more obscure. We had bought a guide book for the temples which told us about this apsara statue which was smiling so that you could see her teeth. She is the only one of 2,000 apsaras at Angkor Wat which smiles like this. And we found her. I was very proud of us.

Ta Prohm was also cool; this temple was featured in Tomb Raider when Angelina Jolie sees the little girl by the tree with jasmine and then runs through the door, before shooting up the place and fighting the stone monsters. We saw the tree and door where that scene was filmed. We were going to recreate the whole scene in still pictures but then the inside of the temple in the movie was not really at Ta Prohm.

My favorite temple of them all was Bayon. This temple had fewer paths and such; you can just climb all over it. Awesome.

this post is taken straight from my journal Nov. 25

this post is taken straight from my journal, which is why it sounds a little different...

Today turned out to be an awesome day! I started late to class and was consequentially in a bad mood. But then after class, I had a stroke of genius and decided to go to The Bookworm, this little bookshop near the Temple of Literature and Fine Arts Museum. Bookstores always make me feel good. Always. I took my camera and got some great pictures along the way. I met a woman collecting donations for the blind and disabled for the Red Cross. Karma points check. The Bookworm was perfect, exactly what I could hope for. All the books were second-hand, my favorite. Second-hand clothes and books and such just have so much character. It is like being a tangible part of history, connected to every other person who owned that item. The staff was so great! It made me miss Books on the Common, the bookstore I work at back home. As I was buying my books, the small staff and the other two customers in the store got to talking about the books I was buying, books that the others were buying, what we all liked to read. Exactly my kind of people! It was such a good discussion just between people who are passionate about books.

When I left, I walked along Hoan Kiem lake and saw some men out in a boat but couldn’t figure out what they were doing. I stopped to watch for a while. There were three older Vietnamese women watching it too, near me. I said, “Xin chào” and they smiled and stared at me. They kept smiling and staring and speaking in Vietnamese, obviously about me. I did not mind, as I think I usually would (I thank The Bookworm for my very good mood), they were sweet old ladies and it was really just funny that they were so interested in me. Then this younger Vietnamese woman wandered up and she spoke some English so she told me that they said I was beautiful and had a child’s face. She said they were not from the city so were unaccustomed to foreigners. It was really amusing.

Then I went to Highland’s Coffee (like Starbucks) to sniper shoot justice ladies walking from the balcony. I was sitting by myself but talked to this couple there with their whole family from Australia. They were super sweet! It was nice to talk to them, just me. Sometimes I get lost in the crowd, even/ especially with a close group like ours. Then this group of four people from England sat next to me. One of the men was taking a picture and I offered to take it for him so that they could all be in the group shot they were trying for. I sat back down after and after a minute or two the first man came over and offered to take my picture with my camera. He said his daughter had traveled alone a few years ago and had said her biggest trouble was that she never was able to send pictures of herself home because no one to take them. It was so sweet! It was so like a parent looking out for me. It is getting to the point where I am ready to go home.

Sapa-- November 11 - 15, 2009

The last five days were spent in the ethnic village of Sapa.

We got to take another overnight train to get there (yay). It was actually pretty chilly because it is slightly more northern but much higher elevation.

I made friends with a woman named Chi, of the Black Hmong people. Admittedly, she probably only talked to me because she wanted me to buy some trinkets from her, but it was still really nice talking to her. I was looking for the lake to walk around and she pointed me in the right direction and then walked with me. We talked about her kids and her village, it was nice.

We also climbed Mt. Fancypants, the highest mountain in Vietnam and in all of IndoChina. The name is actually Fansipan but because that is several degrees less fun than Fancypants, my name for the mountain will be used exclusively in this blog. It took us a day to climb up; we hiked for about 2 hours to a semi-permanent camp where we ate lunch, then hiked another roughly 2 hours to the second camp, where we had dinner and slept. We had hired porters who carried food and sleeping bags for us, which was great, except the sleeping bags they provided were not warm enough by a long shot. and we slept on a bamboo platform which really just let the cold air get under us to suck our heat that way. So it was a very cold, uncomfortable night and in the morning, most of the group decided to turn back and not see the summit. So seven of us (out of 15) started up the 2 hour hike to the top ("a geographical oddity, two weeks from everywhere!"). Our friend Alaina, however, fell pretty hard about 30 minutes in; she was fine but shaken up and had lost her momentum to keep climbing. So she turned back and the six of us went on. The top of Fancypants was very windy and foggy so there was not much of a view but still completely worth it! We had conquered the tallest mountain in Vietnam, when others had fallen short. We had braved the cold and the wind and the steep path to get to that point and the fog just made it seem more intense. We came, we saw, we conquered!

Saturday November 7, 2009-- the day Vietnam blocked Facebook

... title says it all...

We discovered this when we got back from Sapa and couldn't stalk people from back home for news. I don't think I fully appreciated before Facebook and how convenient it was for keeping in touch with people. Some people have found a way to get around this block but I am curious about what life is like without Facebook now. So for the next month, I am doing without Facebook...

email is probably the best way to get in touch with me now: wilsonm2@union.edu

Ha Long Bay Oct 25

We went to Ha Long Bay on the weekend of October 23. It was so amazing! Actually the most beautiful place I think I have ever been! And we did not have an academic agenda so it was just relaxing. We wend for a boat ride all around the bay on Saturday and went kayaking swimming. The boat had a second level, a deck to sit out in the sun, from which we jumped for swimming. It was so fun. I had never realized before that every other jump is less than a second so there is not time to think about it before it is over. The time to think made it scarier and much, much better.

We went "trekking" in the national forest (Mark likes to apply the term "trekking" to anything from a hike down a road to a visit a village to hiking Mt. Fancypants, thus the quotation marks). We met a couple of German guys on the trail and Eliza got to bust out her German to talk to them. This picture shows Eliza climbing on this big tower on top of the mountain. There were huge bees but also great views.

And we toured a cave which had been converted into a hospital during the American War. There was a natural cave but they had added a heavy metal door and formed rooms with concrete. There were doctor offices, operating rooms (really sketchy with single bare bulbs), patient rooms. They even had a movie theater for morale; this was on the roof of the artificial rooms, with the natural cave ceiling. It was really cool!

The post in which I tell you a little bit about classes and internship in Hanoi...

We are continuing all of our classes here that we were taking in Saigon, Vietnamese language, Vietnamese culture, and photography. We are also doing internships. The language class here is much less effective but I still manage to learn a lot. I am dissappointed because we were supposed to take a placement test to divide us into levels. When we got there, the teachers heard that we only had 3 weeks of instruction from Saigon and figured that in that time we couldn't have learned enough to take the test and not enough to be at different levels. So we did not take the test, and were divided arbitrarily into three classes. It is really frustrating to me because three of the people in my class just do not seem that interested in learning Vietnamese. They always look like they are not paying attention in class; the teacher explains something and invariably, one of them asks him what he just explained 2 minutes before.

I find the class really interesting. I think I am learning a lot of the language; I can say most simple sentences and understand much more than I expected to after only 3 months.

My internship is really great! I have been working for Thế Giới Publishers, an international publishing house. I edit the English translations, which are generally speaking error-riddled and incomprehnsible. But I like the work a lot. I have worked on articles about economics, rice production, Ho Chi Minh's family and such; so I know have some knowledge about all of those.

Ten Day Trip 10/2 - 10/10

The much anticipated newsy post...

Sorry! It has been way to long since I posted something new for you all. I am going to fill you in on everything I have been up to but in an attempt to make it better organized, I am going to post in chunks of time. Here is the trip we took from Saigon to Hanoi back in October:


October 2, 2009: We left Saigon late yesterday afternoon. Several hours on a bus later, we arrived in Da Lat. This city was beautiful with a big lake and post office shaped like the Eiffel Tower. We visited a Zen Buddhist monastery and had lunch at a local farmer's house. The food was delicious!

October 3, 2009: We rode elephants today! Coolest term abroad ever! You only wish you got to ride elephants that moved whole trees out of the way! yeah that is right, the elephants moved trees out of the way that had fallen in our path. Our tour guide, Viet, told us a fantastic fable about elephants a few days ago. According to legend, the elephant used to have six legs, of which he was very proud. The dog had three legs and the duck just one. They were upset becuase they felt that they should have gotten more legs. They talked to God who realized His mistake but instead of making new legs, he asked the elephant to share his extra legs. The elephant conceded but asked the dog and duck to be very careful with his donated legs. That is why the duck sleeps with his legs tucked under him and why the dog lifts its leg to pee.

October 4, 2009: We were in Nha Trang today and went to the beach this morning. Very beautiful. Then we saw some Cham ruins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa).

October 5, 2009: We visited My Lai today. That was really intense; it was eerily quiet and they had houses set up like they might have been immediately after the massacre. There were a few trees in which you could still see the bullet holes.

October 6, 2009: I love Hoi An, partially because we actually stayed put for more than a few hours. We had lunch at this cooking school where they taught us how to make Vietnamese food. I made fresh spring rolls, banh xeo, and chicken kebabs. It was awesome!

October 7, 2009: We visited My Son today, another exapmle of Cham temples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n). It was really cool!

October 8, 2009: We left Hoi An this morning to go to Hue. Ate dinner at the house of the (former) Princess. Our host was really awesome. He used to be a history professor but had to stop when the government changed because they had a different way of remembering and teaching history.

October 10, 2009: Last day of our ten day trip! We went on a boat on the Perfume River to see another pagoda this morning. Pretty fun. And then we took an overnight train to Hanoi. I was so excited about being on a sleeper train!!! Getting on board was a bit stressful: the train only stops for a few minutes so we had people on the train pulling bags up, people on the platform guarding bags and handing them up. The conductors came over to yell at us to get on the train already but Lana (Mark's wife and secretly superwoman), stood them down and gave us time to get it all together. We all made it and all of our stuff made it, the train was just as fun as I hoped, and we got into Hanoi at 4:30 AM.

And so I am now in Hanoi.

Pictures!

hello everyone,

As the title of this post would suggest, there are indeed pictures in this post. But first, a bit about what I have been up to. I am still taking Vietnamese language classes and if I say so myself, I am getting pretty good! We are going to be filmed learning Vietnamese by a local news station this week which will be terribly embarassing because we still don't know enough to make good news. We learned how to order food today. I would have thought that that would be in the first week because it is pretty fundamental to living without a kitchen but it has worked out. Then at lunch we tried to order in Vietnamese and the waitress laughed at us but then corrected our pronunciation so hopefully we will do better next time.

Lily and I went to pick up our ao dai today but they were not ready. They material we had picked out was no longer available (they have the material in another location where they sew the dresses I guess). So we picked out new fabric and they will be ready on Monday. Pictures will follow; I am so excited about this!

We went to a Cao Dai temple and Cu Chi tunnels last Saturday. The Cao Dai temple was beautiful! We went to see the worship ceremony at noon and it was really impressive. There were so many people praying in the ceremony! The building was really colorful and gorgeous. Apparantly, God gave them instuctions on how to construct the temple in the 1920s when the religion was founded. They have only three saints: Victor Hugo is one of them. This seems strange as Victor Hugo had nothing to do with this religion at all. But Cai Daiism is completely unique to Vietnam.

The Cu Chi tunnels were really interesting. The local people in this region called Cu Chi played a big role in fighting the Americans in the Vietnam War. Their villages were being bombed and so they dug this tunnel system in which they could all live for up to 12 days at a time. These tunnels allowed them to disappear in a moment during a fight and hide and otherwise mess up the American offense. The tunnels themselves were tiny though. We went through a short segment and we had to crouch down and we still barely fit. But they had been expanded to almost twice their original size. Veitnamese people are smaller but that is still incredible! Our guide through this area was telling us about an experience he had a couple of years ago when a mother of one American soldier came to visit the tunnels. Her son was killed in this region during the war. They had a memorial service for this soldier and all his fallen compatriots. Both this mother and the guide started apologizing for what happened during the war and crying. It was so emotional that the guide started crying as he told us the story.

Everyone I have met so far in this country has been so nice to us! The one exception was a man we talked to at dinner a few days ago. He was talking about us before he talked to us, saying things like, "Oh looks like the sorority moved in next to us. Wonder what they're here for." Then he turns to us and says, "I am very sorry to interupt your dinner but I was wondering what you all are doing in Vietnam?" So we told him we are here studying on a term abroad and we are from America. His response: "Oh so you all are from snooty liberal arts colleges?" One of my friends tried to make a sort of joke out of his blatant rudeness and said "Oh I don't think we can talk to you anymore because you called us snooty." And his retort was, "Let me guess you voted for Hilary didn't you?" Like because we did not want to be insulted to our faces by this man who was so clearly an idiot, we must be some kind of crazy feminists. I do not get angry very easily but I kind of wanted to slap this guy. Didn't. But the conversation went downhill quickly and ended shortly afterward. Luckily, he was from New York City so the Vietnamese record is still clean.




As promised, here are some photos of Ho Chi Minh City. These photos were taken for my photo class so hopefully you will find them to be interesting, good photos.

My face is just always shiney here because it is so hot and humid. Deal with it. I do. : ) This is my friend Lily and me at a rooftop restaurant.







The traffic in this city is ridiculous but apparently is worse in Hanoi. Everybody drives a motorbike here. There would be no room to move if they all switched to cars. But they are all crazy drivers and the traffic lights are more like suggestions. I am very careful crossing the street.

This was in the touristy center of town and motorbike drivers like these harass passersby (especially very pale, Anglo passerby) to take rides in their taxis. "Good morning. Where you going? Motorbike?" It was quaint at first but got old quickly.

Really, all of the telephone wires look like this here. I think it is such a mess because the city got cell phones and internet and such really quickly and so wires just got put where they fit without much of a master plan. Also, the wires seem too low to me but Vietnamese people as a whole are much shorter than Americans so it doesn't matter as much to them but I have to be vigilant not to be hit in the face by low hanging wires. Also, when it rains (which is often) street vendors put out tarps to keep dry and the strings are right at American-height eye level. Mild dangers ready to snare unsuspecting American girls.

There is a sort of perpetual costruction project going on here right now. Almost all the sidewalks are ripped up/ in the process of being re-done. This was some sort of project they were doing in an empty lot. I included it here for you all to see because I just like the photo, I don't know why.

This is a view of the city at night from that rooftop restaurant we went to. Really we went for this view. All of the little dashes are motorbikes.

I will write again soon. Thanks for sticking it out through this extensive blog post. I hope you found it worth the length.

love to you all,

Maggie

Successful Vietnamese conversations

So I usually have language class every weekday for 4 hours. Today, being the end of our first week, we only had half as much class and then took a mini field trip to practice speaking. Our teacher, Cô Trinh, (we actually have three teachers but Cô Trinh is our favorite) took us to the zoo and we practiced everything we knew. It was really nerve-wracking at first, walking up to perfect strangers and not having a solid grasp on the language, but then got easier! Some people were difficult to understand, either from talking too quickly or using vocabulary which I do not yet know. And I scared one woman who was working at one of the concession stands. I walked over and said "Xin chào. Tôi là sinh viên. Tôi học tiếng Việt. Bác tên là gì?" which means, "Hello. I am a student. I am studying Vietnamese language. What is your name?" Admittedly, it must have been somewhat unsettling to have some strange girl ask her name first thing. But then she had some conversation I could not follow at all with her friend until a security guard came over and reassured her and then she very warily answered me. Most people were very friendly though. And I successfully conversed with several Vietnamese zoo patrons and one kindly old French man. And Darwin, you will be happy to hear that my French is giving my Vietnamese a wierd accent instead of the other way around.

I have realized that the one of the most difficult parts of this term abroad is eating. Not because the food is not delicious, but because I have to first communicate what I want, when I do not have any idea what the strange foods are. Sometime it would be nice not to have to fend for myself here. Regardless, the food is amazing and it is educational if challenging to get food from Vietnamese restaurants for every meal.

We also went to the fine arts museum today which was very interesting. I loved the architecture of the building almost more than the art itself. It used to be an art school, built by the French around the turn of the century. It had all these fantastic wrought iron railings and an old fashion lift. Alyse, there were only a few paintings of boats but you can guess that those were my favorites (I have noticed that in painting galleries, my favorites are always paintings of boats or nautical scenes; not like a conscious decision but just something about them...). Then we went to a moderm commercial art gallery which was not as enjoyable because it was very hot and stuffy! It made breathing somewhat troublesome but I lived through the experience.

On the walk back from that, my friend Lily and I stopped at a bookstore (I couldn't resist) and I got Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in Vietnamese. Wish me luck on this experiment... Then we stopped at a shop to enquire about áo dài which is a traditional outfit in Vietnam and they tailor it specially for each person. I plan to go back on Sunday to order one.

Then we went to karaoke with some Vietnamse friends. Super fun but much as you would expect, not much to report.

This has been a pretty typical day here in Ho Chi Minh City: learn Vietnamese, study/practice Vietnamese, eat, learn about Vietnamese culture, eat, hang out with friends, study more.

Tomorrow we go to a Cao Đài monastary and the Củ Chi tunnels. I will write about those once I have been and actually know something about them.

love to all,
Maggie

ps. photos are still in the works...

I am here.

Xin chao!

I am here in Vietnam and sorry that it has taken me a few days to set up this blog for you to read. The internet connection is somewhat troublesome. I am staying in a guesthouse (which is like a cross between a motel and a youth hostel) and we only have internet by piggy-backing off nearby networks, which is unreliable. but we seem to have found the spot for it in the courtyard down the hall, which is where i am now. Photos will follow when i have a good chunk of time to wait for them to load.

It has been downpouring for the last 30 minutes here and every few hours since we arrived. It is the rainy season but they say it is almost over.

I started language classes yesterday and already can carry on very limited and stilted conversation. we can talk about name, nationality, phone number, and profession. and I can count to one thousand.

The food is great here and really cheap. My favorite breakfast choice is ban mai (I am not sure how it is spelled but it is pronounced something like that). It is a little bagette filled with egg and veggies and some sort of soy sauce and the best one I have found so far had cheese in it.

Everything here is so new and exciting and it would take too long to write all of it here. I will write again soon with updates. Thanks for checking in on my adventures abroad!

love,
Maggie