Intermission - Drill Baby Drill

No. Not really.

Because the vote is a week away and because anyone who knows me, realizes that I rarely fail to form a political opinion about just about anything, I must make a claim about where my vote will go this year.

A couple of months ago Jason asked me what issues this year are the trump cards that could swing my vote one way or another. After a bit of thought and a realization that this election holds a whole new set of deal-breakers than the last election, much like the rest of America, I finally settled on a solid and logical plan for the reduction of American’s reliance on foreign oil being the issue that seems most comprehensive of all reasons I would prefer one candidate to another. Wait….that was important to me during the Bush-Gore elections too, but I digress.

Anyways, Obama’s got some good things to say about this. He wants to ensure a programmatic regulation of the financial system by creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank. Through this bank he plans to create millions of jobs in support of building more solid and green mass transit-systems, and up-keeping the ones we have now. He also has planned some detailed goals about cap-and-trade programs to reduce our emissions and require that by 2012, ten percent of our electricity is generated from renewable sources. Meanwhile McCain chants “drill baby drill“. A long term move that the Department of Energy claims will be “insignificant” both in results and effect.

Since I would assume most of my reliable readers here have already decided who they will vote for on November 6th, I’m not writing this to sway anyone (aside from maybe encouraging any potential Brady bailers to stay firm when it comes to punching that little hole). I’m just saying that all of the issues that are most important to me (including positive diplomacy with middle-east regions and bringing our troops home, a suffering global economy, environmental concerns, etc.) seem to be very obviously intertwined and therefore my choice this week is an easy one.

I’m also very excited to finally vote in a swing state for once and I hope Colorado is the new Florida, leaving the whole world in balance while the absentee ballots pour in……

Travel Blog; Part Three (of Four)

I didn’t tour the Literature Museum in Hanoi. Rather I stormed it. After taking a motorbike taxi ride that, given the small distance covered was a significant rip-off geared toward the naïve traveler, I was finished being taken for my “money” in Vietnam. I pushed past the throng of Japanese tourists taking pictures of such useless figures as trashcans and billboards towards the interior of the museum which blessedly, was a aesthetically calming courtyard. A delightful retreat for a tired mind and body.

Debating every price really takes it out of me. Especially when the locals insist that you give them more than the price you agreed on and know just enough English to give you some far-fetched reason why they agreed to a price, but the conditions of the trip or transaction warranted more from my pocket book. Usually the circumstance allowed for me to give the negotiated amount and turn my back and simply walk away. This time at the museum however, I didn’t have the correct change so of course the taxi driver sped off with my larger bill. Sitting in the courtyard next to me was two 40-something American men, one of whom enthusiastically commented to the other, “Did you hear that tour guide say this place is where they used to train kids to Kung-fu?” Surely I don't act like those kinds of tourists. Such banter only served to irritate me further so with a very blatant roll of my eyes, I continued my journey inward to the next stop in the museum which happened to be a small room with a few chairs set up to listen to Vietnamese women play traditional instruments. Ahhh what a retreat this was. Much to my disappointment, the ladies only played for 30 minutes. I would have listened to them play those weird looking instruments for hours to sooth away the building tension I felt while traveling Vietnam, getting royally ripped off at every turn. As the ladies were packing their instruments up, I wandered up to the tip jar and of course, did what anyone else would in my position. I gave significantly more than I had paid for taxi rides all week.

The morning I left Vietnam on a flight to Bangkok, I had to ease through an alley past a man carrying a barely-live chicken upside-down by the feet, with it’s wigs splayed out across nearly the entire alley, feathers flying everywhere. Yes, I said to myself. It’s time to go home. A Buddhist proverb that I read recently says that nothing like traveling makes you realize where you home is. I guess I understand the concept here, but I would venture to say that Buddha (or whoever actually said this) failed to point out the significance of making one’s home fluid and transitional. Littleton is my home that I think is referenced in this statement, but I have certainly felt “at home” many places like Denver, Oklahoma and now Thailand.

These experiences in Vietnam left me yearning for some delicious Pad See Eww and the friendly Thai-English blend of conversation with motor-taxi drivers in Saraburi, while they genuinely drive around lost taking me home and actually get stuck in traffic jams, but of course never charge me extra for it :)

Travel Blog; Part Two (of Four)

According to the statistics at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, 8 million Vietnamese died during war with the U.S. and around two-thirds of those were civilian casualties. You do the math. The number of people caught in the crossfire is staggering. During the 20th century Vietnam was also involved with two other major wars with the French and the Chinese on their turf. The fact that a white chick can safely travel solo in this once war-torn country is a true testament to the progressive resiliency of an amazing culture.

Walking around major city centers of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, I didn’t really notice the average age of the locals until, well, I started noticing it. Unlike Thailand and the U.S., it is rare to see people older than 40 riding motorbikes to work on the streets, driving buses, walking in and out of banks, working at restaurants and hotels, etc. and I think, in part, the statistics claimed at the museum might explain why.

In the north region of Vietnam, I got to take a two day cruise on the beautiful emerald South China Sea through a rocky region known as Halong Bay. I had the best company of travelers on the cruise and spent one night on the deck under the stars talking American politics to two 20-something couples from Czech Republic and Sweden. They had the usual questions about why individual votes don’t really count in the U.S. (I tried my best to explain the math behind the electorate) and why Bush got elected a second time when people didn’t really like him after the first four years (for which I didn’t really have a reasonable explanation but I think the two are somehow related). The question that struck me the most is when they asked how it feels to tell the local people that I’m from the U.S. and what kind of reaction I get.

In Thailand, my students, friends in my community, and random taxi drivers looove that I’m from Am-er-ree-gaa. They love to cheer Obama, ask me about snow, sing to me their favorite Justin Timberlake tunes, and just recently have asked me to set their daughters up with Jason‘s friends. Conversely, there’s not much casual conversation about America in Vietnam. By the end of my trip I was barely whispering my answer when the locals would ask me where I came from. It’s not that I don’t love my country and am proud of my heritage of course. It’s just that many people my age in the states had parents that were severely impacted by the war in Vietnam and after observing the culture and reading up on a few statistics, I would venture to say that nearly everyone I talked to while traveling the beautiful country lost someone close to them at the hands of my government, often in a very harsh and violent way. It would be a sincere understatement to say that I hope their traumatic history will never repeat itself.

Travel Blog; Part One (of Four)

There I was after hour four on the bus through Cambodia’s remote frontier, linking my trip to the beautiful ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, to the next stage of my journey. I had grown weary of riding the bus by this point. Though the frontier is splendidly rural, unspoiled and certainly a joy to observe from the windows of a bus, I was ready to reach my destination, the capitol city Phnom Penh. That’s when my carriage to the capitol got caught in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen.(Including LA, Bangkok, and last December when Jason and I were vectored over Loveland pass on a Friday at midnight because of an accident in Eisenhower tunnel!) During the bus ride, I had been seated next to the only other traveler aboard, and while I was content to ride the jam out, he was not. After some confusion, a bit of translation, and lots of questions to the locals on the bus he determined with more than 50% certainty that we were about 7km from town, and it would take around four hours for our bus to clear the bottleneck of other buses, motorbikes, vans and cars, that were returning from a religious pilgrimage to the countryside by way of this one-lane, barley paved highway.

“Get off now, we’re walking,” he said. Playing the more than 50% odds and remembering my 5k ‘fun run’ times from my days in Stillwater enjoying the Juke Joint Jog, I figured it was worth a shot. So I got off and I walked, at breakneck speed jumping muddy ditches, dodging other Cambodian walkers, pushing and weaving through congested bottlenecks of motorbikes and moving horizontally through narrow breaks in bus traffic. At some point my 200 baht (6 USD) backpack straps broke and I had to tie a them into knots around the waste strap, but that only stopped our forward progress for a moment and after a bit of adapting, I had a bag that could be carried on my back again.

It was crazy! But it was a blast and in the end it worked. We reached the other side of the traffic jam in about an hour of speed walking with only a few bumps, bruises and burns from running into motorbike pedals and bus bumpers. I got the best cardio work-out since leaving the states. And I think in a few months my lungs might recover from the fumes as well. Definitely worth getting off the bus.