My luck continues to hold on neighborhoods, as I’m once again in a great spot. I wanted to stay right in the Old City, but I also insisted on a pool. So, close to the Old City also works.

I’m on the edge of the Nimmanhaemin neighborhood, or Nimman for short. It’s the artsy, boutiquey part of town, so there’s plenty to see strolling of a sultry evening. Which is all of them. I have the best of both worlds.

It’s certainly nice to have access to culture and some of the big city amenities that weren’t available in Krabi. Of course, the trade is that there’s no ocean here. But there is a water feature! The perimeter of the Old City is delineated by a perfectly rectilinear moat, making it very easy to tell if you’re in the Old City’s one square mile or not.

The moat and fortifications date all the way back to 1296, so they truly mean Old City. Although I’m sure that name made no sense in 1296, when Chiang Mai was founded. “Don’t worry, someday…”

The Apartment

I’ve definitely noticed that Airbnbs seem less quaint since we’ve set up a home base in Chicago. It was one thing when we were unhomed, but now that we have a sanctuary I’m acutely aware of its absence. Our apartment is comfortable and delightful, and Chicago, on the last leg back, started to feel like home.

So my Airbnb is fine. I’ve just had to accept that Southeast Asian residences only have hot water in the shower. At least in this apartment there’s a faucet. My last couple of apartments have only had hot water out of the shower head, which is awkward. I’m pretty sure this is not an Airbnb trick for farangs, but how Southeast Asians live. I don’t let dishes sit and I’ve mastered the art of the cold water shave. We adapt.

Here’s another Southeast Asian oddity. What’s up with duvets instead of top sheets? Who fucking sleeps under a duvet in this heat? I’ve shopped for sheet sets in every country we’ve been to here and top sheets just don’t exist. I stooped to buying an empty duvet cover at the Ikea in Bangkok and pretending it’s a top sheet.

This would be easy to solve by cranking the AC up to ten, except for this notice left sitting on a bureau:

I reached out to the host to help me decode this cryptic message. 600 units per… what interval? Day, week, month? Month. OK, where can I monitor usage? Not possible. She has to come to the unit and read the meter after I’ve left and tell me if I’ve gone over. So, you want me to manage consumption of a resource without giving me any information as to how much of it I’m using? Well, as long as you don’t run the AC 24/7 you should be fine.

So I’m living like a monk, running the AC about ten minutes a day. Which should be fine? I’m certainly not going to run it while I sleep so I can warm up under their fucking duvet. That’s crazy.

Other than that, it’s well appointed and clean, with enough hangers (!) and a full complement of cookware and dishes. There’s plenty of cabinets and drawers, so I’m moved in nicely for my month in Chiang Mai. And there’s that pool…

The Hood

The area around my apartment is chock full. There’s shopping, dining, entertainment. I’m a fifteen minute walk from a mall with a hypermarché in the basement. It’s not like the Bangkok malls, which all seem to feature a host of small vendors doing interesting things. This mall, the Maya, is strictly chain stores, like American malls. But mighty convenient to have the hypermarché walking distance. It makes everything easy.

One lovely thing about the neighborhood is that the closest laundry service only charges 30฿/kg, which is about 94¢. Bangkok was 100฿/kg and even the hinterlands in Krabi was 50฿. It’s good to be king.

I’ve also been able to get back into my weekly massage protocol. My bout of food poisoning in Krabi left me unwilling to be operated like a bellows, the hallmark of traditional Thai massage, so I stepped away. Under the best of circumstances I struggle to avoid farting during a Thai massage, and those were hardly the best of circumstances.

Among other wonders, Chiang Mai offered my first massage by a ladyboy masseuse. She was unusually tall for a Thai woman, and was also in possession of unusually large hands and an unusually deep, gravelly voice. To top it off, she was the only one on staff at the spa wearing a mask, which conveniently hid her Adam’s apple.

All signs point to, but short of dispositive. The actual tell was hysterical, though. At one point she was manipulating my legs and told me to relax the muscle, that she didn’t want me to help. A little later this admonition was apparently necessary again, when she lightly slapped my thigh and said, “Don’t help! I don’t need your help.” No further questions, your honor.

As to whether the large, strong hands were a net benefit, I’d say yes in a regular massage and no for a Thai massage. Thai massage is like someone using you as a Yoga prop. “Hold still and I’ll put you in Downward Dog.” It’s about leverage more than pressure. In this case, I think she leaned on her strong hands too much, as there was more kneading and less stretching than I associate with Thai massage. What with me being an expert and all.

Night Markets

I think Chiang Mai might be Thai for Night Market. You can’t throw a lemur in this town without hitting a night market. Don’t ask how I know that.

For just one example, the Weekend Night Market butts right up against the Every-Day-Of-The-Week Night Market in an Ouroboros of trinkets and street food. Ubiquitous doesn’t begin to cover it.

And no visit to a new locale is complete without enjoying local packaging and design.

I know I complained that my Bangkok apartment only had hot water coming out of the shower head. As it happens, that’s one more hot water source than my current lodgings offer. I am retroactively grateful.

To be fair, I’m not truly in an apartment. I’m in a hotel room with a refrigerator, so I don’t need hot water to cook or clean. I only have breakfast and snacks en suite, which is easy to clean up. And the climate doesn’t exactly argue for hot showers.

Still, some hot water, anywhere, kind of feels like table stakes for housing. Like you shouldn’t have to check with your outcall beforehand that she boasts a full complement of limbs. You just assume some things. At your own peril, apparently. It makes for an awkward greet.

Krabi is both the province and the nearby town. I’m staying in Ao Nang, which is a little beach town, not unlike our location in Bali. The beach in question is Khlong Muang, which is a convenient fifteen minute walk from the hotel. I’m even closer to the Main Street for shopping and eating, although there are good eats right nearby. The hotel is called Amanah Mansion, so I can only assume that Amanah translates as Gilding the Lily. It is a mostly serviceable hotel room, which may be the definition of mansion here.

Per my host, the disco light machine was the room’s highlight, and it’s hard to disagree with that assessment.

The Neighborhood

Like Bangkok, there are a wealth of weed shops here. I don’t know if Thais are smoking all the weed or if the clientele is primarily farangs. There seem to be too many to be supported by farangs alone.

My host pointed out where I could rent a scooter nearby, and I actually considered it, as the traffic here isn’t like Bangkok. There were tons of farangs on scooters, so that made it look plausible. Although that’s the clever observation that got me stranded on top of a pyramid. Twice.

Then I took a ride on, or clung to, a Grab scooter, which picked me up and delivered me to the supermercado in Krabi Town. And I have to say that nothing about that experience made me think, “You know, this would be way better if I was in charge.”

Then there was this sign, which was all over. The authorities seemed to feel that this message was important, which gave me pause. Although I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s only in English.

Hilariously, this sign was always on the left side of the road. So if you were driving on the wrong side, you’d never see it.

Another reason not to rent a scooter, as if I needed one, is that the whole gas situation here is opaque. I’ve seen one actual gas station, but mostly it’s this:

These are just scattered about. It seems straightforward, but that’s what I thought about the Bangkok train system’s ticket machines. First you had to find your destination on a touchscreen interface that assumed you knew how the different lines were structured. When I finally worked my way through that, I stumbled through to payment to learn that it wouldn’t take a credit card or bills. Coins or a local payment app only. Leaving me reasonably confident that I’d never figure out how to make the gas pumps work.

This guy was just a few doors from my lodgings. I’m not out all hours soaking up the nightlife here, as if there were any, but I have yet to walk past this business when they weren’t actively processing coconuts. All day and all night. The mound never seems to get any smaller. I think they add to their stores at about the same rate as they process them.

Or they’re witches.

Shopping

The only stores right in Ao Nang are convenience stores. There are, unaccountably, multiple 7-11s. There are supermercados in Krabi Town, a short but harrowing scooter ride away. The other shopping venue is the Ao Nang Landmark Night Market, which is open every day of the week from 5:00 – 11:00, and completely lives up to its name. No groceries, but everything else your little heart could desire.

If you’re a farang, that is. I’d say 90% of the clientele was farang. That’s OK, it’s our job to contribute to the local economy.

There are sit-down restaurants, but also a dense warren of takeout stalls offering a mind boggling selection. There are clothing shops and kiosks, handicraft stalls, and every form of entertainment known to man.

When it was my turn to tip this delightful creature I handed my 100฿ note to the little girl in the clip, so she could deposit it for me. And I wasn’t arrested!

There was even a poorly regulated Muay Thai bout, with mats for the ring and no referee. This lent the affair even more of a street fighting ambiance than the arena bouts I saw in Bangkok.

The Beach

Of course, my entire point in being in Ao Nang is the beach, and it did not disappoint. It’s not one of those tropical beaches that travel writers lose their shit over, but it has everything you’d want. Clean white sand, warm, calm, turquoise water, colorful teak longtail boats, cheap delicious food from stalls lining the beach, and no crowds. It’s perfect. I’ve been swimming (bobbing, to be more precise, since swimming is actual work) twice a day.

So I’m waiting for a smoothie at one of the stalls, in a line that’s not moving very quickly, to be fair. Just ahead of me is an Aussie who can barely contain himself. Finally, he walks up to the front to inform the proprietress that she should hire another juicer, as it’s taking so long that people are leaving and she’s losing business.

That is wrong on so many levels. First, you’re waiting for a smoothie on a beach in Thailand. Dude, it’s ok if the operation isn’t running at peak Western efficiency. That’s almost the point. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Second, White Savior much? Do you honestly think that without your prompting it would never have occurred to the owner to explore the pros and cons of scaling up? Thank goodness you were there to calculate her run rate, factor in the cost of a new hire, and assure that the marginal revenue increase produced a positive ROI. All that, just from standing in line. Thank goodness the poor dear had you there to rescue her.

I was praying he’d turn to me for farang solidarity, but, sadly, I had to keep my opinions to myself. Like you’re supposed to.

The only thing missing from my perfect beach is snorkeling. That requires boat trips, and boat trips there will be. In the meantime, there are other interesting things to do here besides swimming, and I intend to do them. And write about them. I have two weeks to fill, and don’t think I won’t.

Nah. The void and I are good, and neither of us would be pleased if I somehow filled it. But I am loosely tethered, and come by the gypsy feet honestly, having been subjected as an adolescent to my parents’ hardcore Wanderjahr.

So we’re doing what we’ve been doing all along: learning more about what works and what doesn’t and trimming to fit. We started with an idea, and we’ve been refining and redefining that idea on the fly ever since. No need to stop now, when the current iteration of that idea has me in Thailand instead of wintering in Chicago. Some ideas are objectively better than others.

It’s an interesting experiment, as Dorothy and I have never really been alone. We moved in together on my 18th birthday, directly from our parents’ homes. She waited until I was of age, which is kind of romantic, in a predatory sort of way. So this life is all we’ve known, and current circumstances will test our appetite for being apart and Dorothy’s appetite for my having fun without her.

Early returns are positive. We both conceive of Us as our atomic unit, but it appears that atom can be split. When we travel with others (my sister excepted, who will gladly have fun wherever you set her down) we’re always conscious of having to adjust our preferences to other’s desires. Not in an invidious way, just that we’re aware of the need to arbitrate across two sets of needs: Us and Them.

We’ve been doing it so long, it’s easy to forget that getting to Us also requires arbitrating across two sets of needs: Mine and Hers. It’s seamless and pretty unnoticeable, but now that it’s been stripped away it’s hard to be unaware of its absence. Not that the compromise is painful, but there’s something delicious and buoyant about just standing up and going somewhere, without any conversation required.

A steady diet of it would require living alone, which sounds like a punishment, but there’s no reason not to enjoy and appreciate it while we’re able. We’re thinking a few months off from each other every year could be an excellent thing for all.

On the emotional/psychological scale. On the practical side of the ledger I think it’s all negative, as we each have to replace the effort and expertise we provide one another. I have to feed myself and Dorothy has to do her own travel planning. Survivable (I haven’t gained any weight!), but measurably suboptimal.

The Neighborhood

The Airbnb is fine, its greatest asset being its location. It’s a one bedroom with a kitchenette. Like our place in Hà Nội, the kitchen sink is on the balcony. Also like that apartment and our Balinese apartment, the only source of hot water is the shower. Unlike those two, which had hose bibs in the shower, the shower head itself is the only place hot water appears here. I promise to never again take Western plumbing for granted. I believe it is our sole meaningful contribution to Civilization.

The textbook protocol for what we do is to take a place for a week on arrival and then use that week to scout neighborhoods and be certain of where you want to stay. We’ve never done that because it sounds tense and hard. Hitting the ground and having that kind of existential task in front of you with the clock ticking just seems nasty. So we do our homework in advance, learn about different neighborhoods, make our commitments and takes our chances. We’ve only had one fail so far, where we didn’t really enjoy our location, but our track record’s been pretty good.

Bangkok has been no exception. I’m in the Sukhumvit district, a ten-minute walk from stations on two of the main train lines. I’m a ten-minute walk from two hypermarchés. There’s a convenience store on the corner, a laundry a few doors down, and a weed shop directly downstairs. There’s two major malls, including an Ikea, within that same ten-minute radius. And food fucking everywhere.

The streets here are filled with weed shops (four just in the half block from the apartment to the main street), massage spas (eight in that same half block), bespoke tailors (only three, but that would be ridiculous density on any other half block on the planet), and more restaurants than can be counted. I have all the amenities I could want right at arm’s length, with trains able to take me to whatever isn’t right at hand.

I had to get to the Immigration office to extend my visa and there was no gracious public transit method, so I took the scooter version of Grab, the local Uber. It was faster than a car and a quarter the price. What I didn’t factor in was that the streets around my apartment were constantly clogged with traffic and moving at a crawl, but other streets were open and moved at full speed. That was a harrowing 30 minutes. That I won’t be repeating. I took a car home.

I have no idea how the ladies sidesaddle the scooters. That’s just nuts.

Those trains, by the way. First, always nice to have your train station look like a pagoda. But one of the lines has a positively brilliant innovation. You can buy a ticket or a pass, but if you’re a casual traveler you can also just wave your credit card at the gate and it will open up. Do it again on departure and the system will calculate your fare and charge your card. I think it’s new and hasn’t been rolled out across the entire system yet. It is the most friction-free transit system I’ve ever encountered.

Add bilingual signage and Google Maps directions that tell you what entrance to use and what platform to wait on, and it couldn’t be easier to get around like a local. Literally, as I’ve yet to see another farang on a train.

The extreme walkability of my neighborhood has led to extreme walking. In my first seven days here I’ve clocked 43 miles. That is not a typo. Thank goodness massage is so cheap and plentiful.

Neighborhood Wonders

OK, don’t pretend you weren’t about to google it. I did, and once I saw the pictures I had to go. For you, dear readers, always for you.

It turns out, which would have been my very last guess, that Cabbages & Condoms is the front end for an NGO, the Population and Community Development Association, focusing on birth control, education, and AIDS safety. It was founded by a retired politician interested in improving lives by promoting sexual health, and all profits go to the NGO.

It’s actually a lovely space, although the condoms are everywhere, once the eye adjusts. The food was OK, nothing to write home about, but the bowl of condoms on the table was a nice touch.

That was entirely my pleasure.

And then there’s this. This was just occurring outside an entrance to the MBK mall. No explanation was offered and, frankly, none was expected. I watched it until just before it got creepy and I was asked to leave.

Medical Tourism

I saved $850 today. I needed a root planing, but didn’t have time to take care of it before I left. I figured that I’d get it done in Bangkok, since my Balinese tooth cleaning had been such a positive experience. I saw this place in a mall (within my ten-minute radius), and walked in to inquire about rates. All four quadrants would be $250, as compared to the $1,100 I’d last paid in the US, so I asked to be scheduled.

They had me wait a few minutes then took me into a practice room for what I figured was a conversation with the dentist. Nope, they sat me down and started in. The dentist had excellent English (they even had forms in English), and asked me if I had any problems with my mouth. I told her that I couldn’t make it speak Thai.

She was super deft, and even the anesthetic was administered gently. I don’t much care for needles, whether they’re depositing or withdrawing, but of all of the places I hate needles, needles inside my mouth are the worst. The entire process was gentle and impressive. Although leaving the hearing aids home was a solid decision.

She did the first two quadrants and scheduled the finish in a week. Elapsed time, from walking in the front door cold to leaving with a slab of meat where my face had been: an hour and fifteen minutes.

Sometimes I just never want to come back.

Fun Fact

Thailand is the very first place we’ve been that doesn’t have some kind of brutal colonial hangover. Because it’s never been colonized, one of only a handful of countries that have avoided the master’s whip hand. There are a few we’re unlikely to visit (Afghanistan and Iran, although I’d love to see both), but we could wind up in Nepal or Ethiopia. It could happen.

Frankly, it’s a delight. Wading through the colonial aftermath, especially in Southeast Asia, has been illuminating but rough. Whatever fuckery they’ve inflicted on themselves is a rounding error compared to what the West would have done to them. Except, I suppose, Pol Pot, who colonized his own country. Anyway, I’m happy to have the break.

Massage Culture

There are two distinct and largely mutually exclusive massage cultures here: the traditional Thai massage and the traditional Happy Ending massage. Tradition! The trick is telling one from another, as each is only good at its specialty. If you’re looking for a real Thai massage and stumble into a Happy Ending place, you’re going to leave disappointed. And vice versa.

Some of the Happy Ending spas are easy to spot, as the photos of their “therapists” are alluringly posed, often including measurements and specialties, and their menus are a matrix of duration and granular variations on the Happy Ending. Just right out there in front of god and everyone. Unashamed. Easy, however, to avoid mistakes.

Real massage shops tend to offer masseuses in uniforms, rather than low-cut dresses. Although that’s a sort of uniform, too. A masseuse is assigned, rather than selecting one from a lineup. Some of their menus even say No sex, which is pretty clear. But not dispositive, since some of the Happy Ending shops are camouflaged, with uniformed girls and innocuous menus. By the time you’ve suffered an indifferent massage and been offered a Happy Ending, you’re already way past the desired experience.

Another tell: do they offer nuru massage? Nuru, if you don’t know (and if you do you probably shouldn’t admit it), is a Japanese invention, because of course it is. It involves a slippery, seaweed-based gel that’s applied by a naked masseuse using herself as a loofah. Like if a Slip ‘N Slide® and a succubus had a baby. It’s hard to conceive of anything more Japanese than that particular combination of innocent and depraved. That’s not just my opinion, by the way. These are the people, after all, who gave us anime tentacle porn. Anyway, as delightful as it sounds, nuru’s intentions are completely different than that of an actual massage.

Or this. The emphasis is probably not on the quality and integrity of the massage.

Online reviews are their own minefield, as coy verbiage makes it unclear exactly what experience is being reviewed. I found a forum where men traded intel on Bangkok’s various Happy Ending spas and posted a question: where do you go when you want an actual, real Thai massage? I figured consumers of the one would be able to tell them apart, and sure enough, I got a handful of recommendations right within my ten-minute radius.

Wat Pho? I Don’t Know, Stop Asking…

My first stop, counterintuitively, was the temple at Wat Pho. Wat Pho is actually the thankfully shortened nickname, its full name being Wat Phra Chetuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Rajwaramahawihan. But everyone knew her as Nancy. No one knows exactly when it was built, but sometime during the Ayutthaya Kingdom, which places it anywhere from 1351 to 1767, a pretty wide range. The current footprint appears to have been established right around 1700. Which is notable because it still has that new temple smell, like they just removed the tape.

We’ve been in plenty of places (Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Hagia Sophia, the Medina in Marrakech, Tunisia’s El Jem colosseum…) so deeply infused with their own antiquity that their age had a seat at the table. And ordered for you. Not so Wat Pho, which has been buffed so hard and maintained so diligently that it could have been built yesterday. But it wasn’t.

These days, Wat Pho is known for several things. One is a 150 foot long, 50 foot high golden Buddha statue. If you had one of those, that’s what you’d be known for, too.

But I’m not fooled. You came for the stupas. And you’re not wrong. They are splendid. Enjoy.

It is also Thailand’s first public university, teaching traditional Thai arts and sciences. In 1955 they opened a school for traditional medicine, including Thai massage. It’s still operating, and there’s a massage center on the grounds of the Wat. No appointments, but I walked right in. I figured I’d baseline Thai massage at ground zero and have a yardstick for judging how good the massage was at a more convenient, less expensive location.

Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Massage

I’d never had a Thai massage before. It’s on the menu at most of the places I’ve been in Southeast Asia, but I didn’t know enough about it to know if I’d like it, or what it was for, or even if what was offered was an actual Thai massage, so I’ve never requested one.

What surprised me most was how intimate it turned out to be. Not in the Happy Ending sense, obviously, but in the sense that it’s a full contact sport. Elbows, knees, legs, feet, all used to stretch this limb or that, to bend me, rotate me, and generally tie me into a pretzel knot.

Rather than standing up and addressing me from a remove while I lay on a table, like an autopsy, the massage therapist was on the same surface as me, climbing, rolling, circumnavigating, and doing anything a squirrel can do to a tree. She was a preposition. We were engaged with one another, rather than my being the supine recipient of the kneading of muscles.

It was a lovely, intricate dance (I followed), and a fabulous massage, so much more actually therapeutic than a traditional massage. I staggered to my feet feeling noticeably better, more limber, able to move more freely. I am an official Thai massage stan.

Armed with my newfound expertise, I went to one of the shops from the suggestions I’d been given. Truthfully, I picked it on price. There were a number of ladies sitting in front in branded masseuse uniforms, and I wasn’t given a choice of therapist, so that was promising. One just grabbed me. I did notice that most of the masseuses were aunties, but the young cute one had picked me. It’s all the charisma. Not my fault.

I then proceeded to get the very best massage I’ve had in my life. In fact, had I done this one first I think I’d have been disappointed in the Wat Pho massage. In the interests of full disclosure, I was high. I’d stopped at one of the many dispensaries on the walk there and scarfed down a 10mg gummy on the way. No paperwork or ID, by the way, more like a convenience store purchase. It was harder to get a tube of cortisone cream.

I don’t think that harmed the experience in any way, but I also think, my condition notwithstanding, that it was an objectively amazing massage. I’ll be going back, for sure, and will do it sober, so I can report if the experience in that condition is less ecstatic, more quotidian. What I suffer for you all…

In addition to massage, the Me Time options here include a smattering of Vietnamese-style barber shops, like the one I visited in Hà Nội. 700฿, by the way, is about $22 for 90 minutes of service.

Weirdly, the one thing they don’t offer is the haircut. I guess the claw grooming makes up for it.

Bangkok

Bangkok feels most like Istanbul to me, with echoes of Mexico City. It’s a dense capital city with plenty of historical flavor and a strong modernist streak. But our view of the cities we’ve visited is inevitably colored by where we’ve chosen to stay. Hà Nội undoubtedly has much in common with Bangkok, but we stayed in the Old Quarter, which felt more like a LARPing arena than a modern capital.

Here’s one of the strangest things I’ve noticed about Bangkok. In every other place we’ve been on the planet, sidewalk traffic patterns mirror roadway traffic patterns. If the cars drive on the left, pedestrians walk on the left, and vice versa. Not here. The cars drive on the left but pedestrians walk on the right. The only pedestrians walking on the left are farangs, desperately trying to rationalize the chaos. And only making it worse. It’s a gift.

It makes crossing the street even more disorienting than usual, for those of us used to cars on the right. I feel like a meerkat, swiveling back and forth, never certain in which direction lies danger. All of them, I think. Danger lies in all of the directions here.

The Old City

If I’m staying in the heart of modern Bangkok, I owe myself a visit to the Old City to compare the experiences. Little did I know that I’d already been, as Wat Pho is in the Old City. I did a little more homework before venturing back, and learned that the area, properly known as Rattanakosin, is also home to the Grand Palace, the ferry piers of the Chao Phraya river, ancient forts, and Phra Athit Road, home to some of Bangkoks oldest structures.

Truthfully, Phra Athit was a little underwhelming. Yes, there were some old buildings, but they were leftovers that have been individually repurposed as shops and restaurants. There was no sense of the history of the district or what it had once been like. Hà Nội’s Old Quarter, Marrakech’s souks, Istanbul’s Sultanahmet historic district… You could trace their history directly back from their modern iterations in an unbroken lineage. Phra Athit, on the other hand, was some old buildings still in use. Not uninteresting, but not the living history I craved.

The Grand Palace

This was definitely the highlight of the Old City, especially viewed in tandem with Wat Pho. The grounds of the Grand Palace hold two distinct attractions: The Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Grand Palace itself.

Before I could cross the threshold, however, my exposed calves were deemed insufficiently respectful. Thank goodness they couldn’t see my musclebound thighs. The horror! I was forced to both purchase and wear a pair of long pants. In their defense, they were light and gauzy and were gaily festooned with elephants. In my defense, I was wearing long pants in 90° heat. I appealed to Buddha directly, but was met with stony silence. Fucking Buddha, amIright?.

Like Wat Pho, every one of the buildings here seemed scrubbed raw and built yesterday. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha was built in 1783, but you’d have to carbon date it to tell. As advertised, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha holds an emerald Buddha, high up on a platform, orders of magnitude smaller than Wat Pho’s massive golden Buddha. In addition to pants being required, there was a sign at the entrance admonishing: Do not point your feet to the Buddha. Not entirely sure how that was supposed to work in practice. Crab walking?

No photography was allowed, so let’s thank Wikipedia for this image.

But that’s OK, because the temple itself had plenty to offer on the outside, having a, how do I say this, distinctly Liberace vibe, all gilt and polished mirror tiles.

The Grand Palace was built in 1782, and served as the royal residence until 1925, although it’s still in use for official events and state functions. Which is probably why this was as close as I could get.

The grounds also held the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles. She seems to have been much beloved, and had just died in October of 2025, a few months before my arrival. Memorials to her are all over the city.

Just hanging out in front of a metro station. The guest book on the table was completely full

Finally, I ended my tour of Rattanakosin with a walk to Phra Sumen Fort, right on the Chao Phraya River. Dating from the late 1700s, Phra Sumen is one of only four of the original forts still intact. The rest were demolished to make room for roads and buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was a peaceful way to end my visit, but I was truly knackered by the conclusion. The easiest way to get home from the fort was a water taxi to a train, about an hour-and-a-half total transit time. I buckled, and took a Grab back to the apartment.

The Dainty Elephant In The Room

While there are Happy Ending massage parlors everywhere on the planet, Thailand stands tall as one of the globe’s sex capitals. Much of it is tourism-based, but there’s a considerable portion of it that’s local. It seems only lightly stigmatized, as it enjoys a quasi-legal status and is a substantial contributor to Thailand’s economy.

Prostitution in Thailand is legal so long as there’s no coercion or trafficking involved, no pimping, and so long as solicitation isn’t undertaken “openly and shamelessly.” That’s a vague metric, yet no one seems to have run afoul of it.

In July of 2016 the then Tourism Minister announced that the government would be abolishing the sex industry to make Thailand a more wholesome destination. He lasted just over a year after that proclamation. Instead, there’s a substantial movement in Thailand, led by human rights organizations, to fully legalize and regulate prostitution. Which would bring Thailand up to par, human rights-wise, with the rural parts of Nevada.

The Happy Ending massage parlors, because they blend into the landscape and are everywhere, are actually the underneath of the iceberg. The more visible tip is the overt red light districts: Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, and Patpong in Bangkok, Bangla Road in Phuket, Soi 6 and Walking Street in Pattaya. Unsurprisingly, given my central location, I’m close to two of them, Soi Cowboy within my ten-minute perimeter, Nana Plaza just outside it.

All of these areas are combinations of gogo bars, hostess bars, and ladyboy bars. Soi Cowboy has a ladyboy bar called Cockatoo. That’s just excellent. Thailand’s ladyboys are legendary, and if it was just a cabaret show I would totally go. Why not? But all of the bars, ladies and ladyboys alike, are hard-sell hustles. Entering a ladyboy bar is implied consent to being hustled, so no. Also, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about beautiful women with unusually high testosterone levels. I just feel like I’d be on the wrong end of that. I am a gentle woodland creature.

One of the bars just off Soi Cowboy is called Bush Garden, which also warrants calling out. It’s not even their language, but they use it awfully well.

I’ll confess that I walked Soi Cowboy’s single neon-lit block intending to check out one of the gogo bars. First, because why not? And second, because sure. I’m here. It’s a thing. Life’s rich pageant. But the drink hustle is supposed to be fierce in those places, and if you’re not vigilant you can wind up with a substantial, padded tab and large men insisting it be paid in full. The level of effort required to avoid being hustled just seems to exceed the likely entertainment value.

In general I consider myself a pretty intrepid traveler, hardy and capable of taking what the universe throws at me. Unless it has tentacles. Then I’m out. But if I’m being totally honest, it’s not just the effort to avoid being hustled that’s keeping me out of the gogos. I don’t consider myself easily intimidated, but they intimidate me. I’m probing that feeling like a sore tooth, and the only solution may be to man up and cross the threshold. Or I can just be a weenie. Also a perfectly reasonable option.

I think the most dangerous thing we can do, as travelers, is to apply our lens to other cultures and judge them on their fidelity to a foreign point of view. We’ve been able to see positives in everything from one-party rule (Cuba, Vietnam) to state religions (Morocco, Tunisia), although, looking through a US lens, those things are just objectively wrong. Even though plenty of Americans, it seems, would be happy with a state-sanctioned religion. So long as it’s theirs.

So I’m not about to tell Thais that their approach to prostitution is wrong. If that’s how they felt about their own country, they’d abolish it, not work to legalize and formalize it. There’s an argument that in a perfect world prostitution would probably follow the abortion mantra: safe, legal, and rare. In that perfect world, every man would have a partner he loved and who loved him in return, and every woman would have a wealth of career opportunities. But that’s not this world.

Say what you will about the underlying economic conditions that make this true, but prostitution in Thailand pays better than many of the available options, allowing women to send money back home and support their families. Until there’s equity in access to education and career paths, I’m not in favor of shutting the industry down because it’s morally dubious. To us.

I remember the last time I went to a strip club, 20+ years ago. I went for Pretty Ladies, but that’s not what I saw. I saw a room full of men desperate for connection, with, for a multitude of reasons, no other options for achieving it. It wasn’t at all obvious who was exploiting whom. And it was sad.

I think I’ll skip the gogos.

Shopping

I’ll be doing a separate post on craft shopping, as I do, but there’s still plenty to discuss short of that. The big reveal here is that local shopping is incredibly mall focused. I suspect that’s because of the weather. Mall shopping means air conditioning, which seems to be everyone’s first choice.

My host came over the other evening to drop something off, and I was very proud of the fact that the AC was off and the balcony doors were open. Living like a local. I thought. Until he asked if the AC was broken. I’d assumed that living here inured you to the heat, but they hate it just as much as we do. Thus, I believe, malls.

Because they’re the dominant form of retail, they exist in a dizzying range of variations. Unlike the US mall monoculture, which is nothing but chain stores, and where the physical relationship of Hot Topic : Auntie Anne’s : Victoria’s Secret seems to be an immutable law of nature. Or at least building code.

Sure, they have their fashion malls here. There’s Chanel, YSL, Tory Burch, and both Dolce & Gabbana. The usual suspects. But the malls distinguish themselves primarily in the small one-off shops that make up the bulk of their rosters. In fact, in hunting for Thai silk I found Old Siam Plaza, whose entire massive second floor is given over to small silk shops, most of which had room for a sewing machine. We tend to have a negative view of mall culture, but it means a completely different thing here.

One of the malls nearby is the EmSphere, which is where the Ikea is located. It also has a robust first floor food court, which has both Subway and Krispy Kreme kiosks, but is primarily made up of small one-offs, just like the retail tenants.

The other mall right nearby is Terminal 21, which has a very odd conceit. Each floor is assigned a geography, so there’s a Rome floor, San Francisco, London… The shops aren’t specific to the location, but the site design traffics in unsurprising stereotypes. San Francisco has a faux cable car, Rome has classical statuary, London has inedible food…

I took an entire afternoon one day to tour a mall complex with four (or more?) malls all connected by sky bridges. My research told me that one of them specialized in indie fashion and the other in crafts. I did find a few non-branded clothing vendors in the one mall, amongst all of the LV and Vans and Levis shops. Hardly a concentration. Likewise for the place that was supposed to have crafts. I found a few shops tucked in a corner, and that was it.

What I did discover was that mall layout here is so non-linear as to be effectively non-Euclidean. I did an entire tour of the first mall, Siam Paragon, without seeing any clothing stores, except the high fashion brands on the lower floors. Then I did a second tour and there was an entire wing of the mall that I swear hadn’t been there on my first go-round. Same thing happened at the second mall, Siam Discovery. The Discovery being, I suppose, that the laws of physics have been suspended on premises. Every mall here is a Harry Potter tent, bigger on the inside than the outside.

The Fucking Language

I thought Vietnamese was the worst. With an honorable mention to French, for, you know, all that French. But Thai takes the cake. It has the worst elements of every language we’ve tried to learn, plus a unique fillip all its own.

First, the alphabet. It’s pretty, like Khmer in Cambodia. But put all those letters together into words and sentences and it’s just a soup of loops and whorls. Here’s an example.

ผ้าพันคอสวยๆ ที่หน้าต่างราคาเท่าไหร่ and ฉันสามารถมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับภรรยาของคุณได้. The first is “How much is that beautiful scarf in the window?” The second is “Can I fuck your wife?” It’s a minefield.

Then there are the vowels. Thai is tonal, like Vietnamese. No one can agree on the exact count, but Thai’s five tones interact with the basic vowel set to create well over 100 distinct vowel sounds. To put that into perspective, English has 19 vowel sounds. Your mouth can’t make a sound your ears can’t hear. That’s fucked up.

What’s really fucked up? Thai has taken the worst elements of both Khmer and Vietnamese and added… duration. Yep, how long you hold a vowel completely changes its meaning. It’s like the anti-Esperanto, a hash of phonemic fuckery whose sole purpose seems to be tripping up farangs. I’m sure it is a constant source of amusement to them. Or they wish we’d just stop shitting on their language. Or both.

The vowel stretching is also why Thais always seem to be singing, but that’s not enough. Beautiful, yet incomprehensible. That about sums it up.

Any final indignities? Oh, right. No cognates to speak of. Sandwich. Awesome.

I think we may have learned three words in Vietnamese, which is three more than I’ll be learning in Thai.

The only upside, such as it is, is that none of the farangs, no matter their country of origin, are able to learn Thai. Which makes English the official language of tourism, leaving everyone else to struggle with a non-native tongue. There is something delicious about making French people butcher another language, since they’re so snooty about theirs.

It’s the small pleasures that make life worth living.

Yogyakarta is pronounced Jogjakarta, and is commonly referred to just as Jogja. The J-Y shift is a Dutch hangover. Don’t worry. It’s the only one. The Dutch were otherwise stellar stewards of their benighted little brothers. BFFs, really.

Jogja is also, and this was a surprise, a monarchy. They have their very own sultan! While a few other areas in Indonesia have their own sultans or local rulers, Hamengkubuwono X is the only one with official state power. As sultan, he is the Governor of the Special Region of Yogyakarta. This arrangement is payback for the then sultan’s support for independence during the post WWII revolution.

Kotagede

This time around we’re not in the throbbing heart of the city center, as we so often are. Instead, we’re in Kotagede, Jogja’s old city. Kotagede means Great City, and it was the capital of the Mataram sultanate, dating back to the 16th century. The Matarams were the precursor to the current Yogyakarta sultanate, having lost power through Dutch fuckery. Kotagede is renowned as a craft center, and has been a major locus of silver artisans since Mataram times.

Our Apartment

The apartment is comfortably appointed, if a little charmless. There’s a thorough selection of kitchen appliances, a dining table (which has been in short supply during our Southeast Asia run), a comfortable seating area, and three (!) bedrooms. That last is important because my sister, Nef, is joining us for four of our six weeks in Jogja, so she gets the upstairs bedroom and some privacy. We get to use the extra first floor bedroom as a closet. It’s nice to not trip over our stuff.

There are a lot of nice, small touches. They provide water, in five gallon bottles with a dispenser for hot and cold. There are balconies on both floors. There’s a washer and more than enough drying racks. And this is the first place we’ve ever been that’s provided enough hangers.

We are suffering a quirk of Southeast Asia, which is that they use duvets instead of top sheets. Which makes zero sense, since the weather is way too hot for duvets. We’ve managed this in the past by pulling the duvets out of their covers and using those as top sheets, but the duvets here don’t have covers, so there’s nothing to strip off. We visited several department stores and figured for six weeks it was worth it to buy a top sheet and just leave it behind, but there were no top sheets to be found. We are sleeping under a rotating layer of lovely Balinese ikats.

The bathrooms here are a challenge. The only hot water is from the two showers, but at least there’s a faucet, so you’re not holding a basin under a shower head to get hot water to wash dishes, like we did in Amed. And the only actual sink is in the kitchen. So the bathrooms are more like 3/4 baths, with just a shower and a toilet. We renovated ours by moving in an outdoor table and placing a plastic basin there for a faux sink. We’re survivors.

The biggest challenge was how shockingly dirty the apartment was. We spent our entire first day doing nothing but cleaning. It was everything. Floors, walls, toilets, dishes, cookware… I spent over an hour on the refrigerator alone. It’s fine now, and we’re not using their cleaner. There’s no point. We haven’t said anything, as it’s not like there’s something they can do. It was dirty and now it’s not, so problem solved. Also, they’re really nice people, and we don’t want them to think we’re weirdos. There’s been the odd plumbing problem, for example. and they’ve been great about getting someone over right away.

And we are completely not being weirdos. Every place we’ve been has required some cleanup on move-in. That’s a normal and expected part of the Airbnb experience. But what we faced here was a level of filth we’ve never encountered before.

The Neighborhood

Kotagede’s streets are narrow and recursive, circling back on themselves not unlike the souks in Marrakech’s Medina, but without the density. They’re perhaps more reminiscent of Gunajuato’s narrow, winding streets, but without the mountains. It makes exploring the neighborhood feel like an actual exploration.

The vernacular building design here is completely different than in Bali. There, homes are built around open courtyards, almost Mexican or Moroccan style, and the ubiquitous black volcanic rock is a common material. In Java, peaked, tiled roofs are constructed over wood-framed buildings. A completely different look, but every bit as beautiful.

While that’s the archetype, there are other interesting things going on here. This street is Between Two Gates, and features traditional Javanese Joglo houses.

Masjid Gedhe Mataram Kotagede

Kotagede is also home to Mataram’s historic mosque, first established in 1575. The current iteration is a rebuild from 1926 due to a fire, but there are clearly still structures from much, much earlier.

At the ticket booth there’s a separate price for wedding party photography, which made sense once we were inside. It was almost impossible to take a step without unintentionally photobombing a bride and groom posing together.

The site is full of beautiful historic structures.

And sweet architectural details.

The highlight, without question, was the Pasarean Mataram, the final resting place of the royal family of the Mataram Sultanate. All of them. Going back to the 16th century. I am disinclined to credit the spiritual, but let’s just say there was a vibe to this place. It was an indoor mausoleum, and pictures were not allowed. I even searched the interwebs for something to scrape, figuring they’d have let in a journalist at some point, but nothing. Not, of course, that a photo would have communicated what it was like to be in that space. It was truly beautiful. I felt things.

This is from a neighborhood cemetery, but the style of the aboveground crypts is typical Javanese. The royal crypts are fancier, of course, but the design is pretty much the same.

Appropriate dress to enter was both required and supplied, for a donation. Leading to a rare sighting of a mating pair of Waldos.

Taman Sari Water Palace

The Taman Sari Water Palace was built in the 1750s by the first Yogyakarta Sultan, after the Mataram’s fell. It was meant to be a place for the sultan to relax after a series of wars. It’s a modest site, but it has some beautiful structures.

Taman Sari’s highlight is the bathing pools, which is where the sultan did much of his relaxing. He would leer out of an upper floor window watching his concubines bathe. But not in a creepy way. They were his concubines, after all.

When he made his choice he would throw a rose down to her to indicate his favor, and she would get to spend the night with him in one of the upper chambers, in a bed heated by charcoal braziers underneath. That’s just a win for everyone.

Shopping

Pasar Kotagede, a traditional covered market, is just a few minutes walk from our apartment. There’s an even bigger version, Pasar Beringharjo, downtown. It was massive, covering several square blocks, and has… everything. Groceries, handicrafts, electronics, an entire batik market…

Supermarkets were a different thing. It took us multiple attempts before we found something usable. The first two we went to were Carrefours, whose local brand is TransMart. Which led to this:

As it happened, the first TransMart we went to was being renovated so hard it was no longer a store. They were doing the same thing to the second TransMart we went to. Then we went to a third supermarket, based on a google search, and it was just a jacked up Quickie Mart. I finally asked our host, and on our fourth attempt we found a real supermarket. Although it took a fifth store before we were able to locate pickles. Vlasic is everywhere, if not in every store.

Downtown’s Malioboro street is chockablock with batik shops, but it also seems to be snack central. There are snack shops that seem like the modern equivalent of the riches of the Silk Road. Rendered in snacks. These photos are all from the same shop!

Dining

Eating is a form of shopping, and we enjoyed an evening at the Alun Alun Kidul Night Market, a nightly cultural institution.

The high point was these hollowed out cars that had been transformed into glowing pedicabs. I know, we should have taken a ride. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

We also dined at Omah Duwur, a lovely Dutch era restaurant with magical grounds, right in the neighborhood.

We’re back in a Muslim country and are once again immersed in the call to prayer. There were places in North Africa where competing mosques reduced the overlapping calls to prayer as noise, but there were also places where a single mosque’s call rang clear and sounded like music. There must be a lot of mosques here, since we’ve yet to hear a distinct call. Here’s what it sounded like while we dined at Omah Duwur. Hard to peel it back and hear how many mosques are at work here, but it seems like a lot.

The Javanese have done to Islam what the Balinese did to Hinduism, mixmastering it with their traditional belief systems to make a bespoke religion that’s all theirs. We’ve had several people say, “We’re Muslim, but not like [waves hands] them. You know, that whole Sunni/Shia thing.” They really want us to know they’re the chill Muslims.

To be fair, this is a thing.

But our very best meal was when we backslid (all the way to grade school) and had dessert for lunch. But look what we were up against. We never stood a chance.

And here’s how Bear In Bathtub met his end. Oh, she’s a savage one. Although I suppose that bringing a hammer with your dessert is technically foreshadowing.

Graphic Design & Packaging

This is always one of my favorite reports. I absolutely adore local graphic design, and Java has seemed denser in entertaining graphic presentation than many of our destinations. There’s a lot to love here.

We’re being more flexible now, acknowledging that some locations don’t warrant a full ten weeks. We spent four weeks in Siem Reap in Cambodia, soaking up the Angkor-era ruins, and that was just right. We were afraid four weeks would feel like a rushed tourist cadence, but Siem Reap was fine.

We’re also now splitting time between locations, rather than having a home base for the full ten weeks. We’re ten weeks in Vietnam, but six of those were in Hà Nội before hitting Hội An for the final four weeks. Again, that’s felt pretty good. Enough time to sink into both locations without feeling rushed, and a broader view of Vietnam than we’d get if we were ten weeks in Hà Nội with the occasional junket.

In fact, we’re cutting our Hội An trip short to add three full days in Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn before we leave for Indonesia. Even three days in HCMC will be more entertaining than missing it entirely. Then we’re pulling the same stunt in Indonesia, starting with four weeks in Amed, a quiet Bali beach town (of which there are few), followed by six weeks in Yogyakarta on Java before heading back to the US.

Hội An has been a lovely antidote to Hà Nội’s Sturm und Drang. Six weeks in the Old Quarter was much like being a BB in a can, and Hội An’s more relaxed vibe is welcome. Even the “crowds” in Hội An’s Old Town are a joke, after Hà Nội.

For a change, we’re not staying in the Old Town. We’re about a fifteen minute walk away, but that’s enough distance to put us in a more quiet, residential neighborhood. There are still plenty of goods and services, without the jangle of Old Town and its proliferation of souvenir shops. We’re out where people live.

Our Airbnb is a little four story, eight room hotel-style accommodation, but each one bedroom unit has a workable kitchen and a washer/dryer, which is always an appreciated amenity. More importantly, it has an elevator you can take to the fourth floor for a short flight of stairs to the rooftop pool. It is hot here, high 80s – low 90s, and I’ll confess that there are days when we visit the pool more than once. We have even gone to the beach and then returned to go to the pool. I’m not proud, but neither will I apologize. It’s easy to lean into your weakness when it involves a pool.

It is also tropically humid here. We couldn’t figure out why the weather report kept saying it was raining when it wasn’t. Then we checked the humidity. 84% humidity is rain.

The beach is a little far to walk, but it’s a fast, cheap taxi (10 minutes, about $3.50 with a generous tip), and the beach clubs are practically free. We can sit under a palapa all day, swim as much as we like in the deliciously warm water, and use their showers and changing rooms for the cost of renting a towel. They’re 20,000 VND each, or about $1.50 for the two of us. It’s good to be king.

The walkable part of the neighborhood offers plenty. We have our very own lotus pond right around the corner, plenty of restaurant options, and a choice of mercados.

There’s a mercado about ten minutes from us, and the big central mercado on the edge of Old Town is about a fifteen minute walk. There’s a variety of mini marts of various sizes and distinctions, but no real supermercado or hypermarché. We’re about forty minutes from Đà Nẵng, a much bigger city, and all the big supermarkets are there.

Less than a block from our apartment is our own personal sweets shop, Trà Sữa Nọng. Trà Sữa is milk tea, and we’re pretty sure Nọng means wattles, which makes sense based on the branding.

What we are certain of is that milk tea is a delicious treat.

Old Town

Hội An’s Old Town is like most of the old quarters or Medinas we’ve visited: a thick crust of turista atop a foundation of very old buildings, old being a relative term based on location. Here, old goes back as far as the 1600s.

The Old Town itself, strung with traditional Vietnamese silk lanterns, is intentionally charming.

Gaudily lit boats ply the Thu Bồn River, while riverside vendors offer tourists floating candles that, released into the river, grant wishes. Here are the boats at dock.

The boats were lit up like pinball machines, so a lantern boat ride seemed compulsory.

The combination of low light and a fast moving boat led to some great effects.

Shops all over the district offer the silk lanterns, adding to the storybook nighttime ambiance. It all adds up to a UNESCO World Heritage Cute designation, richly deserved.

My favorite feature of Old Town, though, is the pedicabs. For some reason they have neither horns nor bells, so the drivers holler “Beep, Beep” as they make their way through the pedestrian scrum. Charming.

Old Town is also home to some very old and completely ridiculous structures. Here’s the Quan Công Temple, dating from 1653. Obviously its contents aren’t that old, but the building itself is graceful and beautiful.

Quan Công also hosted a gallery featuring the beautiful watercolor and ink work of local artist Ngo Duc Chi. We were beguiled, despite officially owning enough things.

Hội Quán Quảng Triệu, the Cantonese Assembly Hall, fell on the ridiculous side of the ledger. It featured a massive outdoor fountain of entwined dragons and wiggy 3D reliefs all over the interior.

I am providing no commentary on the reliefs because commentary is neither necessary nor possible. There’s nothing to say. They speak, eloquently, for themselves.

And no Assembly Hall would be complete without horses and dragons.

While those two spots were major, there were plenty of old buildings and houses dotted about Old Town, offering up beauty, mystery, and entertainment, if you just kept your eyes open.

Of course, Old Town is more than just silk lanterns and old buildings. It’s also…

I leave you with this last, indelible image of Hội An’s Old Town. Just across the Thu Bồn River, via a short pedestrian bridge, Hội An’s Night Market offers up a welter of restaurants, bars, shops, street vendors, and Hội An’s most iconic structure: The Mr. Bean Bar.

You’re welcome.

Where We Didn’t Go

We took side trips to Mỹ Sơn and Huế, but there were also places we intentionally avoided. Like Sa Pa, there were places near Hội An that were high on the Instagram & selfie tours and a little too too for our taste. Primarily, that meant avoiding the Ba Na Hills.

You know it from this iconic (scraped) image:

This is, obviously, not some local expression of support for the God Of Big Hands. This was built for tourists. And, thus, isn’t particularly interesting.

But that’s not all Ba Na Hills has to offer. There’s also, unaccountably, this: French Village.

To be fair, this is a 19th century artifact of French colonialism, not a modern theme park. On the other hand, it’s a modern theme park now. With bumper cars, a wax museum, and a mini-train, among other amenities, French Village is, more than anything, an eloquent fuck you from the Vietnamese to the French. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And we’re turning your precious chateaux into EPCOT Center, motherfuckers.”

Even so. Pass.

The second unexpected pleasure was checking in to our Vietjet Air flight. We’re always very careful about checking baggage restrictions for each airline we fly, because they vary so dramatically. In this case we were given a generous allotment of 30kg for one checked bag each, but our combined carry-on and personal item could weigh no more than 7kg each, which is nothing. Each of our carry-on bags, empty, is 3.5kg.

The only way we could figure to get our combined carry-on weight to 14kg was to cram full one of the bags we usually carry on and check it. According to the airline’s website, the extra bag would be about $19. I tried to add that third bag online but it wouldn’t work, so we’d have to negotiate that at check-in.

After getting the third bag weighed and checked, the agent shows me a calculator displaying 59. Which is outrageous, as it was $19 on the website. After some back and forth, I figure out that 59 is the combined weight of all three of our bags, and because we have a total allotment of 60kg between us, all good, thank you very much, everything is free.

Can you even imagine a Western airline reaching that conclusion? In your dreams. What a lovely introduction to Vietnam.

And, of course, they never weighed our carry-on.

The Old Quarter: Hanoi Rocks

We’re staying right in The Old Quarter of Hà Nội, and it’s pretty much the reason we came to Hà Nội at all. Much like the Medina in Marrakech, to which it bears more than a passing resemblance, The Old Quarter is a centuries-old commercial center, with plenty of callbacks to its historic past.

The area has been a commercial and arts center since the 11th century, with its current footprint dating to the 15th century. It’s also known as 36 Old Streets, although today there’s about 70 total streets in the jam-packed square kilometer that makes up the district. The 36 Streets refer to the 36 historic guilds responsible for individual arts, each relegated to a specific street. Echoes of those old guilds still reverberate in the shops that occupy the Old Quarter today.

These are just some of the streets where the modern mix of shops calls back to the historic guilds. Hàng Bạc Street: silver; Hàng Mã: religious goods and festival decorations; Hàng Gai: silk; Lãn Ông: traditional medicines; Hàng Thùng: bucket and barrel makers; Hàng Tre: bamboo; Hàng Đào: clothing; Hàng Đường: sweets… There is a Pudding Street. And, clearly, a god.

We are staying on Hàng Chiếu, the Street of Mats, historically known for the concentration of reed weavers. There are still plenty of shops specializing in mats and woven totes. Our doorway is literally flanked with vibrant reed weaving. Dorothy is in heaven. She has a particular fondness for totes made of woven reed or plastic, so she can satisfy that craving entirely within inches of our door.

We have six weeks in Hà Nội, with plenty of day and overnight trips planned to take advantage of the North’s ridiculous natural beauty and vibrant culture. But we won’t be neglecting the Old Quarter, and hope to report fully on as many of its 36 streets as we can.

This greeted us from the cab on our way in from the airport. I have been unable to find any information about it. Perhaps because it’s unexceptional? It was still a pretty cool welcome from Hà Nội.

Our Apartment

Let’s settle on quirky. Quirky is good.

It’s actually fine. But it does have a couple of notable quirks. The first is the entrance.

The next endearing quirk is in the apartment itself, the kitchen specifically.

I can hear you: “Well, that seems like a lovely kitchen. Adequate counter space, plenty of dishes, full size refrigerator, useful appliances. How nice.” “But, wait,” you continue. “On mature reflection, where the fuck is the sink?”

On the balcony, of course. You can be very, very silly sometimes. It’s why I love you.

The bathroom is probably more challenge than quirk. There isn’t a dedicated shower, it’s just the area between the sink and toilet. And that toilet is very close to the wall. I can sit on it properly with my stubby legs, but Dorothy’s more generous, less pliable gams force her to sit sideways.

Plus, we’re not supposed to flush toilet paper. We obviously had bidets all throughout our last leg, as we were exclusively in Muslim countries, but I have to confess I never used one. I was confused by the geometry. I was convinced that I would spray either up my back or front, rather than properly Down Below. You’ll be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that I can bidet myself without getting the walls wet. And you’re welcome for that image.

The rest of the apartment truly is fine, even comfortable. There’s a switch for the hot water heater, so we have to wait about ten minutes before there’s hot water available, but we’ve had that before, in Chetumal. We get it. It’s expensive to keep hot water heated 24/7, and we’re happy to help keep our host’s business model in balance.

It’s a 3rd floor walkup, which here means that you climb two flights. Some places, like Cambodia, don’t count the ground floor as 1, so a 3rd floor walkup is three flights. We didn’t know until we got here whether we’d be walking up two flights or three.

Since Dorothy’s mishap in Cambodia, we’ve adopted a new stair protocol: I am always below her. In front of her going down, behind her going up. We refer to my role as Meat Cushion. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

There’s another critical component of our Airbnb lifestyle in addition to the apartment itself, and that is, of course, our hosts. We have had many, many excellent hosts. Hosts who have helped us solve local problems. Hosts (sadly, plural) who have taken us to the hospital. Hosts who have brought us delicious baked goods.

But An, our Hà Nội host, is working hard to top that list. She and her delightful daughter, An Binh (both their names mean Peace), came to our apartment for its first weekly cleaning and stayed to provide a home-cooked traditional Vietnamese dinner. There was some kind of shrimp cake with whole shrimps baked in, several fried things in tubes, filled with delicious I-don’t-know, little patties of rice noodles and greens to wrap them in, dipping sauce, a dessert of sweet soup and sticky rice, and fresh longan on the stem. And green tea that had been stored in a lotus flower and made fresh.

Home-cooked meal #2, we are told, will be a traditional Vietnamese hotpot. Or as An called it, a food sauna.

Somehow we mentioned going to the flower market, and without looking it up I recalled that it was called Quảng Bá. I said Kwahng Bah, and both An and An Binh looked at me and then each other. They finally figured out what I’d meant to say, and after recovering from a fairly alarming fit of laughter, An Binh took some time to try to teach Dorothy’s mouth how to make the vowel sound in Quảng.

Which brings us to learning Vietnamese, or trying to. As the above clip demonstrates, Vietnamese vowels are slippery, due to the tonal component. In American English we use tones to modify the meaning of a sentence. A rising tone indicates a question, a falling tone indicates that we’ve completed a thought, but it doesn’t go much farther than that. A changed vowel tone certainly doesn’t indicate a completely different word in English. Or Southern drawls would be unintelligible. More unintelligible.

In fact, regional dialects in the US are all about shifting vowel sounds. A d is pretty much a d everywhere, but the vowels go every which way. When we moved to Rhode Island I was shocked to discover that sauce was a multisyllabic word. Suh-wass. But it still meant sauce.

Put another way, English has 19 different vowel sounds. Vietnamese has twenty-one vowel sounds (twelve basic vowels and nine diphthongs) and six distinct tones that modify the vowels and completely alter both the sound and the meaning of a word. Ma means ghost. Mà means but. Má means mother. Mả means tomb. Mã means code. And mạ means rice seedling. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to get an accurate count, but most folks agree that Vietnamese has over 100 vowel sounds.

Even less of a surprise, not only can’t we make the sounds of those tonal vowels, as Dorothy proves above, we can’t even hear them. We’ve lived our whole lives only needing to hear and know 19 vowel sounds, and now we’re swimming in over 100? After Cambodia, who’s Khmer alphabet is completely alien, we thought Vietnamese might have an easier uptake since we share an alphabet. But do we? Really? Not when a, à, á, ả, ã, and ạ are all different letters.

Here’s a good one. Cảm ơn means thank you. Câm mồm means shut up. The biggest difference is the intonation on that last vowel. Rising and it means thank you. Falling, as I’ve been pronouncing it, and you’ll be heard to say shut up.

At the end of the day, it’s still pretty much like everywhere else we’ve been. Their English is better than our Whatever, and that’s how we get by. But we did way better with Turkish and the Arabic dialects in Morocco and Tunisia, so our utter failure with Khmer and Vietnamese is a little disheartening. Here’s to butchering Indonesian on our next leg.

Mercados

For convenience, this may be the best shopping location we’ve ever had. Obviously we’re at Ground Zero for handicrafts, but we are, more importantly, hard by the largest traditional market in Hà Nội, Chợ Đồng Xuân, the Đồng Xuân Market. The Đồng Xuân offers three floors of shopping, with the first floor given over to wholesale and retail vendors of all stripes, from fresh meats to hard goods. Hats, cosmetics, sunglasses, backpacks, souvenirs, handbags, bras…

We had seen pictures and we’d noticed that the upper floors seemed to have quite a bit of fabric. What we hadn’t realized is that half the second floor was textiles, with the other half and the third floor given over to ready made. We wound up a three minute walk from one of the largest textile bazaars in Vietnam. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Which won’t keep us from going to Hom Market, the largest textile market in the city. It’s only a mile and a half from us, and will probably be a full-day field trip of its own.

We also visited the mall on our first full day here, which isn’t in the neighborhood. While we love the traditional markets, it’s hard for Dorothy to cook without the stuff available in a hypermarché, and the nearest mall was so blessed. Plus, while we’re not enamored of mall culture, it’s always interesting to see its vernacular expression. The Lotte Mall West Lake did not disappoint.

For starters, it’s pretty fucking big. Even by mall standards. Five stories, with more focus on children and experience than I expect from a mall. Not that there isn’t shopping and eating. There’s the full complement of upscale retail, from Polo and Lagerfeld to Hermès and Chanel. There’s restaurants, from food court to fine dining. As expected.

But there’s also Kidzania, where you can drop Der Kinder off by the hour. And a metric buttload of DIY crafting shops, where you can make jewelry or ceramics or embroidery. I’m sure you could enjoy it as an adult, if you like that kind of thing, but the target was definitely children. Also plenty of arcades and toy stores, nicely splitting the difference between mall and playground.

Oh. And an aquarium. Because, sure. And an outdoor park on the fifth floor.

The Neighborhood

I’m going to do a whole post on the 36 Streets from a handicrafts perspective, but the Old Quarter reminds us most of Mexico City, both in the ridiculous density and the retail specialization. For example, our apartment in CDMX was in the lighting district, but the clustering there was a naturally occurring phenomenon that happened over time. Here, the effect was very much intentional, with the Guilds being assigned to specific streets. It was believed that both merchants and shoppers would benefit from the close proximity, and thus it was decreed.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to make you wait until the 36 Streets post before sharing some of the photos. That would be mean. And you know how fundamentally kind of heart I am. Here’s a little amuse-bouche, compliments of the chef.

Part of the Old Quarter’s density comes from the fact that there are effectively no sidewalks. The sidewalks are either used as extended retail spaces for restaurants and shops or as parking lots for the hordes of scooters, which soak up whatever square footage has been left uncolonized. Pedestrians are left to share the road with scooters, cars, rickshaws, and commercial vehicles. It’s like a game of Frogger where you only get one life.

Even though they ban the tuktuks ubiquitous in Cambodia due to their diesel spew, the vehicular density has contributed to the designation, just a few months ago, of Hà Nội as the most polluted city in the world. Who says communism can’t deliver wins for the People?

What’s this? A picture of blue sky? What’s the big deal? The big deal is that this was the first blue sky we’d seen in Hanoi, and it took four full weeks to show up. We were stunned, but still had the presence of mind to capture it before it disappeared.

You could save a lot of money here if you smoked. I can’t imagine anything less necessary. The pollution fills the pulmonary niche of a burning cigarette’s chemical compounds, and if you miss the nicotine kick you can just cross the street. Zero reason to spend on cigs here.

The Old Quarter’s vehicular density is matched by its population density. The last information I could find was from 2020, which pegged the Old Quarter’s square kilometer at 66,000 people. If the district’s population grew by as much as Hanoi’s overall (15%) since 2020, you’d get a 2024 population of about 76,000.

The current densest city on the planet is Manila, at 46,000 people/km². Even without estimating growth since 2020, The Old Quarter’s 66,000 people/km² would make it the densest city on the planet, if it were an entire city. Which is, unsurprisingly, exactly what it feels like here.

Like Siem Reap, the Old Quarter is also chockablock with spas. So much so that Southeast Asia’s entire economy seems to be based on spa services. Once we got outside the neighborhood things calmed down, but you can’t swing a cat in the Old Quarter without hitting hot stones. Which makes a horrible sound. I counted 16 spas on one short block, all offering foot massage, full body massage, waxing, nails… The works.

I’ve already reported on the local custom in salons, and you can be sure I’ll be covering local spa culture. The sacrifices I make for you all…

Hoàn Kiếm Lake

The Old Quarter also abuts Hoàn Kiếm Lake, which means Lake of the Returned Sword. As the story goes, Emperor Lê Lợi was boating on what was then known as Hồ Lục Thủy, Green Water Lake. When suddenly a Golden Turtle God breached the calm waters and asked the Emperor to return his magic sword, Heaven’s Will, as it had been appropriated by the Dragon King to help the Emperor defeat the Chinese Ming Dynasty.

After defeating the Chinese, the Emperor acceded to this very reasonable request and returned Heaven’s Will to the Golden Turtle God, renaming the lake in honor of this singular event. Today, there is a multi-media show presented on the lake multiple times per week, retelling the legend. Cheesy tourist WTF? Sure. But we’ll still do it.

The Man On The Street

Our first night out on the street was great. We were outside the city center in Siem Reap, in a comparatively bucolic setting, but we’re right in the thick of it here, which is swell. We got a little tired of swimming with every other fucking salmon at the same fucking time in the Medina of Marrakech, and the Old Quarter’s charms may start to similarly fade by the end of six weeks. But for now we’re loving the night markets and street food and finding something new around every corner.

The first thing we discovered, on our very first night out, was how to present as chumps. Which turned out to be primarily a math problem.

The exchange rate here is tricky. There are ~ 25,000 Vietnamese Dong to the dollar. At least it’s not a completely random number, like 17,000, which would be an unmitigated disaster. But it’s still a fair amount of math to wrap your head around. VND 1,000,000 is $40 USD. It makes the currency a little tricky, too, as a result of all the bonus zeros.

So we’re out wandering around and enjoying the warm evening when a nice woman comes up and offers us pastries from a rolling cart. Sure. A little bag is VND 120,000, almost $5 USD. I know we’re being overcharged, but whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. I pull out a 100k note and as I’m fumbling for bills that add up to the other 20,000, she reaches into my hand, plucks out a 500,000 note and hands me the change. By the time I figure out that she’s handed me only 80,000 in change (hey, it’s a lot of zeros to keep track of) she is literally nowhere to be seen.

So that’s about $17 USD for a bag stuffed full of pastry and lesson-learned. What’s galling about is that I knew that the street vendor change hustle was a thing, and I got stung anyway. Whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. And it’s not like we didn’t receive something valuable in return.

Cà Phê is a big deal here in general, but Kopi Luwak is its own thing. Although it’s primarily associated with Indonesia it’s also produced in Vietnam. It’s colloquially known as Weasel or Civet Coffee, and it’s the partially digested coffee berries that weasels poop out after they pick up a little onsite fermentation. They’re then filtered out of the scat and roasted like nothing was amiss.

I don’t drink coffee, but Dorothy, who will cheerfully ingest offal, will have nothing to do with it. Who knew she was such a delicate flower?

This warrants not getting buried in a slide show. It was part of a little food altar set up in a ramen shop.

Buildings

We always love exploring a new location’s vernacular architecture. Hanoi’s defining feature seems to be narrow. And not just the Old Quarter. The whole city is made up of narrow buildings, known as tube houses. The tube houses can be as narrow as two meters, as deep as 100 meters, and up to twelve stories tall. Going back to feudal times, property was taxed by its width, rather than its area, which was the driver behind the creation of the tube houses, whose origins date back to the 10th century. They are the method by which the Old Quarter’s density is possible.

The narrow alleys between them, like the entrance to our apartment, also contribute to the density, as they are the gateway to the interiors of the blocks. The units that face the street are the most valuable, as they feature windows, but they’re just the visible iceberg tip. I don’t think they cut through to the opposite street, they just burrow into the block’s interior.

One night, after the restaurant that uses the alley closed, I followed our alley back, but I gave up before I found its end. I tried again, during the daytime, for a better view, and was angrily shooed away by the restaurant staff. I’ve read that it’s not uncommon for a family to occupy the interior housing and run their business from the street front, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here. It would certainly explain how they were able to set up an outrigger kitchen right in the alley.

The tube houses are also a likely contributing factor to a quirk of the local retail landscape. There are no big box stores here. To be fair, an Ikea is coming, but that’s about it. Mexico City has Home Depots and Walmarts, Costcos and Sam’s Clubs, all of which peacefully coexist with smaller, traditional retail. Hanoi is noticeably a big box desert. Retail is all very small-scale and local. OK, there are a lot of Circle Ks here. Which is weird.

I’ve read that one of the inhibitors to big box stores is that the narrow buildings make it difficult to accrete enough real estate to shoulder a Walmart in. And that’s a more than plausible explanation. But I have to believe there’s more to it than that.

Vietnam is nominally communist, but primarily in the sense of one party rule by the Communist Party of Vietnam. The CPV plays a significant role in central economic planning, but lets a thousand flowers bloom when it comes to private enterprise. That doesn’t just sound like capitalism, it smells and tastes like capitalism. Private enterprise may be small-scale and local, but it’s also riotous and dense. Where a Western commercial street might have a dozen businesses, that same street in Hanoi might house fifty or more.

I think the absence of large-scale retail isn’t just the result of the limitations of the physical infrastructure, but is also driven by a profound preference by the state to avoid succumbing to the rampaging megafauna of Western capitalism. They tend to trample what’s inconveniently underfoot, and reasonable people can agree that they’re evil.

It will be interesting to see whether the incoming Ikea is a sport or a harbinger. My money is on sport.

Street Food

You don’t truly know a place until you know its street food. If that’s what it takes, we’ll rise to the occasion. For you, of course. We do all of this for you.

The Temple Of Literature

Just outside the Old Quarter, the Temple of Literature beckoned. Like Tunisia, which reveres Ibn Khaldun, the famed Arab polymath who, among other accomplishments, invented sociology in the 1300s, the Vietnamese have a genuine love of the arts and sciences.

What we weren’t expecting was how crowded it would be. There were buses parked in front disgorging tourists by the long ton, and even the site’s generous 13+ acres couldn’t absorb everyone comfortably.

Most places we’ve been there have been a couple of sites on The List. Marrakech had Le Jardin Secret and the YSL gardens. Istanbul had the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. Places that would be packed like a mosh pit no matter the time of day or day of the week because they were on literally every tourist’s itinerary. We just didn’t think the Temple of Literature would be one of those places in Hà Nội.

Adding to the tourist crowds were a ridiculous number of school groups. We think it must have been graduation day, because there were literally dozens of school groups and their teachers, all dressed formally and posing for group pictures. What better place to bring the little dears for end-of-year pictures than the Palace of Deep Thoughts. “Look, kids. They built this whole building just for thinking!”

It’s obviously been rebuilt and restored multiple times over the centuries, but the original temple, on the current site, was built in 1070. It has always been a temple to learning, as Vietnam’s first national university, the Imperial Academy, was hosted in the temple from 1076 to 1779. Take that, Harvard.

What I love most about it is that all of the various courtyards and gates have inspirational names. There’s the Courtyard of Great Success. The Star of Literature Pavilion. There’s the Gate of Great Synthesis. The Gate of the Crystallization of Letters and the Gate of the Magnificence of Letters. A pool called the Well of Heavenly Brilliance. There are slogans carved throughout, such as “The country is peaceful and prosperous thanks to respecting culture,” and “Just as the Khuê constellation shines in the sky, the humanities shine everywhere.”

If you think I’m making sport of this, you’re wrong. That undertone isn’t snark, it’s jealousy. This is a real place that has those statements as shared values. What the fuck is wrong with us? I’m not sure we actually have any truly shared values in the US anymore, but if we did we wouldn’t be wasting our breath on extolling learning and the humanities. That stuff is for pointy-headed losers. Fuck Don’t Tread On Me. Our flag should read Hand That Over, Bitch.

Not that we have anything to learn from Commies.

To a great extent, I built what passes for my career on this ability, along with writing. Those were the two things I did well enough to warrant a paycheck. I’ve been planning and organizing for so long it seems like part of my nature. And there’s a small part of our lives, managing the logistics of our travel, that still calls for that skill. Planes, trains, automobiles, and Airbnb.

But except for those occasional travel-related bursts, our days serve as an active rebuke to the entire notion of planning ahead. We pretty much wake up and decide what to do each day. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

For the past eight months, as we’ve been Stateside, I have been thrown headfirst back into the world of multivariate critical path management. Which has been almost exactly as much fun as that description makes it sound. It turns out that when I’m not engaged in planning and management as the daily wallpaper of my job and life, I find it kind of unpleasant. Being good at it doesn’t really reduce the sting.

The first six of our Stateside months were spent preparing our new apartment in Chicago. If we’re going to use that as a safe harbor and break from travel, it’s important that it be done when we next come back. It won’t be much of a rest if we return to more move-in projects.

Plumbing, electric, tile work, demolition, repair… Figuring out when tradesmen could execute their piece, how we needed to order their work, planning when we could slide in the pieces we were tackling ourselves, coordinating with the building. I was basically the general contractor on a small construction project.

We had about a month at the end of the process where we could just chill, which was nice. We got to enjoy Chicago a little bit, and we feel really good about the choice. There’s more than enough going on to keep us entertained during our annual summer US sabbatical, and when we’re all done traveling it’s a city well set up for oldsters.

For the last five weeks we’ve been in Temecula with Dorothy’s parents. They’re 92 and 88, and have finally admitted that their massive house is more than they can manage. They’re moving to Tucson to be near Dorothy’s sister, and their house needed to be cleaned and staged for sale. They’re flipping their expensive California property for a smaller, cheaper Tucson property and banking the difference, which they need. They haven’t done a great job managing their finances.

They’ve been in their current home for 24 years, and they’ve accumulated as much stuff as you’d expect, or more, all of which seems to hold some sentimental value for them. Prying them off of every tool, every stick of furniture, every Christmas decoration they’ve ever owned has been a grueling, unrewarding series of arguments. 20 boxes of holiday ornaments, most of which haven’t been put up in years. It was demoralizing.

But all of this was going on while we’re trying to strip the place down so it didn’t look like a Grandmacore stage set and cleaning it so it didn’t look like no one had ever cleaned it. And managing the various vendors and tradesmen who were doing the heavy lifting that we couldn’t. Figuring out what order to execute, when it’s safe to put new curtains up, making sure the outside windows and screens don’t get washed until the landscaping is done…

It’s a lot, made worse by the effort required to help people who don’t want to be helped, and who fought us every step of the way. I think the worst of it is that Dorothy and I pride ourselves on not wasting experience. When bad things happen, we’re dead set on figuring out what possibly useful thing we can extract from the episode. Even the arguably worst thing that has happened to us, the collapse of our successful business when we were in our 20s, served up useful perspectives on, if nothing else, how to avoid getting fucked like that in the future. There’s almost always some positive you can take away from even the worst situation.

But very rarely, every so often, you walk outside your front door and a meteor hits you. It came from nowhere, you didn’t do anything to cause it, and there’s nothing meaningful to take away from the experience. It was just a bad thing, and all you can do is rub some dirt in it and walk it off.

I could relate all of the arguments and stupidity and self-sabotage, but it wouldn’t mean anything. There’s nothing to be learned from it. Except, at best, the limits of filial piety. So we’re rubbing some dirt in it and walking it off, leaving a clean house and taking away a few bruises as souvenirs.

Our job was to prep it for sale and then skedaddle, and we’ve done both. There’s still the nightmare of actually moving that Dorothy’s sister is going to have to manage, but we got the elders as far as we could. Our hands may be tied, but they’re clean.

Which, thankfully, brings us to the first stop of our third year of travel: Cambodia. We arrive slightly beaten up, ready to relax and explore, and delighted that no more complex logistical challenges await us. Now we can just live day to day, as we’ve intended all along.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Since out first stop is Cambodia, it made more sense to leave from LAX than go back east to leave from Chicago. So pretty much the moment the photographer left we headed to LA. Our dear friend Bob Rossoff lives in LA, and he graciously drove down to Temecula to rescue us.

Photography was on a Monday and our flight was Wednesday evening, so we arranged two nights in the lovely Royal Pagoda Motel in Chinatown.

Which, whatever its kitsch exterior suggests, was actually fine.

Bob docented us through our brief LA stay. We took a walk in Griffith Park, we went to Sherman Oaks, where I grew up, for pastrami and chopped liver sandwiches, and Bob showed us an art installation he’d done beside the LA River. We also walked around Chinatown, which was weirdly silent. Bob explained that many of the businesses had failed to make it past lockdown, but the whole effect was of a Chinese Potemkin Village. Somehow it was charming, in a way I’m sure native Chinese abhor, ridiculous, as the entire Chinatown esthetic was created by two white architects who had never been to China, and disturbing, as the desolation made it feel like a post-apocalyptic hellscape where only the architecture had survived.

Choo Choo! Next Stop Singapore…

But not before fucking up the LAX airport experience. Remember how I started with how great I am at planning and organizing? Apparently that skill needs to be used more often if I expect to still apply it at a high level.

I’ve fucked up calendar timing for a flight before by being sloppy about time zone shifts, so I’m now super careful to doublecheck that time zones are correct for both arrival and departure locations. Not so careful, apparently, about checking the actual times. My calendar entry said that our flight left LAX at 5:00 PM, whereas the actual time was 10:05. Not entirely sure how that cog slipped, but I’ll add Check Your Fucking Tickets to my Paranoid Departure List. Which also now includes Make Sure Your Airline Hasn’t Gone Bankrupt.

But, of course, we didn’t arrive at the airport at 5:00. Bob dropped us off at 2:00, leaving us eight hours to kill at LAX. Which is a lovely airport, but it lacks about seven of the eight hours of entertainment we needed to fill. Especially since, given the lateness of the departure, Singapore Air’s ticket counters didn’t even open until 4:00. So the first two hours were spent in the modestly appointed public area of the airport.

We walked a lot. All the way to Singapore, it seemed.

Which was our transfer point to Cambodia. After about 18 hours in the air we were looking forward to a six hour layover at Singapore. Genuinely looking forward to it, as Changi Airport in Singapore is world renowned as the Disneyland of airports. Maybe looking forward to it a little less, after having to cool our heels at LAX for eight hours, but still. A treat.

And it only modesty disappointed. It turns out that some of the most amazing features are outside the security perimeter in the public parts of the airport. And while we technically had time to leave and reenter, it would also mean clearing immigration for Singapore, which we hadn’t planned for. No clue what the paperwork and bureaucracy requirements were. Better, even with six hours between flights, to not tempt fate.

Which still left plenty to do.

The first thing you notice about Changi is its sheer scale. It’s the third busiest airport in the world by passenger volume, handling almost 70 million passengers a year. Plus us.

The next thing you notice is how very, very green it is. There is an absurd amount of plantings. And water. And art. There’s pretty much an absurd amount of everything.

There’s also a large, impressive two story butterfly garden. Because of course there is.

I know nothing at all about butterflies, other than that they’re pretty, so there’s nothing clever or insightful about this. It’s just pretty pictures of pretty things. Shallow.

However, I did just finish the ninth book in the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn, about a Victorian lepidopterist who solves crimes with her swashbuckling beau. Which books are an order of magnitude better than that description makes them sound. Highly recommended high quality, lo-cal reading.

There’s a fair amount of video-based art, most of which was impressive in both conception and execution. Here’s a multistory installation that I think is part of one of the duty-free stores, even though we watched it for awhile and didn’t catch any branding.

Here’s Dreamscape, an installation that pulls it all together: plantings, water you can walk on, koi, and a digital sky.

And finally, our white whale: The Wonderfall. A four story digital waterfall that was outside the secured area. We never even saw it from a train. We are suffused with regret.

But all things must pass, even Changi airport, so we finally board our flight to Siem Reap. Where for one last time we get to truly enjoy the hostess uniforms for Singapore Air.

This is not a great photo, but as I was positioning myself for another attempt, Dorothy helpfully pointed out that taking multiple pictures of Singapore’s airport security infrastructure wasn’t my best idea.

Khmer, You

For accuracy’s sake, I should point out that that’s a visual pun. They pronounce it k-my. For decency’s sake I should delete it. Obviously. I’ll get right on that.

While we’re correcting pronunciation, we say kam-bo’-dee-ya, but they say kam-bo-djee’-ya. Pretty close to Kampuchea, as they were affectionately known during the Pol Pot years.

This leg is all Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. With the exception of Hanoi, we’re staying away from capital cities on this tour. So no Phnom Penh, or Ho Chi Minh City, or Jakarta. The big capital cities rarely seem to represent the best a country has to offer.

For Cambodia, we’re four weeks in Krong Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat and all the rest of Angkor, which was the seat of the Khmer kingdom from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is just the largest and best known temple in the area. But Krong Siem Reap itself has plenty going on, as it’s become one of Cambodia’s primary cultural centers. Plenty for us to explore in our four weeks.

We got into our Airbnb at about 7 in the evening. Dorothy passed out instantly, and my dinner was the rest of a bag of airport trail mix. Before I fell asleep standing up, I asked where the closest ATM was, which was about a half hour walk each way. I’d downloaded the local Uber equivalent, Grab, so I could very easily have called a tuktuk, but I was still pretty muzzy and I’d forgotten that was an option. I was going to walk, but our lovely hostess took me there and back on her scooter. That’s service.

With a fresh One Million riel in hand I went home to pass out, too. Knowing that I’d have to wake up to nasty exchange rate math. Up until this point we’d been mostly lucky on exchange rates. 10:1, 100:1, 20:1… those are all pretty easy to do in your head. But the riel was 4,000:1. One million riel was only $250. You can figure it out, but it takes some effort.

It turns out that almost everything here is denominated in USD. I have no idea why. It’s kind of weird. Anyplace that takes credit cards not only prices in USD but charges in USD. Cash transactions can be priced in riel or dollars, but they’ll take both. I still have to do math, since all of the bills in my pocket are riels, but it’s mighty convenient to have things priced in USD. You do the math once at the end, and not every time you’re trying to figure out what something costs. It is a little disorienting, though, to pay for something in riels and get change mixed between riels and USD, depending on what they have in available cash.

After we’d been here for a few days our hostess offered me one of their scooters, which seemed like an obviously bad idea. The traffic here, a mosh pit of cars, trucks, scooters, bikes, and tuktuks, reminds me of nothing so much as Mumbai, in the sense that it seems to be governed by the laws of physics rather than the rules of the road. Is there space for your vehicle? It’s clearly meant just for you.

The confounding thing is that while it looks random it clearly isn’t, or there would be pileups everywhere. Which means that there are implicit rules governing traffic that everyone has agreed to follow, but for the life of me I can’t decode them. I’ve watched every merge in every tuktuk we’ve been in, searching for the cues used to let you know it’s safe to insinuate yourself into traffic, and nothing. They are communicating, somehow, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how.

No scooter for me. I would be a danger to myself and others.

Here’s an unexpected local oddity, what we refer to as the Fuck It Outlet. “Sure, fuck it, plug in whatever you like. I have the slots.”

We’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a standard that all devices adhered to, but everything that plugs in here has a different plug. If you can figure out the proper orientation.

Truthfully, I didn’t even know a universal outlet existed. Travel is broadening!

Our apartment is charming. We’ve had apartments in Morocco that were more ridiculously over the top, but this one has a generous layout, gracious amounts of storage, and lovely furnishings. We need a few things for the kitchen, but nothing serious. The host is responsive and the onsite staff is superb (the day after getting my scooter ride to the bank I walked literally a quarter block to the corner minimart to get water and ice, and when I turned to come back she was right behind me. She’d followed me to carry my bags back. I suspect she thinks I’m not safe alone). We’ve had a lot of accommodations that were just fine, but this one is actively good.

We’re a little outside the city center this time, so we’re not smack in the hurly-burly. We stayed three months in the Medina in Marrakech, and one takeaway is that we don’t need to be at ground zero for Action. The Medina was a little jangly.

We’re about a 45 minute walk to the heart of Siem Reap, but only about ten minutes by tuktuk, at less than $2. Grab is fast and convenient, and transportation is ubiquitous, so we’re fine with someplace a little quieter.

The weather has been surprising. Yes, it’s in the 90s every day, but there always seems to be a breeze that takes it down a notch, and the evenings have been lovely. It’s a little like the climate in Chetumal, only less clammy. We’ve been warned about the weather here, and it may well get bad, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Rub Some Dirt In It And Get Carted Off

We wake up to our first full day ready to conquer Cambodia. We’re flush with cash, the morning is leavened with a cool breeze, and we’re a 25 minute walk to the grocery store. What’s not to love?

We stopped for breakfast on the way, our first local meal. The setting was delightful and the food was delicious. We felt relaxed for the first time in months, and talked about how ready we were to slide back into what has become our preferred rhythm for daily living. I definitely feel most at home now when we’re not at home.

Down the back stairs we go, ready to grab the day by the throat, but the day had other plans for us. About 3-4 steps from the bottom, Dorothy’s foot slid off the side of her sandal, twisting her ankle and tumbling her down the stone stairs to land face first in the dirt. This was like her stumble coming off the train in Tunisia, but obviously, at first glance, much, much worse. I was behind her on the steps and watched the whole thing, helpless to do anything.

We drew a crowd, including our waitress, who said she was calling her boss. Someone else said they were calling for help. We lost about ten minutes until I figured out no one had called for transportation to the hospital yet, so I dialed up Grab to get a car to the nearest hospital.

Meanwhile, we’d managed to get Dorothy turned face up. She was obviously in a lot of pain (I recognize the sound, sadly), but I also knew how terrified she was about her replaced knee. That’s what had caused the stress in Tunisia, worrying that she had damaged the artificial joint and convinced the next step would be medevac back to the US. There’s not a lot of soothing you can do to alleviate a fear like that. We’d just have to get her to the hospital where they could check her knee and address the gash on her shin.

The tally: busted lip, bruised jaw, bruised and swollen knee, badly sprained ankle, a ragged gash that would definitely leave a gaudy, Frankenstein scar, and road rash on hands, arms, face, and legs. So, date night.

The Grab car showed up in a few minutes, and with the help of the crowd we got her laid down across the back seat with only the expected amount of screaming. Our waitress had climbed into the car to help at Dorothy’s head while we were managing her feet, and then closed the door on herself and accompanied us to the hospital. Unexpected.

Once there, Dorothy was taken care of quickly. Someone dressed the gash pretty much right away. It took a little longer to get an x-ray and a doctor to review it, but all told I think we were there for no more than an hour. We’d have left skid marks in a US ER.

The x-rays were negative. Dorothy was cleared to lose the fear so she could focus on the pain. Don’t knock it. One less thing to worry about, especially the worst thing, is a win.

No stitches for the gash, which kind of surprised me, but I think it might have been too ragged to stitch. They cleaned it and dressed it, and everything else was a rounding error.

My only complaint about the hospital was the weak sauce of acetaminophen and ibuprofen they prescribed. This called for opiates, dammit. Fortunately, we don’t leave home without.

The other thing that happened while all this was going on was that the restaurant’s owner showed up, a lovely woman who took charge, communicating with staff and translating for us.

When we were all done she drove us to a pharmacy to get a cane and then took us back to our Airbnb, where our kind scooter hostess helped manhandle Dorothy up the stairs.

I’d like to report that, like our other hospital experiences on our travels (Mexico and Tunisia), Cambodia’s system was clean, efficient, and cheap. I can vouch for clean and efficient, but I have no idea what it cost, as the restaurant’s owner paid for everything and refused to let me reimburse her. While we were driving around to find a cane she shared her life story, which included the information that her husband was a very successful manager at Dow, and that she only ran her restaurants and hotels to provide jobs and education for her employees. I think she was trying to let us know that paying for our ER visit wasn’t a financial burden.

I’m sure that at least some part of her response was fear-based. An American Karen had fallen and hurt herself at her restaurant, which must be terrifying. We didn’t present in any way as troublesome, reassuring her that the blame was on Dorothy’s sandal and not her stairs. And she seemed genuinely kind and concerned. But there had to be at least a soupçon of let’s-just-keep-this-from-getting-out-of-hand.

It’s hard to overstate the level of kindness and care we received from strangers, from our waitress to her boss to the bystanders. Not exactly how I wanted our first day back in the saddle to go, but affirming nonetheless.

I’d reached out to our host while at the hospital asking if we could be moved closer to the ground floor so Dorothy didn’t have to manage getting up to the fourth. Our scooter hostess had prepared an apartment on the second floor, and when we got back helped move our things down. Thankfully, we hadn’t been there long enough to move in, so we just threw everything that had been strewn about back into suitcases, and she carried most of them down for us. Young and strong.

The new apartment is a tad smaller, but that’s fine. The other one seemed kind of pointlessly large. But we are missing the washing machine that our first apartment sported. There’s a laundry service a scarce half block away that returned beautifully folded laundry same day for $1/kilo. A week’s worth of laundry was $3. Why would we do our own laundry?

The barber is also just around the corner.

As exhausted as I was at this point, we still hadn’t made it to the grocery store we’d set out for in the morning. Despite the fatigue, I decided to take the 25 minute walk. I’d tuktuk back when I was laden.

On the way I ran across a kiddie car rental lot, which we’ve seen variations of in many countries. It never fails to charm.

We didn’t know how Supermarket the place we’d been told to go would be, so Dorothy sent me with a pretty deracinated list, assuming there would be few options. So “rice,” “coffee,” and “cooking oil,” as opposed to “jasmine rice,” “French roast coffee,” and “olive oil.”

The grocery store was a shiny new two story marvel, the equal of any Carrefour in North Africa.

So many choices, and no one to help, as Dorothy was fast asleep at home. I was overwhelmed, like Borat with cheese. I soldiered on manfully and was even able to buy fruit for breakfast, but I totally failed at veggies. Other than onions all the vegetables looked alike to me. But not in a racist way.

The Local Mercado

Everywhere has something like the Mexican mercado, sometimes open air, sometimes covered. The place where the locals buy fruits, vegetables, meats, spices, housewares, and lunch. It took us a minute to locate the Old Market, around the corner from the night markets downtown, but it didn’t disappoint. It’s an entire square block, with everything you could want. I think shopping for fresh groceries in the mercados may be our favorite activity when we travel.

I went a couple times on my own before Dorothy was stable enough to manage the narrow aisles and tight quarters. I spent a lot of time texting her photos of produce so I could bring her what she wanted.

Streetscape

There’s always interesting things to see just walking and driving around wherever we happen to be.

The Royal Independence Gardens are known for the colony of bats that live in its trees, specifically Flying Foxes, so named for their red fur. Bats being nocturnal and all, we expected to see them sleeping during the day, but they were super active. And screechy.

The Royal Independence Gardens are basically the front yard of the Royal Residence. Which is every bit as ornate as you’d expect.

One more thing. The cats here are mutants. They have this weird thing going on with their tails. There’s the odd freak with a normal tail, but 99% of the cats here have either ridiculous, stubby tails or, more likely, a bizarre kink. I know, Jerry, you have a bizarre kink, too, but no one wants to hear about it.

Follow Up Care

The ER we went to for Dorothy’s extravaganza had been strong on right now but weak on later, so we thought a follow up visit to check the wound would be prudent. Her ankle and knee were both healing nicely, and she was even starting to get some side-to-side action on the knee. But that wound was troublesome, and we needed to know if it was healing OK, and how long we should keep it bandaged and moist before letting it have air exposure.

Our host provided the name of the nearest local doctor/hospital: The Golden Queen. That sounds about right. They specialized in women’s issues, but they also handled the normal range of injuries and such. We were in and out in half an hour, which included the cleaning and dressing of the wound, a detailed and thorough consultation about caring for it while it healed, and a bonus Tetanus shot for good measure.

Oh, and a bill for $22.

But we live in the greatest country in the world. And don’t you ever forget it.

We now have a path forward on all of Dorothy’s various recoveries. It’s probably going to be at least another week before she’s ready for any serious sightseeing, but we’re arranging some car sightseeing for a few days from now.

And we’re here for four weeks. While that’s a short visit for us, we have plenty of time to see what needs to be seen, and no reason to begrudge the healing time. We have ordered our lives to have nothing but time, so when something like this happens we’re not derailed.

Just slowed down.

This is our safe haven, our sanctuary, our respite from travel. Now, when we’re on the downside of a visit and discussing where to go next, Home is an option. Rather than perpetual travel until we break, which had been the previous model, we’re looking at nine months of travel broken up by three months of Home in Chicago.

At least that’s our starting offer. The entire point of this escapade is that we don’t know what we’re doing, so we’ll pivot as new facts on the ground suggest new approaches. Will nine-and-three be our final model? Who knows? Maybe we’ll settle into six-and-six, or three-and-nine. Dunno. We’re going to set out, knowing we now have a safety valve to trigger, and see what happens.

The Apartment

The apartment is in a hospital that had been converted to residential units in 2000. It’s a solid five-story elevator building with surprisingly useful amenities and reasonable monthly HOA fees. For our fees we get: hot water, cable, high-speed internet, a mail room for parcels, two fairly well appointed exercise rooms (including rowing machines, so I don’t have to find room in the apartment for my rowing machine), a covered parking space, nicely landscaped grounds, and a spacious 8’x18′ temperature controlled storage unit in the basement.

The apartment itself is a modest ~ 1,100 square feet with two bedrooms and a single bathroom. It has a slightly industrial ambiance, with concrete ceiling beams and exposed ducting. The master bedroom has a generous walk-in closet, and the main living area is open plan, with the kitchen, dining area, and living room all sharing a large space. It’s how we designed our St. Louis apartment, so it’s a style we really like.

Even though our last apartment was measurably larger, about 1,500 square feet, this apartment feels as big, or bigger. A lot of the square footage in our previous digs was taken up by the massive open plan living room/dining room/kitchen. It felt enormous because it was, but I don’t know that it had more usable space than we currently have. Everything was just further apart.

Here, that open plan area has been compressed, but we have just as much living room and dining room as before. The kitchen is noticeably smaller, but some of our changes have mitigated that. As a bonus, the compression of the common area also created enough room for a second bedroom, so Dorothy has a fully equipped workroom. We’ve just had to pretend we’re living on a boat and make every cubic inch count. As a result, it feels more spacious than it should.

But the highlight of the apartment is the North-facing view. We’re pointed right at the downtown skyline and Navy Pier, so we’re line of sight to the regular summer fireworks displays. We’re right at the tree line, so we have a leafy, green panorama, and the 5’x10′ balcony permits not just warm evenings but also offers BirbTV. We have a birb feeder, and we spend hours happily watching BirbTV.

Would you like a tour? Home would love the opportunity to show off.

Le Foyer

That’s French.

The front door opened onto a narrow path to the living area, with the small bedroom just to the right and the bathroom off to the left. Straight ahead was a small coat closet. The path from the front door to the living area felt like a tunnel.

This is what it looked like looking towards the door.

So we removed the wall, turning the closet into a niche. That widened the visual pathway to make the entrance seem less claustrophobic.

Which also left a trench in the floor. This was when we discovered that the walls in the unit had been set down to the original hospital concrete floors, but the flooring had been built up. We lost a wall but gained a hole.

Our other renovations seemed more obvious. This seemed a little weird, but the end result, with the view on entry opening up to the living area, is a shockingly substantial improvement.

The Workroom

Having an extra bedroom provided Dorothy a dedicated work space.

The only change we made to this space was to add a track for overhead lighting. Like the rest of the apartment, this room was dark.

While there’s some fabric still stored in the basement, there is a surprising amount stored under the gracious 6′ x 4′ cutting table. She has a gravity feed iron, a primary sewing station, a serger station, and a dress form in her size. There is no happier sound in our home than the sound of a sewing machine.

There’s even enough room between the cutting table and closet to unfold our full-size guest mattress. Luxe accommodations!

The Living Area

This is where the action is: living room, dining room, and kitchen, all mashed up together in a common space. This is also where we made the most changes.

Living Room

Lighting

First, the room was dramatically underlit. The entire living room/dining room area had an adorable little 3′ track section, providing a fraction of the light necessary. The apartment was dark. We extended that track across the room, so it now provides lighting for the living room, dining room, and the art walls.

We did something a little different with the lighting here than in our last St. Louis apartment. There we set up multiple smart lighting circuits, so that we could use light to define spaces in the open plan space. We want to do the same thing here, but we’re not building from scratch, like we did in St. Louis, so we had to be clever to avoid ridiculous electrician bills.

We just have three tracks in the whole space: one covering the entry and Dorothy’s workroom, one for the kitchen, and one for the living room/dining room. Instead of smart circuits we’re using smart bulbs (Wiz, if you’re interested). Now we’re not constrained by the physical circuits, we can use the smart bulbs to create as many logical circuits as we like.

For example, the track in the living area has ten lamps. Three are part of a Living Room group, three are part of a Dining Room group, and four are part of the group which lights art on the walls, which also has lamps on the kitchen track. Dorothy’s workroom has two lamps in the track and another smart bulb in a gooseneck at her sewing station, all of which can be triggered as part of the same logical circuit. You can put in magnetic wall switches that can control any group you want, you can trigger them through an app, or you can voice control them through Alexa, which is what we usually do. It’s great when you have your hands in food prep and realize that you need more light to just holler for it.

As a final bonus, you have granular control over how the lights fade on and off, their color, 100 steps of fade, and their color temperature. We’ve set the Living Room lamps to warm and the Kitchen and Dining Room to daylight, for example, but that’s all easy to modify, even by voice. “Set dining room to warm at 75%.” Yes, sir.

Fireplace

The living room featured a non-working gas fireplace that was taking up useful space and preventing a seating configuration focused on the view. It was non-working because it was unvented, and my sister, who’d owned the apartment before us, decommissioned the gas. Because who in their right mind would turn on an unvented gas fireplace? So we had to pull that out and remove the conspicuous black gas pipe that supplied it and spanned the living room ceiling.

It seemed stupid on paper, as the fireplace was a 2′ x 6′ installation, and reclaiming all of 12 square feet seemed kind of ridiculous, relative to the cost and hassle. But, like the closet wall we removed, it made a surprising difference. Also like that wall, it left a lovely hole in the floor.

Interestingly, the blue we chose for the walls is not precisely the Majorelle Blue we saw in Marrakech. But it’s mighty damned close.

The Sisyphus table, in action.

Dining Room

The dining room isn’t a separate room, just a space defined by furniture and lighting. It’s pretty full.

This is it, the OG, the very first piece of folk art we purchased, which set us on this long, winding path. We were both ridiculously hung over one day when we wandered into a little folk art shop in the East Village, long before this stuff was cool and collected. We looked at it, looked at each other, and asked, “Do you see that, too?” Since we both saw it, we bought it, brought it home, and named it Santa Tequila, the Patron Saint of Roaring Hangovers. This is an original piece by Pedro Linares, the literal inventor of the dream creatures he named alebrijes. The Victor Fabian porcupine wouldn’t exist without Pedro Linares. We are proud to be Santa Tequila’s caretaker.

By the way, he does stand up, but putting all his weight on his papier-mâché toes is a bad idea. Dude has some years on him.

The Kitchen

The industrial ambiance shows through here, with the concrete open beam ceiling and the exposed duct. The second bedroom, Dorothy’s workroom, is just behind the kitchen.

We added lighting in this area. There was a short section of track lighting, but it was on the beam that was exactly between the island and countertop, meaning that whichever direction you faced the light would be behind your head and you’d be working in shadow. So we moved that track over the island, and added the gooseneck lamps over the sink and stove. No more shadow.

There was an unvented gas range, so that needed to be replaced with an electric induction range, and the new electric line to run it. We took down the upper cabinets because they loom unattractively, they use wall space that would best be allocated to art, and we can’t reach them with our little T-Rex arms anyway. They did, however, hold things, so we had to extend the island with additional cabinets to make up for their loss.

The Bedroom

This is the room where we did the least work. We were going to add track, but decided that overhead lighting wasn’t strictly necessary in a bedroom. Other than paint, we pretty much left this room alone.

The Bathroom

This is where most of our renovation budget went. The bathtub had unusually tall sides, and while watching Dorothy, with her surgically reconstructed hips and knees, try to spider over the edge was reliable entertainment, it wasn’t a sustainable solution, so we had to pull that out and convert it into a step-in shower enclosure.

What we didn’t realize before demolishing the tiled tub enclosure was that the drain wasn’t at floor height. The drains were set above the hospital’s concrete floors, which was why the tub seemed so tall. The bottom of the bathtub had to be above the drain, and so did our shower floor.

Despite the sudden change of plans, and with many thanks to Tony, who jumped in with no prep to build the shower platform and step, we finally got our bathroom.

The Basement

A house is not a home without a garage, and ours is a generous 8’x18′ storeroom in the basement.

And yes, the racks are tagged and numbered and the bins are labeled. Shut up. You’re just jealous that your garage isn’t this well organized.

And it’s not like we have a choice. We have to do what the voices tell us.

One of the things we’d been looking forward to about being back in the US is being in an environment we can navigate like natives. So here’s the funny thing about Chicago. We’ve never lived there. We’ve never lived in our new condo. Or any kind of condo. We don’t know where food comes from. We don’t know where trash goes. We largely understand the speech, which is not an unalloyed benefit, but we have no clue whether the condo association is OK with hemming the curtains. We’re struggling with the local currency (“That can’t be how much burritos cost”). Once again, we’re in a brand new environment figuring it out as we go along.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same. Once we do figure it out we’ll be able to leverage that knowledge in the future. Sussing out Marrakech didn’t really give us a leg up in Istanbul. And while navigating what the condo association will permit is challenging, it’s also a one-off. We’re going to do some renovation at the front end of this process and then ride the apartment out until death. It’s not like we’re going to Winchester Mystery House our condo.

Moving In

Our transition to the new apartment was super greased. We bought a unit in the same building that my sister, Nef, lives in, and she and her daughter Amber set the apartment up so it was gracious when we arrived. Rather than a completely empty apartment, there was a little sofa and a couple of barstools. There was a bed with linens and towels in the bathroom. There was butter and eggs and cheese and cereal, dishes and flatware. There was bourbon and beer. We arrived with our suitcases and didn’t have to immediately find a grocery store for provisions and a Target for necessary housewares. It was a lovely greeting and a welcoming, civilized start to our stay.

And especially helpful because our first official act as newly minted Chicago residents was to come down with Covid. I thought it was a brutal case of jet lag, so it took a couple of days to recognize, and then, of course, Dorothy caught it. Because we share everything. It definitely slowed our entry.

Which was fine, because a slow entry actually worked out. We’d sold or given away almost all of our lifetime accumulation of WTF prior to launching and what was left, the choice bits, fit in a 10’x15’ storage facility we rented in Chicago. So instead of hiring movers and swimming, Scrooge McDuck-like, through all of our belongings, we borrowed a car from family and moved over a carload a day. One day’s stuff could be absorbed into the apartment the day it came over, and we dealt with trash and recycling in real time, so we were never living in that move-in morass of boxes and garbage.

We got about halfway through the storage facility on our own before hitting the furniture too big to fit in the car and the boxes too heavy for old people. While Dorothy was visiting family in San Diego, I had movers bring over the last of it and largely got things organized and put away before she got back. One of the lovely perks of our 1,100 square foot apartment is a dedicated 8’x18’ store room in the basement, so there’s enough garage to hold what we don’t need every day in a rational, accessible fashion. You know: labeled, inventoried, taxonomized bins stored on matching steel shelves. All the comforts of our OCD home.

Our apartment is on the fifth floor of a hospital that was refurbed into housing, but the wing we’re in doesn’t have trash chutes on the fifth floor. I knew that before we bought the apartment, and it was a definite negative. But when we got here and moved in, we were all, “OMG, the trash is only one floor away!” We didn’t have to walk it to the corner two blocks away and just leave it on the sidewalk (Carthage). Or walk it three blocks to the parking lot and ask for Cuco (Guanajuato). Or walk it four blocks to the closest dumpster (Marrakech).

We are committed to retaining our childlike wonder at the world’s marvels. Like a trash chute that’s only a floor away. We’ll see if we can avoid becoming jaded, entitled burghers. Stay tuned.

The Apartment

The apartment is lovely. It has 10 1/2 foot ceilings, so it feels nice and spacious. It also has exposed ducting and concrete beams, so it’s a little industrial from the neck up, but the rooms are graciously proportioned. There’s a master bedroom with a walk-in closet and a smaller second bedroom, which will be Dorothy’s workroom. The main living area is open plan, which we love, with the kitchen an integral part of the living room/dining room space. The bathroom is split with a sink and toilet in one room and the tub in the other. So guests don’t have to be confronted with the army of unguents and potions that occupy the modern bathroom.

We’ll be doing some renovation. There’s a gas fireplace in the living room that we’re taking out. An unvented gas fireplace is an epically awful idea, and the enclosure eats into the living space. Removing it will reclaim a fair amount of usable square feet. We’re removing the upper cabinets in the kitchen, because we can’t reach them with our little T-Rex arms. We’re adding a ton of track lighting, because the previous owners appear to have been blind. I have never been in a darker apartment in my life. And we’re swapping out the tub for a more age appropriate barrier-free shower enclosure.

But the best feature of the apartment is probably the north-facing view. Just about the entire north side of the apartment is glass, pointed straight at the downtown skyline. We’re up at the tree line, so the view is leafy and green (at least at this time of year), and there’s a nice 5’x10′ balcony. And, best of all, BirdTV. I could watch BirdTV for hours. And have.

One final curiosity. The very first property we ever purchased, in 1992, was a condo in the Renaissance East in Spanish Harlem. The very last property we’ll ever purchase is a condo in the Renaissance Place in Hyde Park. Nothing like a little unaccountable symmetry to wrap things up in a neat bow.

Money, Money, Money

One of the things I’ve been most interested to discover is whether it’s truly more expensive to live in the US than the other parts of the world we’ve visited. I keep a detailed budget, so I can compare month to month costs and make sure we’re not ridiculously overspending. In order to compare apples to other apples I factored out our move-in costs, which are all one-time, one-off. Mattress, vacuum cleaner, table and chairs, movers… They’re functionally capital expenses to set our home up, not operating expenses.

Turns out, July, our first month in Chicago, was not our most expensive month so far. We spent more in Tunisia in April, because of the life-changing, expensive, week-long Sahara tour, and we spent more in Istanbul in June, because of multiple road trips and one very costly rug. But those two months were well above average for us, and our Chicago month is also near the top. I’ve updated the post on our spending with a broader range of locations, and included our Chicago month, so you can see where the money goes. July picked up the tag end of our Turkey trip, so if August looks more representative I’ll swap those numbers out.

Chicago Its Own Self

Getting here, getting Covid, going to our summer camp, physically moving in… We definitely haven’t been able to enjoy Chicago yet. At least we know where the trash goes in our building.

Chicago certainly seems to possess all of the benefits we imagined when we picked it as our Final Resting Place. As we learn yet another foreign city I’ll post about our adventures here. To date, though, moving in has been our primary adventure.

Sure, sure, it’s Istanbul not Constantinople, but before that it was fucking Byzantium. Which was founded in 657 BC. OK, I’m cheating that timeline a little, since Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians in 800 BC. But even if Carthage is technically older than Istanbul, it’s a matter of inches from this remove. What’s undeniable is that somehow we’ve managed to create a cradle-of-civilization tour. We swear, it wasn’t on purpose. Nothing we’re doing is on purpose.

Once again, we’re dealing with a metric buttload of old. Besides ourselves. The Old City of Istanbul houses a Grand Bazaar that dates to 1455. Topkapi was built in 1460. The Blue Mosque was completed in 1617. The Hagia Sophia was originally built in 537. Jesus, there’s a hammam in the Old City that was built in 1584.

To say nothing of the various ruins scattered about the country. Inspired by our epic Saharan trip, we’re planning a tour to take in some of the amazing things outside Istanbul, including a trip to the Greek era city of Ephesus, which Dorothy recalls reading about in her childhood bible study classes.

But how did we even wind up in Istanbul? Weren’t we supposed to head to Chicago after Tunisia? Yes we were, and thank you for asking.

We haven’t tired of traveling, but we have tired of being homeless, so we were headed to Chicago to set up the apartment we purchased from my sister, which is currently occupied by my niece and her husband. They took on a huge gut renovation, turning an abandoned synagogue in Chicago into an arts center and residence. To no one’s surprise, or at least not ours, that project ran over. They figured they’d need another two weeks past our planned return date to actually be out of our apartment.

What to do? We could come back as planned and spend those couple of weeks somewhere in the US. Or we could stay in Tunisia longer, stretching our visa out. Or we could go somewhere else completely.

One of the interesting things about what we’re doing is the illusion of freedom. Freedom is just a machine into which we sluice data and await the result. When we’re planning our next stop, we could go anywhere. But then we factor in the weather. And the cost of transit. And the cost of housing. And the ease of entry. And the local safety and political outlook. And the EFF (Estimated Fun Factor).

By the time we’re done, the machine usually spits out a single answer. So much for freedom.

As it turns out, going back to the US and Airbnbing for those two weeks was the costliest option. Housing in the US is expensive. This whole journey is pretty much built on housing arbitrage. Staying longer in Tunisia was the cheapest option, but the lowest EFF. It didn’t feel like adding two more weeks would squeeze a lot more out of Tunisia after our three months there.

Istanbul? Cheap transit, cheap housing, and exceptional EFF. Thank you, Machine-That-Makes-Our-Decisions-For-Us! But two weeks in Istanbul seemed stupid, so we upped it to five weeks, to make it worth our while. Maybe the machine doesn’t make all of our decisions.

Turkey is also of a piece with what’s turning into a Muslim World Tour. Turkey is about as Muslim as it gets, with some estimates tallying 99% of the population. What’s shocking is how deep the commitment to secularism runs here, despite the fact that it’s pretty much all Muslim, all the time. Yes, Erdoğan has been eroding that bit by bit, but he hasn’t made truly significant inroads. Plus, he just took a spanking at the polls, although that’s probably related more to his strongman dreams than his Muslim nationalism.

But you can feel that secularism on the street. Sure, there’s the call to prayer, and there are niqabs and head scarves, but not as many as you’d expect. The booze situation is incredibly normal. Unlike Morocco and Tunisia, the grocery stores have it behind the registers, not locked away in a separate room, and all the restaurants sell booze, which was practically unheard of in our previous Muslim stops. I’m sure it’s different out in the country, but in the big city modest dressing doesn’t seem to be a thing. The women could be from any European capital and the men wear Western dress almost exclusively.

Honestly, if I didn’t know anything about the place and I’d just landed I’d have said Istanbul had a conspicuous Muslim minority. That’s how it feels. Ataturk’s reforms are a bedrock part of Turkish society, and even Erdoğan hasn’t been able to put a noticeable dent in Turkey’s secular culture.

Our Apartment

We’re not staying in the neighborhood we preferred, but that’s what we get for pivoting at the last possible minute. We booked our Airbnb four days before arrival and there just weren’t a lot of affordable options (note to self: next time maybe a less affordable option is a good idea). We’re in Beyoğlu in the New City, and there’s nothing wrong with the location. It’s just heavily focused on hotels and over-priced restaurants. This is not a neighborhood anyone lives in, so there’s a paucity of goods and services that aren’t tourist focused. Lots of convenience stores and travel agents, not a housewares or hardware store in sight.

On the other hand, we’re hard by Taksim Square, and are ridiculously well positioned for transit. We may not be in a hanging-out neighborhood, but we have ready access to the entire city. Public transit puts us minutes from the old city and just as close to a smorgasbord of walking neighborhoods. It’s not a bad tradeoff.

That transit system may be the best we’ve seen so far. It’s plentiful, cheap (50¢/fare), modern, and efficient. Honestly, the transit system here smells like money.

It also encompasses just about every form of public transit known to man. The Metro is a dense, sophisticated subway system, but there’s also a surface Tramway that operates on tracks like a trolley, avoiding the congested street traffic. There’s even a special class of bus that zips though traffic in dedicated lanes. There are buses, funiculars, the Teleferikler (aerial tram), and ferries, all part of the same system, and all accessible using the same pass, the Istanbulkart. Which is even good for entering public restrooms. Istanbul is one of the most livable big cities we’ve encountered.

I should note, by the way, that we’re in Europe, a short walk to the Bosporus. We can see Asia from our neighborhood. There’s a walking bridge, and you can literally walk from Europe to Asia, but we haven’t done that yet. And probably won’t. The Bosporus isn’t exactly narrow.

The apartment itself is fine. We’ve become inured to the insults of the Airbnb lifestyle. It’s a little spartan, but it’s clean, there’s regular hot water and adequate water pressure, and the kitchen is… functional. The bed is comfortable. That’s not nothing. The living room is gracious, with enough seating and the apartment’s highlight, a wall of exceptionally wacky oil paintings. There’s even a little balcony with enough room for a small table. We eat out there and enjoy the post-Soviet splendor. It is a fourth floor walkup, which we don’t love, but we’re only here five weeks.

Speaking of those crows, we’ve been adopted. They’re Hooded Crows, and Dorothy read up on them enough to be able to entice them with little dishes of food and water. There are a pair who stop by regularly, and they like nuts, fruit, and, especially, French fries. They’re quite fastidious, and rinse their food in the water before eating. At this point, they’ve taken to bringing food for later and leaving it in the food dish along with our offerings. When they’re ready to eat they come back, rinse, and dine. We could watch Crow TV for hours. And we do.

Shopping

As mentioned, there’s really nothing in our neighborhood but convenience stores. There are grocery stores nearby, but there are day-of-the-week markets scattered about the city. That’s the way to shop here.

This is the Saturday market in Beşiktaş. It occupies a two-story car park, but it pales in comparison to…

Fındıkzade Cuma Pazari, an absolutely massive Friday market in the Old City featuring everything from cheap clothes to cheap housewares. And balloon animals. This is a classic street market (no permanent structures) that takes up what feels like an entire neighborhood. I’m sure if I lived there I’d hate it. But I don’t.

While the array of goods is impressive, Fındıkzade Cuma Pazari is the best food market we’ve seen anywhere so far. In overall size it’s smaller than the Abastos in either Oaxaca or Mexico City, but it trumps both in the breadth and depth of the offerings, and the sheer density of the experience.

We also went to a Tuesday market, the Kadkikoy Sali Pazari, which is across the Bosporus in Asia. Pazari means market, by the way, which comes from the same Persian root as bazaar.

We’d attempted to go to a couple of day markets the day before, and put on six miles without ever locating them, but we were confident we’d find this market. Which we did, only to discover that it was a flea market, not a produce market. A very, very large flea market, with every manner of things. But mostly clothes.

We finally wound up in a neighborhood with quality produce stores. We referred to them as Produce Palaces, for obvious reasons.

Of course, not all the shopping was produce. While most of our artifact looting occurred in the Old City or on our road trips, Istanbul offered up this lovely little shop specializing in repurposed antique silk velvets.

Streetscape

Istanbul is big. It’s the world’s fifteenth largest city, with over 15 million residents. It’s not the capital (that’s Ankara), but it’s the beating heart of Turkey’s culture and economy. So far on this trip it has most in common with Mexico City. It’s dense and vibrant, but it doesn’t feel quite as sardine-packed as parts of Mexico City, or even the Medina in Marrakech.

Some of that is that we’ve been judicious about partaking of the Old City. There’s a cruise ship port there, so the trick to seeing the high volume sites (Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Topkapi) is timing. We’ll do our best to hit them on days when there’s no ships in port, but even then we should be fine if we do only one a day and get there for opening, before the midday crowds clot up. We’ve been through the Old City to go other places, and the crowds at the major locations are frightening.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of street to enjoy here.

Turkish: It’s More Than Just A Delight

Turkish is by far the most rational language we’ve tried to learn so far. If we were here longer than five weeks I think we could pick up a fair bit. Spanish wasn’t bad and French was a fail. Arabic is acknowledged as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, and we were dealing with two completely different dialects (Darija in Morocco and Tunsi in Tunisia). We never stood a chance.

The reason that Turkish is so comparatively rational is that it was forcibly modernized as part of Ataturk’s grand reforms on taking power post-WWI. Turkish had been written using a Perso-Arabic script for a thousand years, but that alphabet had trouble properly expressing Turkish phonemes. Ataturk set up a language commission that created an entirely new Latin-based alphabet optimized for Turkish, which was delivered in 1928. A law was passed mandating its adoption, and the government set up the training programs to teach the new alphabet and drive literacy.

Ataturk just made up a new alphabet and demanded its use. Amazing. Other than Chinese, I can’t think of another language that’s been forcibly rationalized, rather than evolving organically. English could certainly benefit from a little thoughtful pruning. OK, a complete rethink. One thing traveling the world has done is make me understand the impetus behind Esperanto.

A number of features of the Turkish alphabet contribute to its simplicity. First, each letter makes a unique sound. That means there are no diphthongs, so there’s none of that feat/feet nonsense. Neither are there consonant digraphs, so you never have to parse whether ch is for cheese or chute. And because each letter makes a unique sound, each sound is associated with a unique letter. There’s no duplication, like f and ph. And there’s nothing like the bullshit C in English, which can make the S sound or the K sound, and is both redundant and annoying. Seriously. The C should just die. It adds nothing.

The one exception to the unique sound rule is the R, which has a different sound depending on whether it’s at the beginning, the end, or the middle of a word. But even there, that sound is fixed. As far as I can tell, each of those three R sounds is firm and unyielding, not dashing to and fro as they would in English.

In addition, with one exception, every letter is voiced – there are no silent letters. So if you see a letter, you say it. And because each letter makes a unique sound, there’s a startling lack of ambiguity in how to pronounce Turkish. As opposed to, and I’m just throwing this out there, French. Which has baked in ambiguity in pronunciation specifically so you can be scorned for getting it wrong.

That one exception, by the way, is the Ğ, which serves as a transition between consecutive vowels. But unlike, say, the E in English, which can be voiced or silent, I don’t know, randomly, the Ğ is always silent. Still zero ambiguity.

You can see this in a word like kuaför. English can only make the KW sound by combining letters, like in quick or backwards. But if you voice all the letters in kuaför, you get that sound naturally. K-oo-ah-f-ew-r. Say it quickly and you get the kw sound.

The third factor making Turkish comparatively easy is unrelated to the alphabet, but absolutely related to kuaför. And that’s the shocking number of cognates in Turkish. I found one fellow on the interwebs who had compiled a list of over 3,000 English/Turkish cognates. Amatör. Spekülasyon. Üniversite (remember, that final e is voiced).

More to the point, you can’t hardly read a sign in Turkey without running windswept through a welcoming field of cognates.

What I can’t quite figure out is why. I suspect that the wealth of cognates weren’t part of the 1928 modernization, but occurred over time as loanwords made their way into the vocabulary. Honestly, some of them, like kuaför, seem less like cognates and more like transliterations.

But it’s not like English and Turkish, or French and Turkish, share any linguistic roots. They come from completely different branches. These truly are loanwords, but I don’t get why Turkish needed so many. For technology that didn’t exist when the language was formed, sure. Elektronik. Knock yourself out. But I’m pretty sure there had to be a Turkish word for sex before they borrowed seks. If anyone has some insight into this mystery, I’m all ears.

I am, of course, completely glossing over the true complexity of Turkish to an English speaker, which is syntax. Unlike English’s fairly straightforward subject-verb-object construction, Turkish features the verb at the end and a slippery relationship between subject and object. Unlike the alphabet, this is the place where Turkish is happy to wallow in arbitrary ambiguity.

But I’ve glossed over it because for our purposes it doesn’t really matter. If we get the vocabulary right, mangled syntax isn’t a massive impediment to being understood. We’re not having deep conversations about politics and ethics. We’re reading signs, shopping, and ordering in restaurants, all of which can survive toddler syntax. Thank goodness.

But I will say that I think the single most grinding thing about our adventures is being places where we don’t speak the language. It just makes everything extra hard, and not in a fun way. Our paltry language skills neatly straddle the line separating bravery from arrogance, and I honestly don’t know which it is. It feels brave, but I fear it reads arrogant. We’ve never gotten any blowback suggesting a negative reaction, and we’re careful to learn enough of whatever the local language is to at least say please and thank you. We’re not animals. But communicating with others is definitely the most fatiguing element of our journey.

And having gotten that off my chest, it warrants adding that we’ve been met with a surprising amount of English here. While French is the second language in Morocco and Tunisia, English is the second language in Turkey. Train announcements, for example, are in Turkish and English.

We’re in Istanbul and our interactions are shopping related, so that exposes us to the highest level of English we’ll find here. But it’s been surprisingly easy to get around with just English. Even when we’ve been stumped, there’s consistently been a local nearby who’s jumped in to help. Or good ol’ Google Translate.

We’ll see how far relying on English gets us when we hit Uzbekistan.