Hostels & Guesthouses

Hanging In Bangkok

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Doug’s 45th birthday is today but he is in Chiang Mai and I am wishing I were with him to celebrate his 45th. I sing Happy Birthday when he calls in the morning. “Oh quit it!” he says. 🙂

As for me, people seem to be looking curiously at my clothes I acquired in the islands. At least I think it’s my clothes they are looking at. lol Thais are usually curious about my wild curly hair…natural as it is.

This week in Bangkok, my VX50 Guesthouse only had a room on the 3rd floor so I moved to the Imm Fusion Hotel a bit up the road on Sukhumvit near the On Nut Skytrain exit. It’s fine and has an elevator. Doug will join me for a few days here before we take off for the States. So I’ll just cool out and meet up with a couple people who live here who I met through Facebook and one I met and hung out with in Chiang Mai. And Jiraporn…my friend who teaches fisheries at Kasetsart University. And of course my Yellow Shirt friend. Oh and I can’t forget Leila from Australia who I traveled with in Lao and Thailand and then met up with again in Las Vegas several years ago.

Anxious to get Jiraporn’s take on the weird current political machinations occurring in Thailand with anti-government (but mostly anti-corruption) protesters clogging up the intersections and trying to “ShutDown Bangkok” in a bid to force the Thaksin regime out of power. Good luck with that, I say. Bangkok is a big place. But people are losing patience with seven huge 8 lane intersections closed. It is a party atmosphere. A huge stage is set up at each one with music groups playing to keep the attention of protesters in between video speeches by the leaders. Vendors abound along the “walking” streets selling everything they usually sell including Shut Down Bangkok and The People Of The King T-shirts adorned with the Thai character for the 9th Dynasty King.

The boys’ dad is still living in Pattaya Thailand. Here he is with his Bingo Bango Bongo Golf Club buddies in Pattaya. 2nd from the end on the right. We meet in Bangkok one weekend to talk taxes and kids.

Antalya Turkey

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I left Adana by plane for Antalya.  Outside the Arrivals Hall I asked a gentleman if he spoke English. He didn’t but another one with a very busy 4-year old in tow, overhearing me, asked if I needed help. The city  was a considerable distance from the airport. “Do the Red buses leave everyone off at the same place in the city?”  Yes, he said, but my friend can give us a ride into town. Oh my, I thought!  Ever since I arrived the Turks have been friendly and generous everywhere! He even gave me a Turkish pastry to eat on the way!

I am staying in the Kaleiçi (KAH-leh-ee-chee) a castle ruins at the center of the sprawling modern city which was a Roman town, then the Byzantine, then the Seljuk Turkish, and finally the Ottoman town.   There are oodles of shops, boutique hotels, guesthouses and restaurants along the narrow winding walking streets. I am staying at the Sabah Pansiyon…with breakfast…very friendly and helpful staff. And wifi in my room!  It’s a short distance to both the city center and the many coffee houses that line the beaches.  So the easy walking has been a pleasure.

I had to laugh today at an outdoor cafe with a view of the Taurus Mountains. About 40 German guys took nearly all the tables and chairs and ordered beer. The first one took a taste and made a face! lol. Turkish beer not so good?! ha! Then a Turkish guy tried to sell them all cologne and perfume. They had great fun with that!

I’ve been corresponding with a woman in Germany. When she read my blog and saw that Antalya was full of Germans she said:

The place where you are staying sounds very romantic. I know I would enjoy it there. The pension inside the ruin makes it even more romantic. I wish I could join you, but I don´t think I would like meeting so many Germans. I hope they behave and respect the country and the customs. There are reasonable ‘packages’ for a vacation in Turkey, so that must be the reason, why so many Germans are there now. We had a very tough and long winter . The sun has been out for the last two or three days, but next week, winter will be back again.

I assured her the Germans here were very well-behaved and gracious. lol I told her I felt sorry for these Germans. Cold in Germany and it’s been damn cold here!

Taurus Mountains

I have never seen so many stray cats in a country. The people put food outside their doorways to feed them. Dogs too. The surprising thing is they are so mild and gentle and approachable. Never seen an approachable cat before! I think this says a lot about the people here. They treat animals with love and care and it is a joy to watch.

I called another couchsurfer and a food writer, Tijen, whom I had had lunch with in Bangkok a couple of years ago. I was delighted to find that she lived only about a 10 minute walk to my pensyon in the Castle.  She cooked a lovely vegetarian lunch for me…steamed artichoke hearts with oil and lemon and a lentil salad. Says she:

“Green lentils with dried eggplants, wild leeks and dried tomatoes (I just soaked green lentils in water for few hours, then add all of them in the pot with some water and cooked it down. Of course there is salt, pepper, cumin seeds and olive oil. You can use normal leeks or onions, doesn’t matter. Buon appetite!”

The next day we had a breakfast of Borek, a wonderful Turkish pastry made by an old Borek Master in his tiny three-table restaurant. He learned it from his older brother and his uncle, Tijen said. Watch the video below showing how Borak is made:

Making Borak

Well, Tijen surprised me this morning and came by my pensyon to see if I needed anything. So I walked her back to her apartment and on the way we stopped and bought a bus ticket for tomorrow at noon to Bodrum. Thank God! I would have gone to the bus station not knowing there was only one bus a day and might have missed it! I told her she was my angel! She is leaving in the morning for Morocco. She is lucky she can travel all over the world for her work…writing food articles.

This morning in the breakfast room I talked again with a tall blond Danish guy…about 50. A former journalist, he is enraged by the lack of transparency and the corruption in Denmark! And the stupidity of the EU. Of all places! That should tell you a lot about all the other countries! When he described his Prime Minister I told him she sounded like our Sarah Palin. “Worse!” he said! She’s never worked…just always been a politician/bureaucrat. He actually said a lot of other things too I won’t repeat here.

I’ve always said that people running for government office should be required to have some time in the workplace first. He’s been aggravating government officials with letters and questions he doesn’t get answers to. He is afraid they will find a way to nail him and shut him up. So he is writing a book. He’s supposed to be here resting from all the controversy but it’s so cold he has been miserable…and we’ve both gotten chest colds…we think from the unclean air con/heating units in the rooms. I told him I was sorry to get him revved up again but he said no, it’s all just going round and round in his head anyway and that it was good to talk. I hope so.

I caved in this afternoon and had my first Burger King in 5 months!

Sukhumvit Soi 22 Bangkok

Posted on by Laughingnomad

You hardly find a mention of Soi 22, where I usually stay in Bangkok, in the travel guides. Interesting. Not anything here for sightseers really. But good if you live here long term.

The well-dressed tourists in the high end hotels and serviced apartments here must just head off in a taxi because you don’t often see them on the street. The men in the high end hotels are mainly businessmen…many of them Korean or Japanese. Most of the farang (westerners) that live around here and are married to Thais or farangs. Some of them have lived and worked here for 30 years and just retire here. Hardly ever see female farang tourists by themselves, although on this trip I did meet a young Frenchwoman who missed her flight on a layover and was stranded. So here I am with the “boys” and the Thais.

I’m staying in a lovely refurbished room above the Bourbon St. Bar and Restaurant, a family restaurant owned by an American…in Washington Square…behind the Mambo Cabaret.
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The guesthouse is small and they keep good track of me. If you stay a month they give you 25% off the room rate so I am paying 1000 baht (about $31) a night with free breakfast. Most of the people frequenting the restaurant are the male guests upstairs who are here on business (I’m the only woman) or farangs and Thais who live around here. The restaurant serves great Thai and western food including a whole menu of Canjun, Creole and BBQ dishes. Last night I splurged on one-half kilo of the biggest crawfish I’ve ever seen.
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Last Days In Jinghong

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Joe, a gregarious Dai tour guide who hangs out at the tourist haunts looking for business invited me to join him and his family and friends, including a young French couple, at the new BBQ restaurants on the road along the river…the ones we couldn’t find before. His English was great and we shared many ideas. “My heart is breaking with the pollution in the environment,” he said. I told him about Amy’s International School and it’s mission to bring east and west together. Not against each other, he asked? No I said, entwining my fingers. Together. He liked that, as he entwined his own fingers. I told him he had one foot in each culture. He liked that too. Then he wrote a C on one shoe and a W on the other shoe as we laughed.

It is the Spring Festival here and fireworks are going off everywhere. Over 20-40 small dishes (river snails, cow’s skin, river moss and the like) we raised small glasses of beer too many times to shouted toasts…first among ourselves (we women toasted to our beauty…!) and then with a group of about 20 Anhi teachers sitting at the next table.

The next day a German woman and her son, who is getting an advanced degree in business in Hangzhou (SW of Shanghai), invited me to go with them to a small village on the other side of the Mekong River by ferry and then tuk tuk. She is here, like me, visiting her progeny. Her son has been here three years and is fluent in Mandarin…as are many of the Westerners I’ve met here. A group of American high school girls here in Jinghong on break from on a one year exchange program in Beijing to learn Mandarin amazed me with their ability to speak the language…their futures will be bright with opportunities.

I will be glad to leave the An Ya Jiu Dian Hotel, however. It is newer…clean and very nice with satellite TV and a hot and cold water cooler for about $7…and friendly owners. It’s just up the street from the western-oriented Mei Mei Restaurant on Man Lan Lu. But there is a restaurant down an ally behind the hotel…outside my window…that starts up about midnight…with many shouted toasts…and finally subsides about 3am. Ear plugs only take the edge off.

No lack of internet cafes on this street!

And I won’t miss the Asian toilet, if you know what I mean. The shower head is above the open-hole toilet in the floor so one must be very careful where one steps.

Almost Didn’t Make The Plane To Kunming

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Hard to believe I was in Beijing for two weeks. But you know what they say about stinking guests if they stay too long. So today I flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province in the south of China. Stewardess announced that the flight would take 3.5 hours to go 200 kilometers. I figured there was something wrong there…think she meant 2000 kilometers. Warmer than Beijing but still damn cold…39 degrees F. Had hoped for it to be warmer this far south. Might have to keep on going.

But before I could get to the plane, I had an adventure! Got out of the taxi at the airport and walked around to the back of the car to get my backpack out of the trunk. Then I’ll be damned if the driver took off like a shot with me flapping my arms, running and yelling after him in the middle of the road…to no avail. A nice taxi was coming up behind me…told me to get in…he ran the first taxi down to get him to stop. Boy…woke me up! The driver was just stupid! Didn’t even know why we were pulling him over until we got him stopped and pointed to the trunk! My rescuer kindly refused money. Travel tip: don’t get out of a taxi, if you have baggage in the trunk, until you see the driver getting out too!

I’m in the Camellia Hotel where I stayed both in 2003 and 2004. Great buffet breakfast comes with the room…$28 a night. Couple bars, internet cafe…mostly lauwai (same as gringo only it’s what the Chinese call anyone not from China). There’s a hostel here too…but mostly with twenty-somethings and I want my peace and quiet so I have my own room in the main building. Channel TV Asia is the only English language station but I get most of the world news….as if I needed it. Announcers have a British accent…think it’s operated by Reuters.

Same cafe down the street but with a different name…Chinese and western comfort food…but now with free WiFi. Around the corner is MaMa Fu’s Cafe…hot and sour noodle soups. And next door is a big noodle shop with Over The Bridge Noodle Soup…platter of meat and vegetables comes to the table and you drop the food in and it cooks in the still hot broth…indigenous Yunnan style soup.

No colorful minority peoples selling things in the street now. Guess it’s either too cold or the government has banished them.

I really like the neighborhood here…with a market nearby. A group of crazy Europeans are biking China in this cold…bicycles all parked in the street in the front of a sports clothing shop while they make repairs…older Chinese men stopping by to peer at the loony western barbarians.

Luang Prabang Lao

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Luang Prabang is an outstanding example of the fusion of traditional architecture and Lao urban structures with those built by the European colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its unique, remarkably well-preserved townscape illustrates a key stage in the blending of these two distinct cultural traditions. It is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The last time I was here was in 2002. There are few changes and not as many tourists as I expected but then this is the off season. I’m in the Jaliya Guest House on the Pha Mahapatsaman…about three blocks from the tourist center along the Mekong River…a lovely cottage in a nice garden in the back with air con and TV for $12.

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A few doors down this woman was peeking out the door of her shophouse…just as I saw her doing two years ago!

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Yesterday, renting a bicycle for a dollar to scope out the village left me with sore legs. There are few tourists here now as this is the beginning of the hot season. It’s a relief to be out of Thailand…girls here are very different…no 70 year old farangs hand in hand with 19 year old “children” and besides such a thing is illegal here. Thailand ought to take a lesson.

I notice there are many more guesthouses and restaurants cropping up everywhere. The Red Cross up the street used to offer the only massage in town and now I see signs for massage all over. Chucking my bike for an hour, I enjoyed a “refillable” cup of coffee in front of the Scandinavian Bakery while visiting with a guy from Seattle Washington who has been living in Phuket Thailand for three years and is on a two-day “visa run.” He is planning on moving to Bend.

Typical Building From French Era
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It is getting close to the time for the water festival and the children have already started throwing water…giggling at startled pedestrians, taxi and tuk tuk drivers. It is best to keep a watch out!

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Every evening, near the night market, the Hmong people from the mountains set up their racks of woven fabric and other goods to sell in the middle of the street through town. I am learning prices.

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While having early morning coffee this morning I visited with a young woman from Eugene who knows Boni, a friend of mine from Salem! Susan has been living in Manhattan…but is planning on moving back to the northwest…and maybe even to Mexico to visit me!

“Taxation Without Representation”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Taking a fast sleek train, we are visiting our country’s capitol city for a few days. “Taxation Without Representation” is written at the bottom of D.C. license plates here in the District of Columbia. Don’t know why DC’s fair citizens don’t have any representation in Congress, but we nevertheless enjoy their city.

The weather has been fantastic…sunny, clear and brisk. The trees have become a palette of fall colors. We are staying in a cute little Victorian bed and breakfast called Kalorama Guest House on Mintwood Place NW, (it’s on the web) around the corner from a slew of coffee shops (free internet at Tryst during the week) and ethnic restaurants full of thirty-somethings carrying computer bags and wearing official appearing ID tags. One overheard conversation: “…the working title of my book is The China Wars of 1871…” We think there are a lot of very highly educated people in this city but aren’t sure this is a good thing considering some of the policies coming out of this place.

But alas, our visit will be short. Tomorrow the Red Line of the clean plush subway train will take us from our neighborhood directly to Union Train Station…the most elegant we have seen anywhere in the world except maybe Victoria Station in Bombay..where we will catch our train back to Penn Station in Manhattan.

The gigantic government office buildings remind Bob and I of the utilitarian Nazi-built grey concrete buildings in the eastern sector of Berlin-what used to be East Germany. It occurs to me that at least our tax money hasn’t been spent on hegemonic architecture. But at least a few or more thousand people have jobs in this gigantic bureaucracy.

I spent two days at the National Archives digging up info on my great grandfather who spent 14 months in Confederate prisons, including Andersonville, while Bob roamed the city. We make fun of all the others walking around with cell phones glued to their ears but it’s a darn good thing we have them (cell phones and ears) or we’d still be looking for each other.

Revisionist history: Eisenhower was the first president to send “armed advisors” to Viet Nam. The last time I was in Washington I didn’t notice that the date engraved on the wall of the Vietnam War Memorial…1955… was the date indicating the first death. But the pentagon has revised this date twice in the eighties, explained the park service guide…upping it to sometime in the 60’s. But once a date is engraved you just can’t mark it out with a black marker, the guide wryly remarked…

The city, full of irony, was laid out by, of all people, the same Frenchman who designed modern Paris. The J. Edgar Hoover building is exactly across the street from the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building-the two men, of course, hating each other during their tenures. Washington was in the south at the time of the civil war and a bridge crosses the Potomac River, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, to connect the District of Columbia with Arlington Cemetery on land that was given the city by Robert E. Lee.

The Smithsonian Museums, set up by a foreign benefactor, are free and not to be missed. And the residence of the Vice-President was set up on U.S. Naval grounds in order to save taxpayer money by not having to build another palatial home.

But Bob and I looked at each other with not a little bewilderment when the hop-on- hop-off bus driver/tour guide told us that Washington D.C. had more species of trees than any other city in the world. We wondered how they figured this out.

Jazz In Familiar Old Quarter Hanoi

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I had to check out of Thailand…thought my visa was 90 days that I got in Kunming in December but it was only 60 days. So at the end of March I had to pay a hefty fine at the airport to get out of the country…almost 10 a day!

I hopped a flight to Hanoi and stayed at the Classic Street Hotel again…this time thoroughly enjoying the Old Quarter with a minimum of running around.

Found a jazz club and while enjoying the free WiFi on my laptop had a great conversation with an American woman who, having been out-stationed in Hanoi for several years with Ford Motor Company, met and married the sax player and owner of the club. Even bought a T-shirt with an orange sax and name of the club that I have now forgotten!

At the end of a month at the Classic Street Hotel I flew back to Bangkok.

Ancestral Village In Poland

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We take local electric trains three hours north from Warsaw to Ostroda where we book into the Park Hotel on a lovely lake that caters to German-speaking tourists many of whom are coming to the former East Prussia to revisit lost homes and distant relatives. In fact while there we get a glimpse of a crackly BBC news report of an organization of older Germans who are demanding recompense from Russia for lost land and money during WWII…comparing themselves to the victims of the holocaust! President Shroeder, of course, refuses to intervene on their behalf, reminding them that the whole mess was due to their own country in the first place.

We luck out and find a pretty English speaking taxi driver in the line-up outside the Ostroda train station who agrees to take us the next day on a 20 minute drive (with liberal European speed limits amounting to no limits at all) to my ancestral village of Szczepankowo. And by village I mean village. Besides three or four homes with cobble stone lanes leading away from the main road, there is one tiny market. The village and the surrounding lush farmland looks like an 18th century pastoral painting.

While I walk around taking pictures of cobbles and pigs, the driver notices what appears to be the remains of a compound-like rock wall in the trees and overgrown grass across from the market. When she asks the old man in the market who lived there the response came: “Oh a rich man used to live there a long time ago.” Since my great grandparents sold their land in order to bring their 10 children to America and since anyone in 1890 who owned land would have been considered rich, and since my ancestors lived in this village as far back as the early 1700’s, I’d like to think I found their home…even if it wasn’t.

Five minutes away is Pratnica, a small town where we visited the church that my ancestors attended. Two priests, one 82 years old and a younger one originally from Gdansk, came to the door to the well-maintained quite large rectory and welcomed us in…offering candy and a viewing of copies of church records since the original were sent to Germany during the war )and since have been photographed by the LDS Library).

They let us into the church, which burned down twice in the last century…with one huge original rock cemented in near the foundation. But a rector’s chair was dated 1602 and we are told that a large hollowed out stone standing just inside the front doors is the original baptismal font. A Polish descendent like myself from Wisconsin donated nice new church pews in the 1970’s. The older priest remembers that one old Mroczynski lived nearby but has been dead several years. We drive to the home nearest his old one to visit an old woman who might remember him but there is a big lock on the door and no one is at home except the chickens and ducks.

Before leaving Pratnica, we stop for a bowl of soup at noon and our driver is happy to see Duck Blood Soup on the menu-a dish my grandparents always reserved for special occasions. We order our favorite made with rich dark smoky mushrooms from the forest.

On the way back to Ostroda our driver, in her early 30’s with two young daughters, tells us that there are few jobs in Poland and that her husband went to Ireland two years ago for work. She visited once, she says, but “things were not the same anymore so we must get a divorce.” (Skeptical Bob thinks there is more to the story.) But by this time we have made friends and she invites us to her parent’s home where she lives with her two girls on the top story. Her mother is in the hospital getting radiation and chemotherapy for breast cancer that she says is very common in Eastern Poland…due, everyone here thinks, to the Chernobl nuclear disaster in Russia about 25 years ago. We pick plums and apples from their backyard orchard. On the way out her father offers us Polish beer but we have already had coffee and cake in his daughter’s apartment and I feel bad turning him down.

My great grandmother was born in Radom…another visit to Poland some day.

Before leaving Poland we tank up one last time on pierogis..little savory pockets of noodle dough stuffed with mushrooms or other vegetables, meat or cottage cheese or sweet ones filled with blueberries or other fruit…just like my grandmother used to make at home. Oh, and I buy a CD that is popular in Poland right now…romantic songs sung by a thrilling Polish Zucchero. “I like very much,” says the young little blond in the music store. Read More

Zhangziajie

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Bob and I said goodbye to Jana who would leave later in the day on a train to Shanghai and then home from Hong Kong. The next day we took a train to Zhangjiajie in Hunan Province.

Zhangjiajie
At the Dragon International Hotel Coffee shop…Little Santas and Christmas trees hanging everywhere…like Cinco de Mayo at home…no one knows what the day really celebrates but it is an excuse for a party…Kenny G on the stereo as usual…Old Lang Syne and Winter Wonderland. Our waitress, Liu Wen Qin, is a smiling friendly 19 year old…”excuse me, can I ask you some questions?”…absolutely we say…where are you from…where is your tour group…you are by yourselves? And we quickly become friends. She is from Hubei Province near Yichang…has two sisters one of whom she lives with in a room costing 120 yuan a month ($15) with the husband of her sister and five year old child…the child having a heart condition, she said. When she gets off work at 11am she leads us to the bus that will take us to Zhangjiajie Village in the Wulingjuan Scenic Park about 40 minutes away…by ourselves we never would have found the bus, one of many that all look alike.

Zhangjiajie Village

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The Park is truly stunning with craggy cliffs and columns rising out of sub-tropical growth…the winter fog sitting low in the narrow canyons-a place that would be wonderful for hiking in the summer. Lonely Planet said the best hotel in the village was Minzu Shanzhuang, a thatched, Tujia-run (a Chinese minority group) hotel…but this was winter and it had snowed the night before. We buried ourselves under blankets and hot water bottles because the heater was lousy…and quit altogether during the night…

Back in Zhangjiajie City early the next morning we stumbled off the bus to the welcome-warm smile of Liu Wen Qin at the Dragon International Hotel Coffee Shop…glad for a place to park ourselves for the day until the train for Guangzhou at 6pm. We walked the streets awhile…a bookstore…Diary of Johann D. Rockefeller sitting right next to a book about Mao Tse Tung….in the window Bill Gates” Theories of Management and “How To Win Friends And Influence People.”

Since it was winter and hardly anyone was in the hotel, we spent most of the afternoon speaking English with Liu Wen Qin…Bob teasing her and loving it when, laughing delightedly, she finally catches on. He’s good at flirting with Asian girls 😉 When it was time to leave we paid the bill and by the time we had our backpacks on she had disappeared…the rumor that the Chinese hate to say goodbye apparently true…my throat getting a catch as I write this.

We settled in for what Lonely Planet said was a 24 hour train ride south back toward Hong Kong in a hard sleeper. But 6am the next morning, after only 12 hrs, we were awakened by the train attendant…we are here, she said…Guangzhou…Guangzhou!

After a night in Hong Kong we flew to the Philippines to warm up on a beach. Then we flew back to Hong Kong to catch our flight back to the States.

This is the end of our first year of travel around the world.