Back In the Saddle

I’ve learned what it’s like to get out of the habit of writ­ing in this blog. For me, at least, just start­ing again has been excru­ci­at­ing.  Part of the prob­lem is the first few paragraphs. I’ve been try­ing to invent a clever, or unique way of resum­ing, but there doesn’t seem to be any­thing I can do that’s novel, witty or deliv­ers a sat­is­fac­tory expla­na­tion as to why I’ve not added any­thing here since we were on the beach in Hoi An, Viet­nam. I’ve been told that you should never, never apol­o­gize for not hav­ing writ­ten in a blog for quite some time. In fact, some par­tic­u­larly pathetic blogs are noth­ing but a series of these ‘O-I’m-so-sorry-I-haven’t-written-lately’ posts. So there, no apologies.

OK, since I’m break­ing a long, awk­ward silence at this table, I’m going to clear my throat and move the con­ver­sa­tion back to you. So, what have you been doing for the past 2 months, dear reader? Noth­ing much?

With no smi­ley equiv­a­lent of a shrug, I’m just going to pick up with the here and now, and prob­a­bly will fill in some of the details about the past 10 weeks or so in due course.

So, from the here and now front… Today:

The Van­dusen Gar­den Sale

Pam, a friend of ours and I all got up early this morn­ing and drove down Oak street and parked about a block before the entrance. Before we got out of the car, there were 4–5 cars pulling in behind us along Oak! We got in line, and soon the rain started. About a half hour later, they opened the doors, and we all sloshed in, many folks with wag­ons, carts and bas­kets. For us, this year was herb year. We picked up some sweet basil, Thai basil, Rose­mary, Viet­namese corian­der and thyme. I’ll be cook­ing with most of that, and hope­fully the herbs will grow all sum­mer enough to keep up with my har­vest­ing them. We found out at the check­out that any­thing edi­ble (i.e. herbs) was tax-free! Note: Oddly enough, we learned that manure is also tax-free, although I have no idea why.
We were in and out within about 2 hours, and Pam is repot­ting some of the plants now. Good times.

Paradise Found

One of the hard things about blog­ging on the road when you travel far east­ward, is that you tend to conk out ear­lier in the evening. Com­bine that with early morn­ing starts, and, well, I’m not mak­ing excuses, but upload­ing my pho­tos is just about all I’ve been able manage.

So, with about an hour before din­ner, and a bit of the day’s adven­tures behind me, I can try and write a bit.

I won’t try and catch up com­pletely the last 6 days or so, which included our visit to Bangkok, Siem Reap, and Ho Chi Minh City, but will try to get back to them in a future entry. If I have to go through all of my notes and write them back in Van­cou­ver, I guess I’ll do that.

Let me try and describe the scene before me. We are in what they call a ‘Villa’ in the Nam Hai resort, near the town of Hoi An, in Cen­tral Viet­nam. This place has been listed as one of the lead­ing resorts of the world, and I can’t argue. As it grows dark out­side, we can hear the surf of China Beach on the South China Sea, as well as my iPhone, which is con­nected to their iPod plug, play­ing some Chopin on the invis­i­ble sound sys­tem. The tem­per­a­ture is cool, around 24C, with a strong breeze, which is toss­ing the palm trees. Pam found a cou­ple of fra­grant Frangi­pani blooms on the front lawn and brought them in to per­fume our laun­dry bag.

This ‘house’ (which is nearly as large as our condo back at home) has what I can only describe as a ‘room within a room’. A frame of dark wood encom­passes a bed, lounge, desk, bath­tub and white tapes­tries (almost like mos­quito net­ting, but there’s no need for that). The bed faces the sand lead­ing to the beach. There is an exquis­ite bon­sai tree at one end, and indoor and out­door show­ers of our own. The floor (aside from the inner ‘room’) is dark stone, with steps lead­ing down to the back of the room and exit to the beach. The 60 Vil­las are laid out in 5 horse­shoes, with the beach behind them. The com­plex includes 2 Restau­rants and bar, Library, swim­ming pool, Spa, Gym and Ten­nis, Bas­ket­ball and Bad­minton courts.

The only bad thing about this place is how short a time we’ll be here; just two nights, and dur­ing the day, I’ll be in Hoi An, attend­ing a cook­ing class. Still, it’s an extra­or­di­nary resort, and even though some of the places we’ve stayed dur­ing this trip have been pretty good, they just can’t com­pare with this, which I’d say is about as lux­u­ri­ous a spot as I’ve ever seen. I could eas­ily spend a week here, but that kind of a stay is some­thing only a movie star or Steve Jobs could afford. I haven’t spot­ted him, but we haven’t ven­tured out to the main com­plex yet. Dare I say, we feel a lit­tle underdressed.

On the Road

Years ago we decided that we’d make room for some of the vis­i­tors to Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics. So, on Mon­day evening, we set out, rolling our suit­cases down the hill to the Olympic street­car. Four min­utes later, we got on the Canada­line Sky­train and got off at the Van­cou­ver air­port. It couldn’t be eas­ier, and I’d rec­om­mend any­one who’s on the fence about the new mass tran­sit vs. a taxi to look seri­ously at tak­ing the Canada­line, espe­cially if you have lug­gage on wheels (which the vast major­ity of bags are these days). About the only down-side was the Olympic crowds, even at 8:45PM.

Our flight on Cathay Pacific left at 2:00 AM, so we had a quiet air­port and some time to use the Wi-fi to make some last tweets (and to chat with a friend in Hun­gary — what a small world this is becoming…but more about that in a later post).

The flight was OK, but very, very cold. Hon­estly, it was like spend­ing 10 hours in a meat locker; You could almost see your breath. Pam and I had coats with hoods, which we kept up the whole time. There was one blan­ket per per­son, and no more. We got in to Hong Kong at their 7:30 AM or so (a day later). After a short lay­over of about an hour, we boarded another flight to Bangkok. A cou­ple of hours later, we touched down and saw their new(ish) air­port, that had been built 3 years ago. It’s a very impres­sive struc­ture, with caterpillar-like gates con­nected to a steel, con­crete and glass main sec­tion. We were imme­di­ately met by two young reps. for the tour com­pany (Aber­crom­bie & Kent, who Pam used for her tour of Antarc­tica). They whisked us through bag­gage and cus­toms, and we then were handed off to one of the tour guides here, who goes by the nick­name Tukke (Tookie). She, and a dri­ver, drove us through the enor­mous city of Bangkok, to the hotel where we are stay­ing here, the Man­darin Ori­en­tal. It’s a very fine hotel (offi­cially 130 years old), albeit old enough that I saw echoes of my grandmother’s taste through­out: the Eng­lish colo­nial fur­ni­ture, the palms and white palm tea­room, the pool with cabanas and teak walk­ways through­out. It’s well main­tained, how­ever, and the Inter­net in the room was good enough that I could phone my par­ents back in the states via Skype on my iPhone and it was good enough for them that my father thought it sounded like I was ‘next door’. The view, of the Chao Phraya river (River of Kings) is pretty impres­sive too:

We man­aged to stay awake (barely) until about 7:30 PM before col­laps­ing and then wak­ing up at 3, and then 6 this morn­ing. After one of the best break­fast buf­fets I’ve ever eaten (included with the room — I’ll try and take some pho­tos tomor­row), we returned to the room, and after a short rest, I write this update.
I’m going to try and update the Flickr set of our trip as we go, and it’s here…

Update: After many prob­lems with the set get­ting too big, I’ve split it into 7 sets, including:

• Bangkok
• Siem Reap, Cam­bo­dia and Angkor Wat
• Ho Chi Minh City
• The Cu Chi Tunnels
• Hoi An
• Hanoi
• Day Trip to Halong Bay

So, it’s off for a short boat trip across the river to explore some of the city (after we change into shorts to adjust for the heat). Then, per­haps a ride on the Sky­train (Hah, Just like home!). I’m also plan­ning on a mas­sage for my aching shoul­der, back and neck, which may be from the plane ride, plus accu­mu­lated stress from the past few weeks.

More to come…

Google Nexus Phone Joins the List of Technologies Not Available in Canada

I know, I know, I shouldn’t even be sur­prised, but once again, Google tells Canada to wait. Just like they did with the Street-level view in maps and Google Voice (which still isn’t here).  The Kin­dle is now avail­able in Canada, but with­out the key fea­ture (for me, at least) of a built-in browser. The TiVo is dying because the CRTC is block­ing adop­tion of Cable­Card. Pan­dora, Hulu, and Mint aren’t here either. So, Google’s new phone joins the grow­ing list of tech­nolo­gies that are start­ing to pile up due to a com­bi­na­tion of the CRTC and other road­blocks, keep­ing Cana­di­ans back in the pre­vi­ous decade. I hope the Apple Tablet makes it up here, but now I’m begin­ning to won­der. I had to hack my 1^st gen. iPhone just to get it work­ing up here.

All the same, it looked pretty sad when I saw, the first day it was released, this screen:

Is it just me, or does that phone bear a resem­blance here to a mid­dle finger?

A Glimpse of a Future Transit Option (for a short time, at least)

While walk­ing back from gro­cery shop­ping at Granville Island today, we saw the new Olympic Street­car, which they are test­ing on the tracks nearby. I did get a fuzzy pic­ture of it a cou­ple of weeks ago. It’s sim­ply beau­ti­ful. We went a lit­tle closer and thanks to a friendly Bom­bardier employee, we got a look inside. I wish I had my cam­era in hand, and I inad­ver­tently left my iPhone in its cra­dle back at home. That also wouldn’t cap­ture the fact that the train smells new inside. It’s a 5-car model with 2 artic­u­la­tions, which are the ‘hinges’ between cars (if you ride the B-Line Bus, you know well what I’m talk­ing about), accord­ing to the engi­neer. It’s oper­ated man­u­ally, and to open the doors, you press a but­ton on either the inside or out­side while stopped (the door stays open for about 20 sec­onds after that). There are info screens at var­i­ous points on the ceil­ing, and the engi­neer said that they are linked back to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem back in Bruges, Bel­gium, where this train was built.
The street­car, which is really much more like a train, will begin oper­a­tion on Jan­u­ary 21, and will then run back and forth between Granville Island and the Olympic Vil­lage at Cam­bie street for 60 days, where it will be free. We were sur­prised to find out that it won’t con­tinue past the Olympic Vil­lage and con­nect up with Main Street/Science World, which would have cre­ated a per­fect cir­cle around 1/2 of the down­town area plus False Creek (See map below. Anno­ta­tion and dashed line for the con­tin­u­a­tion of the route are mine. Click to see a larger version):

While I was a big fan of this new addi­tion to our tran­sit sys­tem, if it only goes from Granville Island to Cam­bie, it’s not as big a deal as if it had gone to Sci­ence World. If it had gone that far (as we had always assumed — since the orig­i­nal tracks that are orig­i­nally there go that far) it would have pro­vided a really easy way to get to Chi­na­town and other parts of down­town from our neigh­bor­hood. Tran­sit lines always open up new neigh­bor­hoods to explore, but get­ting to Cam­bie and 6^th from our area is already reach­able by a pretty fast bus. Still, I’m look­ing for­ward to rid­ing this new tram. What is per­plex­ing, is that in addi­tion to the abbre­vi­ated route, is why it isn’t a per­ma­nent addi­tion to down­town Mass transit.