Better Late Than Never

I apologize for the lengthy wait since the last posting. Here it is, Phuket, Beijing, and Shanghai:

We touched down in the small airport in Phuket slightly dazed from the late night prior in Bangkok, followed by the half a day of travel. Phuket is a popular tourist destination in southern Thailand. It is an enormous island and the numerous beach towns are vacation spots for Australians and Russians, among others. We realized the size of the island during our 45-minute drive from the airport to the hotel. We arrived and headed to the beach for subpar Pad Thai (compared to what we had made in the Mai Kaidee cooking class.) After the early dinner, we swam in the Andaman Sea, which is apparently the sea off the west coast of Thailand. Trivia fact. The sea was churning due to a typhoon/tropical storm hitting Myanmar (Burma) to the north. The wind was getting on it but there were some solid swells throwing rights with monster tubes, and obviously we were all frothing uncontrollably. That was some hardcore butchered Cali surfer lingo, you might be able to Google translate it.

We headed back to the hotel for an early night and some much needed air conditioning. To our luck, the power went out. Apparently the island has been experiencing rolling blackouts for a while and need to rewire something or another. After five minutes, the bright, cool rooms turned into dark, sweat factories. Sweat factories minus the whole working and child labor ordeal. As you know, time flies when you are suffering from heat stroke and have nothing to entertain you, so the hour and a half wasn’t that bad.

The next day we met up with Señor Sam, who was residing just up the hill, and we all made the intense two-minute hike to the beach. We got burnt, hiked a mountain, body surfed, drank chilled beverages, Coco got to hold (and get bit by) a small monkey-like creature and buy sweet shawl thingies from a lady walking around. 

The beach was nice; I could see the place going wild in their tourist season. We were four of about twenty people on the entire beach. We met an English couple, the husband of which worked for a major oil company and told us a variety of crazy stories about his job as health and safety inspector for oil field/refineries all over the world (Iraq).

I enjoyed Phuket, reminded me of Tenerife in the Grand Canaries, and I really took the time to try to absorb the culture, especially the Western influenced cuisine. I ate fish and chips. Twice.

The nightlife in Phuket was unbelievable, we went to a popular tourist town called Patong and met tons of travelers from all over the world. We played some ping pong, threw some darts, and saw a band. We met an American promoter who showed us around and pointed out all the ‘lady-boys’ patrolling the streets. Apparently lady-boys in Thailand are the best-paid ‘women of the night’ and are reasonably respected in the community. Who would have guessed?

The next day we spent recovering and hanging around the hotel until our 2AM flight to Beijing. I am not sure if your geography of Asia is as flawless as mine, but Beijing is flipping far from Phuket. As we prepared for our quick 9-hour redeye across the Asian continent I looked around at the rest of the travelers sitting with us in the airport. As one would expect, all Asians. There was a melting pot of different cultures; Thais, Chinese, Malaysian, and… others. Who am I kidding? They all looked the same. I know, blatant ignorance, but really, I couldn’t tell. With a last name like Lee, I should really be more familiar with Asian culture. Maybe next time.

So that flight was literally the worse flight I have ever been on. And by ‘literally,’ I mean it in the most literal sense. I felt graced to be placed in the middle seat of the awfully small plane. I guess because it was an Asian airline, the legroom and seat size were fitted to the average Asian height. We take off, lights go down, and the uncomfortable battle of sleep begins. I kept shifting between trying to lay my head down on the tray table and sitting straight up. After the second shift, I heard a groan from behind me. After the next shift I got a poke from behind. Twenty minutes later, I shifted back to sitting up, I guess a little suddenly, and I heard a fury of groans and shouts from behind me along with about three minutes of seat shoving. I can only assume the person behind me was sleeping on the tray table and kept waking up when I shifted positions. As you can guess, I sat like a statue for the next five hours of the flight as Robert and Clayton dazed peacefully to my sides. It was blissful.

Next stop, Beijing. We arrived half dead and had a crazy negotiation process with the cabby to get us to the hotel. The Chinese cab drivers were the absolute hardest to deal with. A Thai cabby conveniently forgot how to speak English when I asked for change, but the Chinese cabbys that we had refused to look at maps, and wouldn’t you guess, couldn’t read a word of English. They also ‘couldn’t figure out’ the directions written in Chinese and had to drive in circles around our destination until we pointed at it and made them stop.

We did a bike tour of Beijing along with a Swedish family of four who live in Singapore and speak perfect English, and an Asian couple. I automatically assumed the Asian couple couldn’t speak English, like the thousands of other Asians I had come in contact with on the trip. That was until the guy spoke up in an American accent and told me he and his girlfriend were from Texas, small world.

On the tour we saw a ton of magnificent gold palaces, tons of interesting stores and restaurants, and even rode through Tiananmen Square. Robert and Clayton each got pulled away from our group to have their pictures taken with Asian strangers. I do believe I heard the picture-takers mumble George Clooney and Owen Wilson under their breath. I must have been riding too fast and doing too many neat tricks on my bike to get stopped for my picture.

The next day we had a trip planned to the Great Wall. Robert wasn’t feeling too well, looks like we have the second winner (loser) to the Saigon Squirts Challenge (Diarrhea, incase you haven’t been keeping up). I joined Clayton and Coco on our wondrous government-organized tour to the wall. We got in our tour van and they took us immediately to the jade factory. First question the tour guide asks, “Did you know the Beijing Olympic medal had jade in it?”  Me neither, whoops. They gave us a five-minute tour of the factory, and then shoved us into the show room to buy their products. They followed us around like we were going to steal stuff, telling us everything we looked at was beautiful and perfect for us. I had to buy a little snake, my zodiac symbol, in order to get out of there in one piece.

Next we stopped at an emperor’s tomb in the hills, and then headed to the Great Wall. It was a lengthy drive from the city, and when we arrived, we were put in a chair lift to get to the top of the hill. The view was amazing, the steps of the wall were tiny and steep, and there were venders every so many yards yelling at us to buy water and beer. I did see a few people who were hiking the wall, which seemed like an impressive feat. The wall was enormous and stretched as far as I could see. It rose and dropped with the terrain of China and looked almost impossible to pass. The Great Wall was by far the coolest thing I saw in Asia.

Coco vandalized the wall, I saw her. Hopefully China isn’t spying on this blog as much as the US government is spying on this blog. And I hope these Chinese spies can’t crack the complicated codename Coco. What a boring job for the NSA dude reading this blog, actually, I guess it could be worse; it could be a blog about a cat.

After we spent some time on the wall, we were given the choice to ride the toboggan down to the bottom, or take the rickety chair lift back down. Toboggan it was. We sat on individual little medal sleds equipped with a joystick (brake) between our legs. We were shoved down a curvy medal track one by one by an aggressive Chinese woman. Clayton was behind me and decided it was his job to try to crash into the back of me on the way down. I was going as fast as I could and the employees kept yelling at both of us to slow down. I had to slow down when the lady ahead of me (going as fast as she could manage) turned her head with a look of horror and said something to me in foreign language. We got to the bottom and waited five painstaking minutes for Coco to appear, she had gotten stuck half way down. J

After the wall we were taken to a restaurant and ate traditional Chinese food in a ‘family style’ manner. I even used chop sticks, well attempted to. Apparently, contrary to popular belief, you put both chopsticks in one hand, not one in each hand. Silly Asian culture.

Next we were given a three-minute tour of a silk factory, then lead into their massive silk showroom/store. I managed to squeeze out of there without buying anything. And our last stop was at a tea factory, where again we were rushed through the tour, then allowed to try a few teas. By this time, we had all caught on to their tactics and were finished with buying touristy products. We almost got guilt tripped into buying some tea when a worker told us our tour guide would get into trouble for not selling any tea to anyone in her group. Communism is fun.

We returned to our hotel, met up with Robert, who was feeling much better, and headed out to grab a taxi in the rain. No taxis would take us to the restaurant we had chosen, apparently it was too close and not worth it to the drivers. It was fifteen miles away. So long story short, we had cheap pizza and wine for dinner on our last night in Beijing.

At this point in the trip, Coco departed back to the ole U S and A, and Robert, Clayton, and I headed down the coast to Shanghai. We had a business conference to attend there and were excited to try out the cheap custom suits we got in Thailand. Arriving at the airport was OK until we had to deal with Chinese taxi drivers again. The nice man was going to offer us a van cab for about a hundred dollars, but we decided to take our chances with the taxis. We managed to get to the general area of our hotel, then asked a young doorman at the Radisson for directions.

Shanghai felt like New York. It was an International city with heavy Western influence. As we arrived at our hotel, we saw that the Delta crew was staying at the same place. It was immediately obvious how different the young and attractive flight attendants of the Asian airlines looked compared to the raggedy old Delta flight attendants.

We were the best-dressed (and best looking) guys at the conference. I got to experience my first full-fledged international business conference. Half of the presentations were in Chinese and we had little earpieces through which we could hear the live translation. I learned a good deal, especially the fact the Google is blocked in China, so the majority of the presentations had to do with Baidu, the major Chinese search engine.

We farted around in Shanghai in between conference sessions. We checked out their black market and ‘did not’ by some knock off items. The bargaining was high level, we had to bring our A game. I have never been so rude to a middle aged woman in my life, but she was going to charge me at least ten times what I would have paid if I wasn’t. I put my foot down, raised my voice, and got my knock-off Beats headphones for ten dollars. They died three weeks later.

One evening we walked into our hotel and through the bar. Clayton nudged me and pointed to the bar and said, “Isn’t that the guy from N-SYNC?” I looked the guy over and agree. We talked about how cool it was that N-SYNC was in our hotel as we passed the bodyguards. It was only when got back to our room and looked it up we realized it was the guy from the Backstreet Boys. Kevin, to be exact. I hope Kevin and his guards didn’t hear our mistake. They did though, I’m sure of it. So the Backstreet Boys were starting off their International tour in Shanghai and the lobby became full of teenage Asian girls all desperate for autographs. We saw Nick Carter come strolling out and pose for the picture with the fans, I made my way over for one, but was just a little too late. Next time.

Shanghai was a good end to the trip; it felt like we were almost back in the US. We went to a brewery restaurant named Mr. Beer. I don’t know how that managed to suck us in. We stumbled into a Whiskey Bar in which the staff were playing their best attempt at American music, country music. (gag) Our flight home was a quick 12-hour hop across the Pacific. I sat next to an Asian lady who didn’t speak a lick of English, haha imagine going to a foreign country and not knowing any of their language. What a joke. Robert sat next to an Indian guy who didn’t speak English as well. Clayton sat in the back of the plane next to who knows, he was too preoccupied. He was the third winner (loser) of the Saigon Squirts challenge. Although I won the challenge, he gets an honorable mention because it hit him on the 12-hour flight back to the US.

All in all, amazing trip—got to see a ton of places, experience many new cultures, and meet a bunch of new people. While I poked fun at the cultures and differences I experienced, I have the utmost respect for them and my eyes have been opened to the lives of individuals on the opposite side of our planet. If I could go back, I would like to see more of the islands of Thailand, travel to North Vietnam, and visit Singapore. I would highly recommend a visit out to the Far East if you ever get the opportunity. While I have given a rough summary of our trip, there are a handful of stories that didn’t make the blog; those will only be told face-to-face over a cold beer.

  

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” –Mark Twain

Iron Chef Bangkok

We woke up the next morning in Bangkok ready to rage. By rage, I mean a vegetarian/vegan cooking class experience with May Kaidee. I am not sure exactly how this slipped into our itinerary, but it was entertaining. We headed out to the class and underestimated the length of the taxi ride. We arrived late. Not only late, but to the wrong location. We were escorted by a nice local man (American from New York) to the correct location and walked in about thirty minutes fashionably late.

There was a table of about eight people and the four of us, along with May Kaidee—a smiley Thai woman dressed up in ridiculous clothing—and her two assistants. We were immediately thrown into some type of Thai sing-along, which had a pause to sing your own name. Because of the whole language barrier, Clayton was given the name Cray for the duration of the class. We must have sung it ten times while in the class, not only did I butcher every Thai word, I couldn’t even say my name in tune. I may look like remarkable vocalist, but I hadn’t prepared and had a tickle in my throat. It didn’t go well.

We were teamed up in groups of two, I was matched with Iron Chef Robert E Lee, and Clayton & Co. were together. (Couple names are so in) We cooked a variety of tasty dishes. When I say cooked I mean we placed the pre-selected, pre-chopped vegetables and tofu into the hot wok following the recipes we were given, under the direct supervision of Mai Kaidee and her posse. I can’t imagine anyone really messes up the dishes in the class. All I did was toss a carrot in the hot oil one time, making the oil jump from the pan and burn Sous-Chef Robert E Lee’s leg once. That was it, one time.

                       

We would return to our seat intermittently to eat our dishes. Many of them were quite spicy, and the assistant pouring out the cold water must have had a hell of a night prior. He was moving like cold molasses. So, yet again, we suffered from the spice sweats. Good thing the upstairs was nice a cool with seven burners running and minimal air conditioning. The sweaty kids at the vegetarian cooking class, good times.

I have to admit I do not support vegetarianism, seems like a fad to me. If you are going to be vegetarian/vegan, I expect hard core, home grown everything, recycle your life, and live barefoot in the forest. Maybe I just enjoy the taste of slow-tortured, industrial-farmed animals pumped full of chemicals and corn based food products. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by how tasty and filling the food was. Best food I ate in Bangkok, and not just because I cooked it. I am now an expert chef of Pad Thai, red and yellow curry, summer rolls, and sticky mango rice. Well, by expert chef I mean I can follow a recipe reasonably well. Call for reservations.

After we finished our first few courses, we watched May Kaidee and her assistant (also dressed up) perform a ‘traditional’ Thai dance. There was a lot of wrist rolling and stepping and hip stuff. I was terribly excited to try the dance as soon as I got home, and to my luck we were all told to stand and circle up to dance right in the kitchen! I half-assed the dancing of course, if she had thrown a little Thrift Shop on things might have been different. To my right Clayton was making an excusable attempt at keeping up, and across the circle Coco was dancing next to the Iron Chef General. Now this Iron Chef had somehow mastered the moves, moving his arms and hands in graceful sways, and really breaking it down. He was on fire, actually I thought he was going to catch the back of his light green apron on fire on the burner behind him, but managed to dance his way out of that one. Clayton has video of him getting down with it, and busting a move or two.

After the class we met a tour guide to see the Royal Palace. The guide was nice and spoke pretty good English. As if the guide would have been a mean old woman who didn’t speak English.. When we got to the Palace we were told that we couldn’t show our legs or shoulders because of the Buddhist temples we were entering. The crop top and short shorts I was wearing weren’t going to cut it. We had packed some clothes to put over, we were prepared—or so we thought. I uncomfortably pulled my jeans up over my shorts only to look around and see Robert pulling up his relatively tight black jeans over his shorts. Clayton did the same, and Coco had a scarf thing or shawl or whatever you call it to cover her shoulders. The guide said that wasn’t good enough and got her a very fashionable and cultural top with temples and elephants on it. I was jealous.

We saw a variety of amazing temples and palaces; I won’t bore you with that cultural stuff. You can Wikipedia it. Here is a fun picture of an Asian lady doing an epic ‘Asian taking a photo’ stance.

Ok here are a few cool things we saw, including the reclining Buddha. Google it. This was ironic because reclining was the exact position I was wishing I could be in, preferably in an air-conditioned room. The whole double pants thing wasn’t going too well in the heat. Some how we survived. Here is a Buddha statue and me getting my meditation on, you can tell how deep in thought I am by the size of the sweat stains on my shirt:

After the tours we headed back to change and shower. We then met up with Sir Samuel and headed over to Khao San Road, a world famous backpackers street of restaurants and bars. It was a lot of fun. There were guys walking around trying to get us to go to Ping Pong shows (whatever those are), there were very dressed up good looking girls (lady boys), and people walking around with trays of cooked scorpions and cockroaches. 

After we ate (real food, not the bugs), we walked around getting hassled by all the venders and promoters until we settled down for a drink. As the night progressed, we met a crazy variety of interesting people. I met a couple from Whales, tons of Australians, two middle aged Indian guys, a group of English, Pakistanis, Americans, Germans, and even a few Thai. Somehow, (beer consumption) the Australians convinced us to try the scorpions, which I could tell were fresh by the stale, flavorless crunch, and the way little pieces got stuck in your teeth for about thirty minutes after.

We managed to avoid the lady boys on our ride home, and even managed to make our flight in the morning without too much drama. We were on to Phuket, an island in the south of Thailand. It was beautiful, weather was great, and table tennis was interesting. 

Stay tuned.

Goofballs and Dumbos

After Vietnam, we arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. We connected in Malaysia on the way, which I really didn’t know was a country—just thought it was from Zoolander. It looked like a fun, tropical place; maybe next time. We found a taxi and messed around with directions. Apparently many taxi drivers cannot read English, who would have guessed? I can imagine a Thai tourist coming to New York and giving the taxi driver a note written in Thai. Better yet, can you imagine a Thai tourist going to New York knowing one, maybe two words of English? That was us in Thailand—American goofballs not speaking the language.

Anyways, the guy nods and we get settled in. At some point in the ride the driver realized he didn’t know where we were going so decided to pull to the side of the road. In the middle of the highway. We sat on the shoulder as he called random people asking them where the hotel was. We finally get going again and begin to realize just how bad of a driver this guy is. I have been in my share of taxis all over the world but this guy really took the cake. I do not know how he could possible be a taxi driver. He was either sharply breaking or gunning it all the way to the hotel and seemed to have no real control over the vehicle. He almost hit a few pedestrians and was very close to causing an accident or two, but somehow we made it to the hotel in one piece, one lucky piece. Maybe I had left all the bad luck in the hotel toilet in Vietnam.

We got settled and felt exhausted from the travel. Clayton left a few hours later to pick up a special guest from the airport. This person wishes to remain anonymous, for reasons I am not quite sure of, so I will give her a penname. Let’s go with something fun and slightly Asian… Coco. So Clayton endures another potentially dangerous taxi ride across the city to pick up his darling Coco, and then uses his body to shield her from harm as he takes yet another risky trip back to the hotel. Coco announced her presence to the hotel room by loudly knocking on Robert and my door at 1am. It was a delight.

The next day we had a big tour planned. Robert, Clayton, Coco, and I were picked up and we headed to a nearby hostel to pick up another new member on the trip. SAMUEL WYZAN, a dear friend of mine that studied with me in Valencia, who happened to be traveling Thailand the same time as us. Yea right, he stalks me.

Our first stop was the floating market, a super touristy market that is.. you got it: floating. It is sort of like a rural Venice, minus the overpriced coffee. You sit in a long, thin paddleboat and are carted from merchant to merchant all selling just about the same stuff. 

A shot from my spot in the boat, note the authentic fan Coco is rocking.

We got out of the touristy mess of things and enjoyed some local iced coffee. It was iced coffee, condensed milk, and sugar. The sweetness was almost too much, but it was certainly refreshing. Afterward, we got out and wandered around the market place, trying to bargain with stubborn venders. 

Then we headed back to the tour bus and were taken to death railroad. This was a bizarre stop on the tour. It was an obviously touristy area surrounding the railroad that was constructed by imprisoned Chinese. Many of them died of heat exhaustion and other diseases, giving the name ‘death railroad.’ 

Here is the crew, minus Coco, chilling at DEATH RAILROAD.

There were cheesy love songs playing, fruit for sale, and tons of Asians taking weird pictures. There was a young Asian girl with a photographer following her around. She was modeling and posing, throwing out lazy peace signs and dramatic looks. They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but we imitated her for the rest of the trip because she looked absolutely ridiculous.

Next stop on the tour was the elephant bath. Now I know what you are thinking, how do you fit in a bathtub with an elephant? I was thinking the same thing. To my pleasant surprise, it meant you accompany your elephant and trainer into a murky river with a strong current and participate in a number of forced, awkward activities. Elephants are big--granted--and they weigh tons, or a ton, I am not sure exactly. I read a nice review of the place we went and said it was great, until one elephant had enough and threw a car down a hill.

We follow our elephants down to the river where they are standing in about three feet deep water. We are divided up, Robert got his own, Clayton and Coco together, and Sam and I had the pleasure of sharing an elephant. Romantic, I know. We awkwardly climbed on top of this massive, hairy animal with the trainer and the elephants were commanded to squirt us with water for about five minutes. Each trainer had a stick with a curved metal hook on one side it would use to prod the elephant if it wasn’t cooperating. It really calmed my nerves knowing the trainer behind me was poking the elephant every couple of seconds. At least I could push Sam down and hopefully swim my way to safety if anything went wrong.

Next we were instructed to play ‘Rodeo’ with the elephants. Just what I was hoping for, and elephant bucking me into a shallow murky river. We hadn’t signed insurance waivers. We mounted the elephant one at a time and then were violently shaken back and forth until we fell off. I fell right next to the elephant and surfaced looking right up into his eye. He could have lifted his front leg and stepped on me. That would have been a way to go.

This is me getting thrown off the elephant, a sweet pic I think.

We then had a photo session with the elephants, the trainers told us to sit on their trunks one at a time and they would lift us out of the water for a picture. Brainwashing and animal cruelty at its finest. I am sure the elephant woke up that morning just itching to lift heavy, soggy, ungrateful tourists out of the water on their trunks. You get it by now, I felt bad for the elephants. 

Next we had a ‘water fight’ with them. We stood in a line and splashed the elephants and they were instructed to shoot water at us. I was just waiting for one of us to splash one of them in the eye and we learn the real definition of a water fight. It started raining as we were ‘playing’ with them, and it made the whole activity feel quite surreal.

After a few more pictures we were told to ride them to their camp. Camp meaning the place where they were chained in between rides. Sam and my elephant wasn’t listening very well, taking time to reach out with its long trunk for the bushes along the way. It was yelled at a few times, and prodded with the hooked stick by the handler who was walking next to it. We were about twelve feet off the ground on top of a hungry elephant that was being made to walk us soggy tourists back to the holding area. I didn’t have a worry in the world. That was until the elephant sped up momentarily to stay ahead of the elephant behind us. That was when Sam grabbed me for dear life. Or something like that.

The next day in Bangkok involved cooking class, dancing, lady boys, and scorpions. Stay tuned.