Better now. Much, much better now.
We've put a deposit on an apartment. Hopefully it's all downhill from here. The apartment is small, but it has an oven (a rarity here). I'll discuss the apartment in more detail later after we've officially moved.
I'm coming home (to the States) in a few weeks to gather up more household items and visit for a few days. I'll be home the 21st and I'm back to S'pore the 29th. A short trip for such long flights (about 30 hours each way), but I want my things. Plus we have some loose ends to tie up with banking and such. There's so much to remember before a move like this....We've definitely made some mistakes along the way.
Joy of the day: Discovering Crest toothpaste at the grocery store near our new home. Crest is a rare find in this town. Overall though, we've been able to find most everything we want/need. Singapore's a pretty easy place to live in most respects.

More pictures!

Wildlife spotting: the Hanoi gutter chicken.

Trekking 'mongst the rice paddies. The path that Marjorie and the guide (and the village children) are on is wide, but the smaller muddy barrier between the two levels you see in the middle is the sort of thing we spent much of the time walking on.

The outhouse over the river during our homestay.

A big load of bull. On the right, smart guy. Water buffalo droppings were enormous. I had big plans to take a picture of one, and post it with the caption: "Marjorie's reluctance to use the local squat toilets ended in embarrassment after four days of trekking." But I forgot.

Lots to see in this picture. The waterfall was nice. The path down the mountain was typical, and very, very slippery. The bridge on the right had gaps of at least a foot between boards; Marjorie crossed it because she had her hands free; I took the easy bridge to the left, because I was carrying our walking sticks. That's my story, at any rate. The villager is, I believe, a Black Hmong.

A typical spread of food.

Problem resolved. The movies I uploaded caused me to go over my storage limit. There was no feedback, though, to tell me such, until I complained to tech support.

I had to delete some of the other movies, but here's another movie I've uploaded. This is the view from riding around in a cyclo (basically a rickshaw/bicycle). There's a good example within of how people cross the street, as well as the national sport of let's-see-how-much-we-can-load-on-a-bicycle.

Apartment hunting in Singapore makes me miss the care-free days of wedding planning.

This is a test, this is only a test. We're having problems with the blog updating so there's no content here. Just testing.

2003 is here. Let's hope it's as exciting and eventful as the last, though it's hard to see how it could be. We went to a small party at a friend of our friend's here, and considering how much red wine I drank, I'm lucky to only be feeling a little crapulent. I've been up for three hours and Marjorie's still asleep; I don't think she's faring as well...

I forgot to mention the cool thing I bought in Vietnam. I've decided to collect musical instruments from wherever we visit, and in Vietnam I decided on an instrument I saw played at the water puppetry: the dan bau. It's a single string, and you pluck only harmonics on it. The bar sticking up on the right is very like a whammy bar on an electric guitar. It's really cool. And it actually plugs in to an amplifier.

Tomorrow, once everything is open again, we start house-hunting in earnest. We have a number of criteria, which we hope won't hinder our ability to find a place:

Must be near MRT (subway). We're not going to have a car, so this is a must.

Near a grocery store. ("Cold Storage" is the only chain out here.)

Washer/dryer in building, or at least hookups for them. We're not into trudging bags of clothes onto the MRT.

A nearby pub. You might view this as a somewhat alcoholic- (or at least British-) sounding requirement, but we liked having one nearby where Marjorie used to live, just to nip off for a quick bite and a pint.

Wired for fast internet. A must, here.

Speaking of pubs, there's a hairdresser up the street that has a sign that reads "Unisex saloon". And another one two doors down apparently copied the misspelling. Lots of funny manglings of the English language all over southeast Asia. Reminds me of this site.

Year In Review This year has been amazing. Maybe the most intense year of my life. Here's a quick summary of the highlights and for some reason I've decided to include a song that reminds me of each moment:
1. Engagement in Paris, Christmas Eve, 2001. For those that don't know the story...Mark asked me to marry him after dinner in Paris on Christmas Eve. We were crossing a bridge over the river Seine with Notre Dome in the background when he got down on his knee and popped the question. Very romantic.
Song: Tower of Learning by Rufus Wainwright.
2. The Birth of My Niece Katie, first offspring from my side of the family. Song: Danny's Song by Kenny Loggins. "Pisces Virgo rising is a very good sign"
3. My Marriage to Mark. We got married in Key West in a very small ceremony on the beach with just our closest family and friends. It was really beautiful and intimate.
Song: Rainy Night in Soho by the Pogues because my darling Mark "you're the measure of my dreams, the measure of my dreams".
4. Hanging out with my best girl friends the day after our wedding. I so rarely get to see them and to have everybody together in one place was really great.
Song: Reunited by Peaches and Herb, because it felt so good.
5. Seeing David Bowie in an intimate show (about 1000 peeps) at St. Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY (Thanks again Mike!!!!).
Song: Moonage Daydream by David Bowie "keep your electric eye on me babe"
6. Meeting my friend Jenn in Atlanta. Friendships are sometimes like romances, you have immediate chemistry and immediately like each other and know you're going to be friends. It was like that with Jenn this year, and I'm so sorry I had to move before we got to know each other better. Thank goodness for e-mail, and I look forward to reading your blog and will keep harassing you until you create one.
Song: Waiting on a friend by The Rolling Stones
7. Leaving Atlanta after 10 years of residency. Atlanta was very good to me in the time I was there. I was really ready to leave, but I'm sure I'll miss it.
Song: Sugar Mountain by Neil Young.
8. Moving to Singapore. After months and months of talking about it, then more months planning for it, we finally did it.
Song: Island in the sun by Weezer. "We'll run away together, we'll spend some time forever, we'll never feel bad anymore. Hip Hip"
9. Visiting Vietnam. The longest and most intense vacation of my life. Very educational, but not an experience I'm likely to do again.
Song: In my place by ColdPlay. "I was scared, I was scared, tired and underprepared."
10. Culture shock, This is sort of the combination of Vietnam and Singapore and a prediction of difficulty to come. I'll do my best to maintain my sense of humour. It's funny, I remember reading the book "Culture Shock, Singapore" and thinking that culture shock was something we'd be immune to. If only.
Song: What's the frequency Kenneth by R.E.M. "Richard said to retreat in disgust is not the same as apathy".

We gotcher movies! Here's some footage we took with our digible camera during the trip.

The boats you see in this movie all have families who live on them. And almost all of them have a dog, which is really wild.

This is the house where we stayed on our "home stay" with the ethnic minority villager. You can see Marjorie sitting in the doorway with our guide. The small little bamboo shack in the very middle of the last frame was the outhouse, built over the river, with a hole in the floor.

More movies (and pictures) to come...

Note: If you're having trouble viewing these movies under Windows (they're QuickTime movies, which is an Apple format), try right-clicking the link and selecting "Save Target As..." to save it somewhere on your computer first. Then, double-click it in whatever folder you saved it, and follow the instructions... While we're on it, does anyone know a good .mov - to - .wmp conversion program?

Back "home", inasmuch as Singapore is home, which it doesn't quite feel like yet. Our seats on the flight back from Ho Chi Minh City were double-booked, so we got bumped up to bidness class. Very nice. Except that my salad fork wasn't chilled. It's so hard to get good help these days.

We're very much looking forward to all the "comforts" of "home" -- I think we're going to go hit Borders books first, and maybe a Starbucks for Marjorie. And for some reason we're craving Subway. I know none of that sounds very Asian, but we need to recharge our batteries after three weeks in (decidedly non-Western) Vietnam. (The only Western business we saw the whole time was a single Kentucky Fried Chicken in HCMC.)

Another day in Saigon I still maintain the opinion that, overall, Ho Chi Minh city is much easier to negotiate than Hanoi, and the hassle factor is less. The kids here, however, are much pushier. That said, the kids here, and over all of Vietnam, have been the best parts of our journey. Here are two opposing, yet striking images of kids burned into my memory now: 1. Little kid on the road in front of Reunification Palace holding a very real looking silver gun and pointing it into traffic. This kid would have been dead in the states. The police would have shot him. Very menacing looking image; 2. A very little boy (must have been 3 or 4, looked about the age of the kids I work with) tried to sell Mark some gum last night while leaving the very good German Restaurant (Gardenstadt- no kidding, the best German food Mark and I have ever had outside of Germany, In Ho Chi Minh City!!!!). Mark manuevers to get around him, kid manuevers to stay ahead, they both break into a run in front of me, the kid continues to chase Mark down the block (a game at this point). This was one of the most adorable things I've ever seen in my life. Really, made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, wish I'd had the camera out.
As a result of little guy number two I bought some stickers today to give to the little ones when they attempt to sell us something. This is nice, but doesn't work well. You end up with a crowd of whining kids around you begging for one more. And they're pushy, going so far as to put their little hands in pockets and feel you up to get to the stickers. Poor little guys. Really, they shouldn't be hustling on the streets at so young an age. They're so tough, but they're just babies. Sadly, Mark saw a little fellow about 6 or 7 yesterday selling cigarettes of all things.
We're are totally pampering ourselves our last day here. Tomorrow will be moving to the Rex Hotel. This may not mean much to most of you, but I'm sure you know what we're talking about Dad. Very plush.

Still confused as to why people think Ho Chi Minh City is more hectic than Hanoi. HCMC is a piece of cake, and has so many more places to dine and shop and drink than Hanoi. We're getting bad, though; we just ran out of the rooftop bar at the Caravelle Hotel after only peeking at the menu, because they were charging 46,000 dong for the cheapest beer. That's outrageous! We paid half that at the previous place. Then, riding down the elevator, we realized that that's only $3.00. What's become of us?

We went to the Czech restaurant in town today for a real beer. Then we got caught in a downpour on our way to try the Mexican restaurant in town (the Tex Mex Cafe); it was, uh, not very good. Serves us right.