Flood

My dear friend Sir Thomas, knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, asked about floods here. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream. When I say I am floating I don't mean in a boat, at least not yet. We've had some rain, often heavy. Cleans the air.

This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to present disasters, epic dramas of humans battling the natural elements, battling themselves and so on.

I am floating in the clear sense of sitting, writing, reconfiguring this web site, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. I've been heretwo weeks tomorrow. A delightful respite from civilization and the abyss.

After working in the morning I wander through narrow twisted alleys to a side street clogged with motorcycles, women hawking fruit, veggies, meat, tofu, used clothing and babbling in their incomprehensible tongues. I covered a lot of Ha Noi ground the first two weeks so it feels good to sit down and organic stuff.

For example, I cleaned all the useless shit off my hard drive to free up space. Here's to free space, outer space and inner space!

I sit down off the curbing street on a red kinder garden chair at one of my usual eateries. The woman serves delicious freshly grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens along with the bowl of chilies and sauce. Using your clean chopsticks you dip the noodles and spring rolls in the sauce. You smell, chew and swallow. It's cheap and filling. Great taste. It runs less than a buck. Some people stare at you. Others have seen you here before so they accept you. To them you are just a little stranger than yesterday.

She is busy - only doing lunch. She's gone before dusk when a woman selling fruit uses the stone space.

I wander up the choked street dodging speeding motorcycles, women lugging baskets balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling merchandise out of their ground floor flats. Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women sit and gossip about how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in their pajamas play GO slapping scarred wooden pieces on the board while drinking beer or tea with their friends, children scamper through the maze.

No one bothers you because they know you live nearby and no foreigners are crazy enough or lost enough to find this narrow area filled with families and life daily.

I sit down with a delicious thick iced coffee in a cafe where the owner smiles and watches family dramas about love, hope, deception and scheming hollow scripts on the box. Everyone has a box here. It's the BIG diversion, all entertainment. Loud and louder.

I return to my little cave and go up on the balcony with a chair, blue plastic table and two plants - one a flowering bougainvillea. I enjoy green tea, watch the clouds fly past, savor quick rain storms sharing whistle songs with birds, some free, others on distant balconies in sad cages.

Riding the rails south to Hue soon. Playing my blues harp.

Metta.

Week Three

Yes, it's always about starting over as I travel the planet.

"Make it new day by day, make it new," said a wandering Chinese monk sitting in a green garden as light shafted through bamboo leaves. Practicing calligraphy.

Winding down small gifts for Indonesians; orange, green, red, blue, and purple Tibetan silk khata scarves. Long, filled with eight auspicious symbols. Delicate and light.

I arrived three weeks ago on a thirty-day tourist visa. Stayed in an Old Quarter hotel for 2.5 weeks. Submitted my passport and $95 bones for a six-month visa extension. It came through this week.

I turned my attention to finding a room. The New Hanoian provides information on events, groups, classifieds, housing and jobs. Alyssa, a teacher friend from our China university days teaching in Nha Trang sent it along while I was in Indonesia. An excellent resource.

I'm in a new room in a new house in a new neighborhood near Lenin Park filled with your typical narrow twisted alleys, dead ends, byways, rusty gates, spilling bougainvillaea foliage, curious kids, workers pulling wheeled carts filled with discarded bricks and mud, slender looming homes (narrow for land tax reasons with 4-5 floors the max) of Ha Noi.

Sequestered inside intimate homes, palm trees, small ponds, it's a respite from the street, noise and gentle wind. A 4th floor balcony offers views of scattered red tiled and metal sheeted roofs, jumbled balconies, distant flashing red light towers, clouds and sky. New garden potentials. Delightful. It's an excellent base for my work, travels and future teaching opportunities.

Discovering new paths, the price of tomatoes and fresh greens. After showing up daily the women give me a fair price.

Two laid back roommates, a Frenchman working for a privately owned agricultural farm three hours north and a Vietnamese speaking Canadian teaching English and playing music with his band of wandering minstrels.

Metta.

Waterproofing a new bamboo hat for a customer.

Pack your humor

Travelers need to remember when packing for adventures like going to the grocery store down on the corner or to the eye doctor to see clearly, or across town when they need to see friends, neighbors, strangers, aliens and relatives, to whisper goodbye, "I'm off to join the circus!" perhaps for the final time (one never knows if they'll return) to pack their sense of humor.

Many travelers forget to pack their sense of humor. Perhaps they don't consider their sense of humor important or valuable or a life saver on their super serious adventures into foreign worlds. Worlds filled with humans, languages, smells, sights, sounds, - sense data - dirt, dust, sweat, being lost in dire straits, wandering without a GPS or compass.

Strange. You'd think they'd remember to keep it light, stay calm, focused, let go of expectations and perceived outcomes and enjoy their travails, I mean travels, with a sense of humor. Packing a sense of humor means less baggage and less fear.

Before you swim past a wand man/woman at security you don't have to put your sense of humor in the plastic box so it can roll through the x-ray machine. You don't see many travelers collecting their sense of humor after passing through security. Some kept it with them, others forgot it at Home Sweet Home.

After you pack everything cut it in half. Except your sense of humor.

After clearing immigration keep laughing when you have NOTHING TO DECLARE.

Metta.

Small paper gifts open doors

Settling into the flow of the street, city, parks, lakes, and people. It's a joy.

Irony of remembering arriving about a year ago in Jakarta from Turkey. How, during the long flight I studied packaging, how plastic wrap and tin foiled meals are air tight and require a degree in engineering to open them without spilling the contents everywhere.

Miles of tourists waited to have their passports stamped so they could get to Balinese temples, massage parlors and blue-green waves of laughter along some forgotten coast. Where palm oil plantation owners destroy the rain forest so women have sweet facial cosmetics. Where poor farmers kill elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade. Where people spend more time looking back than forward.

How the young immigration man asked me, "Do you have a return ticket?"

No.

"Come with me." He led me to a desk where he talked to another man. My school employer had failed to tell me I needed a return ticket - they assumed I would be stopping in Singapore for a visa but this was never explained. Clearly.

They talked. The man returned. "You need a ticket out." I took my passport from him, opened it and put a $100 note inside. "Will this help?" His eyes brightened, meaning yes. Money talks.

He returned to the box office, whispered to a colleague stamping tired expectant tourist faces and led me down the hall toward immigration officials. We passed rows of people waiting for their final turn at Stamp Entry Verification Headquarters. He went to an important man sitting in his cubicle staring at a computer. Mr. Big.

"Go through and wait there," he said, pointing to the free zone. He handed my passport to the man, they talked, the official stamped my document and returned it to him. He walked over, handed it to me, smiled and said, "Welcome to Indonesia."

"Thank you for your help. Goodbye."

When I shared this memory with the woman in charge of administration for foreign teachers she smiled, "Yes, that's the way things are done here."

So it goes.

Metta.

Wandering

How does it feel in hot, humid, steamy Hanoi? Delightful.

It's the poetry of the street. Diversity of life's energy. Fascinating documentary of modern tribal realities. Blond backpackers wear rubber flip-flops. Hard going through the mud and meadows of reality. Influences and migration.

Ha Noi Handicrafts is a fine place with friendly people. Feel free to see their site: 

I am Anon-o-mouse. Enjoy fresh tea near the lake at dusk. Dancing yellow lights. Fish are jumping.

Massage away your tension, anxiety, fear. Practice sitting and walking and breathing like a monk. Calm, serene and spine. This is a quiet simple dignity.

Metta.