• Vietnam Trip – Day 2

    03Sep
    Categories: Personal Comments: 3

    Day 2
    Tuesday

    The next morning we got up early and went back to the same place we ate the night before for a very good breakfast. I had apple juice, an omlette (with cheese and ham), and wonderful, hard, European bread. I don’t know why that was on their menu, but it was. I was expecting a Vietnamese twist, but it was a straight up European style breakfast and it was wonderful!


    Eating breakfast right next to the street left us vulnerable to the many street vendors walking by hawking their wares


    Breakfast!


    Street vendor walking along in Saigon

    Then Lao—as I shall call Fong’s wife—hailed a taxi and we all clambered in and she took us to the market. We walked through the dimly lit market—it was on a narrow street that had canvas overhangs that made it a covered street—and were on the receiving end of a lot of curious stares—I doubt too many Americans have recently walked the Vietnamese markets of Saigon.


    Just some of the amazing variety that was to be had in the market

    Next, we headed to the bus station and took a bus to the edge of town near where Fong and Lao lived. We got off the bus by a supermarket and they ferried us to their house with three motorbikes.


    Josh and Arlin sacked out on the bus

    They live back a little dirt track that runs beside a railroad, about halfway between two small paved roads. Their three room (living room, bedroom, bathroom) house is set in a nice little fenced and gated courtyard. We went in to lovely AirCon and a nice leather couch. That afternoon the ladies went to the orphanage and played with the kids.


    Phil wolfing down a standard issue Asian whatchamacallit. It’s fairly standard Asian fare, but I don’t know the name for it. It’s a pastry-like thing with meat inside.


    Kids at the orphanage


    Emily playing with the kids

    In the evening, the worship team from the church game to Fong’s house and rehearsed along with Phil, Arlin, and Josh for the English camp. The guys—including Fong and one of the worship team members—slept in their living room. The ladies—including Lao—slept in their bedroom.


    Rehearsing for camp

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  • Vietnam Trip – Day 1

    02Sep
    Categories: Christianity, Personal Comments: 0

    Day 1
    Monday


    Boarding the songtaew to leave school

    We left school early in the morning and went to the airport. On the flight to Bangkok, Arlin and I sat beside each other. We were talking about a parody we had written of Kokomo about IGo that we were going to sing for talent night. We decided that instead of singing it live, we should record it and make it into a music video. So I stood there in the aisle and videoed him sitting in the airplane seat lip-syncing some of the lyrics. When we got to Bangkok airport, he videoed me re-eneacting my running through the airport with two backpacks on my back and slipping on the tile floor, because the song mentions that incident in one of the verses. People looked at me a bit funny.


    Eating on our layover in Bangkok

    Eventually (after a 5 hour layover) we boarded our flight for Hanoi (Ho Chi Minh City) on Vietnam Airlines. We had been praying for a while that the bread would be safe and continued doing so on the flight. When we landed, we offloaded from the plane onto buses and drove up to the terminal. We then tried to go through immigration, but two things stopped us. Apparently the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok had issued the wrong type of visa to us. The lady immigration officer frowned and insistently told us that in the little English she knew. She said it multiple times spread over 5-10 minutes, each time pointing to the Visa type code (which was C1) on my Vietnamese visa. Then she apparently decided to let me through despite the incorrect visa type. However, I had not filled in my destination in Vietnam address. I had no idea what it was and didn’t really want to let Vietnamese customs know what it was even if I did know. She insisted that I fill it in. I told her that I had no idea. I told her we are staying at a hotel, but that a Vietnamese friend had arranged for it and I didn’t know which one. She told me to call the Vietnamese friend and find out. I told her I had no cell phone and didn’t know his number. She furiously punched around in her computer for a while and finally wrote “Saigon hotel” in the destination address blank. I smiled and thanked her for her time and effort and apologized for the difficulty and I was on through. I next waited for Arlin—we had split up in pairs rather than go entirely solo—and she figured out that he was with me and in the same lodging and visa boat, and so she skipped the grexing (griping) phase and wrote “Saigon hotel” and waved him through.


    Outside the Saigon airport

    Our contact, a Vietnamese man, met us outside the terminal and grabbed two taxis which we hopped into. We wended our way through the honking, disorganized traffic to the tourist sector of town where we checked into a small hotel. The traffic reminded me of Dhaka it was so very noisy (our taxi driver sounded his horn every 3-10 seconds) and so disorganized (cars merging everywhere in intersections—intersection trajectories are like a ball of yarn), except it was motorbikes instead of rickshaws.


    A rather orderly example of Vietnamese traffic


    One of the main squares in Saigon with the requisite symbols of Communism

    We were on our own for the evening. We walked around town. Flashing neon signs adorned nearly every shop, restaurant, or bar. Since we were in the tourist section, there were lots of Caucasians around. We walked past all sorts of vendors insistently hawking their wares. Every restaurant we walked past had people out trying to get us to come in. We finally went into one and went upstairs. It was beautifully decorated in oriental style. The waitress was beautifully dressed in a traditional royal blue Vietnamese outfit. We had a very good Vietnamese meal for $2 per person and then played pool afterwards.


    Phil playing pool

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  • Bangladesh: A Photo Essay – Day 4

    06Jun
    Categories: Personal, Photos Comments: 1


    A gas line, because the electricity (which runs the pumps) was out


    Drivers waiting in the gas line


    After we waited in line for an hour, we finally got to the front. Right after they stuck the CNG (compressed natural gas) nozzle in our vehicle, the electricity went off again! This time it was out for an hour, because it was right on schedule for that area’s forced power shedding (the whole country is on a rotation of planned outages, because corruption has siphoned off money for the new plants that were supposed to have been built. Thus the country doesn’t have enough electricity to all have power at once.)


    Another idiosyncrasy of the country is that all the paper put out to the trash is recycled. Fast food bags are one way in which they are recycled. This is a picture of a food bag that a street vendor put our purchased food into. It’s a letter to the Senior Vice President of one of the main banks in Bangladesh about a 50 million taka ($700,000) loan! Our friends in Dhaka didn’t shred their documents before putting them in the trash until one of them found their bank statement on a food bag.






    Swimming (or bathing) in the river; this is the first picture of our day’s visit to the village


    More pictures below the fold. Read more »

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  • Quote of the Day

    03Jun
    Categories: Personal, Quote of the Day Comments: 3

    “Too much Thai food.”
    –a Thai street vendor at the night bazaar as he pointed at my stomach. Being fat is not considered a bad thing in this culture.

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  • Chiang Mai Sunset

    30Apr
    Categories: Personal Comments: 0


    Chiang Mai Sunset from the IGO roof


    Chiang Mai Sunset a few minutes later

    Different qualities (First sunset):
    Medium resolution, high quality (3000×573, 398 KB)
    High resolution, low quality (11,534×2204, 895 KB)
    High resolution, high quality (11,534×2204, 14.4 MB)

    Different qualities (Later sunset):
    Medium resolution, high quality (3000×614, 421 KB)
    High resolution, low quality (11,028×2256, 917 KB)
    High resolution, high quality (11,028×2256, 5.69 MB)

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  • Two IGO Tidbits

    30Apr
    Categories: Personal Comments: 0

    Shelly hilariously and truthfully wrote:

    You know you’re living in Chiang Mai when………
    – You’re taking a shower and yell, “Hey! Who took all the cold water?”
    – You realize you’ve been dreaming at night about pancakes and french fries.
    – You can’t remember the last time you wore a pair of shoes for more than 15 minutes.
    – You’re totally convinced the “manna from Heaven” in the Bible was pizza.
    – The temperature in the dorms gets down to 80 and you feel like you really need a blanket.

    I’d like to add my own:
    – Most everyone bows politely to you and says “Sawati Krup”
    – When you are down in the kitchen at night getting a drink and you hear a noise and see a shadow flicker past the window and you whirl to look, it is one of your Mooban’s (neighborhood) security men patrolling on his bicycle
    – Your Buddhist neighbor brings tropical fruit to welcome you to the neighborhood
    – Whenever something glass breaks, you yell “5 baht!” (Because that’s how much the Coke bottles cost.)
    – You can never remember which way to motion with your hand for a taxi (song-taew)–one is an appropriate way and the other way means… well, something else
    – When taking change from a clerk, your left hand always comes rushing up to accept the money in addition to your right hand because you forgot yet again that you’re supposed to handle money with two hands, because it has the picture of the king on it
    – There are two times as many fans in the room as lights
    – You are treated to the intriguing sight of a small fan bursting into flames (and subsequent frantic activity) on someone’s bed because they forgot and plugged a 110 fan into a 220 outlet
    – You hear a frog croaking and you look around for a little lady selling stuff and rubbing a stick on a wooden thingamabopper
    – You hear a constant stream of complaints from a certain person who was unfortunate enough to receive his tetanus shot in his posterior, much to his continued discomfort

    –

    A large roach/beetle (a big bug!) started crawling up the wall behind two females. This precipitated about 15 minutes of urgent activity by some noble male rescuers who embarked on a mission to capture the bug in a Coke bottle without touching it or slaying it. Darrell captured some hilarious video of the ensuing endeavor.

    (By the way, if you are at all interested in life in Thailand or in IGO, be sure to be reading the IGO blog aggregator.)

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  • Thai Cultural Lesson #2 of the Day

    27Apr
    Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 1

    A missionary lady was living in China and she was feeling really down. So she went to the market and did some shopping to cheer up. She came to one shop where she saw a small, cute puppy. She told the people at the shop that she wanted to do some more shopping, but she wanted that puppy. She went and did her shopping and when she came back, they had the puppy ready for her: butchered, on a stick, and in a plastic bag. Needless to say, her objective of lifting her spirits through shopping was not accomplished.

    Nevin told us this story to illustrate to us that it was a bad idea for our stories (which we are writing as practice readings for our TESOL students) to include dogs as pets, as our Asian TESOL students might not empathize too well with that.

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  • English as a Stressed Language

    27Apr
    Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 1

    Did you know that a simple five word sentence in English has five different meanings based upon tone and stressed words? I’ve always thought of English as a straightforward language without all those silly, confusing tonal distinctions. But I was wrong. Check this out:

    I didn’t tell her that. (…Someone else told her.)
    I didn’t tell her that. (… You said I did. or …But now I will!)
    I didn’t tell her that. (.. I didn’t say it (I might have emailed it); she could have inferred it)
    I didn’t tell her that. (… I told someone else.)
    I didn’t tell her that. (… I told her something else.)

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  • Thai Cultural Lesson of the Day

    27Apr
    Categories: Personal Comments: 0

    If you are trying to cross the street at night and there is an approaching car that blinks its lights at you, it doesn’t mean they’re letting you go ahead, like it would in the States. It means they are warning you that if you step out into the street, they will run you over.

    Don’t lick stamps. They have pictures of the king on them.

    (btw, we are getting our Thai cultural lessons from our TESOL teacher. He (Nevin Bowman) has lived in Thailand for a number of years. We are very fortunate to have him. He has a Masters in English and is a former professor of English at Syracuse University.)

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  • San Jose (Costa Rica) to Miami (Florida) to Dulles (Washington, D.C.) to JFK (New York) to Anchorage (Alaska) to Taipei (Taiwan) to Chiang Mai (Thailand)

    25Apr
    Categories: Personal Comments: 2

    I wrote and (thought I) posted this post on April 20 at 6:53 PM. However, I just saved it as a draft instead of posting it. So here it is.

    Here’s what I’ve been up to:

    After coming in from Costa Rica late Saturday night, I packed for IGO. Tuesday night I slept in a bed. Wednesday night I spent working on the SMBI yearbook. The 2.5 hour drive home Thursday was very interesting. I stopped in Winchester to sleep for 15 minutes because I was weaving all over the road and had horrible reaction times, even though I was blasting music and A/C and hitting myself. I dropped off instantly, despite copious amounts of caffeine in my system. I groggily woke half an hour later to my cell phone ringing. The only time I was more disoriented in my life was when I came out of surgery. I had trouble breathing, I couldn’t think straight, etc. Poor mom on the other end of the phone–she was somewhat at a loss to communicate with my broken phrases and thoughts. I cranked the A/C full blast, which sobered me up and started my brain working again. I was very glad she had called–much more oversleeping would have been ruinous. I only had budgeted an hour to be at home before leaving for the airport. I felt loads better after the nap.

    I got home and finished packing for 8 months at IGO. The whole family took me to the airport. I hopped a short commuter flight to JFK, New York. I sat beside a “secular” naturalized Israeli lady the whole way. She was on her way to Tel Aviv to visit family. We had a long spiritual discussion–she is an ardent post-modernist. I tried to witness to her, but she believed religion was simply a good social/cultural tool to form orderly and moral societies. She was an ardent pacifist, which allowed me to take a page from Paul’s Mars Hill discourse and play up pacifist/non-resistance parallels. However, that was just one more thing in which our “relative, self- & society-determined morals” coincided. I hearkened back to the excellent book The New Tolerance by Josh McDowell and tried to draw out all the egregious post-modernist contradictions, but they were all neatly deflected. Through this time I was praying and I finally appealed to her “God-shaped hole” which she acknowledged. One side of her family were Holocaust survivors and the other half did not survive. That is one of the big reasons she believes there is not a God. I drew from many Cliff Schrock classes to explain to her how God interacts with people and why there is so much pain in world that has an all-powerful, all-loving God.

    When I got to JFK, I had a 4 hour layover which I spent laptop-ing. At 11:45 PM, I boarded a 747 for Taipei, Taiwan with a stop in Anchorage, Alaska. I sat beside a quiet American man in an exit row. The multitude of China Airlines stewardesses, in their skirts and hair up in a bun, were polite and helpful, but their English was somewhat less than ideal–one time I asked for apple juice and got orange juice. They were quite generously going seat to seat handing out glasses of wine. It was 6 hours to Anchorage and then 10 hours to Taipei. The sun finally caught up to us several hours before we made Taiwan landfall. It was a gorgeous, cloud-studded sunrise. I got to Taipei at 6 AM. On the way off the plane I met an American of Philippine (I believe) ethnicity. He was a Christian Realtor who knows a Mennonite home-builder from Anchorage by the name of Dennis (?) Byler. He wished me the Lord’s blessing as I ministered in Thailand. He was on his way to Manila to visit his family.


    Relaxing in my comfy exit row seat from JFK to Taipei.


    A feeble attempt to record the sunrise

    Next I found a small, free internet room which is sponsored by a tech store located in the Chiang Kai-Shek airport. It has two desktops with net access and free wireless. That’s where I am now. Blessings to all! Thanks for those that prayed for me when I was driving home without sleep. I will soon post the rest of the Costa Rica updates.

    I board my flight for Chiang Mai at 9:20.

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  • The Positive Side of Incarnational Living

    24Apr
    Categories: Christianity, Personal Comments: 0


    Row of sandals… Incarnational living… No shoes inside…

    No A/C is the uncomfortable side of incarnational living, but no shoes inside is the comfortable side.

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  • Currency and Temps

    23Apr
    Categories: Personal Comments: 0

    I must now switch my currency conversions from “colones times two, chop off three zeros” (Costa Rica) to “baht times three, chop off two zeros” (Thailand). 515 colones = $1 and 35 baht = $1. Ahh, the mental agonies of standing in a marketplace with your head cocked toward the sky and one eye shut in concentration trying to multiply and divide and arrive at that American-dollar based, Mennonite trained sense of value.

    Last night I was shocked to discover that the temperature at night in the men’s dorm was 94 degrees! We have no A/C, as I might have mentioned before, but it is surprisingly comfortable. I am amazed at how fast one’s body adjusts–of course I had the advantage of being in similar conditions in Costa Rica for two weeks–and I am becoming convinced that A/C is a nice, but unnecessary, luxury.

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  • IGO Blogs Aggregator

    23Apr
    Categories: Blogosphere, Tech Comments: 0

    I have put up an aggregator for the IGO blogs.

    If any techie person wants to apply this patch to the planet planet source code and email it to me, I would be very delighted. Obviously we all here are on GMT+7 and UTC is somewhat less than satisfactory.

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  • Updates from Thailand and IGO

    23Apr
    Categories: Blogosphere, Personal Comments: 0

    I don’t have time right now to give any Thailand updates, so I’ll refer you to some fellow students who have been doing a good job blogging it. Kelly has been doing the best job so far. Huber has some sweet pictures of the Arctic. There are some more that are blogging it too:
    Phil & Becky Stoltz
    Val Yoder
    Arlin
    Shelly

    There should be a couple more showing up on the IGO Xanga blogring.

    I’m looking into setting up an IGO blog aggregator… Stay tuned…

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