Places I have Viewed: Vietnam

In the morning we crossed the street, just held our breathe and crossed. The scooters just flowed around us. My mother and I shopped around, then drank some coffee in a average looking cafe. We talked about the bag I wanted, and I decided I prefered the haggling to the actual bag. Later on we ate some ice cream at a temple where Buddha was depicted as a woman, where 30 some people tried to sell us Tin Tin shirts. One women tried to sell me some ducks, but just wanted to look at them. I'm sure they were nice eating.

My mom and I then took a tour of life in the Mekong which included eating a deep fried fish as a whole. The guides were in their 60s and pushed us around their river ways, it was hotter then Hell and a lot of us were overweight. I didn't want things to be like this for them. At night on the bus ride home we passed by a park full of young people kissing on the back of their scooters. We all turned for a second look. The Vietnamese were falling in in love side by side right before our eyes. There was a tinge of jealously.

America became someone during this country. My Mom and I thought together, some of the parents in our group must have fought this part of the world when their hair was much longer. What was America ever thinking that we could win a war here? No one can train for Vietnam, the humid that makes your mouth feel cold, the places in between places, the rivers.

How could American go into another person's home and rearrange things, and expect things to stay that way? Is war even about making sure others live in a certain order? Oh America. Strong hearted and dumb.

Our last night in Vietnam I waved good-bye to my Mother from the back of a scooter with one arm around a middle-aged Vietnamese man. Her eyes filled with tears and as she cried to my driver, "That's my baby girl! Be careful!" He gave her a reassuring thumbs up. It was a warm night, I was very happy.

I smiled at the idea of her going back to her room, turing on the television only to think about her children and husband, and I back to floor 3 to capture everything done and seen while going about this part of the world with her.

Back at the ship students were buying fake North Face backpacks. Who could blame them, we were living in the surreal.

Traveling make us a little irrational.

Places I have Viewed: Malaysia

Jumped from Penang to Borneo with a plane to see great great great great x 10 grandparents. They had lives up in the trees, and the guides coaxed them down to us with bananas. No wonder we eat bananas today, that's what our ancestors did.

As a group we climbed up into Kota Kinabalu, the person I sat next to on the bus dropped his 5,000 dollar camera into a river. He was very sad. We looked for the biggest flower in the world.

There were a lot of prostitutes at night in the town we were staying at. They swarmed around the hotels full of drunk white men. I wandered and watched the locals sing late into the night on my walks home and wondered how much money the women would actually take home that night for the work they were doing. The men that looked after them were gross, and smile-less. I wanted to speak something other than English.

In the day I tried to avoid being in a big loud group. I smiled, walked past windows, looked people in the eye, and tried to go unnoticed. I dreamed of living there for a few days. Some people lived over the ocean and fished outside their houses. Some people lived in wooden enclosures without bedposts or coffee tables. Some people lived in houses with tin roofs next to cloud forests. Some people lived above of stores that sold the Koran. Sometimes it was foggy, but overall life was warm and beautiful and people just seemed to live on top of each other.