I just finished my last "class" of the "semester."
April Fools!!!
Double April Fools!!!! Today really was my last day.... Suckers.
The past few weeks have been really busy. After our school beach trip, I spent a few days around Bangkok. I went to a shitty amusement park and a really fancy shmancy mall. The rest of the time I watched bootleg DVDs and ate take-away pad thai in an attempt to cure myself of my lung disease before the ship arrived.
On Thai buses they have this courteous (highly annoying) custom of dropping people off at their individual homes if they're relatively on the way to the bus station. This makes 1 hour long trips take about 3, which is how long it took me to get to the Laem Chabang Port to pick up Ben and Ga. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere I realized I was the last person on the bus... this didn't alarm me too much until the driver realized I was the last person on the bus and unceremoniously dumped me on the side of the road, with no bus station in sight and drove off. I started to mildly freak out because Ben and Ga both didn't have phones and I had told them to meet me at the bus station about 2 hours ago. I got on a motorcycle taxi and asked him to take me to the bus station. After what must have been 3 hours of charades he finally agreed and took me to an office with folding chairs outside and drove away. At this point I was very stressti and decided none of these people could help me because none of them spoke English, so I just started walking in the direction I assumed would lead to the most white people. Straight. After about 5 minutes of walking I saw a little soup lady on the side of the road and asked her if she knew anyone in the area who spoke English. She pointed straight ahead... and about 100 yards away, sitting outside a different office with folding chairs... were Ben and Ga! (and Heather who will from here on out be referred to as Luna Lovegood) They were the English speakers I was looking for! Woo.
Happily reunited, we got on a bus to Rayong which is the coastal beach connecting to Koh Samet, the island we were headed for. We spent about 2 days there, eating, floating, smoking, drinking and drinking.
The next two days we spent in Bangkok, not really straying much from the main backpackers area, and doing mostly the same things as we'd done in Rayong, minus the floating. It was also St. Patrick's Day our first night in Bangkok and we spent it at a bar called Shamrock's which was actually the first place I'd ever gone to in Thailand and a really cool pub. Highlights included Ben eating bugs and Ga buying sunglasses.
On Thursday they had to get back on the ship on their way to Vietnam and I flew out on Friday morning to meet them in Saigon. I was there for a couple of days by myself where I met the CRAZIEST girls I've ever met in my life. They were totally ridiculous and after 2 days of partying with them, I was pretty relieved when they told me they were going to an Island to hang out with these new Australian boys they had met and were 'in love with.'
On Sunday I met up with Ben and Ga and we went to the zoo in these funny bicycle mobiles. It was really beautiful and relaxing there. Lots of cute Vietnamese babies running around. An Orangutan threw a piece of corn at my head. Afterwards we met up with their friend Pete and just ate and drank around central Saigon. The next day we went to the War Remnants Museum which is basically a collection of pictures of people hurt by agent orange and used to be called The Museum of American Atrocities and War Crimes. It was really fucking intense and also incredibly awkward to be there as an American. Communist propaganda or not... It was a very sobering experience. We didn't really do much else the rest of the week. The heat coupled with our attempts to get drunk with breakfast really took it out of us and we just hung out mostly and bought really cheap DVDs at the free DVD store across the street from our guesthouse. (If you must know, I know own seasons 1-18 of the Simpsons on DVD)
After the boys left, I had a couple of days left in HCMC. I went to the Mekong River Delta about 2 hours outside of the city which was really cool. I saw some bee farms, some coconut candy factories and some fishing markets. We got to walk around the village for a little while and it was interesting to see a really residential Vietnamese neighborhood after spending so much time in downtown Saigon. The next day I visited the Cu Chi Tunnels which is the site of a famous group of Guerilla VC fighters who defeated an American army base while living underground. The propaganda at this place was INSANE. As soon as we got there we were shown a 30 year old documentary about the people of Cu Chi and their heroism in defeating the enemy. They told the biographical story of a 14 year old girl who was given the Award for Killing Americans and has numerous schools and streets named after her now. The tunnels themselves were fascinating, and the way these farmers managed to survive while living three stories underground is pretty amazing. They were really innovative and resourceful people- as mostly demonstrated by the make-shift booby traps they had set for the American soldiers. There was a whole row of the traps set up for us to look at, backed by a poorly done mural showing various American soldiers getting impaled on bamboo spikes and spouting blood. The tour guides were also all dressed up in VC uniforms and talking about "the enemy" as a "crazy batch of devils who shot women and children." (who were evidently trying to kill them also). Anyway, political inclinations aside, it was really interesting and kind of disturbing to see the other side's documentation of the war. Somehow though it didn't yield any animosity towards Americans and I still felt really welcome in the country the whole time I was there.
After skipping the entire month of March, I returned to classes this week to find (as I had suspected) that no one noticed my absence and I hadn't missed anything. I slipped right back in for my last 2 days of class, and now have only to await finals before officially finishing my "study" abroad.
My future travel plans include the North of Thailand for Song Kran, the Thai New Year (which is a huge nation-wide water fight) and Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia before heading to Sydney. In the meantime I see much Simpsons watching in the immediate future, and possibly some E-mailing of you good people.
Love you guys.
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