Dave Fox's Outbursts!

What They Don't Teach Norwegians in English Class

Oslo, Norway

More or less everyone in Norway speaks at least a little English. Kids here start learning it in first grade.

I've just wandered in from Akerbrygge, Oslo's lively harbor area, where it's a sunny evening and a swing dance demonstration is in full swing. People of all ages were dancing on the pier. Among others, a girl of around eight years old was dancing with her father to, "Time to get your drunk ass home."

Okay... so English class has its limits.

Squid Bike Barbecues

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Looking for a late night snack in Vietnam to go with your beer? Flag down a squid bike.

These bikes are typical Vietnamese ingenuity, and while dried sea creatures aren't my favorite food, I can’t help but love the concept.

Many of the local beer joints don’t sell food, but Vietnamese friends tell me you never go out drinking here without something to snack on. The solution: Here comes the squid!

Special bicycles (and occasionally motorcycles) prowl the streets at night with tall racks of dried, pressed squid. For 20,000 dong (5,000 if you’re shrewd enough to negotiate the local price), the squid biker will run a squid through a hand-cranked press and flatten it out one last time, then warm it on a mini charcoal grill attatched to the side of his bike. The squid is chewy and served with a sweet-and-spicy chile sauce for dipping.

If you go out drinking in Vietnam, you have two types of bar to choose from. Some sell fruity cocktails to backpackers. Others are more authentically Vietnamese –- hole-in-the-wall joints offering pint bottles of Saigon Beer, or jugs of local tap beer for around 10,000 Vietnamese dong per liter. (There are 17,600 dong to the US dollar.) The local watering holes usually have outdoor seating at undersized plastic tables and chairs or stools. The seats are wobbly, and low to the ground, but fun once you get used to them.

The Quyen Thanh Hotel: Pet Geckos and Brilliant Balconies

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

The Quyen Thanh is my favorite budget hotel in Saigon. Seventeen US dollars a night gets you a double room with a bathroom, air conditioning, and pet geckos. A soda from the minibar will set you back 35 cents. A full load of laundry runs about two bucks. Flip flops are recommended in the shower. The green faux-granite bathtubs are grimy, but otherwise, the place is clean.

I’m a night person, which makes staying at the Quyen Thanh awkward. They padlock the front door around 10 p.m. and two receptionists crash on cots in the small lobby. To get in after 10, you ring the doorbell and wait a couple of minutes. Then you ring he doorbell again because the guys in the lobby never wake up on the first ring. After that, you bang on the sliding metal gate that covers the front door. Then a person at the café next door tells you to try ringing the bell again. Eventually, someone wakes up and lets you in. Like I said, this is awkward, especially when you come in well past 10 on a nightly basis, but I’ve offered to move to another hotel so I won’t disturb them. They have graciously assured me they are happy to wake up.

The best thing about the Quyen Thanh is the balconies. The hotel has 14 rooms on four floors, all overlooking my favorite Saigon intersection. Each floor has a single, shared balcony that wraps around the corner for great views of the street below. I’ve sat for hours watching the cyclo riders, food vendors, streetside masseurs, cigarette hawkers, lost backpackers, drunk backpackers, friendly residents, and afternoon downpours. Then, there are the squid bike barbecues. (More on those soon.)

My favorite part of the view from my balcony at the Quyen Thanh is the motorbikes. I’ve already blogged about Saigon’s motorbike culture. What I hadn’t done up to this point was actually participate in it. The swarming traffic was risky enough on foot. Hopping on the back of a motorcycle seemed like a deathwish. But in the morning, my friend Phúc would meet me at my hotel. My belongings reduced to what would fit in a small overnight bag, we would ride 190 kilometers south, weaving through Saigon’s morning rush hour, then buzzing through the Mekong jungles to the city of Can Tho.

I felt nervous about the journey as I crawled into bed. I popped in my earplugs (recommended, as the street noise below lasts all night), crawled under the giant towel that served as my blanket, popped an Ambien to conquer my jet lag, and drifted to sleep.

...To be continued....

Up All Night in Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

It's 2 a.m here in Saigon. I'm sitting on my hotel balcony, sipping a final Tiger Beer before I leave for the airport in two hours to fly home to Seattle, and savoring all of my senses.

What I see: A street full of people – tourists drinking at streetside tables, a cyclo driver sleeping on his bike, kids playing a dice game on the sidewalk, specially designed bicycles with built-in mini barbecues... their riders are selling dried squid to late-night revelers. Neon floods my pupils. Muted moonlight is slipping through a crack in the clouds.

What I hear: The honking horns and motorbike motors that never stop here, happy voices in Vietnamese, English, and other languages, the rattles of late-night masseurs who bicycle through the streets advertising their services, a squabble at a bar across the road that has been going on for a good 45 minutes now. Every so often, there is breaking glass, and an angry, apparently drunk woman throws a chair or a small table. But this is not the norm. I feel blissfully peaceful in this frenetic city.

What I smell: Muggy air and my own sweat. The scent of grilled, dried squid does not make it up to my third floor balcony, but I know it's down there. And something sweet – either the hibiscus flower in the pot by my feet, or the sticky, empty can of Xaxi – a Vietnamese soft drink that tastes like licorice-laced root beer.

What I taste: sour remnants of Vietnamese rum, from a drink a couple of hours ago at a bar across the street. The aftertaste is sour, but in the moment it's consumed, it is the most delicious rum I have ever drunk, with strong hints of vanilla. I have two bottles in my backpack, wrapped in dirty laundry, hoping they won't break on the journey home. Cost per bottle: 25,000 Vietnamese dong, or roughly US $1.50

What I feel: Humid air and sticky skin, a pinched nerve in my back from motorbiking through the Mekong Delta last week, a pinched nerve in my foot from too much walking in flip-flops, a strain in my lower back from the 12-inch-tall foot stool on which I'm sitting as I type this, and a reminder from my bladder that it should be emptied soon,

It happened here again, just like last year. I came to Vietnam with limited expectations and a hint of nervousness. I came with a plan, and things did not go as planned. They went better. I'm not exactly sure what it is about this place, but it's magical here.  I don't want to leave. I want to stay. Ho Chi Minh City, still casually referred to as Saigon, feels like home -- in some ways more than home feels like home. After two short trips, I have good friends here.

Ten things I've done these last two weeks:

1. Been massaged by a blind person
2. Spent 15 hours in two days on the back of a motorcycle
3. Watched the sun rise over the South China Sea
4. Eaten chicken penis and coagulated duck blood
5. Watched the streets fill with water during a pounding thunderstorm
6. Lost my day bag and moneybelt
7. Had my foot stung multiple times by pissed-off fire ants
8. Chased after a purse snatcher
9. Left tourist neighborhoods for three-dollar meals of fresh shrimp and beer at roadside, barbecues
10. A few other things we'll get to later.

The clouds have now cleared. The moon is peeking at me over the top of a hotel across the intersection. I have the hiccups. I don't want to leave.

Airplanes mess with our sense of reality. In the next 24 hours or so, I will fly from Saigon to Hong Kong to Vancouver to Seattle. I will arrive home Tuesday night, sleep as much as I can, and teach a free travel journaling class Thursday night. Then I will sleep some more. Then I will blog through the week with elaborations on the above.

Scooting in Saigon

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

[Eek! My laptop battery is about to die here... I'm splashing this online without edting, spell-checking, or anything. Photos coming next week.]

Ask anyone who has visited Ho Chi Minh City what sound they remember most, and invariably they'll tell you it's the honking of horns and the constant rumble of motorbikes. In a country where the price of a used car is beyond the reach of most people, in a crowded and sprawling city with roughly eight million residents and limited mass transit, the motorbike is the preferred way to get around.

The sheer number of motorcycles in Ho Chi Minh City, (or Saigon as it's still casually referred to), is mind-blowing. Looking out over a busy intersection from my hotel balcony, so many motorbikes whiz by, counting them all is impossible. There are no traffic lights or stop signs. And people don't stop. They just slow down and swerve around each other.

Their constant honking is functional, not hostile. People navigate by sound as well as sight, paying attention to audible warnings from bikers behind them who want to pass.

What's most amazing to me is the amount of people or stuff they can cram onto a single motorbike. These are generally not big bikes, but my girlfriend, Kattina, says she's seen a family of six on a single bike. I have seen five, and four is routine. Young children sit, helmetless, on top of the gas tank, cradled in a parent's arms. I've seen several kids napping this way. Older kids, age six or older, are often sandwiched between two parents.

The things people carry on their bikes? Huge sacks of rice. Cases of beer. Not single cases. In any given hour, I will see at least a couple of bikes ride past with eight beer cases in two stacks of four, bungee-corded to the seat. Those are the bottles. With cases of cans, I've seen double the amount. But there's more. In any given hour, at any random intersection, you can see motorbikers carrying huge baskets of fruit, furniture, car windshields, even bicycles.

This would all be very illegal in the States. And friends here tell me Vietnam has laws too that are semi-enforced. But it seems safe here. I haven't seen a single accident. I saw one near miss during a pounding downpour.

People drive slowly here, constantly watching out for each other. While motorcycles in the US terrify me, hopping on a motorbike taxi in Saigon and slaloming through the city streets is thrilling – as is sitting on my hotel balcony during rush hour, sipping a beer, and watching the tangle of motorized life below.

“I never get tired of watching this,” Kattina said to me the other night.

I don't either. It's like watching fireworks.

Fluzilla Zaps Tokyo

March 24-25 – Flying over the Bering Sea, Somewhere around the International Date Line

I'm looking at the in-flight video map right now en route from Seattle to Tokyo, and I can't help but notice that in the north, around the Bering Sea, the International Date Line is really an International Date Zig Zag. My theory is that the Date Line People must have started in the south, and once they hit the upper quadrant of the Northern Hemisphere, they got a little  woozy. I don't have a theory as to whether this wooziness was caused by drunkenness or seasickness. I am just making an observation.

I'm not sure if it's Tuesday or Wednesday right now. Looking at the diagram on the screen, our plane is actually straddling the Date Line, one wing in each day. Also, according to the screen, our plane is roughly the same size as Korea.

What I know for sure it is not is Monday. This is unfortunate. Monday is the day I was supposed to leave Seattle. I was supposed to fly to Tokyo, hang out for 24 hours, and write an article about how ridiculous it is to go to Tokyo for just 24 hours. I was going to take in the cherry blossoms, which are rumored to be blooming, and attempt to score some sake in Ueno Park. I was going to sleep in a capsule hotel, described by one American expat on Twitter as “coffin-like.” I was going to seek out Tokyo nightlife, and shopping mayhem in the electronics district. I was going to push through my jet lag, albeit with a whimper or two, and get completely disoriented in a culture I know little about.

Instead, I got the flu.

The flu hit a week ago. My doctor had reassured me I'd be fine by Monday. But “fine” is a relative thing. I found myself, Sunday afternoon, wanting nothing more than to snore for about 38 hours.

Reality hit Sunday night around 9 p.m. when I realized I had about six hours worth of stuff to do, and my body was screaming at me to go to sleep. If I wanted, I could delay my trip a day and skip my Tokyo stopover.

“Don't decide now,” my girlfriend, Kattina, said to me. “Go to bed. Wake up early. You know how to pack fast when you need to.”

I slept fitfully. By 4 a.m. Monday, my mind was made up. Running around Tokyo in 50-degree drizzle with the remnants of the flu was not going to fix the severe fatigue that had kept me down all week. I didn't want my fever to relapse in Vietnam. Tokyo could wait for another trip.

Of course, that is also what I said 20 years ago about Eastern Europe after I came down with a nasty cold in Turkey and decided to scrap my planned train ride north via Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland. “Eastern Europe isn't going to change overnight,” I wrote in my diary, thinking I could come back and see those countries in a few years and they'd be exactly the same.

Four months later, the Berlin Wall toppled.

So here's a personal message to the good people of Tokyo: Please don't change. No revolutions or diseased cherry blossom epidemics or Godzilla attacks until after I can come visit, okay? It's going to feel sad, a few hours from now, changing planes quickly in your airport and zipping straight on to Vietnam. But sometimes when we're traveling and we get sick, we have to change our course.

Maybe that's what happened to the guys who were plotting the Date Line.

Spring Fever and Travel Delirium

Greetings from Seattle, where I have spent the last three days basking in the radiant glow of a 102-degree fever. (That's 39 for my Celcius-loving friends.)

"What," you ask, "could possibly be more enthralling than having a 102-degree (39-degree Celcius) fever?!?!"

I'll tell you what!

Having a 102-degree (39-degree Celcius) fever when you are supposed to be leaving for Tokyo in four days! That's what!

No, wait! Three days!

Ummm, wait! I mean, 37 hours!

And counting!

Holy crap!

The good news is my aforementioned 102-degree fever is now down to a slender 99.6. This means that I am now able to get out of bed for the first time since St. Patrick's Day, and pack.

"But Dave," you say, "you are a Scandinavian specialist. Besides, Tokyo is expensive! What the hell are you going to Tokyo for?"

Relax. I am only going for a day.

Actually, I had no intentions of going to Japan this week, but it's on the way to Vietnam. I am going to Vietnam because I have articles to write, a tour to organize. And I can get there free with frequent flier miles. And once I am there, it's cheaper than staying in Seattle. Call it a struggling travel writer's creative solution to the so-called "economic downturn."

It was a brilliant, profitable plan -- until I found out I had to fly via Tokyo, and I could have a free stopover.

I can't afford a free stopover in Tokyo. A day in Tokyo costs as much as a week in Vietnam. But it's Tokyo, damn it! I've never been to Japan before. And the cherry blossoms are blooming. I can't just turn down a free peek.

"Okay," I rationalized. "One day. Twenty-four hours is all I can afford."

Then I thought some more. I began arguing with myself:

"Twenty-four hours to see Tokyo, Dave? That is probably the stupidest travel plan you have ever concocted!"

"Exactly! What a brilliant story idea!"

Brilliant story or not, I found my rationalization.

So I'm flying to Tokyo Monday. I arrive Tuesday afternoon at 4:30. My plan: Get through customs, store my bag overnight at the airport, and high-tail it to Ueno Park. Rumor has it if I show up in the early evening, all of Tokyo will be there, picnicking under the pink, flowery trees and guzzling sake.

After that, I have no clue what I am doing, no idea where I will sleep that night, or if I will sleep that night. I just need to be back at the airport by 6:20 the following evening to fly to Vietnam. I'll be in downtown Saigon around midnight Wednesday.

Or I might be passed out behind a bush in Ueno Park. I'm not really sure.

If I make it to Vietnam, I've got more articles to write. I contacted my friend Phuc (rhymes with "hook") last week to see if he could work as my interpreter for a story I'm researching in the city of Can Tho. Phuc guided me and my girlfriend Kattina last year on a kayaking / cycling journey through the Mekong Delta. After I e-mailed him last week, he wrote back with a fair price for his services, plus a driver to get us to Can Tho and a hotel for the night. We had a deal.

Two days later, Phuc e-mailed me again: "Hi Dave. I have an amazing plan for you."

His amazing plan: Forget the driver. He could take me on the 110-mile journey on the back of his motorbike. He'd knock 70 bucks off the price.

I'm all for saving 70 bucks. That should just about cover a bottle of sake in Ueno Park. But four to five hours each way, via motorbike, through insane traffic, in blistering heat and humidity, with jet lag?

Another brilliant story idea.

Or not.

Seeking advice about the motorbike (it is Vietnam's favorite means of transportation), I e-mailed my travel writer friend, Amanda: "I don't want to do this. I'm afraid I'll end up splattered against a banana tree."

Amanda had been awake all night, working on a tight deadline of her own. She was semi-delirious in her response: "Scared is good. Scared makes for great copy. Do it!"

So this coming week is going to be kind of busy. I have spent the last three days in bed when I was supposed to be getting ready to travel. Starting in a couple of days, however, I will be blogging from Asia as often time, technology, and banana trees allow.

But right now, if you'll excuse me, I need another throat lozenge.

Last Year's Bloggage from Vietnam and Hong Kong

• Crossing the Line
• Low Voltage Shock
• Vietnamese Millionaire
• Still in Saigon
• Midnight Snacks in Vietnam
• Kowloon Typhoon

Passports with Purpose: Win Nifty Travel Prizes!

My pal, Beth Whitman, author of Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo, and her new follow-up, Wanderlust and Lipstick for Women Traveling to India, has just launched Passports with Purpose, a travel-themed raffle to support Heifer International, along with fellow travel bloggers Debbie Dubrow of DeliciousBaby, Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View, Michelle Duffy of WanderMom. And... I am among the prize donors.

Buy yourself a ticket, and you could win signed copies of my two books, Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad, and Globejotting: How to Write Extraordinary Travel Journals (and still have time to enjoy your trip!) But wait... there's more! Along with these two books, the winner will receive his or her choice of either a one-hour writing consultation with me in Seattle (or anywhere else I happen to be traveling), or a critique via phone or e-mail of any 1,000-word-or-less piece of writing.

Here are some of the possible topics we can talk about if you are the lucky winner:

• How to break into freelance writing, identify markets for your work, and pitch ideas to editors
• How to turn your travel journals into polished, publishable essays
• Tips to make your humor writing funnier and get more laughs
• Tips on infusing humor into other styles of writing to hold the reader's interest
• Motivational strategies to help you write more, write better, and break through writer's block
• Ways to tighten up your writing so your words have maximum impact with your readers
• A review of your travel (or other) journals to help you capture more meaningful stories and/or achieve greater personal growth
• ...Or anything else you can think of! (Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you want to run an idea by me!)

With the holidays coming up, this might also be a groovy gift for a writer you know. (And if you don't win, I will also be announcing my new critiquing and consulting service for writers soon. E-mail me if you are interested, or subscribe to my mailing list.)

And this is just one of the prizes you can win. Beth's "Passports with Purpose" raffle is teeming with other nifty prizes such as a three-night stay at the Wyland Waikiki in Hawaii, a cultural food tour of Harlem, camera gear, travel clothes and gadgetry, world music CDs, and more.

"Dave! Dave! How do I buy my tickets?"

Thank you for asking. Tickets cost 10 bucks each, and all proceeds will benefit Heifer International, an organization dedicated to ending hunger, poverty, and other forms of suffering around the world.

To enter, check out Beth's Passport with Purpose page on her blog.

Peter Cottontail Revisited

Sleima, Malta

I didn't want to eat the rabbit. The last time I ate rabbit, things didn't go so well.

My previous rabbit gobbling experience had occurred back in an earlier century, in a land called France. Pierre le Cottontail came served in a Dijon mustard sauce, and was tasting delicious until I accidentally chomped down on a very non-delicious kidney.

Kidneys are not really food. They are gag-reflex-stimulators, with a squishy consistency. They like to pause near the back of your tongue as you attempt to swallow them, so that you can still taste them but are unable to spit them out.

At the time, I had thought it strange that my French rabbit would come served with kidneys. You don't get served kidneys if you order chicken, or fish, or moose. Why did rabbit have to be any different?

Alas, it was. And good for the rabbits, I suppose, who get to exact post-mortem revenge upon anyone who would eat them. I probably deserved it. Pierre had probably been cute and fluffy once upon a time. I was a cruel, cruel bastard for eating him.

So I vowed never to eat rabbit ever again... until I arrived in Malta.

My problem in Malta was that in the harborfront town where I was staying, it was difficult to  find cuisine that was uniquely Maltese. Malta is a former British colony – and one with lots of sunshine. It is clogged with British tourists, some of whose primary travel goal seems to be to recreate their own culture in a more palatable climate. Fish and chips, and “full English breakfasts” are rampant.

I wanted to distance myself from this breed of so-called “holidaymakers.” Eating traditional Maltese rabbit seemed like one way to do so.

I procrastinated for a few days. On a walk one night into the town of St. Julian, I stumbled onto an outdoor festival where one of the street food offerings was a rabbit kebab. That was a tricky call. The sauce might help cover any kidney flavor, on the other hand, half the problem with kidneys is the consistency, and the way the kebabs were wrapped in pita bread, it would be hard to locate any of the said organs until it was too late. To be safe, I settled for chicken.

The next day at lunch, I found a pub with rabbit on the menu... but I just couldn't do it. I went instead with “Combo Plate Number One,” -- two barbecued ribs, two chicken wings, and an egg roll.

Yeah, an egg roll. It hardly seemed Maltese.

At dinner the next night, I finally did ordered the rabbit – but not without hesitation.

“Can you tell me how the rabbit's prepared?” I asked the waitress.

“It's stewed in a tomato sauce.”

Sounded as safe as I was going to find. Okay. It was time.

As I waited for my food, Alan spotted me and waved across the room. Alan was a widower I met the day before in my hotel bar. He came from England and spoke with working class slang. He was on holiday in Malta because his daughter had made him come. “She said I needed to get away.”

I wandered over to say hello, but when the waitress appeared with my meal, I retreated to my table.

I eyed the rabbit, steaming among the tomato sauce. Luckily, it didn't eye me back. I poked at it carefully at first. Then I went for it. It was as delicious and tender as it had been the last time, in France. Rabbit, I remembered, tastes delicious if you can avoid the kidneys. But I was having trouble nonetheless. Visions of Easter bunnies started dancing in my head.

I couldn't send it back. That would be rude. Besides, they had already cooked it up for me. To not eat it now would be to let the animal die in vain. My short-lived attempt at vegetarianism, maybe 12 years ago, had ended in a nutritional meltdown, and i realized I wasn't cut out for such a diet. But since then, I've made a point not to waste the animals I choose to eat.

Well, except for the kidneys.

Speaking of which, my thoughts of fluffy cuteness were suddenly overcome by a disgusting discovery. It seems the Maltese, like the French, also like to serve their rabbits with kidneys. There one was, sitting on my plate, attempting to veil itself in tomato sauce.

“Oh no you don't!” I whispered to my food.

At that moment, Alan stood up from the bar and came to see what all the fuss was about. “Are you enjoying your dinner?” he asked.

“Ummm... yes,” I said, and went back to eating more cautiously.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

I kept eating.

“That looks good. What is it.”

“Yeah, it's pretty good. It's the rabbit.”

Alan turned pale. My Cockney-speaking, former-construction-worker friend looked like he had just swallowed a kidney.

“Not your thing?” I asked.

“Oh no! I could never eat rabbit! They... they run around!”

As he said “run around,” he wiggled his fingers in a way that reminded me of Wallace from the “Wallace and Gromit” cartoons.

The image in my head morphed – from a cute, fluffy bunny to a claymation creature hopping through claymation fields, being pursued by evil farmers with pitchforks or something.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't eat anymore.

“Your finished?” The waitress gave me a scolding look for leaving so much food.

“I'm just not very hungry. I think it's the heat.”

She took my plate away.

My final night in Malta, I went for dinner with four Maltese-Australians on their first visit to their parents' native country. They were staying at my hotel.

“We're all going to eat rabbit tonight,” they said. “It's a Maltese specialty.”

“Yeah. I had rabbit last night,” I said. “I'm kind of in the mood for a salad.”

September Fool's Day

Sliema, Malta

Hey! You guys! You guys are seriously not going to believe what wacky jokesters they are here in Malta! I don't know WHAT was going on on Maltese television yesterday – maybe September 1 is the Maltese equivalent of April Fool's Day in the States or something – but all day long, all the news channels here kept running this spoof of a news story claiming Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter was... HA! Get this!... PREGGERS!

It was seriously good... like, better than even John Stewart could come up with. They kept showing interviews with these actors who were pretending to be delegates at the Republican National Convention, and the actors were super convincing. They were all like, “Yeah, well piss off, you news media scumbags 'cuz Sarah Palin loves family values and her pregnant teenage daughter is nobody's business but the Republicans! Hey, look! A hurricane!”

And I've got to admit, these madcap Maltesians almost had me fooled with their little comedy sketch. Yeah, but then when all the actors pretending to be family values people started going on about how unwanted teenage pregnancies just happen sometimes and that's okay, and if it had been Joe Biden's teenage daughter who got knocked up, they would totally respect HER privacy and not say a WORD about Joe Biden's family values in THEIR political campaign, well, that's when I realized it was all just a joke.