The Complete Travel Journals

Travelling in Kyoto with a baby: Maybe don't do it

cisoux — Sat, 4 Jun 2016 01:10:00 GMT

Well this blog has certainly not lived up to its name.

But now I have a new impetus to write about my travels - my son Nayel. Especially since we have just taken our first trip together, and I (and LY) want to remember as much of it as possible because, well, he certainly can't be counted on.

Before I actually write about the trip though, I want to preface by saying that a lot of thought went into the choosing of our destination, Kyoto. I am not a very brave parent. Many of my friends who are also parents have embarked on trips with their kids even at three months, four months, six months. My son was 14 months old when we set out for Kyoto, and I was still very nervous about how challenging it would be, especially on the flights.

I decided on Kyoto because a) it was one of the destinations I had been planning to visit next just before I got pregnant and b) among those destinations that I had been planning to visit next, it seemed to be the most convenient. For example, I'd first explored the idea of taking Nayel to Hokkaido, but soon realised that it was the kind of place that would require you to move from city to city to really get the full experience, and I was really not keen on the idea of constantly having to repack our luggage and take hours-long train rides every few days with a restless baby. With Kyoto, you could probably base yourself there for a month and still not see everything the city and its surroundings have to offer.

Furthermore, I came across several Kyoto travel guides and blogs written by other parents who testified that Kyoto was indeed a very safe, hygienic, fun and convenient place to take a child, even an infant.

Dudes, I beg to differ.

Let me set out my arguments against taking your infant (airline definition of anyone under 2) to Kyoto:

1. I read online that diapers were easily available at supermarkets, drugstores and the like. I booked us a room at a serviced apartment, the Citadines Karasuma-Gojo (great decision, by the way), which happened to be 100m away from a 24-hour supermarket, and packed just enough diapers for two to three days.

We didn't feel urgently about it, so we only dropped by the supermarket at the end of our first day in Kyoto. We found it didn't sell diapers. We shrugged it off, told ourselves we'd just buy it the next day at any other supermarket we might chance upon.

The next day we went on a walking tour of temples which did not bring us anywhere near a supermarket or drugstore, so once we'd ended our explorations - which, by the way, involved a solid eight hours of walking and climbing (while taking turns carrying a 10kg baby and his hefty diaper bag) with a short break for lunch - we took a bus to Kyoto Station and actively started looking for diapers. We went to the kids' department in Isetan, then its supermarket, then across the road to Kyoto Tower to a two-storey drugstore, then another building with a department store, before finally finding diapers in a Nishimatsuya on the fourth floor of a building next to Kyoto Tower.

I swear to god my heartbeat slowed down as we entered Nishimatsuya and looked through the aisles, and LY and I burst into laughter when we finally saw diapers, and then I burst into tears.

"This is so hard. It's so hard," I sobbed.

Translation: Being a parent is hard. Travelling with a kid is hard. Finding diapers in Kyoto is REALLY hard.

We took no chances. We bought a huge pack of Pampers that would last us about three weeks, although we only had 6 days left on the trip.

2. We did not come across a single baby chair, with strap and buckle, at any of the restaurants we ate at. Nayel was a demon, climbing the tables and banging sauce bottles, crawling all over the tatami mat rooms and shouting at the top of his voice in glee or screaming in anger when we tried to stop him.

It became such a chore to have a meal that a couple of days in, we would simply wait until he went down for a nap (which, thankfully, was always around lunchtime) then hurried to find a restaurant to have lunch at. Dinners were a bigger problem, because he doesn't nap in the evenings. A few times we ate out, a few times we bought food from depachikas and ate in our room, which was the more comfortable (i.e. less embarrassing) option - at least when he screamed and shouted about being confined to his cot, we weren't disturbing other diners.

3. Kyoto's attractions aren't really baby- or toddler-appropriate, are they? First of all there's all the climbing and hiking - and have I mentioned we had to do it all while carrying a 10kg baby who squirms and struggles? I was so glad I'd been going to the gym - I hadn't known it back when I started training with Ashley, but THIS was the reason why I needed to get fit.

Second, most of the top sights (i.e. temples) are so intensely crowded that you can't let your toddler down on the ground much. It was just too risky (people could bang into him anytime) and inconvenient (we kept having to swing him out of the way of oncoming tourists). So even at a site like Fushimi-Inari Taisha, which is touted as a kid-friendly place, we had to carry him.

Third, the less crowded sights (i.e. temples) are often meant to be quiet, peaceful, restful, meditative havens. And guess what kind of people don't respect values such as peace and quiet. So even though we felt safe letting him roam around temples such as Konchi-in and Shoren-in, we were also acutely aware, especially in their gardens, that we were being a goddamn nuisance. I even accidentally caught on camera a man - another tourist - shushing my son as he shouts in excitement and glee.

So, instead of being able to fully enjoy the delights of these beautiful pockets of paradise, LY and I often just ended up feeling embarrassed and quickly bundled Nayel away and ran off into the woods. (Literally, cos many of these temples have woodsy sections).

Looking back, I think the only place we went to where Nayel could roam happily, freely and safely and express all his feelings as loudly as he wished, without us feeling like we were imposing on anyone - that is to say, the only place where all three of us felt fully at ease and happy, and therefore the only truly kid-appropriate place we went to - was the Kyoto Imperial Palace Garden.

4. The buses come every half an hour, so if you miss one that's a half-hour of waiting. Not sure about other kids, but mine's not a big fan of standing around in one spot for 30 minutes. The buses also get progressively more packed throughout the journey so if you're unlucky and don't get a seat/ nobody gives up their seat to you, it could be a very uncomfortable ride.

Unlike in Tokyo, where I've never had to take a bus on either of my two trips because the subway goes everywhere, you do need buses to get to a lot of the sights in Kyoto. Sure, there are taxis too, but they are pretty expensive. We only took them for short distances, and usually when we were already tired at the end of the day.

So there you have it. Don't bring a baby to Kyoto!

Still, we ended up having a lovely time anyway and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. More on that later.

San Francisco Day 1

cisoux — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:16:00 GMT

I regret not having written a full travelogue of Nepal and San Francisco while the memories were still fresh. The Flickr photojournals I made for both trips do help to relive the moments but a full journal like the one I did for Tokyo would've been much better.

So here's a recap of San Fran:

Day 1.

We were pretty exhausted after the long flight, so we didn't manage to do much that day although we landed in the morning.

I remember that we had to wait quite long at the airport for our shuttle bus to the hostel to arrive, and I also remember that as we approached the hostel I was surprised that San Francisco was so grimy and not at all pretty as I had expected. It was only later that we learnt that we were living in an area overlapping Tenderloin, and that the pretty parts of San Francisco that are on all the postcards are elsewhere.

When we reached Adelaide Hostel we were too early to check in so we left our bags and wandered around Union Square in a daze. We stumbled into a small cafe and I had a croissant sandwich, which was oddly satisfying. I was exhausted. I saw a girl pour sugar into her orange juice, a glimpse into why America has an obesity problem.

We came across the Tourist Information Centre and bought a transport pass, which turned out to be one of the best investments of the trip. And luckily too that even in our half-asleep state we did not make the mistake of scratching out the first day's date on the spot, and waited til the next day until we took our first ride on the cable car. We got some information from the counter about how to get around San Francisco and get to its top touristy spots, including the outlet mall. But that turned out to be quite far away and required pretty much a whole day, so we decided not to go after all.

We wandered around a couple of the malls and then when it was finally time to check in, we returned to the hostel and did so. We were shown our room, which was small and kind of stuffy. "Bau penguk," in Suryani's words. The whole hostel had an air of marijuana about it.

From what I recall, we pretty much fell asleep right away. We planned to wake up at about 7 pm for maghrib and dinner but neither of us heard the alarm and by the time we woke up it was more like 9 p.m.

We decided to just head out and look for a pizza place we had spotted earlier in the day, which the Internet had said served halal pizzas. In the daytime, this pizza joint had been very near our hostel but that night it must've packed up and moved somewhere else! As we were walking about in circles, a homeless black guy came up to us and asked us what we were looking for. We only had the name of the pizza joint and the street it was on, but not the cross-street, so he had no idea what we were talking about.

With great concern he told us that if we were to walk any farther north, we'd step into very dangerous and shady territory. He told us he'd guide us back to safer ground, like Union Square. Along the way he told us that he used to work in construction but that he'd lost his job during the downturn and eventually lost his home too. He asked us whether we had McDonald's, Wendy's and Starbucks in Singapore.

By the time we reached Union Square, I'd already prepared a $5 note to give him as thanks. He said, "I'd appreciate it if you could give me a little something," and I said yes of course and when I gave him the note he gave me a big bear hug. It was really sweet.

Nepal itinerary

cisoux — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT

Day 1: Meet at Kathmandu Airport: We will meet you at the Kathmandu Tribhuvan International Airport and transfer you to your hotel. Visit our office, discuss for the programme and all tour arrangement. If your time permits you can go for tour of Kathmandu valley including Hindu temple complex at Pashupatinath (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and the biggest Buddhist Stupa at Boudhanath. You will also visit Swyambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple, a 2000 year old temple.

Day 2: Fly to Pokhara:After breakfast we will drive you to the Domestic Airport to take a 25-minute flight to Pokhara. In the evening you can go for a boating trip on Phewa Lake, where you can enjoy the spectacular views of Annapurna Himalayan Range reflected in all its glory in the calm green waters of the lake and visit the temple which is only accessible by boat.

Day 3: Morning Paragliding and trek to Tikhedhunga (1540m):
After having breakfast in Pokhara you will do the Paragliding. After paragliding, you start your journey for Annapurna Poonhill Trekking. Drive by car to Nayapul via the large village of Lumle. It will be about 1 hour 30 minutes drive. You will start your walk from Nayapul with crossing a large and prosperous town Birethanti. Today the trekking trails follows the bamboo forests and past waterfalls with plunge pools which invite you to swim. You can have a lunch at small village Sudame. After lunch the trail climb steadily up to the Hile, after a short working you will arrive Tikhedhunga, overnight at guest house.

Day 4: Tikhe Dhunga trek to Ghorepani (2775m):From Tikhedhunga the trail ascend to Ulleri village through a stone staircase. Ulleri is a large Magar villages situate at 2070m. From Ulleri the trail gently climb through pasture and cultivated fields as you climb up you walk up besides the cascading river through refreshingly cool oak and rhododendron forest. We have a lunch at Nangethanti. The trail again ascent to Ghorepani today final destination, The place provides a majestic views of Dhaulagiri I (8167m), Tukuche Peak Nilgiri (6940m), Annapurna South, Annapurna I (8091m), Hiunchuli (6441m) and Tarke Kang (7193m) and other mountains.

Day 5: Ghorepani trek to Poonhill (3193m) and trek to Tadapani (2540m):
Early morning trek up to Poonhil, One of the best Himalayan view points in Nepal poonhill provides an unobstructed view of sunrise over the high Himalayas . From poonhill one can enjoy spectacular view of Dhaulagiri I (8167m), Tukuche Peak Nilgiri (6940m), Annapurna South, Annapurna I (8091m), Hiunchuli (6441m) and Tarke Kang (7193m), Gangapurna (7454m), Lamjung Himal (6986m), Mt Fishtail ( Macchapuchre 6997m), Tent Peak and many more High Himalayas, trek down to Ghorepani after breakfast start trekking to Tadapani, A short early morning climb to the Deurali pass for a spectacular panorama over Dhaulagiri and the Annapurna, Trail descends steeply through dense moss-covered forest rich with bird life to Tadapani which provides you a close up sunset view.

Day 6: Tadapani trek to Ghandruk (1940m):Today trekking trails steeply goes through forests where you can encounter with monkeys and different birds. Ghandruk is the second largest Gurung village in Nepal and explores the maze like streets of this thriving Gurung settlement you can have a good mountain view of Annapurna south and Fishtail. Over night in guest house.

Day 7: Ghandruk Trek to Birethanti (1065m) drives to Pokhara:Today the trail gradually decline down to the valley. Today the train passes through small hamlets, terraced rice fields and subtropical forests with giving the glimpse of like in the mountains. At the last part we will mostly follow the Modi khola valley with an easy and pleasant walk along the river bank to Birethanti, continues work to Nayapul and catch a private vehicle to get to Pokhara. Overnight at hotel

Day 8: Pokahra to Kathmandu:Drive back to Kathmandu by tourist bus or you can take 25 minutes flight to Kathamndu.

Day 9: Depart Kathmandu:Final Departure. we will take you to the Kathmandu Airport to catch your flight home. We will wish you a happy journey in the traditional and cultural way of Nepal and hope to see you again!

The rest of Belgium/The Netherlands

cisoux — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:39:00 GMT

No offense to anyone from Belgium or The Netherlands, but I just lost the energy to finish my travelogue about my trip to these places because there just weren't enough interesting things that happened to fuel my drive for writing.

I blame myself though -- I had packed our itinerary with fucking museums galore. It was so boring. But in my defense, I only did it cos there wasn't much else that was recommended by the guidebooks I consulted. I don't know if this is a guidebook problem or a location problem. E.g. do the guidebooks on Singapore recommend you to visit museums? If they do, then yeah, guidebooks suck. But then, I bet if you picked up a guidebook on Bhutan or Nepal you wouldn't be told to visit ANY museum at all right? So maybe it's a bit of both.

Ok so anyway, we went to a shitload of museums, of which the only one that was unmissable and truly worth visiting was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. There was one painting that I stood in front of for about 10 minutes and I would honestly move to Amsterdam just to be near that painting. It's the one of the pink peach tree in his garden.

Other highlights of the trip:

Albert Cuypmarkt, Amsterdam: Nice open-air street market with cheap everything. We bought some cheese and nuts.

Asian food in The Netherlands: On Day 5 of the trip (Bruges), I almost cried at having to eat spaghetti for dinner and we both listed the foods we missed most from home. When we reached Maastricht, we found a street market with food stalls and lined up for some Vietnamese spring rolls. HEAVEN!!!!! It felt like a spiritual returning. after that we had some Asian takeaway for dinner, and in Amsterdam we hunted down some Surinamese chicken curry at Albert Cuypstraat. Asian food fucking rocks.

Good local food, Belgium: The Europeans are not completely lacking in good cuisine. The Belgian waterzooi and stoemp were good (though I wouldn't be able to live on it daily) and of course their waffles and chocolates were brilliant. I mean the ones they sell at supermarkets, not even the expensive boutique ones. Jacques Callebaut is awesome. I can't eat low-quality Asian chocolate anymore, this trip has spoilt me. Oh yeah and Speculoos -- love the biscuit and the spread, which Kristiaan from Su'ro served us at our last breakfast with him.

Hot chocolate: I must've had at least one a day. You can't get hot chocolate this good in Singapore :( Oh well you can, but at European prices!

Hmm yeah otherwise, we had more fun in Tokyo than we did on this trip. I think I overplanned it cos I was trying so hard to have a perfect trip. Oh well, you live and learn.

Belgium Day 3: Ghent

cisoux — Tue, 1 Dec 2009 20:51:00 GMT

We said goodbye to Jeff and Magda on the morning of Day 3 and checked out of Het Singelhuis. Magda drove us to the train station, and we took a train to Ghent. Or Gent. It's cool both ways.

The problem with Ghent is, the thing I remember most about it is the fact that this was where I experienced a total physical breakdown because of the cold. It's not fair to Ghent -- it's charming and pretty and lovely to walk around in.

I was sniffling non-stop because of the weather, and my nose was chafed from the constant wiping with tissue. The skin on my legs, usually dry even in Singapore, were now cracking. I didn't have any long socks, so the tops of my boots were cutting into my dry skin and making it bleed - you can still see rings around my legs where that happened. And after we climbed the Belfry, my right knee started aching so that every step - walking or climbing - was painful.

"I'm suffering. I'm really suffering," I told Lianyi.

"I know," he said.

Another thing that I remember clearly about Ghent was that this was where Lianyi got yelled at by a shopkeeper because he entered the shop just to use the toilet and he didn't ask for permission and he didn't buy anything. I wasn't there to witness it. I was sitting at a bench somewhere feeling sorry for myself, trying to figure out how to get us back to our B&B. (Eventually, I called our B&B owner while he was at work and asked him for directions. His accent was thick and I barely made out what he was saying but somehow we made it back without a hitch.)

Our B&B was called Su'ro, and it's the home of a man named Kristiaan who teaches at a hospitality school in Ghent. So he really knows what he's doing. The only drawback to Su'ro was that I had foolishly booked a room on the third floor, and the stairs in Belgium and The Netherlands are very steep and narrow. I felt like such an old woman climbing up and down those stairs with my busted knee.

When we checked into Su'ro in the morning, Kris was out at work but he'd given me instructions on how to let ourselves in and where to find our room key. Once we'd lugged our luggage upstairs into our room we headed back out to explore Ghent.

We started by having a huge amount of fries with ketchup, mayonnaise and onions at the city centre that we couldn't finish, then taking on the Lonely Planet recommended walking tour of the city to work off all the fats we'd just ingested.

During this tour we climbed up the Belfry that I mentioned earlier. I can't remember how many steps there were. It was probably not that many, and would've been easy peasy for a fit and healthy person. But I am neither fit nor healthy and by the time I reached the top, I was gasping. By the time I got back to the bottom, my knee was busted. It wouldn't get better until I got home so I pretty much had to drag my right leg around for two weeks.

But enough whining. The Belfry gave us a nice panoramic view of Ghent, and after we climbed back down we had a nice walk through the medieval centre. There are three huge towers that dominate the centre - the Belfry, St Nicholas Church and St Bavo's Cathedral - and when you're walking down one of the bridges into the centre, it really is kind of magical to see these medieval towers looming ahead of you. You can quite easily imagine yourself in a different age.

I didn't take a good shot of this but I found one online here.

Since we were feeling physically worn down we took quite a lot of breaks. We stopped at an organic café for juice and coffee. We stopped at a pub for hot chocolate. At the pub there was a friendly Belgian guy at the table next to us who kept looking over and talking to us, giving us recommendations on what to drink and asking us what we thought and where we were from. I think he was a student who was living in Ghent just for the school term because he said he came from some other city whose name I've forgotten.

By the time we were done with our walking tour, I realised there was no way I could go on without better clothing. So we went shopping! I bought two pairs of long socks and a turtleneck sweater and Lianyi got himself a thick sweater. These we would wear everyday for the rest of the trip.

That was pretty much it for Ghent. It makes for a pleasant day trip and it's cheaper than the other major tourist cities in Belgium but, you know, it's no Bruges.

Belgium Day 2: Ypres

cisoux — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:04:00 GMT

Ypres was kind of a mistake. Well the whole day was full of mistakes. I decided to squeeze a day trip to Ypres into our schedule at the last minute, and it seemed to me that out of the 14 days we had, Day 2 was the only one that could be spared for this day trip. Originally, Day 2 was supposed to be spent exploring Antwerp's top fashion houses -- this was the only walking tour for Antwerp in my Lonely Planet guide. And it was the only thing in the schedule I wasn't 100% excited about, so that's why I thought it would be better to sacrifice one day in Antwerp for a day trip to Ypres instead, where we would learn more about World War I.(Ypres was a major battlefield during the war and was totally destroyed by bombs. It's now a popular tourist destination especially among the British -- most of the names on the cemetery headstones are English.)

And this despite the fact that I knew Antwerp was very far away from Ypres. In fact, out of all the Belgian cities we were going to visit, Antwerp was the farthest away from Ypres. Visitors usually go to Ypres from Bruges, never from Antwerp. But I didn't want to sacrifice a day in Bruges to go to Ypres. Ah I could go on all day defending myself over this decision but I know in the end it was a damn stupid one.

So anyway, I knew from my research that it would take us about two hours to get to Ypres from Antwerp. But the day before, I'd mentioned to Magda (the owner of our B&B) that we were going to Ypres and she'd said, "Oh yes it takes about an hour to go there." So I thought, hey that's not so far after all. So on the morning of Day 2, we thought we even had time to squeeze in a visit to Antwerp's Royal Art Museum before taking the train to Ypres. We had to reach Ypres by about 12:30 p.m. -- I'd made a booking with a battlefield tour group that would set off at 1 p.m.

It was a damn cold morning. I remember feeling shocked the moment I stepped out of the door. It was like, "Who left the fucking freezer on all night?!" (The next morning, we told Jeff that we were freezing and he said, "No this is not so cold.")

Lianyi held the map and acted as the guide. The museum was close enough to walk to so we had a nice stroll through the neighbourhood. It was a peaceful Sunday morning. And I really do love the apartment buildings in Antwerp. Along the way, we stopped at a convenience store run by a Belgian Turk to buy tissues - my nose was running like the Nile of course - and he asked us where we were from. We told him Singapore and he asked, "You came to Belgium for a holiday? You must be crazy."

So we walked and walked and eventually we came to this huge, grand building that was ultra modern and imposing. But it was still closed. The museum would only open at 9 am and we had about 10 minutes to spare. Lianyi went off in search of a toilet at one of the nearby shops while I stayed behind. When he came back, he was still unrelieved -- all the shops were closed. And the museum was still closed too, although it was already five minutes past 10. We started peering into the doors, and seeing nobody, we went looking for some human contact. We saw someone enter a door to what looked like an office, so we followed behind and kind of stood outside the door like idiots until a disembodied voice said something to us in Flemish.

The voice was coming from a speaker on the wall outside the door, and we saw that there was a video camera pointed straight at us too. Big Brother eventually realised we couldn't understand him, so he switched to English and said, "This place is not for you!"

"Is... this the royal museum?"

"No this is the courthouse!"

Yeah, my trusty tour guide had led us to the court of justice instead of the royal art museum. By then, we didn't have enough time anymore to make our way to the museum because we had a train to catch, so we just made our way to the train station. But at the stationplein (such a convenient word, that) we found the Diamond Museum, so we decided to take a peek (to make full use of our Antwerp City Pass, remember). It was quite interesting, but we only had a cursory look before rushing off to take the train. And oh my god, what madness it was just trying to get on the right train!

Antwerp's train station is huge. And destinations aren't tied to the platforms, meaning for example -- if you've missed your train to Brussels that just departed from Platform 1, you might have to now go to Platform 9 to take the next one. And this was just our second day in Belgium so we hadn't yet mastered the art of reading the train schedules.

So, you know, in cases like these, you would trust the guy at the ticket counter to give you the information you need to get to your destination safely and on time, right? Well the guy told us to go to Platform 14 to go to Berchem and make a transfer there. But when we got to Platform 14, we realised the train wasn't going to Berchem after all. Yet we weren't sure that our reading of the train schedule was correct, and if we should just trust the guy after all. And we only had 2 minutes to make up our mind before the train moved off...

In the end, we decided not to take it. By this point we were getting really annoyed with each other so I decided to let Lianyi take charge of getting us to the right train, while I sat down and waited. Then this Dutch-Ghanaian man came along and asked me for directions! Is it that easy to look like a local in Belgium? I said, "Sorry man, I'm lost myself", and we made friends. He was with his wife and kids and I guess in the same position we were.

Eventually, Lianyi figured out where the next train to Berchem was leaving from and when - Platform 2, in four minutes!! Dude, we ran like we'd never run before (but not like how we ran later that day when we had to catch the train home, but that'll come up later). So we caught the train, we got to Berchem, and from there we had to take a train to Kortrijk, where we had to change trains again. And then, so much for North Eastern efficiency, the train to Ypres was delayed by an hour!

Long story short, we totally missed our battlefield tour, which was the ONLY reason we were going to Ypres, but the company waived the cancellation fee since it wasn't our fault the train was delayed.

Well to be honest, even if the train hadn't been delayed, we would still have been late because there was no way we could've gotten to Ypres in an hour. The journey definitely takes 2 hours on a good day.

But Ypres was a charmer. Our moods were lifted once we got to the main square and saw just how damn pretty it was. Everything was pink and brown and people were having waffles and ice cream everywhere -- yeah, we were freezing our nuts off but the Belgians were having ice cream. You can't quite believe that this town was bombed to shreds. It just looks so... innocent. Why would anyone want to drop a bomb on a place like this? It's all fancy chocolate shops and little bistros.

We didn't really have much time to spend there since we didn't want to miss any one of the three connecting trains back to Antwerp so we just visited one museum, another standout in my opinion - In Flanders Field museum. ("In Flanders Field" is that poem by John McCrae which you probably read in school. I vaguely remember learning it.) It was a pretty moving experience, especially the snippets of first person accounts they had scattered around the museum.

I was especially touched at the stories of the World War I Christmas Truce. I didn't know this but it happened all over the Eastern and Western fronts (I'd always thought it occured only at one spot). My favourite story was one where this British soldier recounted how he had swapped hats with a German soldier during the truce, but the next day the German soldier shouted over his trenches something like, "To the officer I gave my hat to -- I have big inspection tonight. You lend it to me, I give it back to you tomorrow." So the British soldier gave it back, and true enough, the day after, the German returned the hat to the British soldier, filled with candy to boot.

After the museum, we just walked about aimlessly through the town for a bit, stopping for waffles and the occasional peek into a candy shop here and there. But it turned out our aimless stroll had taken us to the Menin Gate, a huge war memorial, beside which was a big park with more memorials and some medieval forts and ending with a war cemetery. So, with map in hand, Lianyi planned a route we could take through the park and back to the train station. And I'd just like to say here that I would totally visit parks more often if the weather wasn't so hot in Singapore. It's so much more pleasant to walk through a park when you're not dripping and stinking!

We did sweat though. The walk back to the train station turned out to be longer and a little more complicated than we'd expected, so by the time we could spot the station, our train was very close to arriving and we had to run again. It felt like being on The Amazing Race!

I said, "You know with some people when you travel with them it's all about eating and relaxing and taking a break from the stress of everyday life. When you travel with Yasmine and Lianyi, it's more stressful than work and you can forget about lunch!"

This is what we looked like when we reached the train station:

Belgium Day 1: Antwerp

cisoux — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:17:00 GMT

We met the nicest people in Antwerp - the nicest people we met on the entire trip, and the nicest people we've met on any trip. When we arrived in Antwerp, we were flush with newly exchanged Euros, but all of our money was in notes, and we had to have coins to take the metro to our bed and breakfast.

We didn't realise this until we got to the underground metro and found that the only way to buy tickets was through a machine that would only accept coins. To add to the confusion, the tickets were priced according to how many 'zones' you wanted to travel through, and there was no map or guide to show us how many zones away our desired stop was.

But then, a lady came over to help us pick the right ticket. And when we realised we didn't have the coins to pay, another lady came over and forced us to take her money! So we made our way to our B&B on kindness from strangers.

Later that same day, we had an old man call out to us from across a street, asking us where we wanted to go and how he could help, because he saw us looking at a map.

And the next day, after asking another old man at a bus stop what bus we should take to the train station, he not only gave us the answer and specific instructions on how to spot the right stop, he also talked to the bus driver and told him to call out to us when we had reached our stop so that we wouldn't miss it.

They weren't the only ones. People would just stop in their tracks and ask us what we were looking for when we were standing around looking lost. What a great place to live!

Our B&B in Antwerp was called Het Singelhuis, and was the best accommodation we had for the whole trip. It's the home of Jeff and Magda, a retired couple who decided to rent out two of their rooms to travellers when their own kids grew up and moved out.

The room was large and spotless and comfortable. The only drawback to it was that it didn't seem to have a heater, so it took me a while to get warm before I slept, which I did by rubbing all the cold parts of my body on Lianyi while he screamed in agony. Weird observation: every night when we got back to our rooms, I would be freezing all over while Lianyi would be warm. Is this a blood thing?

The breakfast each morning was generous - a spread of different types of bread, cheese, some kind of meat or fish, eggs, yoghurt, juice, tea or coffee and biscuits. On our second morning they also specially bought for us a Belgian pastry called matten, which we certainly would never have tried if it weren't for them. (It was sweet and reminded me a bit of almond croissants without the fragrance.) We had breakfast each morning with both Jeff and Magda and it was really nice just to chat and swap stories about the countries we came from. For example, they had no idea what a Malay was.

After checking in on our first day, Magda handed us a map and a transport guide and we set off to the Grote Markt, the main square in the medieval centre of the city.

It was a revelation for me. This was my first time in Europe, remember, so I was completely awed. It really did feel like I'd been transported into another world, one that only used to exist on TV. The square was ringed with historic buildings, one of which housed the tourist information centre. When I was doing my research on Belgium, the main attractions highlighted by the guidebooks were museums, museums and more museums. So naturally, I thought we should check them out. The guidebooks also said it would be worthwhile to buy city passes in each city that for a fixed price, will give us access to all of the major museums and unlimited rides on public transport. And so that was the first thing we did - buy a city pass.

We pretty much spent the rest of the day going from museum to museum. And well, that pretty much describes all of our days in Belgium. We were so sick of museums by the end of the week. The worst part was, I'd booked city passes for Bruges and Brussels online beforehand to get a discount, so even when we'd gotten sick of museums, we still had to force ourselves to visit more, just to make the passes worth it. Lianyi was really mad at me but in my defense, that's what the guidebooks told me to do!

But back to Antwerp. Among the museums we visited that day, the standout for me was Rubenshuis -- the house of Belgium's most renowned painter, Peter Paul Rubens. I think though that this was mainly because we received a free audio guide upon entry, which meant that unlike in the other museums, I was properly learning and understanding the meaning and context behind the artefacts and artworks I was looking at. It was quite interesting to learn about the life of this painter I'd never really known much about before, and to see where he lived and what his interior decor tastes were like!

Another highlight for me that day was just walking through Antwerp's shopping area. Antwerp's known as the fashion capital of Belgium and according to Jeff and Magda, people from The Netherlands like to visit Antwerp on the weekends just to shop at its unique boutiques. But all I bought that day was a wool hat from H&M to keep my head warm.

I bought that hat just before 5 p.m. and it was disappointing to see that even in the fashion capital of Europe's capital, shops closed promptly at 5. But it was just as well, because we were both exhausted from the flight and hungry too, so we had an early dinner (we hadn't even had lunch actually!) of giant salmon and cheese sandwiches and went to bed at 8 p.m.

Belgium/Holland itinerary

cisoux — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:48:00 GMT

This is our itinerary for the trip:

Fri 16th Oct: Depart from Singapore to Amsterdam on Malaysian Airlines, with a 1-hour stopover in Kuala Lumpur.

Sat 17th Oct: Arrival in Schiphol, Amsterdam. We'll immediately take an InterCity train to Antwerp. We'll check in to the Het Singelhuis bed and breakfast and spend the day exploring the city.

Sun 18th Oct: We'll take a train to Ypres, which is 2 hours away. There we'll do a guided tour of major WWI battlefields and cemetaries. I happened to borrow a couple of books from the library recently about WWI, and that rekindled my interest in Wilfred Owen's poems and the Great War in general. I figured it would be more interesting and meaningful for me and Lianyi to take the 2-hour trip to Ypres and do this tour than spend another day in Antwerp doing what the Lonely Planet recommends -- a "flit" through expensive boutiques started by the six fashion designers who made Antwerp a fashion capital.

Mon 19th Oct: We'll take a train to Ghent, where we'll be basing ourselves for three days. Today, we'll explore Ghent itself.

Tue and Wed 20th+21st Oct: For these two days, we'll take day trips out to Bruges, the #1 tourist destination in Belgium. I hope to visit all the sites shown in the film In Bruges :)

Thu 22nd Oct: We'll take a train to Brussels and check into Downtown BXL, which better be as good as the reviews say. We'll spend the day exploring Brussels.

Fri 23rd Oct: Explore Brussels some more.

Sat 24th Oct: We'll cross the border into Holland, stopping at Maastricht, where we'll stay a night and spend the day exploring some Roman tunnels and fortresses.

Sun 25th Oct: Finally, we'll take a train to Amsterdam, where we'll be based for the rest of the trip. From Sunday to Tuesday, we'll explore Amsterdam itself - the Van Goghs, the Rembrandts, the canals, and of course, the coffee shops. Oh yeah, also the Ajax Stadium because Lianyi insists. Grrr.

Wed 28th Oct: We'll take a day trip to Apeldoorn, site of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, within which lies the Kroller-Muller Open Air Museum. If it's anything like the Hakone Open Air Museum, it should be amazing.

Thu 29th Oct: Another day trip, this time to Haarlem, which is just 20 minutes away from Amsterdam. And if we have time afterwards, we'll make our way to Zaanse Schans, a fake town with reconstructed windmills and medieval buildings. Cheesy tourist trap, but what's a trip to Holland without a visit to a windmill right?

Fri 30th Oct: Yet another day trip. We'll go to The Hague to see how the upper class live, and if we have time afterwards, to Delft, which is supposed to be small and charming.

Sat 31st Oct: We depart from Amsterdam back to Singapore

Pointless paranoia

cisoux — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:29:00 GMT

Rereading all the travelogues I've uploaded here is making me even more excited about my upcoming trip. I've been planning for it since June, quite obsessively actually, so I really hope all goes well and nobody almost dies. Or dies.

It'll be my first ever trip to Europe and I am so psyched. You know, throughout my planning I've been worried about that, that it's my first time there and what if I get lost or don't make enough arrangements or haven't done enough research and lose out or ruin everything.

But now, after looking back at what we went through in Cambodia and Vietnam, I don't think I should worry much at all! I've had to try and enjoy myself in places that involved constantly suppressing guilt and horror, being inundated by sights of beggars with missing limbs, poor children begging me to buy postcards so that they can go to school, dying animals.

But where I'm going next, I'll be one of the poorest people around!

And of course I probably won't have to deal with taxi drivers calling out to me and following me wherever I go, scammers at every turn or policemen demanding money for made-up reasons.

Belgium and Holland would probably be as easy to traipse around as Tokyo was, and I didn't even do much research on Tokyo before going. The only thing that would make the trip even more exciting, really, was if we had other friends joining us. I'm sure weed is just that much more fun in a group!

Tokyo Day 6: Summersonic

cisoux — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:01:00 GMT

Well there's really nothing much I can say about this day. We went to the Summersonic Music Festival in the morning and left at midnight!

We started off by watching The Wombats at the Chiba Marine Stadium.

Then June stayed behind to watch Vampire Weekend, while Lianyi and I made our way to the Dance Stage to catch MGMT.

After the second acts, June caught up with us and we watched The Teenagers. The most memorable thing about that show was a group of three tall, good-looking white girls who were standing close to us and trying their darndest to catch anyone's attention, lifting their shirts and running their hands through their hair. I wanted to vomit but none of the Japanese revellers around us even seemed to notice.

After The Teenagers, we grabbed some lunch -- there were lots of stalls set up within the giant halls selling all kinds of food, from prata to ramen. What we had wasn't very good though, and overpriced to boot.

Then we caught Against Me, just cos they were playing in the same hall that Super Furry Animals would perform in afterwards, and we wanted to get a good spot in front. A bunch of white guys started a mosh put right in front of the stage but otherwise I wasn't so moved by Against Me and neither was June. Lianyi liked them though.

And next was the Super Furry Animals!!! They were godlike, what can I say.

After their show we made our way back to the Chiba Marine Stadium in time to catch Alicia Keys. But by the time we reached the stadium, it was already full with people. All 60,000 seats and most of the field! We somehow managed to find three seats but they were way, way up.

And apparently it's not within Japanese custom to stand up and dance when you're in the seats, so towards the end of Alicia Keys's performance, June and I went down to the field so that we could jump and dance for the next and final act - Coldplay!

And when that ended we streamed out of the stadium along with the other 100,000 concertgoers straggling home. You know what it's like when you're trying to get home from Kallang after a concert or National Day? Yeah, multiply that by a hundred.

That's how Lianyi, June and I got our Japanese sardine train experience that night. So crammed I couldn't even put both feet on the floor. So crammed my knee was jammed against someone's ass. So crammed that if I turned my head my nose would be up someone's armpit.

But well, it was an experience!

Once we reached Shinjuku after what felt like FOREVER, Lianyi and I got some takeaway burgers from an all-night fast food joint near our hotel, where a white guy stared at me as I leaned against the counter at a 90-degree angle from exhaustion. He probably thought I was drunk. My feet were burning so badly, they'd never hurt that much before. It felt like my feet were ruined. It felt like the only way to get rid of the pain was to chop of my current feet and get myself a new pair.

But oh, it was all worth it. Only for Tokyo.

Tokyo Day 5: Tsukiji, Asakusa, Akihabara, Ueno

cisoux — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:40:00 GMT

We woke up at a disgustingly early 4:30 a.m. and stumbled out into the world at 5:30.

Today was the day we would visit the famous Tsukiji Fish Market. This is where all of Tokyo’s seafood comes from. It’s also the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. You’ve probably seen it on Japan Hour. Guidebooks are vague on when the auctions for the catch, generally thought of as the highlight of any visit to Tsukiji, really begin, so we thought getting there around 6 a.m. would be a safe bet.

Wrong.

By the time we reached the market, at about 6:30 a.m., the auction hall was cleaned out except for two large tunas.

But wait, I’m making it sound too simple.

Before we even entered the market, we were already lost and confused. We had promised to meet June outside the train station. Of course, all three of us forgot that there are several different stations for each area and which one you end up at depends on the subway line you take. So while Lianyi and I had taken the Oedo line and ended up at Tsukiji-shijo station, June was at Tsukiji station on the other side of the market. So Lianyi and I went into the market without June, and we thought we could perhaps catch up somewhere inside.

I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the chaos inside. It felt like I was back in Hanoi! There are fishmongers on these mechanical trolley-like contraptions zooming around all over. Hundreds of them, and they make it quite clear that they aren’t going to make way for you stupid gaijin.

And once inside, we still didn’t see any fish. Actually all we saw were extremely crowded shops and restaurants and a car park. So we walked back and forth trying to figure out where to go to see all the “action”, until eventually we just decided to venture into the central building next to the car park.

Finally, we were in the market proper. Here were the fishes and the weird seafood in various states of death, bleeding and stinking and slopping water all over your shoes. Fishmongers were going about their business gutting and chopping and displaying their wares for sale. None of the seafood looked appetising, but the buzz and the movement of the market really woke me up.

After walking about and taking random turns, Lianyi and I got tired, so we decided to make our way out. Finding the way out of the market took another 20 minutes since we didn’t remember anymore which turns we’d taken or where we’d even entered from.

Eventually we managed to get ourselves back to the shop/restaurant area, where we miraculously found June sitting on some steps hiding from the chaos. There were long queues outside each restaurant there, all of them serving the freshest seafood in Tokyo. We picked a tiny sushi bar with a short-ish queue and waited for about half an hour before getting in.

The chef was a boisterous old man who brought to the life the stereotypical image of the Japanese chef. He had a loud gravelly voice that he used to amuse his customers, booming things like “Ladies first! Hai!” as he served us across the counter.

Lianyi had a whole sushi set to himself. June and I shared but even then we couldn’t finish our food. The seafood rolls had way too much wasabi for me and the super weird seafood stuff just made us feel sick. June had a bite of a sushi with salmon roe and then gave the rest to Lianyi. He said it was milky and delicious. I had a tiny taste of this orange mushy stuff that sort of looked like crab roe except mushier and softer, and immediately felt like vomiting. Lianyi lapped that up too.

For the rest of the morning up until late afternoon, I couldn’t even look at any kind of Japanese food without wanting to vomit. And even today, I can’t even think of sushi without feeling my stomach lurch a little. We totally should have had grilled seafood instead.

(That’s what I say, but Lianyi claims this was the best sushi he’s ever had in his life.)

After the questionable sushi breakfast Lianyi and I parted ways from June. She had to go change hostels, we wanted to take a boat ride from the Hama Rikyu Garden to Asakusa.

From what Lianyi said of the garden, I was unimpressed. I said, “I’m all garden-ed out really.” But he insisted that the guidebooks and one of his interviewees said the boat ride was really worth it. So I went along.

We walked for 20 minutes from the Tsukiji market to get to the Hama Rikyu Garden, and it wasn’t even open when we got there. We had to sit outside for another 20 minutes to wait for the gates to open. I was seriously exhausted (endless walking for the past 4 days, not enough sleep) so I took off my shoes, put on my sunglasses and went to sleep on Lianyi’s shoulder while we waited. When the garden was opened, the first thing I did was go to a vending machine and get myself a can of coffee.

I haven’t mentioned the vending machines yet. There is a vending machine at every corner of Tokyo. Down every alleyway is a vending machine. At our hotel, there was a vending machine on every single floor. In parks, vending machines are much easier to find than toilets. Actually that applies to all of Tokyo.

So anyway, I got myself some coffee, then followed Lianyi around the park. He was trying to act as a tour guide to the park using the official map and guide, but he was kind of lousy. The boat ride that we wanted to take would only begin at 10:30 a.m, so we had an hour and a half to kill in the park. It was a nice enough park with a few quirky things like a tomb for ducks that were killed by the emperor during his hunting sprees, and a 300-year-old tree that was being propped up by crutches.

I fed the tree some of my coffee cos it looked like it needed it.

Just kidding.

But anyway as I was saying, the park was nice enough but it wasn’t spectacular the way the Detached Palace Garden at Hakone was. And it doesn’t hold a candle to the fabulous Ueno Park, which we would visit later that day. So it was kind of a blah place.

That amazing awesome boat ride that the guidebooks and Lianyi’s interviewee raved about? Phooey.

I don’t know if we were just too tired to appreciate it, but it was seriously dull and underwhelming. It was 40 minutes of nothing. Ok so I got to see some riverside flats which house Tokyo’s less-well-to-do residents. And we passed under some bridges that are apparently significant for some reason or other. But whatever ok, it was boring. Lianyi, who MADE ME take the damn boat, slept throughout the whole ride.

The garden and the boat ride were such a waste of time, time that we later wished we had spent at Ueno Park instead.

So anyway the boat brought us to Asakusa, where we headed straight for Nakamise Dori. This is a tourists’ marketplace, a sprawling roofed market that has lanes and lanes of shops selling souvenirs and knick knacks to bring home. But because Japan’s tourism industry is mainly targeted at domestic tourists, the things sold there weren’t all rubbish. They’re actually stuff that Japanese people themselves would buy.

We tried a couple of their street snacks, one of which I really liked – a sesame-flavoured fried pau with red bean filling. Lianyi bought a couple of boxes of cakes for the people back home. I bought two aprons for my mother and my aunt.

After walking down one of the lanes, I spotted a Uniqlo sign on a small-ish shopping centre across the road.

“Uniqlo!” I squealed. “Can we go please please please?”

I’d been keeping my eye out for this clothing chain since I got to Tokyo but for some reason it had been eluding me. Which is strange indeed, since there are over 80 outlets across Tokyo. My friend had told me to look out for this chain because they sell very well-designed t-shirts for really cheap prices.

So we made a dash for Uniqlo, which turned out to be more of a treasure chest for Lianyi than for me. All I could find to buy were a pack of socks, while he walked away with a sizeable stash of t-shirts, polo shirts and socks. After the short detour, we returned to Nakamise Dori.

Walking down Nakamise Dori brings you to the Sensoji Temple, the most crowded temple I’ve ever seen in my life. Before you enter, you have to go to a giant cauldron and try to get the smoke from the burning incense into your hair and clothes, it’s supposed to bring you good fortune or whatever. Inside the temple, you can pay 100 yen to receive your fortune. We couldn’t really be bothered.

I was really very tired so I just sat down at the temple steps while Lianyi roamed around the compound for a while. He said it was beautiful. I guess we have to trust him.

Once he was done with the temple, it was a quick pit stop at a restaurant for Lianyi to get an extremely expensive cup of coffee and for me to rest my burning feet. And then back to the subway station to get to Akihabara!!!

(You cannot mention Akihabara (!!!) without also typing three exclamation marks next to it.)

Akihabara (!!!) is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”. It is an entire Orchard Road filled with Sim Lim-type stuff. It is arcades and computer shops and electronics bazaars and not-so-secret porn stashes, all in one huge shopping district. If it runs on batteries or electricity, you can find it here. It is also where you go to feel better about the way you look after the uber-cool hipsters of Harajuku and sleek chic types in Shinjuku and Shibuya have made you feel like a troll.

Akihabaraaaaa!!!

Akihabara!!!!!!!!

And after visiting two temples, four art museums and two history museums, it was where I had my first spiritual moment in Tokyo.

It happened in the first arcade that we walked into. The arcades here are all 5 storeys high each. In this first one, the first floor was jam packed with those machines where you slip in a coin and try to manipulate the machine arm to pick up a soft toy that you want. (What are those called?) Except the machines here don’t just offer soft toys, they also offer things like nurse and french maid costumes in boxes, and female anime figurines for lonely lonely boys.

The second floor had the good stuff. The Rock Band-type games, and these huge pods that you go into and the entire interior surface of the pod, from floor to ceiling, turns into a gaming screen, and, of course, the Dance Dance Revolution.

As I watched this androgynous Japanese teenager thumping his/her feet on the electronic dancefloor, I seriously got a lump in my throat. Because, dude, this is where it all began! It felt like I imagine what it would feel like to finally see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or to watch a bullfight in Spain. You've seen it on TV, you've watched local kids do it in the arcades and now here you are, face-to-face with the REAL THING.

We walked into pachinko parlours, and a Mac store that didn’t really look like a Mac store, and five-storey manga stores. For some reason pornography is always sold on the third floor, while legit computer games take up the highest floor. Why? To satisfy Lianyi’s curiosity I had to go with him to the porn sections. You know, they play the DVDs on preview screens so you know what you’re buying. There’s also anime porn if real women aren’t really your thing.

Akihabara is madhouse!!! It’s awesome!!! (Besides the porn, which made me uncomfortable. As Lianyi noted, I stuck uncharacteristically close to him whenever we were in the porn sections of any store.)

The worst thing that almost happened: We got into a lift on the 5th storey of an arcade to go back down to the ground floor. It was already full when we got on. On my right was Lianyi. Very close to my left was an obese young boy who looked about 13, with glazed eyes and what looked like food bits at the corner of his mouth.

On the third floor, the door opened and more people wanted to get on. “Ohmygod ohmygod if the lifts here work like the subway I am just going to vomit and die,” I thought.

Thankfully, they don’t.

The worst thing we saw: Two MEN dressed as french maids, long scraggly wigs included, handing out leaflets for a french maid café. We wanted to take a photo but we were too scared. Seriously, one of them looked like the Wicked Witch from the West out of Oz.

After Akihabara, we had to choose whether to go to Ginza, the upscale shopping district that’s known as the Fifth Avenue of Tokyo, or to go to Ueno Park. We didn’t have time for both. Based on June’s descriptions of both places, we chose Ueno. We didn’t want to shop anyway.

Once we got to Ueno, I had gotten over my sickness of Japanese food enough to need another meal so we looked for a place to have a really late lunch. It was about 4 p.m., 7 hours since our sushi breakfast. We were actually hunting down a restaurant that was listed in our Lonely Planet, but because Japanese streets have no names, it’s really impossible to track down anything so after a while we just settled for a cute little place that seemed palatable. In fact, it turned out to be one of our best finds in Tokyo and I had my best meal in Tokyo right there. Not only that, their English menu was comprehensive and flawless too. It even explained things like how you can ask for half-servings of rice/noodles or add a drink to make a set and stuff like that. This was the first and last time we got such a great English menu in Tokyo.

I actually ordered a bowl of rice and tempura but when Lianyi’s noodles came I made him exchange dishes with me. It was delicious.

All around the restaurant and Ueno station itself is a large shopping arcade where apparently you can find all kinds of Asian goods and designer label knock-offs, but we decided to just head for the park. But when we got there, it was already 5 and all the museums in the park had closed. It was quite disappointing, especially that day also happened to be the second Saturday of the month, which means that entry to the Museum of Western Art would have been free! I had also wanted to have a look at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Natural Science but alas all we could do was walk around the park and just take a look at the shrines and tombs there. And homeless people. We couldn’t even take a seat anywhere because every single bench in the park was occupied by a homeless person.

Despite the museums and even the zoo (yes there’s a zoo within the park! With pandas!) being closed at this point, Ueno Park was still kind of fantastic, if just for its sheer size. I can imagine it would have been pretty damn awesome had we been able to catch a visit to all of the museums and all. Still, it might have been for the best that we didn’t get to go to the museums, because I was seriously exhausted beyond redemption by this point. I had to sit down after every 5 minutes of walking. My feet were starting to feel numb and I was also feeling kind of vomit-y. I don’t know if it was from the fatigue or the memories of the morning’s sushi.

After the park we just headed back to our hotel and napped for an hour until about 7:30, when June came to our room cos she happened to be exploring Shinjuku at the time. We watched some Olympics judo together and then headed out to Nishi Shinjuku for dinner.

We had dinner on the 29th floor of a skyscraper, at a restaurant called Hakkaku. It was ok, not fantastic but not too bad. The views were pretty cool though.

After dinner of course we were too fucking tired to do anything else so we all went back to our respective beds to sleep. Because the next day was Summer Sonic day!

Tokyo Day 4: Hakone Pt 2

cisoux — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:01:00 GMT

We started the day bright and early at 6:30 a.m. with a dip in the hot spring at our guesthouse. It’s a shared facility, but guests can reserve it for private use. Since you have to go in fully naked, it’s really best that you do this.

The Japanese hot spring ritual is such: You have to take a shower and soap yourself down until you’re clean. Once you’re washed, you can enter the hot spring, but you must never immerse your head in it. And when you’re in the hot spring, you have to take regular breaks so that you don’t die from sulphur suffocation.

The water wasn’t as hot as we’d expected it to be, but very sulphurous. The moment I got in, the water felt very heavy on my chest and it was very difficult to breathe. The smell of rotten eggs hung lightly in the air. No wonder reservation blocks are only half an hour each. Still, it was quite relaxing. I took another shower after the bath, just to wash the smell of sulphur off my skin.

We had breakfast at the guesthouse, a buffet spread of simple stuff like bread and jam, fruits and cereal. Over breakfast I pored over a pamphlet of The Museum of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and The Little Prince and begged Lianyi to go there. The museum was just two doors down from our guesthouse, a fabulously charming French-style mansion from what I could see from the outside. I thought it would be a super cute and unbelievably lovely experience. He thought it would be a waste of time.

I WAS RIGHT. (As it turns out I always was when it came to picking out tourist attractions.)

The entire museum compound is a recreation of Provence, France, complete with cute little fake bakeries, a travel agency, library, bank, etc etc. The ground was cobbled stone and every corner was a picture perfect postcard shot. Sculptures of the characters from The Little Prince were scattered all over. Within the compound was a house. Its entrance was a recreation of Saint Exupery’s own childhood home. Upstairs, there were recreations of his childhood bedroom, as well as the different offices and rooms he later had in Morocco and New York. Another room was fixed up to look like the inside of a mail cargo plane, which Saint Exupery flew as a pilot. It was such a loving installed and obsessive museum. And God knows what Sain Exupery or the Little Prince had anything to do with Japan or Hakone except the shared affinity to cuteness!

The only drawback to the whole place was that all the exhibits and posters were in Japanese. There was a short film played about Saint Exupery’s life in a cute theatrette (that was made to look like an asteroid!) and that, too, was in Japanese.

After the film we left the museum and took a bus to the POLA Museum of Art, a private museum built by the guy who started the POLA cosmetics company. Only the museum entrance is above ground, because the architects didn’t want the building to interfere with the natural environment of the area or to be taller than the surrounding trees. Inside, there were pieces from both the Western world and Japanese artists through the ages. There were some great pieces by Renoir, Cezanne and some Japanese artists whose names I’m sorry I’ve forgotten.

But what really captured us were three paintings by Monet – one was a painting of the Rouen Cathedral at sunset (it was one of series that he painted of the same cathedral at different times of the day just to capture the effects of the light), another was a painting of a Japanese bridge over a pond and the third was a patinting called the Rio della Salute. When we first looked at the paintings up close, we weren’t really sure what was so great about them, or about Monet. But later on, as we were looking at other paintings in the room and then turned around, and saw the Monet paintings from that distance, we were struck by just how real they felt. The cathedral one especially. Up close, it really just looked like a mess of pink and blue and you can’t even really see the shape of the cathedral. But from a distance, it really does look like what you might see if you were walking towards a cathedral at sunset.

It was the same with the other two paintings. Up close, all we saw were splotches of random colours of paint. But from a distance, they looked extraordinarily real and true. It’s really quite amazing. And only when looking upon the actual paintings do you realise that prints don’t even come close to capturing the essence of the artwork.

We were also awed by the Van Gogh. It was simply, upon a glance, a painting of a vase of flowers. But when you looked up close, you could see the violent jagged strokes of the paint brush. The flower stalks looked like a witch’s hair. From a distance it looked plain and simple, Up close, it was wild and angry. And when the audio guide told me that Van Gogh finished this painting just a few days before killing himself, my hair really stood on end.

After the POLA museum we got back on the bus and went to Gora. Not wanting to skip lunch yet again, we decided to eat a nice little homely restaurant at the train station. The sole waitress there, an elderly lady, couldn’t speak a word of Japanese, so we actually had to bring her out of the restaurant to point at the food displayed in the window outside to show her what we wanted. We both had tempura with rice. It was not bad, it tasted like good home cooked Japanese food.

Then we took a cablecar to Sounzan and transferred to the ropeway to get to Owakudani, a giant crater that was created from the eruption of Mount Hakone 3,000 years ago. Today, tourists can take a ten-minute trail up one of the gentler slopes of Owakudani to get close to the volcanic activity of the area. At the top of the climb, you can buy eggs that have been boiled in the natural hot spring water from the area. These eggs are black from the sulphur in the water, and are said to add 7 years to your life.

Sounds good right?

But of course, our trusty Lianyi managed to find an off-the-beaten-track path that was far away from the tourist trail and suggested we take a hike up that instead. I followed him, because that is what obedient wives do. The trail was very narrow and tall wild grass grew on both sides, as tall as me, and sometimes so long that they obscured the path. We were the only tourists taking that route, so at first we were a bit unsure about its safety, but just 5 minutes into our climb, a long line of old Japanese people came climbing down. We said to each other, if those old people can do it, so can we!

So we soldiered on. It was honestly the toughest hike I’ve ever done in my life, not that I’ve done many. But it was really difficult. There were a lot of small slippery stones that caused us to trip, the soil was sometimes soft and slippery too and the wild plants kept scratching our bare arms. The trail was also pretty steep and as I mentioned, very narrow. But still we persisted. Every once in a while, Lianyi would ask me if I wanted to turn back but I kept saying I don’t know, I don’t know, let’s just go on and see what happens next.

After 20 minutes, we saw a sign that was in Chinese. Lianyi said, Hey this sign says we’re 10 minutes from the top! That gave us motivation to go on.

But 10 minutes later, we still weren’t at the top yet. I was panting very heavily and my entire body was slick with sweat. I couldn’t stop scratching my arms and my feet were yelling at me to let them go free. We took a break. Our water was finishing.

As we were catching our breath, a middle-aged Japanese couple came climbing down. We stopped them and asked, how long is it to the top?

The man replied, “2 hours.”

Oh my fucking God.

Obviously we turned back down, taking another half an hour or more to reach the ground. The climb down was horrible. I must have screamed like, 5 times, throughout because I kept slipping. What was to be a 10-minute leisurely stroll turned out to be a one-hour jungle trek. And we didn’t even get to eat the long-life eggs!

We were strangely good-humoured about the whole affair though and were laughing about it as we made our way down. If we hadn’t met that Japanese couple, who knows, we might have ended up having to stay overnight somewhere on the damn mountain without food, water or any protective clothing.

Before the trek:

After:

Once we made our way down we got back on the ropeway to go to Togendai, where we would take a boat ride on a pirate ship across Lake Ashi. It was a beautiful ride. We passed by a lot of luxurious property along the shores of the lake. I guess Hakone is a place for the rich to build their summer homes.

The boat dropped us off at Hakone Machi. It was already pretty late by that point. We actually had 3 sights to see in Hakone Machi but one of them, the Checkpoint Museum, was already closed. So we just walked past it to get to the next stop, the Ancient Cedar Avenue, which is really a short path framed with beautiful old cedar trees on both sides.

The avenue led us to sight #3, which was the Detached Palace Garden. This was another thing in Tokyo that I wish I had more time to spend in. It was a beautiful, beautiful garden. It looked truly royal, like seriously, a garden meant for an emperor. It’s open 24 hours but it was getting dark so all we did was zip in, take some photos, and zip back out. We probably only saw 0.1% of the whole garden.

After that we just turned around and went back the way we came, back to the jetty, which was next to a bus stop. There we took a bus to Hakone Yumoto station and boarded a subway bound for Shinjuku.

And then.

About half an hour into the train ride, Lianyi looked up and said, “Eh. We’re back at Hakone Yumoto!”

Obviously he was talking rubbish so I said, “What?”

“We’re back at Hakone Yumoto!”

I looked up. We were back at Hakone Yumoto.

None of the guides we read, none of our guidebooks, told us this: that when the train from Hakone Yumoto reaches Odawara Station, you have to transfer to a different train to get back to Tokyo.

Of course, the train driver did announce this when we had reached Odawara, but ONLY IN JAPANESE.

And the train we were on, on the Odakyu Line, didn’t have any signs in English at all, unlike those on the JR Line.

So let this be a lesson to all: Transfer at Odawara or you will be stuck in Hakone FOREVER.

For the rest of the now-3-hour train ride, we made jokes about how no matter how many times we transferred trains, we would always end up in Hakone Yumoto because it was like this haunted horror town that never lets you go. And at night when you’re stuck there sulphurous green monsters come out and eat you.

Therefore, even though we were supposed to reach Shinjuku at 9 pm and have dinner with June (who’d arrived in Tokyo the day before), we only arrived back in Shinjuku at 10, by which time most restaurants had closed. Luckily a cafe near our hotel, called the Ooze Charm Cafe, was open til midnight. We took a much-needed shower (the sweat and scratches of Owakudani being still stuck on our skins) and then practically crawled to the cafe, where we had excellent Japanese-style pasta in an underground indoor smoking area.

Our clothes still smelled of smoke the next morning.

Tokyo Day 3: Hakone

cisoux — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:52:00 GMT

If it hasn’t been clear so far, I had an absolutely amazing time in Tokyo. It was fucking exhausting and my feet were BURNING with pain throughout all 7 days – in fact the sides of my soles are still aching today – but the trip was brilliant anyhow. Each day we saw something that wowed us. (Thus far, the Mori Tower, Kiddyland, the 7-storey Tower Records.) We tried to cram so many things into our short stay, which was why it was so tiring, but even then there was still a lot that we missed, despite skipping meals and scrimping on sleep!

And the absolute best part of the whole trip was Hakone, where we spent Days 3 and 4.

Hakone is 70 kilometres outside of Tokyo, and it took us about 2 hours from Shinjuku to get there. It’s where Tokyoites go to get out of the city, and it has hot springs, hiking trails and excellent parks and museums.

The day didn’t start so well. We planned to wake up at 7 a.m. but ended up waking up at 8 instead because we were so tired. And since we were late we had to skip breakfast. Then I screwed up at Shinjuku station by getting us to the wrong platform and so we missed our train and had to wait about 20 minutes for the next one. After a 90-minute ride we got off at Odawara, which houses the (rebuilt) Odawara Castle. I honestly thought it was a bore but Lianyi seemed to like it. It’s a long walk from Odawara Station to the castle, which is now a museum. I’m not really a fan of history museums, I much prefer art museums.

Plus it was seriously fucking hot.

After Lianyi was done with the castle, we had to walk back to the train station but this time we took a nicer route that led us through the shops and restaurants of the town. It was really a charming little town. There was even some cute music playing in the air as we walked through the place. We couldn’t even tell where it was coming from but it just felt so quaint.

Once at the station we hopped back on the subway to Hakone Yumoto. From there, we took a railway train to the Hakone Open Air Museum, which is BRILLIANT. Fucking unbelievably wonderful. It’s basically a park with hundreds of sculptures and other interactive installation art pieces, and at the end of the park is a huge building with the word PICASSO on the front which houses, well, what do you think.

It was the best park and museum I’ve ever been to in my life. Right at the entrance, before you even enter the museum, when you look up, you see a sculpture of a man suspended in the air just above the trees. It’s too cool. When you enter, it turns out to be the sculpture "Man and Pegasus" by Carl Milles.

Us, looking at the museum map: Ok we don’t have much time. Let’s just skip the kids area.

10 minutes later: Oh my god there’s a slide! Let’s go down together! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!! That was so fast! Let’s go again!!!

Of course, our camera died halfway through the park so I can’t even show you how amazing it was. You just have to believe me. Besides the outdoor sculptures by people like Joan Miro and Willem de Kooning, there were also a couple of small buildings housing collections by Henry Moore and Giacomo Manzu. Another small building had a giant net for kids to get trapped in.

Halfway through our exploration we stopped for some shaved ice and syrup. We pointed at the condensed milk, and the old man said, “Miruku?” Too cute.

After the break I walked into a maze and almost couldn’t find my way out. And then we walked to an 18-metre high tower called the Symphonic Sculpture, which is a cylindrical building whose walls are all stained glass. The building is hollow, with just two double helix staircases winding themselves up to the top. As you walk up the stairs your footsteps echo throughout the tower and each turn you make, the colours of the stained glass changes.

I got vertigo about a third of the way up (there are no levels or landings, the stairs just go on forever, so it gets pretty scary for people with a fear of heights, like me) so I went back down. The Russian went all the way up however and on the rooftop got a fantastic view of the whole park. I didn’t realise there was even a rooftop to stand on or I would have braved myself for the climb. Grrr.

Right next to the Symphonic Sculpture was a hot spring for people to rest their tired feet in. We just paid a dollar for a towel and walked around in the water. It was actually pretty effective. After we got out, my feet didn’t hurt for a while. Well, for ten whole minutes I felt no pain.

After that, it was the grand finalé – the Picasso building. There are over 300 Picasso works stored in the building, making it one of the largest Picasso collections in the world. Too bad we can’t fully understand art, but I walked away feeling awed just the same.

We had planned to spend not too long at the open air museum since we were pressed for time and there were a zillion things to do in Hakone, but we ended up spending something like 2 and a half hours there. It was worth every minute though – I would have hated to have missed out on any part of the place.

And since it was already about 4 pm when we were done with the open air museum, we had to quickly make our way directly to our guesthouse in Hakone, which stops checking in people after 6. To get there we had to first take a cablecar (which is a car on railway tracks, but attached to overhead cables) to Sounzan, and then transfer to a ropeway (which is what we call a cablecar over here) to Togendai. And from there, we had to take a bus to Senkyoro-Mae where our guesthouse was.

We reached the guesthouse around 5 pm. Note that we had not only skipped breakfast, we had skipped lunch too. I don’t think any of our trips to third world countries had been this hardcore. I think we would have made Soo Hian hate Tokyo if he had come along with us.

So, being broken and almost dead, we checked in and immediately went searching for dinner without taking a shower first. After getting lost, we came across a bunch of white guys sitting in the backyard of a cute little building and asked for help. Among them was a Japanese guy who, when we said we were from Singapore, said, “Oh, Singapore! Apa khabar?”

Thanks to his help we eventually ended up at the restaurant we were looking for, an adorable little place called Hanashi where you have to take off your shoes and sit cross-legged on tatami mats. We were so excited to get food. But when we got our food we were a bit disappointed: The portions were quite small. And when we looked over at the table next to ours, we realised that the Japanese customers were eating plates of food that weren’t even listed in the menu that we got! Mussels, prawns, calamari. The English menu we got was a piece of laminated paper with like, 10 items on it and the only seafood listed was fish!

So after dinner our next stop was Lawson, a 24-hour convenience store, where we bought ice cream, cakes and cup noodles in Milk Curry and Cheese Curry flavour. Yes, you read that right. Well, we were in Japan so why not?

We sat at a bus stop outside Lawson and ate our ice cream, and talked about what a lovely little charming town we were in. It really looks like a great place to grow old in. I wish we had had more time there just to chill and go to the village centre. But it was already dark as we finished our ice creams and we made our way back to our guesthouse.

We had booked the cheapest room we could find in Hakone, which was SGD130 a night. And for that hefty sum, we had to share a toilet and shower room with the other guests. (All other rooms in Hakone cost SGD300 to 600 a night.) But my fears about gross toilets were misplaced: everything about the guesthouse was spotless. It was quite amazing. Our stinking, sweaty bodies were pretty much the dirtiest things there.

Later that night we had our cakes and cup noodles. Milk curry and cheese curry are really not bad at all!

Tokyo Day 2: Roppongi, Harajuku, Shibuya

cisoux — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:39:00 GMT

One of my main missions for this trip was to find a wedding dress. Because let’s face it, if you can’t find a nice dress in Tokyo, there’s little hope for you anywhere else. All of my hopes for finding this elusive dress were pinned on Day 2, the day we would explore the main shopping havens of Tokyo. I knew that if I didn’t find the dress on this day, I could pretty much forget about getting a dress ever.

Well in short, I failed.

We started off the day with breakfast at a café outside Shinjuku station’s new south exit, which faces Takashimaya Times Square. The menu was completely in Japanese so I just pointed to a photo of some fried things and hoped for the best. They turned out to be giant fried oysters. Success!

Then we took the subway to Roppongi.

It took us something like 10 minutes just to find our way out of the Roppongi train station and figure out which exit to take, because all the train stations in Tokyo are MASSIVE. They just go down and down and down until you wonder just how deep underground you really are, and then they sprawl this way and that. Some stations have over 40 exits. According to Wikipedia, “the Toei Oedo Line platform 1 at Roppongi station is 42 metres underground, making this station the deepest of the Tokyo subway stations.”

Eventually, we found the right way out, which was the way that would lead us to Roppongi Hills, the upper class mega-complex which incorporates office space, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafés, movie theaters, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor amphitheater, and a few parks. Our main destination within this area was the Mori Tower.

It was gorgeous. It was modern architecture at its best. It oozed class and money and good taste.

The Mori Tower is a 54-story building. The first six levels contain shops and restaurants. The top six levels house the Mori Art Museum and the Tokyo City View.

To get into the museum and city view, you have to take a separate entrance, which is really just a lift that brings you straight to the 52nd floor. Outside that entrance is this super cool spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, named “Maman” (”Mummy” in French).

At the 52nd floor, we bought tickets that would gain us entry into both the art museum and the city view but unfortunately the museum was closed. The museum doesn’t have permanent exhibits so it’s always closed in between exhibitions. We were really quite unlucky — the museum would have been opened on the very next day, with an exhibition that looked extremely cool, judging from the posters and videos they were playing around the tower.

So we just went to city view, which was in itself pretty awesome. It took up the whole of the 54th floor, and had floor-to-ceiling windows all around, which meant you could get a 360-degree view of all of Tokyo. Pretty fucking awesome.

While the city views took up just the outer edge of the 54th floor (where all the windows were), all the space in the centre was used to house a large and beautiful aquarium. Lianyi loves fishes, so he was very pleased. I’ve never been fascinated by the creatures, but this aquarium arranged all the fishes so that they became works of art.

We thought that was all but no! After we came out of the aquarium, we found out that we could go to the rooftop of the Mori Tower to see the views without all those pesky glass windows to block us from death.

According to this plaque, the open air sky deck is a Lovers Sanctuary. Indeed, nothing says I Love You like vertigo and heatstroke.

Once we got tired of the view we went back down and made our way to Harajuku. HARAJUKU!

Once we got out of Harajuku station, it was another pain in the ass trying to figure out which way to walk. There were maps outside the station but they didn’t help much. Eventually we just decided to follow Lianyi’s instinct and walked towards what we hoped was the Meiji Jingu Shrine. His instincts proved right!

This Shinto shrine was built after the deaths of Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken, in the garden area which they sometimes used to visit. It’s a tourist attraction, but also a working shrine, where people come to pray. Shinto weddings are also held here, but we weren’t lucky enough to see one.

The shrine is enclosed within a 700,000-square metre forest. Once you’re in, you don’t hear the noise of the city anymore. It’s quite amazing, like a whole different part of Japan altogether.

You can buy a votive tablet and then write what you wish for on it and hang it here. The monks will collect it and pray for you.

After the shrine, we went searching for the Edo Memorial Museum of Art somewhere in Harajuku. It was a pain in the ass to find, but eventually we found it, almost by accident. It was a very small museum and we couldn’t take any photos inside of course. We had to take our shoes off at the entrance and change into Japanese slippers. The museum contained a lot of wood block prints from ancient Japan. Some of them were really beautiful. I would have bought a print if they hadn’t been so expensive.

It was already dinnertime after we were done with the museum. We had skipped lunch (so much to do, so little time!) so we were pretty damn hungry. We decided to hunt down a sushi place recommended in one of our guidebooks. We found it along Omotesando, Harajuku’s main shopping street. It was a little conveyor belt-type restaurant, and it was delicious and surprisingly cheap. We had our fill of sushi and okonomiyaki for just about SGD10 each!

Then we just wandered along Omotesando, feeling very unhip and uncool. We entered La Foret, a shopping centre that is just shop after shop of painfully hip clothes that neither of us were cool enough to wear (or wealthy enough to afford). For example, one of the items of clothing on sale there was a t-shirt that was already pre-torn with holes all over it and cost something like $200. Most of the other buildings in Harajuku are just single shops devoted to one designer label. The one above is the Gap store. Unlike in Shinjuku or Shibuya, the buildings here aren’t very tall, which makes the whole area feel less claustrophobic.

After that we went into Kiddyland. Kiddyland is 5 floors filled with toys and all sorts of nonsense that you don’t need. In short, it is amazing. We must have spent an hour there. The first floor held all kinds of crazy things, like a USB stick with a humping dog (so that when you stick it into your PC it looks like the dog is humping your computer), stereo sets that look like they’re made out of Lego bricks (I really wanted one), cutesy kitchen utensils with faces cut into them and dancing animals of all sorts.

Each of the other floors contained toys dedicated to specific cartoons, like a floor for Hello Kitty (of course), a floor for Snoopy and a floor for Naruto. On the top floor we found a toy that you have to put together yourself, and then it will light up and make funky colours. The box said the act of fixing up this toy would bring you back to your childhood days of assembling train tracks and Lego houses. “Remember when your eyes used to be bright?” What a way to sell eh.

There was really a lot to see and explore but we were already damn tired and running out of time so we couldn’t take much of it in. Along Omotesando there are lanes branching off of it and each lane consists of more shops and art galleries that look really inviting and happening. I was quite sad that we couldn’t spend more time in Harajuku or Roppongi. I would love to go back to Tokyo and just spend entire days exploring these two cities.

After Harajuku we went to Shibuya, which is like Shinjuku on drugs. It’s just filled with tall buildings all over, so all we did was take a photo with the statue of Hachiko, cross that famous eight-way traffic junction and then pay a visit to Tower Records, which is 7 storeys tall.

We spent like an hour inside Tower Records, that’s how great it was. They even had special booths dedicated to the bands performing at the Summer Sonic music festival which we were attending at the end of the week. Lianyi wanted to buy a box set of The Who CDs but decided against it and then came to regret it later. We ended up buying a CD that the store was playing, by a band called The Faint which we’d never heard of before.

After that we took a cursory glance inside one of the shopping centres and then went back to Shinjuku for some sleep. It was about 11 pm when we returned, we’d been walking around for about 12 or 13 hours non-stop and we had to wake up early the next day for Hakone. Exhaustion was pretty much the theme of this trip.

Tokyo Day 1: Shinjuku

cisoux — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:36:00 GMT

This will be a story of confusion, exhaustion and lots of near-vomitting. Let’s start from the top.

I got about 2 hours of sleep before waking up at 2:30 a.m. to go to the airport. Our flight was at 6 a.m. We landed at Narita Airport around 2 pm Tokyo time. Immigration was a breeze. We took two trains to get to Shinjuku, where we were staying. The whole trip from Narita to Shinjuku took two hours. Tickets were bought from actual human beings so that was also easy. The only thing of note on the train ride was a Japanese girl-Italian guy couple who were being loud and annoying, pissing off the old Japanese couple next to them.

Once we reached Shinjuku… well I don’t know what I was expecting but I was super fucking excited. Shinjuku is one of the major commercial centres in Tokyo and its administrative centre. It’s also home to the busiest train station in the world, servicing a million commuters daily. This was apparent from the chaos that surrounded us the moment we got out of the train.

We stayed at the Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku. It came with our relatively inexpensive flight package so we weren’t sure what to expect, but it turned out to be a pretty swanky hotel. The room was tiny, as most Japanese hotel rooms are, but it was otherwise very nice. It had one of those high-tech Japanese toilets with a bidet. During the trip, I formed a very fond attachment to the Japanese bidet.

It was raining that afternoon, so our first purchase in Tokyo was a pair of umbrellas. Very cute ones that made us feel like Tokyoites. I was quite sad to leave them behind on our last day but they were too cumbersome to carry onto the plane.

We basically just wandered around aimlessly, wondering where to eat, since everything was in Japanese and we weren’t really sure what was good and cheap. Eventually we stumbled across one of those vending machine restaurants, and we stopped there. At the entrance is a vending machine. You put in your money, choose what you want to eat from the pictures, and then the machine gives you a receipt. You give the receipt to a waitress, who then passes it to the kitchen and then you get your food.

It took me a long time to decide what to eat because the pictures were so small and I didn’t know what was what. I ended up having a hot plate of fried rice, which turned out to be pretty good. When the waitress gave it to me, she warned, “Hot-to.”

After dinner we went to Takashimaya Times Square, the 11-story behemoth with a floor to cater to each age group. We entered right into Tokyu Hands, a department store that pretty much sells everything you never knew you needed, like crepe makers, towels specially designed for hair-drying, cutters that create cute faces on your seaweed so that you can make sushi and rice balls that look like this:

I almost bought some really cute ass chopsticks, which were yellow and came in their own plastic box and said in French, “Have you eaten yet?”. I was also stuck for a while at the lunchbox section. SO MUCH CUTENESS.

Eventually Lianyi tore me away so we could explore the other floors. Well we were too tired to do any shopping so we just went all the way up to the top to HMV. After buying a Super Furry Animals CD, we had a crepe and then we walked back to our hotel. There was a Krispy Kreme right outside Taka. It had a long queue outside it when we walked past it on our way to Taka, and it still had a long queue as we walked back. I guess donuts are popular everywhere.

Late night recollections of Hanoi

cisoux — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:23:00 GMT

I should be sleeping now because I have to wake up early but my brain is still quite active. I was lying in bed just a while ago trying to let my thoughts run their course and into the darkness but instead I ended up with the urge to write. I was thinking first about my snoring, and then about how I always worry that I'll wake up my hotel roommate(s) with my snoring when I travel. Xai complained about it one night in Hanoi. Lianyi is already used to it although it wakes him up quite often. In KL, Mel said she didn't hear me snore at all, but I don't know if she was just trying to save me some embarrassment.

Then of course I thought about travelling, and the first thing I thought about travelling was Vietnam. I suddenly remembered Raphael the Australian who gave us too much to pay for his share of the cab ride, and whom we bumped into again while contemplating the strangest hot dog sandwich in the world at the pit stop between Hanoi and Hai Phong.

Then I thought about that cab ride. How we dropped Raphael off first at Hang Bac, which looked like a really happening street to be on, and then finally got off at our own street, Hang Ga, and saw it for the first time with not a little twinge of disappointment. Well, I don't know for sure about Lianyi but I was disappointed. There wasn't really a buzz, or any cool shops, just the usual loud honking and hawkers selling bamboo, household items and unappetising street food.

Hanoi was not a surprise in the way one hopes all of one's travel destinations will be. It was more of a shock. The unexpected cacophony of traffic, the nerve-wracking unfriendliness of the streets and sidewalks, especially to people like us who wanted just to walk. The reign of motorcycles here was something I was not prepared for, nor made aware of during my research and planning of the trip. How can something called so charmingly "The Old Quarter" be like this?

Vietnam was... difficult. I don't recall the trip without fondness but much of my recollections are overwhelmed with fear and anxiety -- and I'm not even talking about the end part with the hospital. I just mean the tripping over motorcycle wheels and balancing by the side of open drains and, of course, the road crossings.

That first day that we got to Hanoi and dropped off at Hang Ga, I was so tired and scared of the Hanoi outside that I didn't really feel like leaving the room. Yet I hated the room too, and I didn't want to stay in for long. I found the dilemma so exhausting. Not that I'm used to luxury -- we stayed at similar types of lodgings in Laos and Cambodia -- but the combination of the hostile exterior and the uncomfortable shelter was enough to drive me close to homesickness. I was just grateful I had Lianyi with me, someone whose fleshy bit between the shoulder and the chest I could rest my head on to regain some sense of security.

But that's the kind of situation that brings people together. When Xai arrived the next morning and said, "I don't like this place," and when I asked him, "You mean this hostel or Hanoi?" and he said, "Hanoi," it was that kind of moment where you know you're not alone and that for the next four days or so, someone else will be cowering by the side of the road with you, refusing to cross.

Vietnam Day 10: The worst ending ever

cisoux — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:50:00 GMT

Lianyi had been sniffling and coughing a lot and suffering from an on-and-off fever since Halong Bay. That was Tuesday. We thought nothing of it, just kept plying him with Panadol and Strepsils and their Vietnamese equivalents.

On Saturday I found out my grandma was in hospital with water in her lungs. We were on our way back to Hanoi from Tam Coc when I got the message. He was sleeping because at that point the fever was on. I cried quietly in the dark unlit bus, fearing the worst. I asked my mother if I should go home sooner. She said no need.

Back at the hotel room that same night his temperature was very high. We didn't have a thermometer but I could feel it. I rubbed his back. We looked through the list of clinics in Hanoi in our Lonely Planet. SOS International sounded like a good bet. But he said he didn't want to go to the doctor yet, maybe we could wait until the next morning.

On Sunday we were supposed to go home. He didn't have a temperature anymore, but he was still feeling very weak. Every hundred metres he asked to sit down and take a breather. But still I pushed him on, asked him to walk with me in the cold polluted air to get the most out of our last day there, do some last minute shopping.

In the taxi on the way to the airport he slept while I kept my eyes open, absorbing every last detail of Hanoi. The overcrowded streets and bus stops, the haphazard buildings, the beautiful but moulding architecture. He said he was feeling very bad. I said ok, don't worry, we'll be home soon.

At the airport I walked around finishing up all my Vietnamese dongs. He sat down. Every twenty minutes he would say he was feeling very bad.
What can I do?, I asked.
Nothing, he said.
Half an hour before boarding he said, walk around with me. I feel pins and needles throughout my whole body and my head.
So we walked.
Is this making you feel better, I asked?
Not actually, he said, I think I need a doctor.

We asked one of the shopkeepers, is there a doctor in here?
She said we'd have to go back out to get one.
We sit back down. Five minutes to boarding.
I don't think I can get on the plane, he said. I need a doctor. Take me to a doctor.
We went to an aiport official.
My friend is sick, I said, can you get a doctor?
She barely spoke English. She talked to her colleague in Vietnamese. She told us to sit down.

When we sat down that was when it began. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't feel his fingers, then his arms, then his legs. Mucus was running down his nose and I had to wipe it away for him.
I asked the airport woman, where is the doctor?
She told me to wait. She asked if we could board the plane.
I said no, I need a hospital. I need an ambulance. Where is the doctor?

A Singaporean man came over to us and asked us what was wrong. I said, my friend is sick.
He asked if we'd done any jungle trekking.
I said no.
He asked if we had gone to Sapa.
I said no.
He said, I'm afraid that maybe he caught one of their viruses. You sure you didn't go to Sapa? You better report this to the Singapore embassy.
I asked him to help me find the number. I handed him my Lonely Planet. I was busy wiping Lianyi's nose and holding his hand and making sure he didn't lose consciousness. Everytime his eyes stayed open too long I would snap, Blink! just to make sure he was still alive. When he closed his eyes I would shout at him, Wake up! Don't sleep!

The Singaporean man couldn't find the embassy number in my guidebook. He said he would try his. He went away and the last I saw of him, he and his daughter were thumbing through a guidebook.

The airport doctor still hadn't arrived. Where is the doctor? I yell at the airport woman.
She told me to wait some more.
It's getting worse, Lianyi said, I think I'm going to die.
No you're not, I said.
No, you don't know how I feel right now, he said.
Then his face froze up. He couldn't move his mouth. He couldn't talk properly. Saliva was starting to appear in bubbles at the corners of his mouth. His eyelids flickered crazily.
Oh my God I'm calling your mum, I said, swallowing back my panic tears.

If I die, he said, I love you.
You're not going to die, I said, Oh my god oh my god oh my god.
I'm sorry, he said, I'm sorry.
No, I'm sorry, I said, I shouldn't have made you walk around Hanoi with me today, or let you eat ice cream. I should have forced you to see a doctor.
In my head I also thought, I'm sorry for being a whiny little bitch. I'm sorry for all the times I ever got angry with you. I'm sorry I wasn't a better person. Please don't die. I'm not ready.

I called his mother. The moment she picked up, the words rushed out in an unintelligible mess: Lianyi is very very sick he can't breathe or move and he thinks he's going to die. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.
She told me to calm down and get a wheelchair. She told me to put him on the wheelchair and board the plane. She asked me what she could do.
I said I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what to do.

The doctor finally came. She was an old woman and didn't speak a word of English. She put a few drops of something in his mouth. It worked, he could feel his limbs again. He could talk. He calmed down. But only for a while. Ten minutes later it started all over again.
I need a hospital, I said.
They put him on a wheelchair and took him out. I carried our bags and his shoes and walk out with them. At the border between the departure gates and the public part of the airport a guard took away our passports.
Why are you taking our passports? I asked.
Yes, said the guard.

They wheeled him to a first aid station. On the way there I called Adr.ian, U.ma and Joon to ask for the number to the Singapore embassy. The first two didn't pick up and Joon had no access to the Internet. I gave up.

The first aid station had a bed and a table and two chairs, nothing else. Another doctor came in, this time a middle-aged man. He also didn't speak a word of English. He injected something into Lianyi's arm and hooked him up to an oxygen tank. Lianyi felt better again for another short while but soon he was telling me that it was getting worse again. By this time a flock of airport officials were in the room shouting at each other in Vietnamese. I wanted to cry very badly. We were fucked. But I had to keep holding it in.

Can I have our passports back? I need to go to a hospital now, I said.
The airport woman who was with us from the beginning said ok, we will get it for you.
It was a 2-minute walk from the gate where the guard took our passports to the first aid station but five minutes later the passports were still not there.

Where's my passport? I said.
Wait, ma'am, we are getting for you, she said.

Then the Singapore embassy called my mobile.
My name is Mr Pang and I'm from the Singapore embassy, he said. Mr Ho's mother called me. I understand you have an emergency.
Yes, yes, I said. I told him everything.
He said, ok go to a hospital.
Can you help us with that? I asked, thinking the embassy might have an ambulance or an emergency vehicle of some sort.
He said no.
How about afterwards, could you help us get home? I asked.
He laughed, he fucking laughed, and said no.
I wanted to tell him to fuck himself in the ass but I didn't.
He said, you better go to an international hospital like SOS or the French hospital. The Vietnamese hospitals are not very good.
I said ok and hung up.

I called our insurance company. The woman said, when you get to a hospital call me again.

In the meantime Lianyi was getting worse. He was clutching my hand and saying, It's getting worse, I can't breathe.
I tried to make him calm down but it was impossible since I was also panicking and the room was full of Vietnamese yelling.

Then the embassy guy SMSed me the numbers of the two hospitals he had recommended me. Why couldn't he have called them for me? I had difficulty saving the numbers because my hands were shaking so badly and I had to read it over three times before I could remember one of the numbers, my brain was so wonky. Eventually I managed to call SOS International.

I said, I need an ambulance please I'm at Hanoi airport and my boyfriend needs help.
Well we can't just send out ambulances you know, the French bitch at the other end said. This is a private hospital not a public one. First you have to tell me what's wrong.
I told her what was wrong.
She said, The ambulance will take an hour to get there.
I said An hour?!
She said, yes we are in the centre of Hanoi and the airport is far away. So what do you want to do now?
I said, I don't know, I don't know, ok send an ambulance here please.

Our passports were still not there.

Where is my passport?! I yelled.
The woman told me to wait some more.
I asked, where is the nearest hospital?
Nobody seemed to understand the concept.
One of the airport people said, you want to take taxi to nearest hospital?
I said yes.
They shouted at each other some more. Then they asked, are you using our ambulance or are you calling for one?
I said, you have an ambulance here?
They said yes.
Ok then take me now! I yell.
The woman said, we have ambulance here but must pay 35 US dollars.
I said ok, can you take us to the nearest hospital?
They still looked blank.
You want to go to hospital? they asked.
Yes. Take. Me. To. The. Nearest. Hospital. Please. Where's my passport?!

I thought, maybe I could take him to the nearest hospital for basic care and then transfer him to SOS International afterwards.

Finally our passports arrived. Our luggage came too. We took everything into the ambulance. It was spartan. No lights even. For some reason the doctor sat in the passenger seat in front with the driver. I sat behind with Lianyi and an airport official, a man. Five minuts into the ride they stopped to get more oxygen tanks. Then Lianyi had to pee. There was no bottle to pee in. The airport guy, Dong, rummaged around and finally got a plastic bag. He wanted to help Lianyi pee but Lianyi kept pointing at me and pushing him away. I helped him pee and when he was done I handed the bag to the airport guy but he refused to take it. He pointed out the window instead.

You want me to throw it out the window?! I said.
He nodded, took the bag and threw it out the window.

Joon messaged and asked what was wrong. I told her.
She said oh my god shit, I'll ask Zat to help.
I asked her to maybe google his symptoms and find out what's wrong with him.

I remembered that I'd called for an SOS ambulance, so I called them back and canceled it.

The ride was bumpy, which made Lianyi worse. He kept saying, it's getting bad again, my chest is tight, I can't breathe.
I knew part of it was panic that was making it hard for him to breathe but it was so hard to try to make him calm down when both of us thought he was going to die.
I told him, calm down, you're still breathing, you're still alive, it will get better and worse from time to time, it's just the cycle, don't worry. As if I knew for sure.
I kept calling out to the doctor in the front seat to ask him for help but he kept saying, no problem, no problem.

Then Adrian called. He asked what was up. I said Lianyi is dying and we're in an ambulance, it's ok now. I hung up quickly.

Then I got another call. This time it was the manager of Tiger Airways in Vietnam. He said, don't go to the nearest hospital. Vietnam's medical system is very bad even I don't use it. Go to SOS International ok. I will meet you there. Give the phone to your driver.
I did that, and the Tiger guy told him in Vietnamese about the change of plan.

And then SOS International called me. The woman said, we have sent out an ambulance with a doctor.
I said, oh but I'm already in an ambulance going there.
The woman said, Listen to me, listen to me. Ok? We've sent out an ambulance and we will meet your ambulance halfway and transfer your boyfriend to our ambulance. Give the phone to your driver.

So halfway there, we saw another ambulance speed past us in the opposite direction. We stopped by the roadside and waited for them to come to us. I whispered to Lianyi, It's going to be ok now, the SOS people are here. He just looked at me and blinked.

The airport ambulance driver asked me for 40 US dollars. This was no time to be fighting scammers, of which let me tell you, Vietnam has plenty. So I just gave him the money.

When the SOS people came I knew everything was going to be ok. The doctor was a Vietnamese woman who spoke English. She asked me a lot of questions, then she and her nurse took charge. They took his blood and ran a test on the spot, hooked him up to an IV drip, scanned his vital stats. Then they transferred him into their ambulance. It was a world of difference. This ambulance actually had lights and equipment.

This time I sat in front with the driver, while the nurse and doctor sat behind attending to him throughout the whole ride. It was my first time in an ambulance. On the dashboard were several buttons. There were three sound buttons that said, "Yelp", "Yeowl" and "Wail". The driver hit Wail.

Ten minutes into the ride I called to the back, How is he?
He's fine, the doctor said.
Then he began vomiting. A lot.

Half an hour later we were at the hospital. The moment the ambulance stopped the nurse rushed out and gagged, ran into a toilet and threw up.

The manager of Tiger Airways was waiting for us outside the hospital. He was already at home when the airport called him and told him about our emergency. He didn't have to come all the way to the hospital but he did. I suspect he was the one who had called SOS and told them to meet the airport ambulance halfway and take over, even though I'd cancelled on them. He made sure everything was ok and when there was nothing else he could do, he left.

The doctors spent about an hour attending to him behind closed curtains while I sat outside calling the insurance company and messaging his mother, my mother and our friends. Each time I flipped open his phone I saw my own damn face looking up at me. It was the worst, knowing that someone loved me and that I didn't deserve it.

At about 1 am the doctor came out and told me what had happened: He'd had hypokalemia -- low potassium in his blood, which caused his heart to misfire. He also had low blood pressure. Now he was stable. He was hooked up to an IV drip injecting potassium into his body and he just had to rest.

After they were done I went in to see him. I spent the night sitting by his bedside except for 3 hours, when I slept on a bed in the adjoining room. He was discharged the next morning and we booked the first flight home. This time on the taxi to the airport I slept the whole way. I'd had enough of Hanoi.

The moment I got home I put down my bags and went with my parents to visit my grandmother. Turns out she has heart and kidney failure, water in her lungs and deep vein thrombosis. At the hospital I wanted to cry again but again had to hold it in in front of my family. And again there was the guilt -- of knowing that I was her favourite granddaughter and had done nothing to deserve the position, that I don't spent enough time with her and that now I might lose her before I could make up for it.

When I got home I spent half an hour in the shower letting go of three days' worth of bottled up panic and tears.

In the hotel on Sunday we'd seen a documentary about how scientists have found that your brain is only fully adult at 25. On my 25th birthday I think I was made painfully aware of my entry into adulthood. I almost lost the 2 people I loved most in the world and for the first time had to sign a hospital legal consent form as someone's guardian.

Then this morning I realised that our insurance policies had expired the day BEFORE Lianyi got hospitalised, because I'd forgotten the date of our return and had only bought insurance up to the 15th of December. That's over 2,000 US dollars in hospital bills and plane tickets that can't be claimed. I am such an asshole.

Vietnam Days 7 to 9: Exploring Hanoi and Tam Coc

cisoux — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:02:00 GMT

On Day 7, I woke up feeling pretty sad because Xai had left that morning. It would be a long time before we would see him again.

I remember the next two days being quite aimless. I think we were quite bored of Hanoi by then. We'd overestimated the amount of things we could do in Hanoi.

June, Lianyi and I went back to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and joined the line to view his corpse, which didn't look very real. I don't doubt that it is, but it does look very waxy from all the chemicals.

I remember the mad scramble we went through trying to get our belongings back after the mausoleum visit. Our bags had been taken away before we entered the mausoleum and somehow we couldn't figure out where to go to get them back. We had until noon to retrieve our belongings, or we wouldn't be able to get them back until the next day. And I remember it was something like 11:45 and we were still dashing around trying to find our stuff. We eventually did find the place where everyone's bags were stored. I can't even remember how and where it was anymore.

And I can't remember what else we did that day, except that we moved into the wonderful and fabulous Hong Ngoc Hotel. It was more expensive than any other accommodation I'd stayed at in any of my travels so far. But in the grand scheme of things, it was still pretty cheap - something like US$20 a night per room. I realised I was too old and too scared of dirt to take budget accommodation anymore. I think that move from Thuy Lam to Hong Ngoc marked my transition from backpacker to flashpacker. I haven't looked back since.

On Day 8, we had really run out of things to do. We ended up walking around the districts outside the Old Quarter, finding new neighbourhoods and at one point even considering watching a movie. It was a little boring but it was still nice to see what Hanoi was like outside the touristy areas. The outer districts are a lot less frenetic than the Old Quarter and more metropolitan. We even came across the business district, which had 100% penetration of wi-fi and coffee chains.

We also visited Hom market, which is filled with about a hundred stalls all selling fabric. June and I both bought some. I have yet to make anything with the fabric I bought.

After Hom market, we took a cab and asked him to bring us to some museums, where Lianyi learnt a lot and I nothing. As usual. I'm a pretty lousy student. One of the museums we visited was the Museum of Ethnography. Yeah, we were that bored.

June left on Day 9, but Lianyi and I still had one day left. We decided to take a day trip to Tam Coc, which the hotel helped to organise for us.

It was quite a lovely trip too. Tam Coc is like Halong Bay except on land. You get on a small sampan with an old Vietnamese lady, and she rows you about for an hour. We actually saw some mountain goats on the cliffs!

Vietnam Day 6: Halong Bay Pt 2

cisoux — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:47:00 GMT

When I woke up that morning I opened the door and found Xai standing outside my room, about to knock. And behind him, a giant cliff passing by.

Til today, that's still one of my very best travel memories. There's something magical about waking up in the middle of a gulf with friends and majestic cliffs around you. I recommend it to everyone.

For the rest of that day, all we did was sit on the top deck of the boat, listening to music and talking nonsense. It was the best moment of Vietnam for me.

The boat slowly sailed back to shore, where we had lunch with a group of other tourists who were from a different boat. Among the people at our table was a middle-aged German man with a young Vietnamese girl who didn't speak any English. Or German. Yeah, I don't have to tell you what we all suspected.

After lunch we spent a very long time waiting for a bus to take us back to Hanoi. I have a very clear memory of staring at a big group of mainland Chinese tourists squawking at each other. It was a pretty depressing moment, a very stark contrast from the peace and beauty we'd just experienced in Halong Bay.

By the time we got back to Hanoi, it was late in the afternoon. We met June, who had come from Hue, and who already hated the Thuy Lam guesthouse as much as I did. She said she'd walked around the city earlier that day and found a couple of nice hotels we could move to. I quickly agreed.

But first, we had to have dinner. It was our last evening with Xai so we had to make it a good one. We had a nice dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant and then we took a cab to Kinh Do, a bakery that was once visited by Catherine Deneuve. That doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the bakery serves really good pastries and yoghurt. We were really happy.

Vietnam Day 5: Halong Bay

cisoux — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:16:00 GMT

We woke up early, around 7 am, to take our bus to Halong Bay at 7:45 am.

The bus was super crowded. It was really just a mni-van. Every seat was filled with a tourist and any other available floor space was filled with a backpack. The tour guide took a liking to me, Lianyi and Xai because, like himself, we were from ASEAN countries. His name was Tu, and he sat next to Xai. He asked Xai where we were from. Xai said Singapore and Laos.

Then he said, "Oh you all look like Vietnamese, except more handsome and more beautiful!"

Of course he was 100 percent telling the truth.

Then he asked Xai if we were friends or family and Xai said, family. He looked puzzled. "But you are from Laos and they are from Singapore?"
Yes, said Xai.
"But you come from different countries..."
"Why, is it wrong?" said Xai. He is smiling, enjoying his moment.
"No, no. Usually family come from same country."
"But we come from different country."
After a while Xai said, "We are friends. We met in school."
So then we all talked about Lao and Vietnamese kids studying in wonderful, clean Singapore. And we talked about who'd visited which ASEAN country.

The ride was about 4 hours long. Midway we stopped at a nondescript white building. It sold souvenirs and on the wall it said, "Workshop of handicapped children". Yet the souvenirs being sold here looked exactly like the souvenirs being sold in every shop in Hanoi.

While we sat there having breakfast, other tour groups to Halong Bay stopped by, and we spotted Raphael. He came and sat with us, and I offered to pay him back for the taxi ride that he shared with us but he refused to accept. He said he was really impressed by the way I walked away from the taxi driver in Hanoi when he said he had no meter. I said it was thanks to Lianyi and his repeated warnings about scammers. Lianyi asked me if that was a meta-nag, like me nagging about him nagging, but it really wasn't. Then we had to get back on the bus and that was the last we ever saw of Raphael. Cool guy.

Finally, we reached the docks of Halong Bay. There was a cool breeze and lots of tourists.

"What if, we get on our boat and out to sea, and the view is just like, tourist boats as far as the eye could see?" I said.

It was not inconceivable. From where we stood, all we could see were messy rows of tourist boats and tourists for miles and not a lot of peaceful water. We joked about this for a while, and I think each of us knew that there was a real possibility that that could be the case.

We had to wait quite a long time for our tickets but eventually we got on our boat. We had to walk down a sliver of a plank to get on. It was seriously thin. And I was carrying my sling gym bag. The Russian was scared I would fall into the water but I made it.

Once we got on the boat we felt very happy. It was a nice boat, and we were excited about what was to come. Well, the first thing to come was a boat crash. Our boat had a lot of difficulty getting out into the open water and it kept banging into neighbouring boats and even snapping the ropes of one of them with two loud bangs.

Once the boat began moving, the staff served us lunch. It was mostly unimpressive and pretty simple. Much like the rooms on the boat. You get what you pay for lah. We were on a tight budget so we couldn't quite afford the luxury boats that serve lobsters and crabs on board. And anyway, it really didn't matter because Halong Bay itself more than made up for it.

The best part of the Halong Bay tour is sitting up on the top deck of your boat and just taking in the scenery around you. The fresh, cold air and the majestic cliffs are really something.

But every Halong Bay tour boat will make two stops at a couple of very popular caves, Sung Sot and Dau Go, where you can get off and have a quick walk inside. The limestone formations are beautiful to look at, but you wouldn't want to stay too long in the caves because they are super crowded with tourists.

After the stops at the caves, the tour boat sailed back to the jetty where we came from, and dropped off all the tourists who'd only paid for a one-day tour of Halong Bay. DON'T DO THIS. It's not worth it. The best part of Halong Bay comes after the cave tours, so you must book the two- or three-day tour.

After dropping of the day trippers, the boat continued to sail around Halong Bay and as it sailed, we soon lost sight of any other boat. We clambered up onto the top deck and watched the sun set over the bay. Beautiful.

Once night fell, it was much too cold and too dark to enjoy the top deck, so everyone went back downstairs and had dinner. We made friends with a couple of Scottish guys and played cards with them after dinner, during which Xai totally cheated and got away with it because nobody expects a Laotian liar!