Hoi An Custom Couture
Hoi An is one of those places you kind of love, kind of hate. I don’t usually like to complain that a place is too touristy. After all, I’m there, aren’t I, and why do I think I get to hog a good thing all to myself and not share with other outsiders? But Hoi An takes touristiness over the top. By all accounts, it could be a delightful little city. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site with historic old buildings and shophouses, all painted yellow, many punctuated by colorful flowers out front. The streets are lined by rivers and criss-crossed by bright lanterns. The shophouses are filled with stores selling trinkets to tourists, restaurants, and tailors. Sounds good, right? Well, the problem is that the locals took a good thing and ran out of control with it. Who’s to blame them, really, because the tourists were eating up what was on offer. Hoi An became known as the little town in Vietnam where you could get a custom wardrobe tailor made to your exact measurements for rock bottom prices. Where there was once a few tailors, there is now over 600 tailors, all asking you as you walk by to buy something, come into my shop, you want dress? You want suit? I can make you anything, very cheap! No time? No problem. The Hoi An tailors can turn around a entire men’s suit, with a shirt and tie to match, from scratch in less than 24 hours.
As you can imagine, out of the 600+ tailors, some are very good, some are very bad, and many are average. Sure, there are “couture” like deals to be had, but the reality is, whether you show them a picture or not, most of what they’re churning out is replicas of standard patterns.
Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of clothes and shopping, you’ve been wearing the same four outfits for almost a year, and you’ve got nightmares of job interviews dancing around your subconsciousness, you start thinking it would be kinda fun to get in on the action. So I did.
I had a custom suit tailored at B’Lan, modeled roughly after a JCrew picture I grabbed on the internet the night before. I debated about going to Yaly Couture, the shop in town with the best reputation for suits and with the highest prices, but I fell in love with a grey pinstripe Super 110 wool at B’Lan. The first take was not good. The pants, despite being measured rather extensively, could not even be zipped. And the jacket? Well, let’s just say whoever sewed the jacket must have been watching Star Trek the night before. After I got them to majorly tone down the shoulders and majorly widen the pants, the second take was better. All in all, I probably had seven fittings to get it right.
In the end, there are things I don’t love about the suit. You need to be very precise in what you want, right down to every little pintuck and button. For example, I paid more to have the suit lined. What I ended up with was a lined jacket and unlined pants. The response of the sales representative at B’Lan was that suit pants are always unlined. Since I have lined suit pants at home, I know that’s not true. Maybe in Asia, but not as a general rule. Plus when they offered me the lining option, they never specified it was for the pants. Then again, I never specified it was for both the pants and jacket. So there you go. They begrudgingly offered to remake the pants for a reduced fee, but in the end, I didn’t want to sink any more money into the suit. The pants are also a little straighter than I envisioned, but I realized I probably didn’t communicate what I wanted in a clear enough fashion. The sample suits I saw at Yaly look a little more finished, but overall, the fabric is nice and the suit is cheaper than what I’d pay at JCrew. The real test will be whether it holds up over time. We’ll see – right now it is still enroute from Vietnam to Pittsburgh. Hopefully it will get home in time for job interviews. Oh God I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I also had a casual dress made at a little shop I wandered by. The name of the shop is something like Hieu Vai Gia Dinh Family Cloth Shop. Many of the dresses on display in town are similar and rather flimsy, but I liked the fabric in the window. From a catalog of dress patterns, the tailor and I designed the dress based upon parts of patterns I liked. She whipped it up, with a lining, in something like 12 hours’ time. One set of tweaks, and it was good to go. I really love the dress and it was fun to design something from scratch without making a major investment.
Despite the tailors’ best efforts, Sean never gave into having a suit made, although he wavered once or twice. They were trying to sell to the wrong man; he already has a suit, and he wears the same suit to wedding, funerals, job interviews, and my old firm’s holiday parties. But he did end up having a suit made, albeit of a much different variety. I may have mentioned before Sean is obsessed with keeping our packs light, even to the point of recording our bags’ weights on his Ipod at the airlines’ weigh ins. He is so obsessed, he insisted upon using a pair of his shorts as his swim trunks. This worked fine when we were only visiting beaches now and again, but with a month of straight beach time coming up, he finally caved into wanting separate swim trunks. (But only if he could ditch the shorts, of course).
We saw a pair of swim trunks in the window of a tailor shop in Hoi An, and wouldn’t it be fun to have custom swim trunks made turned into actually having said swim trunks made. There was only three problems. (1) The trunks turned out to be REALLY ugly. I guess we’re bad designers. (2) At $15, the trunks were three times what he could have spent buying one of the thousands of pairs of board shorts sold on the streets. (3) The lining was rather, um, small. So the swim trunks never saw the light of day, and some hotel employee is now the proud owner.
In the end, getting custom clothes made in Hoi An wasn’t all it cracked up to be. It was fun getting something you designed made to your exact measurements, but I don’t think it is worth any major investments. Spreading out your purchases from different tailors definitely helps in case the tailor turns out to be a dud, but it also means you’ll be running all over town to fitting appointments. If I had to do it over again, I would have a fun casual dress made and maybe a going out shirt made from Vietnam’s beautiful silks, but that’s it. I wouldn’t have gotten the suit made. We’ll see how it fares, but I have the sneaking suspicion I’ll wear it a few times and then ditch it for a JCrew suit bought on sale. We’ll see; maybe I’ll be surprised. Or, ideally, I’ll have a job where I won’t have to wear a suit.
Total price: $190 (premium wool pants and jacket + silk/poly blend lining for jacket) + $15 (swim trunks) + $26 (casual cotton dress, lined) + $37 (3-4 month shipping to United States for suit, sandals I sent home, and four Vietnamese lanterns direct from B’Lan).
Hog Tales, Vietnam Edition.
We didn’t plan on doing an Easy Rider tour, exactly, but when we wandered up to Dalat from Saigon, endorsements of others ringing in our ears, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we’d end up on the back of two stranger’s motorcycles, zooming through the Central Highlands. You don’t find the Easy Riders; they find you. In our case, My and his sidekick Mr. Pepperman found us as soon as we stepped off the bus. They’re part of the Dalat Bus Station Easy Rider gang. Neither official Easy Riders nor an official gang, they roll around town with emblemed jackets and work for the same boss, one Mr. Lee. Despite being accosted minutes after we arrived in Dalat, we didn’t hold it against My (pronounced Me). My didn’t give us the hard sell and he seemed like a nice guy. We thought about it for a day, then gave him a call. We negotiated a three day, two night trip through the Central Highlands from Dalat to Nha Trang for $61 a day, including accommodation and fees but not food, which we split down the middle. A fortune in Vietnam, but somehow we kept finding ourselves talked into tours and things we wouldn’t otherwise do in other countries. They’re good salespeople, those Vietnamese.
For three days, we zoomed around the Central Highlands on the back of their bikes, an interior region filled with mountains and forests and rice paddies. The motorcycles turned out to be much more comfortable than riding on the back of any of the scooters we’d taken, although by the end, our butts were ready to say good-bye. During our journey, we learned all about agriculture and now know where silk, coffee, rice, cocoa, sugarcane, tapioca, peppercorns, mushrooms, pineapples and rubber comes from. We saw three different waterfalls, a temple (of course!), a flower farm, and countless scenic overlooks. We watched people make silk, rice whisky, bricks, and rice paper. One night, we even slept on the floor in a wooden house on stilts in a minority village with a minority family (although curiously we never laid eyes on the family).
My promised us an insider’s look at Vietnamese culture, and for the most part, an insider’s look we got. He’d march us into people’s workplaces in the middle of their workdays and say, Ah-mee, where’s your camera, there’s a good picture over there. Then the next thing I’d know he’d be interrupting people’s work, posing photo ops, and My would be saying, Come here, Ah-mee, and I’d be wearing a conical hat or making rice paper or Sean would be pushing a wheelbarrow of bricks or driving a farm vehicle. Although we never fully got over the embarrassment of busting into someone’s life and taking pictures or regret that we were interrupting people in the middle of doing their really hard jobs, it was a side of everyday Vietnam we’d never be able to see without My and Mr. Pepperman. It was nice to be far, far away from the towns where everybody you talked to wanted to sell you something. For three days, no one tried to sell us anything.
In fact, because we were with My and Mr. Pepperman, we even got the local’s prices. More importantly, we got the local’s food. For each meal, they’d order dish after dish, and we got to try Vietnamese food outside of what appeared on the tourist menus. Some of the tastiest food we’ve had was during our Easy Rider tour, once I got over my food and utensils being touched. Back home, someone else touching your food would be rude, but in Asia, communal eating is the norm. Each meal would be begin with My selecting our chopsticks from the crock on the table and rubbing them down with the paper-like napkins to eliminate splinters. He’d clean our spoons, sometimes with his thumb, and organize all of the sauces. Then, we could begin eating. Communal eating doesn’t mean dishing food out with a clean spoon onto your plate to eat. No, communal eating means taking food from the common dish with your chopsticks, putting the food into your mouth, and taking some more food with the same chopsticks you just put in your mouth. And communal eating with My sometimes meant him taking food he with his chopsticks he thought you should have and putting it onto your plate. I suppose I should be glad he didn’t try to put it directly in my mouth.
We, too, were responsible for our share of cultural differences. I kept asking My if he’d fought in the war (thinking of the blurb in the guidebook about most of the Easy Riders being ex-Southern army men). Sean eventually kicked me and told me My was way too young to have fought in the war and I should quit asking because I wasn’t going to get any war stories. Which, really, was best. For one, it’s always good to have periodic reminders to kick preconceived notions out of your head. For two, it’s always a little awkward discussing war when your country was involved. Like when we stopped at an overlook, and My told us matter-of-factly, your country bombed this hillside and burned the whole thing down during the war. It’s kind of hard to formulate an appropriate response to that. Sorry just doesn’t seem to cut it.
Likewise when your Easy Rider guide apologizes for his county’s littering problem, or rather primitive bathrooms. One morning, after eating some tasty pho bo at a tasty roadside restaurant, I made my way back through the family’s home and used the restaurant’s bathroom, which doubles as the family’s bathroom. When I returned, My said he was sorry the bathrooms weren’t the same as what we were normally used to, and asked me what the bathrooms are like at home. Well, they usually flush by mechanics instead of pouring water down a hole, and uh, you don’t have to squat two inches off the ground or stand in a pool of let’s-pretend-it’s-water-not-pee to use them and, well, they have toilet paper and sinks with soap and hot water and, oh yeah, they’re not strewn with the proprietor’s dirty underwear or toothbrushes seemed like too much detail, so I just mumbled that they were a little different.
We’re not used to being around other people day in and day out besides each other, so My and Mr. Pepperman were an interesting addition to our traveling duo. As is usually the case with Easy Riders, My did most of the talking and Mr. Pepperman tagged along, eating an astonishing amount of peppers at every meal (hence his nickname) and every once in a while piping in with some broken English, like the time he showed us a picture of him as a young man fighting in Cambodia and bragging that he used big guns, big American guns! You never knew what was going to pop out of Mr. Pepperman’s mouth. Mr. Pepperman never stopped smiling during the entire three day trip, and as we’d come to learn, Mr. Pepperman comes prepared. At one of the lookout points, he suddenly busted out a warm can of Ba-Ba-Ba, a local beer, from his tiny bag and handed it to Sean, instructing him to drink. Later that night, after we’d finished dinner, he produced a guitar out of nowhere (albeit with only five strings) and crooned a series of ballads for the crowd.
My was much more talkative. When he wasn’t busy educating us on agriculture or telling us fun facts about the Central Highlands, he was practicing his skills as an amateur photographer – with my camera. Ah-mee, he’d say, give me your camera. This is a good shot! Sean and I had more pictures taken together as a couple during those three days than we did our entire trip. My’s favorite type of photos are jumping ones, and I could tell he had practice, as he got much higher than any of the rest of us. My periodically dropped us off to walk for a little bit, and on one of those walks, we came upon My and Mr. Pepperman posing for their own jumping photos, giggling up a storm.
Like anyone who has taken an Easy Rider tour before us, we found the three days to be a definite highlight of our travels in Vietnam. We saw beautiful scenery, got to know My and Mr. Pepperman, and saw Vietnam outside the tourism industry. If you’re thinking of going on an Easy Rider tour, do it. It’s definitely worth the money. We recommend My and Mr. Pepperman wholeheartedly. They were fun to hang out with, and very thoughtful, always making sure we were comfortable. They always went the extra mile, such as when they took us out to dinner in a cab to give us a rest from the bikes. We found them to be expert, safe drivers, which really, is the most important part. You can find My and Mr. Pepperman hanging around the Dalat bus station. Or they’ll find you.
Just outside of Dalat in the midst of evergreens
One of the many examples of My's fine photography (and the Central Highlands' scenic outlooks)
Our first big happy Buddha
A woman unwinds the silk from the silkworm cocoons
Cheers at lunch, with Sean, My and Mr. Pepperman
Someone's house My lead us into
Born to be wild
Minority coffee plantation workers trek home from the coffee plantations
Sean and My outside our homestay
Mr. Pepperman sings the blues
Women work in the rice fields around Lak Lake
My puts me to work too, much to my dismay at having to interrupt this women's work and borrowing her hat for a photo op.
One of the awesome scenes along the way
Sean helps wheel some bricks for drying
Fishing boats just outside of Nha Trang
And...JUMP!
When you look up awesome in the dictionary, you’ll find New Zealand.
So our love affair with New Zealand continues, although our shock over the New Zealand prices has not yet subsided. I fear the price shock is causing us to spend more than planned. Because now when I see a $3 cookie, I can rationalize it by saying it is $3 kiwi dollars, which isn’t really $3 actual dollars, and if you don’t do the math, you never have to figure out that it is a really overpriced cookie. But let’s not dwell on that, because guess what kind of overpriced cookies New Zealand has? Cookie Time cookies, for serious cookie munchers. And what am I but not a serious cookie muncher, especially after months of being deprived? In Queenstown, the Cookie Time serves chocolate chip cookies warm, with milk from a draft pump. How awesome is that? Clearly worth any amount of kiwi or U.S. dollars.
So far we’ve learned that if something is marked as a scenic route in New Zealand, they really mean super scenic route, and if it is not marked as a scenic route, chances are it is going to be a scenic route anyway. We pretty much spend all of our time cruising around in our campervan, stopping every five minutes for yet another photo. Our vocabulary consists of ooh and aah and wow and amazing and awesome and other such words. Because New Zealand? Is totally deserving of all of those words and many more. Not only is the scenery consistently beautiful, the country is totally neat and organized. There’s absolutely no litter, every lawn is immaculately landscaped (doesn’t anyone have a trashy overflowing front porch in this country?), and all of the roads are nicely paved with scenic lookouts just where you want them. Every town has an information center brimming with free information; I hope someone reuses or recycles the zillions of brochures that are threatening to take over our campervan. The Department of Conservation has conserved land all over the country, and each area is well signposted with historical, ecological, and logistical information. I hate to keep making unfair comparisons to Asia, but the differences between New Zealand and Asia are so wide, so profound, I can’t help myself.
I’ve been trying to figure out why New Zealand is so scenic, and I think I’ve come up with two explanations. First, there’s just not that many people here to screw things up or even to get in the way of your fabulous photos. The people are crowded into little towns and cities with tons of trendy cafes and wool shops galore, which much of the land is undeveloped and untouched, or touched only by sheep farms. Which brings me to point number two. There’s a ton of sheep here. We were certain there had to be more sheep than Ireland, and it turns out we were right. There are 8 million sheep in Ireland, but there are 40 million sheep in New Zealand. And you all know how I love sheep. Unlike Ireland, most of the sheep here are unpainted. And super fluffy. I’m thinking it is because it is almost winter, but who knows? All I know is the high fluffy sheep density is reason number 433 why I’m loving New Zealand.
We’ve covered a lot of ground already; we didn’t listen to our wise buddies over at the Road Forks and are trying to cram both islands into a month. Luckily New Zealand keeps you moving; no matter how much you’re enjoying where you are and no matter how much you feel like you could stay forever, you feel the pull towards the next amazing place around the corner. We’ve visited the little French town of Akaroa on the gorgeous Banks Peninsula; cruised down the east coast to the historic town of Omarau; stopped by the Moeraki boulders at low tide; ate a tasty but pricey blue cod lunch at Fleur’s Place by the ocean; explored the Otago peninsula but passed on pricey penguin and other wildlife tours; hung out in the college town of Dunedin and got some tasty produce and treats at its Saturday farmer’s market for cooking up in our campervan; meandered through the sunny Catlins coast and Southern Scenic Route; sped towards Curio Bay on zero gas in time to catch the yellow eyed penguins come ashore there for free; stayed in a campground wedged between two gorgeous ocean bays with a sea lion visitor; saw an amazing sunrise over our campground in Te Anau; cruised through the Milford Sound and explored the Fiordlands in the pouring rain and fog; gawked at impossibly gorgeous sunny Queenstown in fall, in April; gawked at others jumping off bridges and the like but opted only for the tamer jetboating through the Shotover Canyon; tasted a fantastic blackberry and chocolate muffin along with a long black at Ritual Espresso Cafe in Wanaka; drove through the Haast mountain pass, again in the pouring rain and fog (what is with this, New Zealand?); detoured to Jackson Bay to eat perfectly battered fresh fish and chips in a trailer by the sea; and now we’re in Fox Glacier township, about to explore a real creeping glacier tomorrow. Whew!
p.s. New Zealand is toying with our weather emotions. One day it’s freezing cold and winter-like; the next it’s a sunny fall day in April; the next it’s back to rain and fog. The weather really better pull itself together; from here on out, we’re northward bound. And in this upside down world, north is like south. So I expect sunshine; you hear that, New Zealand?
p.p.s. After all this talk of gorgeousness, I bet you’re wanting some pictures, huh? Fear not; there’s so many, I’ll have to break them up in future posts. But if you can’t wait, you can see all of them through yesterday here because I am a photo processing rock star and current on my photos for the first time during the whole trip!
Back to the Future
I’m jumping forward to the future again to let you in on some big news on the travel front. Before we headed off to adventures in Southern Laos without internet, we bought our return ticket home.
Because I’m all about sharing the reality of travel – the good and the bad – let me explain how that came to be. It took us a while to admit it, but somewhere in the last few months of endless buses, boats, lukewarm showers, hard beds, temples and cafes, we both started feeling a little burnt out and bored. I know it is a hard thing to imagine – how could someone feel anything but ecstatic on a “trip of a lifetime” – but it is true. And it happens to the best of them.
I can think of many possible explanations. Maybe it was because we got waylaid involuntarily in several towns in a row. It is one thing to decide to stay put and relax; it is another to be ready to move on but being stymied for one reason or another.
Maybe it was because one or the other of us was sick off and on for weeks.
Maybe it was post-India let down. India was invigorating precisely because it was challenging. Anything Southeast Asia could throw at us paled in comparison and seemed like a nagging bother instead of a cultural challenge.
Maybe it was because until recently, we’ve been mostly moving along Southeast Asia’s tourist trail. It is all too easy to go through the motions of travel and end up in the same places, surrounded by other Westerners doing the same things and eating the same comfort foods.
Maybe it is because getting off the tourist trail seemed like more work than we felt like exerting by this point in the trip.
Maybe it was because on some level, we are homesick and some part of us wants to be eating the comfort foods instead of more noodles and rice.
Maybe it was because the trip was rapidly winding down, and neither of us is any closer to figuring out what we want to do with the rest of our lives.
Maybe it was because we let the extraordinary become ordinary.
Maybe it was just because we’d been away from home for nine whole months.
In reality, I suspect that it was some combination of all of these things.
So, naturally, we did what any burnt-out traveler would do…we decided to extend the trip. Makes perfect sense, right?
As we waited for me to recover from a stomach ailment in Vientiane, we found ourselves scheming. One great part about Laos was traveling for a bit with our new German friends. Hearing about their upcoming plans to head to New Zealand, we found ourselves searching for flights and researching costs of campervans. We realized part of the reason we were feeling a little blah was the thought that Southeast Asia could be it for our trip. Our dwindling funds and time meant that we easily could finish out our time in Southeast Asia, in countries that may be unique but that are more alike than they are different.
So, one day – kinda like how this whole trip started in the first place – we just did it. We bought a ticket from Malaysia to New Zealand. Sure, there was much deliberation first. Sure, we probably are just procrastinating returning to the real world. Sure, we’re going to dip into our savings to finance the extension. But, you know what? Suddenly, we’re excited again. About everything. About spending more time in Southeast Asia to see most of what we want to see at a slow pace. About going to New Zealand. About getting our own wheels again. About having a firm return date home.
The truth is, I think the open-endedness of the end of the trip was making us flail around a bit. There are tons of lifestyle redesign proponents out there advocating traveling without time restraints or plans. I’m continually fascinated by the growing chorus of interesting people designing ways to travel indefinitely and encouraging others to do so. I think that’s great, and if there is one thing I learned from our travels is that I need to create the lifestyle I want rather than just do what I’m supposed to do. But the thing is, creating the lifestyle I want involves going home. We’re both too big of homebodies to travel forever. I like Pittsburgh. I like having a home. I know that I want travel to be part of my life, but I don’t want travel to be my life.
So while I haven’t had any grand epiphanies about what I want to do with my life – just small revelations that I haven’t quite worked into a coherent whole – as of May 13, 2011, 408 days after leaving Pittsburgh, I’ll have to work on creating the life I want at home. And I’m okay with that. Especially since between now and then, I have a lot to look forward to. Instead of only spending a week or so in Laos as we originally planned, we only had days to go on our 30 day visa when we crossed the border to Cambodia yesterday. We’ll spend a couple of weeks in Cambodia (famous last words!), including watching the Steelers play in the AFC championship game at the crack of dawn on Monday, then cross over into Vietnam to be in Saigon in time for the Steelers to win their seventh Super Bowl. : ) We plan to be in Vietnam for three to four weeks in total, and we’ll fly from Hanoi back to Bangkok in late February/very early March. We hopefully will be meeting up for a little bit with a friend of mine from high school who has been working on her own travel plans. We’ll head south through the Thai islands, and do a quick jaunt in Malaysia as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur for our April 3 flight to Christchurch. We’ll tour New Zealand by campervan for a month in April (when the flights and campervans are cheaper as it turns to the shoulder season), and then head home – but not before making a week-long stop in Hawaii first. As it turns out, flying from Auckland to Honolulu and from Kauai to Pittsburgh was slightly cheaper than just flying straight home from New Zealand. Which is awesome, especially since we missed Kauai on our honeymoon. As opposed to our big pimping honeymoon splurges, we’ll attempt frugality in Hawaii this time (unless the Hotel Hana-Maui wants to put us up for free, of course. Love that place). As far as re-entries to the United States go, I can’t think of a better way than to visit state number 50. I can taste the pineapple already.
So that’s our plans in a nutshell. Hope you’ll join us for the rest of the ride, as well the rest of the highlights and lowlights from our travels in Thailand, round one, and Laos. Teasers of what’s to come: elephants, elephants and more elephants; the slooooooooow boat to Laos; why foreign massages aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be; and Sean and Amy do Laos on two wheels. Thanks for reading along!
Jumping Ahead to the Future
We’ve been in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city, for over two weeks now. Before we came, I had heard that Chiang Mai is a black hole that sucks you in, but if our travel plans were waylaid, I was assuming it would be for fun things, like hanging out with elephants, cooking, and chatting with monks. We did those things – more on that later – but would have been well on our way to exploring the rest of Northern Thailand or even into Laos if life hadn’t happened.
First, our netbook went completely kaput. It wouldn’t start up, not even in safe mode. Luckily, I have constant tech support by my side. Sean worked his computer magic for a couple of days building a bootable thumb drive, recovering important data we never backed-up (like pictures!), installing a new hard drive, giving Windows the heave-ho and installing Linux, and then fine-tuning everything to make sure it all worked with Linux. Or something like that. The moral of the story is, if you aren’t traveling with your own tech support, or even if you are, back everything up NOW because you never know what is going to happen.
Just as we were about to leave Chiang Mai, spiffed up computer in hand, Sean started running a fever with body aches, culminating in his first hospitalization ever! Turns out he acquired a bacterial infection, probably from something he ate, although for the life of us, we can’t figure out what was the culprit, because nothing seemed amiss. He ended up in Chiang Mai Ram Hospital for two days in order to receive IV antibiotics, officially making our decision to purchase World Nomads’ travel and health insurance a good one. They were very on the ball, and worked with us and the hospital to make sure that he received quality care.
I got in BIG trouble for taking this picture...from Sean, not the nurse. I didn't post the one where I'm being given a very dirty look.
The hospital was World Nomads’ recommendation, and other than all of the medical workers being Thai and the retro nursing hats some of the nurses wore, it could have been a hospital at home. Well, except the part where we had to ride in the back of a pick-up truck to get to the hospital. And the part where there was a blaring rock concert outside the hospital on the first night. Or the part where it was super-efficient and cheap. A couple of days before Sean was admitted, he went to the ER to be checked out. We were in and out in two hours, including getting lab results, and the whole visit, including two prescriptions, was only $45. No wonder people come to Thailand for medical care. The two day stay, which was mostly covered by our insurance, came to a grand total of $900. Sean had his choice of private rooms, which came with cable televisions, a kitchenette, and free wi-fi. Once again, he proved to be too tall for Asia – the nurse had to remove the foot of the bed so he could fit. The moral of this story is, for all of our consternation about eating in India, you never quite know how your food is handled anywhere in the world so eat up and get insurance.
Sean's hospital room
View from Sean's hospital room
Once Sean was released, we hung around Chiang Mai for a few more days to make sure he was fully recovered. Just as we were ready to head out, we were waylaid for the THIRD time. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say FedEx and United States Customs are the grinches that stole Christmas. The sordid tale involves non-responsiveness from FedEx, long aggravating phone calls, 3 hours filling out customs forms, and hundreds of dollars in shipping fees, with the end result being that our Christmas gifts for our families were re-routed back to Bangkok, where we are not. Supposedly the package will end up at the Chiang Mai FedEx tomorrow or the next day for us to deal with, so it looks like its Christmas in Chiang Mai for us. The moral of this story is, shipping stuff home is more trouble than its worth (considering our track record includes this fiasco, stolen shoes from a package sent from Spain, broken pottery in a package sent from Morocco, and a missing sculpture last spotted at the Johannesburg post office in a package sent from South Africa).
Actually, the REAL moral of these stories are life happens…no matter where you are.
p.s. Stay tuned for scenes from Christmas in Thailand tomorrow, then next week, more from India to round out the year.