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Aug 03, 2007 00:17

This is another entry with a lot of pictures, so,

Ross left recently, he's back home to finish school.  Good for him. 


here's a picture of him at barbecue.  I asked him to be really still and move his eyes back and forth quickly and I had the camera leave the lens open a little longer than usual.  He's not really evil.                                     Visibly.


'Ere he is again on the roof of my building.


Ross once said "you know your country sucks when you make a favorable quality comparison with Thailand, and you're probably lying."   There were a ton of red-bull knock offs up in the north.  Red Buffalo, Red Deer, and my personal favorite, RED DIMOSAUR.  Yes, that's an M.




here's Trung, the bartender at Le Pub pouring us two flaming shots of Sambuca. 


Here we are at my destination on my recent trip.  The HOLY SEEEEEEE of Cao Daism.  It was a mostly boring drive, took about three hours, and I got there just in time to take some photos before the service started. 


worshipers filed in and sat in neatly organized tetris games.  There were like 40 million tourists on the top level taking pictures of this, and almost all of them left within 10 minutes of the service starting.  Because, y'know, we only want pictures of culture.  We don't want to actually sit and look at it.  ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CULTURE OH GOD OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH


Here are some dudes in awesome outfits.  AWESOME outfits.  The yellow ones are specialists in Buddhism, the blue one is Taoism and the Red one is Confucianism.  Maybe.  Fuzzy Memory. 


The roof was awesome   Look at all the foreigners!  GET YOUR CAMERAS QUICK.

The city this was in - Tay Ninh - is insanely boring.  There is NOTHING to do.  And I knew it was going to be like this, so I decided to dart up to Duong Minh Chau, a city 15 km away that was on a lake.  as we left the Cao Dai temple, it started raining.  Any adventure begun in the rain is an adventure ill-begotten.   After driving 15km in the rain, we realized there was not a single hotel in Duong Minh Chau.  We drove around the lake.  None of the towns on the lake had a hotel.  Dude what the Hell.  So, exasperated, we drive back to Tay Ninh.  But 6km into the drive back I get a flat tire.  So we walk about half a mile in the rain.  Finally we find a place that repairs tires.  As he's doing that, I notice next door there is a team of men demolishing a house. 
Now is a good time for a brief anecdote I didn't tell any of you before.  On our motorcycle trip, after we got off our chartered boat, we saw three or four guys and 20 goats.  the men were throwing - literally throwing - the goats onto the truck.   This was hilarious, and I immediately got my camera and began filming.  http://youtube.com/watch?v=i5gE2TXaRJE         Please watch this.
Then Ross had the best idea ever: let's help them.  We went over and asked politely if we could help, and they were all about it.  So we got to throw some goats into a truck.   http://youtube.com/watch?v=ABU0g87HKSs
Anyway.  The purpose of this aside is that this event stirred in me an impetus to just ask people if I could do what they're doing whenever I see people doing something awesome. 
So I went over and asked if I could help demolish the house.  Without even a moment's hesitation, a guy handed me a sledge hammer. 


Just as I was starting to get bored of hitting a house with a hammer, they pulled out battering rams.  Kukhee has the video, and I'll post it eventually, but with a few rams we brought down the foundation of the house with a crash.  SWEET, DUDE.
So I'm going to start doing that all the time.  Anything something awesome is happening I'm going to try and get in on it.  My goal is to drive a steamroller.  How awesome would that be.  
Oddly enough, these two stories got me a job writing a monthy half-page adventure column for a magazine here.  Ha ha! 
Anyway!



On our way back we saw, surreal though it was, a field full of fake animals.  Once Yoon-mi had been very excited to see a field of cows out the window of a train we were on until she realized that they might have been fake.   "Ooh!  Cows!! *clap* *clap* *clap*  ....are they real?"  Of course at the time I thought Yoon-mi was insane.  I still think she's insane.  But now I know that sometimes there are fake cows that may or may not be for sale.  All the Koreans still insist that that doesn't happen in Korea, though.  LUCKY GUESS, YOON-MI.


RIDE THAT GIRAFFE, KUKHEE!


This is me and my charming younger sister, Claire.  I love you, Claire.  We look so similar. 
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