‘Be someone you would look up to’ Hanoi, Vietnam Part two

Tags

anxiety, Chickens, Circle K, Factory farming, Hanoi, mindfulness, Tet, The Little House, Travel, Travel health, Travel writing, Vietnam, Vietnamese hospitality

Draft extract from my travel memoir

The next day the guesthouse woman very kindly walked me to an open supermarket, Circle K, waited for me whilst I shopped, and then walked me to an open pharmacy.  I paid attention so as to learn the way, she pointed out the sign to the hotel alley; I took note of a place selling car oil, a corner with a closed shop, an outdoor gym, and a big bright blue building- a military school, she said.  She told me that she opened the guesthouse ten years ago so that her son and daughter could learn English.  At the pharmacy she translated so I could get some medicine for Anthony.  On the ground in between the pharmacy and the guesthouse were multicoloured shiny pieces of paper from Tet, rough squares like cut up homemade children’s decorations, like confetti.

All around were big new buildings, high rise blocks, dense housing, hotels and offices.  One further away building had a spiral bit like Tokyo, like Phnom Penh and amongst all these a tiny old traditional house like a pagoda with a triangle roof, surrounded on all sides by these upstarts.  It reminded me of the book The Little House, where a dear little once loved house in the country becomes surrounded by busy roads and new buildings and is forgotten.  The house falls into sadness and disrepair, until one day someone falls in love with it and moves it out of the city and lovingly restores it.

Even though it was unlikely, we got scared that Anthony might have malaria.  We were more scared about health now we were not in India.  After seven months there altogether, India was more familiar, and many more people spoke English.  But I just thought, there’s loads of ex pats and foreigners in Hanoi, what do they do, and looked up online, found a hospital popular with Westerners and saved the details.  They were open twenty four hours and had an ambulance service.  Then I felt better, which is probably why people say to research and note down the details of local hospitals and doctors when travelling.

The family cooked us rice and vegetables, brought up on a tray to our room, huge bowls of steamed rice and lots of lovely fresh chunky vegetables; broccoli, carrots and cauliflower.  It was healthy but very plain, maybe the sauces etc had meat in them.  Once we had noodles with bits of meat in which we had to leave.

The second day I went to a big supermarket we’d found online, alone, I took so long crossing the road that people stopped and asked if I wanted a taxi.  I was anxious, not used to going out alone, anxious about Anthony, and about making decisions- even simple ones like what to buy to eat.  A man in the queue behind me actually packed up my bags for me, he didn’t speak any English.  It was so nice of him.  Back at the guesthouse I asked if they could make us tea, they brought it up in pretty china cups, it felt like such an achievement to ask and get, and we had French stick from the supermarket and oranges with it.

Our guesthouse was down an alleyway, with other houses either side.  On the opposite side of the alley were chicken cages, one presumably belonging to the guesthouse, the other to the house next door.   The first cage was two tier with no floor, just criss crossed steel bars that I thought looked uncomfortable for their feet.  I saw a big plump brown hen sitting down.  The hen had a red comb and looked healthy enough.  I stood in front, pushed down my sorrow and sent them some love.   I told myself the eggs in our supermarkets or the KFC chickens are no better, probably worse off.  Sometimes you hear stories of workers in intensive farm settings or slaughterhouses torturing birds (and animals) for fun.  Not here, these belonged to the family.  The next cage had a solid floor with dirt on it not bars, plus lots of fresh greens and a feeder of corn.  lt looked like it had a second tier but it was actually a perch, which chickens like.  Better, good, in comparison to the first one.

One day when I was returning to the guesthouse I saw a small fawn and cream coloured cat sitting on the roof of the chicken hut eating some meat.  I called to it but it ran away, startled.   The next day I was at the desk speaking to the man.  In the alley outside the chicken huts was a little handbag sized dog on a chain beside a cardboard box.  Later I saw the dog and the cat both inside the box, the dog chained, the cat free, the cat smooching the dog.  ‘Friends,’ I said to the man.

Anthony felt slightly better and fed up with being in the room, and we both went to Circle K to eat.  It was a small supermarket with a few tables at one end beside the freezers and the drinks cabinets, and served a few simple dishes as well as coffee and tea.  I was impressed that it provided a cheap place for people to sit down and eat or even have a beer.  We ordered plain noodles and Thai ice tea, one of each kind, one green and one brown, the tea tasted strange to us, and I who will drink and eat anything ended up having both of them.

We walked up to the main road, after Circle K, past new and half built buildings, one covered in mesh, like the buildings in Sihanoukeville.  There was no building going on thankfully, presumably due to Tet.  When I went out alone, I orientated myself by the big tall new buildings beyond the main road, many with neon names, some snazzy and done, some just a metal frame shell but still kind of beautiful, and beyond them, the pink sky.

On day four Anthony was getting better and I felt comfortable going for a walk and leaving him for longer.  I did a few loops of our local area, past a smart looking college with inspirational quotes on boards;  ‘Be someone you’d look up to,’ ‘Go wherever you want,’ ‘Question the answer,’ ‘Why ask why.’  There was a nice little coffee place nearby.  I had seen it the day before but it was closing.  I went for a walk down to the main road with the huge new buildings, and off down a side street, with old buildings, washing hung up, the balcony and rooftops caged in.  I went down another road, looking to see what was open, everything still closed, except the same little coffee place from the back.  This was day four, Saturday, Tet started on Tue, and aside from Circle K this was the only one, and this the only proper coffee cafe.

My coffee came in a dear little brown earthenware cup and saucer with a metal percolator on top- a metal ‘saucer’ on top of the cup, on top of that a metal cup with a lid, perfect to draw, if I could draw.  It dripped out one drop at a time, an exercise in patience.  Coffee with sugar, the tiny coffee cold by the time it had gone through but still nice.  They also gave me a glass of water, it was a hot day and I drank half before I remembered I shouldn’t drink the water and spat the last mouthful back discreetly.  I sat outside, the garden area had a brown wooden fence, brown tables and chairs.   Each table had a big square umbrella sunshade, much bigger than the table and chairs, that would really cover everyone even with seats spread out.  I saw a white butterfly, red flags and crazy wires.  A thread from my black scarf got caught on my bracelet and I made it into an imperfect bracelet, finger knitting, one loose end, mis-tied.  I asked if they had cake.  No. We have fruit.  Fruit salad?  No, just fruit.  No then.  They came back, we can do fruit salad, fifteen mins.  I shouldn’t have complicated it, but I had fruit at home and imagined them just bringing fruit, but then of course it would have been prepared? Control freak…  Or not; they brought me chopped fruit covered in mayonnaise, I ate it all.  When I told Anthony later he said, ‘You ate it?’!  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I just thought of Waldorf salad.  Afterwards they asked me, we have never made fruit salad before, was it okay?  Usually I would just say yes, but then I thought what if another Westerner came and asked for fruit salad and got that, so I said, it was very nice, but for Westerners, it’s okay to do it without sauce, just fruit.  Which may well have been what they would have given me had I said nothing… probably everyone was more confused by the end.

Later the same day we went out together to see if anywhere else was open, or if not to go to Circle K for noodles, or my place for coffee and fruit salad.  A restaurant/cafe looked like it might be opening, there was a super cute puppy poking through the fence, and a man in the garden.  We used the translate app on the phone to ask if it was open later, No, he said.  A Vietnamese family walked past, using sign language, empty hands, we said to each other nowhere open, ‘Coffee?’ They asked.  ‘Yes, anything,’ I said.  They beckoned to us to follow.  We just followed them and went where they showed us.  We followed them all the way around the block again, them looking around and showing us which way, past bushes and plants in wide shallow stone pots on the pavement, past a woman’s garden with bonsai and lily pads, and coriander, the smell delicious.  They took us to somewhere we hadn’t noticed but had probably walked past.  We said thank you, and went in.

A woman greeted us warmly and said she could make us noodles, which were served nicely in a white bowl on a big white plate.  Beauty in simplicity; my coffee earlier with its tiny apparatus on top of the tiny cup, and the necessary patience.  The instant noodles made beautiful with coriander; beside the white bowl a little leaf green oval dish with two pieces of lime to squeeze.  Chilli sauce, chop sticks, a spoon, and coffee and tea.  The glow from the people’s kindness who had taken us there and the friendliness of the woman, and the relief of Anthony getting better.  We made a list of all the Netflix shows we watched on the trip and tried to remember where we were when we watched them; some powerful place links such as watching Wild Wild Country (about Osho) in Kerala then coming across Oshos guesthouse, some we struggled to remember where we were when we saw them, we stayed in so many places…  Link to blog about everywhere we stayed on the year long trip.   Link to Everything we watched on Netflix blog

I wished I’d done better- done better shopping, gone out alone more, gone to the ATM by myself, done all the booking, been more capable, made decisions, not leant on Anthony at all, been in total charge when he was ill- but I didn’t, my mind disintegrating under stress plus not used to it.   But as they say in AA, all you can do is ‘Do the next right thing.’

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

‘Be someone you would look up to’ Hanoi, Vietnam

Tags

Dairy cows, Hanoi, Indian hospitality, mindfulness, spiritual memoir, Tet, Travel, Travel memoir, Vegan, Vietnam, writing

Draft extract from my travel memoir

On the plane from Cambodia to Vietnam we sat next to an Indian man, a Sikh from the Punjab.  He was very friendly and keen to chat.  He told us about himself and asked us what our experience of India had been like.  We told him the places we’d visited and about how friendly and helpful Indian people had been.  I told him about the train from Kolkata to Varanasi, about how a whole family came to chat to us; and about us being called Grandma and Grandfather not Auntie and Uncle.  ‘It’s a natural stage of life’ he said.  ‘I know, if we’re lucky,’ I said.

In the taxi from the airport I saw lights like fairy lights or Christmas lights decorating narrow houses, and chrome banisters like the peachy orange house in Siem Reap.  The narrow houses got narrower and narrower from bottom to top; fascinating.  There were hotels with lots of chrome.  I saw a woman holding a white dog, the dog was fluffy and furry like a toy.  Just after that I saw a woman wearing a white woollen jacket with three buttons in the centre, the material dense and furry like the dog.

The driver took us through back streets, dusty like Chennai, with nail bars in the front rooms of houses, and red flags with yellow stars (the flag of Vietnam.)  He stopped the car and said we were there.  It was the wrong place, no guesthouses in sight; he must have wondered why we would be going there.

Near our place, we saw a blue house the paint faded, next door a faded orange-yellow house with wrought iron.  In the morning we walked over the moped bridge to the old town and the market.  It wasn’t for the faint hearted, there were gaps in the floor and on the outside one rail and beyond a big wide river.  The traffic was relentless and the pollution was unpleasant; like most of the riders, we wore thick fabric masks.  Many mopeds had big bunches of flowers, or branches with flowers or even trees in pots on the back for Tet.  Below there was so much green, and lots of fruit trees, wrapped in plastic to protect them.  A woman went past in a beautiful gown-like red velvet dress.  At the end of the bridge, we saw a group of tourists taking selfies on the rail track.

We walked through small streets, a market area.  It had a feel of Kathmandu with small shops and eating places, and a bit like where we stayed in Kolkata but less faded, with lots of bright yellow.  Then we came to the tourist area and suddenly lots of white people, and lots of North Face, like Nepal, which is made in Vietnam, and loads of coffee places.  We stopped for coffee and coconuts; really great coffee.  Cambodia and Vietnam were great for coffee and baguettes, in Otres Village in Cambodia Rupa said, re the baguettes, ‘There’ll be the undoing of me trying to lose weight.’  Furniture shops sold cheap veneer, in contrast to  the heavy carved antique looking mirrors of Cambodia, but there were also lots of antique shops.  A wedding dress in a shop window, the mannequin like a slumped teenager, reminded me of a cover of a punk-pop 80s album like Transvision Vamp.

We had a rest at home and returned later to see the night market.  Balloons, branches of yellow flowers, orange trees in pots, flowers everywhere, TET decorations, new year cards, lanterns, pigs, lots of red, pinks and gold.  Glassware, oil swirled, gold, like Venetian or my grandmother’s; cake stands, tea sets, trays, all piled up on the pavement.  There was lots of street food, most of it was meat but we did get thick handmade crisps on a stick.  We ate them whilst we walked along.  People on mopeds cruised slowly past stalls; they got in the way of the pedestrians and brought noise and exhaust fumes.  It was easy to get irritated.  At the front of a rack of clothes on a stall was a jumper embroidered with the words:  ‘Venture out of your comfort zone, the rewards are worth it.’  I held my wooden stick from the crisps until we went down a side street, where there were small piles of rubbish at the edges of pavements near the road, mostly from street stalls.  It was clearly a rubbish pile, and would be burned or otherwise dealt with later, but I still found it hard to throw things on the street.  Outside street stalls or just sitting in the street, were young guys with good haircuts dressed in smart cool clothes, black with silver zips.  People wore silver chain handbags.  We saw some people let off big party popper streamers; cut up pieces of gold sparkly paper landed on the ground.  As Anthony said, it was ‘the biggest assault on the senses since India.’  

The day after Anthony got ill, presumably due to getting too much pollution from being out all day and evening.  It started as fatigue and a tight chest and then got more like flu, with him sweating and shaking uncontrollably.  We were booked to do a twelve hour overnight journey but he could barely get out of bed.  As much as we wanted to get out of Hanoi, we couldn’t leave.  We sat in bed and cancelled the train and the guesthouse we’d booked, and tried to think what to do next.  The trains in Vietnam were also heavily booked and we had to plan ahead and decide what we wanted to do in advance rather than just going with the flow.  We had around three of four different options and struggled to make a decision; Anthony feeling too ill and me feeling too anxious.  I had relied on him to do all the booking and suddenly faced with it I felt overwhelmed and anxious.  Oscillating between anxiety and peace- it’s amazing how quickly that can happen.  We decided to go to SaPa and booked a bus for five days away and somewhere to stay in Hanoi until then- we had to leave the current place the next day whatever.

That evening there were fireworks, people celebrating Tet.  I love fireworks but I didn’t really enjoy them.  It was hard to enjoy them in my anxiety, and also, being acutely aware that they were only adding to the pollution.

I hadn’t bought enough orange juice, the only thing it turned out Anthony wanted.  The next day I went out, there were a couple of tiny little shops open in people’s houses, a few items on a cabinet, no orange juice at the first one, but then I came to a woman with a fridge full of cans of juice.  I bought a pack of eight cans of gloriously cold pure orange juice.  She invited me in.  I automatically slipped off my flip flops but she pointed at my feet looking horrified, maybe like in Thailand feet are disliked?  She offered me tea or some kind of drink but I didn’t stop, wanting to get back to Anthony.  I asked how much in Vietnamese (bon you); that and hello (zin chow), and vegetarian (an chay), was all I knew.

The next day we left.  It was hard to get a cab, standing by the busy road with our bags, conscious of the pollution.  There were very few cabs about, fewer stopped, and sometimes those that did were taken by other people.  After a while Anthony got one, the cab driver used a translate on his phone app to tell us not many cabs, ‘they are at home with their families for Tet.

We’d booked a double deluxe room that looked very nice on the photograph but on arrival we quickly realised we couldn’t stay there, even though it felt as though Anthony couldn’t move anywhere.  The room was barely bigger than the double bed, and made from a partition off the landing, with the tops of the partition open, so there was no protection from mosquitoes, and no fan.  A window at the end of the bed faced the dorm next door and we could see into the dorm.  No privacy, no space, and no fan.  I went to take a look along the road, to ask if there were anywhere else nearby, another homestay, but they were closed.  Outside one of the houses was a big guard dog in a cage barking at me as I went past.  It filled the cage.  Dogs tied in cages was sad, but again I reminded myself about dairy cows.  Farm animals are no different in their suffering it’s just us that feels it differently.  Anthony lay on the bed, simultaneously not being able to stay and not feeling like moving, and looked for somewhere else.

It was a long journey, as we neared there was lots of building, and we worried it was another poor choice of place.  There was a big dog chained up outside the hotel, the chain not long enough for it to get to us over at the counter, but we waited for the man to hold it anyway before stepping forward.  I was a bit daunted at first, my first impression was negative, but the young man at the desk knew our names and was expecting us, and the woman owner came straight away and greeted us and was very friendly.  She was wearing a red velvet knee length dress for Tet.  The room was nice, big, with our own bathroom, a duvet, pillows, and clean.

Just as we were settling in, the woman came up to our room and brought her son up to introduce him to us; they brought us packets of ‘Lucky money,’ for Tet.  They told us all the restaurants were closed but that they would cook for us.  Later, the young guy from the desk took our order, carefully explaining the prices, and checking the ingredients of the instant noodles for us.  ‘Taste of beef but no beef in it,’ he said.  ‘That’s fine,’ we said.  He brought us instant noodles with added home cooked vegetables.

There was a small desk where we ate and I mostly did my writing there.  The bed was comfortable.  There was a big window but no view, it faced only a concrete wall and we kept the curtains closed.  Beside the bed was a big stained glass window with lots of fish, it faced out to the landing.  During the day natural light came through it, and at night the lights on the landing lit it right up.  It had curtains but I often left them open and lay in bed looking at the fish wall glowing in the dark.  The window in the bathroom stayed open a little and we had to watch out for mosquitoes if we had the bathroom light on.  The bathroom window at night was a cracked mosaic of blues and purples, the light through the coloured glass broken up by leaves from a tree that pressed against the window.

Part two on Sunday

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

‘Order beer with your breakfast we won’t judge you’ Siem Reap Cambodia Part Two

Tags

awareness, Cambodia, Enlightenment, Siem Reap, spiritual awakening, spiritual enlightenment, Spiritual experience, spiritual memoir, The matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Travel, Vanilla sky, writing

Draft extract from my travel/spiritual memoir

See you in another life, when we are both cats*  

*Vanilla Sky

I watched a couple of YouTube videos with Anthony about ‘the matrix’ and felt trippy and inspired, as usual.  I scribbled down quotes and ideas :

Words are spells that programme you

Make friends with your body, subconscious, conscious, make all one

People inside same age- body irrelevant look past this 

Don’t live in the past

Don’t live in the future

Stay in the NOW

Don’t live in fear

Raise your frequency

Dream where you are now

One of the comments mentioned language and conditioning; would we be freer without language?  I’d talked about this before when thinking about the man at Osho’s guesthouse in Kerala who couldn’t read.  If you didn’t see any ads, if you weren’t exposed to all those ideas and conditioning… But it is double edged: the good books get you there, wake you up, the bad ones keep you sleepy and distracted.  Who defines good and bad though?  I’ve had an inspiration moment through a car ad and they’d (car ads) would probably be banned if I was in charge…

Anthony had seen The Thirteenth Floor and told me about it but I hadn’t seen it.  In Koh Rong I had a conversation with a fellow blogger who had written a blog post about Westworld and its effects re thinking about consciousness etc.  I mentioned Battlestar Gallactica which we had recently finished and had similar themes.  Anthony said, ‘Tell him about The Thirteenth Floor.’  It turned out that The Thirteenth Floor was kind of like his (the blogger’s) The Matrix, he had gone to see it with his cousin, hadn’t known what he was going to see and had his mind blown unexpectedly.  The internet wasn’t strong enough at Koh Rong to download it.  We tried again in Siem Reap: bingo.

We switched off The Thirteenth Floor.  I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, still kind of in the film, feeling or imagining that I had just ‘arrived.’  I noticed two new moles on my body.  I came back in, still feeling floaty, as if I was a film character.  I looked out of the window.  There was an unrecognisable animal sitting on top of a car.  I couldn’t process what it was, and I couldn’t find the words to name it.  It was black and about the size of a monkey.   But at the same time it looked like a cartoon; with big orange triangles inside its ears and an orange ‘O’ shape for a mouth.  It was as if my brain didn’t recognise it at first.  A monkey?  A cat?  A completely unrecognisable animal, before coalescing into a recognisable creature; a black cat.  Or possibly a small monkey.  I remember returning home at seventeen and thinking the cats were enormous, having not seen them for a while.  Anthony didn’t look until it was almost too late; he thought it was a cat, although he admitted it did look weird.

We went outside, me tripped out on a drug free high, everything colourful and sparkly.  I pointed to a building, struggling to speak: ‘Look- orange- no- purple-.’  I couldn’t find the words, couldn’t say the colours.  I was looking at a small purple house set back from the road.  Next door to it was a bigger building, a guesthouse, peachy orange with shiny chrome balcony rails.  Draped in front were sparkly tubular lights, plastic tubing, it was still daylight, sunny, and the lights in the tubes were subtle like a prism or glitter.

I wanted to talk about the cat.  I kept telling Anthony off for not staying with me; I used to say this a lot when I was trying to explain something strange and he was either trying to ground me or finding it hard to follow me.  Plus he was hungry.  We went into the 7/11 next door.  I told myself:  ‘Don’t think about coffee or deodorant or mascara (things I wanted).  Don’t speak.  Wait for him to eat and go back’ (To the cat, etc)

We sat outside the 7/11 on a bench.  ‘Don’t let me get put off.  Don’t look at anything.  Pick the most boring thing to look at.’  But even just sitting on the bench, it was hard to keep my focus on my ideas, a man walked by, some interesting dogs, always distractions…

To wake up is to realise.  To unplug is to disconnect- no distractions, no phone, no unconscious actions/interactions; no actions/interactions that aren’t conscious.  Act in awareness.  Wake up.

We walked down to the river.  I had to sit down again.  Even under normal circumstances I can get overstimulated walking and talking.  It’s easier for me to be still when talking about something serious, and if the visuals around are interesting I can’t take both in and process everything.  So we sat down on a bench.  I looked down- it was made of shells, like a mosaic.  Like the paving in Otres Village, like the path to the village in Koh Rong.  Even the bench was overstimulating.  Shells and mosaics seem to be kind of a thing for me, maybe they signify arrival?.

So are there blank lives we go into, available slots that we light up on the circuit board?  I have visualised this like a ball of stiff string, with many intersections, our lights/us moving around it and lighting up different places.  Like a circuit board crossed with a ball of wool attacked by a kitten; like The Thirteenth Floor?  Or is it remembrance of other lives?

It was hard to focus on thought.  So many distractions- a man acting weird, on drugs, two weird dogs.  Keep focussed, wits about.  It felt like it was a matrix.  Experiment with thinking it’s a matrix.  Stop saying hi to everyone- waste of energy.  Don’t worry about what others think; people near/walking past. Parents, possibilities; if not real then not scary. Personal power.

We kept looking for a quiet road- but it just got busier- and then the neon lights of Pub Street with the multi coloured tumble blocks of lights. Eventually we came to a dusty road, three stools were set out at a mini table; I felt like I could sit there.  ‘I think that’s just where the staff go for their breaks,’ Anthony said.  It was the back of a hotel.

Even underfoot, so many distractions, so much to focus on, sand, uneven paving of all kinds, constantly watching footing, feeling footing, small chairs in the path to go around, being aware of obstacles, constantly aware/distracted, how much variety/stimulation can there be?

Home….  The plastic cable lights of the orange-pink and chrome guesthouse were brighter now that it was dark, I could see all the different colours, blobs on a loop…

Day after, had I changed reality?  Egg off the menu- avocado egg sandwich.  I used to order without the egg, almost every day, a wet, full sandwich chock full with avocado and salad, absolutely delicious.  Now it had a blank sticker over the egg!  I was excited, Anthony not so much, he said he tends to just notice and accept things like this and move on rather than focus so much on them as I do. Aside from whether it was exciting or not, we agreed it was a sign of being in flow like Instagram synchronicities, like all synchronicities.  Like ‘conjuring’ sheets, towels, beans on toast at the ‘wrong time,’ in Kerala.  Why so hard to believe, when people have vision boards of Porsches and trips to Australia?  Because people think the little things are just coincidences.  As if The Thirteenth Floor wasn’t enough, we also watched Vanilla Sky:  exploring consequences, the little things, decisions… ‘There are no bigger things.’

The hotel had really lovely staff but ultimately they weren’t all that effective; they never did fix our window mosquito mesh which we improvised a repair for by stuffing tissue in the hole, and they didn’t book our cab for the correct time to get to airport.  Still, it didn’t matter.  The happiness of Siem Reap, me experiencing a work-pleasure balance, or at least, both things; us both physically well and feeling close again, the out there experiences…  It was a very full six or seven days, and we didn’t even go to Angkor Watt…

Thank you very much for reading

‘Order beer with your breakfast we won’t judge you’ Siem Reap Cambodia

Tags

Cambodia, Mindful travel, mindfulness, Siem Reap, Slow travel, Travel, Travel fatigue, Travel writing, Traveling, Travelling

Extract from my (draft) travel memoir

Even from the road the hotel looked good: shiny, clean and smart with a cream facade and at the front a blue swimming pool; to our eyes it was like a pop star’s luxury residence.  The outside was neatly paved, with pots of bright pink and orange flowers, and lots of pretty summer shoes outside the entrance.  As it was early our room wasn’t ready so we waited at the bar/restaurant: fruit salad, baguette and jam, and lots of coffee.  We met two women sitting at the next table, one from South Africa, one, younger, from England, they’d met on a previous trip and decided to do a trip together.  We went on about India and how great it was.  The younger woman didn’t like India, she said she’d got hassle from men.  She was the only person we’d met who hadn’t liked India.  But of course there’s a flipside to every country, no point pretending otherwise.

The reception staff, young men with good haircuts, were lovely and friendly, they did us a hand drawn map of directions to the barbers for Anthony and a place that did proper massage for me.  ‘Not like-’ he mimed someone giving a very lazy massage and chatting- ‘Ten dollars please.’

The room was big and clean, painted white with its own bathroom with a hot shower and towels provided.  The bed had white sheets, duvet and pillows.  The headboard was solid wood, shiny and carved, mid colour wood not pine not mahogany but sturdy and heavy.  At the other end of the room was a wardrobe with double sliding mirror doors, it was like having my own private yoga studio!  A desk and chair, two bedside tables, and everything so clean and polished and shiny.  That room, although no more expensive than our average, felt luxurious.

I had read about travel fatigue in someone’s Instagram post.  As well as the normal missing friends and family, dealing with the stresses and strains- unfamiliar foods, new places- of travel; some people also over schedule, moving from place to place too fast, packing the days with long tours, and over photographing everything.  There was no danger of us doing that but we still got tired sometimes, especially when ill in Delhi, hence why we cut our plan to travel around Rajasthan down to a month in Pushkar.

Nearby the hotel were smaller restaurants, cycle hire places and travel agencies.  A short walk away was the main food area with lots of restaurants, pubs and an indoor market which we had a look around.  I became temporarily enamoured with glazed and decorated bowls made from coconuts, elephant purses and checked scarves, the prices going down as I looked without me doing or saying anything.  Other than a pair of sunglasses to replace my ones from Phnom Penh which had broken, I didn’t buy anything, and the feeling of wanting things soon wore off.

That first night we had tofu, pad Thai, ‘no fish sauce,’ staff familiar with vegetarians which was good, and fresh mango juice, thick and gloopy, ‘sexy in the mouth’ like the noodles of the first night in Bangkok and then later our first night in Cambodia in Phnom Penh.

There were lots of big Westernised bars and restaurants as well as street stalls with small plastic tables and chairs on the pavement, stalls on the back of motorbikes, plugging into power supplies installed on trees.

The room in Siem Reap represented real comfort and luxury; especially after a week in a tent, with everything sandy.  On the polished wood bedside table, my lipbalm, my kohl eyeliner, my earrings, a charcoal face pack I was excited to buy from the 7/11, and my new glamorous (but cheap) black mirror sunglasses which I always kept there, the ceiling fan reflected in them.

We’d noticed shrines in Koh Rong, here there was a big one in the hotel foyer, and another big one in the restaurant we went to most often.  Every day fresh; two cans of coke; a can of drink, cups of coffee, a cup of tea in a glass cup; two glass cups of hot drink; two apples; a bunch of bananas; a basket/bowl of all sorts of fruit; fruit and veg; stacks of money; a bunch of incense, something new every day.  It was like the morning rituals we watched in Pushkar, shop keepers sprinkling water and lighting incense before the working day began.

I wondered if we should do it at home, make a shrine, have a morning ritual, make a tea for the shrine, light incense, set an intention, not directly from or connected to a recognised religion.  Anthony said religious practices look like a kind of OCD sometimes; he once had a friend who used to walk around the room fifteen times before he went out, everyone thought it was a big problem but Anthony always wondered why was it a problem, why not just accept that it was something that he did, like a kind of ritual.  Like I could change my OCD checking of the taps before I go out into a mini ritual, say thank you for having water.

The restaurant where we ate regularly was open to the street, we watched people going past on motorbikes and scooters and parking outside.  I liked looking at people’s clothes, a lot of the women looked quite glamorous in lacy dresses and one day we saw a woman with astonishingly long hair.  On the opposite side of the road there were shops, I saw a bird going in and out of an electrical box, a small box on a pole with a slit; I saw that in front of the shops next to it there were also boxes with birds nesting in.

At the restaurant, I was excited to notice that there were fans reflected in my sunglasses again, just like in the room.  Anthony pointed out that I put them on the table facing up, and fans are on the ceiling… Another time, in the market, I saw my sunglasses reflected in two big blocks of ice.

We talked a lot over meals at the restaurant.  I noticed that we were able to discuss things like politics better without annoying each other or getting annoyed.  It’s not so much that we disagree on big picture stuff, more that the way we approach things is different and used to cause conflict during discussions.  Each difficulty this year has moved us forward in terms of how we handle discussions, personal issues and the way we are together….  Part two on Sunday

Thank you very much for reading

Pavement: Here

Tags

90s indie music, 90s music, Bands of the 90s, Forties, happiness, Music, Pavement, Pavement Slanted and Enchanted, Slanted and Enchanted, Thirties, Twenties

Pavement: Here

I was dressed for success 
But success it never comes 
And I’m the only one who laughs 
At your jokes when they are so bad

And your jokes are always bad 
But they’re not as bad as this. 
Come join us in a prayer 
We’ll be waiting, waiting where

Everything’s ending here. 

From their debut studio album Slanted and Enchanted, released in 1992 when I was twenty two.  Pavement were/are one of my favourite bands and their albums formed the soundtrack to my twenties and thirties.  Now forty-nine (and much happier than I was in my twenties and thirties) I still sing this song to myself even if I don’t play it that often anymore.

Thank you very much for reading (and listening!)

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Ellie Goulding – Love Me Like You Do

Tags

Ear worms, Music, Travelling

Ellie Goulding – Love Me Like You Do

In Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia we were plagued by chart music we’d switch off at home, and the same few songs were played over and over.  I hope I never hear Perfect by Ed Sheeran again.  He seems like a nice guy and I saw him at Latitude (a UK festival) years ago and enjoyed his set but that particular song was played everywhere we went until it drove us half mad.

But by the time we were at the end of our year long trip, which ended in Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, I’d started to have a ‘If you can’t beat ’em join ’em,’ attitude and just gave in to singing ‘What are you waiting for!?’ (from the song above) several times a day.  This is called Stockholm Syndrome, I believe.  The other day I heard it on the radio on the boat and found out who it was for the first time.  It has had 1.9 billion views on YouTube.  In spite of having previously been driven crazy by it I was happy to hear it for what felt like the billionth time…

One more: this too was in my head every day for the last part of the trip:

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for va year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Lou Reed: Transformer

Tags

Albums to listen to all the way through, death and dying, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Lou Reed Transformer, love, marriage, meditation, memories, Music

Lou Reed: Transformer

Listen to the whole album all the way through for the perfect accompaniment to your Sunday morning/afternoon housework/dancing around the house with a duster pretending to do housework…

Released in 1972 when I was two years old.  Of course I didn’t discover it until several years later, maybe around the age of seventeen.  I can remember listening to it at that age anyway, lying on the floor in a room in a house I was babysitting at.  It’s one of the few actual moments and places I can remember from the past.

Lou Reed was married to the artist Laurie Anderson.  Lou Reed died in 2013.  In an interview with Rolling Stone Laurie Anderson said:

‘As meditators, we had prepared for this – how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.’

And if you really can’t listen to the whole album, just listen to this:

Thank you very much for reading (and listening!)

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Snow Patrol: Run

Tags

Choir, Lou Reed, Norfolk, Singing as therapy, Small towns, Snow Patrol Run, UK

 

I bought the album just for this song.  It’s one of the songs we used to sing in our DIY choir group at work (at a secure hospital)- we used to put YouTube up on the big screen and sing along.  Most of us couldn’t really sing but there was one young woman, a patient, who had an especially lovely voice and sang this solo.  She was quite shy but when she sang it sounded amazing, and she lit up with the praise.

When my husband was transferring all our music onto an old ipod (bigger memory than the newer ones), a pivotal part of the decluttering we did ready for selling up and going off to India, he found the case but no disc inside.  The day after I drafted this post he came back from town with vegan magnums and a copy of the album- he’d hunted for and found it in a charity shop.

But I first fell in love with this song more than a decade ago at an acoustic night above a pub in Wymondham, Norfolk.  A brother and sister sang it, it was absolutely beautiful.  Wymondham, pronounced ‘Win-dam,’ is a small market town similar to the nearby town of Diss where I was brought up.  As an adult, one might think either town is perfectly nice.  As a young person, especially if one is a bit different, those kinds of places can be awful for the soul.

Not to mention surprisingly violent, as drinking and fighting provide something to do for groups of bored young men.  I looked out of the window of that pub that night and saw a man staggering down the street, his face covered in blood.  As Lou Reed sang, there’s only one good thing about a small town: You hate it and you’ll know you have to leave.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.