Amusement Park Darwinism

We went on this crazy ride at the Ho Chi Minh City amusement park that was like a version of It’s a Small World with these really cheesy looking dinosaurs in it. Some rubber toothed dinosaurs were set up to pop out at you when you went around a turn. They definitely succeeded in scaring you, but they were so goofy looking it was just funny. How about the ape-man and the snake? Is it is pet python or is it trying to kill him?

The kids were really into this poster outside the dinosaur ride. I was forced to give an explanation of evolution that conformed to the visual, which the kids found very authoritative. It went roughly as follows - first monkeys walked around on all fours, which was probably pretty boring since you couldn’t see very well, plus your hands were always dirty and just plain muddy on rainy days. Eventually, one got really mad about this situation, picked up a stick, stood up and started yelling. Fortunately, the artist captured this very event.

After that a fairly straightforward evolutionary process kicked in in which the monkeys gradually got taller, less hairy, happier about their clean palms plus the sticks they carried got better. The picture was clearly painted before vintage t-shirts, cargo pants and hand sanitizer were invented. That would have been the next picture. Why did I spend a whole semester studying evolution in college when I could have just gone on the dinosaur ride in Saigon?

The Sphinx of Saigon

We went to this crazy amusement park in Ho Chi Minh City the day before Jenny came to meet us. This followed the basic pattern of finding activities that at times included levels of danger that would have been impermissible with a full parental complement. Anyway, it was like a giant State Fair full of sketchy rides. One of my favorites was the Sphinx, a faux Egyptian haunted house place. Abby insisted on visiting it as she felt she had developed a certain expertise in Egyptology by watching “Scooby Doo and the Pyramid of Giza” on the flight down to Vietnam. It had some scary fake mummies inside that sat up when you walked close by. Abby’s verdict – scary, but somewhat lacking in authenticity when compared to the Scooby treatment of similar content.

Almost Lonely Planet

I thought this was kind of funny. This is in Ho Chi Minh City. The Chinese are good at DVD pirating, but I'd never seen pirated books until I got to Vietnam. These are fake Lonely Planet books. The paper seems to be thicker and the pictures were mostly black and white. The asking price was about US$4 per book. You’ve got to hand it to these guys for knowing their market – if you’re looking for a place to sleep for US$10 a night, there’s a decent chance you’ll be interested in a cheaper way to help you find it.

Phu Quoc

Our next stop was a little island called Phu Quoc in Southwestern Vietnam. There is a big very developed tourist island in Thailand called Phuket. This place is sort of like Phuket with almost no development. Get there while the gettin's good because you can see the build up beginning. Now the economy is pepper farms (the black spice kind), squid fishing and one little fish sauce factory. Almost all the roads are dirt and at night you can lie on the beach and see the Milky Way. I hadn’t seen it in many years, since camping way up in the mountains in the Western U.S. The kids weren’t even sure what it was when they first saw it. Anyway, here are a few pictures. Double click the small ones if you want to see them better. My good friend and tennis doubles partner in high school died a few years ago of skin cancer so since then I’ve been a big enforcer of these high sun protection swimsuits for the kids. They don’t seem to mind yet. (Jenny is pregnant so I’m required to keep posted pictures of her at a minimum at this point, which I believe most women other than Demi Moore or Britney Spears will completely understand). You could buy seafood at these little shack-ish restaurants on the beach and they’d cook some right on your table. Super fresh and super cheap. The beaches were beautiful. No waves, a la Apocalypse Now, but that is better for the kids anyway.

Tuk-tuk

Here are a few more Cambodia pics. One night when I let the kids pick the restaurant, they picked Indian food to my surprise. We eat it once in a while on Saturdays in Shanghai. When I was little I would have assumed that Indian food was what Navajos or Hopis ate and I had no idea what that was. Anyway, we got to and from the hotel to the town via tuk-tuk or a sort of trailer thing hooked on the back of motorped. The kids loved it. They used to have versions of these in Bangkok where the motorcycle and the seat were sort of one unit – think Sophie Ellis-Bextor riding around Bangkok in the Spiller video of “If this ain’t love (groovejet)”. I heard those have been banned there now.

After Cambodia it was back to Vietnam via prop plane on Vietnam Airlines.

Temple of Doom

The coolest part of Cambodia are the Khmer temples. Real Indiana Jones stuff. Here are some pics. Double click if you want to see more detail.

This is where the absence of a maternal influence really came into play. We climbed up some really steep and slippery pyramids. The kids were clearly instructed that if they didn’t follow my strict instructions they would not only fall and get seriously hurt, but I’d also get in huge trouble with their mom. Luckily, compliance was reasonably high and no one fell.

The Circle of Life

We ate lunch at a restaurant next to one of the more remote temples in Angkor Wat in Cambodia.This is a good example of the plunging levels of hygiene that I found acceptable under the circumstances. The kids loved this place. It had dirt floors, no walls and there were some workers sleeping in hammocks about 10 feet from the tables. A dog wandered around the place as did a chicken.

We ordered chicken with rice and the kids asked me whether the chicken that was walking around and eating the spilled bits of chicken with rice was actually a cannibal chicken and if it would end up getting eaten next by other people who wanted chicken to eat. Then Abby started reflecting on The Lion King and the circle of life.

Best of all somebody spotted a walking stick on the ground in front of the restaurant. Its one of those weird bugs that actually does look like a stick with legs.

Rice, Sprite, cannibal chickens, dogs and walking sticks. What more could you want?

Beat that Rain Forest Café!

Stuffed Animals

One of our stops in Saigon was the building where the former South Vietnamese government was officed. The décor was basically left as it was when the tanks rolled in in the late 70s so there was a certain grooviness to the place. The high point from my kids’ point of view was the ex-President’s office which had a variety of mangy looking stuffed animals in it. Not teddy bears but small dead carnivores. If you’ve got a taste for taxidermy this bad, I’m not sure that you should be running a country anyway.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

On our trip to Vietnam we spent a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. We hired a tour guide who took us to one temple that was full of these graphically illustrated pictures of all the absolutely awful things that happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s while in this mortal coil. It reminded me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw once in Spain called “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Anyway, the tour guide was happily chatting away to the kids about grisly punishments such as having your legs chopped off by a blue guy with a cow's head or getting eaten by long-fanged snakes while you’re tied to a stake. The kids were mesmerized (and scared). It was a bit freaky for me too. Fortunately, all thoughts of eternal doom quickly vanished when a little cat walked by and the kids ran after it.

Heart of Darkness

We recently got back from a vacation to Vietnam and Cambodia, a perennial family-friendly destination. I told people at work that we rented a motor boat with a machine gun mounted on the back and headed up river. I think they sort of believed me.

We booked the trip before we realized that Jenny, being pregnant, couldn't take the needed malaria medicine for the Cambodia leg, so we decided that I'd go on first Cambodian leg (3 days) with Abby and Ben and then we'd meet up in Vietnam after that.

Needless to say, with me alone at the helm the acceptable hygiene level dropped way down, the danger level went up and I think the general fun level went up quite a bit also. Once we got back together in Vietnam things normalized, but we still had a good time.

Anyway, I'll try to post some pictures etc. of the trip soon.

Remote problems

Does this happen to anyone else with little kids? This drives me crazy and it seems like it happens every other day. First, the back cover of the remote gets lost, found, lost, found, etc. The batteries drift in and out during the cycle. Eventually the cover gets irretrievably lost. Then the batteries are just gone most of the time or at least one of them is. Then I try to tape the batteries in, but that's apparently just as much temptation because the tape gets torn off and batteries just disappear again. Asking where the cover or the batteries are is absolutely useless. I'll ask if anyone knows where the batteries are and get an answer like, "No, but can we get a dog?"

Notorious

We watched this movie again recently. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. This is the disturbed and twitchy Cary Grant of the Hitchcock films he did and not the goofy romantic comedy Cary Grant. And Ingrid Bergman… Rio looked so clean and elegantly exotic – every one dressed up for day to day life. Great stuff.

I remember when I was in high school there was a theatrical re-release of a series of Hitchcock movies – Rear Window, The Man who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, etc. A new one would come out every 3 or 4 months. I would rally my friends to go see them and they were great on a big screen. They weren’t at too many theaters, but I remember going to an older theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which hadn’t been cleaned up at that time. My friends were pretty reluctant at first, but after seeing one of these on a big screen people started wanting to go. Plus it was a little offbeat, which had an appeal to a certain sort of LA high school kid. LA was a fun place to grow up.

Bienvenidos a Guangzhou

I saw this ad in the back of a cab in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) recently. I just thought it was sort of weird. Its hard to read, but its an ad entirely in Spanish for a sourcing coordinating company. How many people that understand Spanish ride in the back of cabs in Guangzhou?

17th National Congress

Recently the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party began. On the first day I was in Qingdao, a city by the sea between Shanghai and Beijing for some meetings. I unfortunately had a long negotiation and ended up stuck with a 10pm flight back to Shanghai. We watched part of President Hu Jintao's opening remarks in an airport restaurant.

There weren't many people there and most didn't pay much attention to the speech. One guy was playing solitaire on this computer. About the same level of interest as would be generated by the State of the Union address in a US airport restaurant I imagine. It looked like there were 1000's of delegates in the meeting which is being held in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I went to a anniversary party for a big Chinese shipping company there last year and it was very impressive.

Mooncakes

The Mid-Autumn Festival recently passed in China. This is the second biggest traditional holiday in China, after Spring Festival (which in known in Western countries as Chinese New Year – if you talk to someone Chinese about Spring Festival they’ll think you’re pretty savvy). It’s a lunar holiday, like Easter, so it doesn’t fall on the same day each year. Families get together and celebrate under a full moon, traditionally eating a celebratory meal outside and presenting their food to the moon before eating. One of the big traditions of this time of year is the giving (and eating) of mooncakes. Mooncakes are circular in shape, usually about the diameter of a racquetball and have a pastry shell on the outside. The inside was traditionally a sort of sticky sweet red bean paste filling, but it sometimes has a lotus root filling and maybe a hardboiled egg yolk in the center. When I first tried these about six or seven years ago on a trip to Singapore, I didn’t like them too much, but now they’ve grown on me. In the last few years, mooncakes, like everything else in China, has both modernized and bowed to commercial pressure. Now there are lots of new and different flavors, including caramel, tapioca, apple, peach, even grapefruit. There are even ice cream mooncakes. Haagen dazs even makes them now.If you have a business, you usually get a bunch from suppliers etc. Sometimes they are given via gift certificates from certain shops or bakeries. Fancy hotels make their own also. I got a box given to me that was from the Shangri-la Hotel in Shanghai – where Yao Ming recently had his wedding banquet. What could be cooler? The fancier the origin, the better perceived in a very status conscious society.

As a side note, there are number of common dessert components in China which are basically unknown in the West. Red bean and lotus root are two that come to mind. These are both sweetened and used in various ways in desserts, much like chocolate in other places (you almost never see anything chocolate in a real Chinese restaurant – too sweet). The only place in the U.S. I’ve run into anything similar is at shaved ice stands in Hawaii where you can usually order red bean as an extra with your shaved ice.

Anyway, someone told me that they had read a Wall Street Journal article that said that mooncakes were analogous to fruitcakes in the U.S. at Christmas. I disagree. First of all, there is almost no one over 85 years old who likes fruitcakes, as far as I can tell. When we set out the mooncakes at our office party before Mid-Autumn Festival, they get downed in no time. While some people don’t like them, most people do. Second, I think fruit cakes are basically a thing of the past in the U.S. I haven’t seen one in quite a few years at Christmas. As was a child it seemed like there were always a few that my grandparents would pick at. They do get re-gifted a bit. The mooncake giving season starts 3-4 weeks before the holiday and the coupons in particular can see several different temporary owners. Whoever ends up with the coupon a few days before the holiday rushes out to redeem it for the mooncakes, since the coupons expire on the day before or the day of the holiday. The difference between mooncakes and fruitcakes is that the person who ends up with them is rarely disappointed.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

I was playing rock, paper, scissors with Ben and Abby the other day. The game started pretty normal, with the usual elements (rock, paper, scissors) and hierarchy. Then other things started to creep in. First it was ground, fire, rain and wind (which made me wonder if they were studying medieval medicine or alchemy in school), then gun and bomb got added. These things were added slowly at first and then in a flurry of one-upmanship. Nobody really seemed to mind if you added something. The relationship between rock, paper and scissors was always straight forward. The relationship between some of the others was pretty fluid and situational. As far as I could tell most of the time rain beats fire, as does wind, and ground beats rock. Gun beats rock, paper and scissors. Gun doesn’t seem to hold much sway over ground or wind, which seemed vaguely logical, but it doesn’t necessarily win either – it really depends on what the third person has. Bomb beats most anything, but it seems like if you use it too much everyone just gets mad, so it drops out after one or two uses. The winner was sometimes defined by who hadn’t won in a while or who was crying because of the injustice of it all.

Looking for work in all the wrong places

We were interviewing for a senior operational manager recently and a bunch of my staff settled on one candidate. I usually have them filter down a pool of candidates to a few before I talk to them, just to be more efficient. Anyway, I interviewed the top pick recently and wasn’t too impressed. I asked him about how to handle situations where the customer might not be too happy, for example. He just said that those situations shouldn’t happen since you should always make the customer happy. While that sounds good, it’s not very realistic and worried me.

In any case, I asked my HR manager about it and she shut the door to my office and began to tell me in a characteristically matter of fact way that we shouldn’t hire him because he was over 35 and unmarried. I was then informed that if a woman in China is 35 and unmarried that’s her business, but if a man is 35 and unmarried, he’s got to be a total loser. Either he’s a dismal failure in his professional life or a complete social incompetent. What if he’s very shy, star-crossed or maybe had bad luck?, I asked. No, in China even the bashful and unlucky will have plenty of options if they’ve got their act together, particularly in a big city like Shanghai, which she believes has many more available women than men. Why should a global company like ours hire someone so patently inadequate?, she asked.

The HR conversations here are really crazy some times. There are plenty of times when people say things that are so insanely un-PC or clearly biased that simply having said the thing about a person in the US during an interviewing process would almost force you to make them a job offer.