It is SO NICE to have somewhere to call home for a little while. I arrived in Okinawa, Japan two weeks ago and Julie has made me very at home here, which is good since I'll probably be here for about 2 more months before heading up to China. The first night here Julie was busy teaching a couple of language classes, so her friend Marc, a very professional military guy, picked me up at the airport and drove me to her apartment half an hour north of Naha. We imm...

Hanoi was very cool, I just had bad timing. The Chinese (Lunar) New Year began on February 17th so the few days before and pretty much the entire week after that date had the effect of shutting down the whole city, and from what I could tell, a lot of Asia in general. Everyone goes home for the New Year to be with their families, thus crowding the buses and trains and closing down all businesses. Instead of waiting around and killing time for a week+, I did a cou...

At the time, I wasn't terribly interested, nor happy, while I was in Hue. But in retrospect there was a good amount of cool architecture and interesting tombs. Sadly, everything worth checking out was outside the city and mainly only accessible through tours and the tours were utter crap. My so-called English speaking guide sounded like he probably had good grammar, but his accent made it so difficult to understand him that half of the time I was wandering of...

I thought Nha Trang was fun, but man, Hoi An just blew it out of the water. But before I start going on about Hoi An, I would just like to mention a few little things I like about Asia so far.Number ONE: I like how in every pot of standing water (intentional or not) there are always fish and/or snails.Number TWO: I like how, like Free Willy has become the name of the whale, New Year is always referred to as Happy New Year. For example, "On Happy New Year the...

Just a quick note on my new Scuba experience yesterday. Though definitely not as brilliant as Koh Tao was, diving off the coast of Nha Trang was really great. I saw a ton of new things that I hadn't seen yet, for example..., a school of shrimp fish, cowfish, a LION FISH, several flutefish, very adorable nudibranches and my favorite of them all, making my dive-life 1/3 of the way complete....dum duhduh DUM! Three whole live cuttlefish! I'd been wanting to ...