Bill Murray's Blog, page 38
April 21, 2019
Morning Coffee with Marching Band
On your first visit or two to HCMC you’ll need to acclimate to the differences in personal space; here, lots more stuff is arrayed across every square meter in a mostly agreeable, user friendly way. I’m a laggard though at adjusting to the difference in aural personal space.
We’re staying on the 13th-floor of a 21-floor building and we might just as well have been on hand at the Saturday night invite-only show in the skybar above us, live Viet Pop invading our personal earspace the same way a plane flies over your house’s airspace. With utter impunity.
This morning at 7:00 there’s a live concert down on the street, sounds like it’s right in front of the Eximbank, horns and marching band-drums. Can’t see them and they never seem to march away. Unique hour for a concert, but it’s an agreeable accompaniment to strong ground Vietnamese coffee, strained through a .
April 20, 2019
View from My Window
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Light traffic, Quán 1, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo a day from a long trip around the world. All collected in Around the World Slowly at EarthPhotos.com. From our home for a month in Saigon.
April 19, 2019
Quotes: On Patience, and Resilience
“it is sometimes tiring to try to get the Vietnamese to do something which is, after all, for their own good (or so we think . . .). On the other hand, when I step back just a little to look at everything, it seems to me that the Vietnamese have taken our overbearing presence rather well over the last few years. We arrive here with no knowledge of the country or of the situation and immediately start giving advice, some of which we can really turn almost into orders because of the materials and money and transportation that we fully control. I think that no American would stand for such a deep and continuing interference in our affairs, even if it appeared that survival was at stake. Yet the Vietnamese accept it, and with rather good grace.”
– Richard Holbrooke as a young foreign service officer in Vietnam, quoted by George Packer in The Longest Wars in Foreign Affairs magazine.
“This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them—either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.”
– on Saigon, 1965 from Tatjana Soli in The Lotus Eaters
War as a Theme in Saigon Fine Arts Museum
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All these and other photos from our long round-the-world-trip posted here, at EarthPhotos.com.
Let’s Get Down to Breakfast
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Love this part of the world. Welcome to Saigon.
April 18, 2019
Arctic Route
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Travel Time, two posts back, had it about right. Regulatory confidence in Boeing’s abilities to fly on two jet engines over the pole produced this flight path for us on Tuesday/Wednesday. The flight was Air China CA818 Dulles to Beijing, fourteen hours in a Boeing 777.
Never having seen Hudson Bay in mid-April, I’m here to testify that there’s not a thing down there, no sign of Churchill and polar bears, just icy patches with streams to the bay and snow fields beyond.
Washington Dulles to Beijing was followed by Beijing to HCMC where everybody is wilting after several 97 degree days.
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April 16, 2019
Star Alliance IAD
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Enjoying the Star Alliance lounge at IAD. Pretty generic lounge but it’s branded as Turkish Airlines and serves pita, hummus, baba ganoush, a Moroccan vegetable soup and some nice vegetarian sides. Pleasure to touch with Turkey-world on the way to Southeast Asia.
April 12, 2019
Travel Time
CS&W will be mostly quiet for a few days as we relocate to a different part of the world, beginning our round-the-world trip number four. By the end of next week we’ll turn up in Ho Chi Minh for an extended stay, and we’ll see you then. Here’s the long bit:
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Graphic from weekendblitz.com.
April 9, 2019
Photo a Day, Vietnam, Day 15
A photo a day from Vietnam ahead of a month in Saigon. Here, the Continental Hotel. Graham Greene spent an extended stay here, and the Continental featured in his The Quiet American. It was also the location of the Time and Newsweek bureaux during the war, and our home on our first trip to Vietnam twenty-some years ago.
That’s the 19th century French-built Notre Dame Cathedral lit up on the horizon, above, seen in a different view here:
These daily photos are collecting all in one place on Earthphotos.com. We’ll be on the road for a few months, so we’ve called our EarthPhotos archive page Around the World, Slowly. Join us.
April 5, 2019
Photo a Day, Vietnam, Day 14
Looks like we’re restocking cabbages here at the floating market at Can Tho, Vietnam.
A photo a day from Vietnam ahead of a month in Saigon. These daily photos are collected here, on Earthphotos.com.
