hello! time for photos! but before that, if you are me, you have just been served a complimentary moist towelette to freshen up along with my coffee. Now that I've freshed up, I can continue! Moist towelettes are given everywhere! What I thought was just regulated to slightly fancy Chinese restaurants is actually a full blown Asian phenomenon, and by Asia I really mean Ho Chi Minh City and the airport in Taiwan (based on those two experiences I can make generalizations for the entire continent, didn't you get the memo?)
To the left here is a picture of a tie I found being sold in a gift shop in the Chiang Kai-Shek airport in Taiwan. As you can see, the design is made up of the repeated images of shirtless brown men wearing turbans. Those of you who delight in ironic appreciations of the world, would hopefully enjoy this. That is one thing I miss. One's sense of irony is hard to translate across different cultures and languages, since so much of it is based on common points of references and what not. Even my roommate doesn't get it...she even hates Arrested Development!
Now the photo to the right is the view from my hotel room. I live on the 7th floor of a nice hotel. It's interesting being here. On one hand, I don't like how much it reeks of privilege, the fact that this is my lodgings for two months. It's strange the idea of having a staff cater to you, having your room cleaned and your sheets changed everyday by someone who is not you. What I do like is the people watching, seeing all the different people stay and leave the hotel. as a result i also like getting familiar with the people who work here, it's nice seeing some familiar faces everyday. My cousin Tung used to have a bar where the hotel currently is. By coincidence, a friend of his from Myanmar was also staying here when I arrived, so I would bump into my cousin in the mornings and stuff like that. He says that this is a hotel more for men than women...that basically this is a love hotel (where men bring women. i have seen older rich looking men with younger women, but also i've seen families staying here, and women staying here. however, it is true that down the hall there are raucous partying noises at night. the sketchiness stays out of our room so i don't really mind. tung thinks i should stay somewhere else due to said sketchiness...however doesn't that make him rather sketchy because he put his friend in this hotel?
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