You aren’t my sunshine until you throw the ball

Greeting from stormy Ft. Lauderdale! I’ve been in America for training.

I’ve been here all week and don’t think the sun has come out more than once. As a native Floridian, I felt I should apologize to the other training participants who really thought that they were getting a trip to the Sunshine State.

When I was filling out my travel authorization, the money keeper joked that I couldn’t expense suntan lotion. I said um, it’s south Florida in fall. It’s hurricane season. Even at its best, it’s still rainy season.

Sometimes the rains have been brutal. I drove from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday and the weather was just horrific. My estimate for the drive had been maybe three hours and it came to closer to four and a half.

And I might have kicked up my mail during the trip. I have an E-Pass, but upon further review, I might not have had an *operating* E-Pass. Zippy drove down with me and we kind of realized that we hadn’t heard any beeping, which usually ensues at the little toll places.

And later, on the turnpike farther south, it turned into Sun Pass. I thought this was the same as E-Pass and continued to drive, but have since learned that they are not the same things.

How can they not be? How screwy is that? Two electronic payment methods for different parts of the same road that are not interchangeable? What year are we?

So anyway, I really fear that in a few weeks, I am going to be getting a lot of mail with bills for running toll booths. Oops. It was an honest mistake, but not one that will be fun to try and get out of.

Anyway, this training … it’s part of mandatory training, although the classes aren’t offered very often to people in my position. I was very thankful to get it, and in my first year to boot. Really, that’s unheard of. We had one person who’s been in service over 20 years (actually, now that I think about it, we had at least two) who hadn’t have the opportunity to take it.

I’d known when it would be offered and to whom it would be offered (it is once a year, but is only offered to people in my position who are serving in a particular part of the world) and had my eye out for it since I arrived at post, which was in December.

Initially, it was supposed to be in Bangkok, but there was some unrest there, so it got switched to Ft Lauderdale. I’d expressed to my supervisor my interest when I arrived and when I thought it was in Bangkok, so when I found out it was in America had been on record and got the nod. My office has three people in my position and we could only spare one, so making a point about it from early on helped my case, I think.

The training was interesting. One was personality types and how to work with them, but that confused me. It was Myers Briggs and I tested as an ISTJ, but other than the introvert part, the other three were “slight” indicators. And when we went over the different characteristics of each, I could relate to all of them. After being told it would come clearer the more we studied it, I feel I can honestly say I got more and more confused as the class went on.

One thing I was definitely strong about, though, was that people make the easiest things complicated. Some people just kept harping on made-up details.

And my God, they got hung up in the details.

We did some teamwork thing where you got in a circle and the instruction was to throw a ball across the circle to each person, with each person getting it once and then it went back to the original person. It could not touch the floor.

Those were the only directions.

Seemed simple to me. But would you believe people asked questions and for clarification for 10 solid minutes? How do we tell when someone catches the ball? How will we know if a person hasn't had the ball? Should people who've had the ball turn around? Cross their arms? What constitutes "crossing" the circle? Is there a time limit? What happens if it drops? Lots of discussion on each question plus many more. Questions I never would have thought of prompted much dialogue.

Geez, people. Don't make it complicated.

I and another person were just disgusted. The noticed and commented on having team members "disengaged." Someone asked her how to re-engage us. She was like, "ask them."

So the person asked what we should do. I was like, throw the damn ball. It's not that hard, and there's no rule that says you can't say "Hey, have you had it? I'll throw it to you next." There was no rule that you had to do it on the first try. It wasn't like we were blindfolded or something. It was easy. They just went on and on and made it so hard.

Just throw the damn ball.

A whole lot of nothing

That’s been my weekend. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Starting from my Guilin trip – two weekends ago – and about Thanksgiving, I am in town exactly three weekends. This was one of those, so I am fairly delighted to have done barely anything noteworthy.

I mean, I filled my time successfully, even finishing two books. I worked out as usual, then got in some decent sauna/steam room/swimming pool time both Saturday and Sunday. But beyond a quickie trip to the grocery store, which is about a five-minute walk away and doesn’t entail going into the outside world, I didn’t even leave my apartment.

Guess it’s kind of a respite in the middle of a storm. Not exactly the eye of the hurricane, since in another three weeks I have another weekend off, but a nice break.

My long-awaited Walmart orders arrived. They were placed about three weeks apart but arrived on the same day. I think they all go to Hong Kong and get pilfered through to make sure everything is able to be imported with no questions. I say this because one of the three giant bags of Cheetoes I’d ordered came in a plastic Ziplock-ish bag. It had been popped open. The two bags of sugar were also in their own private locked bags.

So the biggest noteworthy things going on during my non-noteworthy weekend have been eating Cheetoes and LifeSavers. And, trust me, I’ve done quite a bit of both.

I did make an effort to share. I had two people over here this week to watch a movie. One of the pair’s husband has been out of town two weeks and I think she was lonely, so I invited her,  then asked one of my other colleagues at work to join us, too.

I let them choose the movie and both were kind of shocked at the number that I own. I honestly didn’t mean to bring the whole collection with me, but I misunderstood the packout instructions and somehow thought I’d be able to go through them later and thin the herd. That didn’t happen and I have pretty much everything I own, although not all of them play in the disc player that came with the apartment.

After about 10 minutes, one of them picked up “9 to 5” and the other, who’s maybe 26, hadn’t heard of it. So we went with it.

Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I watched it, but it is still so very funny. It’s from 1980, and it’s kind of frightening to know things really haven’t changed a whole lot.

In the office scenes, though, there are no computer monitors on any of the desks. The copier that Jane Fonda tackles is that giant behemoth thing, and I swear I remember those.

Lily Tomlin is hysterical, but I think Dolly Parton rules that movie. Man, she is just awesome. Definition of spunk. They don’t make them like her anymore.

It was a nice evening to just sit and chill and do a movie. I’d had to work late that night and had to skip the workout routine, so it made it a non-wasted evening and I got to be social at the same time.

I’m way better being social in small groups than in large ones. There was a party on Saturday night at someone’s apartment and although I’d planned to go, I wound up opting out. The theme was “hipster,” something that I am decidedly *not.* And it only takes a fraction of the blink of an eye to make that decision.

So I bailed even before it started; I’m just not a party-goer. I can do the dinner parties and such, but the let’s-get-drunk stuff just isn’t for me.

And sometimes you really do just need a weekend off.

Cruising along in the Halong Bay

Cruises appeal to lots of people, but they don’t sound all that great to me. I don’t like the idea of sitting around and doing nothing, even as beautiful scenery goes by. Boats are awesome, but they’re tools to me. You don’t sit idly on a boat. You fish from one, dive from another and get hauled in an inner tube from another.

Vegas shows are for Vegas. So are casinos. Swimming can be done from a boat, but I’m not sure why anyone would want to swim in a boat. It’s contradictory to me.

And I don’t like sitting around with nothing to do. To me, cruises have no point.

But I thought I’d give it a try anyway, just for one night.

From what I read, the big thing worth doing in Vietnam was to see the Halong Bay by boat, and the only way to do it by boat was to take a cruise, so I figured this would be a good test of whether or not I could adapt to a cruise.

Although I slept pretty good in my little room, the answer to that is still a resounding no, but the bay was absolutely gorgeous. I’d definitely recommend the one-night cruise. (They had a two-night, and even the drunken Australian group acknowledged that it got boring the second day.)

The bay is one of the Seven Wonders of the Something World; not sure which category it falls under. It’s just this fairly peaceful (there were lots of tour boats) large area of water with mountainous rocks, or maybe they were little mountains. Apparently, from the sea, the rocks appear like a wall, but as you get closer, you realize they’re spread out and you can go in between them with plenty of room to spare.

I didn’t see any critters like goats or things living on the rocks – how would they have gotten there? – but there were, according to some sign, 76 species of birds. There were also lots of fish, apparently, because my highlight was getting in a little rowboat thing and touring “floating fishing,” which was a village of fishermen who lived on the water.

Their houses looked like little floating dollhouses, and it was cool to see people hanging out in hammocks, seeing laundry hanging from a boat or a noticing a couple of dogs wandering around on the docks.

Up close, the mountain things were incredible awesome. They had lots of foliage growing out of them, which was odd because there was no dirt, only rock. It was just beautiful.

We had another land excursion in the afternoon, where we hung out on a little beach for about 45 minutes. Some folks swam and others kayaked, but I just waded.

I would have loved to kayak, but you had to have two people and I was by myself.

And that was a different level of awkward. It wasn’t a higher level, just a different one. Everyone else was in twos or fours, for the most part, and it was very odd and uncomfortable to just go plop down by a small group at lunch, which was the first thing we did on the cruise.

When we boarded, I was walking behind an American couple. Young, but early 30s young, not college young. The woman, whose name was Rowena, was talking to her husband and telling him something about how the tour director told her to “go ask her husband” and apparently that was a joke between them.

With his sunglasses on, her husband, Jonathan, was a dead ringer for Billy Currington. Without them and with his regular glasses, though, he looked a little more like the college professor that he actually was, but only a little more. Messy hair and unshaven can only translate so much to professor of quantum whatever it was.

I sat next to them for lunch, and chatted a bit. They were nice, but I didn’t want to encroach on their vacation, so I did try to sit elsewhere for the next meal, but they got re-routed to me again to make room for a larger group at the table where they’d been seated.

They were really nice and at the second meal, we speculated about some of the other groups. One in particular was odd – three men, late 40s to maybe early 60s – traveling with one Asian woman. The American couple had some wild theories, but being the reporter I am, I just went over and asked them.

They were three Italian friends (two attorneys and a knee surgeon) who had hired a guide. On the “floating fishing” side trip, I wound up in a boat with them and they were pretty fun. Our rower was an older lady and these guys – Hairy, Alan Arkin and No Pants, I named them – were pretty heavy and they took over for her, almost capsizing us in the process.

Hairy spoke some English and he was the one from whom I gleaned the information. When I told him I was from Florida, he said he’d been there; he’d spent two weeks in Vero Beach a few years ago. That’s random.

We also had a group of four English speakers. My transport from the hotel was with them, and I was exhausted and trying to doze and place their accents on the two-hour ride to the bay. I was completely baffled because I couldn’t tell if they had Kiwi, Aussie, Scottish or English accents. One would talk and I think I had it, then another would answer and it would sound different. Yet they were all together.

Turns out, they all worked for an American company but were from all over. Specifically, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Britain. So I felt a lot better about my ability to place accents.

One couple was from Australia, and we also had two couples from England. The two were traveling together, and one was on their honeymoon. Now, why you would bring another couple along on your honeymoon I never figured out, and didn’t have a chance to ask.

A Spanish couple was also along, and I felt really bad for them because no one spoke Spanish. The American couple knew some words and conversed a little, but it was pretty much sign language until Hairy started speaking Italian to them and they understood.

That was pretty amusing, because an Australian couple had been sitting with them at dinner and I could tell they were really into trying to communicate. Australian Woman had told me the Spanish couple was traveling for six months and would be going to Australia soon. When we realized that Hairy could communicate, the lady asked him to find out when they were coming to Australia.

Well, the heart of communication is not only relaying the message, but having it understood. When Hairy got the reply, it turned out that the couple was not traveling for six months. They had never taken a longer trip than two weeks.

So no idea what happened there, but it clearly had been a fun conversation. Just not one that was understood on both sides.

Playing in traffic

I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike. Before last weekend, anyway. It might have been sometime during PC. I mean, definitely, I rode one then because we were all issued them, but they were such pains in the butt to deal with that I turned mine in. Before that, I’m not sure. I remember Blazing saddles in San Francisco, and that was the year James was born, so … gosh, 10 years ago?

But it’s true. You never forget. Or almost never, anyway. One of my colleagues told me a story of her first days at college, when she opted for a bike and totally forgot, crashing big time on campus.

But I guess that’s not normal. Most people don’t forget, including myself and my traveling companion from the past weekend.

Didn't seem too safe, but was gorgeous.

Finally, I ventured within China, taking a one-hour flight to this place called Guilin and neighboring Yangshuo. I’ve absolutely no idea of the history or anything like that, but it was an easy getaway, and one my traveling companion had tried to make twice before without success. She wanted to go, and I agreed to join her.

After some scheduling issues, we both wound up on the same flight and got there with few hitches. Upon arrival, though – another hitch. The hostel I’d reserved in the neighboring city was supposed to send a cab for us, and when we walked out of baggage claim, there was not a guy holding up a sign with my name. And of course, I’d written down the hotel address, but not the phone number.

So Traveling Companion, who had wanted to visit Guilin more than Yangshuo anyway, talked to the tourist people in the airport and arranged for us to hire a car and driver for the day for about the cost of the cab I’d tried to hired, then would deposit us at the bus station, where cheap buses ran every 20 minutes or so.

It helped very much that TC speaks extremely good Chinese. She is American, but her parents were from Vietnam, and she could blend in a lot more easily than me. In fact, on at least three occasions people asked if she was my tour guide, which both of us found to be a little offensive. Another time, someone complimented her on her “extremely good English.” Uh, TC is from DC. English is her native language.

Don't stop, TC!

But her excellent Chinese helped me a lot, and it solidified that I am just not about to venture into China alone. I’m not equipped to do it. I’m now looking at a package tour that another colleague did with his family and am thinking that’s the way to go. It goes to Beijing, X’ian, Shanghai and Chengdu, which is pretty much what I want to see. There’s another western city I’d also like to visit, but that’d be a fairly distant No. 5 on the list, so I’m OK if I can’t get to that one.

Another thing I learned this trip, though, is that I really am used to traveling alone. It’s a lot easier to plan for what only you want to do. I had a good time on the trip, but did do some things that weren’t on my list and weren’t all that impressive but were kinda pricey.

Or just hokey. One thing that looked good on paper was a “cave.” We paid something like $15 to see stalactites and stalagmites and I swear it was completely fake. Don’t get me wrong; it was a nice replica but was being sold as the real thing. Caves generally aren’t formed with stamped concrete flooring or have impressive lighting features installed.

Fake but cool. This one was called "Palm Tree"

That one was a little cheaper about the two others we did that day, but we discovered the reason: they took several opportunities to hawk merchandise. Like hard core selling. I was immune to it, as everything was conducted in Chinese, but TC had to deal with it. I just feigned total ignorance, even though I really did know what was going on.

Really, in all that we did, they took those digital photos and tried to pressure us (meaning everyone, not just the Americans) to buy them. And I’m just not interested.

The second day, in Yangshuo, our bamboo raft driver guy was the worst. I never really talk about where I’m from or what I do, but I guess TC answered the “where are you from thing” (after explaining that she wasn’t my tour guide) and the guy, according to her interpretation, just started in on if our car driver had told us “the rules.” She said he went on to lecture her that we were obligated to tip him, and that of the 180 RMB ($30) we’d given for the one-hour raft, he only saw about $5 of it. He also told her that we had to buy the photos that they took. He pushed the raft up to the little hut where they were hawking and practically pushed us out of the chairs to view them. He was pissed that we didn’t, and even more pissed that we didn’t at the second stop, either. But he didn’t even try on the third – seriously, they hawked these things three times during a one-hour thing.

That one upset TC far more than it did me, but then, I didn’t have to hear it in a language that I could understand. He went on and on and she just muttering that she wished he’d shut up. Eventually he did and I thought the scenery was just gorgeous, but I don’t know that she enjoyed it at all. She kept mentioning how the guy ruined her vacation. I blew it off.

She did, however, like the little toboggan thing. This was the quick way down from a mountain. You go up a cable car – a cable car that does not seem very steady, let me tell you. But it’s really pretty. We got about a quarter of the way up and I started hearing these clack-clack-clack sounds and couldn’t figure it out until we crossed over what looked like a metal log flume without water.

It was "pretty deep."

Halfway up the cable car, there was a platform and people who were coming down were getting off. I saw off to the side it was the start of the toboggan ride. We continued up the mountain on the little cable car thing, explored up there (there wasn’t much, but great views) and came down.

The little cable car cab thing did not stop, which freaked TC out. I didn’t see the big deal (how could it stop, anyway?) to just jump out of the way, but TC didn’t quite understand it. She did do better getting off on the way down, but she might have jumped off in her hurry to get on the toboggan, and really, who could blame her? It was SO cool. Like, I want to join the Olympic team. It was SO much fun.

They were one-seaters and for some reason – probably because we were American – we had to follow a guy in front and pace ourselves. We weren’t allowed to go full throttle. TC went next and I followed. It was just a lot of fun. We both got off and wanted to go again, but not for the price. Even on the flight back, we were still talking about that. I’d have paid for a two-hour pass or something and just gone up and down as much as I could. It was, by far, the highlight because it was so much fun.

We did a couple of other things on her list and then headed out to Yangshuo. The next morning, we did the bamboo rafting with the extortion guy and I finally got some good pictures. They key to that, of course, is remembering to bring your camera as well as the batteries but also remember to charge them. I got it right this time, which was good because it really is just gorgeous.

View from the raft

I love tropical foliage. This time, it wasn’t even just flowers, but just green. At one of the places, there was a group of trees and all had ferns growing all over them. They looked like hairy trees. There was also a banyan tree that was purported to be 1,000 years old. It was quite huge.

We ran into that one as we were biking to Moon Hill. Yep, biking. TC was terrified. She said the only two other times she’d biked in China she’d almost been killed, and Lord, looking at the traffic in Yangshuo, I was kind of worried about it myself.

Even though the city isn’t all that large, traffic is dangerous because there really aren’t rules. You can be on a two-lane road and be in a vehicle that is passing a vehicle that is passing a vehicle. A car flashing its lights means “Move, now!” and a blast from the horn usually means “OK, I’m passing you now; fair warning.” Big trucks, tour buses, cars, motorcycle, scooters, bikes and pedestrians are all in their own kind of patterns, and those don’t always include going in the direction you’d normally think of as being legal.

1,000 year-old Banyan tree

It’s sort of terrifying, especially when roundabouts are concerned. And TC and I were on these decrepit bikes, but we both eventually emerged unscathed, if a bit filthy. I almost bit it once, when I was trying to pull over and make sure TC was still with me. I was going a bit faster than I thought and almost crashed into the curb, which would have most certainly left me with a visit to a hospital, but it worked out OK.

Give me the motorcycle with someone else driving any day, though. It’s much easier to sit back and ride than it is to make the decisions: Does that car see me? Is it going to pull out? Why is that scooter headed directly toward me? Oh, gosh, a huge rock pile in my lane while a rickshaw, a scooter, a car and a bus are all passing me at the same time. Can I risk moving over 18 inches and trust that they will shift, too, even if them shifting is going to be in the path of that oncoming tour bus?

So while the bike ride wasn’t what I would classify as relaxing, it was a good way to get around for about 3-4 hours and see some stuff. I think the Moon Rock place was 13 kilometers from the city, and we were staying a bit on the other side of it, so we got in a workout. By the time we got to Moon Rock, though, we were done and ready to turn around. We didn’t even pay to go into that park. We went in and I snapped a photo and we just kind of looked at each other said decided that was enough for the day.

Heading back into town wasn’t near as hard for some reason, but it was still harrowing to maneuver through the city. We broke up the ride home with dinner, though.

Yangshuo and Guilin are known for rice noodles, or some variation thereof. When we landed in Guilin,, we were hungry and asked the driver to stop and let us grab something to eat, and he took us to this place where we both got a dish of rice noodles. It was quite good, so before we left for Yangshuo, we asked him to let us grab another bite before taking us to the bus station. Rice noodles again. Very good, and quite a bargain at about .50 a bowl.

But when we left on Sunday morning for the bamboo rafting and asked our different driver to stop and let us grab some breakfast and he took us to another place where we got rice noodles, we felt that was enough and on the way back from the bike ride we got something different. (Beef, fried rice and some kind of green thing I’ve had before that’s really good but I don’t know what it is.)

And on the way to the airport, we were transferring from the taxi to the bus and decided to grab a bite, we wound up in front of a rice noodle place. Ate five meals while on vacation, and four of them were identical. Those four meals totaled about $3.50, though, so there’s that.

And they were good.

Next weekend is Hanoi.