#Daughter From Danang

[xtruss]

Living in Two Cultures! The Asian American and Pacific Islander Experience

— American 🇺🇸 Experience | NOVA—PBS

Andrew Lam is a California-based journalist, short story writer, and National Public Radio commentator. In this interview, he shares his thoughts on Vietnam and America.

How did you come to the U.S.? I left Vietnam on April 28, 1975, two days before communist tanks rolled into Saigon. My family and I were airlifted in a C-130 cargo plane out of Tan Son Nhat airport and a few hours before Vietcong shells bombarded the runway and effectively stopped all other flights from taking off. My father was an officer in the South Vietnamese government and he got us passage out of the country. He himself stayed behind and left on a Navy ship on April 30, 1975 when he heard on the radio that General Duong Van Minh, acting president of South Vietnam, had surrendered.

I remember spending a few hours at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, wondering what had just happened. I also remember eating a ham sandwich and drinking milk, my first American meal. It was the best sandwich I ever had in my life though I didn't like the milk. Next we flew to Guam where a refugee camp was already set up to receive tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. I was confused, frightened, and from all available evidence -- the khaki army tents in the Guam refugee camp, the scorching heat, the long lines for army food rations, the fetid odor of the communal latrines, the freshly bulldozed ground under my sandaled feet -- I was also homeless. I was 11 years old.

My family and I spent three weeks in Guam and then we went on to spend another week in Camp Pendleton in Southern California. It was freezing there. I had never been out of Vietnam before, and it being a tropical country, well, I was not used to the weather, to say the least. We all wore army jackets given to us by the GIs and mine reached down to my ankles. Luckily, my family was among the first few families who were sponsored out of the camp. My mother's sister was living in San Francisco at the time and she drove down and took us back to San Francisco with her. I went to summer school and entered the 7th grade in autumn and became an American.

Andrew Lam

What was it like for Vietnamese in America when you came? What is it like today? There were no Vietnamese in San Francisco to speak of when I came here in 1975. There was my aunt's family and five other families, and there were diplomats or foreign students who remained in the U.S.. That's how small the Vietnamese community was here.

In school, kids always asked whether I had killed anybody in Vietnam or had seen dead bodies and helicopters being blown up. It was interesting: Vietnam was the first television war and though traumatized by that war, everyone in America knows something about Vietnam. It gave me an entry to the American imagination that was not otherwise available to a kid, say, from Sri Lanka. The truth was that I had not killed anyone but yes, I have seen dead bodies, and had seen burnt out helicopters and villages during the war, being an army brat. I became a story teller. But after a few years, I fit in so well with my American life that I stopped telling my stories. I stopped speaking Vietnamese altogether. Not until college, not until I started dreaming about Vietnam and my childhood again, not until I wanted to become a writer that words came back, language came back, dreams came back, Vietnam came back.

The America that received my family in the mid-70s was not an America that could have imagined a Pacific Rim future. It was an America which had retreated from the Far East, traumatized by its latest adventure abroad. Vietnamese living in America had little access to Vietnam. It was the height of the Cold War. It took six months, if at all, for a letter to reach that country. We were cut off from our homeland in the United States. We adjusted quickly to life in America because of it.

Luckily the first wave of refugees were among the crème de la crème, as they say, of the south -- doctors, lawyers, government officers, professors -- and, having experienced far less trauma than what Vietnamese boat people experienced later on, and having no experience of life under communism (where children of the bourgeois class were deprived of schooling) we adjusted rather quickly in the United States. But we also managed to create a little community and gathered for various occasions, most of which were very political. We rallied each April 30 in front of City Hall in San Francisco and demanded freedom and democracy for Vietnam and so on. We celebrate Tet, Vietnamese new year, together. We mourn the loss of homeland and the fate of being an exile. In other words, we share a particular history, and were very close.

Andrew Lam as a child

Much has changed a quarter of a century later, in a globalized and post-Cold War world...

Today I can e-mail my cousin in Vietnam and I can send him money via a bank. I do not have to hide it in a tube of toothpaste. And movement back and forth between Vietnam and the U.S. is the norm after normalization. Vietnamese newspapers in the States freely advertise flights to Vietnam and phone cards so you can call home to talk to your grandmother anytime you like. If we all considered ourselves exiles in the late 70s, only a small percentage do so now. Now the picture of the Vietnamese community in the United States is a very diverse one. There are still a staunchly anti-communist faction, especially those who suffered life in re-education camps and whose family members were killed by the Hanoi government. But there are also foreign exchange students, tourists from Vietnam, American-born Vietnamese who have no memories of the war, people who go back and forth, and even those who went back to live and work in their homeland, and so on. It's estimated that more than 200,000 Vietnamese living abroad return to Vietnam every year during Tet. I myself have gone back eight times as a journalist. I am more familiar with Saigon than Los Angeles.

America, too, has changed dramatically. Years ago, for instance, it was impossible to find fish sauce, the prime element of Vietnamese cooking. Now you can go to Safeway and get it. Vietnamese and other Asian populations in California have indelibly changed its cultural landscape. America is more accepting of Asian cultures than ever before. When the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh spoke at Berkeley last year, there was standing room only, and most of the people who attended were white Americans. Buddhism is on the rise here and the longing for the Far East is growing. Witness the number of Asian directors now working in Hollywood. What was once considered private or ethnic culture is moving into the public sphere... I was interviewed on NPR when Campbell soup decided to make Vietnamese pho -- beef and noodle soup. "How did you feel?" The interviewer asked. "Well," I said, "it seems inevitable. Think of pizza and burritos. Grandma still makes it best, but in America, if it's good, it's appropriated and mass produced." If I associated pho with a particular geography, I have to change my mind. It's an age of open borders and perceptions are shifting very quickly.

As a journalist, what is your perspective on Vietnamese-American community issues? There are several issues that the community is struggling with. There's the language problem. The older generation speaks Vietnamese and the younger English. This is particularly problematic when a person from the older generation speaks no English and the younger person speaks no Vietnamese. How can you communicate? There is a communication gap. Many books written by Vietnamese in the United States are written in Vietnamese, but a generation of Vietnamese born in the United States can not access them. Many turn to libraries as a way to find out about their own history. But books in libraries don't address the South Vietnamese experience. The South Vietnamese are losers in history and very little is devoted to their plight. North Vietnamese have the upper hand. Hanoi rewrites history and that history is now being accessed in the U.S. I met several Vietnamese American kids who asked me to tell them how they got here. "Don't your parents tell you?" I said. And they said: "No. All they said is that we lost a war and that's why we're here. I want to know more." And they should know more. The responsibility of the older generation is to translate or have their works and testimonies, i.e.. life in re-education camps, boat peoples' experiences, adjustment to American life -- translated so that it's accessible to the new generation.

The other issue is the question all diasporas tend to ask: how to sustain a community over time? There are several diasporas that the Vietnamese community can learn from: the Chinese, the Jewish, the Indian. These have been in existence much longer and can provide models for fledgling ones.

What are some of the areas of difference between Vietnamese and American cultures? I think Americans are fond of saying "I love you." Vietnamese are not. Vietnamese don't share words of affections very easily. In fact, it was unusual to see in Daughter from Danang the mother being overly affectionate and saying "I love you" repeatedly. My mother who loves me dearly never says "I love you" in such a way.

It's more typical for Vietnamese to demonstrate affections through gestures. When I went home to visit my parents, my mother would fry a fish as it's my favorite dish. And to show her I love her I would have to eat the whole fish. When I won a journalism award a few years ago, my father was very proud. But he couldn't find the words in Vietnamese to say this so finally he shook my hand (which in itself was very unusual) and said in English: "I'm very proud of you, son." It was the first time I heard him saying something like this and it was in English. In some way, English is used when Vietnamese words fail us. And they tend to be words like proud or love.

Many American-born Vietnamese have complained to me that their parents don't love them. "They never say 'I love you' to me," they'd say. But they don't understand: it's not the standard practice in Vietnam. You have to read affection through gestures and actions.

When I first came to the United States, I also failed to look at teachers in the eyes. In Vietnam it's a sign of disrespect when you look at someone in the eyes. In the United States you are shifty if you don't look at people in the eyes. Even now I tend to shift my focus when I look at someone too long in the eyes. I feel as if I am invading their privacy. Strange but true.

What cultural differences have caused the most difficulty for Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S.? Vietnamese culture puts a strong emphasis on being part of the We. Your individualism is below the need of the many. This is how families survived traditionally. Children are duty-bound to take care of their families. When I went to school at Berkeley, more than half of the Vietnamese student population majored in computer science and electrical engineering. Many told me they didn't want to. It was competitive and difficult. A few wanted to be artists or architects and so on, but their parents were poor or were still in Vietnam. They needed to find a solid footing in America in order to help out the rest of the family.

America, on the other hand, tells you to look out for number 1. It tells you to follow your dream, to have individual ambition. Take care of yourself first. Go on a quest. The Vietnamese American conflict is one where he has to negotiate between his own needs and dreams with that of his family.

I myself was lucky. My parents found jobs and moved us to the suburbs when I was in high school. I didn't have to make money to send home to someone in Vietnam. I was the youngest in the family. There were no big demands on me. I was free to decide what to do with my life. But if my parents had been stuck behind in Vietnam and living in the New Economic Zone, I would have been an electrical engineer by now.

In some way, for Asian immigrants, to learn to negotiate between the I and the We is the most important lesson to learn, a skill much needed in order to appease to both cultures.

Immigrants always face the challenge of how much to assimilate to American culture and how much of their native culture to keep. How has this played out in the Vietnamese American community? I think in many ways normalization with Vietnam has helped boost a revival of Vietnamese culture dramatically. I know young Vietnamese Americans who went back, or visited for the first time, and came back speaking Vietnamese whereas they didn't speak a word before. These totally Americanized kids suddenly feel connected to another place and it gives them an edge over their American counterparts.

I think all Americans would love to have another country connected to their history. Ireland, Italy, China, whatever. To have a hyphen connected to your identity makes you feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated, a bridge to some other place. You have something that you can call your own. This is a recent phenomenon. Before the idea of a melting pot was still the aim, at least by the institutions. But now it's chic to be ethnic, to speak another language, to feel connected to another culture, to another set of values, to a sensibility. It's a post-modern age where options are far more available than they were to someone who lived in America in the mid-20th century. And far more individualistic. You pick and choose. Stay traditional as you want or be as modern as you want. Options are available at your beck and call.

Besides, the pressure to assimilate is no longer as heavy as before. If anything, all Americans are learning to assimilate to new cultures that keep showing up at the American shores. In San Francisco, blacks, hispanics, whites, all know how to use chopsticks. Go to Bolsa in Orange County and see non Vietnamese eating pho and buying Vietnamese groceries. My mother complains that I speak to much English in the house, but as the most conservative member of our family she, too, has changed. She goes to the gym, does aerobics. She prays to Buddha, but bets on football. I don't watch football, but she's fanatic. So who's more American than whom?

Is it true that one of the areas of cultural divergence is the relationship with authorities such as police? Yes, that's true. The problem is that in Vietnam you cannot trust the authorities. In dictatorial countries, there's no good news when the police come calling. You function best when the authorities leave you alone. And worse, in poor countries like Vietnam, petty corruption is a daily event. A cop might stop you and say that you have violated some traffic law. What he means is: "Give me five dollars for breakfast and I'll let you go." The idea that the authorities are on your side is such a novelty that it does not occur to the newly arrived refugee or immigrant to the United States. If you call the police they might arrest you instead of the criminal. There's always a risk as everything could be deemed illegal in Vietnam (and nothing is). Everything can be settled with grease money.

It takes a while to learn to live in a civil society. It takes a while to have the idea that the police work for you sink in. At least that's the idea. In some neighborhoods, the inner city, for example, that may not be true. Also, many Vietnamese are afraid to fill out forms. Census or otherwise. They have this fear that the government will know everything about them and will use the information against them. And even in the United States, given the post 9-11 scenario, there is some valid justification for that fear.

Another is in the difference in health and mental health issues? There's a big difference. You must understand that traditional Vietnamese are Confucian bound. We worship ancestors. We light incense and pray to Grandpas and Grandmas long dead. That is to say, we talk to ghosts. Once I worked as an interpreter and there was a case where a Vietnamese woman was suffering from depression and told the psychologist that she kept seeing her dead husband. He thought she was having some kind of disorder. But I told him it's actually typical. Mind you, I was stepping out of bounds as an interpreter, but I couldn't help myself. My grandmother, when she was alive, saw her dead husband, in dreams, or late at night sitting in his old chair for a brief moment, and there was nothing wrong with her. Practically all old people talk like that lady. It was a way for her to say she mourns her losses. It took a while, but I think the American psychologist came around. They have to: they can't put an entire population in the insane asylum, can they?

The other classic example in terms of health problems is the one that I'm sure that's well recorded in medical school. A little Vietnamese boy showed up in school with red marks on his back. "Who did this to you?" the teacher asked. "My father," he answered. His father was immediately arrested. Having no idea how to explain what he did, his English limited, and lacking money to hire a lawyer, he ended up serving time in jail. He was so frustrated he hung himself. What he did was a typical thing: Vietnamese practice cao gio -- a kind of therapeutic massage for people who come down with a cold. They scrape the skin on your back with a spoon or a coin, using an ointment. He wasn't abusing his child. He was helping him, but nobody believed the man.

Had the U.S. prepared at all for addressing any "culture shock" that the airlifted Vietnamese children might have experienced? I think there was an assumption on the part of the Americans who wanted to adopt those Vietnamese children. That they will assimilate and become Americans. That they will forget Vietnam. That their personal history is not as important as the new reality in which they found themselves. What they were not prepared for is the hunger of memories. Many of those babies may adjust well to America as adults but they also long for their Vietnamese past. They want to know where they come from, who are their relatives, and how can they learn to connect to that past. They will always look, they will always search, they will never be satisfied until they have all the fragments of their life put together. It's an inevitable human impulse.

What parts of Vietnamese culture do you see thriving in Vietnamese-American communities? The wedding is the biggest event in Vietnamese American community. It's the time where people dress up, meet, exchange information and show off their children, meet new people, and so on. Vietnamese in the U.S. live for weddings and a typical wedding has about 300 people at the reception. Five hundred people came to my brother's wedding and it's not the biggest. People invite themselves. They want to come.

Vietnamese newspapers, television shows and magazines are thriving. So much so that the San Jose Mercury News has a Vietnamese language weekly. Vietnamese read quite a bit and they thirst for information regarding Vietnam. Go to any Vietnamese restaurants in the Bay Area and you'll see three or four give-away newspapers full of news on Vietnam.

Vietnamese love their Vietnamese singers. Some Vietnamese American singers make quite a bit of money singing in Vietnamese communities in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, New York. Tickets can go as high as $40 a pop.

Food is thriving. Vietnamese restaurants are packed. I know a Ph.D. student, an American-born Vietnamese. She speaks very little Vietnamese and is a feminist and a vegan. But she has a dark confession: she eats pho soup. Sometimes she can't help herself. She's got to have that beef broth

In a newspaper article, Heidi Bub's adoptive mother, Ann Neville, dismissed the importance of cultural differences, saying, "...we're all part of the human race..." Do you agree? I think we are all part of the human race, but differences will always remain. That's what makes the human race interesting. If everything is merged all you get is a bland, uninteresting picture. It's easy to dismiss other cultures when yours is the dominant one. It's easy to dismiss other sensibilities when you assume yours is the only one that's important, and that it's the only one that matters. We're all part of the human race, but we are different by degree -- and that difference will never go away.

In the film, Heidi rejects her brother's request for financial help. Is Heidi's response personal or cultural? It's expected of you to help your family out, no matter what culture you're from. In the Vietnamese case, it's even more so considering that those who left for the U.S. are in general far more wealthy than those they left behind. An average income in Vietnam is around 400 dollars a year. A Vietnamese American coming home for the first time will always save a few hundred if not a few thousand dollars to give to his family and relatives. For him to leave Vietnam in the first place the family had to sacrifice quite a bit -- gold, land, dollars -- to purchase a seat on a boat for him to escape. He owes them. Many Vietnamese living overseas become an anchor person — someone who will help the rest back home when they make it abroad.

Heidi doesn't understand that tradition or that kind of arrangement at all, having been raised in an American family. And her Vietnamese family didn't understand that she barely knew them. That, in essence, she was a stranger, not someone who was raised by them and shared their belief system. But I think Heidi was also overwhelmed by the needs of her family and though she didn't say it, she herself is not wealthy, or so that was my impression when I watched that movie. She held on to her fantasy of being reunited with her original family without being open to the possibility that it's not all rosy, that they have fantasies of their own.

Heidi did not experience much family closeness growing up. In Vietnam, she was amazed at the love and unity her family there showed. What are the ties that bind a Vietnamese family together? Love and a shared belief system and in many ways poverty. You don't leave at 18 just because you reach 18. You live with your family until you're married and even then you might not have enough money to buy a house for yourself and your spouse. So you create a three-generational family and to do so you must learn to suppress your individualism. You cannot get everything you want because you have to share resources to survive. You learn to live well together and you learn to suppress your own desire. You learn to sacrifice a lot to live in harmony with a large family. But in return, what you get is a kind of insularity that many Americans don't have. You know you'll never be alone. You know that you will be taken care of no matter what. You make that kind of promise to each other. You make that kind of promise to your ancestors' spirit. When you break away from all that, you are seen as selfish or unfilial, and of course, anti-Confucian.

Is it true that opening a gift in front of the giver is considered rude in Vietnam? Does this explain Kim and Vinh's awkwardness in the film about Heidi's gifts? I suppose it might be rude, but I'm also very Americanized and my family and I open Christmas gifts in front of each other all the time. But it's true, traditionally you don't open it in front of the person who gives it to you, though you can ask for permission to open it. I don't' know if Kimand Vinh's awkwardness came from that or rather that they had never received gifts from America before and they were simply awed by the experience. I was, when I was a child in Vietnam and received my first Sears catalog gift from an uncle in the U.S. It was like a miracle. The gift wrap was so beautiful. And the smell of my new pair of jeans was out of this world.

Toward the end of her stay in Danang, Heidi says, "this is not what I had pictured." Was there a way to prepare her for her experience? Hers is not a typical Vietnamese reaction. Vietnamese Americans gossip among themselves and prepare each other for the "shock" of returning. The heat, the mosquitoes, the smell, the needy relatives. You come back with a certain level of cynicism built in. But Heidi, being so disconnected from the community experience, did not have any of that. I think Tran Tuong Nhu, the journalist and interpreter, should have prepared her for it instead of just teaching her "I love you" in Vietnamese. Nhu should have been more savvy as to what happens to the naive returnees.

Do you think Vietnamese Americans might have a different response to the film than non-Vietnamese Americans? I can't say for sure. In some ways Heidi is a non-Vietnamese American with a Vietnamese American dream. Non-Vietnamese Americans can watch her experience unfold and say: yup, I would feel that way too if I were her. I would feel overwhelmed. I would probably run out and look for a McDonald's and get away from the heat. But a Vietnamese American who watches the film might say she should have known better. She should have prepared herself. Poor naive woman. What do you expect when you go to a Third World country that is yearning for a better life. Of course, they would have seen you as a life saver in the middle of a turbulent sea. Between Heidi and her birth family is a gap and it needs to be filled with stories: stories that Heidi needs to tell and stories that her mother and sisters and brother need to tell. They need to bridge that gap before they can make familial demands on one another.

[brynandchristopher]

On to the next

Greetings and Salutations!

I hope you are all enjoying the holidays and the Christmas cheer! This is the first time in my life we have been away from home this time of the year and it feels really strange - I miss it!!

The last time we posted we were in Danang, Vietnam. Where we spent a couple more days before heading on to Hoi An, just a 30 minute drive south down the coast. We were very lucky to have a great friend of ours, Allison, come visit us from Shanghai for a few days in Danang and Hoi An. Bryn and I first met Allison in Bali (which is also where Bryn and I met but you already probably know that). She was there teaching English as well and we became fast friends. Allison and I have actively stayed in touch and have met up in England, Nepal, and China prior to this trip in Vietnam. She’s been living in China for 3 years now but is planning on moving to the Danang/Hoi An area next year and the dates lined up for us to meet up and check it all out!

Hoi An was a really nice relaxing getaway. We stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast located on An Bang beach. It had been a couple of weeks since we had any really nice weather, nothing too inclement but for weeks it had been overcast - but the first couple of days in Hoi An we got lucky with a few awesome beach days and soaked up the sun. Our first night in Hoi An was unexpectedly wild. We went into town to explore some shops and get dinner and found out the Vietnam national soccer team was playing in the finals of the SEA games. We had noticed the build up throughout our trip as many people watched them make their way to the finals. We knew it was a big deal to the Vietnamese, but my goodness.. We took a lantern boat down the river that runs through town to the main drag of restaurants and bars where we found a place that had put up a sheet on the wall and was projecting the game. They ended up beating Indonesia 3-0 in a thrilling match. The aftermath was inanity, there were literal riots in the streets, the entire city seemed to be out in full force waving flags, chanting, singing, dancing and blowing horns. The streets were flooded  at a standstill with people and cars for hours and it took us nearly 3 hours before the roads were clear enough to get a taxi back to our hotel. The next evening we met up with a friend of my fathers from high school. He has lived in Vietnam for the last 3 years with his wife and their 3 year old daughter. The last time my father and he had seen each other was before I was born. He took us around to some cool local spots and told us about his life and what living in Asia as an expat is like. He was a really interesting person and we had a great time getting to hang out with a local! Their daughter was absolutely adorable and it was really fun to entertain her and make jokes while she shared lots of candy with us. :)

Our final day in Hoi An was spent relaxing at a spa. In Asia you can get various spa treatments/massages for ~10$ and seeing as we wouldn’t have that opportunity again for a while, we treated ourselves. I did a hot stone massage for the first time, it was really freaking hot, but awesome. Bryn got a coffee bean and honey body scrub and a manicure and Allison did some extravagant package deal. It was wonderful. The rest of the evening we just chilled out and played cards, got some dinner and drank wine from the local vineyard. The next morning we parted ways with Allison and flew to Saigon for the day. We had a a flight late that evening so we booked a cheap AirBnB with a pool and hung out in the sun and then went to see the new Jumanji movie before our flight. One last Bun Cha and bowl of Pho and we were saying goodbye to Vietnam. 

Bryn and I are cheap flight aficionados, we have some know-how on working the system and typically find great deals wherever we go, but going ultra-budget can pose problems. At the start of our trip we flew on China Eastern, the budget Chinese airline. Our flight from the US to Thailand was just over 200$, short layovers, good seats, crazy deal! However, right before our flight they changed the flight schedules in China and we were unable to make our connection so we had to hang out in Shanghai for a couple of days. Luckily, our friend Allison lives there and she we got to hang out with her and explore the city. We will flashback and include a few photos from our Shanghai trip in this post as well. Well.. that was not to be the last of our flight debacles.. When we were searching for flights, the flights from Vietnam to New Zealand were pretty damn expensive - this is the high season for tourism in New Zealand as it is the beginning of their summer, and with the holidays and such flights in December were very out of our price range. Except for this one date, we were baffled why the flights on December 13th were less than half the price than all of all the other flights but we counted ourselves lucky and locked it in. A few days later I came to realize that December 13th fell on a Friday.. We definitely got a real Friday the 13th experience... We went to the airport ~3 hours early for our flight and as we got through the check in line they informed us that we did not have the proper clearance to get on our flight to New Zealand. Since we had started traveling, New Zealand just implemented a new regulation that you have to pre-register your automatic visa on arrival - it seems silly requiring people to apply for something they are guaranteed to get but nonetheless, we were in a bit of a pickle. We had an hour or so before the counter closed to work it out and there were a couple other folks in the same boat as us. The approval process is only supposed to take 20-30 minutes so we applied but our application didn’t go through properly and the counter was about to close. We cajoled the people in Vietnam to at least let us board the first leg of our flight to Australia and figure it out on our long-layover there - luckily we had been approved for Australian visas a couple weeks prior and that was an option otherwise we would’ve be SOL. We barely made that flight as we had to wait in an insanely long immigration line and sprint through the airport - they closed the doors as soon as we stepped inside. We were able to call the New Zealand immigration department from Australia and re-apply and get it all expedited. We got to New Zealand as planned, but with a whole lot of added stress and 3 months wasted on our year-long visas in Australia. Could’ve been a lot worse but it will be a long time before I fly on Friday the 13th again. 

We have been in Auckland for 3 days now. Another friend of ours from Bali, Arnaud, has a downtown apartment in the city that was between tenants so we’ve been staying in a lovely 22nd story apartment in the heart of the city. The first morning we were here we headed across town to the weekly used car fair to begin our search for a van - which will be our means of room and transportation throughout our 3 months in New Zealand. At first we were a bit overwhelmed and disheartened - the vans on display were either way out of our price range, way too small for me to lay down comfortably, or most predominantly, being sold by a shady used-car salesman that clearly was just trying to do a quick flip. We left the fair to go get a lovely gas-station breakfast and decided to go back and give it one last lap before the day was out. In the far back corner, clearly having arrived late was an older guy from Vermont who charmed us with his stories of living out of the van in New Zealand and living on sailboats in New England. The van was a bit out of our price range but he was trying to get out of the city for the holidays quickly and after some relatively easy negotiating we got the price down in to our ballpark. We got it tested by a mechanic yesterday and he’s currently doing a small fix on a radiator tube, but if all goes well with that we will go to the post office tomorrow with a scary amount of cash in our pockets and buy our first car!! 

Today and tomorrow we are going to get prepared to head out on the road! We are starting by heading North of Auckland up to Cape Reinga. While I may be missing the Christmas season and cheer a bit, I live an incredibly exciting life and am super stoked and grateful to start out on this advanture. ;)

Hope all is well in your lives wherever you may be <3

Christopher and Bryn

[liftjelly6]

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Reconsider journey to the People’s Republic of China as a end result of arbitrary enforcement of native legal guidelines and COVID-19-related restrictions. Three of these people have been arrested and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for the fourth who is a fugitive from justice currently being harbored on the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. That change was a political win for China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up pressure to isolate the self-ruled island on the international stage. We make riding to Embassy of the People's Republic of China simple, which is why over 930 million customers, together with customers in Makati City, trust Moovit as the most effective app for public transit. Oasis China Visa Services Extensions to the 30-day visa could be applied for on the Bureau of Immigration. You could additionally be requested to supply a travel itinerary exhibiting return travel plans and resort reservations. You will want proof of onward or return journey and could also be requested to prove that you have at least $500 both in money or a bank assertion. Your departure tax ought to be included within the worth of your flight or cruise ticket, however it's best to check. To apply, you’ll need a replica of your passport, a passport-sized picture, and a copy of your yellow fever vaccination certificates. In some instances, and/or if the applicants passport is legitimate for less than 1 12 months, the visa may be legitimate for a limited number of entries and for a shorter interval . As with all visas, the precise visa issued is at the discretion of the Embassy/consulate. The applicant should apply one month previous to the supposed travel. In case Express/Urgent Processing is accredited by the Chinese embassy or the consulate-generals, the applicant might be required to pay an additional fee. Check out our guide to journey insurance coverage to search out one of the best one for you. Consider a new passport when you have accumulated plenty of stamps. Although most countries solely require 1 blank web page, many require 2 clean pages. Information about the visit (the objective of visit, arrival and departure dates, place of intended residence, relations between the applicant and the inviting individual, financial source for expenditures, etc.). Photocopies of both sides of Chinese ID or foreign passport and permanent residence allow of the inviting individual. Photocopies of either side of Chinese ID of the inviting individual or international passport and permanent residence allow. Issued to those who intend to go to China to visit the foreigners working or studying in China to whom they're spouses, mother and father, sons or daughters under the age of 18 or parents-in-law, or to those who intend to go to China for other non-public affairs. No appointments are required if you submit your functions by way of post or courier service. You can enter Vietnam on an e-Visa at any of the nation's eight worldwide airports, including Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Danang, as nicely as 14 land crossings and 7 seaports. China Travel Restrictions 2022, When Will China Open Its Borders 5.6 All phrases hereof are governed by legal guidelines of the respective state or province the place the Chinese Visa Application Service Facility is positioned. Litigation referring to visa providers might be heard by a court within the resident state or province. four.three The Chinese Visa Application Service Facility might collect Clients' Personal Information by way of telephone, email, fax, software documents , on-line application system, online appointment system, video monitoring system and different media. You can discover more information about flights to China and book tickets on the web sites of China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, Air China, United Airlines, British Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Air France, or other related airways. You can only know the specific requirements when you arrive at the lodge. Generally, you presumably can head to your last destination after a 14-day centralized quarantine at your first city of entry. The length of quarantine is dependent upon totally different cities' insurance policies. These measures will change from time to time, depending on the local pandemic state of affairs. Please notice that, ordinary passport holders from exclusive 14 nations can enjoy the privilege solely, while other circumstances applies to diplomatic or official passport holders. The visa-free stay is at a maximum of 30 days, 60 days and 90 days for various nationality. Citizens holding strange passport of Singapore, Brunei and Japan are visa-exempted to China, after they enter by way of any port opened to foreigners, and stay in mainland China for tourism, business or visiting friends/relatives for not more than 15 days. Visas Malaysia Visitors from other countries need to apply for a visa by way of the embassy. A foreigner’s nationality will determine the kind of visa they need. Conveniently, eligible travellers can now get a visa on-line, from their smartphone, laptop computer, or different electronic gadget. Yes, residents of China can go to Cambodia, offering they've a legitimate passport and a visa. Once a traveler has obtained their visa to Cambodia from China, they'll visit the country. Other nationalities can apply for different forms of visas for Malaysia at any Malaysian embassy or consulate. Travelers with passports issued by China and India also can apply for the eNTRI Visa for Malaysia. Chinese citizens can even apply for a Tanzania single-entry tourist visa on the border after they arrive. Be conscious that there are sometimes long queues at immigration if you apply for a visa in individual in Tanzania, and it's generally not as easy or environment friendly as making use of online. New agreements between the Tanzania Tourist Board and holdings firms in China are anticipated to deliver an influx of Chinese vacationers to Tanzania, and the model new electronic visa system shall be important to maintaining immigration operating easily. We don't settle for applications are despatched by submit or courier for categorical processing service of visa functions. This consists of the applying process for each the Tourist Visa and eVisa and the required paperwork. The fees differ based mostly on your nationality and type of journey doc. For instance, Americans need to pay a $50 fee but Chinese nationals should pay $60. Turkey doesn't course of any refunds so in case your trip will get canceled, this can be a sunk price. With Atlys you'll be able to apply now with out worrying in regards to the application course of. This new system made visa processing for business and tourism journey to Turkey effortlessly and cost-effective as long as you complete your application. Please ensure that you have uploaded the right photograph of the person detailed in the utility type when filling within the on-line application. The visa centre will reject any utility where the uploaded image is of one other individual. A new utility type with an acceptable photograph shall be requested if the appliance form accommodates one other particular person's photograph. If the online kind signifies that the photo is not certified and cannot be uploaded successfully, please remember to deliver an appropriate photograph to the centre if you come to submit your utility. Alternatively, in case you are planning a vacation, business trip or are visiting, family and friends, in Saudi Arabia, you can even apply for an eVisa for Saudi Arabia online. This can be accomplished via any smartphone, pill, or private pc. Visa Facilitation In 79+ International Locations If there isn’t any direct flights to China out of your country, you may also select to fly to a 3rd nation first then go to China, besides these nations who usually are not accepted to enter China through the third nation by China government. The notices issued by each Chinese consulate are barely totally different, so please seek the guidance of the local embassy, consulate or visa service center for the ultimate clarification and confirmation. Issued to those who intend to go to China for industrial and trade actions. Foreign nationals who plan to visit China want to use for China a new visa with the nearest China embassy, consulate or China Visa Application Service Center. More than 200 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have already been provided to citizens in China and about a hundred million Chinese individuals have already been vaccinated according to the the statistics from the China National Health Council on April 21, 2021. As summer time ends, many firms are hoping to renew enterprise journey. To assist interested parties plan for the next Asia-Pacific journey, this LawFlash outlines current entry bans and quarantine requirements in popular APAC locations. These guidelines are topic to speedy change based mostly on the global and local pandemic scenario. Chinese embassies in no less than 20 countries have, as of Tuesday, begun offering facilitation to visa applicants who have been inoculated with China-produced COVID-19 vaccines as part of efforts to resume worldwide exchanges under strict epidemic prevention measures. Vaccinated passengers travelling to China by air will still want to indicate unfavorable checks as beneath current guidelines, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian stated, according to an official transcript of a every day briefing. That guests to China would nonetheless need to have adverse outcomes from both nucleic acid tests and serology checks earlier than boarding a flight to China. After getting into China, the guests can be required to examine in for weeks-long quarantine at a government-designated hotel at their own expense. In addition, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council introduced on April 14 that Taiwanese residents who stay in China will be allowed to register for a vaccination at their locations of residence utilizing their residence permits or a certificates of Chinese medical well being insurance coverage. As of August 27, 2021, Singapore’s Ministry of Health has opened up a brand new Vaccinated Travel Lane for travelers from Brunei and Germany. Entry for vacationers with travel history to all Excluded Countries is presently prohibited. Travelers with journey historical past to Indonesia or the Philippines might be required to take an Antigen Rapid Test in addition to the PCR take a look at. Chinese President Xi Jinping personally promoted worldwide cooperation in telephone calls or meetings with dozens of overseas leaders and heads of worldwide organizations. Usa Nonimmigrant Visas While interviews are generally not required for candidates of certain ages outlined below, consular officers have the discretion to require an interview of any applicant, regardless of age. The consular officer will evaluation your utility and paperwork. They could ask questions about why you want to visit, your itinerary, and the way you will pay for it. Nationals of nations within the Entry Permit Waiver Program might visit for as a lot as 30 days without an entry allow. However, if arriving by air, they want to apply online for an digital authorization called "OK to board" or "OK board", a minimal of 48 hours earlier than journey, providing a biometric passport and itinerary. They should additionally pay a payment of US$20, earlier than travel or on arrival. Residents of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in Russia who are members of the indigenous population do not want a visa to visit Alaska if they've family members in Alaska. Canada– Nationals of Canada don't need a visa to go to the United States beneath most circumstances. In addition, under the USMCA , they may obtain authorization to work beneath a simplified process. Chinese Visa The leaders pledge to cooperate more successfully on pressing bilateral, regional, and world points, together with climate change and North Korea. Obama and Xi additionally vow to establish a “new model” of relations, a nod to Xi’s idea of creating a “new type of great energy relations” for the United States and China. In 台胞證 , a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft collides with a Chinese fighter and makes an emergency touchdown on Chinese territory. Authorities on China’s Hainan Island detain the twenty-four-member U.S. crew. That journey made Blinken the first secretary of state to go to Fiji since 1985. This should include U.S. advice and assistance to boost the credibility of Taiwan’s navy as a Taiwanese establishment, not a legacy of the Chinese civil struggle that enforced martial legislation on the island till the late 1980s. Building public belief within the Taiwan army is important to overcome lack of significant focus on the specter of military conflict and defeatism. U.S. coverage for Taiwan should follow the Tsai administration’s instance of basing its legitimacy on the colourful high quality of its democracy and financial freedom. You can enter the Schengen member states as many times as you want, for so lengthy as your ETIAS is legitimate, and you have not stayed more than ninety days in a 180 day period. UK residents who're passport holders of one of many nations with which the EU has a visa regime in place are not eligible to use for an ETIAS despite their residency in Britain. Citizens ofCambodia,India,Indonesia,Laos,Myanmar, andVietnamcan apply online for an R.O.C. Travel Authorization Certificate from the National Immigration Agency, Ministry of the Interior. ‧The holder of emergency or temporary passport should apply for a visa on the ROC overseas missions, or alanding visaafter arriving within the ROC. Attempting to obtain a visa by the willful misrepresentation of a cloth fact, or fraud, might end result in the permanent refusal of a visa or denial of entry into the United States. For instance, one may argue that Western society itself can't be characterized as homogeneous because it's composed of a quantity of cultural groups, with completely different orientations communicated to folks. Therefore, homogeneous orientations do not happen to use to such societies. Alternatively, one could argue that the behavioral variations discovered within the experiments are minor compared to the radically completely different ethical codes and social practices differentiating cultures. Electronic Visa Replace System Evus Frequently Requested Questions Until the payment is applied, vacationers can full their EVUS enrollment with out charge. Travelers will need their People’s Republic of China passport containing a most validity (10-year) B1/B2, B1 or B2 visa and access to the web. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is not going to gather a fee for an EVUS enrollment when the website opens for early enrollments. For candidates holding a U.S. passport, we suggest VisaHQ, who supplies a quick, efficient service at a very aggressive price. You may submit the applying to the Visa Office at Chinese embassies or consulates, or China Visa Application Service Centers if they are working in your nation. Must be collected and tested at a laboratory establishment on the record provided by the Chinese Embassy or Consulates General. See below for the latest list of laboratories accepted by the Chinese Embassy . Please give consent to the sampling agency and testing laboratory to announce the take a look at outcomes and different personal data to the Embassy. The Embassy will contact the issuing agency to confirm the authenticity of all the submitted stories and certificates. It's very tough to obtain a China port visa at the Chinese border entry factors. However some cities and areas of China are visa free in sure circumstances. Third, wait 5 to 10 days for your visa to arrive within the mail. Research possible flights to China, contemplating your timeline and price range. Keep in thoughts that transfer flights are unallowed – all flights must instantly land in China. The TAR requires particular permits for vacationer journey, most frequently obtained through a Chinese journey agent. If you do enter a restricted space with out the requisite permit, you could be fined, taken into custody, and deported for illegal entry. To study more about particular entry necessities for Tibet or different restricted areas, verify with theEmbassy of the People’s Republic of China. The PRC has additionally threatened, interrogated, detained, and expelled U.S. residents living and working within the PRC.

[essaynook]

Students will assess the main character of a PBS movie Daughter from DaNang by a

Students will assess the main character of a PBS movie Daughter from DaNang by a

Students will assess the main character of a PBS movie Daughter from DaNang by applying knowledge gained in class to demonstrate their understanding of key concepts and theories of human behavior and the social environment. Students will critique the character utilizing developmental theories discussed in class i.e. Erickson, Bowlby, Ainsworth, Kohlberg, Piaget, Levinson, etc. When concluding the…

[acemywriter]

Multi level Social Work Assessment of PBS Movie Daughter from Danang

Multi level Social Work Assessment of PBS Movie Daughter from Danang

Students will assess the main character of a PBS movie Daughter from DaNang by applying knowledge gained in class to demonstrate their understanding of key concepts and theories of human behavior and the social environment. Students will critique the character utilizing developmental theories discussed in class i.e. Erickson, Bowlby, Ainsworth, Kohlberg, Piaget, Levinson, etc. When concluding the…

[bbcbreakingnews]

News24.com | LIVE | SA’s Covid-19 cases rise to 452 529 as death toll tops 7 000, while global cases cross 16.5m

US-backed vaccine trial enters ‘late stage’, Kenya enforces booze ban – International Covid-19 news

Moderna Inc has started a late-stage trial to test the effectiveness of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, the first such study under the Trump administration’s program to speed development of measures against the novel coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has banned the sale of alcohol in eateries and restaurants and extended a curfew in a bid to halt a steep rise in coronavirus infections.

Nigeria will allow schools to reopen for pupils due to take graduation exams, a presidential aide said on Monday, reviving a plan dropped earlier this month due to rising cases of Covid-19.

The World Health Organisation says that a key committee would meet later this week to discuss Covid-19’s emergency status, six months after it was declared.

The airport in the central Vietnamese tourism hotspot of Danang was packed on Monday after three residents tested positive for the coronavirus and the evacuation of 80 000 people began.

And, Indian actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her eight-year old daughter, Aaradhya, have recovered from Covid-19 and left hospital after a 10-day stay, her husband and actor Abhishek Bachchan said on Twitter. 

Morocco has banned all travel to and from some of its major cities in a bid to stem an increase in coronavirus cases.

Pictured: A healthcare worker checks the temperature of a woman during a medical check-up in Mumbai, India. (Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto via Getty Images) 

The post News24.com | LIVE | SA’s Covid-19 cases rise to 452 529 as death toll tops 7 000, while global cases cross 16.5m appeared first on BBC BREAKING NEWS.

from WordPress https://bbcbreakingnews.com/news24-com-live-sas-covid-19-cases-rise-to-452-529-as-death-toll-tops-7-000-while-global-cases-cross-16-5m/

[uss-edsall]

I’d like to talk to you tonight about the generation gap as it applies to what’s going on. I find myself in the uncomfortable and almost untenable position of a man in the middle—the so-called moderate liberal whose roots go deep into the American soil, pounded there by immigrant parents who fled Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century because that peculiar breed of flag-wavers on the other side had taken upon themselves to the prerogative of choosing who should survive and who should not. Because of this particular background there are certain gut-deep philosophies and attitudes that are a part of my bone marrow—unshakable and unswervable. I will salute our flag and stand for our anthem and feel an affection for my native land with the kind of fervor and admitted emotionalism that would be peculiar especially to a fat-cat Hollywood writer whose father was an uneducated butcher. This, on the face of it, removes me from the pale of the new left. It sets me apart—and I suppose in their view, places me dead center in the basement of the establishment. But I’ll tell you something. Reserving certain criticism and negative judgment as to methodology, I nonetheless subscribe to and support what are the goals and aspirations of America’s young. I am much more prone to embrace their causes that I am any cause which would see the perpetuating of certain aged and no longer applicable concepts of ethics, mores, moralities, more peculiar to my own generation. I would rather have a son or daughter of mine march through the streets of Chicago protesting injustice—than I would siring a Chicago policeman who’ll club anyone who’ll get in his way—and that includes sixteen-year-olds, newspaper photographers, and senior citizens. And if anyone wants to raise the spectre of “provocation”—I say this categorically. There is no provocation extant short of a motive of self defense to excuse as representative of law and order wading in with a billy-club under the pretense of saving the sovereign city of Chicago. Of the four hundred young people currently held under arraignment for so-called assault and battery, half of them are under eighteen and half of those under a hundred and twenty pounds. Suddenly we are a nation whose new battle slogan is law and order. Last year it won countless numbers of elections. It’s the great new American euphemism. Law and Order. It is now interchangeable with God, Motherhood, the Constitution and the Holy Grail. But how empty and how suspect is this sloganry when it points up the incredible selectivity on the part of America’s citizenry—how picky and choosey they are when it comes to moral outrage. There was no hue and cry for a re-examination of American conscience when four little Negro girls were bombed to pieces in a Birmingham church. There was no collective gasp of offense when three young civil rights workers were slaughtered in Mississippi. There were no slogans at all attending the bombing off over a hundred churches in the south in the past five years, or the fact that there have only been two lawyers, available to defend civil rights cases in the state of Mississippi until last year—or that juries were all white—or that a white man accused of first degree homicide has never, in the history of the south, been given a sentence commensurate with the proven charge. Or we could go down the list of flagrant violations of law and order as they have existed for the past hundred years—beginning with the five thousand lynchings. These assaults on conscience we live with, and nobody cries out for law and order. For a quarter of a century, in the Congress of the United States, we tried to get passed an anti-lynching bill. A simple law to protect the lives of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon line. This was not legislation, as our protesting brethren so often take us to task for—the legislation of brotherly love with they say is impossible. It was a law making it a federal offense to hang a human being from a tree, cover him with kerosene and cremate him. But the loudest cheerleaders of our current law and order rallies—the Eastlands and the Strom Thurmonds—were the very gentlemen who fought against that legislation until it was ultimately passed. It’s hardly a revelation to me that the young people in this country take a dim view of our current up-tightness when it comes to street rioting. They believe, and I think quite properly, that on the scale of misbehavior the black man who takes a torch to a building or breaks a window to loot, and does so out of passion, is less the criminal than the white man who puts his torch to human beings and does so with a cold, calculated, predatory pre-planned blueprint of destruction. The black man, because he’s suffered this for over a hundred years, looks upon us as a convocation of lizards—a cold blooded species of being who will call out the national guard to keep a ghetto from being burned down—but will raise no finger, let alone an octave of voice, to protest what has been done to him over the past century. Look across that generation gap now and see it as they see it—the young. Thirty two billion dollars into a civil war ten thousand miles from our shore to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese and keep the Viet Cong from attacking San Francisco. That’s where we are told is America’s destiny—in the rice paddies of DaNang. And America’s youth—or at least a sizeable share of them—find this to be patently unbelievable. America’s destiny, in their view, lies on the streets of Newark, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and Harlem. That’s where we keep alive the dream. Not in Saigon. And certainly not at the cost of twenty-thousand dead American boys with a hundred-thousand wounded and a half a million civilians put to a torch.

Rod Serling, writer of the Twilight Zone, during a speech on December 3, 1968, in Moorpark College.

[cuhree]

Try as I (sometimes) might I don’t think I’ll ever understand white people.

[englishchinesetranslations]

The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or any one else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of napalm, casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps because until recently the terrorism has been waged mainly in remote places, this aspect of the war has received scant attention from the press. Hence the enemy has largely succeeded in casting himself in the role of noble revolutionary. It is long past time for Americans, who are sick and tired of being vilified for trying to help South Vietnam stay free, to take a hard look at the nature of this enemy.

Bloodbath Discipline.

The terror had its real beginning when Red dictator Ho Chi Minh consolidated his power in the North. More than a year before his 1954 victory over the French, he launched a savage campaign against his own people. In virtually every North Vietnamese village, strong-arm squads assembled the populace to witness the “confessions” of landowners. As time went on, businessmen, intellectuals, school teachers, civic leaders — all who represented a potential source of future opposition — were also rounded up and forced to “confess” to “errors of thought.” There followed public “trials,” conviction and, in many cases, execution. People were shot, beheaded, beaten to death; some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death, Ho has renewed his terror in North Vietnam periodically. Between 50,000 and 100,000 are believed to have died in these blood-baths — in a coldly calculated effort to discipline the party and the masses. To be sure, few who escape Ho’s terror now seem likely to tempt his wrath. During the 1950s, however, he had to quell some sizeable uprisings in North Vietnam — most notably one that occurred in early November 1956, in the An province, which included Ho’s birthplace village of Nam Dan. So heavily had he taxed the region that the inhabitants finally banded together and refused to meet his price. Ho sent troops to collect, and then sent in an army division, shooting. About 6,000 unarmed villagers were killed. The survivors scattered, some escaping to the South. The slaughter went largely unnoticed by a world then preoccupied with the Soviet Union’s rape of Hungary.

With North Vietnam tightly in hand, the central committee of the North Vietnamese communist party met in Hanoi on March 13, 1959, and decided it was time to move against South Vietnam. Soon, large numbers of Ho’s guerrillas were infiltrating to join cadres that had remained there after the French defeat in 1954. Their mission: to eliminate South Vietnam’s leadership, including elected officials, “natural” leaders, anyone and everyone to whom people might turn for advice. Also to be liquidated were any South Vietnamese who had relatives in their country’s armed forces, civil, services or police; any who failed to pay communist taxes promptly; any with five or more years of education. 

A captured VC guerrilla explained how his eight-man team moved against a particular target village: “The first time we entered the village, we arrested and executed on the spot four men who had been pointed out to us by the party’s district headquarters as our most dangerous opponents. One, who had fought in the war against the French was now a known supporter of the South Vietnamese government. Another had been seen fraternizing with government troops. These two were shot. The others, the village’s principal landowners, were beheaded.”General Walt tells of the “revolutionary purity” of Vietcong who came home to two other villages. In one case, a 15-year-old girl who had given Walt’s Marines information on VC activities was taken into the jungle and tortured for hours, then beheaded. As a warning to other villagers, her head was placed on a pole in front of her home. Her murderers were her brother and two of his VC comrades. In the other case, when a VC learned that his wife and two young children had cooperated with Marines who had befriended them, he himself cut out their tongues.

Genocide.

In such fashion did the storm of terror break over South Vietnam. In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of last year, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnaped. Few of the kidnaped are ever seen again.

Ho’s assault on South Vietnam’s leadership class has, in fact, been a form of genocide — and all too efficient. Thus, if South Vietnam survives in freedom, it will take the country a generation to fully replace this vital element of its society. But the grand design of terror involves other objectives, too. It hopes to force the attacked government into excessively repressive anti-terrorist actions, which tend to earn the government the contempt and hatred of the people. It also seeks valuable propaganda in the form of well-publicized counter-atrocities certain to occur at the individual level — for South Vietnamese soldiers whose families have suffered at communists’ hands are not likely to deal gently with captured VC and North Vietnamese troops.

Dr. A. W. Wylie, an Australian physician serving in a Mekong Delta hospital, points out that a hamlet or village need not cooperate with the Saigon government or allied forces to mark itself for butchery; it need only be neutral, a political condition not acceptable to the communists. After a place has been worked over, its people of responsibility are always identifiable by the particularly hideous nature of their wounds. He cites some cases he has seen:— When the VC finished with one pregnant woman, both of her legs were dangling by ribbons of flesh and had to be amputated. Her husband, a hamlet chief, had just been strangled before her eyes, and she also had seen her three-year-old child machine-gunned to death. Four hours after her legs were amputated, she aborted the child she was carrying. But perhaps the worst thing that happened to her that day was that she survived.— A village policeman was held in place while a VC gunman shot off his nose and fired bullets through his cheekbones so close to his eyes that they were reduced to bloody shreds. He later died from uncontrollable hemorrhages.— A 20-year-old schoolteacher had knelt in a corner trying to protect herself with her arms while a VC flailed at her with a machete. She had been unsuccessful; the back of her head was cut so deeply that the brain was exposed. She died from brain damage and loss of blood.

Flamethrowers at Work.

Last December 5, communists perpetrated what must rank among history’s most monstrous blasphemies at Dak Son, a central highlands village of some 2,000. Montagnards — a tribe of gentle but fiercely independent mountain people. They had moved away from their old village in VC-controlled territory, ignored several VC orders to return and refused to furnish male recruits to the VC.

Two VC battalions struck in the earliest hours, when the village was asleep. Quickly killing the sentries, the communists swarmed among the rows of tidy, thatch-roofed homes, putting the torch to them. The first knowledge that many of the villagers had of the attack was when VC troops turned flamethrowers on them in their beds. Some families awoke in time to escape into nearby jungle. Some men stood and fought, giving their wives and children time to crawl into trenches dug beneath their homes as protection against mortar and rifle fire. But when every building was ablaze, the communists took their flamethrowers to the mouth of each trench and poured in a long, searing hell of fire — and, for good measure, tossed grenades into many. Methodical and thorough, they stayed at it until daybreak, then left in the direction of the Cambodian border.

Morning revealed a scene of unbelievable horror. The village now was only a smoldering, corpse-littered patch on the lush green countryside. The bodies of 252 people, mostly mothers and children, lay blistered, charred, burned to the bone. Survivors, many of them horribly burned, wandered aimlessly about or stayed close to the incinerated bodies of loved ones, crying. Some 500 were missing; scores were later found in the jungle, dead of burns and other wounds; many have not been found.

The massacre at Dak Son was a warning to other Montagnard Settlements to cooperate. But many of the tribesmen now fight with the allies.

If the communists’ “persuasion” techniques spawn deep and enduring hatred, Ho could not care less; the first necessity is the utter, subjugation, of the people. Ho was disturbed by the rapid expansion of South Vietnam’s educational system: between 1954 and 1959, the number of schools had tripled and the number of students had quadrupled. An educated populace, especially one educated to democratic ideals, does not fit into the communist scheme. Hence, the country’s school system was one of Ho’s first targets. So efficiently did he move against it that the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession soon sent a commission, chaired by India’s Shri S. Natarajan, to investigate.

Typical of the commission’s findings is what happened in the jungle province of An Xuyen. During the 1954-55 academic year, 3,096 children attended 32 schools in the province; by the end of the 1960-61 school year, 27,953 were attending 189 schools. Then the communists moved in. Parents were advised not to send their children to school.

Teachers were warned to stop providing civic education, and to stop teaching children to honor their country, flag and president. Teachers who failed to comply were shot or beheaded or had their throats cut, and the reasons for the executions were pinned or nailed to their bodies.

The Natarajan commission reported how the VC stopped one school bus and told the children not to attend school anymore. When the children continued for another week, the communists stopped the bus again, selected a six-year-old passenger and cut off her fingers. The other children were told, “This is what will happen to you if you continue to go to that school.” The school closed.

In one year, in An Xuyen province alone, Ho’s agents closed 150 schools, killed or kidnapped more than five dozen teachers, and cut school enrollment by nearly 20,000. By the end of the 1961-62 school year, 636 South Vietnamese schools were closed, and enrollment had decreased by nearly 80,000.But, in the face of this attack, South Vietnam’s education system has staged a strong comeback. Schools destroyed by the communists have been rebuilt, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Many teachers have given up their own homes and move each night into a different student’s home so the communists can’t find them, or commute from nearby cities, where they leave their families.

Against such determination, the size of Ho’s failure can be measured: in 1954, there were approximately 400,000 pupils in school in North and South Vietnam together; today South Vietnam alone has some two million in school. About 35,000 — four times as many as in 1962 — now attend five South Vietnamese universities, while 42,000 more attend night college.

A South Vietnamese government official explains: “A war shatters many traditional values. But the idea of education has an absolute hold on our people’s imagination.”Bar of Justice.

The pitch of communist terrorism keeps rising. After the Tet carnage at Hue early this year, 19 mass graves yielded more than 1,000 bodies, mostly civilians — old men and women, young girls, schoolboys, priests, nuns, doctors (including three Germans who had been medical-school faculty members at Hue University). About half had been buried alive, and many were found bound together with barbed wire, with dirt or cloth stuffed into their mouths and throats, and their eyes wide open. The communists came to Hue with a long list of names for liquidation — people who worked for the South Vietnamese or for the US government, or who had relatives who did. But as their military situation grew increasingly desperate, they began grabbing people at random, out of their homes and off the streets, condemned them at drumhead courts as “reactionaries” or for “opposing the revolution” and killed them.

“The Tet offensive represented a drastic change in tactics,” says General Walt. “This is a war to take over the South Vietnamese people. Ho launched the Tet offensive because he knew he was losing the people. But his troops didn’t know it; they were told that they didn’t need any withdrawal plans because the people would rise and fight with them to drive out the Americans. What happened was just the opposite. Many fought against them like tigers.” Some of the Tet offensive’s explosion of atrocities probably can be attributed to sheer vengeful frustration on the part of Ho’s terror squads — which Ho may well have foreseen, and counted on.

The full record of communist barbarism in Vietnam would fill volumes. If South Vietnam falls to the communists, millions more are certain to die, large numbers of them at the hands of Ho’s imaginative tortures. That is a primary reason why, at election times, more than 80 percent of eligible South Vietnamese defy every communist threat and go to the polls, and why, after mortar attacks, voting lines always form anew. It is why the South Vietnamese pray that their allies will stick the fight through with them. It is why the vast majority of American troops in Vietnam are convinced that the war is worth fighting. It is why those who prance about even in our own country — waving Vietcong flags and decrying our “unjust” and “immoral” war should be paid the contempt they deserve.

Finally, it is why the communists should be driven once and for all from South Vietnam — and why, if possible, the monsters who presently rule North Vietnam should be brought before the bar of justice.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------NB: For other accounts of communist mass murder in North Vietnam, see here and here. For communist mass murder in pre- and post-1975 South Vietnam, see the many sources archived here.

[bluebearcollectorfan-blog]

‘Yolanda’ leaves over 100 dead in Tacloban City

MANILA, Philippines—Rescuers in Tacloban City in Leyte counted at least 100 dead and many more injured Saturday a day after one of the most powerful typhoons on record ripped through the central Philippine province, wiping away buildings and leveling seaside homes in massive storm surges, then headed for Vietnam.

With communications and roads still cut off, Captain John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, said he had received “reliable information” by radio from his staff that more than 100 bodies were lying in the streets of Tacloban on hardest-hit Leyte Island.

Armed Forces Central Command spokesman Lieutenant Jim Alagao, quoting reports from soldiers on the ground, said “too many” bodies lay in the streets and that the city was a scene of “total devastation.”

He said he could not say how many people died in the storm in Leyte alone, one of five islands where Typhoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) slammed Friday.

‘They’re too many’

“There’s no number yet. But they’re too many,” Alagao told INQUIRER.net.

He said soldiers were having a hard time retrieving bodies as fallen trees and toppled posts block the roads.

Regional military commander Lieutenant General Roy Deveraturda said that the casualty figure “probably will increase,” after viewing aerial photographs of the widespread devastation caused by the typhoon.

Andrews said the airport in Tacloban City, about 580 kilometers south of Manila, “is completely ruined” by storm surges, forcing aviation authorities to close the terminal for commercial flights.

“The terminal, the tower, including communication equipment, were destroyed,” he said, as he recounted the airport manager’s assessment.

The runway was cleared early Saturday to make way for C-130s planes of the Philippine Air Force which delivered relief goods and carried emergency personnel, he said.

Cabinet Secretary Rene Almendras, a senior aide to President Benigno Aquino III, said that the number of casualties could not be immediately determined, but that the figure was “probably in that range” given by Andrews. Government troops were helping recover bodies, he said.

US Marine Colonel Mike Wylie, who surveyed the damage in Tacloban prior to possible American assistance, said that the damage to the runway was significant. Military planes were still able to land with relief aid.

“The storm surge came in fairly high and there is significant structural damage and trees blown over,” he told the Associated Press. Wylie is a member of the US-Philippines Military Assistance Group based in Manila.

Storm surges more than 10 feet had pounded the area, the Philippine Red Cross said.

In scenes reminiscent of tsunami damage, some houses in Tacloban, with a population of about 220,000 people, were completely destroyed, with piles of splintered wood lying on concrete slabs, while others had just the stone frames remaining.

Almost all the trees and electric posts were torn down, while cars were overturned.

Some dazed and injured survivors wandered around the carnage asking journalists for water, while others sorted through what was left of their destroyed homes.

Debris litter the road by the coastal village in Legazpi city following a storm surge brought about by powerful Typhoon Haiyan (Philippine name: Yolanda) in Albay province Friday, Nov. 8, 2013, about 520 kilometers ( 325 miles) south of Manila, Philippines. The strongest typhoon this year slammed into the central Philippines on Friday, setting off landslides and knocking out power and communication lines in several provinces. AP

Fears of mass casualties

The initial reports from Tacloban and Palo raised fears of mass casualties, with Haiyan having devastated many other communities across the central Philippines that remained cut off from communications.

“We have reports of collapsed buildings, houses flattened to the ground, storm surges and landslides,” Philippine Red Cross chief Gwendolyn Pang told AFP, giving an assessment across the whole region.

“But we don’t know really, we can’t say how bad the damage is… hopefully today we can get a better picture as to the effects of the super typhoon.”

Another area of concern was Guiuan, a fishing town of about 40,000 people on Samar that was the first to be hit after Haiyan swept in from the Pacific Ocean. Pang said contact had not yet been made with Guiuan.

She also said relief workers were trying reach Capiz province, about 200 kilometres west of Tacloban, on Panay island where she said most of the region’s infrastructure had been destroyed and many houses “flattened to the ground”.

Fifteen thousand soldiers had been deployed to the disaster zones, military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Ramon Zagala told AFP.

“We are flying sorties to bring relief goods, materials and communication equipment,” Zagala said.

He said helicopters were also flying rescuers into priority areas, while infantry units deployed across the affected areas were also proceeding on foot or in military trucks.

Ferocious winds felled large branches and snapped coconut trees. A man was shown carrying the body of his six-year-old daughter who drowned, and another image showed vehicles piled up in debris.

Nearly 800,000 people were forced to flee their homes and damage was believed to be extensive. About 4 million people were affected by the typhoon, the national disaster agency said.

Relief workers said they were struggling to find ways to deliver food and other supplies, with roads blocked by landslides and fallen trees.

In western Palawan province, disaster officials said three fishermen died in Coron town after jumping off their anchored boat which was battered by big waves. One fisherman survived.

Residents clear a road after trees were toppled by strong winds at the onslaught of powerful typhoon Haiyan (Philippine name: Yolanda) that hit the island province of Cebu, Philippines, Friday Nov. 8, 2013. AP

Strong typhoon

Weather officials said Yolanda had sustained winds of 235 kilometers per hour with gusts of 275 kph when it made landfall. By those measurements, Yolanda would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the US, nearly in the top category, a 5.

Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world.

The typhoon’s sustained winds weakened Saturday to 163 kph with stronger gusts as it blew farther away from the Philippines toward Vietnam.

Vietnamese authorities in four central provinces began evacuating more than 500,000 people from high risk areas to government buildings, schools and other concrete homes able to withstand strong winds.

“The evacuation is being conducted with urgency and must be completed before 5 p.m.,” disaster official Nguyen Thi Yen Linh by telephone from central Danang City, where some 76,000 are being moved to safety.

Hundreds of thousands of others were being taken to shelters in the provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue. Schools were closed and two deputy prime ministers were sent to the region to direct the preparations.

The typhoon was forecast to make landfall around 10 a.m. Sunday between Danang and Quang Ngai and move up the northeast coast of Vietnam.

[vietnamholidaysfamily-blog]

Wandering Chopsticks: Vietnamese Meals, Recipes, And Much More: Small Saigon, Orange County

We checked into our rooms and I instantly felt compelled to shoot some video. Hosted by a nearby family members, the rooms are spacious, nicely lit, exceptionally clean and nicely outfitted. Halong Bay is a should go to for individuals who are journey freaks. Some of the streets are narrower and maze-like so hrs can be invested meandering the pavement in search for your subsequent noodle soup hit.

Guide an afternoon departure to Siem Reap so you can nonetheless use the whole morning to go to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields. Numerous vacationers interested in boating actions in the fields of water and appreciate awesome air in between the cajuput forests.

We will be awestruck by the sheer elegance of Halong Bay, as we sail amongst the dream-like rocks and cliffs that rise straight out of the water. And If you have any concerns, just depart a comment and I will do my very best to solution it. Getaways have a variety of actions that you ought to value as becoming a family members members or getting a lover. To enter Vietnam, US citizens should have a legitimate visa that is issued prior to arrival in Vietnam.

Southern Vietnam has a dry season from November to April and a moist season from Might to October. In between March 1965 and November 1968, "Rolling Thunder" deluged the north with a million tons of missiles, rockets and bombs. I did not see much more stir-fries up North than anyplace else in Vietnam. Discover the very best offers on flights to Vietnam from the United kingdom. On behalf of the Silver State Chapter, Nationwide Society Daughters of the American Revolution, I cordially invite you to assist us commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.

As we depart, to the correct of the Asian Village Center, is the initial Lee's Sandwiches, which brought American sensibilities of services to Vietnamese banh mi. Your personal driver is licensed and usually place your security initial. SJ had a much more tentative method, but her inner determination meant she was generally the initial to attain the other side. Bit much more costly than the rest of South East Asia.

No other area in Southeast Asia is comparable to its stark elegance. We left PP at about eleven:thirty and received to SS early morning, which was just in time for our Ankor Wat tour. Discovering a location to remain throughout your Saigon tour is essential. I also took time off to perform golf on the difficult Montgomerie Hyperlinks program situated midway in between Hoi An and Danang and remain at Nam Hai’s magnificent sixty 1-bedroom villa resort.

Our 5 days in Hanoi permitted us time to discover numerous elements of the city, mainly on foot. Officially recognized as Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon is Vietnam’s biggest metropolis and a vibrant cultural, historical and financial hub. These days appreciate a day cruise on Halong Bay: a UNESCO Globe Heritage Website and all-natural wonderland composed of jutting limestone islands and sparkling turquoise waters, situated in the Gulf of Tonkin. 07:00 Bhaya Traditional weighs anchor to cruise the Bay.

In the late afternoon, the Bhaya Traditional docked for the evening and we had been invited to join the chef on the deck for a cooking demonstration. These days, the tradition of royal cooking lives on in Hue exactly where conventional eating places nonetheless tantalize the palate with fancy dishes ready in miniature fashion and by hand.

These days, you can crawl via the narrow tunnels and see some of the booby traps and weapons that had been utilized throughout the war. Certain you can steam or boil chicken till it is soft and tender, but Hainanese chicken ought to be company, juicy, with a bit of pull. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese individuals frequently steal the display with their demonstrations of ingenuity and their friendliness to guests.

Nevertheless, sadly, we could not appreciate the seaside simply because it was raining. My hope that I would skip a winter, nevertheless, was nowhere near to coming accurate. Your e-mail deal with will not be published. I adore the industriousness of the Vietnamese, give them a issue and they will discover a answer. What will You Discover?

[aimpak]

The White Condo merely known as out Russia by identify for the poisoning of a faded double agent and his daughter

US President Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017. MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images The White House has said Russia "is responsible" for using a nerve agent…

The post The White Condo merely known as out Russia by identify for the poisoning of a faded double agent and his daughter appeared first on AIMPAK.

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[thenewscollector]

The White Condo merely known as out Russia by identify for the poisoning of a faded double agent and his daughter

US President Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017. MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images The White House has said Russia "is responsible" for using a nerve agent…

The post The White Condo merely known as out Russia by identify for the poisoning of a faded double agent and his daughter appeared first on AIMPAK.

from AIMPAK http://ift.tt/2HwWxmP

[stupitdodopooopoookaka]

RAND PAUL stokes even more confusion on his backyard brawl — TAX UPDATE: House Republicans have revenue shortfall as Senate gears up to release its own bill — TRUMP TO CHINA: You guys can solve NKorea

FOR YOUR AWARENESS — SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY.) tweeted stories from the Washington Examiner and Breitbart, which both called into question his neighbor’s story that their altercation was based on a disagreement on landscaping. INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW — So, what really happened? Breitbart http://bit.ly/2zoDuL1 … Washington Examiner http://washex.am/2ykHjgo Good Thursday morning. FROM 30K […] #Politics

https://capitalisthq.com/rand-paul-stokes-even-more-confusion-on-his-backyard-brawl-tax-update-house-republicans-have-revenue-shortfall-as-senate-gears-up-to-release-its-own-bill-trump-to-china-you-guys-can-solve-nkor/ Japan manufacturers’ mood slips but hovers near decade high: Reuters Tankan FILE PHOTO: Cranes are pictured against the sunset at construction site in the Toyosu district in Tokyo, February 12, 2015. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo November 10, 2017 By Tetsushi Kajimoto and Izumi Nakagawa TOKYO (Reuters) – Confidence among Japanese manufacturers slipped in November from a decade high seen the previous month, a Reuters poll showed, but […] #Politics https://capitalisthq.com/japan-manufacturers-mood-slips-but-hovers-near-decade-high-reuters-tankan/ Putin, Trump approve joint statement on Syria-Kremlin U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam November 11, 2017. REUTERS/Jorge Silva November 11, 2017 MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump approved a joint statement on Syria after a brief contact at the APEC […] #Politics https://capitalisthq.com/putin-trump-approve-joint-statement-on-syria-kremlin/ Ivanka Wows In Maine Rocking Knee-High Black Boots [PHOTOS]   WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 02: Assistant to the President and Donlad Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump hosts a listening session with military spouses in the Rooselvelt Room at the White House August 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. The military spouses said the choose professions that they can practice no matter where their partners are stationed […] #TrumpNews https://capitalisthq.com/ivanka-wows-in-maine-rocking-knee-high-black-boots-photos/ All Eyes Were On Melania’s Gorgeous Outfit At Beijing Zoo Tour [PHOTOS]   First lady Melania Trump poses for a photograph after she presented stuffed toy eagles, from the U.S., to children at the Beijing Zoo in Beijing on November 10, 2017. (Photo: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)    8:51 AM 11/10/2017  Pinterest  Reddit  LinkedIn  WhatsApp Melania Trump stole the show again Friday at the Beijing Zoo in China […] #TrumpNews https://capitalisthq.com/all-eyes-were-on-melanias-gorgeous-outfit-at-beijing-zoo-tour-photos/

[haggertyadventuretime]

Coastal Game Changers, part two.

Didn’t mean to end on a cliffhanger there, the other half of my post got deleted and I haven’t had reliable enough internet to finish!

So, I left off by following our new friends to a house to seek refuge from the typhoon coming straight at us. We learned a couple of names, Charlie is a villa manager who was visiting from Saigon to check out the hotels and was also surprised by the storm. We were staying with her friend, Ms Mui, who lives in a large stone house with four rooms: a large dining and kitchen area, the living room (where we were staying) with a couch, a hammock, a fold-out cot and a large oak door leading to the front, two bedrooms, and outside in a connecting area were the toilet and washroom. There is a small concrete garage for bikes (Ms Mui rents out bikes to domestic tourists), and a large concrete garage for cars, as well as a tin roof averaging to cover the front yard. All of this is situated in a very rural neighborhood surrounded by rice fields where oxen/water buffalo (I honestly cannot tell the difference, they look damn similar) bathe. In the house also resides Ms Mui’s daughter (teenage), her mother and an older sister.

That night, we visited another sister, who operates a Banh Xeo stand. In a griddle with four round divets in it, she sears beef to use the fat as a lubricant, then adds a rice flour and egg mixture to make a kind of pancake omelette stuffed with the beef, shrimp, sprouts and veggies. She places the finished pieces on a wooden board, and you help yourself and just count how many you have eaten, and pay for them later (2,000 a piece, very cheap!). We rode back to the house, where the other sister had prepared dinner! Already full, we are as much as we could (and it was delicious, tofu cakes with rice, shrimp paste, morning glory stems and the water the veggies were boiled in to use as a soup with the rice). Brendan and I spent the rest of the night drinking beers on the front porch that we had purchased at the corner store, watching the rain as it started coming in. Landfall wasn’t until morning, so all we could do was wait.

That night, more people started coming to the house. Some were domestic tourists from other associated resorts who were next to the water, others were neighbors who didn’t have strong enough houses. It was becoming clear that the storm would be very bad where it hit, but it was unclear what area would be hit hardest. The wind howling off the tin roof woke me up at 3am. I watched the sun rise and the house fill to about 30 people total. At around 5am, the lights went out. Luckily, the house has a gas operated stovetop, and by gas I mean there’s a canister underneath a tabletop portable stove! Breakfast of noodles or eggs with bread was served for 20,000 ($1)a person. The wind picked up, but never got too severe. Occasionally, there would be very big bursts of energy, and we would close all the windows and doors (big wooden shutters covered every opening in the house) until it passed, but we were lucky. The mountain ranges had spared us from the worst of the storm. I slept through the second wave of storms until around 10 when the wind had stopped and it was just raining steadily. We took some selfies as the last domestic tourists left, then enjoyed lunch with our hosts/new friends. We were even asked to stay another night! We wanted to, but a combination of Brendan’s back sleeping on a rock-hard cot and his need of a personal bathroom for a solid 12 hours (yay traveller’s intestines!) made us obliged to leave, for their sakes. We thanked them thoroughly, and they haggled down the price of our next hotel for us. We will never forget the wonderful generosity of complete strangers, feeding and sheltering us out of pure kindness!

That night we stayed in Cam Ranh proper, about 30km from where we stayed for the storm. The room was windowless, basic, and occasionally without power. The city had a lot more tree branches down than where we had been before. Brendan was too sick to eat, so I checked out a pho joint that Charlie had recommended. It was delicious! The only downside was that I was clearly the only westerner that area has seen in a while, and I was a woman, alone. I sat next to a couple of men who asked if I would have coffee with them after, and I politely declined, telling them I needed to take care of my sick husband in my hotel. I’ve heard some stories about female travelers accidentally making the wrong impression with Vietnamese men, and I didn’t want to remotely walk that path. Nevertheless, they ended up paying for my meal, which I protested but thanked them for.

The next morning, Brendan and I met up with Charlie and Ms Mui to have coffee and Bun Bo, a hearty and flavorful Central Vietnamese noodle soup with pork and blood cake. So. Delicious. We also learned that in Vietnam, tea is served in the same 3-4 cups that remain unwashed. For everyone. And dipped straight into the tea. Culture shock! I’ve gotten over it now. After a delicious meal, we bid our generous hosts goodbye and good luck, and sped off to Nha Trang. We figured that we could find a train station in a more populated area to send the bikes north to Hoi An and skip the dangerous roads affected by the storm.

Nha Trang was devastated by the storm, about 25% of all trees were down, often blocking streets completely. The entire city was running on generators at night. We learned that landslides and flooding would make biking North impossible. We also learned that Hoi An and Danang were flooded, with more rain on the way, Hoi An with water neck deep. All train and bus services were suspended until further notice as landslides had literally covered tracks. We were stuck.

At least we were stuck on a beach with a room for $11/night! We kind of liked how this usually bustling Russian tourist town seemed a little tougher around the edges than usual, as pretty much everyone who was there had survived the storm. Nha Trang was where the eye made landfall, and it was clear. Rubble, down phone lines, fallen billboards were everywhere. On day two, the lights came back on, and off, and on again. The way they restring lights here was amazing to watch... No old lines are taken down, a repair man wearing flip flops just climbs up the pole (no ladder, he just takes handfulls of wire to hoist himself up), connects the wire, throws it toward the next pole, climbs down and repeats. Crazy.

We figured that we only had one option to continue in Vietnam: We had to get rid of the bikes, unfortunately. The train lines south were working, so we had to bid farewell to Mr Bones and Blade Runner and ship them back to Saigon, and take a flight from Nha Trang Airport to Hanoi and just skip the center of Vietnam in general. No Hai Van Pass, no custom suits, sadly. That just means we have to come back!

So here we are in Hanoi! We have been here for two days. Tomorrow, we leave on a cruise to Ha Long Bay. Unfortunately, it looks like the only way to do the area there is with a tour company, and it’s expensive. We also read that you get what you pay for, so we spent a little more than we were hoping for better accommodation and experiences, in theory. We will see. Hopefully the other people on the boat don’t suck.

So now you are all up to date, hopefully the boat will have WiFi so I can post more pictures. Facebook has pics through Nha Trang, feel free to check it out!

[thedeadshotnetwork]

10 things you need to know today: November 10, 2017 1. A woman told The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 years old and Moore, now 70, was a 32-year-old prosecutor. The woman, Leigh Corfman, said Moore kissed and fondled her, and "guided her hand to touch him over his underwear." Three other women said Moore started inappropriate relationships with them when they were 16 to 18. Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice, called the allegations "completely false" and "a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party." The White House said President Trump believes a "mere allegation" shouldn't be allowed to "destroy [Moore's] life," but that he should "step aside" if the accusations are true . 2. Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled their tax plan, which differed from the House version on some key points. Like their House counterparts, whose revised bill was approved by the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, Senate Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, but they want to delay the reduction until 2019. Stocks, which have been boosted by anticipation of corporate breaks, dropped Thursday and headed for another fall Friday due to investors' concerns over the Senate's proposed delay. Supporters of the legislation also worried that the differences between the House and Senate bills on such issues as whether to keep deductions for state and local taxes could threaten efforts to pass the overhaul quickly. 3. President Trump said at a regional summit in Vietnam on Thursday that the U.S. "will not tolerate" trade abuses, saying only countries that "follow the rules" will get U.S. business. Trump said that the U.S. had removed trade barriers to let foreign goods into the U.S., but many countries have not reciprocated by opening their markets. "We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore," the president said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Danang. "I am always going to put America first, the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first." Despite speculation of a possible one-on-one meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House said "scheduling conflicts" would prevent a meeting. 4. President Trump's former security chief, Keith Schiller, privately testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he refused a Russian offer to send five women to Trump's hotel room during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, CNN reported Thursday, citing several sources with direct knowledge of the testimony. Schiller, a longtime Trump confidant, reportedly said he assumed the offer was a joke, and that he and Trump laughed it off. Committee members brought up the matter because of a controversial dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, working on opposition research funded by Democrats during last year's presidential campaign. Steele concluded that Russia had dirt on Trump, including salacious details of an alleged encounter with prostitutes in Moscow. 5. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday suggested that the U.S. is pushing for the disqualification of Russian athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics in an attempt to interfere in Russia's presidential campaign. Putin noted that the Olympics start in February in PyeongChang, South Korea, and Russia's election is in March. "There are very strong suspicions that all that is done because someone needs to create an atmosphere of discontent among sports fans and athletes over the state's alleged involvement in violations and responsibility for it," Putin said, adding that the U.S. might be trying to "create problems in the Russian presidential election in response to our alleged interference in theirs." 6. Pastor Frank Pomeroy, leader of the Texas church where a gunman murdered 26 people on Sunday, told leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention that the building would be demolished. The pastor said the church was "too stark of a reminder" of the massacre, in which his own teenaged daughter was killed, said a spokesman for the national church. The decision won't be final until surviving congregation members are consulted. Charlene Uhl, whose 16-year-old daughter Haley Krueger was killed, agreed that the building should be torn down, saying as she visited a row of white crosses placed on the property that there should be a church, "but not here." Other sites of some other mass shootings, such as Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, also have been demolished. 7. A juror excused from Sen. Bob Menendez's (D-N.J.) bribery trial said she would have found him "not guilty on every charge." The former juror, Evelyn Arroyo-Maultsby, said she believed the government was "railroading him," and she predicted the jurors would be unable to resolve disagreements on the case. "It's a hung jury right now," she said after she was dismissed Thursday at the end of the third day of deliberations. The judge replaced Arroyo-Maultsby to keep a promise that she would be able to make a trip planned earlier. Prosecutors accuse Menendez of doing business favors for Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen in exchange for lavish gifts and campaign contributions. Menendez and Melgen deny it, saying they are just close friends. 8. One-time New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who hanged himself in prison in April while serving a life sentence for murder, suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) ever observed in a person his age, Boston University researchers revealed at a medical conference on Thursday. The researchers said the damage would have significantly affected his thinking and judgment. Doctors found that Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE, never before seen in a brain younger than 46 years old. The finding was expected to fuel renewed debate in football's concussion crisis, and heighten concerns over the possibility of injuries to young players. 9. A major Puerto Rico power line repaired by the tiny Montana company Whitefish Energy failed on Thursday, leaving more than 80 percent of the island, including parts of San Juan and other major cities, without electricity, two months after Hurricane Maria. The failure of the line early Thursday knocked out 25 percent of the U.S. Caribbean island territory's power generation, which had been restored to 43 percent capacity, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said. Whitefish, which lost its contract after critics questioned its qualifications, denied that the new problems "have anything to do with the repairs Whitefish Energy performed," spokesperson Brandon Smulyan said. 10. Five women told The New York Times in an article published Thursday that comedian Louis C.K. either asked to masturbate in front of them or in fact did it , without permission. Comedian Rebecca Corry said C.K. asked to pleasure himself in front of her while they were on set for a TV pilot in 2005, but she declined. Comedic duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov said that in 2002, they went to hang out with C.K. in a hotel room and, before they removed their winter coats, C.K. asked them if he could take out his penis. The women thought he was joking, but then "he really did it. ... He proceeded to take all of his clothes off ... and started masturbating." When reached for comment, C.K.'s publicist told the Times that the comedian "would not answer any questions." November 10, 2017 at 01:04PM