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So far so good…

When I lived in Colorado, I used to say I was living life on pause; now I feel like I’m living life on fast-forward. I can’t believe how much has happened in a month. I’ll start with my trip to Taipei in mid-October.

The high point of my Taipei trip was being taken (by force) to a restaurant called Modern Toilet. You sit on toilet seats, order dishes like “Toilet Chicken Curry,” which arrive in, you guessed it, little toilet bowls, and sip your drinks out of mini-urinals. Genius! Why hasn’t this concept spread outside of Japan and Japan-obsessed countries?! Because no one else knows how to make poop seem so darn cute.

The rest of my trip was pretty much one big night market eating binge. Boba tea, some pancake thing, and big bowl of black jello mud slime were among my favorites. Can you tell I’ve been working on my food writing skills?

So that was Taipei. Then there was Loy Kratong, Thailand’s prettiest little festival. Thai people make little floats out of banana trunk, leaves, flowers, candles, and incense. Then they go down to the nearest body of water and symbolically float away their hardships and sorrows. This year I took a boat down the Chao Praya River to ensure my float actually floated rather than getting stuck in a pile of trash like it did last year.

If the crowds in this video don’t make you feel claustrophobic, my winning camera technique definitely will.

And then Halloween happened. I was going to tell you about a really awesome fetish and bondage show that I went to, but that was before I actually went to it and found out that it was not so awesome. Just a powerpoint of naked people. In Bangkok! Would it really have been that hard to put some folks in S&M gear and have them prance around on stage for us eager viewers?

Moving on to my nearly-never-ending birthday celebrations, which started in Hanoi last weekend and finally came to a reluctant halt around 4 o’clock Sunday morning when I passed out in a pool of someone else’s blood. We went to Koh Samet (Samet Island) for the weekend and my friend cut his toe and turned the hotel room into a scene of a massacre. It was really funny at the time..it was! But not so much when writing it out like this. Now it just sounds horrifying. In any case, I ended up with three different birthday cakes, two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black, and a bottle of Patron. And a silver flask filled with Sangsom whiskey. And a can of SPAM. I’m not sure what this says about me as a person, but all in all, it was the best birthday I’ve ever had. And maybe the best month I’ve ever had.

With my friend Cong at Thang Loi Hotel (where I celebrated my 7th birthday 20 long years ago).

With my guitar hero Ha.

With Tu Anh, who used to drive me around on the front of his motorbike when I could still fit there and who first told me to use my diaphragm while singing, something my father neither understood nor appreciated when I announced it to him, age 12. It was his birthday as well, so we celebrated together; the third picture is of us eating the same piece of chocolate from our cake, nothing more.

A video of us singing Take it Easy, our mutually favorite song:

And driving around Ha Noi:

Cake #2, from my Seniors.

The remains of cake #3 from friends.

And capping it all off on the beach:

And yes, I do actually work on occasion.

(Coming up: Mussoorie, India for Christmas to visit the grandparents!)

© 2009 Dreaming of Hanoi.