Author Archives: Michelle Ross

2016 Book Challenge- A Book Published Before You Were Born

Posted
Filed under Book Musings

2016 Book Challenge- A Book Published Before You Were Born

and-then-there-were-none1

Ten little soldier boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were Nine.

Nine little soldier boys sat up very late;
One overslept himself and then there were Eight.

Eight little soldier boys travelling in Devon;
One said he’d stay there and then there were Seven.

Seven little soldier boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in halves and then there were Six.

Six little soldier boys playing with a hive;
A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five.

Five little soldier boys going in for law;
One got into chancery and then there were Four.

Four little soldier boys going out to sea;
A red herring swallowed one and then there were Three.

Three little soldier boys walking in the Zoo;
A big bear hugged one and then there were Two.

Two little soldier boys sitting in the sun;
One got frizzled up and then there was One.

One little soldier boy left all alone;
He went and hanged himself

And then there were None.

—Frank Green, 1869

May is nearly gone, which means another strike-through on the book challenge list. I was late on figuring out which topic to cover this month, as I got sucked into a few different readings (11 books this month, my favorite being The Sympathizer by Nguyen Viet Thanh), none of which covered the topics I had left, but luckily, with a little over a week left in the month, I got an email from my oldest niece that pointed me in the right direction. She is going to be in sophomore honor’s English at Caldwell High School in the fall (Go Cougars!) and received her reading list for the upcoming year and wanted to know if I would use my Amazon Prime account (a near necessity of the Foreign Service lifestyle) to buy her books. On it were both the books she will be reading during her sophomore semesters, as well as the two she needs to read over the summer.

As a side note, I love that this teacher is suggesting that her students buy their own copies, as it sounds like she is going to teach them to annotate and hopefully do close readings of literature. I wish we had covered those skills when I was in high school! I would have found the much more useful to my future life than divining the difference between sine, cosine and tangents or learning to draw economic supply and demand curves. (I say that in semi-jest. It is true I don’t employ those skills on a daily or weekly or possibly even annual basis, but I am grateful for the way they helped me learn to think and to study. I get it. I get it. Learning to think is key. But, literature. That is where it is really at!)

Back to the reading list. Over the summer, Kels has to read And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie classic, and then another mystery novel of her choice. My favorite part of this email was when she asked if I would pick her mystery novel, making it a true mystery! There is little I enjoy more than recommending books to people. I am ecstatic when I offer up a book suggestion or two and then hear back that it was a perfect fit. This may be what I miss most about teaching. (As a side note, if anyone knows how I can become a personal book shopper, let me know. I would be in heaven!) It took me an hour or two of browsing my GoodReads history and a few lists of best mystery novels of the last couple of centuries before I made a final choice. Mystery is not my go-to genre and I honestly don’t find a lot of literary merit in many of the current options, so I decided to throw Kels back to the beginning, the heart of the mystery novel and hook her up with some Sherlock Holmes. (I must admit this may also have been slightly influenced by my current Netflix binge: Elementary.) With The Hounds of Baskerville headed her way, she’s going to have a seriously fantastic time with her summer reading.

This is made a rather short story long, but the point is that my niece’s email last week pushed me to go back and reread And Then There Were None. I had not read it since I was a sophomore in high school, so it was a great opportunity to reread a true classic and bring me up to speed so we can go to coffee when I am home this summer and talk about her comparison/contrast paper that is due when the new school year kicks off in August. Plus, it was a perfect fit for the “a book published before you were born” category, as Christie’s masterpiece first came out in 1939 under a title that would now be considered highly offensive. (Look it up if you don’t know this history.)

If you haven’t read this foundation of the mystery genre and you’re playing along with the 2016 book challenge, mark it down for June and as “a book you should have read in high school.” It isn’t long and you’ll be sucked in from the epigraph. Plan a day with no distractions and follow along as the soldiers drop, one by one.

In Search of the End of the Sidewalk’s 2016 Reading Challenge

_____ A book published this year– (A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin)

_____A book you can finish in a day-  (When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi)

_____A book you’ve been meaning to read

_____ A book recommended to you by a librarian

_____ A book you should have read in school

_____ A book chosen for you by your spouse/partner, best friend, child or sibling

_____ A book published before you were born (And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie)

_____ A book that was banned at some point  (A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess)

_____ A book you abandoned previously

_____ A book you own but have never read

_____ A book that intimidates you

_____ A book you’ve read at least once   (I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced  by Nujood Ali)

 

 

Goodbye to an Old Pal

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

This poor blog has been sorely neglected over the last handful of weeks. As I look back, I don’t have a great excuse, other than a bit of laziness, but I think I am going to blame it on my recent laptop conversion. Late last year, my trusty pink Vaio laptop began to fail. I would be working away on a project and suddenly I would hear a small popping sound and then everything would go black. Nothing. No power. No charge. Everything not saved, gone. (This was right as I was working on my graduate thesis, so I quickly became an obsessive saver, as little is more painful than having pages upon pages of ideas disappear. Yes, they were still rattling around in my head, but sometimes it is nearly impossible to recreate that perfect sentence that you cobble together, reconstruct and then rework one more time.)

With my faithful laptop looking at an imminent demise, back in late February I finally broke down and bought a new one. I was really hoping to make the current machine last until summer when I would be home in the US to do some in-person shopping, but once it started to blink out three or four times a day, I knew the end was near. A DNR had been issued.

Not wanting to buy local, but also not wanting to buy online without seeing the product, it was time to do a little KL recon. (I am a stickler for a good keyboard. I want something with a bit of a click to it. I adore the sound of typing and want just the right background noise as I write away for this blog and other projects.) Looking at computers in Kuala Lumpur means a trip to Low Yat, possibly my least favorite shopping area in town. It very much reminds me of the computer city buildings in Chengdu- large edifices crammed full of legitimate brand name stores, flanked by less than reputable kiosks and shops selling anything with a battery or electrical connection. The whole place makes me both claustrophobic (something I am not) and uneasy. Am I going to get ripped off? Pickpocketed? Shived? All seem like possibilities.

One quiet Sunday afternoon, Thad and I made the trip to Low Yat where the main test of the day was keyboard clickiness. Once I determined that Hewlett-Packard machines, as whole, had the best sound, it was time to go home and narrow down my options. In the stores (“stores”?) I did see a few other brands of a 360-degree style that I really liked and the internet quickly told me that HP not only has this style, but it was highly ranked among its peers. I love the laptop/tablet combo idea.

Horrified by the price of laptops in general (I really thought they had gone down more than they had over the last five years), I finally settled on the HP Spectre, realized it was pretty much a set price at all stores, so made my purchase. Knowing that it had to be shipped to Kuala Lumpur through the diplomatic pouch, the fact that the Spectre had a built in battery was a huge selling point, as that fits within the regulations of pouch mail. Before buying, I even checked with the embassy mail room staff, who assured me that shipping with an installed lithium battery should be no problem.

Apparently, it was a problem.

As I excitedly watched the shipping progress from Best Buy to the pouch facility, I was horrified one morning to see that the box had been rejected by the pouch and returned to the warehouse. Best Buy refunded my credit card, but what I really wanted was my new computer. Ol’ Trusty was on life support and the prognosis wasn’t good.

Back to the internet I went, reordering the exact same item, but this time shipping it to my brother in Idaho, who then had to rebox it and ship it again (there’s an extra $30) with a customs label indicating that the battery had been removed. Ugh. (The second round of shipping did mean that when it finally came, treats from home and drawings from the niece and nephew were bonus gifts.) Two weeks estimated shipping time on the original purchase ended up being over six weeks, with the new laptop arriving just days after I left KL for a three-week stint at Consulate Ho Chi Minh City.

Now, I’m in the painful process of converting from the dying, cracked, pink laptop to the shiny, new, black and bronze beauty. But, the changeover is fraught. All of my life is on that other machine. It knows my links. It knows my passwords. It has Word. It has everything.

Plus, I feel a strange loyalty to it. (I tend to be loyal to a fault. I remember as a kid feeling guilty when I switched from regularly listening to my parents’ favorite oldies radio station to the current pop station. Strange loyalties, I tell you.)

Last night, I finally downloaded Word onto this new machine, so the replacement process is nearly complete. I am not sure what will become of the old machine as we face packing out in just a few short weeks, but I’m hoping by July to be fully dependent on this fancy new table/laptop, as it is much small and much lighter, a huge benefit as a summer of travel is headed our way. It is time to say goodbye to my old pal, my trusty buddy who has traveled all over Asia and back to American multiple times. It served me well, adding years of postings to my blog, sticking out a graduate degree in literature and giving me hours of wasted time on internet pic-dump sites.

The transition means it is time to get back to regular blogging; no more excuses. Blogs and Wordless Wednesdays are headed your way. Be prepared.

2016 Book Challenge- A Book You’ve Read at Least Once

Posted
Filed under Book Musings

2016 Book Challenge- A Book You’ve Read at Least Once

nujood

I just realized, about two hours ago, that today is the last day of April. How did that happen? It seems like March was just wrapping up. Part of my “where did April go?” issue stems from the fact that I was on work travel to Vietnam for three weeks of the month, so they were a weird “limbo” time that made the month just disappear.  Being a solo-traveler for a good part of the month gave me some great reading time, plus the abundance of coffee shops around Ho Chi Minh City provided the perfect ambiance to settle in with a good book time and time again, so in April I finished fourteen books, many that deserve discussion, but in sticking with the end of the month wrap up for the reading challenge, this month’s topic will be “a book you’ve read at least once.”

Although not the intended topic for the month, this ended up being a perfect fit because of the work we are doing in the consular section at the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Since Embassy Sana’a (Yemen) closed a bit over a year ago, our embassy has seen a dramatic increase in the number of Yemeni cases we are dealing with, both in terms of immigrant visas, as well as American Citizen Services for Yemeni-Americans. We have three staff members who used to work in Sana’a, who have joined us here in Kuala Lumpur, and are a blessing to our section in many ways. Chatting with one of these fantastic ladies earlier in the month, she recommended I read I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced by Nujood Ali and Delphine Minoui, with Linda Coverdale (translator). I first read this book several years ago and honestly didn’t remember a lot of the details of Nujood’s story, but I had given it only two stars on GoodReads and I remember being frustrated with sparse narration of the story. I am not sure if that is the only reason I gave it just two stars, but at the time I may have found much of the story difficult to comprehend on a human/emotional level.

When my colleague recommended the book, I thought not only was this a perfect tie-in with the work I was doing at the embassy, but I instantly knew it would be my book challenge book of the month! I am not a huge re-reader of books, not because I don’t love the stories, but because I can’t help but pick up the newest publications, so my old favorites get pushed back as my to-read list fills up each month with all the great things coming out right now. This was a great way to go back and read a book again, and in this case, changed my entire opinion of the story.

My new connection to Yemen and my regular interactions with Yemeni people let me see Nujood’s tale through a whole new light. Yes, the narration was still sparse and the ending was not satisfying on a literary level (of course, what happened in the end is what happened and I don’t want a false-ending, but I think more follow-up and more of an ending would have benefited the final publication), I found the story itself to be much more powerful this time around. The bravery exhibited by Nujood, a ten year old child, is astounding. Not only did she have to fight against tribal customs and family rituals, but she confronted government itself- never an easy task regardless of age/nationality. The risks she took to save herself were immense and the fact that she was able to find the right people at the right time amazing. (The first time I read the book, I think I found this too coincidental to be entirely accurate, but with a new perspective on the country, I was less bothered by this detail on my re-read.)

What I find most fascinating about this month’s challenge read is just how differently I see this book the second time through. It backs up the idea that one never really reads the same book again, as each time we are in a different place in our lives, bringing a different perspective to the narrative at hand.  The first time I read this book, I was not at all thrilled. I didn’t hate it, but was probably not recommending it to others. The tables have turned. I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced is a short book, fewer than two hundred pages, so can be read in a day or two. It is a fascinating look at a country and culture that are not well-known by most Americans (how many could point to Yemen on a map?) which can speak to a variety of readers. I highly recommend this one to just about anyone.

 

In Search of the End of the Sidewalk’s 2016 Reading Challenge

_____ A book published this year– (A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin)

_____A book you can finish in a day-  (When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi)

_____A book you’ve been meaning to read

_____ A book recommended to you by a librarian

_____ A book you should have read in school

_____ A book chosen for you by your spouse/partner, best friend, child or sibling

_____ A book published before you were born

_____ A book that was banned at some point  (A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess)

_____ A book you abandoned previously

_____ A book you own but have never read

_____ A book that intimidates you

_____ A book you’ve read at least once   (I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced  by Nujood Ali)

 

 

 

 

Goodbye Ho Chi Minh City

Posted
Filed under Book Musings, Travel Musings

As my three weeks of TDY (temporary duty, meaning I am still working for State, but at a different post/different country) come to a close in Ho Chi Minh City, I’ve discovered something about myself as a solo-traveler. Yes, I want to see all of the main sights and yes, I will pay to go to the top of a tall building to look out over the city. Yes, I will wander around the museum and try to make sense of awkwardly worded plaques and yes, I will get a little lost in my wanderings as long as I have a card for the hotel to hop in a cab in case I get really lost. I enjoy all of these things and have spent several afternoons and weekends doing all of it in and around HCMC, but one of my favorite pastimes here, on my own, has been finding a great spot to pull out my book and waste away an hour or two reading/people watching. (Is it really wasting? ? Probably not.)

When Thad and I travel together, we are on the move constantly, exploring new places and enjoying the trip together. With your favorite travel-buddy along, there is always something to chat about- whether it is what you saw earlier in the day or what is in the plans for tomorrow’s seeing. Solo though, those conversations all stay in my head (well, mostly- I have been known to talk to myself occasionally, but it is usually while I am on the move, sorting out directions or plans). Instead, I used my downtime from touring to relax in the shade with a book and a cool drink, sometimes on a park bench and others at a café.  (On the same theme, I also sent out spades of postcards as I enjoyed my strawberry smoothies, and sunshine, so for those in the loop, be on the lookout in about a month! I’m guessing that with the local post, that timeline isn’t too much of stretch.)

It was not a bad way to spend a few weeks.

Of course, I still prefer to travel as a couple. We’ve got almost eighteen years of co-traveling under our belts, so we’re pretty good at the divide and conquer aspects of adventure, but when that isn’t in the cards, I apparently do quite well just me, a book and a view.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

A Little Foreign Service Where’s Waldo

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

I think it is has come up before, but a major advantage to working for the US State Department in foreign postings is that we get to enjoy both US federal holidays as well as local holidays. (Of course, there is a number of days cutoff, otherwise some embassies/consulates would be on vacation all of the time!) My TDY to Ho Chi Minh City happened to fall at just the perfect time, as Kuala Lumpur had no holidays over that three week period, but Vietnam had one long weekend, right in the middle of my stay, so while my dear friends/colleagues in KL were fingerprinting and interviewing and collecting DNA and the million other things that happen in our section each day, I went on vacation to Hoi An.

The other bit of luck that came my way over the weekend was that Thad’s friends were in town from Idaho and he had taken time off work to hang out with them, so the whole crew flew up to Da Nang, where we are able to meet up and travel together for a few days.

Our outdated guidebook (Lonely Planet 2008, but we figured somethings never change!) pointed us towards Hue for a day, a suggestion we gladly took.  About two and a half hours outside of Da Nang, the Hue boasts the ruins/reconstruction of a citadel that were the perfect place to kick off our long weekend.  We wandered for hours, following a few unspoken rules:

1)      If an area is crowded by a tour group, quickly retreat

2)      If there are stairs, take them and see where they lead

3)      If there is an awesome, cool doorway, wander in to see what it offers.

4)      If there is shade, explore the area more thoroughly

5)      If there is no shade, walk briskly; Don’t stop moving to read the plaques- just get to the shade!

(Rule three meant that I was the only one out of the group who did not walk in on random old Vietnamese dude eating noodles in his underwear. Rules four and five were necessary as Saturday turned out to be 100 degrees, which my handy-dandy weather app told me carried a heat index of 117. As a whole, we are a pretty pasty group and were sweating in pretty much every place we could sweat. [I swear my eyes were sweating!] Avoiding direct sunlight was crucial.)

Lunch was another small adventure. Our driver dropped us off at a little shop that had only one offering. Noodles. There were no noodle options. No menu. I held up four fingers and soon four steaming bowls of noodles arrived at the table. They had a bit of spice to them, but were not anything I wouldn’t order again. The others as the table added a bit more spice to theirs, Josh and I shoveled our fatty meat pieces into Thad’s bowl and as a whole, we made quick work of those bowls. (There were also some other random foods wrapped in banana leaves deposited on the table. Justin took full advantage of the chance to try a bit of each.  That is a level of eating bravery I will never reach. One was never identified as either animal or plant-based…who knows…)

Saturday was long and hot, so we all opted for a quieter, cooler Sunday.

Hoi An sits on a river and we instantly knew the day must include a boat in some form or fashion. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to hire a boat for two hours, getting a private tour of the river and a few surrounding villages. (Tour might not be the right word, as our boat driver spoke nothing but Vietnamese and I was the most fluent one in the boat, with an ever-expanding vocabulary that includes such phrases as “left hand,” “right hand,” “good morning” and “thank you.” None of those were going to do us much good unless we needed to make a quick veer to the right or left.)  Nevertheless, we made ourselves at home on our boat (I do believe I was the only one who kept my shoes on!) and enjoyed floating up and around, watching fisherman, working boats and other tourists doing their thing.

How does one follow up something as strenuous as a boat ride? With nothing less than wandering the streets of Hoi An’s old town, checking out the shops and making multiple café stops for Vietnamese iced coffee, smoothies, lime juices and snacks, followed by massages and dinner. Being a tourist is rough!

But, as with all great things, the long weekend quickly came to an end and as a crew, we had to part ways. I headed back to HCMC to finish up my last week of work in the city and Thad, Josh and Justin headed back to Kuala Lumpur in preparation for another week’s travel in the region (Brunei, Borneo and Singapore were on the list). Being able to hop from place to place is a fantastic perk of the Foreign Service lifestyle and one that I am going to miss when we are in Washington DC next year. (It is possible, but much more difficult and expensive from the States. No Air Asia service…)

When you are on vacation in Da Nang from your TDY in Ho Chi Minh City from your posting in Kuala Lumpur from your home in Idaho…

It is a bit of Where’s Waldo for adults.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(Photo credit: Thad Ross)

Saigon Zoo, Go Ahead and Skip It!

Posted
Filed under Travel Musings

If you’ve read more than about three entries on this blog, you are well aware that much of my travel revolves around the ability to go see (and more importantly, touch) *all* the animals. Being based in Southeast Asia has given me some fantastic animal-touching opportunities: snuggling a koala, being a mahout for a day, illicitly touching a panda bear, etc. (Click the links for a quick jump to each of those animal-rific tales. They will open in a new window, so no need to worry about losing this one.) If the chance is there, I’m going to take it! With that in mind and with three weeks of being a solo-traveler in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the first things I did was take the chance to go visit the city zoo.

Now, zoos are not my favorite way to see animals, as I much prefer to get even closer and more personal with the critters, but I’ve been to some fantastic animal reserves/parks, which are just fancier names for zoos, but also usually with a bit more forward-thinking take on keeping wild animals. The animal-area in HCMC is called a “zoo,” but that didn’t put me off in the least. San Diego calls their animal park a zoo and it is amazingly well done, creature-centric and education focused.

So, one day last week, I skittered out of work as soon as I could, made the quick dash to my temporary apartment (a mere one block from the consulate- what a commute!) and changed into a sundress and headed out the door, all in the span of about ten minutes. My  CLO-provided map (thanks , HCMC CLO office!) said that the zoo was a convenient fifteen minute walk, so after a brief consultation with the front desk to make sure I was headed in the right direction (Vietnamese street names all still look the same to me- I have not gotten to a higher level of language understanding yet!) and a book and a bottle of water in my bag, out I went.

The map did not lie about the distance, but I may have slightly overestimated the convenience factor, mainly because I had to cross several large streets and at this early point in my HCMC tenure I had not yet grasped the finer points of local traffic patterns. (A week and a half in, I can report that I’ve gotten pretty good at playing Vietnamese “Frogger” and can weave my way across six lanes of traffic without missing a step.) Arriving in one piece at the front gate, I was a bit taken aback by the general appearance of the entrance to the zoo; rundown is a sliggt understatement. Rather than reading “zoo,” the welcome had more of a “so-creepy-you-might-die-inside-park” vibes. But whatever. I braved the traffic to get there, I was going to see what it had to offer, so I quickly offered up my two dollar entry fee and headed on in.

Saigon Zoo (the official name) is comprised of two main parts: the animals and the botanical gardens. One of these was well-worth my $2 and the other was not.

I’ve seen a zoo or two in my time, but this one ranks as one of the worst. There was a strange array of animals, everything from reptiles galore to sadly swaying elephants. The most abundant caged animal was deer- there was a huge dirt area dedicated to a herd of probably fifty critters. (The “caged” designation is key, as other than the deer, the second most ubiquitous animal at the zoo was rats. I saw enough free-range rats to last me for the next few weeks. ) The best exhibit was the sea otters, mostly because they were actually active and seemed halfway happy. They had just been fed a bucket of fish heads (where were the bodies?) and were skittering around from pond to pond eating their seafood-inspired lunches.

But, putting aside the deplorable menagerie and wandering  a few meters away , I found a decent  botanical garden. It was really more of a nice park that a botanical garden (no labels on flora, nothing seemingly in any order), but I’ll stick with their nomenclature on this one. Toss the poor city parks group a proverbial bone! The park was nice. It was filled with benches, a fountain and several smaller parks-within-a-park. It will come as no surprise that my favorite part of the botanical park was the two huge cranes who wandered by the bench where I had settled in with the book I brought along, in hopes of a peaceful evening. (HCMC is *loud,* so any bit of quiet is a nice reprieve from the bus horns, scooter squeals and general ruckus of a quickly expanding Asian city.) But back to the cranes. These two long-legged, long-necked, long-beaked buddies just walked by as if they had not a care in the world and I was just another inanimate object- a piece of the bench. (Did they make their great escape from the zoo side? If so, props to you giant cranes! Run while you can.)

My afternoon at the zoo was definitely not what I had envisioned when I logged off my State Department systems and headed out the door for the day, but it ended up being an interesting and entertaining evening, regardless. Would I recommend the Saigon Zoo to folks headed through town? Nope. But, if I lived here long –term (rather than my current three-week TDY) I think I’d be a frequent visitor, as the breath of fresh air a bit of calm among the chaos of the city would make for a welcome reprieve. Just ignore the swaying elephants, hungry-looking snakes and slightly mangy deer.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.