punkass crusade

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're in Cambodia right now. We left Vietnam on Thursday, feeling much as we did when we left China: that we were saying goodbye to a newfound home away from home, one that we would like to visit again in the not-too-distant future. This was due in large part to the fact that we felt like we had made a real friend there: Max, with whom we had drinks the night before our morning flight to Cambodia. Maya and I had found a copy of the last issue of Revolver magazine I worked on before our trip (with Down on the cover) in a Hanoi bookshop that afternoon, and we showed it to Max, and we talked about how fucked up the music industry is, and he told us about the time he'd had a meal with Metallica's James Hetfield (who is apparently friends with Max's "mate" from Midnight Oil) and James wouldn't go anywhere without his bodyguard. After drinks, he dropped us off at our hotel on his motorbike (yeah, I know Maya and I vowed not get on one of the "damn things" again - but when Max is driving, it doesn't count) and bid him a fond farewell, promising to stay in touch. In homage to Max, here's a link to the Sir No Sir! anti-war flash trailer he showed us one day in his cafe - Punkass Crusade. It's pretty powerful stuff - check it out.

What else will we miss besides Max? The food. Delicious. All about fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices combined delicately with meat and fish. Over our two weeks in Vietnam, we had sizzling Cha Ca, a fish marinated in yogurt and spices grilled up at your table with veggies and served up with fish- and/or shrimp-sauce (and we ate it with an older Australian gentlemen we happened to befriend whose been eating Cha Ca at this one restaurant over the past 15 years and is writing a book on Vietnam); we had the most scrumptious Bun (pronounced "Boon") - a rice-noodle dish with sweet slices of beef, crispy deep-fried garlic pieces, sprouts, sprigs of cilantro, basil, and mint, and all sorts of other unnamed goodness - at a streetside family-style restaurant of questionable hygiene but unquestionable culinary talent; we had mouth-wateringly scrumptious fresh spring rolls, and fried spring rolls, and apple juices, lemon juices, strawberry shakes, slices of papaya, dragon fruit, and the list goes on... Did we pay for our culinary adventures? Occasionally. But we rarely regretted the days-after that we lost in our hotel bathroom.

On Halloween night, which was rainy and cold in Hanoi, we walked down to a movie theater that the propietress of our hotel recommended to us. (By the way, our hotel, Tung Trang, despite our somewhat frightening first night, ended up being awesome.) The theater was in a huge, western-style mall and had stadium seating and great sound and picture. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which we had missed when it was in theaters Stateside - and it rocked hard. The film, if you haven't seen it, ends in New York City, and seeing the familiar streets, buildings, bridges, and scenery of our hometown on the big screen, Maya and I felt a tinge of homesickness, which was made even stronger by the fact that sitting in the dark neverland of that mall movie theater felt just like sitting in a movie theater back in the U.S. When the film ended and we stepped back out into the dirty, barely lit, frenetic streets of Hanoi, we felt like we'd stepped right from America into Vietnam. The truth is that as much as Hanoi may have come to feel something like a home, we're still only visitors and our real home is half a world - and two more months - away.