Well this might be it... the last post from the other side of the world. I head home tomorrow. TOMORROW!

I've done a pretty good job of keeping myself busy in the face of all the stress and anxiety and excitement of homecoming that is filling up my brain. I spent three days in Northern Vietnam in a little town called Sapa. My days were spent hiking through jungly mountains and terraced rice paddies, my nights were spent shivering under a mountain of blankets in an unheated guesthouse (it gets cold up north!). So the days were lovely, and I had to buy myself a disposable camera so I could capture the best of the scenery.

Here's a picture stolen from a tourist website.... yup, it really was that good.

I got back from Sapa early this morning. Today I wandered around Hanoi. I picked up a couple more souvenirs for friends, and for myself. There was a point in this trip, only a couple days ago, when I thought I'd actually head home with fewer pairs of shoes than I'd left with seven months ago. That dream will not become a reality. Sigh. But I think I'm okay with that.

In between fits of spending every last dong that I have, I went to the Hanoi Fine Art Museum. The collection was really interesting. I saw a lot of scenes of brave soldiers fighting against the "American aggressors" in traditional laquer-painting style. There was also a really interesting collection of massive oil paintings that glorify Uncle Ho.

When I just wander around the streets, and look at pretty things, it is easy to forget about our history with Vietnam, in a way, the art museum today reminded me of it. I saw some pieces that were very beautiful, and very sad.

My plan for tomorrow is pretty simple. I don't have any grand adventures in the works, because I'm not sure my brain could handle it. Instead, I've got a book, and a lovely lake to sit next to and drink coffee. If I make it to another museum or monument, that'll be fine, but I don't want to pressure myself into seeing one more thing.

I am so excited to be going home. I feel like I've been out here the right amount of time because I do feel ready to go home. But I'm also feeling nervous, and anxious. It is going to be a big change to step back into a world where everybody speaks English, and there aren't a thousand motorbikes trying to kill, and you can drink water out of the tap.

US of A, here I come!

Halong Bay.

(not my picture, but simply stolen from the internet to prove how pretty this place is)

I've been in northern Vietnam for about a week now.

It has been wonderful. The weather up north is cool and dry, so I don't end up breaking into a sweat every time I step outside. The coffee is wonderful here, and thanks to colonial French influences I get to eat a crunchy baguette with that coffee every morning, and after months of rice, that is a very great small joy.

I've spent most of the week living on Cat Ba island. It is the biggest island in Halong Bay, which is surely one of the more beautiful places on earth - giant limestone karsts rising straight out of the ocean. We've gone on a bunch of adventures around the area: kayaking around the bay, going on a hike through the interior of the national park, sailing around at suset, but the highlight may have been the chance to go climbing up these giant rock formations and simply falling into the warm water if you happen to lose your grip.

Today I'm going back to basics, I have plans to read my book on the beach and eat mangoes for lunch, but that is probably all the excitement I'm looking for. Tomorrow I'm hoping to do a little bit of biking around the island, and the next day we'll probably catch a ferry and head off toward somewhere new!

I haven't posted in a while, because I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down in front of a computer. This traveling thing has kept me pretty busy, but now I'm about halfway through my six weeks of fun touristing (which means I'm three weeks away from flying home! wow!) and I thought I'd mention where I've been and where I'm headed.

My sister flew out here the day after my job ended. We went on a whirlwind tour of Bangkok and Kanchanaburi, spent waaay too many hours in vans and buses to see Angkor Wat (which was simply incredible, but my camera died in awe of it, so I have no pictures to post) and then headed north to Chaing Mai and Pai. We went rafting down the river Pai, took a fancy Thai cooking class, and I failed at riding a bike up the highest mountain in that part of the country. All in all, I had a magnificent time (Thanks for coming to visit, Kate!).

Then a week ago, I took a long bus ride south to Koh Tao island where I started an introduction to scuba course (to get my basic certification) and ended up loving it so much I stayed on to get the advanced degree! Scuba diving was truly one of the most magical things I have ever experienced, it opened up a whole new watery world that was better than even "Planet Earth" made it look. I saw stingrays! I saw barracudas! I saw triggerfish and moray eels! I saw my fingers and my fins lit up in bioluminescent water!

It was so beautiful, I never would have stopped if I didn't have this darn plane ticket to Vietnam in two days.

My plans for Vietnam aren't entirely concrete, but I fly into Hanoi, and I'm hoping to spend a couple days there drinking good coffee and eating french baguettes, before traveling to Halong Bay and Cat Ba island. Then who knows? Maybe up to Sapa, to see the terraced rice paddies near the Chinese border?

The crazy thing is, I leave Thailand in two days, a country I've been living in for more than six months.... and I don't know when I'll be back again. There are just a couple more weeks of travel ahead of me, but in a way, I feel like leaving Thailand will be the beginning of heading back home.

Final Friday Explanation Point!

Today is my last Friday as a kindergarten teacher in Nonthaburi. You'd think that would be the same same as my last day as a kindergarten teacher, but no, I still have to work four more days next week. However, the finals have all been taken, the grading is about halfway done, and all thats left is for me to spend hours and hours wasting away at my desk, organizing picture cards and dreaming about the next 7 weeks of adventures.

Looking back on this semester, I am honestly amazed at how much my students have learned. All of them say "Good Morning, Teacher!" when I walk into the room. 75 percent of them can say the words "cat," "ice cream," and "fish" when they see a picture of that item. When they say the word "kangaroo," they jump up and down (sometimes I wonder if I've just trained them to do things that make me laugh - I also have them make lots of silly faces every day). Three year olds have a much huger capacity to learn and remember than I ever expected.

Even now, when I'm not quite done with my job, I look back on it and think, "well, that wasn't so bad, I probably ought to do this again sometime." That thought in my head is a funny thing, because I honestly have to force myself to remember the times when I was so frustrated I wanted to walk right out of the classroom and out of the school, the times when all of the assistant teachers left and I was stuck with 36 screaming children hitting each other in a pile on the floor or jumping up and down on top of their desks. Memory is such a wonderful, crazy thing that those moments are already fading.

Yup, I think I want to do this again sometime.

Some thoughts about Bangkok:

The ugliness of the stray street dogs put those weird zombie ones from Resident Evil to shame (why did anyone let me watch that movie?)

I can get a two-hour long Thai massage at the spa on the first floor of my building that is the best feeling my body has ever had (it is like having someone lovingly do yoga to your body) for ten bucks.

The Bangkok Art and Culture Center is a contemporary gallery but also a space for collective community art organizations to exist and promote themselves and their artists, and going there makes me feel like a hipster again.

I can get the best papaya salad in Thailand from the lady outside my apartment who sometimes lets me taste it before she sells it to me, and sometimes chases me with tiny blue crabs.

Every single day I step outside and feel assaulted by pollution and concrete, and somehow, I'm already starting to feel nostalgic for it.

The bus system here is as confusing and convoluted as the traffic jams themselves. But I love paying 25 cents to go anywhere in the city and feeling like I'm on the slowest moving tour in the world at the same time.

Yesterday I saw two rats fighting in a trashcan.

On Saturday I went to what is supposedly the largest market in the entire world (in terms of the largest number of vendors, I believe), Bangkok's Chatuchak Weekend Market. Vendors at the market sell new and used clothing, handicrafts, food, collectibles, and live animals. It was an incredible place to wander around, I saw something new and interesting every time I turned my head.

We took a city bus there, so after about 45 minutes of slowing creeping through Bangkok traffic we made it to the market, which is in a park, so it was surrounded not only by big city buildings, but also green trees and a little pond with rowboats.

The market had everything and more than you could ever possibly want. I was expecting more of the same cheap, tourist-y stuff that we see everywhere, but there was actually an incredible selection of handmade items, used clothes, antiques, stationary supplies, fake flowers, and lots and lots of puppies (that I still wasn't allowed to touch!)

We snacked as we walked, on shaved ice topped with condensed milk and fresh mangoes and coconut ice cream served in a coconut shell. There were big stalls and little ones. Some people sold sunglasses and fake perfumes off of mats on the ground, while others had shops with two or three interconnected rooms and atmospheric lighting. One section of the market entirely sold vintage western shirts and leather goods, another corner was full of local art, with contemporary paintings lining the white walls of mini galleries.

If you could imagine something, some impossible, crazy thing, I have no doubt it would exist somewhere within the winding aisles of Chatuhak Market.

The other excitement from this weekend is that yesterday, the census-people came knocking on my apartment door! After a moment of confusion for all of us when I opened it, from me, because no one ever knocks on my door, from the census takers because they weren't expecting my farang face, they found me a form that was written in English and handed it over.

So as of yesterday, the Thai government now knows that I am the only resident of my apartment. They know I have a college degree but am unable to read or write in Thai. They know I have a tv, a fridge, and air conditioning (they don't know I lack a chair, a spoon, and actual sheets). They know that I have an actual flushing sit toilet in the house and that I don't drink water from the tap. They know everything there is to know about me!

I was out of the country when the US census happened back home, so all this time I've been worried that maybe I didn't actually exist, but now I definitely do! I exist as a foreigner who doesn't even know her address or phone number to fill them in on the census form! I exist in Thailand!

This past weekend I traveled about an hour north of Bangkok to go to Ayutthaya, which is the former capital of Thailand that was sacked by Burmese invaders about 300 years ago. That means it is a place full of historical value, where ancient ruins poke up every which where around a modern town and you can tour through the ruined temple grounds. Which is what we did. It was a little bit of a drizzly day, but the weather seemed to perfectly match the moment of meandering around and looking at pretty old things. It was a magically photogenic little world, here's a snippet: