Big Sky Country

This year, my move back to the native land of DC marked the first holiday season in about 7 or 8 years in which I didn't have to travel to see my family, since they are now right down the street from me.  What a delight to not have to agonize over inflated airfares, long lines at security and cranky/inexperienced travelers with their germy children.  

Well that went straight out the window as the travel bug itched me to find somewhere to jaunt off to for a New Year's getaway.  I'd like to say that I took a wall map and threw a dart and it landed on Montana and perhaps that would make this a much more interesting story, but I digress.

My good friend Jennifer recently moved to Bozeman, Montana to work for the Yellowstone Park Foundation.  I was certainly sad to see her go, but excited to have an opportunity to visit a part of the country that I typically probably wouldn't get to if I didn't have a friend there.  Jennifer raved about the high quality of life, art community and amazing scenery that Bozeman offers, so I decided to take her word for it and, and allow Delta the opportunity to fly me out there to see it for myself.  First things first, though, I needed to find safe refuge for Mr. Smittens, the little foster pup. 

Mr. Smittens (formerly known as Alex) is our third dog we have fostered with CityDogs Rescue.  Though fosters hope that their dogs will get adopted, hence the concept of fostering, Mr. Smittens should stay with us for as long he wants.  We thought about bringing him to Montana with us, but given that he was just recently recovering from a very emasculating sugery (see “cone of shame”, bottom right), Mr. Smittens was afforded the opportunity to spend the week with his Ya-Ya (Georgio’s mother) instead of making the trek to Big Sky Country. 

We planned to travel to Montana for 3 days.  The main attraction was Yellowstone National Park, but I was also looking forward to getting a glimpse of the "simple life" out there in Montana.  Everywhere we turned there was some sort a view of the Rocky Mountains.  The Coors Light cans really don’t do it justice. 

The first full day we spent in Bozeman, New Year's Eve, we ventured in to the mountains to check out the Big Sky area, which is about 45 minutes from Bozeman.  Since we didn't want to be too drained so we could soak up all of the crazy night life of Bozeman (population: 38,000), we thought best to do Yellowstone another day.  

Here are a few shots from the drive up the mountain.  

After an afternoon of driving up and down the mountain, and possibly getting the Yukon stuck in a snow bank because I thought that since I rented a big SUV I could go off-roading, we made haste to get back to town to prepare for our big night out on the town.  


Jennifer had finagled reservations at the hottest, hippest bistro in town, The Emerson Grill.  This restaurant was great - it had the rustic, yet up-scale farm house vibe and focussed on the whole "farm to table" concept.    I'm not big in to snapping pics of things I eat (unless it looks like something that could potentially eat me), so I'll spare you all the wanna-be foodie pics.  My friend Jennifer, a vegetarian, chose the salmon as her entree, so you know this place is decent.  

The rest of our evening consisted of bar hopping the Bozeman strip.  So, three bars later, after ringing in the New Year 3 hours behind the Right Coast to the musical accompaniment of an oldies rock band The Hotel Bozeman we were on our way back home to get tucked in to dream of our New Years day brunch of gluten-free pancakes.

A day or two later, we were ready for the main event Yellowstone National Park "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people".  This is the quote carved in to the arch at the North Entrance of the park.  Much of Yellowstone is not open during the winter because its impossible to keep all of the roads clear.  

The park spans Montana and Wyoming.  In fact when you enter at the North Entrance in Gardiner, Montana, you cross the border in to Wyoming after about 20 minutes of driving.  We had aspirations of driving all the way to Old Faithful, which is about a 2 hour drive from the entrance.  The guide at the North Entrance who took our entrance fee told us "there's only one road open today".  Not being seasoned park goers we shrugged and went on our way.

Well we found out what she meant when we drove all the way to the Northeast Entrance to learn that the road was closed.  

Nevertheless, we had a great ride through the park.  We stopped at the Mammoth Hot Springs, saw wolves, elk, bison and even a bald eagle.

Phnom Penh, The City With No Sidewalks

I recently traveled to Cambodia for a work trip to help put together a proposal to improve nutrition service delivery to women in rural villages in Cambodia.  Don't be too impressed, I don't actually have any part in doing any of that, I just crunch the numbers and nag people for information like audits and accounting manuals.  As uninteresting as my daywork sounds, the opportunity to travel to such great places (oh, and the fact that I'm, albeit indirectly, helping to save the children) is my favorite part of my job.  

The Journey
If you know me, you know I LOVE flying.  Something about being in the airport, people watching, cramming myself in to those spacious international economy class seats and hoping to God my row companions don't want to make friends with me for the next 8+ hours...well...I just can't get enough of it.  

This particular trip was my first opportunity to experience Korean Airlines from Dulles to Seoul for 14 hours, then Seoul to Phnom Penh, the capitol city of The Kingdom of Cambodia for another 5 hours.  I was excited for this trip, one because it was going to rack me a cool 20,000 miles on SkyTeam, though unfortunately not Medallion Qualifying Miles because apparently Delta and Korean are in a SkyTeam family feud so they're taking it out on their customers.  Yeesh, problems of an international traveler.  

The first flight to Seoul, South Korea was a bit of an odd experience.  It was a 14 hour flight leaving DC at 12pm (noon) and arriving in Seoul at 4pm the next day.  A few things about the flight that were different is that they feed you three full meals (that's a lot of airplane food), the flight attendants bow multiple times as they interact with you, and the plane had a little rest bunker for the flight attendants to go take naps throughout the trip.  

Also, something really strange is that they manufactured it to be a "nighttime flight" even though the flight departed in the afternoon and landed in the afternoon.  By "manufactured", I mean that after take off, all passengers were required to close the window shades and then dinner and drinks were immediately served.  After dinner service, the cabin lights were cut off and the flight attendants came around and gave you stickers to wear to indicate for which events you would like to be woken up for.  The choices were "Meals" (clearly catering to the American market), "Duty Free Shopping" and  "Before Landing".  Therein summed up the only three things that Korean Airlines decided I needed to worry about for essentially the next day of my life I'd be sharing with them and 150 other of my closest friends on this 777.  
I wished I had kept the stickers to find a future alternative purpose, like donning one at my next staff meeting, or perhaps using them as lint paper like the woman next to me.  "Take that, Korean Air, you can't put me to sleep just because you turn the lights out!".  

My plan seemed relatively simple and logical: stay completely awake for both the 14 hour flight to Seoul and again for the 5 hour flight to Cambodia so then when I finally land in Cambodia at 10:30pm on Saturday I can crash and go right to sleep.  Flaw: Not accounting for the fact that assumed me staying completely awake for 26 hours once all was said and done. 

So, that didn't really work out as planned.  After a few bad movies, a few snoozes, some bibimbap on the airplane (which the flight attendant gave me a laminated instruction card to guide my consumption), I arrived in Seoul just in time for the afternoon Royal Family processional through the airport.

Fast forward another 7 or so hours and I'm landing in Phnom Penh.  Raining cats and dogs and my airport driver informs me that its an after effect of Typhoon Haiyan.  Kind of a weird feeling realizing that I had traveling within a region just hit by a natural disaster.  

My Week In Cambodia
As I mentioned, I was on a work trip to help save some babies.  It was a fairly last minute planned trip (as most of mine are) and as such the trip was taking place over Cambodia's National Holiday, the Water Festival.  This holiday marks the beginning of the fishing season and the change in the Tonle Sap River's current.  Historically, this holiday is celebrated with long boat races along the river along with a carnival in front of the National Palace along the riverfront.  

National Palace

Unfortunately, the boat races haven't occurred for the past few years.  In 2010, there were crowd control issues at the event and it resulted in a stampede so the event has been contentious ever since.  The following year, floods country-wide caused the the festivities to be cancelled and in 2012 the nation's King Father Norodom Sihanouk died, causing a cancellation again.  This year, the water festival was again cancelled for two reasons: again flooding in some of the areas outside of Phnom Penh but also rumors of fear of potential political protest as a result of elections held this past July.  So, even though I barely found a hotel room in the whole city because of the national holiday, there were no boat races to be seen along the river.  I did catch another race though...

I was able to spend some time down at the river, though.  It was a nice spot with lots of restaurants, bars and coffee shops.  Also was the jumping off point for what seemed to be a huge backpacking seen in Cambodia.  

Top: Some old men relaxing by the river before sunset. 

Bottom:  Muscle beach  Cambodia  style.    This  is an  open air gym on the river walk which kids and adults spend time exercising.  

Another attraction of the riverfront is the Night Market.  It happens on Friday, Saturday and Sunday is a big hangout for local city folk.  The shopping wasn't that good, mostly novelty stuff, but there was also a main stage with local performers, a Cambodian "open-mic", if you will.  There was also big section of street food.  

The Night Market street food experience was pretty cool.  Basically there tons of stands and stalls with all these different types of skewered selections (bottom-right) that you pick out and hand to the fry ladies behind the table (top-left).  They will deep fry it and then voilá (middle-right), piping hot fried everything! Now, just have a seat (take your shoes off first) on the communal mats and you're in a makeshift outdoor Cambodian equivalent of a food court (top-right).  

Here are some other pictures I snapped during a Sunday stroll around town when most are out for they day doing their shopping for the week...

There isn't really any public transit in Phnom Penh, nor (as the title implies) any sidewalks, so its not a very pedestrian friendly place.  So, my mode of transport everywhere was a Tuk-Tuk.  Tuk-tuks are motorcycles with buggies attached to the back of them which will take you pretty much anywhere you want to go for $1, but if you're foreign you have to negotiate down from $3.  Say tuk-tuk really fast pretending as if you're driving a motorcycle and you'll quickly see why they're called tuk-tuks.

I happened to catch a wedding processional in the middle of the street at the Russian Market (not run by Russians nor were Russian items for sale).  I thought it interesting that guests were bringing fruits and cakes as gifts.  

About A Blog

I have thought about writing a blog for quite some time now, and finally, in conjunction with the purchase of a new laptop which makes normal computing tasks slightly more bearable, I started. 

There are two things that hindered me from starting a blog that I thought would be topical to write about.  The first, duh, is the overall topic and theme, that’s an easy one and I’m sure what everyone that wants to start a blog pines about.

But one thing I struggled with around blogging, aside from accepting that I might eventually be associated with that community and how many hipster-plus credits that would give me (note-I’m trying to avoid hipster credits) is the multiple, and seemingly overlapping portals of social media expression that now exist, and how my blog would be carved in that social “mediasphere”.

The second hurdle that really confused me was how do I make my blog a unique space that people will want to regularly visit, since blogging essentially is a back to basics version of all the functionality offered by Facebook, Twitter, Vine, and Tumblr.  It’s why I picked the intro clip to this post from He’s Just Not That Into You - there are so many forms and forums of communication through different portals, how does you decide what’s the most effective?

In one of my previous jobs, my boss required me to write my annual performance self evaluation in the third person point of view, so it could, theoretically,  read like an objective narrative piece should it ever be picked up by a completely uninformed person to read…that’s some awkward word smithing.

What’s the point of spending all this extra time designing HTML layout and copy editing all my writing to express myself when I can so graciously take advantage of the platform that Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and Mr’s. or Ms’. Whoever-else-created-the-rest-of –those-platforms-that-haven’t-had-Justin-Timeberlake-movies-made-about-them-yet created for me to write my thoughts or post my pictures? How do I avoid the tendency to have my Facebook page just be a mirror of what’s on my blog or vice versa especially when everyone is “on” everything now and every app allows you to simultaneously Facebook and Tweet your Instagrams in one fell swoop? (Is there a verb for posting to Vine yet? Is it “vining”?)  And most importantly, how do I combat the awkwardness of writing about myself?

The other thing that I was confused about is how to make my blog, this dedicated space on the Internet for my messaging somewhere that everyone would want to easily access throughout the day when we’re surfing the web.  I’m not an Internet junkie.  I am addicted to my iPhone and being able to access specific information updates at all times, mainly my Gmail and my Facebook feed.  But, I’ve never been one to comb the internet for hours watching endless YouTube videos, reading periodicals, or doing my own research on investing, fitness, product reviews, etc.  I want my blog to have a point and possibly a purpose, and maybe even to be a site that people visit on their own accord and not after I put up a link to a new post.  I don’t really have any concentrated hobbies, but I have come back from numerous travels, told my tales and been responded with, “You really need to start a blog, because you really can’t make this shit up”.  I mean, to be fair, sometimes it’s probably just as likely for me a have a “you can’t make this shit up” encounter on the way to work or to the grocery store, but that’s just how things happen. 

Maybe I’ll even venture in to video blogging – aka – vlogging.  After reading my first post about the drunk priests, a few of my friends told me one of the funnier parts of the story (not sure what’s funnier than a drunk priest) was that they could hear and see me telling this story out loud.  That’s kind of frightening – have you ever heard yourself on the phone or leaving a voicemail to someone? It’s horrendous and makes me want to throw my phone out the window.  But I guess it just goes to show that any given day it’s a church hall bingo ball cage of options for putting something out there on the interwebs.  

Uganda, The Pearl of Africa

I recently went to Kampala, Uganda for a quick business trip.  In terms of African destinations, Uganda has been on my list for quite a while, especially since I read the Uganda issue of TRVL profiling the families of mountain gorillas that thousands of tourists go to see each year.  

Unfortunately, my trip was only 9 days, including my travel days (about 1 1/2 full days each way), so there wasn't any gorilla tracking this time.  But, I was able to get out and snap some pictures and see some cool stuff.

Some City Views

Just a few views of Kampala City.  It's a pretty congested downtown area.

Some Statues in Kampala

Right: “The Stride”, a 19-foot high family group statue that stands at the parliamentary gardens. It is made out of pure copper.  The statue is made up of a family with three striding human figures swathed in draperies marching forward under the banner of the flag while the child touched by the mother is walking securely in the midst holding onto her with the left hand and carrying a book close to the body in its right hand.

Left: Independence Monument, commemorating Uganda's independence from Great Britain in 1962.

Statue bios courtesy of InKampala

Garden City Mall

After running around Kampala on the one Saturday afternoon I had snapping pics of all the sites, and being unimpressed with the markets, I decided to duck in to this shopping mall that my boss had told me about.  It was rumored to have good shopping/gifts and a decent food court.  

Top Left: Picked up a few local crafts at Banana Boat.  This is a really cool store that basically has all of the local handmade arts and crafts that most would want to purchase in the outdoor markets.  I found that a lot of the outdoor markets in Kampala were not very authentic and actually seemed to have most of the goods imported (as most bracelets and artwork were in commercial wrapping).  Supporting this store is a great because they do micro-loans to local artisans, support women's groups, fair trade practices, pretty much everything that makes you feel good, and its a storefront, so none of that stressful haggling.  

Though haggling can be a fun challenge, after living in China, and multiple trips to Africa, I think my days are numbered with that pastime.  

Top Right: My lunch of hand rolled traditional Northen Chinese pork dumplings.  These puppies were served up piping hot out of the bamboo steamer at Element Cafe (newest addition to Garden City, so no website yet), on the first floor.  I was a little skeptical at first since the menu of the hectic coffee shop and cafe had burgers, African dishes, Thai spring rolls, and dumplings.  I was expecting nothing better than some frozen pot stickers because the "open-air" kitchen only consisted of a than a four-burner stove, rice maker and maybe a counter top deep fryer.  

The cafe owner's daughter (Element is owned by a Chinese family) came up to me while I was eating and asked how I liked them.  I told her how delicious they were and she smiled and thanked me, telling me her mother had made them this morning in their house and I was the first person to have ever ordered them, since they had only been open a few days.  Cut to her mother waving and smiling to me from behind the counter.  

Bottom: Having felt like I had a very socially responsible afternoon, I headed out of Garden City back my hotel, and was saluted by this guy on my way out.  Thought it was a nice piece of art for a mall courtyard.  

The River Nile

Having not found a TON to stuff to do in Kampala, I was interested in trying to plan a day trip out of the city.  I had heard of a town about two hours away, Jinja, that was supposed to be nice for hiking and viewing the supposed source of the Nile River.  The concept of the Nile River's true source is a contentious topic between Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, Burundi and Ethiopia which all have major tributaries. 

I had also heard of white rafting on the Nile as another attraction of Jinja.  I had never done it before, and initially wasn't feeling inclined, but serendipitously, while I was in my hotel room on Friday evening trying to plan my day trip, I got an email and text from two different former colleagues both encouraging me to go rafting on the Nile, so I booked it.  

I would definitely recommend going with Adrift Adventure.  The website is great, you can book online, and they have hotel pickup.  Very reasonably priced for a full day of rafting, lunch, (a boozey lunch, which was well needed after the rapids), gear, guide and roundtrip transport from Kampala.  

Adrift also offers other adventure sports, like bungie jumping over the river, something like this:

NO, Lois, I did not do this, I just shot the pictures of it.  That was exhilarating enough to watch.  

Here, is how I experienced the Nile...

 But before all that peaceful tranquility, there was this-

This was a class 5 rapid, and the only one of the five rapids of the day that tossed me out of the boat.  That's me, in the back, yellow helmet, holding on for dear life.  Rafting was such a great time.  I'm not sure I could do it anywhere else but the Nile (not to sound snobby) because there are no rocks on these rapids.  That means getting thrown out of the boat warrants no fear of a cracked skull on the rapid rocks.  I wish I had more pictures of the experience, but the very business savvy tour company that had other guides on the river taking all the play-by-play shots of the whole day charged by the photo upload, so I decided to commemorate the experience with one lone photo.