pictures in the blog!

so i'm going to try to be better about putting pictures in my blog... better late than never!

in Sapa!

At the moment, I'm in Sapa in Northwest Vietnam. The terraced hills and the green montains are amazing! The one thing I have noticed about Vietnam is that people are really aggressive and in your face. I've only now started noticing how calm vendors in Thailand and Burma are. They will follow you for a few blocks and grab your arms at times!

Also... here is the view from my corner room at $5 a person.

What I have noticed however, is that I can look Vietnamese, Thai, or Burmese as long as I keep my mouth shut. Usually my attempts to blend in fail because I have a big backpack, i start talking, or i stand around with a map/ distintive lonely planet book.

Later tonight, I hop on a train from Sapa back to Hanoi in hopes of getting out before the typhoon headed this way brings landslides and floods the traintracks. I've heard that the last time this happened, people got stuck for 10 days. This time the Sapa government has made all hotel owners tell their tourists to get out ASAP (so everyone is leaving at the latest, tonight).

Sapa is really relaxing (minus the vendors and the oncoming typhoon).

in shenzhen!

i've been having a blast interviewing with zaotech and walking around shenzhen. these guys are pretty amazing. there's a lot for me to think about both short term and long term, and i need to figure out what i want...

i've visited Xian a few times here and if i end up working here, we'll be room mates (put the tallest with the shortest!).

besides interviewing in shenzhen, i went to windows of the world, an amusement park with scaled and full-size replicas of some of the world's major monuments. what's wrong with this picture?



and... my room is pretty awesome. i'm staying at the marco polo hotel (a 5 star hotel), very different from some of the rooms i've stayed in over the last 2 months (i.e. my $7 khaosan rd room which only had a bed, and rickety fan).

i'm planning the rest of my SE asia trip (or i'm supposed to). In 3 days, i'm flying to vietnam. what's awesome is after a week in northern vietnam, my dad is flying in and we're going to explore central and southern vietnam for a week before exploring cambodia for a week. it's going to be awesome!

that's all for now!

more on Burma

So, it looks like i can get onto blogspot in shenzhen! Before an update on shenzhen, here's a little more about my three weeks in burma:

Each time im in Burma, it gets harder and harder to leave. I guess i've made some really cool friends there and i enjoy the work that i do. Not sure if i could live and work there like one of my friends, david klaus, but i dont think that it's not a possibility.

An update on the deep lift pump - we finished our test platform on the roof o the workshop (50ft above ground), and have been testing pump designs. We have been able to pump water to the top at a reasonable rate, but there is still lots of design changes to make to the pump, especially after having a chance to go tube well drilling. 1.5" tube wells are drilled 70 to 100 ft below ground by hand for household and farm use.

It's pretty amazing to see how resilient people hit by the cyclone are. While purchasing power is almost gone and debt is high, people are good spirited and optimistic. They are grateful for the aid that is getting to them (i've seen lots of tarps, backpacks, and watertanks provided by foriegn aid as well as fertilizer, rice seed, and tillers provided by IDE), and are optimistic about their recovery (even though for many, it may take 8+ years to recover to pre-cyclone days).

Other little things:
* I found a favorite little burmese restaurant that i've gone to for lunch almost every day i was working on the deep lift pump in the industrial zone
* Last sunday, i went to an 11 match burmese boxing event. Burmese boxing is a lot like muai thai, but i'm not sure what the differences are. However, sitting in the third row does give you a lot of sound effects (lots of fists to face and knees to torso sounds as well as the annoying delayed "pow" and "bam" shouts into the microphone from the guy at ringside).

Who knows when I'll head back to burma... hopefully sometime soon (in the next year?)

finally, a post!

Sorry it's been 3 weeks since my last post. Blogspot is censored in Burma and it's taken me 3 weeks to find a proxy server that isn't blocked so I can post something. In less than 24 hrs, I'm heading to the airport to fly to ShenZhen, and I don't imagine that China's Great Firewall will let me into blogger either, so I'm sorry about that.

In any case, I've posted a few pictures from Thailand on Picasa.

A few highlights in the last three weeks:
* Went to a cyclone area, Kunyangon
* Drilled and donated a tubewell and pump for a family in Kunyangon
* Went to a Yangon Dance Club with a few friends
* Went to see 11 Burmese Boxing matches (sitting in the 3rd row really lets your hear the punches and kicks)

More later!