So It's been an interesting month since I returned from Asia. It took me literally two weeks to sort of get back into the swing of work and over the Jet Lags, and then two weeks to wrap up everything at my job. It's been weird, and I'm feeling very low key this weekend. It's like my brain has finally caught up with me. For the first time in four years I don't have the old job-worries, and I haven't yet got the new ones, and it's very, very strange.

On Friday, I deleted my profile from my work computer, gathered up Ted and Basil, and emailed the sysadmin that it was OK to remove my administrative access. Which was the hardest part. Because power corrupts. Administrative access corrupts completely.

I am excited, and filled with trepidation, about starting my new job. Maybe it's not trepidation, maybe I just ate some bad cheese. But cheese or not, it will be awesome! And I start tomorrow! Yikes.

In other news, I've been working on some stuff for a client this weekend, and I now have two pet peeves: the first is stereotypically gendered stock photography. Can I find a single female electrician? Anywhere? No. Not even on Corbis! Second, all of these photographers who don't know the difference between electrical work and telecom work? They should be shot. Because it is NOT THE SAME THING. Sigh.

I also received an email confirming my business name. I'm now not just a sole proprietorship - I'm a sole proprietorship with a business name and number! I exist! And my taxes just got TEN TIMES MORE COMPLICATED. And insurance? Did you know that small home-based businesses can't get rental insurance unless they have errors and omissions insurance? And that it is expensive? Yeah, me neither.

Also, happy Canada Day!

Airports! They are so exciting. The overpriced exotic foods! The generic padded chair-rows! Duty free shops featuring 25-year-old Glenlivet and Sumatra cigars that are tax free, as if that will make me able to afford them! I arrived in Taipei from Hong Kong, and in Hong Kong from Hanoi, and now I am waiting for my flight to Vancouver. The airport was eerily empty until about 9:30pm, and now it is stuffed with people flying to London and Bangkok and Sydney.

I strained my ankle on our last night in Hanoi (the roads are, um, let's just say "uneven" and leave it at that) and I climbed 130 stairs at the Military Flag Pole Monument Thing (they were BIG stairs! No, honestly, I had to actually use my arms at one point to lever myself up a few of them, they were like two feet high) so I am wandering around the airport very gingerly. Occasionally I limp, but not really because I'm in terribly bad shape, but just to let the impatient people behind me on the moving walkway know that I'm not intentionally walking really slowly in front of them; I am merely a slightly sore traveller, not totally obnoxious one.

Hanoi was very interesting, and I'm not sure if I can choose a place in Vietnam that I preferred out of the three places we went - south, middle, north (a point in favour of central and southern Vietnam is definitely the prolific geckoness. It matters more than you think. Like, they eat cockroaches, for instance). Also, the oceans? They're LIKE SOUP. Beautiful.

All in all I had have an unexpectedly good feeling about all of it. Surprising because I was not sure what to expect out of an openly communist country. Of course, the military monuments are laughably anti-American, but despite this the people bear surprisingly little malice towards the States even though they are inundated by a whole lot of blatant historical glossing-over. And, well, I can see where Uncle Ho was coming from some of the time, too. One way or another, I just don't get the urge to embalm dead revolutionaries. That's just strange.

Anyway, I would definitely like to visit again at some point.

Now, off to the overpriced coffee bar!

Me: Eep! Oh. Hello giant cockroach!
Mom: What's up?
Me: I just chased a cockroach under the luggage...
(after much careful luggage-lifting-up)
Me: I could have sworn he ran under there!
Mom: I guess now isn't a good time to tell you that they can fly?

I think it's the name: cock, roach. Neither are good words. The actual cockroach was actually rather interesting. And also FAST.

In another genus, I neglected to get a photo of the adorable lizards that live hereabouts. They are geckos and they stick to walls and they eat mosquitos and they are SO CUTE. And green. We went into a bank kiosk one time in Siem Reap and the light had attracted the city's entire population of winged insects, and there were about six small geckos camped all over the walls going munch munch munch gulp munch. It was priceless.

We're now in Hanoi, just arrived from the central city of Hue (it was just lovely, in case you were curious). Tomorrow we go to Halong Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site. There will be boats.

Cambodia is on another planet. It was the only "third world" country on our travel list, and it was definitely very interesting.

There are a few things that you don't do here, the major one being that you do not talk about politics. Talking about politics means that you are criticizing the government - the Cambodian People's Party, to be exact - and that means that you will get shot. Maybe you won't die, but I would not place bets, because the medical system here is incredibly primitive (unless you have money to pay the doctors to treat you properly, then you'll be OK). Locals will talk a bit about politics, to introduce you to the system. Then they will pause politely and tell you that they can't say anything more. Democracy my butt.

All government workers make about $25 USD a month. The average salary is DOUBLE the public servant salary, a whopping $50 USD a month. Gas is $1.50 a litre here, and rice has tripled in price. Not enough to live on, so the workers are mostly on the graft - public school teachers charge students for text books, pen and paper, lesson plans, desks, and if you don't pay then your grade goes down. But many children don't go to school - why bother? With an unemployment rate of 60% in some areas, an education helps very little. I saw several police payoffs while I was walking around. Police also make government salary here.

Traffic accidents are the second commonest cause of death (HIV being the first), so the government recently enacted a law stating that scooter drivers had to wear helmets. But helmets are $25 each - many people cannot afford them, or must painfully save a dollar or two each month so that they can afford to drive. (And, obviously, there is no public transit.) Of course, the roads are in such bad repair that many times scooters can't go on them anyway -- corruption is so bad that roads fall apart after a few months due to corner-cutting by companies and lack of oversight by the government.

We went to Siem Reap and saw Angkor Wat, which was breathtaking. It was built in the 12th century, then destroyed and rebuilt a few dozen times over the next few hundred years. Then we saw a floating village, population 5,000.

Then we went to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh and the genocide museum showcasing the many gruesome ways Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed over three million people in only three and a half years. Before Pol Pot Cambodia was a prosperous country. Then the Khmer Rouge came and destroyed the cities and resettled the population into the agrarian paradise of the countryside, and the country has never really recovered.

So, I'm in Malaysia. It has been interesting.

I should backtrack: Honk Kong was wonderful. Except that I got bed bugs. Those? NOT SO WONDERFUL.

Also? EEW.

My arms and legs were absolutely covered in bites. They looked like this. That's not me, by the way. Anyway. I still have the bites - they take a week and a half to heal - but at least they don't itch anymore. And the luggage will have to be fumigated or something equally drastic. Perhaps I shall simply set it all on fire.

Malaysia is also wonderful, albeit smelly, dirty, and incredibly noisy. I'm getting oggled a lot here, which is kind of flattering, except that it's a Muslim country, so that actually makes it kind of naughty, and possibly illegal.

Right now we're in Kuala Lumpur, and we went up the Petronas towers and the KL tower on Sunday. We also went up to the Batu Caves on Friday, a Hindu shrine with the biggest statue in the world, and I climbed 432 stairs. 272 to get up, and then a few more in the cave, and then a few more on a tour of a dark limestone bat cave, which was really cool, and by cool I mean "fun" because it was not cool, it was bloody hot in there. And there were BATS! Three different kinds! Also, I got to eat dosai with my fingers for lunch (dosai is like an enormous crepe stuffed with potato that you put different sauces on. But only eat it with your right hand. That's very important). On the way out, however, I stubbed my little toe on some concrete while running for the bus. The blood? It was EVERYWHERE. Also, ouch.

The only really not-cool part of the caves was the stray dog, Barking. Barking was born in the cave, and she wanders around the mouth of the cave warily. Sometimes barking. She barks when people who aren't cave-tour personnel enter the cave, which is actually very handy. She is very skittish, though, and the cave staff haven't been able to even pet her, though they feed her scraps. The sad part was Barking's mother - we saw something small and sad inside the cave as we entered all curled up barely moving. The tour guide says that she used to be OK but has recently been sick. Poor cave doggie.

Yesterday we went to Ipoh, a small town, to meet with a friend of my Mom's who drove us around all day. Then we came back to Kuala Lumpur through some spectacular scenery of mountains that looked like they'd been chopped in half by a really sharp knife, with lots of limestone caves and whatnot.

Then, when I went to get out of the back seat of a taxi from the bus station, I doored a guy's car.

Crap.

Double-parking is sort of apropos here, and throughout Asia, and so is speeding down narrow streets. You do the math. And I looked, I swear I did, but my mom informs me that it's not enough to look, you must also look and look and look and look. Lucky for me, however, the only car accident I've ever caused only cost $80CAD to both reattach the (very understanding) couple's mirror I knocked off, and to fix the cab door (the cabbie, on the other hand, tried to quote us several hundred ringit more than it would actually cost to fix it - the couple kindly asked their mechanic and got the real price). Knowing friends who have done the same thing - or had it done to their cars - in Toronto and Vancouver, I know that this sort of repair would have cost me $1,000 at least at home. So I wipe my brow and thank my stars and write about it on the Internet for the whole world to share my hideous, but thankfully affordable, embarrassment.

We were going to go see fireflies tonight but it is raining and they do not come out in the rain. But I saw lizard eggs! That was really neat.

Off to Cambodia at 4:00am tomorrow. Phew.

Today I was off on my own, as Mom's back is hurting her. The first thing I did, of course, was get lost. Well, not lost really - I was still in the general Hong Kongish area and, you know, it can't be that big a city, right? I made the mistake of believing a bus driver, which you should never do because they will nod and smile and LIE TO YOU. It's something to do with not wanting to admit that they don't know what you're talking about, so they'll just tell you something completely untrue or agree with you rather than just say "I don't know!" or "Stupid foreigner!" So, in short, the bus drivers are nice, as long as you don't want to get anywhere specific.

The quest itself was actually quite simple, or so I thought: find wireless internet. I knew that a particular coffee chain had it, I just had to find them. Alas, the area I had ended up in was very Chinese, with tiny shops and narrow streets and lots of smoking old men and neon signs, with nary a trendy coffee bar in sight. I got off the bus when the density of the buildings indicated that I was in a place that had an MTR station, and discovered that I was waaaay east of Kowloon (Kowloon being the most densely populated area in Asia, with 50% of Hong Kong living there. It's pretty neat. And crowded). When I got off the bus I was in an enormous street market. Fishy smells and stinky tofu and various meat parts were all present, along with cheap watches and pants and cell phones and about a zillion people. It was pretty cool, actually. So I followed the signs to the MTR (the subway) and took it to Hong Kong Island, the shortest way to get headed in a Kowloonish direction, after spending ten minutes figuring out the map and bumping into people.

So I headed down to Central and got off in the business district, looking for the stressed-out skinny people in suits to guide me on my way. Now I'm sitting in a shopping mall by the Star Ferry, eating the best cheesecake ever (I can taste the cheese! Really!) and nursing a coffee so that they don't kick me out. Now I have work to do, Internetty work, so I will do it, and then take the ferry across the harbour this evening to head home. This time I will get on the right bus. Honest.

(Many pictures forthcoming. Yeah, I know, I know.)

Hong Kong has ruined me for other cities in Asia. I heart it so.

How HK is like Vancouver

• Outrageous house prices
• Pretty decent food prices
• Many languages spoken, many ethnic groups represented
• Great transit
• Ritzy resturants and coffee shops
• Old white guys in shorts
• Green and clean (mostly)
• Ferries and Islands
• Mountains!

How HK is not like Vancouver

• Palm trees everywhere
• Street hawkers
• 220AC and right-hand drive
• Custom tailors everywhere
• More pollution, but not that much more
• Asian-style prison-barred balconies
• Kowloon
• Nice bus drivers

The asian flavour here is subtler than in Taiwan, but it informs the architecture and styles. Also, you can flush toilet paper here. YAY.

HK is probably so familiar and comfortable to me because we were all British colonies at one point or another. They speak Cantonese here, and just as I was getting my Mandarin vocabulary up to a whole eight words it is useless. Everybody speaks some functional English, too, which is actually a bit disappointing because I was having fun mangling tones and saying things like "Your mother eats puppies" when I mean to say "How much is the fruit?" Oh, well.

So guess what I got? No, not a puppy. A sunburn! Just on my lower arms, because I left my special UV-resistant umbrella at a bus stop and my UV Tainted Milk (what it says on the lotion that I have under the "SPF 40") does not work very well. I am surprised by the fact that the sunscreen lotion over here is neither screeny nor lotiony - it really is like milk, very runny and in teeny tiny bottles. Everything to do with women and beauty is "milky," rather than "creamy," here. Westerners, we love our cream. But here, not so much. So no slip, slap, slop - it's more like slip, slap, dab. (I will send the bill to the Canada Airport Authority for my skinectomy - if they hadn't confiscated my perfectly good thick, SPF 60 ubersunscreen lotion I would be, well, somewhat less sunburnt.)

In other news, Hello Kitty really is everywhere. Miniskirts are "in." You pay for busses when you get off, not when you get on (except sometimes, when you do). Jade is WAY OVERPRICED. Whole families live in the back of their shops, and all the children wear brightly coloured two-tone school uniforms - none of this plaid crap. All the dogs (well, the male dogs) have enormous testicles; neutering is virtually nonexistent. I saw a pack of about ten wild dogs just lying around in the sun the other day. They all looked very hot. We went to a carbonate hot springs and the nice lifeguard lent me his goggles for swimming laps in the cold pool. Do not drink tap water, because even if it starts out safe, it travels through some pretty suspicious pipes. Air conditioning is a public service - without it I would be dead. Honestly. We saw a huge mangrove swamp and all the little black-, white- and pink-striped crabs waved their one big pincher at us angrily. Also, the nice old man whose family runs the breakfast shop down the street recognized us and came over and shared his tea with us (after informing my mom that her container of store-bought sugary milk tea drink was probably bad for her.)

This morning I sent off like 20 postcards. If you don't get one in a week or two, well, um, tough luck! It cost me a whole FIVE DOLLARS to mail them all and I hope you all appreciate the fact that I licked those stamps myself (well, not all by myself. My mom helped. You can thank her later.)

Tomorrow we are off to Hong Kong.