a tall personality

The day started out so good. Smoothie bowl with fruit from a little local bakery This view for breakfast. We went down to the dock to board our boat, which was supposed to be a really nice tourist boat.  Clean, cabins with AC, nice places to louge in the shade, the works.  But instead we boarded  a pirate ship.   Probably. The guy who ran the tour company put us on the boat and sent us on our way before we really had the presence of mind to ask questions. After a rocky and worrisome departure where the engine kind of worked and the youngest crew member was swimming in the water to pull the boat...we looked around.  No AC. Broken fans.  Bugs all over the mattresses.  Dirty boat.  Nowhere to sit, just a big box in the middle of the boat, and an upper deck for scorching yourself with the equatorial sun if you so chose.  Crew that did not speak English. OK wait what oops.  Save us. I have worked on boa...

After resting in Jakarta, learning how to use money, not drink water, call a taxi, say thank you in Indonesian Chelsea and I confidently headed for the town of Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores.  It's a little fishing village that has semi-recently exploded with tourism because it's a major port city for anyone wanting to visit the islands home to the Komodo Dragons.  (Why people want to go to Bali rather than visit Komodo Dragons is beyond me!).  Turns out when small towns in third world countries explode with tourism it does not always come out looking like a resort...They have a little airport, a harbor, and main-street lined with businesses while the physical infrastructure seems to be crumbling under the unplanned-for heavy traffic.  It's very interesting and in many respects a lovely place. Chels and I had a plan to land in Labuan Bajo early in the morning, and get on a boat that same day that would take us to some beautiful islands, feed us, drop ...

On the plane from Hong King to Jakarta I sat next to an Indonesian woman who spoke a little English and helped me fill out the customs form since the English translation didn't make a lot of sense.  I thought I had a certain thing that is very normal and legal to have in the US that apparently is NOT OK to have in Indonesia, and can be punished by the death penalty (turns out I didn't have it, but I didn't know that until later).  I showed the woman the word for what I had in Indonesian and she looked at me horrified and said, "You're going to have biiigggg problems!"  Well, I spent the rest of the flight petrified, thinking about the movie "A Brokedown Palace" and spending the rest of my life in prison in a third world country. Turns out it's not terribly hard to get through Indonesian customs, and no one looked at or in my bags, or at my customs form.  And I figured out later that I didn't have anything that was a problem.  But I was s...

A cheap ticket to Indonesia means loooonnnnngggg layovers which is why I had about 8 hours to kill in Seattle.  I took the train to Chinatown in search of ramen.  I found a place, but the moment I stepped inside and the door with the little bells on it shut behind me, every ounce of my intuition told me I was taking up too much space.  (I was wearing a backpack strapped to another backpack with a raincover over it, so I was somewhat conspicuously bigger than my regular size.) There was an insistent sign declaring patrons should wait to be seated.  I stood in the doorway eyeing the only empty table, hoping the host would soon notice me and end my occupation of the most inconvenient space imaginable. Water dripped off the rain-cover of my backpack which I shifted around to avoid sprinkling on other diners in the crowded hole-in-the-wall place.  However, the shifting resulted in even more water spraying off my pack and jacket.  I endured the death stares fro...