I am always very concerned that on any given trip I will be bored, so I always pack way too many things to do on the plane/bus/train than needed. I usually just end up falling asleep and not using any of the things I brought with me. Faced with a 19 hour flight from Newark to Singapore (hooray for Singapore Airlines invention of the direct flight), I of course had to plan boatloads of things I could do.

Thanks to the handy dandy SeatGuru (and my mom for double checking with the flight attendant on her flight to Singapore), I have found out that I will not only have a personal TV to watch movies, games and tv, but each seat is equipped with a power outlet. Fancypants! Gone are the days where I buy a bag of tootsie roll pops and find out the average licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie roll pop! I roll in style now.

This means I get to watch movies that I want and not something stupid like High School Musical 2. Though I will say, as I am browsing through Singapore Airlines website, I noticed that they have the first two seasons of House which I have been wanting to watch from the beginning.

Other things to do on the plane:
-Finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows (audiobook)
-Finish A Bright Shining Lie (book)
-Start Cod: A Biography of The Fish That Changed The World (audiobook)
-Start Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You) (audiobook)
-Take Ambien and pass out

We’ll see how much of this list I actually get done…

So I’m off starting Friday for some good old fashion tourism in Asia. I’ve read the guidebooks, got a map to look at multiple times in the middle of the road andit a nice hefty strap for my camera so I can be ready at any moment. I’ll try and post regularly, but it will of course be dependent on my internet access. Here’s my schedule for the next two weeks or so:

11/2: Newark to Singapore Flight
11/4: Uncle’s Wedding in Singapore
11/6-7: Hanoi
11/8-10: Halong Bay & Cat Ba Island Trip
11/11: Tam Coc and Hoa Lu
11/12: Flight to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City
11/13: Full day in HCMC
11/14: Mekong Delta Trip
11/15: Cu Chi Tunnels, Tay Ninh
11/16: Flight back to Singapore
11/17-11/20: Bangkok or Malaysia?
11/21: Flight back to New York

One of the great attractions of Hanoi is going to see Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum to see his embalmed body (in addition to going to see his stilt house where he lived for a short time and his museum). As I was reading my guidebook and some forums, it came to my attention that during the months of October and November our beloved Uncle Ho is not in Hanoi. Unfortunately every year for two months he is shipped to Russia for maintenance of his body!! Now, the high tourism season in Hanoi is for those same two month. Why couldn’t he have been sent to the embalmer during one of the off peak months? Were those other 10 months already taken?

So I got to thinking, since embalming was such all the rage in the 20th century (and there is probably only one super skilled guy who maintains all their bodies), how did they determine the maintenance schedule? There should have been more thought about respect for elders in terms of this schedule though! Come on, Ho Chi Minh should get preference over Chairman Mao (only because I’m not going to Tienanmen Square). It’s unfair that Ho is gone for the two months that is peak tourist season in Vietnam. I mean I get that Lenin gets first choice, he was the trendsetter and all.

Perhaps it was done on the basis of who killed the most people. I guess that makes sense, afterall if high school history class serves me well I believe that would make it Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh which would explain Ho’s bad date with the embalmer.