Gotta get me a passport -

Myanmar immigrations officer with my passport

A passport, we all need one if traveling outside the USA. I remember  a few years ago, okay many years ago, showing up at Jamaican immigrations, my girlfriend  asking about what  ID I planned on using as proof of my citizenship. Quick thinking on my part had me fishing out my driver’s license just as we reached immigrations control. Meanwhile, she pulled  out a voter's registration card, a certified copy of her birth certificate, Mary Kay frequent buyers card (Mary kay card, what!) and ultimately her driver’s license as my new best friend Red Stripe I waited. 

Spin the world up to date  and the girlfriend was on the right track as now a days you need most of the documentation she brought to apply for a passport, Mary Kay card not required. A passport in reality is a, condensed, certified personal identification folder containing the stuff girlfriend brought for our trip to Jamaica, less the Mary Kay card, documenting your name, birthdate, gender, a photo, plus a record of your travels, along with containing immigration stamps verifying entry and exit dates of the countries you visited.   

Unlike our Jamaican trip of old, now a days you need  a passport with information certified by the stuff girlfriend brought to Jamaica.  Now, unlike days of old, before the rocking 70’s when visiting neighboring countries like Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean a driver's license did the trick. A passport is required to get you out of the USA as well as back in, let alone foreign countries.

So what do you think, metaphorically speaking, passports grow on trees, if so the government is our tree and if we nurture it with money,  worked it with dealing with red tape and our effort we get one of those little blue books  (passports).   The money  $110.00 for what is called normal processing, 4 – 6 weeks, but normal can take 10 weeks or more. Although, for an additional $60.00 you can get your application expedited to 2 -3 weeks because the tree loves the extra nourishment and will bear fruit quicker.  Though, according to the “(fort Lauderdale) Sun Sentinel”  the government in recent years is behind in it's processing due to the 2009 requirement to have a passport for Canada and Mexico travel and the old improving economy excuse. They also wrote September through December are slow for the government's processing centers, so more timely response times are possible during that period.

In order to apply for a passport the money part and waiting is the easiest .  The application part is not so easy as we are talking a DD form, original and duplicates copies of documentation, locating and applying in person at a Passport  Agency.  I’ll stop here and insert this link by the State Department Bureau of Consular affairs                       http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports/first-time.html

A passport - needed to get out of the USA and to get back in, sort of like the notes your mom wrote (actually the neighbor Lonnie using the pen name of mom) to get you out of school and back in. However, once you have a passport, no more permissions are required visit the world except visa's, there is  always something, isn't there. Coming is a visa guide for asia to get on your way with the confidence of a true world traveler.

It's a big world outside the USA, all it needs is you..

                                                                                         

Thanks for stopping by   Doug

com-by-ya moment in Paris - Doug thinks

Julien Warnand/EPA/Landov

The com-by-ya moment in Paris last week which was attended by many world leaders to show solidarity for freedom of speech and denounce terrorist acts was more form than substance. President Obama took a lot of heat for his administrations lack of participation but I'm thinking he saw it as it for what it was, a giant photo op and he keep us above that.

Blogger Daniel Wickham a student a the London School of Economics documented the realities of some leaders attending based on their records of these things at home. I'm sure you will agree this is not a group the president of the free world would want to hang with.

• Nigeria - President Goodluck Johnathan -  Who in his own country turns a blind toward the atrocities of the Muslim group Boko Haram.  Oh ya and how about the 200 school girls who went missing last spring, he is still looking into that.
• Saudi Arabia - Where a blogger has just be sent to prison for 10 years, fined the equivalent of 266,000 US and the worst part is the 50 lashes he will receive every Friday for the next 19 weeks. All for criticizing religious teaching of Celtics from the little know Islamic sect Wahhabism. 
• Turkey - Prime Minister Ahmet Davatoglw  - Presently holding the record for the most number 40, journalists jailed.
• Egypt - Meanwhile President  Abdel Fattah-Sissi  put to use novel way to cut campaign costs, jail the competition - jailing thousands. 
• Russia - Where journalism is considered a high risk occupation and dissidents are regularly jailed .

I'm in HCM City so I really can't give a first hand account of the event but only what I've gleamed from publications and the internet.  I've picked up on Vietnam's low keyed comments that they feel the world should adapt to our modern age and control free speech.  So incidents like the killings at  "Charlie Hebdo" wouldn't happen. 

The French are famous for flash but not for much dash regarding leadership in the solving international events.  So kudos to Barack for keeping the USA above the goofiness. Oh ya and John Stewart go do it to your self..    

Then it was Vietnam - part 4

Off to left down the lane I could just make out a hand lettered cardboard sign saying - Phu Cat - with an arrow pointing down the lane. I start walking and just over the hill the twin gun towers flanking the main gate came into view. Four days after checking in at San Francisco I had arrived into the war.

The reality of what I found after my arrival was probably much like GI’s experienced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the violence of war is not tidily contained but jumps out at you when you least expect it.  Even for a lowly supply sergeant like myself strategically positioned behind a desk, there were those moments, vividly illustrating  the effects of war.   The random acts of violence and how it changes things so quickly.  There were the night ambushes we were encouraged to volunteer for, sometimes resulting in black partially unzipped body bags on display in front of the chow hall, the morning after. Viewing of late night firefights outside the perimeter, across the road from my hut.  

The night ambushes taking the lives of purportedly VC's (Vietnamese communist) but looking down on those lifeless faces I couldn't  help but think - maybe in fact, they were just some luckless folk out for an evening stroll, only to stumble into a bunch of heavily armed combatants playing  war.  Anyway, I was never really sure about the effectiveness of these actions, other than pissing off the Vietnamese family and friends of the one taken out.  Overall it seemed surreal for a bunch of guys who were pencil  pushers and mechanics during the day to hide in the bush on their own time and shoot the first guy that walked by.  So for guys like me, not drawn to the thrill of night ambushes and whose tropical fantasies were squashed by the napalm  ravaged landscape, there was the perennial favorite of spending evenings watching tracer bullets from a top the bunker.  That is, until they found us.

Time moved much slower back then and my year in Phu Cat seemed to go on for ever. When it did finely end it was a strange feeling to find  my self back in  the states and unceremoniously released to civilian life. I was only a few days out of Vietnam, a very short haired, skinny civilian with a great suntan standing at the airport. My worldly  possessions slung over my shoulder, with a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan in hand as I sightlessly stared into the horizon at the rest of my life.  

The first years back from Nam as a civilian was interesting and offered up the craziest times of my life.  Involving speeding tickets, wrecked cars, lots of booze and pills, romances gone arie, an attempted return to college - bet you can guess how that one turned out. After a while life did stabilize, though the Vietnam experience and life there stayed with me and I was to never get over it. 
                                              

Thanks for stopping by -

To be continued - Return to Vietnam

(link to part 3)

from beyond - Doug's on going stomach problem and the VA

"From beyond"  that would be California. Here I am, stomach still a problem and  reading my visa statement, yikes, did I Really spend all that while thinking I was living low budget lifestyle on my travels.  Though, still the stomach problem and my leg and hip are still not 100% but improving.

At one point I tossed my recovery of my stomach issues into the VA's (Veterans admin.) hands and now I better understand the complaints people have lodged against them. It started off well with an appointment date within a reasonable time period. When I arrived for my appointment the nurse and then the doctor and I had a long discussion about my life in Saigon and SE Asia before we got around to stomach talk, then the  usual doctor drill.

She recommended a CAT Scan of my abdomen in the hope of identifying an underlying problem. A few days later someone from from the lab contacted me about an appointment. I found the CAT Scan was fast and easy but the ramp up to it was icky, as I was given a pitcher of what they called Kool Aid, isn't that they called the stuff that took out the folks in the Jonestown massacre, one glass every 30 minutes until the pitcher was empty, then the CAT Scan and different than Jonestown I survived.

So a few days later I called for a follow up appointment with my doctor to discuss my test results and a plan of treatment.  The telephone lady advised me that this kind of thing was handled via phone but I insisted I needed an appointment the tela appointment lady rung off promising a nurse would call within a few hours about an appointment. I knew she lied and so I set the phone down and called the imaging dept to make sure they were open and mounted up for the VA where I had the test. Weird, when I arrived the main entrance was locked so I patiently waited for someone  to come out and then slipped in before the door could close and made me way to their reception desk.  Waited for someone to show up and when someone did I told them I needed the CAT Scan results for Douglas Rice and rattled off my SS number.  Though I was pretty sure the guy I was talking to wasn't my man but I made friendly small talk about the military and life.  Soon an older lady, my age old, showed up asking what was going on,  ah ha, I could tell she was the man and she was.  Within 20 minutes I not only had a copy of the report but a disk with the scan on it.

Sent one copy to my primary care doctor and he called the next day and explained the finding of the CAT Scan to me, still no word from the VA.  Anyway Dr. Fong found nothing of any major importance in the scan but recommended an gastroenterologist.   Meanwhile, I was due for my annual cardiologist visit so l set that up along with the gastroenterologist, man a lot of doctors.

The Gastroenterologist didn't seem impressed with my problem or the results of the CAT scan.  However, he though my stomach wasn't emptying properly, wrote me a prescription to try (expensive) and sent me to another imaging place for a stomach emptying test.  This is an all day test - feed you radioactive egg beaters and every hour slide you into a tube where you hear a bunch of whirring and rumbling that they say are the pictures being taken. When I asked about when the results would be available, the techheto t replied "no news is good news".


Okay on to the cardiologist, reviews the scan and decides this problem I have is not my stomach but is heart egina so on to a heart stress test.   It's a test where they compare the movements of a resting heart to a working heart directly off of your work out on a treadmill. 7 minutes, ending in a phase 3 full uphill run and no problems detected.  With that the good news is that my stomach pain isn't my heart.

So I'm still left wondering about my spending habits feeling good about my leg and hip improving but still the stomach problem.   All this time and money on doctors and tests and the only relief I get is from peppermint oil, Gaviscon and rum and coke but not all together at the same time.    My money issues, still no resolution  but by fall I'll be back in the Thailand /Vietnam region of SE Asia one way or another.

Thanks for stopping by - Doug