farEAST

The farEAST-team meets two very different women at two universities of Bangkok. One of them used to be a man, the other is the leader of a rock band. On the "Friendship-Border-Market," close to the border to Cambodia, the team makes an intermediate stop and meets a textile trader. Cambodia is the land of the Khmer. The farEAST-team encounters great history and world culture but also gets an insight into the more recent bloody history during the Pol-Pot dictatorship. Phnom Penh the Cambodian capital has a breakdance school. While its boss has a criminal past, his mission is to keep young metropolitans from difficult backgrounds from taking a similar path. The farEAST-team visits him and his breakdance students and discovers children mastering "Aspara," the classical temple dance, right next door. A ferry takes the farEAST-vehicles across the Mekong toward the Vietnamese border. Right behind it, the team meets a religious community that seems rather strange - "CaoDai" Their patron saints are Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo. Also, it seems rather bizarre that, for a few dollars, American tourists are permitted to spray bullets all over the place on the grounds of the formerly clandestine tunnel system of the Vietcong. At the same time, a very successful Vietnamese businesswoman whom the team encounters in Saigon, the present-day Ho-Chi-Minh-City, has but one heartfelt wish: No more war.