Viet Nam vo dich!

There's pandemonium in the streets of Hanoi tonight. What's going on out there right now makes Boston's celebration after the 2004 World Series look like a tea party. Vietnam won the AFF Suzuki Cup (SE Asian soccer championship) this evening. This is a very big deal, as Youke pointed out to me when she told me Charlie had scored tickets on the street and was taking her to the game.

I know that soccer (aka football) is the #1 sport everywhere in the world except for two places: Afghanistan, where the fan favorite is polo played with a human head, and the good old USA, where the favorite is a tossup between NFL football and WWF wrestling. Vietnam is partial to ping pong and badminton, but soccer is still #1 here. One of the 7 or 8 cable channels I get shows nothing but soccer 24/7. I often see people, usually men, watching this channel while they fry some fish or repair a bicycle tire in their combination living room/bedroom/workshop/retail outlet. My students often mention their interest in football. I didn't realize, though, until tonight, just how passionate this interest is.

I was sitting in my apartment around 9:00 preparing tomorrow's lesson and thinking about dinner when I heard a sudden mighty roar in the street. Instinctively, maybe because I had the soccer channel on, I thought of Youke and Charlie and the big football game that must have just ended with a Vietnam victory. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door to discover an amazing sight: my street, which is always pretty crowded up until about 10 or 11 pm when the shops close up for the night, was even more congested than usual and really noisy. Dozens of horns were blaring simultaneously, people were cheering raucously, and what most seized my attention were the red flags—hundreds of them—waving from nearly every motorbike.

I had a real struggle fighting my way through the thick crowd of slow-moving bikes to the pizza restaurant where my friend Huong waits tables. As a rule, Huong stops working between the time I appear and the time I leave. Her friends cover for her while she makes the most of another opportunity to chat me up and watch me eat. Tonight was different. She was so excited about Vietnam's football victory she barely noticed I was there. She made it clear that she was in anguish at not being able to rush into the street and join the celebrating. The TV above my table was showing the post-game awards and interviews and Huong alternated between looking at the TV and looking out the window at all the ecstatic revelers streaming past. I asked her if she had watched the game. 'No,' she said, 'I don't like football.'

I'm pretty sure the game ended before 9:00 but when I left the restaurant at 10:00 the party was just getting cranked up. I plowed back up the street to my apartment through a swarming crowd of delirious, laughing faces, chanting 'Viet Nam vo dich, Viet Nam vo dich', which means 'Vietnam can't be beat'. The street was awash in red—red Vietnam flags of all sizes, red shirts, and red headbands bearing the mantra 'Viet Nam vo dich'. A woman with a fistful of headbands tried to hand me one. When I took it from her, she started clamoring for money so I handed it back. All around me people were waving, laughing, pumping their fists, holding up a thumb or a V for victory sign. This was one happy crowd, believe me.

When I got to my apartment I grabbed my camera and headed back out. Luong Van Can street was a river of celebrants, two or three to a motorbike and five or six to a car. Everybody, it seemed was waving a flag or beating two pot lids together. On the sidewalk near Minh's Jazz Club two young men were pounding the hell out of a giant woooden drum with some heavy clubs. While I stood exchanging grins and high fives with passing people, somebody set off some firecrackers. Somebody else threw a cloud of sparkling confetti into the air. One boy whirled a long, sputtering sparkler around his head. Between snapshots, I joined in the chanting of 'Viet Nam vo dich'.

When I left the restaurant, Huong had said, 'I won't sleep tonight.' I assumed she meant because she was so excited. Now, as I sit here blogging at five minutes to midnight, with the drums, the cheering, and the firecrackers beginning to crescendo for about the tenth time since I started typing, I'm beginning to suspect she knew none of us would be able to sleep tonight for all the noise.

Now here's the punchline: all this ecstatic brouhaha has been going on for hours without being stoked to any significant degree by alcohol. Not to say nobody is drinking in celebration, but in the two hours I was spectating I saw nobody with an open container, nobody falling down, nobody being sick on their shoes, nobody trying to break anything or turn anything upside down, and nobody doing anything more foolish than banging on their mother's best cooking pot with a big metal spoon and grinning ear to ear. It's hard not to love this about the Vietnamese—when they're happy it seems to fill them up.

Christmas in Hanoi

I had planned to eat Christmas dinner at the Green Mango. Several of my colleagues had tentatively committed to doing the same. But when the time came, I just couldn't summon the appetite or the energy. I walked past the entrance and kept on going until I found myself at the supermarket, where I replaced my stocks of bottled water and tissues and headed home again. I spent most of Christmas day in bed, fully clothed against a clammy chill, preparing to teach a Friday night class. In the evening I heard party sounds spilling down from De's penthouse apartment two floors above me. The party apparently had migrated to my building from the Green Mango. I expected somebody to knock on my door at any moment, but I dozed off and when I woke up everything was quiet—except for those two cats that fight a grudge match outside my bathroom window five nights out of seven. The Vietnamese have eaten all the birds in Hanoi—the only ones I've seen so far have been in cages—so I don't understand why they've allowed these two cats to live.

Whether it's my advancing age, my body's unfamiliarity with a new virus, or the ineffectiveness of Vietnamese cold and flu medicine, this flu has been the worst of my life. I'm lucky it struck at such an opportune time, when my light teaching schedule was even lighter due to holiday breaks. Most of the past two weeks I've spent lying in bed reading, dozing, and watching the predictable but exasperatingly slow evolution of my symptoms. Only twice did I have to pedal through gray, gritty streets in suit and tie, book bag on my back, to arrive at class with a sweaty torso, achy head, stuffy nose, and cottony mouth and try to give a roomful of hopeful students their money's worth.

I haven't minded being in what you might consider a Christmas backwater during the holidays. I've had my fill of the aggressively commercial form Christmas assumes in the US. For me the best part of Christmas is the heightened fellow feeling of the season and that feeling appears to be widespread all year long in Vietnam. Although they aren't Christians, Thanh offered to give me his bicycle as a Christmas gift, Thu gave me a beautiful pen and a box of green bean cakes, Van gave me a magnificent scarf to guard against the winter chills, Nga gave me bananas, tea, coffee, and vitamin C, Huong, Mai, and Linh offered to help me learn Vietnamese, and two restaurants this week have given me free pots of tea with my meal.

Hoarse opera

I'm sick as a dog with the flu right now. I felt it coming on last Monday and by Tuesday I was mewling like a pup with each inbreath and blowing my nose into a tissue with every outbreath. About every 30 minutes, the nasal gushing would stop just long enough for me to enjoy a prolonged coughing jag that made my aching brain ring like a gong again and again and again until the resumption of histamine shenanigans seemed almost a relief. This has gone on day and night for five days and five nights with scarcely a let up. I've gone outside only to seek Nga's advice and stock up on tissues, water, and cold medicines.

As in the US, there's no shortage of commiseration and helpful advice around me. Several people are convinced I brought this on myself by running around in my shirtsleeves in 65-degree weather (19 Celsius). Others say it's just the inevitable result of a change of seasons. Thu advises eating a stew made of lean pork, rice and shallots. Nga concurs. They both agree that pho, which is essentially chicken noodle soup, is the wrong medicine. Several people have suggested I see a doctor. Someone always suggests that whenever you have a cold. Why? I can predict what a doctor will say and so can you. Why pay to hear it, even if it only costs $5? (Office visits are very inexpensive here. In fact, medicine is pretty inexpensive. After I paid $3 for a pocketful of antihistimines, expectorants, and antitussives, I went across the street to Le Malraux Café and paid $3.50 for a bowl of French onion soup and a pot of herb tea.)

On my way home from Le Malraux I had one of those experiences that makes living in Hanoi seem like such a wonderful dream. Walking up Hang Hom Street I passed the entrance to a little alley I'd never noticed before. The alley led deep into the interior of the block and contained several shop fronts with hanging signs visible from Hang Hom. I decided on a whim to follow the alley to see where it came out. The further I walked the more the alley narrowed and the more residential it became. About 100 feet along I discovered what appeared to be a school on the left and just beyond the school the alley took a sharp left and disappeared into a little maze of rooms where people were obviously living. Several men were crouched in the six-foot wide space where the alley ended. I nodded politely at the men and turned to go back the way I had come, but a man lounging on a motorbike (there are motorbikes in every alley, courtyard, and kitchen here) stopped me and waved for me to go on ahead.

I inched my way carefully past the crouchers, exchanging hellos, and started zigzagging through the maze, practically walking through people's kitchens and bedrooms, hearing toilets flushing on the other side of half-open windows at shoulder height, past a young man brushing his teeth at a sink, arriving at a dark tunnel clogged with people. In the dim light shining down the tunnel from the far end I could make out the forms of young people, boys wearing white shirts and red ties and girls wearing red silk costumes of some sort. They were standing in single file and giggling. There was barely enough room to get by them, but I sidled along excusing myself as I went and catching friendly looks and smiles from most of them. One girl handed me a piece of candy. When I reached the far end of the tunnel, it turned out to be a doorway onto Hang Quat Street just about opposite the Green Mango.

In the street was a smaller group of young people posing for a photographer who was standing on the sidewalk. Cars and motorbikes were honking and swerving around the obstruction. As I rounded them to make my way home, I saw they were swapping places with people in the dark alleyway and the photographer was snapping a shot of each ensemble. What it was all about I have no idea, but maybe somebody reading this blog can leave an informative comment.

I've explained why I'm hoarse, but I haven't yet explained the 'opera' reference. The Hanoi Opera House is one of the places I've been recently. I went there to see a young Russian piano prodigy, accompanied by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra, play Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto. Some photos of the Opera House have been displayed on this blog for some time, along with photos of the 2nd Hanoi International Music Festival at the American Club. After the Rachmaninoff concert, Sarah and I went across the street to the ritzy Metropole Hotel to have a nightcap in the same bar (remodeled since, I'm sure) that Graham Greene and Charlie Chaplin drank in. We nursed two pricey drinks through the set of South African jazz singer Hlulani Hlangwane who was quite fine. On December 6, I went to a Sinterklaas party in Jouke's kitchen (as you might guess, Sinterklaas is a Dutch version of Santa Claus), attended by most of the usual suspects, i.e., my CELTA group, which continues to convene once a week for lunch, each week in a different restaurant. I'm not going to include details of these events. I merely wanted to hint that my life is richer than just pedaling back and forth to class and vegetating in my apartment.

I will tell you something about one spectacle I attended. A friend of a friend's girlfriend--Lisa Carter--visited Hanoi last month and persuaded me to go the August Cinema with her to see an American action flick (Mark Wahlberg in Max Payne) 'dubbed' in Vietnamese. Often, dubbed movies can be amusing because the dubbed actors' voices don't match the on-screen actors' mouths. In the August Cinema, there are no dubbed actors' voices—just one female translator translating all the dialog in voiceover and making no effort to act. The effect is pretty annoying—like watching a movie sitting next to somebody who's talking so loud on a cell phone you can't hear the movie. Maybe I'll feel differently about the August Cinema if I ever get to the point with Vietnamese where I can understand all the hilarious mistakes I feel pretty sure are being made in the translation.

Getting adopted

The chicken toes were on Friday. About midday on Sunday I was surprised by a phone call from Phuong, who was following through on that promise to find me a cheaper room (apartment, okay). I'm pretty happy where I am right now, but at the same time I'm curious to know what's to be had for $200 a month. I would also like to prolong my contact with this group of students. So I arranged to meet Phuong at St. Joseph's Cathedral at 7 pm. I picked this spot because it's a major landmark. I figured that—like the Empire State Building—the cathedral's whereabouts is known to all locals and most tourists. Wrong! Phuong called my cell phone six times between 7 and 7:30 asking me to repeat the street name, spell the street name, confirm that I was there, confirm that I was easily visible from the street, confirm that the church was near the lake, spell the street name again. I finally told him to meet me in front of the nearby KFC restaurant and we rendezvoused there five minutes later.

I climbed onto the back of Phuong's motorbike and we set out for his neighborhood. I don't know how long it would have taken me to pedal there on my bicycle, but it took 30 minutes on the motorbike. A bit drabber and dirtier than the Old Quarter, but organized along the same lines. We parked the bike in front of a ten-foot-wide photocopy shop and went in.

'This is my uncle's house,' Phuong announced. Against one wall were a couple photocopy machines, against the opposite wall an enormously heavy iron paper cutter that recalled the Spanish Inquisition. Phuong offered me a cup of tea while his aunt hurried out the front door to look for her husband. The shop was about 30 feet deep and in the back corner was a tiny spiral staircase made of concrete. Phuong motioned for me to follow him and headed up the stairs. I crouched down but had to remove my motorbike helmet to gain enough clearance to corkscrew my way up the tunnel-like stairs. We emerged into a ten-foot-square loft space that overlooked the shop. The loft contained a wide-screen TV in a cabinet and the kind of bamboo mat on the floor that, from my evening at Thu's house, I recognized as the family 'dining table'. In the back corner near the stairs was a tiny chair in front of a laptop computer on a small shelf.

The spiral stairs continued up to a higher loft where I assume the family slept. A young boy appeared down these stairs and Phuong introduced his nephew and asked him to bring me some tea. The boy left and reappeared a minute later with the news that there was no more tea. 'Would you like anything else?' Phuong asked.

'Just a cup of hot water would be fine,' I said. My throat was feeling a bit scratchy.

The boy left and reappeared with a tiny glass of tepid water, which I assume was run from the hot water tap but had been sitting in the supply pipe for a bit of time. At this point, the aunt and uncle returned and we went back down the stairs. As I snaked my way through the narrow hole, I realized that a hoist was the only practical way to get anything larger than a glass of water to or from the loft. Exiting the hole I noticed for the first time a small bathroom-sized sink and a little unvented gas cooker against the back wall. Next to the cooker was a tiny windowless lavatory. I believe these served as the family's kitchen and bathroom. Phuong had mentioned that his family was poor, but I found this visit to his uncle's home disquieting. The only window in the entire place was the curtainless plate glass looking onto the street.

Aunt and uncle now led us out of the shop, up the street, and into a narrow alley. After several turnings leading us deeper into a warren of four- and five-story houses built with no thought of delivery van access—or even Cooper Mini access—we arrived at our destination, the newly constructed home of the uncle's good friend, a professor of law at the nearby National University of Science and Humanities.

It took me some time to realize the house was new, because it was not built with new materials. Oh, I suppose the concrete was newly poured and some of the flooring was new, but the plumbing and electrical fixtures, doors, banisters, and wood frames appeared to be salvaged from a tear down. When we came in, there appeared to be a party going on. Three adult couples were sitting around a recently finished meal—at an off-the-floor dining table. On a coffee table in front of a sofa were the remains of a tea party—pot, saucers, cups, dirty ash trays.

We new arrivals were invited to sit on the sofa and have some tea. A fresh pot was brought from the kitchen and poured into the unwashed cups in front of us and while we sipped, I was introduced around the room—the law professor, his wife, mother, father, friend, and pretty daughter Dieu Linh who spoke better English than my student and immediately began helping him translate for the family.

When the teapot ran low Linh led me on a tour of the house. As I've come to expect: a staircase up the middle and on each floor one room in the front and one room in the back. The front rooms were more desirable since they had windows looking out on the street (plus a narrow balcony with no railing of any kind). The back rooms only had windows looking onto the stairwell. Linh told me with convincing sincerity and warmth that if I preferred the front room she was now sharing with her younger sister, they would gladly take the smaller, darker, back room.

Despite feeling like a character in a story about a farmer's daughter, or maybe partially because of that, I realized this rental opportunity would not budge me from my current overpriced digs. Even if it hadn't been a hour's worth of pedaling from my colleagues and favorite hangouts, it had no privacy and very little charm beyond the considerable charm of the family itself who graciously offered to share their kitchen with me, to let me share meals with them at no extra cost, to install broadband cable and buy me a TV and any other furnishings I wanted, and to let me name my own rental rate. "It's not the money," the professor said, "but the relationship that's important." Or at least that's what his daughter told me he said. She later sent me an email that began: 'I'm very exciting to talk you! this is the first time I've talked to foreigner for long hours like that.'

Lady fingers? No, chicken toes!

Last Friday was the last meeting of one of my elementary level classes—four young men and women who work for the Vietnamese national tourism administration. We met in front of the school, where I returned their graded final exams; then we went to a rooftop beer garden overlooking nearby Lenin Park to eat, drink, and say our farewells.

Thinking of you, I took a few pictures for the blog before settling down to drink beer in earnest and concentrate on our Englinamese conversation—always a bit of a struggle. Among the many things we discussed was my $400 rent ($475 if you include utilities, laundry, and housekeeping). The students unanimously agreed this was extravagant and that $200 a month was closer to standard for a Hanoi apartment…except they kept saying 'room' instead of 'apartment'. To make sure there was no communication gap, I drew a picture of my apartment's bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, and terrace and even converted its estimated 400 square feet to square meters for them (a little less than 40). They said, 'Let us find you a cheaper room.' 'Cheaper apartment, you mean?' 'Cheaper apartment, okay!'

Ten minutes later I'd forgotten all about this offer because a chicken platter ordered by the students had arrived. I had ordered this same chicken platter at another restaurant with my CELTA colleagues—and deliberately hadn't ordered it again since. Instead of a mouth-watering plate of braised, seasoned, golden-brown chicken breasts, thighs and wings, what arrived was a plate of bright yellow chicken parts including every part of the chicken except those mentioned above: head, check…beak, check…knees, check…feet, check…anus, check.

About a month ago I had the (maybe not so rare in Hanoi) privilege of watching a young man at the neighboring table eat a pair of chicken feet. I expected him to nibble at the skin and then give it up for a bad job, but he surprised me by biting off the tip of each toe, crunching the bits in his mouth for a few seconds and then, hardly pausing to swallow, biting the toes off shorter and shorter as if they were the ears of a chocolate rabbit—except much crunchier. In a few minutes, the feet had completely disappeared inside him. I thought of that man of American legend who is reputed to have eaten a Buick.

Now it was my turn. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the peer pressure of four charming Vietnamese persons half my age who could scarcely speak English. But I found myself crunching chicken toes as if they were petrified shoestring potatoes. Hai Anh was horrified. 'Don't eat the bones!' she cried in alarm.

'With a chicken foot what else is there?' I wanted to know. 'I saw someone do it in another restaurant,' I added.

Phuong and Tu assured us that eating the bones was perfectly okay, but Hai Anh would have none of it. She commandeered what was left of the chicken feet and put it out of my reach. So I can't truthfully say I've eaten a chicken foot…but I can claim to have scarfed down a few chicken toes.

Living the life of Rải Ly

At least some of the readers of this blog assumed my six-week silence was a result of new teaching responsibilities falling on me like a collapsing pile of schoolbooks. Not so. The truth of the matter is that I often feel unreasonably guilty that my life has become so pressure-free. Unlike most of my colleagues, who are teaching 10 to 15 classes per week and thinking of taking on even more, I've been teaching just 3 to 5 classes per week and feeling dreamily content with my slacker's pace.

You might not think an Asian city of 3.5 million people would be a likely spot to bow out of the rat race, but that seems to be just what I've done. I have no mortgage and no car. I have no idea what the price of gasoline is. No bills or junk mail arrive in my mail box—I have no mail box. I never wake to an alarm clock. I can stay at the bar until closing time every night if I want to. Until AFTER closing time, in fact. (When closing time arrives, somebody pulls down the metal door so the bar will appear closed to any patrolling police truck, but the bartenders carry on behind locked doors as long as there are customers spending money.)

I eat in restaurants whenever I feel like it—it costs 5 dollars or less for a decent meal, 10 dollars for something special like veal piccata or sushi. For a change of pace I stay in, cook myself an omelet, and watch something on HBO. I do my own dishes, but the $475 I give my landlady each month includes housecleaning, laundry, broadband Internet, cable TV, and electricity. When my laundry basket gets full I set it at the bottom of the stairs and my clothes come back clean in a day or so. When a light bulb burns out, I mention it and I'm given a new one. When the landlady heard I was shopping for an area rug, she found one in a storeroom and set it outside my door.

For the first couple of months I got around town by xe buyt (bus-18 cents a ride) or by xe om (motorbike taxi-$1-$2 per ride). Now I'm pedaling around on an old bicycle Thanh loaned me (free ride-free exercise). I'm debating buying a motorbike, but as long as the weather stays cool and dry, I'm in no hurry.

You see very few bikes in Hanoi with racing handlebars or derailleur gears. But the town is so flat and the streets so busy with motorbikes that you seldom find an opportunity to shift gears. It's probably just a matter of time before I get a hard knock or worse out there, but I've lost my initial apprehension and, far from cowering near the curb, find myself aggressively insisting on my share of the street, threading between cars slowed by a jam of motorbikes, pedaling upcurrent on one-way streets, and making left turns against oncoming traffic by drifting across the traffic well before the intersection and then drifting back to the right after rounding the corner. In other words, I'm driving my bicycle like any Hanoi schoolkid or their grandfather would. (Only faster. Because I'm bigger, the Vietnamese have a hard time keeping up with me.)

Bac on line

Bac—the Vietnamese word for 'uncle'—is what Thu, my Vietnamese tutor, calls me. More about Thu, later.

When I left off blogging back in October, Hanoi had gone from hot and humid to mild and humid. Now, six weeks later, it's even milder here and somewhat less humid. The locals call this season mua dong (winter) and dress accordingly. Everywhere you look you see people in sweaters, hats, mufflers, warm coats, sporting the traditional layered look of mid-December. In fact, Christmas decorations are going up in the bigger stores and hotels. Shops all over my neighborhood are bursting with artificial Christmas trees, ornaments, and plastic battery-operated Santas dancing the hokey-pokey. All in all, there's way more of a yuletide look than you might expect from a tropical Buddhist country. The thing is, though, the daytime temperatures here are still in the seventies (between 21 and 26 Celsius). It's currently 77F/25C in Hanoi. At night, the mercury drops no lower than 52F/11C. I'm still going about in my shirt sleeves, eliciting comments from people about how strong and healthy I must be to withstand the cold weather without a coat.

Now that the weather has relaxed its sweaty grip on me, I can truthfully say I'm settling comfortably into my apartment in Luong Van Can street, and into my life as an expat English teacher in Hanoi. Yes, as many of you have guessed, I've begun my teaching career. I have a six-month contract with Language Link and have taken over two corporate classes from a departing teacher named Patrick.

Corporate classes are contracted by Vietnamese companies who want to give their employees an opportunity to improve their English. Theoretically, the emphasis in these classes is on language that will be useful in the work place: 'Could we reschedule our meeting for Monday?', 'Put together some sales figures and fax them to me', 'markup', 'conference call', 'glass ceiling'…that sort of thing. In reality, most classes—my classes, at any rate—are at a much more elementary level: 'How old as you?', 'I am very happiness to meet you', 'We will sightseeing a sunset.'

Since the company pays for the class, corporate students are less motivated to attend than students who are paying their own fees. One of my classes meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 5 to 7 PM. The students come to Language Link straight from work on their motorbikes. Not surprisingly, only four or five of the 20 enrolled students show up on an average day and it's rare that anybody arrives on time. The other class meets from 2:30 to 4:30 Mondays and Fridays in one of the company's own conference rooms. Since the class is during office hours, you'd think most of the 20 enrollees would jump at a chance to miss a couple hours of work and still get paid, but only three or four show up for this class and one or two of those usually get a call on their cell phone halfway through the class and head back to their office to put out a fire.

I have to say, though, that the ones who show up are delightful students—warm, cheerful, cooperative, and eager to learn. I enjoy being in their company and I enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways to improve our communication together. In the next few weeks, I'll try to paint a more detailed picture of what our classes are like.

Da Lat whine

Today I had lunch with Sarah and Jouke at the Culi Café, a Kiwi hangout just a few steps from Bia Hoi Corner (where the CELTA gang has downed so many 18-cent glasses of beer in our brief Hanoi residency). The Culi's main claim to fame is a row of coin-op washing machines on the ground floor. Thanh, it seems, was wrong about there being no laundromats in Hanoi. There's at least this one, where you can wash your duds while eating a burger and fries or some spaghetti al pesto. Over lunch I traded my Da Lat stories for some true tales from the classroom. While surely not as gruesome as my CELTA course memories, actual teaching is now looking to me like less fun than hanging out in jazz clubs and pagodas. De Climo said she would contact me this week about signing my contract and getting started, but tomorrow I'm meeting Sarah and Jouke at the Thang Loi Hotel pool.

Hanoi is no longer hot, but it's still sweaty. The first two things I do when I come into my apartment is take off my wet shirt and kick on the AC. I'm looking back fondly on my cool, refreshing visit to Da Lat. I'm not forgetting my curmudgeonly duty to whine and complain, though. Here are some of the things wrong with Da Lat:

· Neither hotel I stayed at had sheets on the bed—just a bedspread tucked around the mattress and a folded blanket at the foot of the bed.
· Some of those women in the conical bamboo hats carried squeeze bottles with noise makers in place of caps. After three days I was starting to get tired of hearing the rhythmic squeaking—like clown shoes—that accompanied their movement along the street. I think the purpose may have been to signal housewives to bring trash or recyclables out to the street for collection, but still…
· Even more tiresome were the garbage trucks which played a calliope version of 'It's A Small World After All' over and over and over again. I don't know how the drivers can stand it day after day.
· My last complaint isn't peculiar to Da Lat, but is common throughout Vietnam: locals sometimes have trouble seeing a foreigner as anything other than a business opportunity. Let me give you two examples:

I arrive someplace on the back of a xe om. I climb off the motorbike, hand my helmet to the driver, and pay him for the ride. Immediately, every other xe om driver within 50 feet starts calling "Hello...motobi?", "Where you going?", and so on, apparently seeing no illogic in my paying for a xe om to bring me to their corner so I can immediately hire one of them to take me someplace else. If I walk past a line of 9 xe om drivers shaking my head and refusing all their offers, the tenth driver in the line will still ask me if I'm looking for a xe om. (To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)

While I was sitting in the karaoke bar in Da Lat listening to Fu Manchu play that one-string zither, something outside the window caught my eye: about a block away, lots of smoke was billowing up between two buildings and a bright spotlight was coloring the smoke first red, then green, then blue, then red again… I waved the waiter over to my table and pointed to the colored smoke. "What am I seeing out there?" I asked. "What is that?" He pointed to my bottle of beer and raised his eyebrows quizzically. "No, I'm fine right now," I said. "I just want to know what that smoke is." I pointed at the window again. "What is that?" He gave a small shrug and wandered off, returning a minute later with another bottle of beer. I waved off the beer and gestured toward the window, but it was hopeless. It was like pointing out something on TV to your dog—all the dog can see is your finger.

Visiting Day

My 72 hours in Dalat went by quickly. I spent the last drizzly day visiting Bao Dai's palace (actually more of a big art deco villa) and the "Crazy House" (a cross between the Winchester Mystery House and the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House). Check out some of the hundreds of pictures I took before my camera lens fogged up.

More interesting to me than visiting these tourist sites was meeting Xuan and Thinh. Xuan is a waitress I met when I stopped at a tiny hole-in-the-wall café for a ca phe den (black coffee). Some very interesting music was coming out of the CD player in the corner—a very French-sounding pop tune with a lush, jazz saxophone accompaniment, the kind of music I seek out when I have access to satellite radio, but which I haven't heard since I arrived in Viet Nam. I was carrying my Vietnamese-English dictionary, so I looked up a couple key words and asked Xuan about the music. She pulled the CD from the changer and let me write the name of the artist in my notebook.

Later on, as I was returning from Bao Dai's palace, I got caught in a downpour and ducked into the same café to dry out a bit and wait out the rain. For about 15 minutes I was the only customer, so Xuan and I were able to have an interesting—albeit confusing—conversation, with the dictionary doing a lot of the talking. Then Xuan's husband Thinh arrived with several friends. If Xuan was warm and friendly, Thinh was effusive. He had no English but, having spent four years working in Germany, addressed me in broken German. When I responded in my own rudimentary German, Thinh sat down next to me, leaned into me, put one hand on my shoulder and the other on my knee, and made it clear I was his new best friend. I can't tell you all the things we talked about, but we laughed a lot and felt we understood each other well by the time the rain stopped.

That evening, while taking pictures on the street, I ran into the students Thanh and Chi. Thanh surprised me by asking if they could come back to my hotel room with me. I know what most of you are thinking, but there's a very good chance you're wrong. First of all, these young women were extremely polite and shy. Second, they couldn't fail to notice that, as handsome and sexy as I am, I'm obviously of their grandfathers' generation. Third, they mentioned to me that they were devout Christians. And fourth, they never once made a move toward my zipper. I wasn't taking any chances, though. I begged off without asking them to specify why they wanted to come home with me.

Back in Hanoi only a few hours, I received back-to-back invitations from my friend/chief advisor Thanh and my former student/Vietnamese tutor Thu. The next day I got to eat not one, but two, meals in a Vietnamese home.

Late Saturday morning, Thanh picked me up on his motorbike and drove me to his home in the southern Thanh Xuan district of Hanoi. Thanh's home is spacious, modern, and comfortable—approximately the same size and footprint as the World Hotel with the same high ceilings. On a common Vietnamese design, the house is one room wide, two rooms deep and connected by an elegant, curving staircase. There are family portraits and travel souvenirs decorating the walls, a stuffed animal collection in daughter Mai Chau's bedroom, and piles of sandals by every door, but a remarkable absence of the kind of clutter that characterizes most American homes—no piles of books, newspapers, magazines, letters, bills, tools, toys, pencils, and so on covering countertops, tabletops, desktops, and chairs.

The house is on a narrow, quiet backstreet lined with similar, prosperous-looking houses. Thanh's brother Lan lives in the house next door. Lan and his wife Ha and daughter Linh joined us for lunch. Thanh's wife Huong (who used to teach cooking classes) prepared some delicious nem (spring rolls) stuffed with crab. Ha prepared some bun cha. Without doing it justice, really, let me explain that bun cha is a wonderful combination of mixed salad greens, cold rice noodles, and charcoal grilled meatballs of seasoned pork, eaten together with a delicate sauce and sliced cucumbers. Yum! I lost some cred as a cultural ambassador when I declined the shot of vodka Thanh poured me before the meal began. But I did drink my share of the beer. And exchanged a few words of French with Thanh's father, who I believe said he was 92. I enjoyed every minute of my short visit and advanced my meager knowledge of Vietnamese, thanks to patient explanations from Thanh and his sister Hanh, who was also on hand.

Before I left on a xe om, Huong packed a dozen or so of the nem for me to take home and also insisted that I line the motorbike helmet with a sheet of newspaper. (You never know who's head has been in the helmet before yours or what microscopic critters they've deposited there.)

After putting my nem in the fridge, running a few errands in the neighborhood, and putting on a fresh shirt, I headed off on another xe om to Dong Da district to eat dinner with Thu's family. By the time I arrived, it was dark and seemed to have have grown hotter. I took a wrong turn and walked a block or two in the wrong direction. By the time I got turned around my fresh shirt was soaked through, front and back. Thu lives on Pho Trung Liet, a very narrow alley, dimly lit and crossed by a malodorous canal. Along the way I passed, in addition to the odd convenience store or beauty salon, several open doors with somebody watching TV from a hard-looking bed just a foot or two from the street. When I reached the address Thu had given me, I found a sliding metal gate like the one protecting my apartment building and most of the stores in Hanoi. When I knocked Thu came down and let me into a room containing about six motorbikes. Through a door in the back was a room containing a platform bed and little else. Off to one side was a cement staircase. I removed my shoes and went upstairs.

Thu's family home is quite a contrast to Thanh's house. I wasn't offered a tour, but what little I saw makes me feel confident I could rent their house—or one like it—for less than I'm paying for my little one-bedroom apartment on Luong Van Can. I was introduced to Thu's brother and father, who invited me to sit on a wooden sofa with him. Thu soon joined us on this sofa, which was really just a bench—wood slats with no cushions. (By the end of the evening it would feel to me like petrified wood.) The room also contained a small TV in a large cabinet against the wall, a wooden sleeping platform in one corner, a coffee table next to the bench, and a couple chairs. The only wall decorations were three calendars and a broken clock.

Thu's father is a veteran of the American War (i.e., the Vietnam War). He was wounded in combat, receiving damage to one eye, and is now retired on a veteran's disability at the age of 55. Two of his brothers were killed in the war. He shook my hand warmly when he told me these things and made a point of adding that the war is over now and what is past is past. With Thu translating, we discussed politics for a few minutes. Thu's father, like every other Vietnamese I've discussed politics with, likes Obama, loves Bill Clinton, has contempt for Bush, and doesn't really care about McCain. After a while, we were joined by Thu's grandmother—a delightful, smiling woman of 83—who was tickled that I greeted her in Vietnamese. She showed me a scar on her foot that she got as a girl during the war to free Viet Nam from the French and described seeing Ho Chi Minh in person once at a market.

We sat drinking green tea for some time and then Thu announced it was time for dinner and we all stood up. Thu seemed to be waiting for me to take the lead, but there was only confusion on my part when she led me over to the TV. I almost stepped on an overturned basket on the floor and didn't realize until Thu lifted the basket to reveal a tray of food that dinner was to be eaten sitting on the woven mat beneath the TV. We all sat down cross-legged on the floor and tucked into enormous bowls of fried shrimp, sliced pork, puffy squares of tofu, and shredded beef with steamed morning glory stems. Thu's father kept refilling my glass with wine—a Russian sparkling wine that tasted to me like watered sherry. He also kept popping more shrimp and pork and tofu into my bowl whenever it started running low. I warned him that I was a light eater and was getting full, but he pointed out that this was a "special meal" (because of me, I suppose) and tradition called for me to eat everything in sight. I did my best but of course my participation in the meal ended with my bowl still full to the brim with shrimp, pork, and tofu.

I kept wondering where the rice was. It turned out to be in a big pot behind grandma the whole time. Apparently, during normal meals the rice is eaten with the meat and vegetables, but during special meals it's held back and eaten last. I would have liked to have some rice, but by this point I was too full. When the food was cleared and we were back on the bench, however, I discovered I still had enough room to eat 9 or 10 big pieces of canteloupe and pineapple. This was a sticky business and I ended up with pineapple juice all over my hands. Seeing my discomfort, Thu's father handed me a wet rag to wash up with, but this rag left my hands stickier than ever. I asked Thu if I could wash my hands and she said "Yes, of course," and said something else in Vietnamese to her brother, who disappeared into the next room and returned with a basin of water for me to wash my hands in. To dry my clean hands I was offered the same rag as before. Oh, well.

I arrived at Thu's house at 7:00 and left at 10:30. It must have been exhausting for Thu to have to translate everything everybody said for three and a half hours, but she appeared tireless. When I finally got up to go, her grandmother said with evident delight that this was the first time she had been able to talk to a foreigner. I was prepared to take a xe om home, but Thu wouldn't hear of it and made her brother give me a ride back to Luong Van Can.

Arriving back in my street, I found myself feeling a little euphoric from all the beer, wine, and hospitality I'd been enjoying all day long. The Jazz Club was right in front of me and it was Saturday night, so I stopped in for a beer. The club was about half full—maybe 40-50 customers—and the mood was mellow: the band was doing a sensuous version of The Girl from Ipanema. While I sipped a $3 beer the female vocalist took a break and the band shifted gears into an uptempo number that soon had me grooving. It wasn't the Yellowjackets, but it was definitely jazz. Oh yeah! This was my best day so far in Vietnam.

I like it, Da Lat

Fresh air with a scent of pine trees! Puffy white clouds against a stark blue sky! A cool breeze raising goose flesh on bare arms! I'm in Da Lat—Viet Nam's answer to…what?…Lake Tahoe?…Jackson Hole, maybe…although there are no casinos, no power boats, and no ski lifts. Da Lat has been compared to Niagara Falls—it's a popular destination for Vietnamese honeymooners and there are several waterfalls nearby. For me it's a mecca of blessed relief from the heat and humidity of Hanoi. I've come to enjoy a few days of R & R before I get down to work.

I've was curious about Da Lat even before I arrived in Hanoi. The last emperor of Vietnam Bao Dai had his summer palace here. The surrounding region is known for lakes, waterfalls, and wine production. It enjoys milder temperatures, lower humidity, cleaner air, lower living costs, and far less crowding than Hanoi. It's been a university town since 1957. Hanoi has its charms but I can't help wondering if Da Lat might not be a better fit for the likes of me, ergo this visit is secondarily a scouting expedition.

Da Lat's xe om drivers naturally assume a Westerner can only be here to see the tourist sights, but I've been a disappointment to them. I've been content so far to explore Da Lat on foot, revelling in the fresh air and marvelling at how Western the place feels. There's a contour to the town that's in stark contrast to the rice paddy flatness of Hanoi. To encourage the illusion of being in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, I ordered a humburger yesterday—my first humburger in Vietnam. I have to say it spoiled the illusion a bit. The burger looked authentic, but in place of a beef patty I found some kind of jasmine-scented mystery-meat paté. The fries weren't bad, though.

When I arrived Tuesday morning after a two-hour flight from Hanoi I checked into the first hotel I found, the Tan Anh. The room I got for $12 a night was spacious, with two double beds and a fine view from the balcony. What I mainly wanted, though, was a secure place to store my bags while I scouted around for a charming bargain hotel. (Security at the Tan Anh turned out to be marginal. Twice I came back to find the front desk deserted and had to help myself to my room key.)

After a nap, I picked up a tourist map and started making the rounds of hotels in Da Lat's city center. There was quite a choice of luxury accommodations in the $60-$260 range and an even wider range of budget hotels. Most of them appeared totally guestless, prime tourist season having come and gone already, so I was in a good position no doubt to bargain, but when I was offered a price of $10 a night for the best room at the charming Thang Loi Hotel I didn't haggle. After exploring a bit more and grabbing a bite to eat, I went back to the Tan Anh to shower and relax.

While checking my email I heard a haunting female voice singing somewhere outside my window. When I went to explore I discovered the music was blasting from the top floor of a nearby luxury hotel. I took the elevator up to what turned out to be a tiki lounge cum karaoke bar, but by the time I got there, the female vocalist had been replaced by a young man in a tight limegreen shirt and white sansabelt slacks singing My Way. His way turned out to be a long way from the key the band was playing in.

After sansabelt sat down, the band turned out to be way more interesting doing instrumentals. The band comprised Yamaha synth, tambourine, drummer playing a cymbal and two hand-carved wooden drums with very heavy sticks, a woman wearing a brocaded white sweater and a white harvest moon headdress playing something similar to a Japanese koto, and the lead man who played some crazy solos on an instrument I've never seen before. It appeared to consist of one string strung on a horizontal sounding board. Standing vertically at one end of the sounding board was what looked like a long black quill which served both as a tremolo arm and as a pitch selector. The dude playing it looked like Fu Manchu in a dark blue robe with big silver polka dots and a matching hat shaped like a deep-dish pizza (about a 9-inch pie). The music had a pronounced Oriental flavor but at one point I thought I recognized the melody of an old Eagles tune. The sensation was not unlike eating a jasmine-scented humburger with fries.

I hung around until sansabelt came back onstage, then returned to the Tan Anh and grabbed my room key from the pile sitting on the deserted reception desk. The next morning I moved into the Thang Loi.

The Thang Loi is not one of your ten-foot wide hotels. It's a big, rambling old hotel with a boarding house feel. I'm the only guest on the second floor and very possibly the only guest in the hotel. After settling in I headed to the other side of the lake to pay a visit to the Da Lat Foreign Language School. This turned out to be a complete and utter delight. Ben Lavarack, the human resources manager, wasn't around but I got a tour of the school from the administrative manager, a charming young woman named Thuy. The school is cozy, comfortable, intimate, and meticulously ordered. It feels like something between a Montessori school and a houseboat. I loved it and am already giving serious thought to applying for a job there sometime in the future. There are some good reasons to serve a tour in Hanoi first, though. I'll keep you posted on developments.

On my way back to the Thang Loi I stopped to watch some little remote controlled boats zipping around Xuan Huong Lake. While I was snapping pictures two young women spotted me, crossed the road, stood near me for a minute or two, then hazarded a conversational opening. Chi and Thanh are third year students at Da Lat University. They wanted to practice their English and we had a long, enjoyable chat. I've had similar encounters with waiters, xe om drivers, street vendors, and hotel clerks. You get the feeling social isolation in Vietnam can only be by personal choice.

Pre-dawn departure

At 4:00 am Tuesday morning I let myself quietly out of my apartment to catch a taxi to Noi Bai airport. I had prearranged (and prepaid) the cab ride a couple days earlier with a neighborhood travel agent named Nga, who had smiled indulgently at my paranoia in wanting to leave so early for the airport. It's only a 45-minute cab ride, after all, and my flight wasn't leaving until 6:00 am. But if I learned nothing else from twenty years as a computer consultant, I learned this: paranoia is good. Paranoia is cheap insurance.

At 4:00 am Hanoi's streets are as quiet as they're going to get, but there's still a surprising amount of activity: small knots of men smoking cigarettes and conversing in low voices, bands of teenagers roaring up and down the street on motorbikes, old women headed who knows where, and here and there a street kitchen still serving bowls of chicken feet to hungry night owls. I set my travel bag and laptop back in the shadows to minimize temptation for the motorbike gangs and waited. Several taxis cruised past, but none of them stopped. I saw a motorscooter transporting a headless pig. About 200 pounds of pale meat was sprawled on its spine in the footwell, cantilevered hindfeet inches from the pavement on one side and forefeet jutting out perilously close to the street on the other side.

When I'd waited 15 minutes with no pickup, I used my mobile phone to call the taxi number Nga had given me. Somebody answered and said something in Vietnamese. I explained my situation in English. They replied something in Vietnamese and hung up. So I called my emergency number—Nga's mobile phone—and woke up Nga. While I was explaining the situation to her, a Morning Taxi cab pulled up directly in front of me. "Oh, wait...here's a cab now. Would you make sure the driver understands that the fare has been prepaid?" I handed my mobile to the driver who had a brief conversation with Nga and handed it back. "Airport?" he asked. "Vâng (yes)," I replied. He helped me load my bags into the cab and we started for the airport.

Da Lat was still over 900 miles away, but already the air was starting to feel cooler to me as we sped through the dim streets, silent now except when the driver leaned on his horn—not so much, I believe, to warn the occasional lone motorbike we passed as to wake up any layabed who might be trying to sleep on the driver's shift. As we were crossing the river, my mobile phone rang. It was Nga. "Does your cab say Noi Bai Taxi on the side?" she asked me. "No," I told her. "It says Morning Taxi."

"I arranged the pickup with Noi Bai Taxi. Their driver just called and is waiting in front of your apartment."

"I thought you confirmed everything on the phone with this driver."

"Yeah. He tricked you."

"He tricked me?"

"Yeah. He tricked us both. He told me he was with Noi Bai Taxi. What do you want to do? Do you want me to talk to him?"

I glanced at my watch. It was almost 5:00. "No. Let's leave it alone until he's gotten me to the airport." I had been wondering why the driver had switched on his meter when we started out. Now in my head I start running through a scenario where I'm counting down the minutes to takeoff while explaining to a non-English-speaking policeman why I'm refusing to pay the taxi driver who delivered me to the airport.

A minute later the driver pulls onto the shoulder, rolls up behind a stopped taxi, and sits there idling his engine. Now what the hell…? A woman in a conical bamboo hat steps out of the shadows, walks around to the driver's window, and sells him some kind of ticket. He pulls back onto the highway. A minute later we arrive at a toll booth where the driver hands the ticket he just bought from a roadside vendor to the toll taker, who tears the ticket and returns the stub. The mysterious Orient!

At the airport it's clear the driver is hoping for some cash, but instead I write out the name, address, and phone number of the travel agency and do my best to get him to understand that he'll have to collect his money from them. To my surprise, he takes the piece of paper I've given him and leaves without an argument. A good thing because the airport is crowded and I reach my gate only 5 minutes before boarding begins. While we're boarding I get another call from Nga. "Did you pay the driver?" she asks me.

"No," I say. "I paid him nothing."

"He just came back to the agency and asked to be paid."

"Are you going to pay him?"

"No," she said. "I'm not. He's a tricker."

Green Mango, Blue Tango

I'm not so sure about my new neighborhood. It's ground zero for tourists and the people who live off them--hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, travel agencies, taxi drivers, con artists, pickpockets, prostitutes, beggars, and itinerant vendors of everything from pineapples to stolen watches. I'm a resident now but indistinguishable from the tourists, so I'm getting approached, pitched, and harangued every minute I'm on the street. It's starting to make me a bit surly. In seven days my response has evolved from 'No, thank you'…to 'No!'…to 'No way, Jose!'…to 'Hell no!'…to the only response that's at all effective but which makes me unhappy I have to resort to it: acting as if the other person is a figment of their own imagination.

On Saturday night I joined Jouke, Imran, and Imran's wife Amy for dinner at a sushi restaurant in my old neighborhood. After dinner we went to a party at the Green Mango, which turned out to be just around the corner from my new apartment. In fact, when I was hunting for incense the other day I walked right past the Green Mango without seeing it. It's another one of those tall, narrow hotels that grow all over Hanoi, but this one is quite posh and deep and it opens up in the back into a big party room with a stage, where on this night a live band was pulling in several hundred of the same people I saw at the American Club the week before. I also ran into Taylor, a Samoan with an Aussie accent who lives in my apartment building and whom I'd met in the hallway just that morning. Hanoi is starting to seem rather a small place in some ways.

In an earlier blog I mentioned wandering around the Old Quarter and chancing upon Hanoi's Jazz Club. The Jazz Club, it happens, is a few doors up the street from my apartment. At one point Saturday evening I decided to sneak out of the party at the Green Mango and wander down to the corner to see what happens on a Saturday night at the Jazz Club.

The Jazz Club is a big cavern fairly open to the street. It features live music seven nights a week with no cover charge. Pricey drinks, understandably, but not too outrageous—about $2 for a beer and $4 for a mixed drink. The place wasn't exactly mobbed last Saturday, but there were a couple dozen people listening to some mellow sounds from a Vietnamese quartet. Not a great band, but altogether more my kind of scene than the high-decibel, standing-room-only crush of the dance party up the street. I made a mental note to come back soon and then detoured toward my apartment to pick up my camera to get some snaps of my friends at the Green Mango.

Suddenly, once again, I'm catching a pitch from a neighborhood entrepreneur—this time from a young woman (in her 30's I think) selling massages. It's about 11:00 and the street has slowed down, but there are still quite a few people about. To make sure I'm not confused about what kind of massage she's talking about, the woman takes the liberty of massaging the front of my pants once or twice. I tell her I'm not interested at the moment (I already have an agenda that involves my camera and my friends at the Green Mango), so she insists on writing her name and phone number for me so I can call her the next day. I tell her I'm going out of town for a few days (true), but will hang on to the number.

She wants to know where I'm going. (Every Hanoi salesperson wants to know this and also what your immediate plans are, presumably so they can show you how perfectly your plans and theirs coincide.) I tell her I'm going home and in fact I'm already there. While she's been previewing the massage, we've covered the 30 paces to my place. I tell her goodnight, try to reassure her I might phone--without making any promises--and slip into the alleyway that leads to my front door. She doesn't need any more encouragement than a dimly lit alley way. Despite my perhaps too polite protests, she follows me to my door, all the while escalating her sales pitch. She indicates, in broken English accompanied by body language that leaves no doubt whatsoever about her meaning, that she's prepared to deliver the massage on the spot and the price is completely up to me. To overcome my sales resistance, she embraces me in a more than sisterly fashion, kisses me on the neck, and unzips my pants--about three times, I think--as I continue to bid her goodnight, assure her that I'll keep her in mind for the future, fumble with my keys, re-zip my pants, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the padlock securing the sliding outer gate, slide open the gate, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the inner door, re-zip my pants, step into the foyer, taking care that she doesn't slip inside with me, check my wallet and cell phone again, close and padlock the outer gate, and tell her goodnight as I close the inner door.

The last thing I need is to acquire an STD while living in a place where getting cured of athlete's foot can be a dodgy undertaking. That consideration and perhaps that consideration alone kept this story from having a happier ending. The woman was physically attractive by any objective standard and made more so in my eyes by the sake and beer I had just consumed and the oath I've sworn against exposing myself to any sexual relationship that might be construed as meaningful. The truth is that for the very first time since I arrived in Hanoi I found the Vietnamese sales pitch that doesn't want to take no for an answer to be not unequivocably repugnant and I went up to my lonely apartment feeling a bit wistful.

I waited long enough for her to have latched onto another sales prospect and let myself back out. As I did so, I suddenly remembered the construction workers who sleep in the newsstand. Even with no English, they probably were able to follow the titillating radio comedy that had transpired on the other side of their plastic tarp. I'm amazed none of them snickered.

Polls apart

I received my absentee ballot today, just nineteen days before the election. Since mail to/from the U.S. can take a month or more to arrive, I wasted no time marking the ballot and hotfooting it over to the central post office on the other side of Hoan Kiem Lake. While I stood studying the signs for a clue to which window I needed, a young man came up to me and offered to help. I showed him the envelope and started to tell him what it was. As helpful Hanoians often do, he got started helping without waiting for any explanation. He took the envelope from my hand and headed directly to the second window, where he insinuated himself between two customers already being waited on and set the envelope on an electronic scale. Noting the weight, he snatched up the envelope again, trotted over to a newspaper kiosk near the front door, spoke briefly to the newspaper vendor, who produced several stamps from beneath her table, and began licking and affixing these stamps to my envelope.

"What happens to the envelope after you put the stamps on it?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied.

I tried again. "You put the stamps on…and then….what? What happens?"

"Yes," he agreed.

"I'm asking a question," I informed him. "What happens next?"

"Oh, yes." He was quite certain of his answer.

I appealed to the newspaper vendor, trying a less open-ended question as advised in my CELTA course: "How long will this take to arrive in the U.S.?"

"Three weeks," she told me. "Maybe 25 days."

"That's no good," I said. "This is a ballot for the presidential election. The election'll be over before my ballot gets there." She explained the situation to the young man, who knew just what to do. He headed off to the sixth window, where he elbowed aside a woman, obtained an Express Mail envelope, helped me fill that out, and then spent ten slow minutes painstakingly removing the several dollars worth of stamps he had already affixed to the ballot envelope. The resulting damage to the envelope I'm almost certain will invalidate my ballot and waste the $35 (580,000VND) I paid for the Express Mail postage.

It had dawned on me somewhere in the middle of this drama that the young man had no official status. He was just an entrepreneur trying turn a buck, which became apparent when he followed me to the exit explaining that he was a 'volunteer' and depended on customer donations to make his continued efforts here possible. (Not in those exact words, of course.) I explained to him that when and if I received word from the Laramie County Clerk that my ballot had been accepted and counted, I would return to the post office and give him a tip.

I've encountered here the rather cynical opinion that the Vietnamese, despite their apparent warmth and good will, consider Westerners to be walking ATM machines. I'm finding a grain of truth in that, at least when it comes to the vendors who prey on the tourists concentrated around Hoan Kiem Lake.

Yesterday, I passed a young man selling baskets. I asked him the price of a fruit bowl-sized basket and he quoted me 250,000 dong. That was a lot more than I wanted to spend for a fruit bowl, so I thanked him and started to walk away. "How much you pay?" he asked.

I was carrying home groceries and didn't want to prolong the conversation, so I said, "30,000 dong".

That drove him wild. "You cheap, cheap," he said, rolling his eyes scornfully.

"Sorry," I said. "I have to get my groceries home. I'll come back later."

"100,000 dong" he offered, making a face to show how abhorrent this price was to him.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I'll look around and if I can't find a basket like that for less, I'll come back here and pay you 100,000 for it. Okay?"

"Oh, you cheap, cheap," he repeated. "80,000."

I was worried about my yoghurt curdling. "I gotta go," I told him. I turned and plowed with my fistfuls of plastic bags into a stream of growling motorbikes.

"Okay…30,000!" I heard him call out to my back as I sidled through the traffic toward my apartment.

Autumng in Hanoi

I explained to you the difficulty Thanh and I had agreeing on the pronunciation of 'khong', the Vietnamese word for 'no'. I sincerely hope Thu can help me resolve this problem, because it's really starting to bug me. My new address is 43A Luong Van Can and when I pronounce the name of my street xe om drivers look at me like I'm a Kalahari bushman. I know it's that 'ng' sound. I had exactly the same difficulty while tracking down an incense (huong) shop today. Every time I said 'huong', I drew blank stares. But when I displayed the written word everybody would say "Ah…huong!" and pronounce the word—to my ears—exactly the same way I just said it. It's maddening. If I had any hair left, I might pull out a few strands in frustration.

I did eventually locate an incense shop. It wasn't on a street full of incense shops and incense makers as I half expected, but it WAS far from any street where you could buy a censer of any description or any kind of iron or brass bowl suitable for burning incense. Vietnamese merchants have a very compartmentalized way of thinking, it seems to me.

Autumn has arrived in Hanoi and I'm grateful. That doesn't mean I'm comfortable (except in rare moments). It doesn't mean my prickly heat rash has cleared up or that I don't turn on the AC the minute I walk in my door. But my shirts now just get damp instead of sopping wet during the day and sweat no longer drips off my nose onto the menu when I stop off for a bite. My former student Huyen—I interviewed her for one of my CELTA assignments—has been emailing me since the course ended and she describes the Hanoi autumn very poetically: she says the autumn shine is honey colored and the wind is cool as fresh beer. Not bad, huh? She closed that email by saying "Now my eyes are calling me to go to bed."

My eyes are giving me a bit of a shout out right now, so I'll close this with a list of some of the items available from the menu at Café Nhan:

Snack……………………….......…10.000VND
Fast food frozen food…………20.000VND
Sand wishes with fish
Humburgers with beef cake
Sour meat soap
Rousted chicken
Violet blutinous rice

And on the drink menu:
Yoghurt vitamin coffee
Maragitta
Grasoper
Tequila Sun Rice

Whoops! The power just went out in my apartment. Except for the glow from my battery-powered laptop, everything is pitch-black. Do I have a flashlight, candles, or a cigarette lighter? No, no, and no. I think it's time I went to bed.

Incensed

Café Nhan is my new hangout. It's the closest spot with free Wifi I can depend on—until closing time, anyway. The café nestles in the bend of a quiet L-shaped backstreet full of tiny cafés and small hotels. Its three floors, connected by narrow staircases at each end of the café, include both indoor tables and outdoor tables, some downstairs on the brick terrace adjoining the street, some upstairs on narrow little balconies overlooking the terrace. I'm usually there in the evening, but I went down there first thing this morning to send an email to Thu, one of my CELTA course students who has offered to tutor me in Vietnamese.

After an iced coffee and a quick email session, I packed up my laptop and headed back to the apartment and then suddenly remembered I had intended to get some incense to counter the rather strong dog odor that seeps into the apartment whenever Kiki is hanging out in the living room below. I had looked in several souvenir shops earlier with no luck so now I asked somebody. A young woman with fairly good English directed me to the nearest Buddhist temple. "They'll give you incense for free!" she enthused.

"I'd like to buy some to burn at home," I explained. "I need a shop that sells incense and incense holders…and matches."

She didn't know of such a shop but thought a Buddhist monk might know. She offered to write a note in Vietnamese explaining what I wanted and I let her write one in my notebook. "What does it say?" I asked.

"It's written in a very particular way," she warned me. "Don't show it to anybody but a monk. They'll think you're…" She couldn't think of a suitable word.

"Crazy?" I suggested. She didn't look as if that was the word she was looking for, but she accepted it with a nod. I thanked her and hurried off to Ba Da pagoda, just a couple blocks away.

Ba Da turned out to be small and unassuming as temples go. There seemed to be nobody about except a young man in the forecourt hand-painting signs or posters of some sort. He didn't look like a monk, so I circled the temple looking for one. In a room off a back passageway I saw a young man with a shaved head slumped on a desk fast asleep. I thought he might wake up if I stared at him, but he didn't. I poked my head through a few other doorways that looked out of bounds before I discovered a monk sitting in a small room on a wooden sofa. He waved me away with his hand, but I waved back at him with my notebook until his curiosity got the better of him and he came to take a look.

The monk, a man about forty years old clad in shorts but no shirt, read my message several times and seemed puzzled by it, which puzzled me. I tried repeating a couple of the key words: 'huong' (incense) and 'o dau' (where?) but that didn't seem to help him at all. He gestured for me to wait, disappeared behind a partition, and reappeared moments later dressed to go out. He grabbed me by the sleeve and started for the front gate. I thought he meant to take me to an incense shop. After a few steps, though, he stopped, turned around and led me back to the room where I had found him.

He escorted me inside and had me sit beside him at a small desk upon which he placed my notebook and the tourist map I was carrying. Switching on a desk lamp he proceeded to examine the map with great intensity. Then he wrote into my notebook what appeared to me to be a list of all the Buddhist temples within a twenty block radius. I didn't see exactly how this was going to help me, but I thanked him several times in Vietnamese and backed, bowing politely, out of the room.

I thought the episode was concluded, but no. He followed me out into the passageway holding a key in his hand. Hurrying past me, he unlocked a padlock securing a side door of the temple and ushered me into the temple where he spent a few moments switching on lights within and around the shrine, which featured four banks of large Buddha figures gazing down at a wooden prayer platform. Grasping a large bundle of incense sticks, he drew out three pencil-thick sticks and handed them to me. If he had hesitated, I would have thanked him again and left with the free incense, but he immediately picked up a box of wooden matches and struck a flame. I fanned out the sticks of incense, but he impatiently took them back, and holding them in a tight bundle, lit all three from the same match. He didn't mess around. He had a nice big flame eating up the ends of the sticks before he blew it out with a quick wrist snap and stuck the sticks one by one into holes in a nearby grate.

The monk nodded at the platform, so I slipped off my shoes, set down my laptop case, and stepped onto the platform. At the front of the platform was a foot-high wooden lectern with a dozen long incense burns across its top. I sat down cross-legged here and closed my eyes. The monk left me a minute later, but before he left he did one more curious thing: he picked up my laptop case and set it on the platform beside me. Then he picked it up a second time and set it directly in front of me, leaning against the lectern. I had no idea if he was safeguarding the laptop against temple thieves, satisfying some idiosyncratic penchant for symmetry, or following some feng shui-type cosmic precept.

I meditated there peacefully for about 30 minutes, hearing in the distance some Buddhist chanting which I took to be a recording, but who knows? Then I stood up, turned off the lights, and let myself out. Maybe I'll go looking for an incense shop again tomorrow.

My new digs

In Hanoi's Old Quarter, each street traditionally was dedicated to a single trade and filled with shops and artisans plying that trade. This past is reflected to some extent even today. Hang Dau, for example, is tightly packed with shoe shops. Hang Gai seems to have silk goods and little else. Luong Van Can, where I now live, is Toy Street and it's lined with dozens of shops overflowing with balloons, stuffed animals, and gaudy plastic crap made in China.

To get to my apartment, you duck between a small toy shop and a tiny newsstand that occupies one corner of a 15-foot x 12-foot construction site that soon will contain, no doubt, a cozy 12-room hotel built over a toy shop. Behind the construction site is a small alley and the entrance to my building. Let yourself in (with a borrowed key) through the locked double door and you'll be standing in a dim foyer where tenants park their bicycles and motorbikes. There are 7 or 8 bikes there right now and room for a few more. Proceed through the foyer past the stairs on your left (which lead up to De's penthouse) and the little courtyard on your right where Duong, the landlady's father, often sits beside a fountain in the morning with his newspaper. Duong and his wife Chi speak French and I find I can communicate better with Chi in French than I can in English with her daughter Thanh—or with my friend Thanh, for that matter.

Step up through the door at the end of the foyer into the TV/living room of the owners. There is seldom anybody in here, but doors lead off from here into those rooms used by the owners for cooking, eating, and sleeping. If you hear a big dog barking menacingly, don't worry. That's just Kiki, who guards the house but has never bit a soul. There's a staircase on your right leading up to my apartment—and possibly two others above mine. Knock on the first door you come to and I'll let you in to my cozy air-conditioned home.

This is my third night in the apartment and so far I've yet to hear any footsteps on my ceiling. I can, however, see light from the living room below shining up through the cracks between my floorboards. My floor, by the way, looks like the floor of a bakery. That's because I powder myself liberally with talc several times a day to combat the heat rash and crotch rot which, since the CELTA course ended, have succeeded rib pain and diarrhea as my primary woes. But that's probably more information than you were looking for.

Some of you have expressed an interest in reading more examples of fractured English from Hanoi. Here are instructions from the teabag I used just now to brew a cup of ginger tea: 'Empty tea sachet into 80-100ml of boiling water, depending on your strong or flat taste, after leaving about 2 minutes and enjoying it, you shall have delicious tea with your work.'

This is from a package of instant lotus seed – maize soup: 'Vegetable nourishing added and calcium milk. Refreshing, good sleeping, anti cancellous…Don't sever too watery.'

I too am tickled by these laughable translations and hope they never end in our lifetime. But I can't help marvelling that they exist at all. How hard can it be to get a native speaker to look at your translation before you spend money to have it printed on 500,000 packages and distributed throughout Asia? One of the things I hate most about my own country is the enormous effort put into marketing, with the result that consumers often end up paying more for marketing and packaging than they do for the end product or service. But I can't help noticing how much catching up the Vietnamese have to do in this department. Big supermarkets near the tourist hotels are full of Westerners all day long. Westerners I'm sure contribute more to the bottom line than natives. But amazingly little is done to exploit the tourist/expat market. There seems to be no effort at all made to recruit English-speaking employees who might help Westerners find more of the things they're obviously looking to buy. Instead of helping customers find what they need, clerks spend their shift gathered in tight groups, blocking aisles while they chat or nap on stools. Meanwhile, the stock is filthy, apparently never getting dusted or rotated, and the same item may be on display in three different store locations—marked at a different price in each location!

Today I bought a couple stainless steel utensil sets (knife, fork, soup spoon, tea spoon). Each set came taped to a card inside a plastic bag. It took me 45 minutes working with a bottle of dish detergent and a heavy duty pot scrubber to remove the tape adhesive from 8 utensils. The price stickers on two china plates I also bought would not come off even using the pot scrubbers. My new bath towels have stock numbers written on their hems with a ballpoint pen. Oh, how heavy is the white man's burden!

Why I love Hanoi

Have I mentioned yet that I'm falling in love with Hanoi? Oh, there's plenty here to frustrate and annoy you, just as there always is when you fall in love with a person, but the compensations Hanoi offers are numerous and beguiling. Like Paris, a city near the top of many people's favorite city list, including mine, Hanoi is built on a human scale, its oldest and most central area rising to no more than five or six stories except for here and there a modern skyscraper serving as a landmark and navigational aid. No concrete canyons blotting out sun and sky in this city.

Despite the crazy traffic, Hanoi's a very walkable city. Once you gain a little faith in the system you find yourself stepping out into the path of oncoming motorbikes with a carelessness you once would have thought impossible and wading confidently through the honking swarm with your senses alert but your mind mostly on other matters. Like Paris, Hanoi is a well-orchestrated balance of wide boulevards connected by smaller—tiny, even—streets and alleyways. Instead of segregated rich/poor neighborhoods, you find upscale shops and salons rubbing elbows everywhere with grubby soup kitchens and corner grocery/bait shops.

I'm sorry I wasn't here ten years ago. I was told by an American who WAS here back then that you saw very few automobiles in the streets and bicycles outnumbered the motorbikes. Back then people traveling together or with baggage hired cyclos—those big tricycles with a bench seat in the back and a cyclo driver up front pedaling and steering. Nowadays the few remaining cyclos mostly just provide tour rides for package tourists stopping at one of the big tourist hotels. Still, from my point of view, it's a big plus today that two-wheeled vehicles far outnumber four-wheeled ones. Autos generally have to find parking off the street. One of the things that makes Hanoi so walkable is that the curbs are not lined with parked cars and parking meters. You can cross a street anywhere.

I also like the culture of xe om in which you can quickly grab a ride anywhere you happen to be—cheaply and without a phone call. The driver's costs are minimal (bike, 2 helmets, gas) and the price is strictly and patently a matter of supply and demand, where the supply seems inexhaustible.

Hanoi's low cost of living is one of its charms that lured me here in the first place, but it's one that's deceptive. It's possible to live ridiculously cheaply here, but once you begin seeking out the comforts of home instead of looking for replacement comforts, you can quickly find yourself paying MORE to recreate your old life in Hanoi than it would have cost you to stay home. For the equivalent of $5-$10 I'm sure you can buy as much food here as you have strength to carry home from the market. The problem is recognizing it as food when you see it and figuring out what the hell to do with it when you get it home. To me it looks like a bunch of noxious weeds, tree roots, and the contents of Uncle Frank's bug-zapper. But fill up your shopping basket just one time with more familiar fare like Spanish olives, salted cashews, Edam cheese, virgin olive oil, and Fuji apples and you'll be longing for the low, low prices at the Whole Earth store in Palm Springs.

As time goes by I discover more and more of those special little cafes, park bench views, unique architectural flourishes, and romantic tree-shaded streets that make you fond of living in a place. And then there's the people. I'll save my elegy on the Vietnamese for another time and just mention—I may have already—that no teacher I've talked to here who has taught elsewhere would trade their Vietnamese students for any other students in the world.

Turning 60

StarBowl was, in fact, able to fit me with bowling shoes—more or less. (I think they keep a box of oversized clown shoes for Americans who might show up.) You wouldn't be able to distinguish StarBowl in Hanoi from any similarly named bowling alley in America—except for the eel soup being served in the bar and a complete lack of league schedules on the walls. Naturally, it was robot-dancing Nam—in a bowling alley for just the second time in his life—who bowled high game Saturday night, easily surpassing the anemic scores of the three Americans present. Nam's accomplishment may have been partly beginner's luck and partly a result of being unused to air-conditioned bowling alleys, which this one definitely wasn't. Every time I picked up my ball, a stream of sweat ran down my arm, pooled in the finger holes, and moments later dripped from the bottom of the ball onto the tops of my shoes. Towels were not available.

After bowling most of the others went on to a Karaoke bar, but that's where I, personally, draw the line between not taking yourself too seriously and not deliberately making an embarrassing public spectacle of yourself. I went back to the hotel around midnight to say my farewells to Gordon and Gordon.

Sunday was my 60th birthday. Thanks to everybody who sent kind wishes. I spent the day moving the last of my kit to the new apartment, shopping for some of the housewares I needed to get myself set up (towels, toilet paper, trash cans, some extra clothes hangers, batteries for the TV and AC remotes…), hanging up clothes that have been packed into a suitcase for 10 weeks, and rearranging my furniture. Around 6:00 I took a xe om around to the other side of Hoan Kiem Lake for the big Regurgitator concert at the American Club.

Those of you who don't keep abreast of the techno-punk music scene in Australia will be unaware how absolutely huge Regurgitator is in Oz. De, the Kiwi recruiter who lives in my building, called the band's appearance in Hanoi "the event of the season". This turned out not to be an exaggeration. The outdoor Sunday evening concert attracted a few thousand enthusiastic music fans who whooped, whistled, and pogo-danced through four hours of music. There was plenty of beer, hotdogs, and french fries on hand and enough patio furniture scattered around the periphery to give less-rabid attendees like me a place to recuperate a bit between sets and get to know a few new Language Link teachers, who showed up in droves. There were times when I forgot completely that I was in Hanoi. The music, the crowd, the food, and the atmosphere could well have been Charlottesville, Fort Collins, or Berkeley.

So that's how I spent my 60th birthday. The only real damper was learning that I was right to be skeptical about the Wifi in my new digs. Before the concert I tried 6 times to get online and the sole unsecured network visible to my laptop was not responding. When I got home from the concert and tried again, the network was no longer even visible. Whover owns it apparently had turned off their computer for the night and cut me off. I looked several times today and the network didn't reappear until about 7:00 pm. I was able to download my email, but the network disappeared again before I was able to reply. Excuse my negativity, but this really sucks!

I need a stable connection at home. I'm writing this blog entry at a Wifi café two blocks from the apartment and conditions are less than ideal. Elvis Presley is singing Love Me Tender at high volume, there's a Vietnam war movie on the TV just above my head, and my waiter keeps coming over to the table to chat with me every chance he gets. He's gotten quite a lot of information out of me, considering I've been typing steadily and have avoided looking at him or addressing any questions to him. He had trouble assimilating the news of how much my rent is—about 6.5 million VND per month. Every time I said 'per month', he asked 'per year?' It might blow his mind to know I've been paying about 12 million VND a month to live at the World Hotel for the past two months.

League night

Sen is a very posh restaurant in my neighborhood. There are always seven or eight formally attired parking valets ganged up around the front door and you can't get in without a reservation. Dinner is buffet-style (not a la carte) and here's a sampling of the sorts of items that pack crowds in nightly for the buffet:

Pregnant fish
Roasted pork stomach
Port rip
Soya curd flies salt eggs
Tomato puts oven
Fried tongue bull with black pepper
To pop rice
Noodle fever oyster
Boilt vegetable
Duck's gizzard bake

And for dessert: Mouse cream or mouse fruits….yum! I'm sure it all sounds even more mouth-watering in Vietnamese. This restaurant is right across the street from the little take-out place that boasts "you name it, we serve it".

This morning I packed up my books and clothes and, with some help from Thanh and his brother Lan, moved in a taxi to my new apartment. Thanh was enthusiastic yesterday about the availability of free WiFi at the apartment, but the paranoid in me imagines a scenario in which the next-door neighbor providing the free Wifi suddenly wakes up to the freeloaders and secures his network, leaving me cut off, or at the mercy of Internet cafes with their limited hours and collateral costs. This issue was potentially a deal-breaker for me, so I raised it as soon as I arrived. The landlady (also named Thanh) called one of her English-speaking tenants to reassure me, which is how I discovered that the recruitment officer for Language Link lives in my new building. How do you say "small world" in Vietnamese?

I still have some skepticism about the WiFi, but I also have just a three-month lease, so we'll see how it goes. While I was learning from Thanh how the propane cooker works, Thanh and Lan's sister Hanh, who arranged the deal, showed up. The four of us went with Thanh the landlady to a nearby café to seal the deal over iced coffees, and I got to know the Vo family better. They're all very smart and warm and have a good sense of humor. I'm grateful to have them assisting my transplantation to Vietnam.

I've felt on the verge of buying a motorbike for the past week, but I'm reconsidering now that Hanh has echoed Thanh's advice to start with a bicycle—just until I get used to picking safe routes through the chaotic traffic. You really have to see this traffic to believe it. It resembles nothing so much as schools of ocean fish flowing around and through each other, with amazingly few collisions. You can find major five- and six-way intersections that are essentially uncontrolled, with streams of traffic flowing continuously all day long in each direction. Drivers making left-hand turns angle across oncoming traffic well before the corner, so that when they enter the side street they're bucking the slower moving traffic along the curb instead of fast-moving motorbikes near the center. Every one-way street will have a few vehicles "swimming upstream" and when traffic becomes heavier in one direction of a two-way street, the street starts looking very one-way as drivers take advantage of any open pavement they see.

Jouke just arrived, drenched from a sudden downpour that caught her on her bicycle. We had talked about going bowling this evening with Mitchell and Sarah. (I discovered the bowling alley by accident two nights ago, when my xe om driver got lost and instead of taking me to Vincom Towers (a major Hanoi landmark whose pronunciation is pretty much the same in Vietnamese or English) headed out into the boondocks. The word 'shanghaied' flitted through my mind at one point, but this guy weighed about 70 pounds and wasn't much younger than me, so I think he was probably just suffering from a little age-related dementia. I got him turned back around eventually and was consoled for my lost time by the serendipity that led me to Star Lanes. (Yow! I hope they have size 11 bowling shoes there.)

Graduation week

Despite warnings from guidebooks (repeated by Thanh the day of my arrival) not to eat at the little sidewalk kitchens strewn up and down every block in Ha Noi, I folded to peer pressure in the second week and joined my classmates a couple times in scarfing down some of this "good, cheap food". They assured me they had all been indulging since their arrival with nary an ill effect and laughed at me for paying $2-$3 per meal at my "expensive" cafés when I could be eating just as well on the street for 75 cents.

Perhaps I'm genetically inferior, or maybe my gut is just worn out from decades of a diet skewed toward pizza, coffee, alcohol, and sugar. Whatever the etiology, I was soon suffering from the last ailment a teacher wants to carry into a classroom—diarrhea. Staying home sick from school was not a CELTA option, so I did the necessary thing—I stopped eating outside a 6 pm to midnight window. Between diarrhea, stress, sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and "heat frustration", it's no wonder I came a little unravelled toward the end and something of a miracle I managed to graduate with my younger, hardier classmates. In fact, I did excuse myself early on the last day, overcome by nausea due to dehydration, and missed a celebratory shindig at Imran's house.

I reconstituted myself enough by Saturday morning, though, to join five other CELTA grads (plus Anna's friend Nicola) on an excursion out of Hanoi. Since it's becoming apparent their names are going to keep coming up in this blog, let me introduce you to my fellow CELT-ics:

Imran used to be a math teacher in his home country, Bangladesh. He's married to a British girl who teaches at the International School here in Hanoi. They have a new baby named Hannah. Jouke (pronounced YOWka) is from Utrecht, Netherlands, where she has been teaching geography for several years. Anna, from Wales, has been teaching English in Korea for a year or two. Russell is a Filipina who has been teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City. She lives with her boyfriend Rommel, also from The Philippines. James and Brian are the two Aussies. Brian is about to wed a Vietnamese girl. Both Brian and James have been teaching English in Hanoi for some time.

The other Americans are: Donna (living in Hanoi with her husband Hank, who is a manager for Chevron), Mitchell (just arrived from Greeley, Colorado), and Sarah (just arrived from Austin, Texas). None of them have taught before.

Jouke and Anna are both staying at the World Hotel (my hotel) and have been my staunch allies and benefactors through the past four weeks.

Picking up the thread of my narrative again, last Saturday several of us hired a guide and a bus with the intention of driving to Ha Long Bay to party overnight on a boat cruising among the islands—our reward for the cruel sacrifices we've made over the past month. Learning on our way out of town that typhoon warnings had shut down all tour boats, we diverted our course to a town about 60 miles south of Hanoi—Ninh Binh (pronounced NING BING). The attraction here—two pagodas—sounded lame compared to a cruise on romantic Ha Long Bay, but Ninh Binh province proved to have considerable hidden charms.

The pagodas were photogenic and a balm to our frazzled nerves. Even better, though, was Tam Coc (Three Caves). The wide river delta in which Ha Noi sits is a flat expanse of rice fields and lotus ponds crisscrossed by dikes and causeways. Around Ninh Binh, huge limestone rocks jut incongruously out of the landscape, echoing the famous rock formations of Ha Long Bay. At Tam Coc, a slow-moving river winds among these rocks and in three places flows right through the rock. For a ridiculously modest fee we were taken up the river in small skiffs—2 or 3 passengers transported by 1 or 2 oarsmen (or oarswomen…at least one of the rowers was a woman considerably older than me)—past farmhouses, rice paddies, into the cool shade of the looming rocks, under bridges, and finally through the three dim caves with their dripping stalactites. Along the way we saw mobs of ducks, an occasional fisherman, and on the steep overgrown cliffs above us, small white mountain goats jumping from rock to rock. When the rowers arms began to tire, they rowed with their feet.

After our boatride we motored up into some actual mountains to visit Vietnam's first national park—Cuc Phuong—where we partied on a verandah, spent the night in guest rooms, visited a monkey rescue facility, explored a cave, and then inexplicably chose to climb down a precipitous mountainside of wet, razor-sharp limestone rocks in our sandals, with the nearest mountain rescue squad about a continent away. (I've really got to get away from these young people with their ironclad stomachs and their delusions of invulnerability!)

Chewed up, spat out at last

Okay. The CELTA course is behind me now and it's the part of the cartoon where Tom the Cat pops out of the pretzel machine shaped like a pretzel. After a few seconds, Tom shakes himself back into his normal shape, but in my case, the pretzel shape might well be permanent.

I can tell you right now I cared less for my CELTA experience than Tom did the pretzel machine. And it's not because the course wasn't worthwhile. The trainers were, I would say, more than competent and the course contained a lot of wise and useful information. This information was presented in an engaging and memorable way and our teaching practice was invaluable (i.e., really valuable).

The problem for me was this: About a 10-week supply of CELTA was piled up on our plates and we were made to start eating. If we paused to ask a question, we were told to shut up and keep eating. When we got full and tried to ease away from the table we were shoved back in front of our plates and shown no mercy. By the third week, the CELTA was being shoved down our throats with broomsticks. At least, that's how I experienced it.

Other people have made similar complaints about CELTA. Most people make it through somehow, but many people exhibit some degree of personality disintegration before the end and a few have experienced outright nervous collapses. In the fourth week, I was on the verge of a total meltdown and only the solicitous support of two kind colleagues saved my bacon.

For those of you who are teachers, or otherwise curious about the CELTA course, I'll go into greater detail offline. For everybody else, let me just say how thankful I am it's over and tell you what else has been going on here in Hanoi.

Gordon is fine. I see him rarely, but he leaves a gecko turd on the edge of my bathtub every morning. If he can do this, I don't see why he can't use the edge of the toilet, but I guess I should just be glad he uses the correct room. Gordon Heavyfoot continues to dine on the frosted glass every evening. One late afternoon when I stepped out on the terrace to see which neighbor was playing the Abba album, I thought I felt Gordon brush against my bare foot and scurry behind a potted plant. It turned out not to be Gordon, but a three-inch beetle, maybe some kind of cockroach. I told him he could stay if he eats the ants.

My latest indulgence is Café 129, just up the street from my hotel at 129 Mai Hac De. (Many cafés around here are named for their address. You'll find Café 141 sandwiched between Café 137 and Café 145.) Café 129 specializes in dishes like huevos rancheros, breakfast burritos, and Mexican hash browns, served with espresso, mango milkshake, or gin and tonic. As far as I can tell, nobody connected with the café has ever been to Mexico, and the service is incredibly slow, and there are only six tiny tables usually jammed with ex-pats before you arrive. But sometimes I just want the comfortable familiarity of guacamole. And the baguettes there are the flakiest I've had in Hanoi so far.

First week of bootcamp

It's Saturday morning and I just woke up with a bit of a hangover. I've finished the first of my four weeks of CELTA training, but this weekend won't be the two-day oasis of repose and refreshment I'm craving—only a chance to catch a quick breather before climbing back onto what is proving to be a grueling 26-day obstacle course.

I had imagined the CELTA course to be this: Me, sitting at a desk, listening to lectures on education theory, classroom methodologies, pronunciation difficulties specific to Vietnamese ESL students, tips on coping with culture shock. In my imagination, I was taking notes, contributing my own brilliant ideas, and asking questions about how to get a good deal on an apartment and where to buy one-a-day vitamins. After a week or two of lectures, discussions, and observations of experienced teachers, I would be given some opportunities to team-teach (me with a trainer in front of a class, then me with another trainee in front of a class). Finally, in the last week, the fledgling would leave the nest and fly solo in the classroom. Weekends would be spent doing short reading/writing assignments and partying with the other trainees.

Here's the reality: Me, one of ten trainees bombarded with a blizzard of important printed handouts to be read "when we get a chance" and forms on which to make a detailed record of everything we observe, do, or plan to do. From the very first moment we're in constant motion, being lead through a rapid sequence of kinesthetic learning experiences in which almost nothing is given to us outright by the trainer, almost everything is suggested or elicited using pictures, gestures, and examples. The trainers are mirroring the same multi-sensory kaleidoscope of activities they expect us to use to engage our students' interest and extend their understanding and skills.

The very first day, Monday, we meet our students and watch our trainer take them through a one-hour lesson. That night, after an eleven-hour day at school, I eat an apple for dinner and then stay up until long past midnight preparing a detailed lesson plan for the next day. I'm exhausted but too keyed up to really sleep. On Tuesday I teach my first 40-minute solo lesson to 8 bewildered intermediate students while being observed and evaluated by a trainer and four peers. Classroom management turns out to be harder than it looks. I bomb, but my peers mistake my zombie-like exhaustion for aplomb under pressure and award me a few style points. On Thursday I teach again. I bomb again. I would be having a better run if the students would just speak English.

Every weekday is jam-packed from about 8:00AM to midnight, a nightmare of non-stop input sessions, teaching sessions, teacher observation, peer observation, student observation, observation feedback sessions, written assignments, and lesson prep.

Lesson preparation is particularly time-consuming. It involves searching books and Web for suitable text and visuals, printing, photocopying, cutting, pasting, photocopying again, etc., while developing, writing, and memorizing a detailed step-by-step plan. It requires such meticulous planning and structuring that it currently takes me about 6 hours to prepare one 40-minute lesson.

Our classrooms are on the 6th floor, the trainees have a workroom on the 5th floor, the trainers' office with resource books is on the 4th floor, the teachers' workroom with the photocopy machine is on the 2nd floor. There's an elevator, but it's quicker to run up and down the stairs all day long. When the power goes out and the AC goes off, it's sweltering.

There are 10 trainees. We are 4 Americans, 2 Aussies, a lovely girl from Wales, another from the Philippines, another from the Netherlands, and a man from Bangladesh. All except the 4 Americans have significant previous classroom teaching experience. I'm the oldest one by far but everybody has been a little surprised to learn how far. Last night Wales, Netherlands, Texas, Colorado, and I joined Philippines and James from Sydney in a drinking tour of the Old Quarter.

We started with a few beers at the Bia Hoi Corner—a small street intersection mobbed by international backpackers where you can sit in a crowd on a plastic chair, drinking beer siphoned into your glass through a hose, and watch more beer drinkers doing the same on the other 3 corners of the intersection. In the street is a non-stop parade of motorbikes, tourists, street vendors, and colorful sights like the guy playing a flute (not badly) with his right nostril and the lovely young Vietnamese girl sporting six-inch incandescent (battery-powered) red devil horns on her head.

We had more beers at Mao's Red Lounge in an upstairs room reminiscent of a hookah bar in Charlottesville (the Twisted Branch). We moved on to a place called Beer Minh where, on a comfortable large terrace overlooking the street, we ate, drank more beers, and watched the human carnival on the street below. We finished—or at least I finished—the evening at Dragonfly, a club that had an actual hookah bar upstairs and downstairs a pool table, a tiny dance floor, and a DJ spinning American hiphop and pop tunes like Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls. I ran out of gas around midnight and headed home alone.

Picture this: I'm slightly drunk and walking all alone down a dark, narrow street. I'm only vaguely oriented as to direction. The street curves and then forces me to choose a turning. I'm wandering through a maze of tiny streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. It's well after midnight. In any other city I'm sure I would feel some apprehension (certainly true of Oakland, but also true of Charlottesville and Cheyenne). In Hanoi I feel quite safe. I can see dim figures crouched in the shadows—a man holding a sleeping child in his arms, a family sitting around a low table having a late supper on the sidewalk, two old women sharing a glass of tea. I turn the corner again into a darker street deserted except for two tiny women sweeping up trash. I can hear a murmur of voices floating down from tiny terraces and dimly lit windows.

Eventually I work my way back to Hoan Kiem lake where it doesn't take long to hear a voice say "Hello, motobi". It's too late to catch a bus, so I agree to take my first xe om ride back home (to Vincom Towers). Before getting on the bike, I negotiate a price of 20,000 dong with the driver. He only knows a few words of English but he's eager to try them all out. He covers most of the ten minute ride with his head turned round to me saying things like "shee kah goh" and "wah sheen tone" and when I confirm the place name by repeating it he nods his head vigorously and laughs maniacally. Reaching our destination, I offer him a 50,000 dong note and remind him of the price we agreed on. He pulls out his wallet and looks in it, but won't pull out any bills until I hand him the 50,000. Then he hands back one 10,000 note. I shake my head and remind him of our deal. He feigns absolute bewilderment. Then he tries to show me how hungry he is. Then he goes back to pretending not to understand a word I'm saying.

In the end I got him to fork over another 15,000, but I was tired and let him slide with an extra 25% (30 cents). At my hotel I found the doors locked and three of the hotel employees sleeping just inside the door on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by their motorbikes. I had to pound hard 10 or 12 times on the glass before one of them woke up and let me in.

Physically, I'm feeling much better, though my state is still a soup of mild rib discomfort, itchy insect bites, severe heat distress, mild diarrhea, brain overload, high anxiety, and sleep deprivation. Gordon Heavyfoot seems to be gaining weight, but I'm losing it (no appetite on the days I teach, too little time to eat on the others—plus the diarrhea).

There's a great many more things I want to tell you about, but I just don't have the time. I have assignments to research and write and a lesson to prepare for Monday. I'm already a little anxious about the time I've lost writing this blog entry. I'll fill in more of the details three weeks from now. In the meantime, drop me an email or post a comment to let me know there's still a world outside Hanoi.