Sunday, August 31, 2008

Chance Encounters

One of my last two hopes for finding a decent source of reading material was dashed yesterday when I sought out the National Library on Ba Trieu street. Nobody was any help whatsoever—people working in the building right next door had never heard of the place. In any case, this library seems to be closed indefinitely. It's currently surrounded by a rusty, dented construction barricade. Looking for more information, I stopped a Western-looking passerby, who spoke a little English, but even better, spoke fluent French and was, in fact, French! Jean-Noel, who landed in Hanoi about the same day I did, came here to teach psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. We exchanged email addresses and will try to meet for coffee at some point. I'm hoping Jean-Noel will be able to provide a link for me into the community of French expats in Hanoi.

My one remaining hope for English non-fiction books, by the way, is the Goethe Institute, which is reported to have, in addition to German books, a few English ones. I'll go there soon, but I seriously doubt I'm going to find what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll pop over to Hong Kong and see what they've got to read. Please don't tell me I'm going to have to go all the way to Australia to fix my reading habit.

If you're a Hanoi café that wants to keep me coming back, do this: slice up a whole avocado and a whole mango on a large plate of fresh lettuce, pile slices of grilled chicken breast on top, drizzle with a creamy, orange-juice-based dressing, add a 20-ounce mug of cold, delicious red ale and sell me the works for less than $6. I don't intend this blog to become a restaurant review site—I'm just saying Moca Café has got it figured out.

Moca Café is in a warren—called the Old Quarter—of narrow twisting streets west of Hoan Kiem Lake, a neighborhood that, like mine, is a hodgepodge of air-conditioned glass and chrome places that look like Starbucks, slightly homier places with neon signs and bilingual menus, way downscale but respectable Viet shops and restaurants, and grungy third-world soup kitchens and sweatshops. On average, though, the Old Quarter is visibly more prosperous than other Hanoi neighborhoods because it's ground zero for Hanoi tourism, with a high density of souvenir shops, karaoke bars, and backpacker hotels.

I wandered into this area looking for any of the landmarks whose names I had jotted down from the Lonely Planet guidebook—St. Joseph's cathedral, The Jazz Club, a French hangout called La Salsa, Pepperoni's (a pizza joint), plus of course, the Half Man Half Noodle bar. Even without a map, ten minutes of wandering brought me to every place on my list except the last one. Before I could find the Noodle, I ran into Helen from DCV. (The teachers refer to their school as DCV—short for Dai Co Viet street—to distinguish it from other Language Link locations.)

Helen and I talked on the street for a minute or two but we kept getting interrupted by an annoyingly persistent xe om driver who wouldn't take khong (no) for an answer. To get away from him we adjourned to the nearest air-conditioned coffee shop for glasses of chilled juice and a leisurely discussion of American politics and Kiwi (i.e., New Zealand) rugby. Helen refers to her country as En Zed (NZ).

Little Gordon has a much bigger (5-inch) brother—or maybe it's his grandfather, what do I know about these things?—living on the terrace. Here's how I contribute to Gordon Heavyfoot's well-being: At night I keep the frosted window closed and the room light on so that insects land on the glass where they can be snapped up and munched. All evening long I can see Gordon Heavyfoot's white belly through the glass, creeping up and down in a most crocodilean fashion, occasionally stopping to munch a bug.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Culture deprivation

There must be a considerable number of Westerners in Hanoi. Besides the several dozen American, British, and Aussie teachers who frequent the teachers' lounge at Language Link, I often see Western faces on the street, in restaurants, shopping at Vincom Towers—students on vacation or businessmen living here with their families. Every block, no matter how exotic or third world appearing at first glance, displays at least one sign in English—"Kentuky Flied Chiken","Spicy Sexy Cell Phone", "Art Exhibitionist".

Vincom Towers is not the only upscale Western-style shopping venue in town. Hanoi Towers, looming over Hoa Lo prison (aka Hanoi Hilton), provides twenty-some floors of luxury apartments and offices over a conference center and shopping center featuring luggage, chocolates, silk lingerie, and other luxury goods. Many restaurants and bars in town cater to foreigners with menus and signage printed in English.

None of this surprises me. Hanoi is a big city and has been energetically courting foreign investment and tourism for the past twenty years. What does surprise me…disappoints me…appalls me, actually…is that apparently nobody has yet begun to cater to what surely must be a fairly large and growing demand for Western pharmacy staples like cough drops, foot powder, vitamins, and cold remedies, or for Western cultural staples like the International Herald Tribune, Stephen King paperbacks, or Billy Joel fake books.

I know, I know. You're right. I didn't come all the way to Vietnam to shop at Walmart. But if Chinese visitors can buy fried chicken wattles in NYC, why can't I find One-a-Day vitamins in Hanoi? Maybe someone will respond and clue me in. Meanwhile I've spent many hours over the past week trying to locate a reliable source of Western medications and/or publications.

Apparently THE place in Hanoi for English language books is a shop called The Bookworm. I went there. The shop is a bit larger than my hotel room and has fewer books than my storage unit in Cheyenne. I bought used copies of Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons and A Parrot in the Pepper Tree—true tales of an English couple's relocation to a mountain farm in Spain. But I carried them out of the shop with a sinking feeling in my heart. Somebody tell me how in the world I'm going to survive here without books?

Actually, the answer came to me while I was asking the question. In all likelihood I won't survive long enough for it to matter. Consider the following: The newspaper reports 32 new cases of cholera this month in the vicinity of Hanoi. I have what looks for all the world like a nasty spider bite on my toe, one day after I saw a spider jump a foot from my keyboard to the window ledge. I waded through a river of speeding motorbikes yesterday to get to the French Hospital, where I hoped to find French doctors dispensing Western style pharmaceuticals and medical advice in French, if not English. What I found was a hospital built by the French, still sporting its original sign, now manned by Vietnamese with no knowledge of English or French. The hospital pharmacy was a narrow safety-glass window like one at an Italian post office. With pen and paper and sign language I conveyed to the clerk that I wanted antifungal powder and multivitamins. For the latter, he had a box of Supradyn—10 effervescent tablets for $4.00. The % of RDA was not given for any of the 20 vitamins (including vitamins H, J, and S) listed on the box. As for the powder, he had 30g of something called Mycoster for $10.50 but couldn't let me have it without a prescription. He volunteered the information that I could probably buy it cheaper, without the prescription, at any street pharmacy.

Maybe I ought to just let it go. Instead of reading more books, I could write a few. Instead of treating my symptoms with Western remedies, I could seek out a Vietnamese herbalist or acupuncturist. I have to say that despite low incomes and a paucity of medical resources, these Hanoians look remarkably fit. The girls and women all—I repeat: all—have the kind of svelte figure American women sacrifice enormous amounts of money, physical effort, and anguish to approach. The men aren't muscular, but they look wiry and competent. I've yet to see a single Vietnamese person who waddles when they walk or requires help to get up from their chair. I saw an ancient woman—she looked about ninety and was walking with obvious difficulty—arrive at the hospital on the back of a motorbike.

Soon I hope to be able to report some kind of social activity. I was invited to come along to a movie downtown by Helen, a teacher from New Zealand, but didn't get back from the French Hospital in time. Maybe this weekend I'll join some of the teachers who frequent a bar in the Old Quarter with the inauspicious name of Half Man Half Noodle.

Xe om (say um)

It's not yet 8:00 AM but already I can feel the heat of the day burning through the frosted glass of my closed windows and the heavy green curtains which serve to cut the morning glare. Since I arrived, temperatures have oscillated predictably between 80F every night and 90F every day, but the sky has been mostly overcast. Yesterday the sun burst through the clouds with a brutal reminder that Vietnam is not that far from the equator. Hanoi, in fact, is a little closer to the equator than Calcutta.

I've been walking a lot. Maybe too much—my right ankle complains every night when I go to bed and I start each day with a limp which disappears around mid-morning. But I've enjoyed poking around the city on foot, observing the overwhelming tide of life that surges out into the street here every day and peering into places that defy Western logic—shadowy caves of gutted buildings in which you can glimpse pots boiling, laundry hung to dry, and young men washing their feet with a hose, or a puzzling place of business with no front wall, just a cashier station on the left, a small glass cabinet displaying 10 or 12 cosmetic products on the right and a roomy interior containing on the left two coffee tables apparently set for tea, each wedged between two expensive leather sofas, and on the right a row of filthy motorbikes blocking the wide, curved, crumbling rococo staircase leading up to the second floor.

I'm in an anguish of frustration at not being able to capture what I'm talking about with my camera. I've snapped some nice pictures of trees, balconies, traffic, but what I'm dying to do is get some close ups of the people and the spaces they inhabit. My western sensibilities keep blocking me from intruding on their privacy all the while I see them conducting their lives unselfconsciously in public as if privacy were a non-issue. Anybody want to lay some advice on me here? I know my Swiss friend Mireille would get some sensational pictures. She's a person for whom strangers gladly exchange their privacy for a little attention. Unlike me, she doesn't look like a CIA agent.

The one English (almost) phrase every Hanoian seems to know is "Hello, motobi'..?" If you're a Westerner you can't walk ten feet without hearing it. Every Vietnamese man with a motorbike is, at least potentially, a 'xe om' or taxi driver. Think about it. If the poverty line in the city is 12 million dong a year, one merely has to earn 33,000 dong a day to stay out of poverty. A ten minute ride costs about 20,000 dong, so if a man can find two good customers a day he can make a living.

There are several xe oms on every block in Hanoi, and since it doesn't cost anything to ask, you can expect to get asked by every single driver you walk past. Some of them are damnably persistent. One wanted to shake my hand. Because it seemed rude to refuse, I shook his hand and then he didn't want to let go. I have to say this for the Vietnamese, though. Something like that could have turned ugly in some countries, but even this "Klingon" shared an amiableness that seems almost universal here. I'm sure there are some bad men in a town this size, but so far I haven't seen a single argument, rude gesture, or threatening look. Equanimity rules here.

News item: a man found 56 unexploded bombs this week on a river bank in a suburb of Hanoi near Long Bien Bridge. These, of course, are left over from the Vietnam War (known to the Vietnamese as "the American War"). How they could have remained undiscovered for 35 years in such a crowded area is a mystery.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Haggling

I don't believe there's a street in Hanoi where you won't find motorbikes and people massed on the sidewalk all day and all evening long. There's one spot, though, en route from my hotel to the supermarket where I always see a particularly thick knot of older men crowded so close together with their backs to the street that I have to suspect a crap shoot—or maybe a gecko fight. Today, for the first time, the knot was loose enough I could catch a glimpse of what these geezers were up to: One of them was unpacking a satchel full of blue jeans, tee shirts, and running shoes while the others crowded in for a closer look and a chance to handle the merchandise. It was a scene from The Great Escape, except instead of Allied airmen concocting German disguises it was Vietnamese urbanites looking to disguise themselves as American high school students.

I do remember reading that cock fighting is popular in Vietnam. I haven't seen any direct evidence of that yet, but I have seen roosters walking around off the leash just daring somebody to start something. Weirdly enough, I have yet to see a single cat or any direct evidence (like cat food in a supermarket or cat dishes on a menu) that the Vietnamese have even heard of cats.

I ate lunch today at a family café called The Family Café—just the sort of place you might find on College Avenue in Oakland: a cavernous joint leading to a small, bamboo-shaded courtyard in the back, brick floor, wrought iron tables, artificial waterfall pouring into a koi pond, speakers pouring out instrumental versions of Simon and Garfunkel and the theme music from the Godfather. I half expected to see koi on the menu, but surprisingly, no, they weren't, so I ordered sauteed pork loin with pineapple on a bed of rice and a bottle of beer. My order came with a side of soup and a slice of watermelon for dessert. I know I've already made the point about how cheap things are here, but I'm really getting a kick out of it, so indulge me a little longer: lunch cost $2.76. I felt so happy I walked over to Highlands Coffee to read today's paper and splurge on an overpriced double scoop of coffee ice cream for $2.10.

Now let me tell you about a friend of mine, let's call him Gary. Gary heard about a DVD store over on Thinh Yen Street. The store turned out to be a music CD store, but it had one bucket of DVDs, packaged in paper sleeves like the 45's my sister used to buy back in the late 50's. There are two kinds of businesses in Hanoi. There are businesses like the supermarket and the upscale boutiques at Vincom Towers where you pay the 100% markup represented by the sticker price. And there are businesses like the DVD store where merchandise has no stickers and you can pretend to be totally indifferent to some item you really want until the proprietor lets you have it for only six and half times his cost. Gary listened to an initial quote of 50,000 dong ($3) per DVD, countered with an offer of 60,000 dong for 2 DVDs, heard his offer rejected, tried again with 80,000 dong for 2 DVDs, suddenly sensed that all messages were being garbled in transmission, that none were arriving intact, that confusion was starting to erupt like a smoke bomb, decided to switch the channel over to sign language, started displaying fingers to indicate bid prices, got finger prices in return, and suddenly discovered that what he had heard as 50,000 each had been in reality 15,000 each and was still the current offer. Gary quickly caved in, stopped bargaining, and bought 2 DVDs (Spanglish and Tears of the Sun) for 30,000 dong ($1.80). Ignorance outpaces shrewdness yet again.

Gordon has been flying below the radar lately. I thought he might have changed hotels. But then I spotted him on the bathroom window tonight thinking seriously about taking a shower. He certainly could use one.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Snake head soup, anyone?

If there's one thing that outnumbers motorbikes in Hanoi, it's motorbike helmets. A helmet law was passed some months ago and, while you might see an occasional bare head in the city, bareheaded biking occurs mainly in the countryside where policing is sparser. The helmets come in all colors and shapes, from mullet-shaped Tour de France bike helmets with a gold sparkle finish, to visored pink-checked polo helmets, to green WWII vintage Red Army helmets, to white construction hard hats. One thing you almost never see, though, is a round, skull-enclosing honest-to-goodness motorcycle helmet, with or without a visor.

I'm starting to feel like a resident out on the streets. I'm sure some of the locals recognize me on sight now even if I don't know their faces yet. What makes the biggest difference is my relationship to the traffic. While I recognize that the anarchic Vietnamese way of swarming through the streets like schools of fish is quite dangerous (a judgment attested by a very high rate of traffic fatalities), I also see that accidents occur much less often than you'd suspect after watching the chaos for just a short time. Hanoians don't want to crash and most of them have developed considerable skill at avoiding crashes. Knowing this makes it possible to lend a little trust to the "system" and, while not abandoning prudent vigilence altogether, at least find the courage to step out in front of a hundred oncoming motorbikes with a fair certainty they're all going to miss you…this time.

I went looking for the Hoang Ngoc Hotel yesterday because it was one of the hotels I considered booking before I arrived. When I saw it was only 10 feet wide I was intrigued enough to go in and ask to see a room. The hotel was actually quite beautifully designed and built, with efficiently laid out rooms, clean modern bathrooms, and built-ins of dark tropical hardwood. The quality of the place didn't tempt me to switch hotels, as I would have to pay almost twice my current rate for half the space. I was inspired, though, to start checking out other hotels in the neighborhood. I've learned that my hotel—at 20 feet wide—is one of the widest hotels around!

I ate dinner at a restaurant called Oriland. It was ordinary by Oakland standards, but extemely hightone for this neighborhood: booths covered in tasteful fabric, embossed beige wallpaper, full bar (Bailey's, Hennessy, Cointreau…), piped in samba music, electric fans, and a terrace shielded from the street by huge potted plants.

I would have pegged it for a tourist trap except I was the only Westerner in the place. I suppose these places also cater to wealthy Hanoians, of whom there must be a sizeable number. I get the impression from what little I've seen that neighborhoods here are less segregated between haves and have-nots than in the US. Apparently Vietnamese who come into money don't move to a better neighborhood. They just fix up the place they're in. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, here's what was interesting about Oriland: When the samba album finished, somebody put on the Best of the Beegees. That was followed by a rousing rendition of the William Tell Overture. I don't know what Vietnamese music sounds like because I haven't heard any yet. Here's another interesting thing: I had the curry chicken with steamed rice and it was really good. It came with a bowl of soup, a side of steamed celery, and some carrots cut up to look like roses. With dinner I had a tall beer, poured into my glass by the very attentive waiter with the bow tie. My bill, including the beer, came to $3.50. As is the custom here, I left no tip. Back home, $3.50 in a place like this would have got me a beer and an scowl from a stiffed waiter.

The beer I had was a Ha Noi, a local beer, obviously. It cost $1.20. For $1.32, I could have had a Heineken—or for $3.30, a Corona. I watched a Vietnamese customer drink 3 Coronas: conspicuous consumption, Hanoi style.

Also on the menu: fresh lemon juice with milk. Does this sound right to anybody? Maybe it was just a loose translation like the one I saw yesterday: "Wide selection of 6 dishes to fulfill your lunch with joy." On my way home from Oriland I passed JQK's, a squalid little eatery with one of those backlit signs with pictures of food that have faded until they look most unappetizing. JQK's slogan was "You name it, we serve it." I believe them. I haven't looked at a Hanoi menu yet that didn't mention either snake head soup or pig's trotters.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Backstory

Through inattention or stupidity I seem to have begun my blog with chapter 2, leaving some readers scratching their heads over why I am in Vietnam with broken ribs but (unlike Adam) no wife. Let me backtrack and fill in the blanks for those of you who haven't been tuned in to this station lately.

In the spring of 2006, Cynthia and I flew to Costa Rica to explore the idea of spending our retirement years in a tropical paradise. Our goals were: consistently warm weather (no mittens, parkas, snow shovels), casual lifestyle (swimming pool, coffee shop, sightseeing), low cost of living (cheap housing, food, clothing). While Costa Rica scored high in those categories it also scored high in these categories: pollution, crime. I came home with serious doubts about relocating and Cynthia came home with no doubts at all—Costa Rica was out.

I think that trip underscored a basic difference in our outlooks. Since moving from Oakland to Charlottesville, I had given up my stressful computer consulting work to devote myself to the less stressful (and less lucrative) work of tutoring French and writing a book (about learning French). I was all about downsizing and finding a simpler way to live that would conserve the capital I had managed to accumulate during the dotcom boom in California. Meanwhile Cynthia's new Pilates studio in Charlottesville was doing well off the folks with big discretionary incomes that Charlottesville attracts. She was doing sessions with—and socializing with—tenured professors, stock brokers, attorneys, successful artists. Rather than downsize, I think Cynthia was looking to gear it up a notch and try to climb a rung or two higher on the ladder. Or at any rate, I think downsizing looked to her like losing ground.

That's a simplistic version, of course, of a more complicated story which I'll tell you over a glass of wine sometime, but the bottom line is that in the end we couldn't hold it together. We divorced in 2007. Cynthia remains in Charlottesville and I decided to relocate to Vietnam (like Costa Rica, tropical and inexpensive, but with much less crime). I'll be starting a 4-week CELTA course on September 8 to earn a low-level TEFL certification and then will try to snare a teaching contract at one of the many language schools in Hanoi.

I originally had booked a flight leaving SF on August 9, but a day before my departure, while running on a mountain trail in California, I twisted my right ankle and took a header on a downslope, falling heavily onto my left knee and rib cage. I bandaged my bloody knee and spent the afternoon icing my ankle. It wasn't until later that night that I discovered my sprained ankle wasn't the worst of my injuries. By morning I was experiencing excruciating muscle spasms from hip to shoulder every time I moved.

I cancelled my flight to Hanoi and tried to tough it out with handfuls of Ibuprofen, but after four days of steadily increasing pain I threw in the towel and had friends drive me to the nearest ER to get a shot of morphine. What I got, of course, was an X-ray and a prescription for Vicodin. Disappointed in a heartless American medical establishment, I rebooked my flight, wrapped my ribcage in an Ace bandage, and on August 17 flew to Hanoi with my pockets full of Vicodin, Ibuprofen, and cough drops (I would rather drink skunky beer than suffer a fit of coughing right now.)

So there you have it. My wife doesn't love me, the gods of trail-running hate me, guess I'll go eat worms—and who knows how to prepare delicious mint worm patties better than the Vietnamese. (This is no joke—I saw a video of it on Youtube.)

I won't prolong today's blog with details of my second visit to Language Link or my stroll through Lenin Park, but you can check out the photos I took at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/gregnelson0/hanoi3

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Pho Ba Trieu (Ba Trieu Street)

Take your shirt off and soak it in a basin of warm water for a few seconds and then lift the shirt dripping from the water and wring it out…but only use one hand. That's how wet my shirt was when I got home today from walking down Ba Trieu Street. Raining? No, just hot, sweaty Hanoi weather.

Thanh showed up this morning to see how I was getting along. When he stepped into my room, he shivered and told me it felt too cold. I have the thermostat set to 77F/25C. Thanh thought it would be better to bump it up to within 10 degrees of the outside temperature, which has hung around 90F this week.

When Thanh asked if I needed anything, I mentioned my three most pressing needs: pharmacy, bookstore, laundromat. According to Thanh, Hanoi has no self-service laundries. Furthermore, I shouldn't trust my clothes to any laundry other than the hotel service. He insisted on calling the hotel desk to have a laundry basket sent up and soon there arrived what looked for all the world to me like a bamboo trash basket a foot in diameter, a foot deep, full of splintery ends. Besides not wanting to snag my shirts in this basket, I also don't want to pay the hotel laundry rates: 50 cents per shirt, 60 cents for a pair of pants, 15 cents for a pair of socks (no price mentioned for unmentionables). Any American laundromat would be cheaper. Maybe I can work something out with a colleague who has a washer/dryer. (If I can find one. To judge by the volume of clothing you see hanging on balconies, a dryer must be a rare commodity in this town.)

Thanh showed me on a map where there is a concentration of bookstores around the corner from the Metropole. As for a pharmacy, he repeated what others have told me—you can find pharmacies all over town, just look for a sign with a cross on it. Then he offered to take me to one on his motorscooter, currently parked out front. I felt a bit apprehensive about loading my shattered ribs onto the back of what is essentially a game of Russian roulette disguised as transportation, but all week long I've watched octogenarians and pregnant women by the score put their frail bodies on the line, so who am I to say, "Not me, I'd rather walk."

The first pharmacy we found was about the size of a French elevator, so Tranh continued toward the town center until we found a bigger one—about the size of a newsstand. I could see through the window that all the merchandise was behind the counter and that, instead of looking for it, I would have to describe what I wanted (throat lozenges, Chloraseptic spray, Gold Bond powder, saw palmetto, mentholatum…). Given that the English-speaking staff at my hotel isn't sure what "four o'clock" means, I saw at once the absurdity of my quest and asked Thanh to drop me at a bookstore instead.

I happily browsed several bookstores but bought only a street map of Hanoi, for the main reason that none of the stores carried any English language books, although the quantity of books aimed at helping Vietnamese students master English was staggering. I was worried that I'd find English teaching materials in short supply, but it's obvious ESL is a serious industry here.

In the same neighborhood as the bookstores is a famous ice cream store called Kem Trang Thien. I looked in. Picture a low-ceilinged parking garage full of motorbikes, with an ice cream freezer in two corners, a broken and empty ice cream freezer in one corner, a collection of buckets and mops in the fourth corner, and dozens of young Vietnamese milling about eating ice cream cones. This is Hanoi's answer to Baskin-Robbins.

Since I was just a block from the Metropole and starting to sweat heavily, I thought I'd stop in, cool off, have a drink at the bar, maybe say hello to the American ambassador. I stopped in, but didn't do any of those other things because I could see right away that a drink at the bar was going to cost me as much as a day's stay at my hotel. The Metropole in Hanoi is world class and no lie. More intimidating than the Plaza Hotel in NYC, or the Ritz-Carlton in SF—or, needless to say, the Plains Hotel in Cheyenne.

This brings me to the part where I walk down Ba Trieu street, my shirt hanging closer and closer to my knees as it wicks the sweat from my body. Ba Trieu is a major street, lined with a motley assortment of businesses shuffled together at random. Next to a glass-fronted, obviously air-conditioned, Western-looking art gallery or camera store with track lighting, expensive furniture, and mahogany display cases will be a gritty-looking garage where an old woman in her pajamas is cutting the heads off fish and tossing them into an aluminum pot.

Along the way, I stopped into what might be the biggest pharmacy in Hanoi—the size of a Mrs. Field's mall store. Its display window featured several gigantic jars of whole ginseng roots soaking in brandy. Except for two cases containing orthotics, heating pads, and such, all the merchandise was behind the counter. I asked for something for a sore throat and was shown three products—lozenges from Germany, a paste from China, and lozenges from Thailand. The German packaging said in English: by prescription only. I bought the cheap Thai lozenges because they resembled cherry Sucrets—24 lozenges for 23,000 dong ($1.38).

Many Hanoi stores are no more than six feet wide. I was invited into a souvenir shop that had shelves on one wall, posters on a facing wall, and between them about three feet of sidling space. At the back of the store was an open door leading to a tiny windowless kitchen. The proprietor stood outside on the sidewalk to avoid blocking access to his own store. Every thirty feet or so, an alleyway appears, always occupied by two or three entrepreneurs cutting up meat, sorting cell phones, pounding dents out of motorscooter body parts, or just squatting in the shade and smoking. A lot of cooking happens on sidewalks here. Many eateries prepare their cuisine in aluminum cookware over a charcoal fire in a big tin can set on the ground. Although half the bike riders in Hanoi wear paper masks over their mouth and nose, on any city block you'll see lots of meat and fish just hanging out in bowls, exposed to sun, humidity, and exhaust fumes. Thanh warned me not to be tempted to try any of this street food.

The moldering ochre buildings thoughout Hanoi, legacies of the French occupation, are heartbreakingly beautiful and neglected. They're strung with so many electrical wires and clothes lines, they remind me of dolphins caught in fishing nets. And everywhere you look there are motorbikes. People here seem to live their lives on the streets. There are crowds on every block, sitting on little 6-inch plastic stools, smoking, drinking beer or tea, and eating noodle soup. Every block is teeming with people. But everywhere you look, motorbikes appear to outnumber people. If Hanoi's human population is 3.5 million, its bike population must be in the millions also. Motorbikes are parked three rows deep wherever the sidewalk can accommodate them.

The girls who cashier at the supermarket are something else. In the US you can really mess up a cashier by giving her $22.26 (instead of $20) for a purchase totalling $12.21. She doesn't see that giving back $10.05 is easier than giving back $7.79. The girls at the Vincom Towers market are just the opposite. They want your small denominations and they know how to get them. Today I gave the cashier a 100,000 dong note for a purchase of 98,500. Instead of just giving me my 1,500 change, she reached out and starting pulling small bills out of my hand trying to build up a payment of 108,500 so she could return 10,000 (or some such strategy). I demurred. I took back the small bills insisting I needed them for the bus. That's how I got my first 500 dong coin (worth 3 cents). I think I might keep it for luck.

Gordon, by the way—like some cats I could name—seems to have a thing for sweaty clothing. When I got back from my trip downtown, I hung my dripping shirt on a peg beside the wardrobe. When I retrieved it an hour later, Gordon jumped from the shirt to the wall, then jumped four feet onto a table and looked at me with a guilty smirk.

Friday, August 22, 2008

A day in the oubliette

My hotel is having some renovation work done. Several of the 10 guest rooms have been gutted and are getting new floors, windows, and fixtures. Naturally this has involved a lot of drilling, sawing, hammering, pounding (my head), and grinding (my teeth). Up until today the work has been confined to daylight hours, but it's now 9:30PM and apparently the work is going to continue until the entire hallway outside my door has a brand new floor. This, I suppose, is what I get for not booking the Somerset Maugham suite at the Metropole.

You might be wondering why I don't just take a powder. Go someplace where the drunken laughter and hot jazz are loud enough to drown out renovations, honking horns, and cats in heat. Don't think that hasn't crossed my addled mind. I've been looking all week for the strength to return to Language Link and get myself invited out for some weekend carousing with those funloving pedagogues and goguettes.

To my chagrin, I woke up with a low-grade headache and even lower-grade diarrhea to go along with my throbbing ribs, sore throat, and still swollen and tender ankle. If Gordon were fluent in English like that Geico spokeslizard, I'd send him out to look for Imodium and a few more Vicodin, but I'm afraid Gordon is just out for himself. Time after time today I dressed up like I had somewhere to go, but I never got twenty feet from my bathroom except for a hurried excursion to the market for more bottled water and baguettes.

About the only thing I accomplished today was to read some of the other blogs being written by expatriates in Hanoi. There are a surprising number of these and every one I looked at succeeded in depressing me. Either the blogger is a handsome, athletic twenty-something zipping around on a motorbike picking up chicks, eating bats, drinking Irishmen under the table, and getting book offers for the ongoing tale of his thrilling adventures, or she is staying with a Vietnamese family and being driven to a different fascinating temple, village, tailor shop, or party every day. One blog is maintained by a couple who live at the Metropole (for the security more than the comfort) and blog about trade shows, opera evenings, and cocktail parties at the American ambassador's home. Aren't there any lonesome expatriates around here with painful hemorrhoids and threadbare pants?

Oh well, I'm going to bed and hope to wake up in a different movie.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Taking a bus downtown

The air conditioner has changed my mode of life. Until last night, terrace door and window stood wide open—funneling in sunlight, moonlight, street noises, disquieting odors, mosquitoes, and hot, humid air. Now my room has become a cool, dim cave smelling faintly of Yardley soap, where socks and blankets have a purpose, where car horns are faint and distant, where hundreds of microscopic ants will either starve to death or start in on me during the night.

Whenever I start to miss my old pre-AC Hanoi experience, I can just step out onto the terrace. I did that just now and was reminded of how different things can appear when you take a second look at them. I told you earlier I could see five or six silver "beer cans" from my balcony. Looking again today, I saw no less than thirty-one.

I took a bus downtown this morning. It was pretty much like taking a MUNI bus in SF, with these differences: 1) it costs 18 cents, 2) the driver never really comes to a complete stop—you have to board or disembark while the bus is moving at 1 or 2 mph, 3) you can bump your head on the ceiling if you're taller than 5'10". The purpose of my excursion was to track down a computer accessory I need to transfer photos from my camera to my computer. (Seriously, how long are you going to stick with my little travelog if I never provide any pictures? Those six hundred pounds of National Geographics in your basement would have been recycled ages ago if they were text only.)

I found the store I had been directed to and bought the item I needed (pictures coming your way soon), but the store didn't have the Ethernet cable I also wanted. For that I would need a computer store. Okay, where is one, I asked. Nobody at the camera store had any idea. Nobody at the tourist info kiosk down the street knew, either. Or anybody at the local Highlands Coffee shop, although I did find out the Olympic event in which Vietnam won a silver medal. You're going to think I'm joking, but I swear this is true: Vietnam won silver this week in…weightlifting! Vietnam's only previous Olympic medal was a silver in taekwondo in 2000.

Eventually, I found somebody who knew where there was a computer store in Hanoi. He directed me to Vincom City Towers, the modern highrise shopping mall where I've been buying peanut butter and mouthwash. I was skeptical because I've explored that mall in some detail, but nobody else had any suggestions at all. So now the problem was how to catch a bus back to where I started. The guys at the tourist info kiosk didn't have a clue. I stopped into an upscale hotel across the street from Hoan Kiem Lake. (This, by the way, is tourist central in Hanoi. Caucasians practically outnumber Vietnamese in this neighborhood. I figured anybody connected with this particular hotel would be used to speaking English and giving directions to out-of-towners.) The desk clerk assured an incredulous me that no bus went anywhere near Vincom Towers.

I just came from there by bus, I said. Surely I can return there by bus.

He shook his head. No, that bus comes on a one-way street. You have to take a cab back.

You mean, I said, bus after bus comes up here from Vincom Towers and then all the buses just stay here?

Yes, he said. You have to take a cab back.

I left the hotel and found a bus stop about fifty feet away. Ten minutes later I was disembarking (at about 2 mph) across the street from Vincom Towers. I found the computer store on the fourth floor of the mall. It's actually a TV/stereo store that also sells laptop computers. The sales staff had never heard of an Ethernet cable, didn't have one, and had no idea where one could be found in Hanoi.

My sore throat is still worrying me, I've been a little nauseous all day, and as usual, the pain in my ribs lessens in the AM and then worsens in the PM. I've decided to revisit Language Link when I'm feeling stronger.

I read today in a newspaper that Vietnam has adjusted its poverty line upward in response to inflation. Two years ago, the poverty line was 6 million dong per year. Now the poverty line is 10 million dong per year in rural areas, 12 million dong per year in the city. For reference, I just paid 6 million dong ($361) for fifteen days in my air-conditioned lodgings.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Playing hooky already

I hope my ribs heal soon. I'm almost out of Vicodin. Around dawn, the pain abated enough that I was able to lie gingerly on my right side for the first time in twelve days. When I woke up, I noticed a mosquito flying around my head, the first I've noticed since arriving in Hanoi. I easily swatted him to the floor and by the time I could lean down to look at him, he was being swarmed by tiny ants about the size of chiggers. Hundreds of them. What the hell am I paying Gordon for? I'm going to have to have words with him, but I'm sure he'll only pretend to understand.

I must remember to close the curtain between my desk and the terrace at night. When I came to the desk this morning I found the morning sun beating down on my computer, which had gotten way too hot to touch. I'm a little apprehensive about the humidity, too. Maybe I can find a safe place to keep my computer at the school.

Although there is a free Internet connection in my hotel room, I find it tends to flake out during the day. Right now, for example, I can't access my mail server (or any other URL). That might be another reason to keep my computer at the school.

I'm struggling to get a handle on the currency here. Vietnamese bills come in denominations of 500,000, 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000, 5,000, 2,000, and 1,000. I'm told there are also bills of 500, 200, and 100 and coins, too, but since I've been here I've seen only one bill under 10,000 and no coins. The supermarket cash registers have no coins and very few small bills. Small bills are scarce. The exchange rate right now is about 16,600 VND (Vietnamese dong) to the USD (US dollar), making the 10,000 dong note worth about 60 cents. The largest denomination—500,000 dong—is worth about $30.

Here's what happens at the supermarket checkout: Your total comes to 357,640 dong ($21.52). You give the cashier a 500,000 dong note ($30.00). She asks you for 8,000 dong more, so she can save her small bills. Of course, since small bills are scarce, you don't have 8,000 dong, so you give her a 10,000 dong note. She gives you back a 100,000 dong note, a 50,000 dong note, a 2,000 dong note, and a piece of candy to make up the 360 dong difference (2 cents). Places of business that don't have candy just round things off to the nearest denomination they can handle.

One of the teachers at Language Link explained to me how to take a bus to the city center. You have to be prepared with the fare amount of 3,000 dong. She didn't say how to get such small bills into your possession.

I told the people at Language Link I would come again today, but I've been feeling so poorly, I've decided to can it. My ribs hurt and I'm starting to get a very sore throat. Except for a trip to the shopping mall to buy water and mouthwash, I've spent the day in my room. I took a shower. I watched the US men's volleyball team win a close match against Serbia. I made observations from the terrace while identifying with James Stewart in Rear Window. I took another shower. I made a wonderful discovery: I have AC in my hotel room after all!

The AC unit high on the wall, which I had assumed to be broken, just needed a little love and understanding—mostly understanding. The key was to figure out which of the five apparently useless switches in my room was connected to the AC unit and to make sure this switch was in the correct position when the remote control unit hidden in the drawer was activated. I feel like I just got a telegram from Ed McMahon.

When I went to the mall for mouthwash I stopped at Highlands Coffee for a sandwich and a cup of iced coffee. Highlands is a very western coffee lounge—dark wood, overstuffed chairs, two floor-to-ceiling glass walls, one looking onto the mall, one looking onto the street, English language newspapers in a rack on the wall. According to the sports page, Vietnam has won a silver medal in Beijing. None of the waitresses could tell me what event was involved. Nobody here seems to have the slightest interest in the Olympics. Thanh admitted to me on Monday he only likes football (i.e., soccer).

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Language Link

I may have overdone the twisting, lifting, carrying, and walking yesterday. When I went to bed last night I found I still couldn't lie down and could no longer even lean comfortably against the pillows. The muscle spasms had returned and I was forced to resume taking my Vicodin. I finally dozed off around 2 AM and slept on and off until 6 AM. The sounds of honking horns and crying children faded away during these pre-dawn hours, but were replaced by the sounds of trucks, heavy equipment, pile drivers, jack hammers, and cats in heat. This city never sleeps. Speaking of heat, the temperature might have fallen off to 79F during the night, but the humidity remained pretty constant. I never once pulled the sheet over me or even thought of doing so.

After a breakfast of fruit, cheese, and leathery bread in my room, I stepped out to the terrace to take some photos. In a tiny courtyard three stories below me a chubby boy of 11 or 12 appeared, totally naked and unselfconscious. He filled a plastic basin with water from an outdoor faucet, squatted over the basin and proceeded to wash his bum with a rag. His mother appeared briefly, patted him on the head, and went back into the house. Later in the day I spotted a rat—a large one—sneaking across the same courtyard.

Somewhere a bird is whistling. I've been hearing it since I moved in. It doesn't sound like a bird so much as a human burglar signalling his accomplices with phony whistled "bird calls". I was suspicious at first, but the whistling went on for hours yesterday evening and has resumed again this morning. I'll try to get a photo of the specimen for Fred. I also heard a male tenor singing opera last night. Definitely not a recording, as the voice stopped and started at irregular intervals.

So far I haven't seen a single spider, cockroach, or snake, but there's a tiny gecko who lives behind my wardrobe. I call him Gordon.

I met an American woman at the supermarket today. She has lived in Hanoi for six months, likes it, but couldn't tell me where to find a pharmacy. The supermarket is in a highrise American-style indoor shopping mall—six floors of clothing boutiques, watch boutiques, perfume boutiques, jewelry boutiques, chain restaurants, and video arcades. But there is no pharmacy, no bookstore, no DVD/CD store, no gym, no movie theater. The supermarket carries no sponges, no paper towels, and no plastic bags. I bought a small plastic tub with a lid to keep my bread out of Gordon's clutches. Also, a fruit knife, some rolls of toilet paper I hope will be softer than the cheap stuff provided by the hotel, a plastic plate decorated with a picture of an ancient Vietnamese temple, a package of toothpicks made of plastic or fish bones (I can't tell which), and a washcloth with which to cool my fevered brow and sponge my sweaty body throughout each steamy day and night.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon I received a phone call from Hung, the hotel desk boy, asking (in halting English) if it was okay to clean my room. I told him I was about to take a shower and then go out, so could the cleaning be done after 4:00? He said yes, so I began my shower. As I was towelling off, I heard the sound of a key trying to unlock my door. I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door to find two startled maids standing in the hallway. I asked them (while gesturing) to go away and come back (another gesture) in 10 minutes (I held up ten fingers). Then I closed the door on their puzzled expressions. This was my first personal confirmation of something several guide books warned me about—the Vietnamese will assure you they understand what you're telling them, even if they don't.

Language Link, the school at which I will be training (and, very possibly, teaching) is three blocks from my hotel. You're walking along the street—the sidewalk is blocked with hundreds of parked motorbikes, piles of dirt, bricks, and lumber, and people squatting on tiny stools—trying to avoid getting run over while casting glances at the row of low-ceilinged storefronts. In an American city they would be storefronts, and in fact some of them hold piles of strange-looking vegetables, or hundreds of grimy, used cell phones spread on blankets, or a girl with a paper mask over her mouth cutting the hair of a boy perched on an overturned bucket, but a majority of them hold something even more ambiguous—a stack of bricks and a pile of sand, behind which a woman and a child sit on a sofa watching television, or half a dozen motorbikes in various stages of repair, buckets of tools and parts, and a man standing at a stove cooking dinner.

Then, suddenly, the row of storefronts is broken by some wide stairs going up to a modern glass-fronted building. Inside the glass front are rows of plastic chairs filled with young people waiting to be processed by one of six young women sitting behind a long table at individual computer stations. This is Language Link.

I ask to see Malcolm Young, the director of studies, but he's away. Instead I'm introduced to Kevin, a short middle-aged Brit with a foghorn voice, who takes me up to the second-floor teacher's lounge and hands me off to Evan, who, with his broad grin, looks like a young Hemingway. Evan shows me a wall of resource material available to all teachers and points out a small section of books on teaching methodology. He pulls out 5 or 6 items of interest and I ask if I might stay and look them over. Language Link is air-conditioned and most of the dozen or so people here in the teacher's lounge are speaking English. I'm in no hurry to leave.

During the next three hours I take notes on an interesting article about how English differs from Vietnamese and which of those differences give Vietnamese students the worst learning difficulties. At the same time I'm soaking up the atmosphere of the teacher's lounge and making the acquaintance of some of the teachers. All of them, without exception, strike me as attractive, intelligent, friendly, and fun. They are all busy grading papers, preparing lesson plans, culling resource materials, photocopying worksheets, and so on, but they still find time to ask about Evan's holiday, how John's new apartment is working out, make up songs about Sierra's love life, indulge in some goodnatured teasing, and share some chocolate with the new guy (me). I like it here. I like these people. Each of them has a plastic tub in which to keep colored markers, glue sticks, crayons, flash cards, etc. It's the same plastic tub I just bought to serve as a bread box.

It gets dark in Hanoi around 6:30 these days. When I finally left Language Link around 7:30 it felt quite late so I skipped dinner and went straight back to my hotel. I supped on bread and cheese and went to bed early.

Once again I had the experience of feeling considerably worse at bedtime than during the day. I still couldn't lie down or even semi-recline with any comfort. The sheets were clammy and any pillow I leaned against felt like a heating pad set to maximum heat. I dozed fitfully. Then around 3:00 I heard what sounded like steam escaping under pressure. I couldn't tell if the sound was coming from outside my window or from the hallway. I thought at once of the giant beercans on the neigboring rooftops. I can see five or six of them from my terrace. They look like 100-gallon silver kegs of beer but probably just maintain water pressure for each building. I was thinking one of them might have sprung a leak but I couldn't imagine how the noise could be so loud. The noise faded gradually over the next minute or two, but then came roaring back and I suddenly realized I was hearing the sound of a hard rain. I gathered up all my ribs and crept onto the terrace and marveled at the suddenness with which the clouds had released their contents.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Touchdown

I expected the 12-hour flight from SF to Taiwan to be a night from hell, but it proved otherwise. I mentioned my broken ribs to a flight attendant who saw me struggling to lift my laptop case into the overhead compartment and in return she mentioned—offered—an empty row of three seats next to the mid-cabin lavatory. I raised the two middle armrests, gathered up all three complimentary pillow and blanket sets, and fashioned myself a cushy chaise longue on which to stretch my legs and elevate my feet while keeping my torso in a mostly upright position. I made it through the 12-hour flight without Vicodin, without alarming my neighbors with pitiful whimpers and groans, without suffering a fatal blood clot, and without flopping about the cabin in a desperate search for relief from restless leg syndrome. In fact, I slept a great deal and arrived in Taipei rested and practically painfree.

The computer at the boarding gate at Taoyuan Airport in Taipei was printing out passenger lists and flight manifests on a tractor-feed dot matrix printer, but otherwise Taipei's airport looked like any big city airport—with fewer stores and restaurants, maybe, but more potted plants. There was even a shelf of potted plants in the "Man Toilet".

The three-hour hop from Taipei to Hanoi was uneventful. I sat next to a Hungarian couple and we were served dubious cuts of pork over gummy overcooked noodles garnished with a hardcooked brown egg—brown clear through except for a dark green yolk. We arrived at Hanoi in a warm drizzle that didn't obscure a flat green landscape brimming with lakes, ponds, and puddles. The temperature was around 80F, but the atmosphere was like your bathroom when somebody has just finished a hot shower.

Getting through Vietnamese customs took all of 30 seconds. A skinny boy wearing an army tunic glanced at my declaration (blank except for my name, address, and passport number), stamped my visa, and waved me through. No words were exchanged. The Hanoi airport is half the size of the Oakland airport. It has two baggage carousels. I had my luggage on the curb ten minutes after we landed.

Thanh met me as promised. He recognized me from my photo and I recognized him from his. I hadn't expected him to come to the airport in a cab, though. Because of my injured ribs, Thanh let me sit up front with the driver on the way back to town. I spent the 45-minute ride to the hotel painfully twisted in my seat so I could keep up a conversation with Thanh. As I expected, his spoken English was inferior to his written English and we both had quite a struggle communicating. Thanh is two years older than me, a physicist who lived and worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He now works as a scientific advisor in Hanoi.

Rain continued to fall as we rolled past flooded fields and across the muddy river into the city. The highway is grade level pretty much the entire way and, though four lanes wide, has no median—just a low cement barrier along certain stretches. Pedestrians meandered across the four lanes here and there. Traffic, moderately heavy, was maybe 55% autos and trucks, 40% motorbikes and motorscooters, and 5% bicycles. The autos were a mixture of European-style compacts, mid-size sedans, and SUVs. I'd say there were more SUVs than small cars, but that might characterize traffic to and from the international airport more than Hanoi traffic in general. I saw no tractor trailers. A majority of the motorbikes and motorscooters carried two people. There were lots of rain ponchos and it was common to see the driver wearing a large one, the front of the poncho draped over the front of the scooter and the back of it draped over the passenger who rode along, dry under the plastic but unable to see anything other than the driver's back. We passed several fresh accidents and neither Thanh nor the taxi driver even gave them a glance.

The traffic circulation in the center of Hanoi was exactly as advertised—chaotic, ill-advised, dangerous. You get the feeling, though, that in Hanoi the reckless drivers are not motivated, as they are elsewhere, by belligerance, road-rage, ego, showing off, etc., but rather by a desire to get where they're going in the shortest possible time even if it means risking their own life and the life of everyone in their path. Everybody uses their horn liberally. They honk whenever they pass someone, whenever they approach an intersection, whenever they're in an intersection, whenever somebody gets within three feet of them, whenever they get within three feet of somebody else or intend to. As a result, Hanoi sounds perpetually like a wedding couple being launched on their honeymoon by the best man and a dozen of his drunken friends.

The architecture in and around Hanoi is a charming blend of Asian and European. I saw mile after mile of freestanding four-, five-, and six-story houses, tall and narrow (12-15 feet wide), elegant, many with cantilevered balconies, covered terraces, or inner courtyards, and red tile roofs with Oriental spires and flourishes, all of it apparently unplanned development—new buildings strongly resembling older buildings in style, but no two exactly alike. We also passed block after block of cavernous sheds made of corrugated tin which looked for all the world like garages or machine shops, but in whose dim interiors could be seen dozens of cheap chairs ranged around large tables and as often as not the chairs were full of shadowy figures looking like a bingo crowd during a power blackout. I'd love to know what was going on in those sheds.

Hanoi is smaller, closer, more crowded feeling than I had anticipated, even after looking for hours at satellite images of it on Google Earth. Even the huge, elegant, expensive Metropole Hotel fronts a narrow, grimy, almost claustrophobic street. That goes for my hotel, too. The lobby is tiny, the elevator must surely have come from France, and the place has no air conditioning. Neither does the neighborhood bank, the neighborhood supermarket, or the neighborhood restaurant where Thanh and I had lunch. The lunch was good, by the way. We had sticky rice, grilled pork, grilled fish, steamed celery and salad greens, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes—as much as the two of us could eat—plus green tea and two 20-ounce bottles of beer for a total cost of about $7.00. No tipping is the custom here. Thanh says if I become a regular customer the restaurant will probably start giving me a discount.

My hotel room is about 15 feet square with a tile floor and a thirteen foot ceiling. Queen-size platform bed with a very firm mattress. Desk with chair and Internet jack. Large mirrored wardrobe. Mini-fridge. Cable TV with 57 channels. Two bedside tables and lamps. Telephone. Occasional table flanked by two easy chairs. Private bathroom. Toilet with bidet attachment (picture the spray hose on your kitchen sink). Four by eight foot covered balcony half filled with potted plants. A six-foot wide window and a glass door that open onto the balcony. The room is clean and pleasant and is costing me about $25 a day. As an experiment, you might try sending me a letter or care package c/o The World Hotel, 137 Mai Hac De, Hanoi, Vietnam. (Don't send anything valuable or vulnerable to humidity.) I've paid in advance through the end of August and will most probably stay here until the end of September.

Did I mention the absence of AC? I'd gladly trade my bidet attachment for some. My balcony looks out on some of those terraces and inner courtyards I mentioned. This evening as I sit at my computer looking at the full moon framed in my giant window I can see lines of laundry hung to dry and hear fighting cats and mothers scolding crying children. On the TV in the corner, Val Kilmer's face is speaking Vietnamese. It's not terribly hot but it's extremely humid. I can see I'm going to be taking lots of showers..

Thanh insisted I buy some groceries for my hotel room while we were near the supermarket. The Vietnamese are no more apt to eat peanut butter than the French are, but the store was well stocked with peanut butter and I bought some, along with two baguettes which proved tougher than shoe leather. Big deal. They were only 25 cents each, and I got a package of 10 coconut cookies for 40 cents. I wanted a plastic knife for the peanut butter, but all I could find was a package of twenty. I bought the pack when I realized it only cost 25 cents.

Tomorrow I'll visit my school (just around the corner) and try to find a bookstore that sells English language books.