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.