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.)