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!