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.