Living the life of Rải Ly

At least some of the readers of this blog assumed my six-week silence was a result of new teaching responsibilities falling on me like a collapsing pile of schoolbooks. Not so. The truth of the matter is that I often feel unreasonably guilty that my life has become so pressure-free. Unlike most of my colleagues, who are teaching 10 to 15 classes per week and thinking of taking on even more, I've been teaching just 3 to 5 classes per week and feeling dreamily content with my slacker's pace.

You might not think an Asian city of 3.5 million people would be a likely spot to bow out of the rat race, but that seems to be just what I've done. I have no mortgage and no car. I have no idea what the price of gasoline is. No bills or junk mail arrive in my mail box—I have no mail box. I never wake to an alarm clock. I can stay at the bar until closing time every night if I want to. Until AFTER closing time, in fact. (When closing time arrives, somebody pulls down the metal door so the bar will appear closed to any patrolling police truck, but the bartenders carry on behind locked doors as long as there are customers spending money.)

I eat in restaurants whenever I feel like it—it costs 5 dollars or less for a decent meal, 10 dollars for something special like veal piccata or sushi. For a change of pace I stay in, cook myself an omelet, and watch something on HBO. I do my own dishes, but the $475 I give my landlady each month includes housecleaning, laundry, broadband Internet, cable TV, and electricity. When my laundry basket gets full I set it at the bottom of the stairs and my clothes come back clean in a day or so. When a light bulb burns out, I mention it and I'm given a new one. When the landlady heard I was shopping for an area rug, she found one in a storeroom and set it outside my door.

For the first couple of months I got around town by xe buyt (bus-18 cents a ride) or by xe om (motorbike taxi-$1-$2 per ride). Now I'm pedaling around on an old bicycle Thanh loaned me (free ride-free exercise). I'm debating buying a motorbike, but as long as the weather stays cool and dry, I'm in no hurry.

You see very few bikes in Hanoi with racing handlebars or derailleur gears. But the town is so flat and the streets so busy with motorbikes that you seldom find an opportunity to shift gears. It's probably just a matter of time before I get a hard knock or worse out there, but I've lost my initial apprehension and, far from cowering near the curb, find myself aggressively insisting on my share of the street, threading between cars slowed by a jam of motorbikes, pedaling upcurrent on one-way streets, and making left turns against oncoming traffic by drifting across the traffic well before the intersection and then drifting back to the right after rounding the corner. In other words, I'm driving my bicycle like any Hanoi schoolkid or their grandfather would. (Only faster. Because I'm bigger, the Vietnamese have a hard time keeping up with me.)