Minor HANOIances

Sugar Junkies

2009-08-30T14:34:00.003+07:00

Yesterday I recorded the English language voice-over for two Vietnamese feature films at the studios of a Ha Noi company called Thang Long Audio Visual. In my experience Thang Long always does things on a much-too-short time line. Here how the process works:

1. Thang Long receives a film from the client.
2. Somebody Vietnamese watches the film and writes down each line of Vietnamese dialog.
3. A Vietnamese translator with a minimal knowledge of English translates each line into a parody of English. I suspect that the Vietnamese may be run through an automated Viet-English translation program or else the translation is accomplished by translating word-by-word using a Viet-English dictionary.
4. I'm given an e-version of the translated script the day before the English-language version is to be delivered to the client, with the hope that I'll fix up any rough spots in the translation. (I did this a few times. To do a decent job requires 10-20 minutes per page. The typical script runs 40-50 pages. For this editing phase T-L pays $18. I no longer bother editing scripts. T-L doesn't care. They're happy to save the $18.)
5. On the last possible day, somebody prints out a hard copy of the script and pushes it and me into a tiny recording booth where I'm plonked down in front of a microphone to read the (unedited) script aloud while watching the film on a monitor for the first and only time.
6. A Vietnamese producer and a Vietnamese sound engineer with maybe 20 words of English between them do their best to keep my reading synched with the action.

Here are some examples of the 'dialog' I recorded yesterday for a Vietnamese comedy about diabetics whose title in Vietnamese was probably something like "Sugar Junkies," but which was rendered by the translator as "People in Thirst for Sweet":

· Damn it, I can not find him when he's in need
· What a bad thing it is

· Alcohol is my best friend
· How good you say so...look at your rash face peeling off lots of scrab, alcohol will burn your liver as well

· It doesn't worth much
· That's not quite exactly

· Are you killing him? Diabetics would die if taking this kind of juice. Take it away.

· You can not ignore it, regardless your sweet thirsty, you're surely diseased.

· You should change your character to be at ease, you should not angry when being serous diseased.

· Anything poisonous and being in wine burial will take much effect by its contrary use, understand?

· Your pulse gets stuck, outside pulses ruined by hot liver, but it doesn't matter, will be ok.

· I'm dead already, but please don't tell my wife, I have to conceal my wife to treat it.

· I don't talk about electricity, don't misunderstand my opinion. Where is Phan? He's gone for his own business?

· It is not late now but in the long term I can be.

· I think if you drink again, it will be sometimes better, the job is done well, not as present.

· Does your car have something wrong that you have to mortify your body like this?
· I'm training the health exercise.

· Such a greedy, drunk, and oversexed he is!

· Anything happens, please tell us, don't abuse indirectly.

· Some days ago I saw him bring here many tennis tools.

The challenges of this job are manifold:

· read each line of dialog with feeling and expression as if it actually meant something
· resist guffawing
· resist thinking about the perplexed passengers trying to decipher this excruciating nonsense during their Vietnam Airlines flight from Ha Noi to Singapore

Phu Quoc

2009-05-27T13:45:00.005+07:00

I know it's been a while since I posted a blog. Xin loi—sorry. When I first came to Hanoi, I had a lot more time for blogging, because I didn't know anybody here and my new expatriate life was pretty basic—sleep, eat, work, look around. But you know how life likes to fill in the empty spots, and when those are full, it fills them in some more. You don't even have to plant a seed to have a jungle grow in your front yard. I know there are choices that can be made and some people do seem to keep their lives nicely ordered. But life will keep coming after you like beggar children on the streets of Bombay, and unless you mount a fierce counterattack, your life becomes something of a mob scene with little leisure for reflection or narration.

I'm only able to write these few lines right now because I've stepped to the sidelines for a moment. I'm sitting on the veranda of a little beach bungalow on the island of Phu Quoc, 4 kms from the Cambodian coast, where I've retreated for a week to clear my head and see if I can't catch you up on what's been happening in my life. Even here, far from Hanoi, with my mobile phone turned off and no Internet connection, there are endless distractions: other guests approach you wanting to swap travel stories and invite you to go searching out waterfalls with them; beach vendors approach you to sell you a snorkeling trip or a massage; the pretty girls who clean bungalows in the morning and wait tables at the beach cafe in the afternoon approach you to find out where you're from and how old you are; the old Frenchman who's been here 12 years wants you to play a game of chess with him; the clean sandy beach, the massive white clouds, the clear warm water, the shocking sunset keep calling you and calling you, eroding your will to resist.

There's another thing, too, that's kept me from blogging recently. It's not just the number of things happening. It's the kind of things—personal things, that can't easily be talked about in a public forum, where the people involved, and acquaintances of the people involved, are quite likely to read what I've written and regret my sharing it. This is where the broadcast nature of a blog loses its advantage over private emails. Consequently, I'm deciding even as I write this to fashion a new reporting strategy that will involve email lists in addition to the blog. Stay tuned for details. In the meantime, I'll continue to post photos here—lots of them. I have a really cool new camera (Nikon Coolpix P90) and my snapshot output is through the roof.

To catch you up briefly, here are some of the highlights of the past three months:

My lone class at Language Link ended the last week of April. It may resume toward the middle of June, but nothing is certain. Things got a little unravelled near the end of the term. For some reason, Language Link scheduled the final exam 10 days before the last class meeting. I could see what was coming and protested...to no avail. After taking their final, most of the students stopped showing up. The last week of classes was anemic and sparsely attended. There were only four students on the final day, which is traditionally given over to an end-of-term party, so I cancelled the party and sent them home.

I've become very fond of my private students Toni and Duong. They're both preparing to attend universities abroad and are two very bright, motivated, fun-loving young people. Sometimes we abandon the apartment to practice English at a cafe. Recently, they included me in a four-day trip to Sapa, a popular mountain resort town, with a few of their friends from school. I'll let the photos I took tell the story. Toni has adopted me and now calls me 'dad'.

Van, a former student of mine, adopted me a few months earlier. To her, I'm 'ba' and I call her 'con' ('child'). We chat online and meet occasionally for lunch, at a pizza restaurant near her office, or at the home of her friend Ha. Ha's nickname online is 'meo con', which means 'kitten'. I call her 'little cat', so she calls me 'big tiger'.

Thai Thu, who manages my favorite restaurant in Hanoi, has become a good friend because I go there so often. Festa, an Italian restaurant with a Vietnamese staff, has good wine, great bread, and pizza as good as any I've had in the US. Unfortunately, the restaurant's going out of business soon—not for lack of business, but due to personal issues of the joint owners. I don't know where I'm going to get my red wine and pesto fix from now on.

Thu, my tutor, and I continue to meet twice weekly for Vietnamese lessons, usually in Language Link's conference room but sometimes at her family's house. You'd think I'd speak a little Vietnamese by this time—but I don't. I have much to say about the reasons for this, which I'll save for another post, except to say that as a teacher Thu has been patient, creative, and devoted. And generous. She won't accept any payment—not even a cup of coffee—but she never fails to bring me something to eat: a bag of fruit, some sticky rice cakes, candy, apricot syrup, a bag of white rocks that turned out to be tapioca. I'm very fond of Thu, but she's too formal to call me 'ba' or 'dad'. Usually she just calls me 'mister'.

I see Miss Nga almost every day since her little travel agency is only 20 steps from my front door. She booked my air tickets to Phu Quoc and I try to steer business her way every chance I get, but it seems little enough to repay all the coffee, tea, and advice she's given me during the past year.

I still get together with my CELTA colleagues once a week for lunch. Jouke has moved in with Charlie, which is fine with everyone. We like Charlie so well we're happy to include him in all our activities. Mitchell's school chum Ben has arrived, completed the CELTA course, and is now teaching at Language Link with us. Mitchell and Ben now share an apartment that just a few weeks ago was a cafe. The neon cafe sign is still hanging over their front gate. Donna comes and goes—it seems she and her husband Hank are back in the US or off to Singapore nearly every month. Imran has taken on a heavy teaching load, but despite duties at school and duties at home he remains faithful to the group. James, too, shows up occasionally despite a busy social life and a leg still recovering from a nasty motorbike accident earlier this year. For news of Sarah, follow the link to her hilarious blog.

I was coming home from Festa on my bicycle one night when a motorbike pulled alongside me. The man driving said nothing, but the woman on the back offered to come home with me and give me a massage. I told her I was going home to sleep and she offered to come sleep with me. I didn't say 'Fuck off', but I should have. By the time I got home, there were two motorbikes and two prostitutes, who jumped off their bikes and tried to follow me into my building. While I was preventing one from lifting my wallet out of the front right pocket of my jeans, the other was lifting my mobile phone out of the front left pocket, a fact I didn't discover until I was inside and they had both disappeared.

Two days later my bicycle was stolen from the entryway of my building. For the first few months I had the bike, I kept it faithfully locked, but I noticed mine was the only one in the building that was ever locked. Since the entryway itself is kept locked, I decided I was being too paranoid and should save myself the trouble of locking my wheels when they were 'in the garage'. It took a thief about 10 days to discover my vulnerability and exploit it. I think what happened was that one of the building's tenants stepped out to run a quick early morning errand and left the front door ajar. Either that or the thief was a legitimate visitor to the building who happened also to be an opportunist. It was old and I only paid $6 for it, but I liked that bicycle. The one I've bought to replace it isn't nearly as good. (I'll tell you more about it in another post.)

Kiss of the Death Devil

2009-02-23T22:42:00.002+07:00

You're drifting down a lazy river, trailing one hand in the smooth, glassy water, vaguely aware of a roaring sound off in the distance somewhere. You round a bend and suddenly you're crashing through a maelstrom of rocks, standing waves higher than your head, and rushing, gushing, foaming white water. No, I haven't been rafting this month in the hinterlands of Vietnam. I'm describing how my life has changed since I returned from Dau Vien village at the beginning of February.

My evening classes at Language Link have resumed, of course. And I now have two private students, Toni and Duong, who come to my apartment three times a week in the afternoon. Of course, afternoon is when I edit the news at VOV radio, so there's been some shuffling and scrambling to accommodate everybody.

The editing at VOV has spun off another job for me at a place called Thang Long Audio and Video. One of the translators at VOV creates Manglish subtitles for Vietnamese feature films and documentaries being readied at Thang Long for international distribution. My job is to edit the Manglish subtitles into something approaching English and then—get this—record the subtitles as English 'voiceovers'. I started by doing a documentary on the annual buffalo-stabbing festival of ethnic minority people in the central highlands and followed that with a short documentary about a sacred mountain near Ha Long Bay called Yen Tu, where an ancient Vietnamese king gave up his throne to become a Buddhist monk. 'Narrator voiceovers' sound fairly normal since the documentaries have no dialogue. Last week, though, I did a feature film called 'Kiss of the Death Devil' where my voiceovers were of the more annoying kind—the kind where, instead of actors' voices actually being 'dubbed' by other actors, one person reads the translation of every bit of dialogue in more or less a monotone over each actor's voice. So, for example, you hear yours truly say 'Please, dear husband, save our child' over the voice of a woman crying desperately in Vietnamese, and then, in more or less the same tone of voice you hear me say 'You fool…Why should a Death Devil sacrifice himself for the life of a human?'

This week I edited subtitles and did voiceovers for 'The Punch', a serious drama about a Vietnamese boxer whose life is disrupted by political strife and war. It might sound like fun work, but every profession has its downside. First, there's the serious labor involved in racking your brain to find a more natural way to say 'No one loves cange and stocks but also can't let him influence into the general uprising' or 'Why was it fired branchy?' And then, synching your reading with the on-screen action can be difficult for a number of very good reasons. For one thing, you have to watch the film on a monitor while reading the subtitles from a printed script on the table in front of you, because the subtitles haven't been mixed with the video yet. When one actor speaks off-screen, or speaks with his back to the camera, or when several actors speak at the same time, or when an actor inserts several long pauses into his speech, synching can go awry. A few times I finished reading a subtitle about 20 seconds before the guy on the screen finished talking. The guys at Thang Long don't seem to care much. Almost never were they willing to do a second take. And although they chided me once for rustling my pages, they seemed oblivious to workmen downstairs knocking down a brick wall with sledge hammers and making so much noise I could barely hear the sound track in my head phones.

I'm still studying Vietnamese 2 nights a week with Thu, meeting my CELTA colleagues once a week for lunch, chatting with some combination of Miss Nga, Thai Thu, Hong Ha, or Bich Van every day, corresponding by email with (and correcting the emails of) a growing number of students, taking lots of photographs, editing some articles for Mr. Dai's promotional magazine, trying to keep up with world news on CNN, and reading Don Quixote. It's surprising how much you can accomplish when you have no significant other to erode your productivity with things like nagging you to repair that leaky faucet, arguing about where wet towels should be hung, discussing which restaurant you should go to for dinner, or hugging and kissing you.

By the way, I found out why there are no geckos on the wall of my apartment. There are no geckos because my spider ate them. From time to time, I've caught a movement out of the corner of my eye which I thought might be a shy gecko darting behind the sofa. There is certainly plenty of opportunity for geckos to come and go when my terrace doors are standing open. But to date there have been no confirmed gecko sightings. Then, a few nights ago, I saw crawling up the wall in the sitting room a form too large to be a cockroach (they seldom exceed three inches in length here) and too small to be a rat (they're seldom smaller than a shoe). It turned out to be a spider reminiscent of a tarantula without his fur. It was about the size of my hand. If your hand is bigger than mine, the spider might have been the size of your hand. I thought right away about killing it so I might sleep better at night, but I had no shotgun or flame-thrower and I didn't want to take a chance on simply wounding it, so I called for backup and for the next hour stayed well clear of it (I remembered the jumping spiders at the World Hotel). They say you should never turn your back on a dangerous predator, but I did at one point, and when I turned back it had disappeared. Now I sleep with a heavy book on my night stand (Don Quixote).

Springtime in Hanoi

2009-02-09T01:34:00.001+07:00

It's February now and Hanoi is already back to shirtsleeve temperatures. Winter has finished, apparently, before it ever really got started. I did end up buying a winter coat here—Goretex with a fleece lining—and actually put it on a few times, but mostly I've been wearing the coat's removable liner as a light jacket. In three months I've had the heater on in my apartment a total of five times…so much for the brutal Hanoi winter I was warned about.

Did I mention that the Lunar New Year marks the first day of spring in Vietnam? Well, it does, so it will be interesting to see if my students exhibit any sign of spring fever when our class resumes tomorrow. Their teacher definitely has a fever…and a cough…and sniffles. It doesn't seem fair so soon after I weathered that hideous bout of flu at Christmas, but one of my colleagues broke his leg last week and another was critically injured in a xe om accident in Nha Trang, so I'll count my blessings.

I had planned during my time off from school to enroll in a one-day Vietnamese cooking class sponsored by a nearby restaurant. For about the price of a Round Table Pizza, you get to accompany the teacher (the restaurant's chef) to a street market to select and buy ingredients for a three-course meal, then you return to the restaurant where the teacher talks you through preparation and cooking, and then you sit down with teacher and fellow students to share—and, we hope, enjoy—the food you've made.

I went in early one morning and learned that the only students signed up that day had called to say they couldn't make it. I said I'd rather come back another time than be the only student, but the chef persuaded me to at least go with him to the market to get a few things for the restaurant. I watched him shop and took a few photos of eels, snake-head fish, chicken-head gristle birds, and piles of weird (but not nameless, according to Chef Viet) stuff being sold as food—food for humans, I mean. Really.

The next day I was sitting in Nga's very lucky travel agency telling her about all this, when in walked Mr. Dai, the owner of the travel company under whose logo Nga operates. Dai is a young entrepreneur who in eight years has progressed from being a hotel doorman to being the owner of two hotels, a restaurant, several tour operations, and a handful of travel agencies. We chatted for a bit and he invited me to come with him to meet his family and take in a festival in his home village of Dau Vien, about 45 minutes north of Hanoi. Apparently many Vietnamese villages commemorate the arrival of spring with a festival that attracts tourists as well as former residents who come back every year for a reunion with family and friends. Dai only needed to ask once.

The next morning I climbed into a tour bus with Dai's wife and kids and half a dozen members of his staff and we headed over the river and through some suburbs to where the scenery started to take on a more rural aspect. Turning off the main road, we were very quickly surrounded by rice farms. The land here was like a waffle, with rice growing in the low hollows separated by a grid of raised unpaved berms, which our bus negotiated cautiously, sometimes jousting with kids on bicycles or farmers driving odd-looking tractors.

Dau Vien I've been told is a very poor village: tiny farms, poor soil, no industry. I saw an ancient school there. I saw a simple little pagoda. I saw an outdoor stage set up for a show…a motorized carousel…a football terrain…some street vendors selling drinks, snacks, and cheap toys for the kids. But I saw no shops, no gas station, not even a fire station. Come to think of it, I've never seen a fire station in Hanoi, either, which seems odd considering there are frequent power outages and every time the power goes off, you can see open flame lamps and candles appear in every shop doorway and apartment window. I wished I'd brought my camera. Oh wait, I did bring my camera! I'll post some of the photos just as soon as I post this short account.

I started by taking picture of some the cute kids in the crowd. The boys responded to this attention like hungry sharks to chum. I certainly felt like their chum, the way they followed me around, mugging for my camera, interposing themselves between me and anything I aimed the camera at, and working themselves into a gleeful frenzy. The village was picturesque, full of ponds and pigs and ducks amid a labyrinth of narrow walled lanes barely wide enough to accommodate an automobile. The rainbow of costumed women dancing in and out of the pagoda to the beat of drums and gongs played by four monks was a great photo op. But it was really the kids that impressed me most. They may have had TVs at home, but almost certainly no books, video games, or Internet access. The festival air must have made them feel as if a circus had come to town—and I was their elephant.

Dai's family home was a simple affair—essentially, one big room and one small one, with a veranda, a bathroom very reminiscent of a gas station rest room in Elko, Nevada, and a big yard full of trees and chickens. The kitchen sink was a large plastic tub under a 2-foot-high outdoor spigot and the kitchen stove was a stack of bricks piled against the exterior wall of the bathroom. On this stove, Dai's mother cooked dinner for about 20 people, including yours truly.

I won't go into detail about dinner, but I'll tell you this much: I had a fantastic time, and I'll give you my best tip for enjoying yourself the next time you attend a Vietnamese celebration dinner for which the cooks have prepared their most special dishes. Keep your own bowl filled with those items you like best(or that like you best) so that nobody else has room to stick in an item like a pig uturus they feel sure you'd enjoy.

The dinner was eaten on the floor in the main room, of course. In two corners of this room were two big beds. After dinner, the women and children gathered on one bed to gossip and nap. The men divided into two strata. One strata gathered on the other bed to play a card game with strange-looking narrow cards. The srata with pockets full of money remained on the floor and began a fast-paced gambling game so simple I saw at once there could be no skill involved beyond dealing off the bottom of the deck. This is one reason I sat out. Another is that 100,000 dong notes ($6 bills) started flying back and forth at a dizzying rate. Too rich even for this American's blood. The third reason is that I wanted to wander around the village and take a few more pictures.

Within 30 minutes I had received—and accepted—no less than two invitations to have tea and snacks with strangers in their modest but very charming rural homes. One family had no English beyond "Hello. How are you?" The other family contained a young engineering student who could converse in English enough to gossip with me about the first family. This conversation took place, naturally, on the floor, with the young man's parents hanging on every word but showing no sign of understanding any of it. I excused myself when the student's younger brother climbed into bed just behind me and his grandmother climbed into a second bed about three feet closer to the front door. I suppose even at festival time country folk still get up with their chickens.

Deeply in Tet

2009-02-05T21:40:00.004+07:00

I don't think I left my apartment on Lunar New Year's Day. I had been led by a number of knowledgeable(-sounding) people to expect a ghost town out there. Besides, the weather was cold and I had all that stockpiled food. Thanh had brought me a beautiful peach blossom branch, Nga had given me a nice little kumquat tree, and Thu had come a long way across town to give me a heavy bag containing Vietnamese fruits, a bottle of Da Lat wine, and some traditional Tet food she had cooked herself. Plus, 'Babe' was on the movie channel. Remember, too, I had been drinking wine and vodka until 3:00am the night before.

The second day of Tet arrived and I recalled an invitation to eat lunch at Imran's house. Imran is my CELTA colleague from Bangladesh, the only CELTA colleague who didn't leave Hanoi for Tet. He lives with his wife Amy and baby daughter Hannah in a beautiful big house near the Red River (Song Hong), the river in whose flood plain Hanoi is built. After a delicious lunch and the most extended conversation in English I've enjoyed in several months, we took ourselves for a walk along the river, which is at low water this time of year. It was a mild day, almost sunny, and when we walked down into the dry portion of the river bed, to my surprise the city seemed to disappear. The area between Imran's neighborhood and the river is still being farmed, with small plots given over to vegetables for the market—or kumquat trees. It has a pleasantly rural feeling and I envied Imran's easy access to running trails flanked by miniature fields and tiny orchards instead of exhaust-spewing buses and herds of tourists.

Speaking of herds, there were three or four water buffalo that had been tethered at intervals along the river bank by some farmer taking a few hours off to enjoy his Tet. One buffalo was bawling in a distressed fashion. When we got closer we saw that his rope, strung through his nostrils in the usual fashion, had gotten wrapped around a low bush and he was kneeling with his nose a foot from the bush, unable to stand up or get himself free. After a short struggle, during which he looked as nervous as I felt, I was able to untangle his rope so he could move again. The first thing he did was resume eating grass and walking slowly around and around the troublesome bush. I saw it was only a short-lived freedom I had given him, but it still must count as a good deed worth some good karma points, I figure, this new year being the Year of the Water Buffalo and all.

On the third day of Tet I was once again an honored dinner guest at the house of the father of my teacher Thu. Most Vietnamese follow the custom (now gaining popularity among Americans) of removing their shoes/sandals at the front door and slipping on house slippers/sandals so that street schmutz doesn't get tracked onto the dining room table/floormat. I'm experienced enough now to have brought my own house sandals to Thu's, but not experienced enough to remove them before sitting down to dinner. Make a note: if you sit cross-legged on a floor for any length of time, you don't want to have on your feet anything harder than a pair of socks.

At this point I have a sad confession to make. Much as I'd like to say I'm in Anthony Bourdain's league when it comes to dauntless appreciation of new foods, the truth is that even after decades of steady eating, my palate, stomach and gag reflex are still pretty much those of your average sheltered, white, American, middle-class kid raised on PB&J sandwiches, potato chips, and Kool-Aid. Although I did my best for about 30 minutes to chew, swallow, and even savor every delicacy placed in my bowl by my generous hosts, in the end the ugly American in me won out. After eating several crunchy black pork colons and two items that looked (and tasted) like strips of gristle tied in a granny knot around an Irishman's knuckle, I finally admitted out loud to my gracious hosts that I didn't really care for those dishes, just so I wouldn't have to eat any more of them.

I pedaled my bicycle back home through a light rain and light traffic. Tet has brought a brief respite from the motorized chaos of the past few weeks. The predictions I'd heard of a total shutdown in city commerce, though, were exaggerated. I've discovered that many of my favorite restaurants stayed open every day of Tet, as did many other businesses that cater to visiting tourists. Even on my street—Toy Street—which has few eateries or souvenirs shops, about 20-30% of the shops continued to open every day. I hope this isn't an indication that Vietnamese family traditions, which have survived centuries of war and decades of communism, are now starting to erode under the pressures of market capitalism.

Tet 'N Us

2009-02-05T00:00:00.002+07:00

For weeks, all of Hanoi has been in the sway of the biggest holiday of the year—Tet—which, like Christmas, is a time to decorate the home with traditional symbols (fruit-laden kumquat trees and budding peach tree branches), gather family together (some Vietnamese travel thousands of miles to rejoin relatives), exchange exuberant greetings (chuc mung nam moi!), enjoy excessive meals of seasonal dishes and delicacies (more about this later), observe devotional rituals (burn incense and offer prayers to various gods and departed ancestors), give gifts (small sums of money or something to eat, rather than consumer electronics or sports equipment), and put work on hold while you party with friends.

My colleagues were nearly unanimous in insisting I ought to leave Hanoi for Tet on the grounds that everything—schools, restaurants, shops, everything— would be shut down during this very family-oriented time, and I would die of boredom if not starvation before the city got back to normal. Following their own advice, they took off for places like Thailand and Malaysia, leaving me on my own to stock my pantry and brace for the ordeal.

The press of people jamming the streets in the runup to Tet seemed to melt away on the final day or so, a result no doubt of millions of office workers shifting into party mode and staying home from the office. My students, who are mostly office workers themselves, made a collective decision to cancel our final class before Tet in order to get a headstart on the holiday, but gave me fair warning so I could stay home, too. Then, halfway through our next to last class, they made a collective decision to cut out early, but insisted on dragging me across the street to a big restaurant in order to get a headstart on the holiday beer drinking. I don't remember everything that happened in that restaurant, but it seems to me that by the end of the evening they had all finally learned to speak English. Either that or I had learned to speak Vietnamese.

Lunar New Year's Eve found me dining alone at my favorite Italian restaurant. Or rather, dining after a fashion with two Aussie blokes at the next table who had just received a wrong pizza when I came in. They were sending it back as I sat down, but, seizing the moment, I offered to take the pizza myself, thereby solving a small problem for the restaurant, lightening the moment for the gentlemen, and eliminating a 15-minute wait for my dinner. The Aussies were sufficiently pleased by my gesture to keep up a friendly conversation with me for the next 45 minutes as we ate, and the beautiful young woman who manages the place rewarded me with a complimentary glass of wine and a complimentary tiramisu. The Aussies have since left town, but that evening may still have been the start of a beautiful friendship. I've returned to eat pizza several times since and Thai Thu, if she's reading this, will know that my visits are motivated by her company, her cooking, and least of all by the complimentary glasses of wine she continues to offer me.

Shortly before midnight I went home, grabbed my camera, and struggled through the crowd streaming down to Hoan Kiem Lake for the big fireworks display. The photos I took that night have been displayed on this blog page for over a week now. When the fireworks ended I headed home, stopping in at Nga's travel agency which was open at midnight so she could carry out a good luck ritual. Many businesses do this at the Lunar New Year. They fill a tray with offerings to the gods—vodka, beer, cigarettes, snacks, a whole cooked chicken with a rose in its beak. Then they pray and burn some fake money in a can. After midnight, they invite a lucky person to be the first person to cross their threshold in the new year, thus insuring good luck for the business throughout the year. Then they eat the luck-imbued chicken and snacks, smoke the lucky cigarettes (they should buy Lucky Strikes), and drink the lucky booze. I was only the second person of the year through Nga's doorway, but I was on hand to drink a third of a bottle of lucky vodka before staggering home around 3:00am to enjoy my first lucky drunken slumber of the lunar year.

I woke up late on Lunar New Year's Day with no ill effects from the vodka, having had the presence of mind to take several Ibuprofen the night before (experience can sometimes be as valuable as luck) and spent a relaxing day watching movies and sampling my large stockpile of Tet food.

A vacation from my vacation

2009-01-19T12:14:00.001+07:00

I've been having this dream. In the dream, I'm on vacation somewhere far to the east of Caucasia. It's winter and everybody is bundled up in parkas and woolen mufflers, yet the temperature never falls much below 50F/10C. All the women in the dream are beautiful and have, no matter what their age, the slim body of a teenage girl. They smile at me and treat me as if I were…not Brad Pitt exactly, but maybe Harrison Ford, describing me with words like 'handsome, sexy, stylish, confident'. The men, far from appearing threatened by all the female attention I attract, call me 'strong, healthy, robust, jolly' and clamor to be my friend. Little children call 'hello, hello' whenever they see me on the street.

In the dream I'm on vacation, but the vacation seems to be perpetual. I never have to go back to a job. Instead, I meet a few times a week with some of the friendly, happy young dream people and they pay me to teach them how to talk like me—pay me enough, in fact, that I can live the life of a tourist week after week: sample strange foods, explore and photograph exotic locales, soak in the strange sights and sounds of an unfamiliar place. Occasionally, as if my life weren't easy enough, I get a vacation from the vacation—like this week and next, when I don't have to do much except eat and relax. Some of my friends are going out of town, but life here is so good, I wonder why they would bother.

I float around the streets on a bicycle and—you know how dreams are—people crash all around me, but nothing bad ever happens to me. I see strange, Hieronymus Bosch kinds of images every day. I saw a man with six bushel-sized bags of something stacked on the seat of his motor bike, him perched on the back edge of the seat, lying forward on the bags to reach the distant handle bars, feet sticking out behind like twin rudders as he zoomed through the traffic.

I saw six young men the size of jockeys erect a five-story brick and concrete building in three months, working in sandals without hardhats or gloves. They had no crane, no hoist, no scaffolding, and their only power tool was a Skilsaw. They didn't even have a tub to mix their cement in. One guy would dump a bag of dry cement on the sidewalk, make a depression in the center and pour a little water into the depression from a hose. Then he'd start moistening the cement powder from the inside to the outside, adding more water as necessary and being careful to maintain a donut shape so the water wouldn't escape. When the cement was the right consistency, he'd trowel it onto a big scrap of plywood and somebody else would carefully hoist it up to the top of the building with a rope. The young men lived on the construction site 24/7 and often worked past midnight, toiling by the light of a nearby streetlamp since their only worklight was a single 40-watt bulb.

As you can see, the dream is richly detailed and often fools me into thinking I'm awake. I know it's a dream, though, because a few details give it away. In the dream, Cynthia and I are divorced and Clark is married. Also, the U.S. President is John F. Kennedy—only in the dream he's African-American and has an African/Muslim name.

Happy News Year

2009-01-15T23:24:00.000+07:00

I saw a motorbike accident today, on a crowded street near Hoan Kiem Lake. I'm sure neither driver felt too reckless going 10 miles an hour, but when they collided headon it was like each of them had hit a wall going 20. They managed not to spill onto the pavement, but one driver's bike and the other driver's hand were visibly damaged in the impact—one minute after the crash, the smashed hand was already turning black. I'm taking it as a personal caution to me to be more careful. As the Vietnamese Lunar New Year approaches, Ha Noi is filling up with people and vehicles. I'm finally seeing actual gridlock at intersections and find myself riding up on the sidewalk to bypass congestion in the street. The odds of a collision are mounting.

The solar new year, of course, was two weeks ago and I celebrated it with friends at David and Christina's house. The party included Vietnamese friends, naturally—Vietnamese students and staff from Language Link, and Vietnamese women met at a karaoke bar or disco by one or two of my more enterprising and party-oriented colleagues. In general, though, the Vietnamese made less of a fuss over the solar new year than we did. They're saving their enthusiasm for Tet.

Tet, the biggest event of the year in Vietnam. For me, it symbolizes what's so wonderful and so frustrating about being here. It's like American Christmas and New Year combined. It's a time when families sometimes travel long distances to get together, when people cook and eat the most lavish meal of the year, when children receive gifts and special attention from the adults, when businesses close their doors, when friends receive friends in their homes. The excitement builds as Tet approaches. It's the biggest event of the year, did I say that? And yet. And yet. With Tet approximately one week away, I still can't find a single person who can tell me definitively what day Tet begins. I can't fathom it. I've asked one student after another. I've asked Vietnamese staff members at Language Link. Everybody knows it's coming, but they're all a little vague about exactly when it is.

I encounter this kind of perplexing disconnect almost every day. In class last night I asked a student to think of a sentence that used the word 'but'. She came up with: 'I like rock, but I don't like yellow music.' 'What's yellow music?' I asked. 'Boring music', she replied. 'Does yellow mean boring?' 'No,' another student said, 'Yellow music is country music.' 'Yellow music is Vietnamese country music?' I asked. The room went silent. 'Is yellow music Vietnamese music?' 'It's traditional music,' somebody said. 'Vietnamese traditional music?' I persisted. Silence. 'Is yellow music Vietnamese?' I asked. I wrote the question on the board. Nothing. 'Yes?' I asked, writing the word 'Yes' as I spoke. 'No?' I asked, writing the word 'No'. Nobody said a thing. A class of students who had been noisily shouting each other down just moments earlier had been silenced by an easy yes/no question about a term they themselves had introduced. I don't get it.

I'm now working afternoons at a radio station called Voice of Vietnam. VOV does an English language news broadcast every day at 3pm and again at 8pm. The news stories are taken from one or more Vietnamese news websites and roughly (often very roughly) translated into English. My job is to correct errors of grammar and polish up the style before the stories go to air. I'm supposed to work from noon to 2pm. The edited stories then get retyped and read on the air at 3:00. What happens is that from noon to about 1:30 there is one page for me to edit…and re-edit…and polish…to a high gloss. After 1:30, pages slowly start piling up in my inbox with a sudden flurry of activity between 1:55 and about 2:15 as translators rush things to my desk for inclusion in the 3:00 broadcast. As a result, I work like a fiend from 1:45 to 2:45 (knowing with a fair certainty that I'll only get paid to 2:00). Today I said something. I said, 'Wouldn't it make more sense for me to come in at 1:00 and work until 3:00?' 'Why?' they wanted to know. 'Well, because most of the stories to be edited come to my inbox between 1:30 and 2:30.' 'You're supposed to edit them before 2:00.' 'Yes, I know, but I'm finding it hard to do that when many of them don't reach my desk until 2:00 or later.' 'Okay, come in at 12:30 and stay until 2:30.' I'm thinking, how did the policy survive unchanged until my arrival? VOV is not a brand new station, as far as I know.

I'm telling you, the Vietnamese definitely have a different slant on things. And while I'm pretty sure they have the best intentions, sometimes their effort to reassure foreigners has exactly the opposite effect, as when I read on a menu this week: OUR FOOD CONTAINS NO CHOLESTEROL, SATURATED FAT, OR BORAX.

Viet Nam vo dich!

2008-12-29T00:17:00.005+07:00

There's pandemonium in the streets of Hanoi tonight. What's going on out there right now makes Boston's celebration after the 2004 World Series look like a tea party. Vietnam won the AFF Suzuki Cup (SE Asian soccer championship) this evening. This is a very big deal, as Youke pointed out to me when she told me Charlie had scored tickets on the street and was taking her to the game.

I know that soccer (aka football) is the #1 sport everywhere in the world except for two places: Afghanistan, where the fan favorite is polo played with a human head, and the good old USA, where the favorite is a tossup between NFL football and WWF wrestling. Vietnam is partial to ping pong and badminton, but soccer is still #1 here. One of the 7 or 8 cable channels I get shows nothing but soccer 24/7. I often see people, usually men, watching this channel while they fry some fish or repair a bicycle tire in their combination living room/bedroom/workshop/retail outlet. My students often mention their interest in football. I didn't realize, though, until tonight, just how passionate this interest is.

I was sitting in my apartment around 9:00 preparing tomorrow's lesson and thinking about dinner when I heard a sudden mighty roar in the street. Instinctively, maybe because I had the soccer channel on, I thought of Youke and Charlie and the big football game that must have just ended with a Vietnam victory. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door to discover an amazing sight: my street, which is always pretty crowded up until about 10 or 11 pm when the shops close up for the night, was even more congested than usual and really noisy. Dozens of horns were blaring simultaneously, people were cheering raucously, and what most seized my attention were the red flags—hundreds of them—waving from nearly every motorbike.

I had a real struggle fighting my way through the thick crowd of slow-moving bikes to the pizza restaurant where my friend Huong waits tables. As a rule, Huong stops working between the time I appear and the time I leave. Her friends cover for her while she makes the most of another opportunity to chat me up and watch me eat. Tonight was different. She was so excited about Vietnam's football victory she barely noticed I was there. She made it clear that she was in anguish at not being able to rush into the street and join the celebrating. The TV above my table was showing the post-game awards and interviews and Huong alternated between looking at the TV and looking out the window at all the ecstatic revelers streaming past. I asked her if she had watched the game. 'No,' she said, 'I don't like football.'

I'm pretty sure the game ended before 9:00 but when I left the restaurant at 10:00 the party was just getting cranked up. I plowed back up the street to my apartment through a swarming crowd of delirious, laughing faces, chanting 'Viet Nam vo dich, Viet Nam vo dich', which means 'Vietnam can't be beat'. The street was awash in red—red Vietnam flags of all sizes, red shirts, and red headbands bearing the mantra 'Viet Nam vo dich'. A woman with a fistful of headbands tried to hand me one. When I took it from her, she started clamoring for money so I handed it back. All around me people were waving, laughing, pumping their fists, holding up a thumb or a V for victory sign. This was one happy crowd, believe me.

When I got to my apartment I grabbed my camera and headed back out. Luong Van Can street was a river of celebrants, two or three to a motorbike and five or six to a car. Everybody, it seemed was waving a flag or beating two pot lids together. On the sidewalk near Minh's Jazz Club two young men were pounding the hell out of a giant woooden drum with some heavy clubs. While I stood exchanging grins and high fives with passing people, somebody set off some firecrackers. Somebody else threw a cloud of sparkling confetti into the air. One boy whirled a long, sputtering sparkler around his head. Between snapshots, I joined in the chanting of 'Viet Nam vo dich'.

When I left the restaurant, Huong had said, 'I won't sleep tonight.' I assumed she meant because she was so excited. Now, as I sit here blogging at five minutes to midnight, with the drums, the cheering, and the firecrackers beginning to crescendo for about the tenth time since I started typing, I'm beginning to suspect she knew none of us would be able to sleep tonight for all the noise.

Now here's the punchline: all this ecstatic brouhaha has been going on for hours without being stoked to any significant degree by alcohol. Not to say nobody is drinking in celebration, but in the two hours I was spectating I saw nobody with an open container, nobody falling down, nobody being sick on their shoes, nobody trying to break anything or turn anything upside down, and nobody doing anything more foolish than banging on their mother's best cooking pot with a big metal spoon and grinning ear to ear. It's hard not to love this about the Vietnamese—when they're happy it seems to fill them up.

Christmas in Hanoi

2008-12-27T23:46:00.001+07:00

I had planned to eat Christmas dinner at the Green Mango. Several of my colleagues had tentatively committed to doing the same. But when the time came, I just couldn't summon the appetite or the energy. I walked past the entrance and kept on going until I found myself at the supermarket, where I replaced my stocks of bottled water and tissues and headed home again. I spent most of Christmas day in bed, fully clothed against a clammy chill, preparing to teach a Friday night class. In the evening I heard party sounds spilling down from De's penthouse apartment two floors above me. The party apparently had migrated to my building from the Green Mango. I expected somebody to knock on my door at any moment, but I dozed off and when I woke up everything was quiet—except for those two cats that fight a grudge match outside my bathroom window five nights out of seven. The Vietnamese have eaten all the birds in Hanoi—the only ones I've seen so far have been in cages—so I don't understand why they've allowed these two cats to live.

Whether it's my advancing age, my body's unfamiliarity with a new virus, or the ineffectiveness of Vietnamese cold and flu medicine, this flu has been the worst of my life. I'm lucky it struck at such an opportune time, when my light teaching schedule was even lighter due to holiday breaks. Most of the past two weeks I've spent lying in bed reading, dozing, and watching the predictable but exasperatingly slow evolution of my symptoms. Only twice did I have to pedal through gray, gritty streets in suit and tie, book bag on my back, to arrive at class with a sweaty torso, achy head, stuffy nose, and cottony mouth and try to give a roomful of hopeful students their money's worth.

I haven't minded being in what you might consider a Christmas backwater during the holidays. I've had my fill of the aggressively commercial form Christmas assumes in the US. For me the best part of Christmas is the heightened fellow feeling of the season and that feeling appears to be widespread all year long in Vietnam. Although they aren't Christians, Thanh offered to give me his bicycle as a Christmas gift, Thu gave me a beautiful pen and a box of green bean cakes, Van gave me a magnificent scarf to guard against the winter chills, Nga gave me bananas, tea, coffee, and vitamin C, Huong, Mai, and Linh offered to help me learn Vietnamese, and two restaurants this week have given me free pots of tea with my meal.

Hoarse opera

2008-12-21T22:41:00.005+07:00

I'm sick as a dog with the flu right now. I felt it coming on last Monday and by Tuesday I was mewling like a pup with each inbreath and blowing my nose into a tissue with every outbreath. About every 30 minutes, the nasal gushing would stop just long enough for me to enjoy a prolonged coughing jag that made my aching brain ring like a gong again and again and again until the resumption of histamine shenanigans seemed almost a relief. This has gone on day and night for five days and five nights with scarcely a let up. I've gone outside only to seek Nga's advice and stock up on tissues, water, and cold medicines.

As in the US, there's no shortage of commiseration and helpful advice around me. Several people are convinced I brought this on myself by running around in my shirtsleeves in 65-degree weather (19 Celsius). Others say it's just the inevitable result of a change of seasons. Thu advises eating a stew made of lean pork, rice and shallots. Nga concurs. They both agree that pho, which is essentially chicken noodle soup, is the wrong medicine. Several people have suggested I see a doctor. Someone always suggests that whenever you have a cold. Why? I can predict what a doctor will say and so can you. Why pay to hear it, even if it only costs $5? (Office visits are very inexpensive here. In fact, medicine is pretty inexpensive. After I paid $3 for a pocketful of antihistimines, expectorants, and antitussives, I went across the street to Le Malraux Café and paid $3.50 for a bowl of French onion soup and a pot of herb tea.)

On my way home from Le Malraux I had one of those experiences that makes living in Hanoi seem like such a wonderful dream. Walking up Hang Hom Street I passed the entrance to a little alley I'd never noticed before. The alley led deep into the interior of the block and contained several shop fronts with hanging signs visible from Hang Hom. I decided on a whim to follow the alley to see where it came out. The further I walked the more the alley narrowed and the more residential it became. About 100 feet along I discovered what appeared to be a school on the left and just beyond the school the alley took a sharp left and disappeared into a little maze of rooms where people were obviously living. Several men were crouched in the six-foot wide space where the alley ended. I nodded politely at the men and turned to go back the way I had come, but a man lounging on a motorbike (there are motorbikes in every alley, courtyard, and kitchen here) stopped me and waved for me to go on ahead.

I inched my way carefully past the crouchers, exchanging hellos, and started zigzagging through the maze, practically walking through people's kitchens and bedrooms, hearing toilets flushing on the other side of half-open windows at shoulder height, past a young man brushing his teeth at a sink, arriving at a dark tunnel clogged with people. In the dim light shining down the tunnel from the far end I could make out the forms of young people, boys wearing white shirts and red ties and girls wearing red silk costumes of some sort. They were standing in single file and giggling. There was barely enough room to get by them, but I sidled along excusing myself as I went and catching friendly looks and smiles from most of them. One girl handed me a piece of candy. When I reached the far end of the tunnel, it turned out to be a doorway onto Hang Quat Street just about opposite the Green Mango.

In the street was a smaller group of young people posing for a photographer who was standing on the sidewalk. Cars and motorbikes were honking and swerving around the obstruction. As I rounded them to make my way home, I saw they were swapping places with people in the dark alleyway and the photographer was snapping a shot of each ensemble. What it was all about I have no idea, but maybe somebody reading this blog can leave an informative comment.

I've explained why I'm hoarse, but I haven't yet explained the 'opera' reference. The Hanoi Opera House is one of the places I've been recently. I went there to see a young Russian piano prodigy, accompanied by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra, play Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto. Some photos of the Opera House have been displayed on this blog for some time, along with photos of the 2nd Hanoi International Music Festival at the American Club. After the Rachmaninoff concert, Sarah and I went across the street to the ritzy Metropole Hotel to have a nightcap in the same bar (remodeled since, I'm sure) that Graham Greene and Charlie Chaplin drank in. We nursed two pricey drinks through the set of South African jazz singer Hlulani Hlangwane who was quite fine. On December 6, I went to a Sinterklaas party in Jouke's kitchen (as you might guess, Sinterklaas is a Dutch version of Santa Claus), attended by most of the usual suspects, i.e., my CELTA group, which continues to convene once a week for lunch, each week in a different restaurant. I'm not going to include details of these events. I merely wanted to hint that my life is richer than just pedaling back and forth to class and vegetating in my apartment.

I will tell you something about one spectacle I attended. A friend of a friend's girlfriend--Lisa Carter--visited Hanoi last month and persuaded me to go the August Cinema with her to see an American action flick (Mark Wahlberg in Max Payne) 'dubbed' in Vietnamese. Often, dubbed movies can be amusing because the dubbed actors' voices don't match the on-screen actors' mouths. In the August Cinema, there are no dubbed actors' voices—just one female translator translating all the dialog in voiceover and making no effort to act. The effect is pretty annoying—like watching a movie sitting next to somebody who's talking so loud on a cell phone you can't hear the movie. Maybe I'll feel differently about the August Cinema if I ever get to the point with Vietnamese where I can understand all the hilarious mistakes I feel pretty sure are being made in the translation.

Getting adopted

2008-12-16T23:32:00.001+07:00

The chicken toes were on Friday. About midday on Sunday I was surprised by a phone call from Phuong, who was following through on that promise to find me a cheaper room (apartment, okay). I'm pretty happy where I am right now, but at the same time I'm curious to know what's to be had for $200 a month. I would also like to prolong my contact with this group of students. So I arranged to meet Phuong at St. Joseph's Cathedral at 7 pm. I picked this spot because it's a major landmark. I figured that—like the Empire State Building—the cathedral's whereabouts is known to all locals and most tourists. Wrong! Phuong called my cell phone six times between 7 and 7:30 asking me to repeat the street name, spell the street name, confirm that I was there, confirm that I was easily visible from the street, confirm that the church was near the lake, spell the street name again. I finally told him to meet me in front of the nearby KFC restaurant and we rendezvoused there five minutes later.

I climbed onto the back of Phuong's motorbike and we set out for his neighborhood. I don't know how long it would have taken me to pedal there on my bicycle, but it took 30 minutes on the motorbike. A bit drabber and dirtier than the Old Quarter, but organized along the same lines. We parked the bike in front of a ten-foot-wide photocopy shop and went in.

'This is my uncle's house,' Phuong announced. Against one wall were a couple photocopy machines, against the opposite wall an enormously heavy iron paper cutter that recalled the Spanish Inquisition. Phuong offered me a cup of tea while his aunt hurried out the front door to look for her husband. The shop was about 30 feet deep and in the back corner was a tiny spiral staircase made of concrete. Phuong motioned for me to follow him and headed up the stairs. I crouched down but had to remove my motorbike helmet to gain enough clearance to corkscrew my way up the tunnel-like stairs. We emerged into a ten-foot-square loft space that overlooked the shop. The loft contained a wide-screen TV in a cabinet and the kind of bamboo mat on the floor that, from my evening at Thu's house, I recognized as the family 'dining table'. In the back corner near the stairs was a tiny chair in front of a laptop computer on a small shelf.

The spiral stairs continued up to a higher loft where I assume the family slept. A young boy appeared down these stairs and Phuong introduced his nephew and asked him to bring me some tea. The boy left and reappeared a minute later with the news that there was no more tea. 'Would you like anything else?' Phuong asked.

'Just a cup of hot water would be fine,' I said. My throat was feeling a bit scratchy.

The boy left and reappeared with a tiny glass of tepid water, which I assume was run from the hot water tap but had been sitting in the supply pipe for a bit of time. At this point, the aunt and uncle returned and we went back down the stairs. As I snaked my way through the narrow hole, I realized that a hoist was the only practical way to get anything larger than a glass of water to or from the loft. Exiting the hole I noticed for the first time a small bathroom-sized sink and a little unvented gas cooker against the back wall. Next to the cooker was a tiny windowless lavatory. I believe these served as the family's kitchen and bathroom. Phuong had mentioned that his family was poor, but I found this visit to his uncle's home disquieting. The only window in the entire place was the curtainless plate glass looking onto the street.

Aunt and uncle now led us out of the shop, up the street, and into a narrow alley. After several turnings leading us deeper into a warren of four- and five-story houses built with no thought of delivery van access—or even Cooper Mini access—we arrived at our destination, the newly constructed home of the uncle's good friend, a professor of law at the nearby National University of Science and Humanities.

It took me some time to realize the house was new, because it was not built with new materials. Oh, I suppose the concrete was newly poured and some of the flooring was new, but the plumbing and electrical fixtures, doors, banisters, and wood frames appeared to be salvaged from a tear down. When we came in, there appeared to be a party going on. Three adult couples were sitting around a recently finished meal—at an off-the-floor dining table. On a coffee table in front of a sofa were the remains of a tea party—pot, saucers, cups, dirty ash trays.

We new arrivals were invited to sit on the sofa and have some tea. A fresh pot was brought from the kitchen and poured into the unwashed cups in front of us and while we sipped, I was introduced around the room—the law professor, his wife, mother, father, friend, and pretty daughter Dieu Linh who spoke better English than my student and immediately began helping him translate for the family.

When the teapot ran low Linh led me on a tour of the house. As I've come to expect: a staircase up the middle and on each floor one room in the front and one room in the back. The front rooms were more desirable since they had windows looking out on the street (plus a narrow balcony with no railing of any kind). The back rooms only had windows looking onto the stairwell. Linh told me with convincing sincerity and warmth that if I preferred the front room she was now sharing with her younger sister, they would gladly take the smaller, darker, back room.

Despite feeling like a character in a story about a farmer's daughter, or maybe partially because of that, I realized this rental opportunity would not budge me from my current overpriced digs. Even if it hadn't been a hour's worth of pedaling from my colleagues and favorite hangouts, it had no privacy and very little charm beyond the considerable charm of the family itself who graciously offered to share their kitchen with me, to let me share meals with them at no extra cost, to install broadband cable and buy me a TV and any other furnishings I wanted, and to let me name my own rental rate. "It's not the money," the professor said, "but the relationship that's important." Or at least that's what his daughter told me he said. She later sent me an email that began: 'I'm very exciting to talk you! this is the first time I've talked to foreigner for long hours like that.'

Lady fingers? No, chicken toes!

2008-12-16T23:16:00.002+07:00

Last Friday was the last meeting of one of my elementary level classes—four young men and women who work for the Vietnamese national tourism administration. We met in front of the school, where I returned their graded final exams; then we went to a rooftop beer garden overlooking nearby Lenin Park to eat, drink, and say our farewells.

Thinking of you, I took a few pictures for the blog before settling down to drink beer in earnest and concentrate on our Englinamese conversation—always a bit of a struggle. Among the many things we discussed was my $400 rent ($475 if you include utilities, laundry, and housekeeping). The students unanimously agreed this was extravagant and that $200 a month was closer to standard for a Hanoi apartment…except they kept saying 'room' instead of 'apartment'. To make sure there was no communication gap, I drew a picture of my apartment's bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, and terrace and even converted its estimated 400 square feet to square meters for them (a little less than 40). They said, 'Let us find you a cheaper room.' 'Cheaper apartment, you mean?' 'Cheaper apartment, okay!'

Ten minutes later I'd forgotten all about this offer because a chicken platter ordered by the students had arrived. I had ordered this same chicken platter at another restaurant with my CELTA colleagues—and deliberately hadn't ordered it again since. Instead of a mouth-watering plate of braised, seasoned, golden-brown chicken breasts, thighs and wings, what arrived was a plate of bright yellow chicken parts including every part of the chicken except those mentioned above: head, check…beak, check…knees, check…feet, check…anus, check.

About a month ago I had the (maybe not so rare in Hanoi) privilege of watching a young man at the neighboring table eat a pair of chicken feet. I expected him to nibble at the skin and then give it up for a bad job, but he surprised me by biting off the tip of each toe, crunching the bits in his mouth for a few seconds and then, hardly pausing to swallow, biting the toes off shorter and shorter as if they were the ears of a chocolate rabbit—except much crunchier. In a few minutes, the feet had completely disappeared inside him. I thought of that man of American legend who is reputed to have eaten a Buick.

Now it was my turn. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the peer pressure of four charming Vietnamese persons half my age who could scarcely speak English. But I found myself crunching chicken toes as if they were petrified shoestring potatoes. Hai Anh was horrified. 'Don't eat the bones!' she cried in alarm.

'With a chicken foot what else is there?' I wanted to know. 'I saw someone do it in another restaurant,' I added.

Phuong and Tu assured us that eating the bones was perfectly okay, but Hai Anh would have none of it. She commandeered what was left of the chicken feet and put it out of my reach. So I can't truthfully say I've eaten a chicken foot…but I can claim to have scarfed down a few chicken toes.

Living the life of Rải Ly

2008-12-14T18:17:00.003+07:00

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.)

Bac on line

2008-12-11T22:36:00.002+07:00

Bac—the Vietnamese word for 'uncle'—is what Thu, my Vietnamese tutor, calls me. More about Thu, later.

When I left off blogging back in October, Hanoi had gone from hot and humid to mild and humid. Now, six weeks later, it's even milder here and somewhat less humid. The locals call this season mua dong (winter) and dress accordingly. Everywhere you look you see people in sweaters, hats, mufflers, warm coats, sporting the traditional layered look of mid-December. In fact, Christmas decorations are going up in the bigger stores and hotels. Shops all over my neighborhood are bursting with artificial Christmas trees, ornaments, and plastic battery-operated Santas dancing the hokey-pokey. All in all, there's way more of a yuletide look than you might expect from a tropical Buddhist country. The thing is, though, the daytime temperatures here are still in the seventies (between 21 and 26 Celsius). It's currently 77F/25C in Hanoi. At night, the mercury drops no lower than 52F/11C. I'm still going about in my shirt sleeves, eliciting comments from people about how strong and healthy I must be to withstand the cold weather without a coat.

Now that the weather has relaxed its sweaty grip on me, I can truthfully say I'm settling comfortably into my apartment in Luong Van Can street, and into my life as an expat English teacher in Hanoi. Yes, as many of you have guessed, I've begun my teaching career. I have a six-month contract with Language Link and have taken over two corporate classes from a departing teacher named Patrick.

Corporate classes are contracted by Vietnamese companies who want to give their employees an opportunity to improve their English. Theoretically, the emphasis in these classes is on language that will be useful in the work place: 'Could we reschedule our meeting for Monday?', 'Put together some sales figures and fax them to me', 'markup', 'conference call', 'glass ceiling'…that sort of thing. In reality, most classes—my classes, at any rate—are at a much more elementary level: 'How old as you?', 'I am very happiness to meet you', 'We will sightseeing a sunset.'

Since the company pays for the class, corporate students are less motivated to attend than students who are paying their own fees. One of my classes meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 5 to 7 PM. The students come to Language Link straight from work on their motorbikes. Not surprisingly, only four or five of the 20 enrolled students show up on an average day and it's rare that anybody arrives on time. The other class meets from 2:30 to 4:30 Mondays and Fridays in one of the company's own conference rooms. Since the class is during office hours, you'd think most of the 20 enrollees would jump at a chance to miss a couple hours of work and still get paid, but only three or four show up for this class and one or two of those usually get a call on their cell phone halfway through the class and head back to their office to put out a fire.

I have to say, though, that the ones who show up are delightful students—warm, cheerful, cooperative, and eager to learn. I enjoy being in their company and I enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways to improve our communication together. In the next few weeks, I'll try to paint a more detailed picture of what our classes are like.

Da Lat whine

2008-10-27T23:18:00.002+07:00

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.

Visiting Day

2008-10-26T16:33:00.004+07:00

My 72 hours in Dalat went by quickly. I spent the last drizzly day visiting Bao Dai's palace (actually more of a big art deco villa) and the "Crazy House" (a cross between the Winchester Mystery House and the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House). Check out some of the hundreds of pictures I took before my camera lens fogged up.

More interesting to me than visiting these tourist sites was meeting Xuan and Thinh. Xuan is a waitress I met when I stopped at a tiny hole-in-the-wall café for a ca phe den (black coffee). Some very interesting music was coming out of the CD player in the corner—a very French-sounding pop tune with a lush, jazz saxophone accompaniment, the kind of music I seek out when I have access to satellite radio, but which I haven't heard since I arrived in Viet Nam. I was carrying my Vietnamese-English dictionary, so I looked up a couple key words and asked Xuan about the music. She pulled the CD from the changer and let me write the name of the artist in my notebook.

Later on, as I was returning from Bao Dai's palace, I got caught in a downpour and ducked into the same café to dry out a bit and wait out the rain. For about 15 minutes I was the only customer, so Xuan and I were able to have an interesting—albeit confusing—conversation, with the dictionary doing a lot of the talking. Then Xuan's husband Thinh arrived with several friends. If Xuan was warm and friendly, Thinh was effusive. He had no English but, having spent four years working in Germany, addressed me in broken German. When I responded in my own rudimentary German, Thinh sat down next to me, leaned into me, put one hand on my shoulder and the other on my knee, and made it clear I was his new best friend. I can't tell you all the things we talked about, but we laughed a lot and felt we understood each other well by the time the rain stopped.

That evening, while taking pictures on the street, I ran into the students Thanh and Chi. Thanh surprised me by asking if they could come back to my hotel room with me. I know what most of you are thinking, but there's a very good chance you're wrong. First of all, these young women were extremely polite and shy. Second, they couldn't fail to notice that, as handsome and sexy as I am, I'm obviously of their grandfathers' generation. Third, they mentioned to me that they were devout Christians. And fourth, they never once made a move toward my zipper. I wasn't taking any chances, though. I begged off without asking them to specify why they wanted to come home with me.

Back in Hanoi only a few hours, I received back-to-back invitations from my friend/chief advisor Thanh and my former student/Vietnamese tutor Thu. The next day I got to eat not one, but two, meals in a Vietnamese home.

Late Saturday morning, Thanh picked me up on his motorbike and drove me to his home in the southern Thanh Xuan district of Hanoi. Thanh's home is spacious, modern, and comfortable—approximately the same size and footprint as the World Hotel with the same high ceilings. On a common Vietnamese design, the house is one room wide, two rooms deep and connected by an elegant, curving staircase. There are family portraits and travel souvenirs decorating the walls, a stuffed animal collection in daughter Mai Chau's bedroom, and piles of sandals by every door, but a remarkable absence of the kind of clutter that characterizes most American homes—no piles of books, newspapers, magazines, letters, bills, tools, toys, pencils, and so on covering countertops, tabletops, desktops, and chairs.

The house is on a narrow, quiet backstreet lined with similar, prosperous-looking houses. Thanh's brother Lan lives in the house next door. Lan and his wife Ha and daughter Linh joined us for lunch. Thanh's wife Huong (who used to teach cooking classes) prepared some delicious nem (spring rolls) stuffed with crab. Ha prepared some bun cha. Without doing it justice, really, let me explain that bun cha is a wonderful combination of mixed salad greens, cold rice noodles, and charcoal grilled meatballs of seasoned pork, eaten together with a delicate sauce and sliced cucumbers. Yum! I lost some cred as a cultural ambassador when I declined the shot of vodka Thanh poured me before the meal began. But I did drink my share of the beer. And exchanged a few words of French with Thanh's father, who I believe said he was 92. I enjoyed every minute of my short visit and advanced my meager knowledge of Vietnamese, thanks to patient explanations from Thanh and his sister Hanh, who was also on hand.

Before I left on a xe om, Huong packed a dozen or so of the nem for me to take home and also insisted that I line the motorbike helmet with a sheet of newspaper. (You never know who's head has been in the helmet before yours or what microscopic critters they've deposited there.)

After putting my nem in the fridge, running a few errands in the neighborhood, and putting on a fresh shirt, I headed off on another xe om to Dong Da district to eat dinner with Thu's family. By the time I arrived, it was dark and seemed to have have grown hotter. I took a wrong turn and walked a block or two in the wrong direction. By the time I got turned around my fresh shirt was soaked through, front and back. Thu lives on Pho Trung Liet, a very narrow alley, dimly lit and crossed by a malodorous canal. Along the way I passed, in addition to the odd convenience store or beauty salon, several open doors with somebody watching TV from a hard-looking bed just a foot or two from the street. When I reached the address Thu had given me, I found a sliding metal gate like the one protecting my apartment building and most of the stores in Hanoi. When I knocked Thu came down and let me into a room containing about six motorbikes. Through a door in the back was a room containing a platform bed and little else. Off to one side was a cement staircase. I removed my shoes and went upstairs.

Thu's family home is quite a contrast to Thanh's house. I wasn't offered a tour, but what little I saw makes me feel confident I could rent their house—or one like it—for less than I'm paying for my little one-bedroom apartment on Luong Van Can. I was introduced to Thu's brother and father, who invited me to sit on a wooden sofa with him. Thu soon joined us on this sofa, which was really just a bench—wood slats with no cushions. (By the end of the evening it would feel to me like petrified wood.) The room also contained a small TV in a large cabinet against the wall, a wooden sleeping platform in one corner, a coffee table next to the bench, and a couple chairs. The only wall decorations were three calendars and a broken clock.

Thu's father is a veteran of the American War (i.e., the Vietnam War). He was wounded in combat, receiving damage to one eye, and is now retired on a veteran's disability at the age of 55. Two of his brothers were killed in the war. He shook my hand warmly when he told me these things and made a point of adding that the war is over now and what is past is past. With Thu translating, we discussed politics for a few minutes. Thu's father, like every other Vietnamese I've discussed politics with, likes Obama, loves Bill Clinton, has contempt for Bush, and doesn't really care about McCain. After a while, we were joined by Thu's grandmother—a delightful, smiling woman of 83—who was tickled that I greeted her in Vietnamese. She showed me a scar on her foot that she got as a girl during the war to free Viet Nam from the French and described seeing Ho Chi Minh in person once at a market.

We sat drinking green tea for some time and then Thu announced it was time for dinner and we all stood up. Thu seemed to be waiting for me to take the lead, but there was only confusion on my part when she led me over to the TV. I almost stepped on an overturned basket on the floor and didn't realize until Thu lifted the basket to reveal a tray of food that dinner was to be eaten sitting on the woven mat beneath the TV. We all sat down cross-legged on the floor and tucked into enormous bowls of fried shrimp, sliced pork, puffy squares of tofu, and shredded beef with steamed morning glory stems. Thu's father kept refilling my glass with wine—a Russian sparkling wine that tasted to me like watered sherry. He also kept popping more shrimp and pork and tofu into my bowl whenever it started running low. I warned him that I was a light eater and was getting full, but he pointed out that this was a "special meal" (because of me, I suppose) and tradition called for me to eat everything in sight. I did my best but of course my participation in the meal ended with my bowl still full to the brim with shrimp, pork, and tofu.

I kept wondering where the rice was. It turned out to be in a big pot behind grandma the whole time. Apparently, during normal meals the rice is eaten with the meat and vegetables, but during special meals it's held back and eaten last. I would have liked to have some rice, but by this point I was too full. When the food was cleared and we were back on the bench, however, I discovered I still had enough room to eat 9 or 10 big pieces of canteloupe and pineapple. This was a sticky business and I ended up with pineapple juice all over my hands. Seeing my discomfort, Thu's father handed me a wet rag to wash up with, but this rag left my hands stickier than ever. I asked Thu if I could wash my hands and she said "Yes, of course," and said something else in Vietnamese to her brother, who disappeared into the next room and returned with a basin of water for me to wash my hands in. To dry my clean hands I was offered the same rag as before. Oh, well.

I arrived at Thu's house at 7:00 and left at 10:30. It must have been exhausting for Thu to have to translate everything everybody said for three and a half hours, but she appeared tireless. When I finally got up to go, her grandmother said with evident delight that this was the first time she had been able to talk to a foreigner. I was prepared to take a xe om home, but Thu wouldn't hear of it and made her brother give me a ride back to Luong Van Can.

Arriving back in my street, I found myself feeling a little euphoric from all the beer, wine, and hospitality I'd been enjoying all day long. The Jazz Club was right in front of me and it was Saturday night, so I stopped in for a beer. The club was about half full—maybe 40-50 customers—and the mood was mellow: the band was doing a sensuous version of The Girl from Ipanema. While I sipped a $3 beer the female vocalist took a break and the band shifted gears into an uptempo number that soon had me grooving. It wasn't the Yellowjackets, but it was definitely jazz. Oh yeah! This was my best day so far in Vietnam.

I like it, Da Lat

2008-10-23T11:03:00.002+07:00

Fresh air with a scent of pine trees! Puffy white clouds against a stark blue sky! A cool breeze raising goose flesh on bare arms! I'm in Da Lat—Viet Nam's answer to…what?…Lake Tahoe?…Jackson Hole, maybe…although there are no casinos, no power boats, and no ski lifts. Da Lat has been compared to Niagara Falls—it's a popular destination for Vietnamese honeymooners and there are several waterfalls nearby. For me it's a mecca of blessed relief from the heat and humidity of Hanoi. I've come to enjoy a few days of R & R before I get down to work.

I've was curious about Da Lat even before I arrived in Hanoi. The last emperor of Vietnam Bao Dai had his summer palace here. The surrounding region is known for lakes, waterfalls, and wine production. It enjoys milder temperatures, lower humidity, cleaner air, lower living costs, and far less crowding than Hanoi. It's been a university town since 1957. Hanoi has its charms but I can't help wondering if Da Lat might not be a better fit for the likes of me, ergo this visit is secondarily a scouting expedition.

Da Lat's xe om drivers naturally assume a Westerner can only be here to see the tourist sights, but I've been a disappointment to them. I've been content so far to explore Da Lat on foot, revelling in the fresh air and marvelling at how Western the place feels. There's a contour to the town that's in stark contrast to the rice paddy flatness of Hanoi. To encourage the illusion of being in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, I ordered a humburger yesterday—my first humburger in Vietnam. I have to say it spoiled the illusion a bit. The burger looked authentic, but in place of a beef patty I found some kind of jasmine-scented mystery-meat paté. The fries weren't bad, though.

When I arrived Tuesday morning after a two-hour flight from Hanoi I checked into the first hotel I found, the Tan Anh. The room I got for $12 a night was spacious, with two double beds and a fine view from the balcony. What I mainly wanted, though, was a secure place to store my bags while I scouted around for a charming bargain hotel. (Security at the Tan Anh turned out to be marginal. Twice I came back to find the front desk deserted and had to help myself to my room key.)

After a nap, I picked up a tourist map and started making the rounds of hotels in Da Lat's city center. There was quite a choice of luxury accommodations in the $60-$260 range and an even wider range of budget hotels. Most of them appeared totally guestless, prime tourist season having come and gone already, so I was in a good position no doubt to bargain, but when I was offered a price of $10 a night for the best room at the charming Thang Loi Hotel I didn't haggle. After exploring a bit more and grabbing a bite to eat, I went back to the Tan Anh to shower and relax.

While checking my email I heard a haunting female voice singing somewhere outside my window. When I went to explore I discovered the music was blasting from the top floor of a nearby luxury hotel. I took the elevator up to what turned out to be a tiki lounge cum karaoke bar, but by the time I got there, the female vocalist had been replaced by a young man in a tight limegreen shirt and white sansabelt slacks singing My Way. His way turned out to be a long way from the key the band was playing in.

After sansabelt sat down, the band turned out to be way more interesting doing instrumentals. The band comprised Yamaha synth, tambourine, drummer playing a cymbal and two hand-carved wooden drums with very heavy sticks, a woman wearing a brocaded white sweater and a white harvest moon headdress playing something similar to a Japanese koto, and the lead man who played some crazy solos on an instrument I've never seen before. It appeared to consist of one string strung on a horizontal sounding board. Standing vertically at one end of the sounding board was what looked like a long black quill which served both as a tremolo arm and as a pitch selector. The dude playing it looked like Fu Manchu in a dark blue robe with big silver polka dots and a matching hat shaped like a deep-dish pizza (about a 9-inch pie). The music had a pronounced Oriental flavor but at one point I thought I recognized the melody of an old Eagles tune. The sensation was not unlike eating a jasmine-scented humburger with fries.

I hung around until sansabelt came back onstage, then returned to the Tan Anh and grabbed my room key from the pile sitting on the deserted reception desk. The next morning I moved into the Thang Loi.

The Thang Loi is not one of your ten-foot wide hotels. It's a big, rambling old hotel with a boarding house feel. I'm the only guest on the second floor and very possibly the only guest in the hotel. After settling in I headed to the other side of the lake to pay a visit to the Da Lat Foreign Language School. This turned out to be a complete and utter delight. Ben Lavarack, the human resources manager, wasn't around but I got a tour of the school from the administrative manager, a charming young woman named Thuy. The school is cozy, comfortable, intimate, and meticulously ordered. It feels like something between a Montessori school and a houseboat. I loved it and am already giving serious thought to applying for a job there sometime in the future. There are some good reasons to serve a tour in Hanoi first, though. I'll keep you posted on developments.

On my way back to the Thang Loi I stopped to watch some little remote controlled boats zipping around Xuan Huong Lake. While I was snapping pictures two young women spotted me, crossed the road, stood near me for a minute or two, then hazarded a conversational opening. Chi and Thanh are third year students at Da Lat University. They wanted to practice their English and we had a long, enjoyable chat. I've had similar encounters with waiters, xe om drivers, street vendors, and hotel clerks. You get the feeling social isolation in Vietnam can only be by personal choice.

Pre-dawn departure

2008-10-22T13:52:00.005+07:00

At 4:00 am Tuesday morning I let myself quietly out of my apartment to catch a taxi to Noi Bai airport. I had prearranged (and prepaid) the cab ride a couple days earlier with a neighborhood travel agent named Nga, who had smiled indulgently at my paranoia in wanting to leave so early for the airport. It's only a 45-minute cab ride, after all, and my flight wasn't leaving until 6:00 am. But if I learned nothing else from twenty years as a computer consultant, I learned this: paranoia is good. Paranoia is cheap insurance.

At 4:00 am Hanoi's streets are as quiet as they're going to get, but there's still a surprising amount of activity: small knots of men smoking cigarettes and conversing in low voices, bands of teenagers roaring up and down the street on motorbikes, old women headed who knows where, and here and there a street kitchen still serving bowls of chicken feet to hungry night owls. I set my travel bag and laptop back in the shadows to minimize temptation for the motorbike gangs and waited. Several taxis cruised past, but none of them stopped. I saw a motorscooter transporting a headless pig. About 200 pounds of pale meat was sprawled on its spine in the footwell, cantilevered hindfeet inches from the pavement on one side and forefeet jutting out perilously close to the street on the other side.

When I'd waited 15 minutes with no pickup, I used my mobile phone to call the taxi number Nga had given me. Somebody answered and said something in Vietnamese. I explained my situation in English. They replied something in Vietnamese and hung up. So I called my emergency number—Nga's mobile phone—and woke up Nga. While I was explaining the situation to her, a Morning Taxi cab pulled up directly in front of me. "Oh, wait...here's a cab now. Would you make sure the driver understands that the fare has been prepaid?" I handed my mobile to the driver who had a brief conversation with Nga and handed it back. "Airport?" he asked. "Vâng (yes)," I replied. He helped me load my bags into the cab and we started for the airport.

Da Lat was still over 900 miles away, but already the air was starting to feel cooler to me as we sped through the dim streets, silent now except when the driver leaned on his horn—not so much, I believe, to warn the occasional lone motorbike we passed as to wake up any layabed who might be trying to sleep on the driver's shift. As we were crossing the river, my mobile phone rang. It was Nga. "Does your cab say Noi Bai Taxi on the side?" she asked me. "No," I told her. "It says Morning Taxi."

"I arranged the pickup with Noi Bai Taxi. Their driver just called and is waiting in front of your apartment."

"I thought you confirmed everything on the phone with this driver."

"Yeah. He tricked you."

"He tricked me?"

"Yeah. He tricked us both. He told me he was with Noi Bai Taxi. What do you want to do? Do you want me to talk to him?"

I glanced at my watch. It was almost 5:00. "No. Let's leave it alone until he's gotten me to the airport." I had been wondering why the driver had switched on his meter when we started out. Now in my head I start running through a scenario where I'm counting down the minutes to takeoff while explaining to a non-English-speaking policeman why I'm refusing to pay the taxi driver who delivered me to the airport.

A minute later the driver pulls onto the shoulder, rolls up behind a stopped taxi, and sits there idling his engine. Now what the hell…? A woman in a conical bamboo hat steps out of the shadows, walks around to the driver's window, and sells him some kind of ticket. He pulls back onto the highway. A minute later we arrive at a toll booth where the driver hands the ticket he just bought from a roadside vendor to the toll taker, who tears the ticket and returns the stub. The mysterious Orient!

At the airport it's clear the driver is hoping for some cash, but instead I write out the name, address, and phone number of the travel agency and do my best to get him to understand that he'll have to collect his money from them. To my surprise, he takes the piece of paper I've given him and leaves without an argument. A good thing because the airport is crowded and I reach my gate only 5 minutes before boarding begins. While we're boarding I get another call from Nga. "Did you pay the driver?" she asks me.

"No," I say. "I paid him nothing."

"He just came back to the agency and asked to be paid."

"Are you going to pay him?"

"No," she said. "I'm not. He's a tricker."

Green Mango, Blue Tango

2008-10-22T00:43:00.002+07:00

I'm not so sure about my new neighborhood. It's ground zero for tourists and the people who live off them--hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, travel agencies, taxi drivers, con artists, pickpockets, prostitutes, beggars, and itinerant vendors of everything from pineapples to stolen watches. I'm a resident now but indistinguishable from the tourists, so I'm getting approached, pitched, and harangued every minute I'm on the street. It's starting to make me a bit surly. In seven days my response has evolved from 'No, thank you'…to 'No!'…to 'No way, Jose!'…to 'Hell no!'…to the only response that's at all effective but which makes me unhappy I have to resort to it: acting as if the other person is a figment of their own imagination.

On Saturday night I joined Jouke, Imran, and Imran's wife Amy for dinner at a sushi restaurant in my old neighborhood. After dinner we went to a party at the Green Mango, which turned out to be just around the corner from my new apartment. In fact, when I was hunting for incense the other day I walked right past the Green Mango without seeing it. It's another one of those tall, narrow hotels that grow all over Hanoi, but this one is quite posh and deep and it opens up in the back into a big party room with a stage, where on this night a live band was pulling in several hundred of the same people I saw at the American Club the week before. I also ran into Taylor, a Samoan with an Aussie accent who lives in my apartment building and whom I'd met in the hallway just that morning. Hanoi is starting to seem rather a small place in some ways.

In an earlier blog I mentioned wandering around the Old Quarter and chancing upon Hanoi's Jazz Club. The Jazz Club, it happens, is a few doors up the street from my apartment. At one point Saturday evening I decided to sneak out of the party at the Green Mango and wander down to the corner to see what happens on a Saturday night at the Jazz Club.

The Jazz Club is a big cavern fairly open to the street. It features live music seven nights a week with no cover charge. Pricey drinks, understandably, but not too outrageous—about $2 for a beer and $4 for a mixed drink. The place wasn't exactly mobbed last Saturday, but there were a couple dozen people listening to some mellow sounds from a Vietnamese quartet. Not a great band, but altogether more my kind of scene than the high-decibel, standing-room-only crush of the dance party up the street. I made a mental note to come back soon and then detoured toward my apartment to pick up my camera to get some snaps of my friends at the Green Mango.

Suddenly, once again, I'm catching a pitch from a neighborhood entrepreneur—this time from a young woman (in her 30's I think) selling massages. It's about 11:00 and the street has slowed down, but there are still quite a few people about. To make sure I'm not confused about what kind of massage she's talking about, the woman takes the liberty of massaging the front of my pants once or twice. I tell her I'm not interested at the moment (I already have an agenda that involves my camera and my friends at the Green Mango), so she insists on writing her name and phone number for me so I can call her the next day. I tell her I'm going out of town for a few days (true), but will hang on to the number.

She wants to know where I'm going. (Every Hanoi salesperson wants to know this and also what your immediate plans are, presumably so they can show you how perfectly your plans and theirs coincide.) I tell her I'm going home and in fact I'm already there. While she's been previewing the massage, we've covered the 30 paces to my place. I tell her goodnight, try to reassure her I might phone--without making any promises--and slip into the alleyway that leads to my front door. She doesn't need any more encouragement than a dimly lit alley way. Despite my perhaps too polite protests, she follows me to my door, all the while escalating her sales pitch. She indicates, in broken English accompanied by body language that leaves no doubt whatsoever about her meaning, that she's prepared to deliver the massage on the spot and the price is completely up to me. To overcome my sales resistance, she embraces me in a more than sisterly fashion, kisses me on the neck, and unzips my pants--about three times, I think--as I continue to bid her goodnight, assure her that I'll keep her in mind for the future, fumble with my keys, re-zip my pants, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the padlock securing the sliding outer gate, slide open the gate, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the inner door, re-zip my pants, step into the foyer, taking care that she doesn't slip inside with me, check my wallet and cell phone again, close and padlock the outer gate, and tell her goodnight as I close the inner door.

The last thing I need is to acquire an STD while living in a place where getting cured of athlete's foot can be a dodgy undertaking. That consideration and perhaps that consideration alone kept this story from having a happier ending. The woman was physically attractive by any objective standard and made more so in my eyes by the sake and beer I had just consumed and the oath I've sworn against exposing myself to any sexual relationship that might be construed as meaningful. The truth is that for the very first time since I arrived in Hanoi I found the Vietnamese sales pitch that doesn't want to take no for an answer to be not unequivocably repugnant and I went up to my lonely apartment feeling a bit wistful.

I waited long enough for her to have latched onto another sales prospect and let myself back out. As I did so, I suddenly remembered the construction workers who sleep in the newsstand. Even with no English, they probably were able to follow the titillating radio comedy that had transpired on the other side of their plastic tarp. I'm amazed none of them snickered.

Polls apart

2008-10-18T14:12:00.002+07:00

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.

Autumng in Hanoi

2008-10-16T14:17:00.002+07:00

I explained to you the difficulty Thanh and I had agreeing on the pronunciation of 'khong', the Vietnamese word for 'no'. I sincerely hope Thu can help me resolve this problem, because it's really starting to bug me. My new address is 43A Luong Van Can and when I pronounce the name of my street xe om drivers look at me like I'm a Kalahari bushman. I know it's that 'ng' sound. I had exactly the same difficulty while tracking down an incense (huong) shop today. Every time I said 'huong', I drew blank stares. But when I displayed the written word everybody would say "Ah…huong!" and pronounce the word—to my ears—exactly the same way I just said it. It's maddening. If I had any hair left, I might pull out a few strands in frustration.

I did eventually locate an incense shop. It wasn't on a street full of incense shops and incense makers as I half expected, but it WAS far from any street where you could buy a censer of any description or any kind of iron or brass bowl suitable for burning incense. Vietnamese merchants have a very compartmentalized way of thinking, it seems to me.

Autumn has arrived in Hanoi and I'm grateful. That doesn't mean I'm comfortable (except in rare moments). It doesn't mean my prickly heat rash has cleared up or that I don't turn on the AC the minute I walk in my door. But my shirts now just get damp instead of sopping wet during the day and sweat no longer drips off my nose onto the menu when I stop off for a bite. My former student Huyen—I interviewed her for one of my CELTA assignments—has been emailing me since the course ended and she describes the Hanoi autumn very poetically: she says the autumn shine is honey colored and the wind is cool as fresh beer. Not bad, huh? She closed that email by saying "Now my eyes are calling me to go to bed."

My eyes are giving me a bit of a shout out right now, so I'll close this with a list of some of the items available from the menu at Café Nhan:

Snack……………………….......…10.000VND
Fast food frozen food…………20.000VND
Sand wishes with fish
Humburgers with beef cake
Sour meat soap
Rousted chicken
Violet blutinous rice

And on the drink menu:
Yoghurt vitamin coffee
Maragitta
Grasoper
Tequila Sun Rice

Whoops! The power just went out in my apartment. Except for the glow from my battery-powered laptop, everything is pitch-black. Do I have a flashlight, candles, or a cigarette lighter? No, no, and no. I think it's time I went to bed.

Incensed

2008-10-16T13:58:00.002+07:00

Café Nhan is my new hangout. It's the closest spot with free Wifi I can depend on—until closing time, anyway. The café nestles in the bend of a quiet L-shaped backstreet full of tiny cafés and small hotels. Its three floors, connected by narrow staircases at each end of the café, include both indoor tables and outdoor tables, some downstairs on the brick terrace adjoining the street, some upstairs on narrow little balconies overlooking the terrace. I'm usually there in the evening, but I went down there first thing this morning to send an email to Thu, one of my CELTA course students who has offered to tutor me in Vietnamese.

After an iced coffee and a quick email session, I packed up my laptop and headed back to the apartment and then suddenly remembered I had intended to get some incense to counter the rather strong dog odor that seeps into the apartment whenever Kiki is hanging out in the living room below. I had looked in several souvenir shops earlier with no luck so now I asked somebody. A young woman with fairly good English directed me to the nearest Buddhist temple. "They'll give you incense for free!" she enthused.

"I'd like to buy some to burn at home," I explained. "I need a shop that sells incense and incense holders…and matches."

She didn't know of such a shop but thought a Buddhist monk might know. She offered to write a note in Vietnamese explaining what I wanted and I let her write one in my notebook. "What does it say?" I asked.

"It's written in a very particular way," she warned me. "Don't show it to anybody but a monk. They'll think you're…" She couldn't think of a suitable word.

"Crazy?" I suggested. She didn't look as if that was the word she was looking for, but she accepted it with a nod. I thanked her and hurried off to Ba Da pagoda, just a couple blocks away.

Ba Da turned out to be small and unassuming as temples go. There seemed to be nobody about except a young man in the forecourt hand-painting signs or posters of some sort. He didn't look like a monk, so I circled the temple looking for one. In a room off a back passageway I saw a young man with a shaved head slumped on a desk fast asleep. I thought he might wake up if I stared at him, but he didn't. I poked my head through a few other doorways that looked out of bounds before I discovered a monk sitting in a small room on a wooden sofa. He waved me away with his hand, but I waved back at him with my notebook until his curiosity got the better of him and he came to take a look.

The monk, a man about forty years old clad in shorts but no shirt, read my message several times and seemed puzzled by it, which puzzled me. I tried repeating a couple of the key words: 'huong' (incense) and 'o dau' (where?) but that didn't seem to help him at all. He gestured for me to wait, disappeared behind a partition, and reappeared moments later dressed to go out. He grabbed me by the sleeve and started for the front gate. I thought he meant to take me to an incense shop. After a few steps, though, he stopped, turned around and led me back to the room where I had found him.

He escorted me inside and had me sit beside him at a small desk upon which he placed my notebook and the tourist map I was carrying. Switching on a desk lamp he proceeded to examine the map with great intensity. Then he wrote into my notebook what appeared to me to be a list of all the Buddhist temples within a twenty block radius. I didn't see exactly how this was going to help me, but I thanked him several times in Vietnamese and backed, bowing politely, out of the room.

I thought the episode was concluded, but no. He followed me out into the passageway holding a key in his hand. Hurrying past me, he unlocked a padlock securing a side door of the temple and ushered me into the temple where he spent a few moments switching on lights within and around the shrine, which featured four banks of large Buddha figures gazing down at a wooden prayer platform. Grasping a large bundle of incense sticks, he drew out three pencil-thick sticks and handed them to me. If he had hesitated, I would have thanked him again and left with the free incense, but he immediately picked up a box of wooden matches and struck a flame. I fanned out the sticks of incense, but he impatiently took them back, and holding them in a tight bundle, lit all three from the same match. He didn't mess around. He had a nice big flame eating up the ends of the sticks before he blew it out with a quick wrist snap and stuck the sticks one by one into holes in a nearby grate.

The monk nodded at the platform, so I slipped off my shoes, set down my laptop case, and stepped onto the platform. At the front of the platform was a foot-high wooden lectern with a dozen long incense burns across its top. I sat down cross-legged here and closed my eyes. The monk left me a minute later, but before he left he did one more curious thing: he picked up my laptop case and set it on the platform beside me. Then he picked it up a second time and set it directly in front of me, leaning against the lectern. I had no idea if he was safeguarding the laptop against temple thieves, satisfying some idiosyncratic penchant for symmetry, or following some feng shui-type cosmic precept.

I meditated there peacefully for about 30 minutes, hearing in the distance some Buddhist chanting which I took to be a recording, but who knows? Then I stood up, turned off the lights, and let myself out. Maybe I'll go looking for an incense shop again tomorrow.

My new digs

2008-10-14T22:11:00.003+07:00

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!

Why I love Hanoi

2008-10-14T22:09:00.000+07:00

Have I mentioned yet that I'm falling in love with Hanoi? Oh, there's plenty here to frustrate and annoy you, just as there always is when you fall in love with a person, but the compensations Hanoi offers are numerous and beguiling. Like Paris, a city near the top of many people's favorite city list, including mine, Hanoi is built on a human scale, its oldest and most central area rising to no more than five or six stories except for here and there a modern skyscraper serving as a landmark and navigational aid. No concrete canyons blotting out sun and sky in this city.

Despite the crazy traffic, Hanoi's a very walkable city. Once you gain a little faith in the system you find yourself stepping out into the path of oncoming motorbikes with a carelessness you once would have thought impossible and wading confidently through the honking swarm with your senses alert but your mind mostly on other matters. Like Paris, Hanoi is a well-orchestrated balance of wide boulevards connected by smaller—tiny, even—streets and alleyways. Instead of segregated rich/poor neighborhoods, you find upscale shops and salons rubbing elbows everywhere with grubby soup kitchens and corner grocery/bait shops.

I'm sorry I wasn't here ten years ago. I was told by an American who WAS here back then that you saw very few automobiles in the streets and bicycles outnumbered the motorbikes. Back then people traveling together or with baggage hired cyclos—those big tricycles with a bench seat in the back and a cyclo driver up front pedaling and steering. Nowadays the few remaining cyclos mostly just provide tour rides for package tourists stopping at one of the big tourist hotels. Still, from my point of view, it's a big plus today that two-wheeled vehicles far outnumber four-wheeled ones. Autos generally have to find parking off the street. One of the things that makes Hanoi so walkable is that the curbs are not lined with parked cars and parking meters. You can cross a street anywhere.

I also like the culture of xe om in which you can quickly grab a ride anywhere you happen to be—cheaply and without a phone call. The driver's costs are minimal (bike, 2 helmets, gas) and the price is strictly and patently a matter of supply and demand, where the supply seems inexhaustible.

Hanoi's low cost of living is one of its charms that lured me here in the first place, but it's one that's deceptive. It's possible to live ridiculously cheaply here, but once you begin seeking out the comforts of home instead of looking for replacement comforts, you can quickly find yourself paying MORE to recreate your old life in Hanoi than it would have cost you to stay home. For the equivalent of $5-$10 I'm sure you can buy as much food here as you have strength to carry home from the market. The problem is recognizing it as food when you see it and figuring out what the hell to do with it when you get it home. To me it looks like a bunch of noxious weeds, tree roots, and the contents of Uncle Frank's bug-zapper. But fill up your shopping basket just one time with more familiar fare like Spanish olives, salted cashews, Edam cheese, virgin olive oil, and Fuji apples and you'll be longing for the low, low prices at the Whole Earth store in Palm Springs.

As time goes by I discover more and more of those special little cafes, park bench views, unique architectural flourishes, and romantic tree-shaded streets that make you fond of living in a place. And then there's the people. I'll save my elegy on the Vietnamese for another time and just mention—I may have already—that no teacher I've talked to here who has taught elsewhere would trade their Vietnamese students for any other students in the world.

Turning 60

2008-10-13T23:07:00.002+07:00

StarBowl was, in fact, able to fit me with bowling shoes—more or less. (I think they keep a box of oversized clown shoes for Americans who might show up.) You wouldn't be able to distinguish StarBowl in Hanoi from any similarly named bowling alley in America—except for the eel soup being served in the bar and a complete lack of league schedules on the walls. Naturally, it was robot-dancing Nam—in a bowling alley for just the second time in his life—who bowled high game Saturday night, easily surpassing the anemic scores of the three Americans present. Nam's accomplishment may have been partly beginner's luck and partly a result of being unused to air-conditioned bowling alleys, which this one definitely wasn't. Every time I picked up my ball, a stream of sweat ran down my arm, pooled in the finger holes, and moments later dripped from the bottom of the ball onto the tops of my shoes. Towels were not available.

After bowling most of the others went on to a Karaoke bar, but that's where I, personally, draw the line between not taking yourself too seriously and not deliberately making an embarrassing public spectacle of yourself. I went back to the hotel around midnight to say my farewells to Gordon and Gordon.

Sunday was my 60th birthday. Thanks to everybody who sent kind wishes. I spent the day moving the last of my kit to the new apartment, shopping for some of the housewares I needed to get myself set up (towels, toilet paper, trash cans, some extra clothes hangers, batteries for the TV and AC remotes…), hanging up clothes that have been packed into a suitcase for 10 weeks, and rearranging my furniture. Around 6:00 I took a xe om around to the other side of Hoan Kiem Lake for the big Regurgitator concert at the American Club.

Those of you who don't keep abreast of the techno-punk music scene in Australia will be unaware how absolutely huge Regurgitator is in Oz. De, the Kiwi recruiter who lives in my building, called the band's appearance in Hanoi "the event of the season". This turned out not to be an exaggeration. The outdoor Sunday evening concert attracted a few thousand enthusiastic music fans who whooped, whistled, and pogo-danced through four hours of music. There was plenty of beer, hotdogs, and french fries on hand and enough patio furniture scattered around the periphery to give less-rabid attendees like me a place to recuperate a bit between sets and get to know a few new Language Link teachers, who showed up in droves. There were times when I forgot completely that I was in Hanoi. The music, the crowd, the food, and the atmosphere could well have been Charlottesville, Fort Collins, or Berkeley.

So that's how I spent my 60th birthday. The only real damper was learning that I was right to be skeptical about the Wifi in my new digs. Before the concert I tried 6 times to get online and the sole unsecured network visible to my laptop was not responding. When I got home from the concert and tried again, the network was no longer even visible. Whover owns it apparently had turned off their computer for the night and cut me off. I looked several times today and the network didn't reappear until about 7:00 pm. I was able to download my email, but the network disappeared again before I was able to reply. Excuse my negativity, but this really sucks!

I need a stable connection at home. I'm writing this blog entry at a Wifi café two blocks from the apartment and conditions are less than ideal. Elvis Presley is singing Love Me Tender at high volume, there's a Vietnam war movie on the TV just above my head, and my waiter keeps coming over to the table to chat with me every chance he gets. He's gotten quite a lot of information out of me, considering I've been typing steadily and have avoided looking at him or addressing any questions to him. He had trouble assimilating the news of how much my rent is—about 6.5 million VND per month. Every time I said 'per month', he asked 'per year?' It might blow his mind to know I've been paying about 12 million VND a month to live at the World Hotel for the past two months.

League night

2008-10-11T18:29:00.004+07:00

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.)

Graduation week

2008-10-09T21:26:00.003+07:00

Despite warnings from guidebooks (repeated by Thanh the day of my arrival) not to eat at the little sidewalk kitchens strewn up and down every block in Ha Noi, I folded to peer pressure in the second week and joined my classmates a couple times in scarfing down some of this "good, cheap food". They assured me they had all been indulging since their arrival with nary an ill effect and laughed at me for paying $2-$3 per meal at my "expensive" cafés when I could be eating just as well on the street for 75 cents.

Perhaps I'm genetically inferior, or maybe my gut is just worn out from decades of a diet skewed toward pizza, coffee, alcohol, and sugar. Whatever the etiology, I was soon suffering from the last ailment a teacher wants to carry into a classroom—diarrhea. Staying home sick from school was not a CELTA option, so I did the necessary thing—I stopped eating outside a 6 pm to midnight window. Between diarrhea, stress, sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and "heat frustration", it's no wonder I came a little unravelled toward the end and something of a miracle I managed to graduate with my younger, hardier classmates. In fact, I did excuse myself early on the last day, overcome by nausea due to dehydration, and missed a celebratory shindig at Imran's house.

I reconstituted myself enough by Saturday morning, though, to join five other CELTA grads (plus Anna's friend Nicola) on an excursion out of Hanoi. Since it's becoming apparent their names are going to keep coming up in this blog, let me introduce you to my fellow CELT-ics:

Imran used to be a math teacher in his home country, Bangladesh. He's married to a British girl who teaches at the International School here in Hanoi. They have a new baby named Hannah. Jouke (pronounced YOWka) is from Utrecht, Netherlands, where she has been teaching geography for several years. Anna, from Wales, has been teaching English in Korea for a year or two. Russell is a Filipina who has been teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City. She lives with her boyfriend Rommel, also from The Philippines. James and Brian are the two Aussies. Brian is about to wed a Vietnamese girl. Both Brian and James have been teaching English in Hanoi for some time.

The other Americans are: Donna (living in Hanoi with her husband Hank, who is a manager for Chevron), Mitchell (just arrived from Greeley, Colorado), and Sarah (just arrived from Austin, Texas). None of them have taught before.

Jouke and Anna are both staying at the World Hotel (my hotel) and have been my staunch allies and benefactors through the past four weeks.

Picking up the thread of my narrative again, last Saturday several of us hired a guide and a bus with the intention of driving to Ha Long Bay to party overnight on a boat cruising among the islands—our reward for the cruel sacrifices we've made over the past month. Learning on our way out of town that typhoon warnings had shut down all tour boats, we diverted our course to a town about 60 miles south of Hanoi—Ninh Binh (pronounced NING BING). The attraction here—two pagodas—sounded lame compared to a cruise on romantic Ha Long Bay, but Ninh Binh province proved to have considerable hidden charms.

The pagodas were photogenic and a balm to our frazzled nerves. Even better, though, was Tam Coc (Three Caves). The wide river delta in which Ha Noi sits is a flat expanse of rice fields and lotus ponds crisscrossed by dikes and causeways. Around Ninh Binh, huge limestone rocks jut incongruously out of the landscape, echoing the famous rock formations of Ha Long Bay. At Tam Coc, a slow-moving river winds among these rocks and in three places flows right through the rock. For a ridiculously modest fee we were taken up the river in small skiffs—2 or 3 passengers transported by 1 or 2 oarsmen (or oarswomen…at least one of the rowers was a woman considerably older than me)—past farmhouses, rice paddies, into the cool shade of the looming rocks, under bridges, and finally through the three dim caves with their dripping stalactites. Along the way we saw mobs of ducks, an occasional fisherman, and on the steep overgrown cliffs above us, small white mountain goats jumping from rock to rock. When the rowers arms began to tire, they rowed with their feet.

After our boatride we motored up into some actual mountains to visit Vietnam's first national park—Cuc Phuong—where we partied on a verandah, spent the night in guest rooms, visited a monkey rescue facility, explored a cave, and then inexplicably chose to climb down a precipitous mountainside of wet, razor-sharp limestone rocks in our sandals, with the nearest mountain rescue squad about a continent away. (I've really got to get away from these young people with their ironclad stomachs and their delusions of invulnerability!)

Chewed up, spat out at last

2008-10-07T21:37:00.001+07:00

Okay. The CELTA course is behind me now and it's the part of the cartoon where Tom the Cat pops out of the pretzel machine shaped like a pretzel. After a few seconds, Tom shakes himself back into his normal shape, but in my case, the pretzel shape might well be permanent.

I can tell you right now I cared less for my CELTA experience than Tom did the pretzel machine. And it's not because the course wasn't worthwhile. The trainers were, I would say, more than competent and the course contained a lot of wise and useful information. This information was presented in an engaging and memorable way and our teaching practice was invaluable (i.e., really valuable).

The problem for me was this: About a 10-week supply of CELTA was piled up on our plates and we were made to start eating. If we paused to ask a question, we were told to shut up and keep eating. When we got full and tried to ease away from the table we were shoved back in front of our plates and shown no mercy. By the third week, the CELTA was being shoved down our throats with broomsticks. At least, that's how I experienced it.

Other people have made similar complaints about CELTA. Most people make it through somehow, but many people exhibit some degree of personality disintegration before the end and a few have experienced outright nervous collapses. In the fourth week, I was on the verge of a total meltdown and only the solicitous support of two kind colleagues saved my bacon.

For those of you who are teachers, or otherwise curious about the CELTA course, I'll go into greater detail offline. For everybody else, let me just say how thankful I am it's over and tell you what else has been going on here in Hanoi.

Gordon is fine. I see him rarely, but he leaves a gecko turd on the edge of my bathtub every morning. If he can do this, I don't see why he can't use the edge of the toilet, but I guess I should just be glad he uses the correct room. Gordon Heavyfoot continues to dine on the frosted glass every evening. One late afternoon when I stepped out on the terrace to see which neighbor was playing the Abba album, I thought I felt Gordon brush against my bare foot and scurry behind a potted plant. It turned out not to be Gordon, but a three-inch beetle, maybe some kind of cockroach. I told him he could stay if he eats the ants.

My latest indulgence is Café 129, just up the street from my hotel at 129 Mai Hac De. (Many cafés around here are named for their address. You'll find Café 141 sandwiched between Café 137 and Café 145.) Café 129 specializes in dishes like huevos rancheros, breakfast burritos, and Mexican hash browns, served with espresso, mango milkshake, or gin and tonic. As far as I can tell, nobody connected with the café has ever been to Mexico, and the service is incredibly slow, and there are only six tiny tables usually jammed with ex-pats before you arrive. But sometimes I just want the comfortable familiarity of guacamole. And the baguettes there are the flakiest I've had in Hanoi so far.

First week of bootcamp

2008-09-13T10:38:00.006+07:00

It's Saturday morning and I just woke up with a bit of a hangover. I've finished the first of my four weeks of CELTA training, but this weekend won't be the two-day oasis of repose and refreshment I'm craving—only a chance to catch a quick breather before climbing back onto what is proving to be a grueling 26-day obstacle course.

I had imagined the CELTA course to be this: Me, sitting at a desk, listening to lectures on education theory, classroom methodologies, pronunciation difficulties specific to Vietnamese ESL students, tips on coping with culture shock. In my imagination, I was taking notes, contributing my own brilliant ideas, and asking questions about how to get a good deal on an apartment and where to buy one-a-day vitamins. After a week or two of lectures, discussions, and observations of experienced teachers, I would be given some opportunities to team-teach (me with a trainer in front of a class, then me with another trainee in front of a class). Finally, in the last week, the fledgling would leave the nest and fly solo in the classroom. Weekends would be spent doing short reading/writing assignments and partying with the other trainees.

Here's the reality: Me, one of ten trainees bombarded with a blizzard of important printed handouts to be read "when we get a chance" and forms on which to make a detailed record of everything we observe, do, or plan to do. From the very first moment we're in constant motion, being lead through a rapid sequence of kinesthetic learning experiences in which almost nothing is given to us outright by the trainer, almost everything is suggested or elicited using pictures, gestures, and examples. The trainers are mirroring the same multi-sensory kaleidoscope of activities they expect us to use to engage our students' interest and extend their understanding and skills.

The very first day, Monday, we meet our students and watch our trainer take them through a one-hour lesson. That night, after an eleven-hour day at school, I eat an apple for dinner and then stay up until long past midnight preparing a detailed lesson plan for the next day. I'm exhausted but too keyed up to really sleep. On Tuesday I teach my first 40-minute solo lesson to 8 bewildered intermediate students while being observed and evaluated by a trainer and four peers. Classroom management turns out to be harder than it looks. I bomb, but my peers mistake my zombie-like exhaustion for aplomb under pressure and award me a few style points. On Thursday I teach again. I bomb again. I would be having a better run if the students would just speak English.

Every weekday is jam-packed from about 8:00AM to midnight, a nightmare of non-stop input sessions, teaching sessions, teacher observation, peer observation, student observation, observation feedback sessions, written assignments, and lesson prep.

Lesson preparation is particularly time-consuming. It involves searching books and Web for suitable text and visuals, printing, photocopying, cutting, pasting, photocopying again, etc., while developing, writing, and memorizing a detailed step-by-step plan. It requires such meticulous planning and structuring that it currently takes me about 6 hours to prepare one 40-minute lesson.

Our classrooms are on the 6th floor, the trainees have a workroom on the 5th floor, the trainers' office with resource books is on the 4th floor, the teachers' workroom with the photocopy machine is on the 2nd floor. There's an elevator, but it's quicker to run up and down the stairs all day long. When the power goes out and the AC goes off, it's sweltering.

There are 10 trainees. We are 4 Americans, 2 Aussies, a lovely girl from Wales, another from the Philippines, another from the Netherlands, and a man from Bangladesh. All except the 4 Americans have significant previous classroom teaching experience. I'm the oldest one by far but everybody has been a little surprised to learn how far. Last night Wales, Netherlands, Texas, Colorado, and I joined Philippines and James from Sydney in a drinking tour of the Old Quarter.

We started with a few beers at the Bia Hoi Corner—a small street intersection mobbed by international backpackers where you can sit in a crowd on a plastic chair, drinking beer siphoned into your glass through a hose, and watch more beer drinkers doing the same on the other 3 corners of the intersection. In the street is a non-stop parade of motorbikes, tourists, street vendors, and colorful sights like the guy playing a flute (not badly) with his right nostril and the lovely young Vietnamese girl sporting six-inch incandescent (battery-powered) red devil horns on her head.

We had more beers at Mao's Red Lounge in an upstairs room reminiscent of a hookah bar in Charlottesville (the Twisted Branch). We moved on to a place called Beer Minh where, on a comfortable large terrace overlooking the street, we ate, drank more beers, and watched the human carnival on the street below. We finished—or at least I finished—the evening at Dragonfly, a club that had an actual hookah bar upstairs and downstairs a pool table, a tiny dance floor, and a DJ spinning American hiphop and pop tunes like Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls. I ran out of gas around midnight and headed home alone.

Picture this: I'm slightly drunk and walking all alone down a dark, narrow street. I'm only vaguely oriented as to direction. The street curves and then forces me to choose a turning. I'm wandering through a maze of tiny streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. It's well after midnight. In any other city I'm sure I would feel some apprehension (certainly true of Oakland, but also true of Charlottesville and Cheyenne). In Hanoi I feel quite safe. I can see dim figures crouched in the shadows—a man holding a sleeping child in his arms, a family sitting around a low table having a late supper on the sidewalk, two old women sharing a glass of tea. I turn the corner again into a darker street deserted except for two tiny women sweeping up trash. I can hear a murmur of voices floating down from tiny terraces and dimly lit windows.

Eventually I work my way back to Hoan Kiem lake where it doesn't take long to hear a voice say "Hello, motobi". It's too late to catch a bus, so I agree to take my first xe om ride back home (to Vincom Towers). Before getting on the bike, I negotiate a price of 20,000 dong with the driver. He only knows a few words of English but he's eager to try them all out. He covers most of the ten minute ride with his head turned round to me saying things like "shee kah goh" and "wah sheen tone" and when I confirm the place name by repeating it he nods his head vigorously and laughs maniacally. Reaching our destination, I offer him a 50,000 dong note and remind him of the price we agreed on. He pulls out his wallet and looks in it, but won't pull out any bills until I hand him the 50,000. Then he hands back one 10,000 note. I shake my head and remind him of our deal. He feigns absolute bewilderment. Then he tries to show me how hungry he is. Then he goes back to pretending not to understand a word I'm saying.

In the end I got him to fork over another 15,000, but I was tired and let him slide with an extra 25% (30 cents). At my hotel I found the doors locked and three of the hotel employees sleeping just inside the door on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by their motorbikes. I had to pound hard 10 or 12 times on the glass before one of them woke up and let me in.

Physically, I'm feeling much better, though my state is still a soup of mild rib discomfort, itchy insect bites, severe heat distress, mild diarrhea, brain overload, high anxiety, and sleep deprivation. Gordon Heavyfoot seems to be gaining weight, but I'm losing it (no appetite on the days I teach, too little time to eat on the others—plus the diarrhea).

There's a great many more things I want to tell you about, but I just don't have the time. I have assignments to research and write and a lesson to prepare for Monday. I'm already a little anxious about the time I've lost writing this blog entry. I'll fill in more of the details three weeks from now. In the meantime, drop me an email or post a comment to let me know there's still a world outside Hanoi.

A gift from Phuong

2008-09-07T22:34:00.005+07:00

Do you remember the ants I mentioned in my August 20 entry? The ones the size of chiggers wearing tiny bamboo hats? Not only did Gordon not take care of this infestation, but I fear the infestation may have taken care of Gordon. I've seen neither hide nor tail of him in days…but I've seen plenty of those ants. I think the AC may have driven them to take up residence in the warmest spot left in the room—the interior of my new Toshiba laptop. Whenever I try to type something, they come boiling up out of the keyboard and swarm across the monitor on their little motobi's.

I've awakened to the sound of pouring rain several times since I've been here, but yesterday was my first chance to go out wearing my rain poncho. On the street there were rain ponchos as far as the eye could see. All my eye could see, though, was my expensive Ecco shoes getting ruined as I plashed along the potholed sidewalk. I'm thinking I should have left the Eccos home and brought the duckboots.

Humidity can be less than 100% when it's raining (look it up), but when it's raining and the humidity and the temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit) are both over 85, an extra waterproof layer is not welcome, trust me on this. Before I plashed from my hotel to the corner I was puffing like a fat man in a steam cabinet. I had to throw off the poncho and continue down the street with the poncho twisted around my head and thrown over my shoulders like an Arab keffiyeh. All in all, I'm finding Vietnam a very hard country to stay dry in.

My CELTA course will be starting tomorrow morning. If the course is as intensive as it's rumored to be, I may not have much leisure for blogging in the next four weeks. Before I go all quiet on you, let me try to correct any impression I may have given you that Hanoi is nothing but one laughable vexation after another. Please remember that I'm a self-confessed curmudgeon and consider it almost a duty to sneer, laugh, or whine at just about everything. But there's a lot to like about Hanoi that I haven't mentioned yet.

A few good things, just off the top of my head:

- Since I've been in Hanoi I've heard no hip hop or rap music, no fast talking radio personalities reading those ads with the stupid 100-mile-a-minute disclaimers at the end, and not one single instance of the f--- word.
- I've seen no graffiti!
- Despite all the visible poverty, urban decay, and pollution the city smells better than New York.
- It might not be a universal pattern, but I see multiple generations (grandparents, parents, teens and toddlers) eating, shopping, and hanging out together as a family to an extent not seen anymore in the US.
- On practically every street corner you can find two men playing Chinese chess with half a dozen kibitzers looking on.
- Many if not most restaurants place a bowl of extra napkins and a container of toothpicks on your table before the meal starts.
- A restaurant check is not brought to your table. When you're ready to go, you get up and pay at the register on your way out.
- You may tip if you think the service is exceptional, but a tip is not taken for granted.
- There is no sales tax.
- Here's the best one: Everywhere you go, people make eye contact with you and smile—this goes for old people, young people, men, women, children, policemen—even teenagers. This feels like the friendliest town I've ever been in.

When I was taking photos in Lenin Park today, I noticed a group of young people milling about some sort of crafts display. One of them approached me and naturally I expected a sales pitch. But to my surprise, the young woman merely invited me to take a photo of the display and in turn have my own photo taken in front of the display. Then she gave me, as a gift, a figure made of rice reeds and paper. Maybe it was a marketing ploy—turn the customer into a friend, since a friend may buy what a customer will not—but I shook hands with Phuong and all her colleagues and then they all, though I offered no money for the reed figure, gave me a warm and friendly sendoff with my gift. Tomorrow I'll take the figure with me to Language Link and get my friend Ninh to decipher the words written on it. Could it possibly say: "This person is a skunk. He accepted a gift and gave nothing in return"…?

Please don't dynamite the books

2008-09-05T13:30:00.001+07:00

When I mentioned to Kevin, an Englishman who works at Language Link, that I was writing a blog, he said a perceptive thing: "Ah, yes, good idea. It's those first impressions that are the most valuable." It's taken me some time to see what he meant: as the days go by, Hanoi has begun to look less and less exotic, i.e., more and more normal. Disparate features—conical bamboo hats and ATMs, bicycle taxis and escalators, pig's feet boiling in a pot outside a Givenchy salon, are starting to blend and average themselves out in my mind. I can see now that eventually the odd, extravagant details will become mere embellishments on a pattern not that different from the one underlying any large city anywhere in the world. Even novelty has an expiration date.

In the meantime, though, let me share a few more of the weird, wacky things I'm seeing with my beginner eyes:

A moment ago, while returning from a run around Ho Bay Mau, I was privileged to witness a prize-worthy display of daring and totally irresponsible recklessness on a "motobi". I had paused a moment to allow a man to emerge from an alley with a wooden case of bottled beer (36 bottles). The man posed the case on the seat behind a motorbike driver. It was a narrow seat, the case heavy, its perch precarious. The heavy beerload tilted to one side and I instinctively stepped forward to catch it, but the driver reached back with one hand and managed to steady it. Meanwhile, the first man had gone back for a second case, which he now stacked on top of the first. Still reaching back with one hand to steady the wobbly stack of beer, the driver gunned his motor and putt-putted off into a heavy flow of swarming, honking vehicles.

When I returned from my run on Wednesday, I passed what I thought at first was another ten-foot wide hotel, but a large sign announced it to be a campus of the University of New South Wales. (That would be an Aussie school.) I couldn't resist stopping in for a minute to drip on their floor and inquire whether they had a library at all. As I expected, there were no Aussies about, but I was given the address of a rumored library on Pho Trang Thi (Trang Thi Street). I went there yesterday and discovered…hurrah!…the relocated National Library.

You'd think that a National Library, relocated, would be relocated into a brand new building, but this five-story building was at least fifty years old and may have been at one time a public secondary school. The first floor was given over to an open reception area and card catalogs. The second floor appeared to be special collections and reading rooms. The third floor had a large, nicely appointed Korean Room with a few hundred books, presumably in Korean, plus several rooms apparently not in use. The fourth and fifth floors had student study areas—dozens of tables and about 18 computer work stations—but no more than a few hundred shelved books. I went up and down the stairs several times, exploring each hallway in search of the main book stacks. There didn't appear to be any more books in the joint than the thousand or so books distributed throughout the reading and study areas. I did locate one reading room—the Friendship Room—which appeared to be devoted to foreign language publications. It was closed, but I could see a few shelves of books through the window. Library rules posted on a sign by the door included this disquieting admonition: "Personal bags, printed materials, explosives should not be taken into the reading room."

Once around the ho

2008-09-04T01:45:00.007+07:00

My broken ribs have knit to the point where I can towel-dry my own feet, cough halfheartedly, and/or sleep through the night with only mild discomfort. The only thing I can't do yet is lie flat on my back (somebody with a working knowledge of anatomy please explain to me why). The true measure of my recovery is that today I went for a run around Ho Bay Mau (Bay Mau Lake) in Lenin Park. It's about half a mile from my hotel to the park and about a mile and a quarter around the lake. I've lost a lot in the way of conditioning in the past four weeks, but that's okay because there's not much competition around here. The few runners I saw in the park were either barefoot, wearing sandals, or running in low-cut Keds with missing shoelaces. I passed them like they were standing still. Actually, they were running in the opposite direction, but it was still exhilirating. And it felt good to be sweating in silk shorts and tee shirt instead of in cargo pants and dress shirt. I suppose my pun-loving friend David would consider me now to be a rib-knit sweater.

The Sunday crowds of childen were absent, but Lenin Park seems to get a lot of weekday use. There was a battalion of teenagers in identical blue and white uniforms playing badminton under the trees, rows of fishermen along the lakeshore, and dozens of young lovers making out, each couple on their own private bench, in the shade—aptly enough—of a roller coaster. Small groups of small women in big hats sat here and there on the lawn, cutting the grass with scissors.

Recent newspaper item: A study shows that Hanoi's rivers and streams contain about 600% of the maximum safe level of bacteria plus enough heavy metals and toxins to kill off any fish other than a few freakish mutants. The study found that 50% of the local hospitals make no effort to detoxify the waste they dump into public waterways. This makes me wonder uneasily what the Ho Bay Mau fishermen do with their daily catch.

Gary reports that the DVD movies he bought for a few pennies apiece are worth what he paid for them. Spanglish crapped out about halfway through. Gary returned it to the shop where he bought it and had no trouble exchanging it for another copy, which also wouldn't play all the way through. Same story with Ghandi. Same story with The Deer Hunter. Several other movies did work, however, so the decision to buy or not to buy pirated software from China is not cut-and-dried according to Gary.

Either the rain pouring down outside is being accompanied by thunder and lighting or saturation bombing of Hanoi has resumed. Whatever it is, it's shaking the walls. Gordon Heavyfoot, though, doesn't seem to care. He's patrolling his window with aplomb—and a hearty appetite. My friends, if I could capture the sound of this rain, you'd think it was a waterfall.

Nose flattened against the language barrier

2008-09-02T23:22:00.001+07:00

Rather than close down on the weekend, Language Link ramps up—Saturday and Sunday are the two busiest days of a seven day school week. Right now, though, the school is closed for a three day holiday and most of the staff are gone away on buses to Quang Ninh, Vietnam's northeasternmost province. The neighborhood seems deserted now, except for me and the two Gordons…and a couple hundred thousand Vietnamese neighbors.

So I was delighted that Thanh showed up this morning for another friendly status check. He always comes by too early in the day for me to take him out to lunch, but we always have a good conversation and he's patient in his responses to my exasperated questions about Vietnamese pronunciation. Here's the kind of thing I find so exasperating:

The Vietnamese word for 'no' or 'not' is 'khong'. The 'kh' is pronounced sort of breathy like a French 'r' or German 'ch', but that's not the problem. There's an accent mark over the 'o', which is pronounced like the 'o' in 'from', but that's not the problem, either. The problem is the 'ng' at the end. I've heard this word pronounced on a Pimsleur CD and it sounded like 'come'. Several phrasebooks and dictionaries I've consulted render it phonetically as 'kawm'. When Thanh says it, it sounds to me like the English word 'come'—or maybe 'kawm'. The point is: it ends with an 'm' sound.

But when I repeat the word, Thanh shakes his head no.

"The 'ng' has an 'm' sound," I say.

"No," says Thanh, "It doesn't."

"Say it again," I tell him, and he says quite clearly: "Come". I can see his lips close the way lips do when you make an 'm' sound.

"Come," I say, and Thanh shakes his head no.

"Ng…ng," he demonstrates with his lips apart.

"Cung," I say.

"Yes, that's it!" he says delightedly. "Come."

"You're not saying 'cung', Thanh, you're saying 'come'. I can see your lips close at the end of the word."

"Come," he repeats.

"Come," I say. He shakes his head no, endlessly patient but not wanting me to fall into bad speech habits…like him.

I have this kind of laughable communication difficulty every day with hotel and restaurant staff. When a young boy name Thu came to pick up my laundry I tried to make him understand that I didn't want to pay the extra charge to have my pants and shirts ironed. Pantomime seemed to confuse Thu even more than English, so I led him to the telephone and indicated that he should call Hung, who mans the front desk and understands a little English. Thu made the call but instead of passing the phone to me, he summoned Hung up to my 4th floor room and then hung up the phone!

When I ordered a beer today, the waitress asked me if I wanted a bottle of beer. Assuming the alternative would be a glass of draft beer, or conceivably a can of beer, I told her no, no bottle. She was dumbfounded. She asked me to confirm that I wanted beer.

"Yes," I said. "One beer."

"In a bottle?" she asked.

"No," I said. "No bottle."

She couldn't believe it. "You want beer?" she asked again.

"Vung," I said. "Yes."

"Bottle?"

"Khong," I insisted. Or maybe what I said was "Come."

She called over the headwaiter who continued with me in the same vein for several minutes before I came to my senses and agreed to have beer in a bottle. It all ended well with smiles and good cheer all around.

It's supposed to be cooler this week, but don't ask for corroboration from me. I still can't walk from my hotel to a café two blocks away without arriving in a serious sweat. While I eat my com heo xao dua (stir fry pork and pineapple with rice), I can feel sweat rivulets trickling down my sides and I lean away from my plate to keep my wet sleeves from dripping on the table. Later, when my shirt has dried over the back of my desk chair, salt deposits will cause it to look as if a tailor has marked it up with chalk for alterations.

Chance Encounters

2008-08-31T22:52:00.005+07:00

One of my last two hopes for finding a decent source of reading material was dashed yesterday when I sought out the National Library on Ba Trieu street. Nobody was any help whatsoever—people working in the building right next door had never heard of the place. In any case, this library seems to be closed indefinitely. It's currently surrounded by a rusty, dented construction barricade. Looking for more information, I stopped a Western-looking passerby, who spoke a little English, but even better, spoke fluent French and was, in fact, French! Jean-Noel, who landed in Hanoi about the same day I did, came here to teach psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. We exchanged email addresses and will try to meet for coffee at some point. I'm hoping Jean-Noel will be able to provide a link for me into the community of French expats in Hanoi.

My one remaining hope for English non-fiction books, by the way, is the Goethe Institute, which is reported to have, in addition to German books, a few English ones. I'll go there soon, but I seriously doubt I'm going to find what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll pop over to Hong Kong and see what they've got to read. Please don't tell me I'm going to have to go all the way to Australia to fix my reading habit.

If you're a Hanoi café that wants to keep me coming back, do this: slice up a whole avocado and a whole mango on a large plate of fresh lettuce, pile slices of grilled chicken breast on top, drizzle with a creamy, orange-juice-based dressing, add a 20-ounce mug of cold, delicious red ale and sell me the works for less than $6. I don't intend this blog to become a restaurant review site—I'm just saying Moca Café has got it figured out.

Moca Café is in a warren—called the Old Quarter—of narrow twisting streets west of Hoan Kiem Lake, a neighborhood that, like mine, is a hodgepodge of air-conditioned glass and chrome places that look like Starbucks, slightly homier places with neon signs and bilingual menus, way downscale but respectable Viet shops and restaurants, and grungy third-world soup kitchens and sweatshops. On average, though, the Old Quarter is visibly more prosperous than other Hanoi neighborhoods because it's ground zero for Hanoi tourism, with a high density of souvenir shops, karaoke bars, and backpacker hotels.

I wandered into this area looking for any of the landmarks whose names I had jotted down from the Lonely Planet guidebook—St. Joseph's cathedral, The Jazz Club, a French hangout called La Salsa, Pepperoni's (a pizza joint), plus of course, the Half Man Half Noodle bar. Even without a map, ten minutes of wandering brought me to every place on my list except the last one. Before I could find the Noodle, I ran into Helen from DCV. (The teachers refer to their school as DCV—short for Dai Co Viet street—to distinguish it from other Language Link locations.)

Helen and I talked on the street for a minute or two but we kept getting interrupted by an annoyingly persistent xe om driver who wouldn't take khong (no) for an answer. To get away from him we adjourned to the nearest air-conditioned coffee shop for glasses of chilled juice and a leisurely discussion of American politics and Kiwi (i.e., New Zealand) rugby. Helen refers to her country as En Zed (NZ).

Little Gordon has a much bigger (5-inch) brother—or maybe it's his grandfather, what do I know about these things?—living on the terrace. Here's how I contribute to Gordon Heavyfoot's well-being: At night I keep the frosted window closed and the room light on so that insects land on the glass where they can be snapped up and munched. All evening long I can see Gordon Heavyfoot's white belly through the glass, creeping up and down in a most crocodilean fashion, occasionally stopping to munch a bug.

Culture deprivation

2008-08-29T15:32:00.003+07:00

There must be a considerable number of Westerners in Hanoi. Besides the several dozen American, British, and Aussie teachers who frequent the teachers' lounge at Language Link, I often see Western faces on the street, in restaurants, shopping at Vincom Towers—students on vacation or businessmen living here with their families. Every block, no matter how exotic or third world appearing at first glance, displays at least one sign in English—"Kentuky Flied Chiken","Spicy Sexy Cell Phone", "Art Exhibitionist".

Vincom Towers is not the only upscale Western-style shopping venue in town. Hanoi Towers, looming over Hoa Lo prison (aka Hanoi Hilton), provides twenty-some floors of luxury apartments and offices over a conference center and shopping center featuring luggage, chocolates, silk lingerie, and other luxury goods. Many restaurants and bars in town cater to foreigners with menus and signage printed in English.

None of this surprises me. Hanoi is a big city and has been energetically courting foreign investment and tourism for the past twenty years. What does surprise me…disappoints me…appalls me, actually…is that apparently nobody has yet begun to cater to what surely must be a fairly large and growing demand for Western pharmacy staples like cough drops, foot powder, vitamins, and cold remedies, or for Western cultural staples like the International Herald Tribune, Stephen King paperbacks, or Billy Joel fake books.

I know, I know. You're right. I didn't come all the way to Vietnam to shop at Walmart. But if Chinese visitors can buy fried chicken wattles in NYC, why can't I find One-a-Day vitamins in Hanoi? Maybe someone will respond and clue me in. Meanwhile I've spent many hours over the past week trying to locate a reliable source of Western medications and/or publications.

Apparently THE place in Hanoi for English language books is a shop called The Bookworm. I went there. The shop is a bit larger than my hotel room and has fewer books than my storage unit in Cheyenne. I bought used copies of Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons and A Parrot in the Pepper Tree—true tales of an English couple's relocation to a mountain farm in Spain. But I carried them out of the shop with a sinking feeling in my heart. Somebody tell me how in the world I'm going to survive here without books?

Actually, the answer came to me while I was asking the question. In all likelihood I won't survive long enough for it to matter. Consider the following: The newspaper reports 32 new cases of cholera this month in the vicinity of Hanoi. I have what looks for all the world like a nasty spider bite on my toe, one day after I saw a spider jump a foot from my keyboard to the window ledge. I waded through a river of speeding motorbikes yesterday to get to the French Hospital, where I hoped to find French doctors dispensing Western style pharmaceuticals and medical advice in French, if not English. What I found was a hospital built by the French, still sporting its original sign, now manned by Vietnamese with no knowledge of English or French. The hospital pharmacy was a narrow safety-glass window like one at an Italian post office. With pen and paper and sign language I conveyed to the clerk that I wanted antifungal powder and multivitamins. For the latter, he had a box of Supradyn—10 effervescent tablets for $4.00. The % of RDA was not given for any of the 20 vitamins (including vitamins H, J, and S) listed on the box. As for the powder, he had 30g of something called Mycoster for $10.50 but couldn't let me have it without a prescription. He volunteered the information that I could probably buy it cheaper, without the prescription, at any street pharmacy.

Maybe I ought to just let it go. Instead of reading more books, I could write a few. Instead of treating my symptoms with Western remedies, I could seek out a Vietnamese herbalist or acupuncturist. I have to say that despite low incomes and a paucity of medical resources, these Hanoians look remarkably fit. The girls and women all—I repeat: all—have the kind of svelte figure American women sacrifice enormous amounts of money, physical effort, and anguish to approach. The men aren't muscular, but they look wiry and competent. I've yet to see a single Vietnamese person who waddles when they walk or requires help to get up from their chair. I saw an ancient woman—she looked about ninety and was walking with obvious difficulty—arrive at the hospital on the back of a motorbike.

Soon I hope to be able to report some kind of social activity. I was invited to come along to a movie downtown by Helen, a teacher from New Zealand, but didn't get back from the French Hospital in time. Maybe this weekend I'll join some of the teachers who frequent a bar in the Old Quarter with the inauspicious name of Half Man Half Noodle.

Xe om (say um)

2008-08-29T09:24:00.001+07:00

It's not yet 8:00 AM but already I can feel the heat of the day burning through the frosted glass of my closed windows and the heavy green curtains which serve to cut the morning glare. Since I arrived, temperatures have oscillated predictably between 80F every night and 90F every day, but the sky has been mostly overcast. Yesterday the sun burst through the clouds with a brutal reminder that Vietnam is not that far from the equator. Hanoi, in fact, is a little closer to the equator than Calcutta.

I've been walking a lot. Maybe too much—my right ankle complains every night when I go to bed and I start each day with a limp which disappears around mid-morning. But I've enjoyed poking around the city on foot, observing the overwhelming tide of life that surges out into the street here every day and peering into places that defy Western logic—shadowy caves of gutted buildings in which you can glimpse pots boiling, laundry hung to dry, and young men washing their feet with a hose, or a puzzling place of business with no front wall, just a cashier station on the left, a small glass cabinet displaying 10 or 12 cosmetic products on the right and a roomy interior containing on the left two coffee tables apparently set for tea, each wedged between two expensive leather sofas, and on the right a row of filthy motorbikes blocking the wide, curved, crumbling rococo staircase leading up to the second floor.

I'm in an anguish of frustration at not being able to capture what I'm talking about with my camera. I've snapped some nice pictures of trees, balconies, traffic, but what I'm dying to do is get some close ups of the people and the spaces they inhabit. My western sensibilities keep blocking me from intruding on their privacy all the while I see them conducting their lives unselfconsciously in public as if privacy were a non-issue. Anybody want to lay some advice on me here? I know my Swiss friend Mireille would get some sensational pictures. She's a person for whom strangers gladly exchange their privacy for a little attention. Unlike me, she doesn't look like a CIA agent.

The one English (almost) phrase every Hanoian seems to know is "Hello, motobi'..?" If you're a Westerner you can't walk ten feet without hearing it. Every Vietnamese man with a motorbike is, at least potentially, a 'xe om' or taxi driver. Think about it. If the poverty line in the city is 12 million dong a year, one merely has to earn 33,000 dong a day to stay out of poverty. A ten minute ride costs about 20,000 dong, so if a man can find two good customers a day he can make a living.

There are several xe oms on every block in Hanoi, and since it doesn't cost anything to ask, you can expect to get asked by every single driver you walk past. Some of them are damnably persistent. One wanted to shake my hand. Because it seemed rude to refuse, I shook his hand and then he didn't want to let go. I have to say this for the Vietnamese, though. Something like that could have turned ugly in some countries, but even this "Klingon" shared an amiableness that seems almost universal here. I'm sure there are some bad men in a town this size, but so far I haven't seen a single argument, rude gesture, or threatening look. Equanimity rules here.

News item: a man found 56 unexploded bombs this week on a river bank in a suburb of Hanoi near Long Bien Bridge. These, of course, are left over from the Vietnam War (known to the Vietnamese as "the American War"). How they could have remained undiscovered for 35 years in such a crowded area is a mystery.

Haggling

2008-08-26T23:00:00.001+07:00

I don't believe there's a street in Hanoi where you won't find motorbikes and people massed on the sidewalk all day and all evening long. There's one spot, though, en route from my hotel to the supermarket where I always see a particularly thick knot of older men crowded so close together with their backs to the street that I have to suspect a crap shoot—or maybe a gecko fight. Today, for the first time, the knot was loose enough I could catch a glimpse of what these geezers were up to: One of them was unpacking a satchel full of blue jeans, tee shirts, and running shoes while the others crowded in for a closer look and a chance to handle the merchandise. It was a scene from The Great Escape, except instead of Allied airmen concocting German disguises it was Vietnamese urbanites looking to disguise themselves as American high school students.

I do remember reading that cock fighting is popular in Vietnam. I haven't seen any direct evidence of that yet, but I have seen roosters walking around off the leash just daring somebody to start something. Weirdly enough, I have yet to see a single cat or any direct evidence (like cat food in a supermarket or cat dishes on a menu) that the Vietnamese have even heard of cats.

I ate lunch today at a family café called The Family Café—just the sort of place you might find on College Avenue in Oakland: a cavernous joint leading to a small, bamboo-shaded courtyard in the back, brick floor, wrought iron tables, artificial waterfall pouring into a koi pond, speakers pouring out instrumental versions of Simon and Garfunkel and the theme music from the Godfather. I half expected to see koi on the menu, but surprisingly, no, they weren't, so I ordered sauteed pork loin with pineapple on a bed of rice and a bottle of beer. My order came with a side of soup and a slice of watermelon for dessert. I know I've already made the point about how cheap things are here, but I'm really getting a kick out of it, so indulge me a little longer: lunch cost $2.76. I felt so happy I walked over to Highlands Coffee to read today's paper and splurge on an overpriced double scoop of coffee ice cream for $2.10.

Now let me tell you about a friend of mine, let's call him Gary. Gary heard about a DVD store over on Thinh Yen Street. The store turned out to be a music CD store, but it had one bucket of DVDs, packaged in paper sleeves like the 45's my sister used to buy back in the late 50's. There are two kinds of businesses in Hanoi. There are businesses like the supermarket and the upscale boutiques at Vincom Towers where you pay the 100% markup represented by the sticker price. And there are businesses like the DVD store where merchandise has no stickers and you can pretend to be totally indifferent to some item you really want until the proprietor lets you have it for only six and half times his cost. Gary listened to an initial quote of 50,000 dong ($3) per DVD, countered with an offer of 60,000 dong for 2 DVDs, heard his offer rejected, tried again with 80,000 dong for 2 DVDs, suddenly sensed that all messages were being garbled in transmission, that none were arriving intact, that confusion was starting to erupt like a smoke bomb, decided to switch the channel over to sign language, started displaying fingers to indicate bid prices, got finger prices in return, and suddenly discovered that what he had heard as 50,000 each had been in reality 15,000 each and was still the current offer. Gary quickly caved in, stopped bargaining, and bought 2 DVDs (Spanglish and Tears of the Sun) for 30,000 dong ($1.80). Ignorance outpaces shrewdness yet again.

Gordon has been flying below the radar lately. I thought he might have changed hotels. But then I spotted him on the bathroom window tonight thinking seriously about taking a shower. He certainly could use one.

Snake head soup, anyone?

2008-08-25T19:00:00.000+07:00

If there's one thing that outnumbers motorbikes in Hanoi, it's motorbike helmets. A helmet law was passed some months ago and, while you might see an occasional bare head in the city, bareheaded biking occurs mainly in the countryside where policing is sparser. The helmets come in all colors and shapes, from mullet-shaped Tour de France bike helmets with a gold sparkle finish, to visored pink-checked polo helmets, to green WWII vintage Red Army helmets, to white construction hard hats. One thing you almost never see, though, is a round, skull-enclosing honest-to-goodness motorcycle helmet, with or without a visor.

I'm starting to feel like a resident out on the streets. I'm sure some of the locals recognize me on sight now even if I don't know their faces yet. What makes the biggest difference is my relationship to the traffic. While I recognize that the anarchic Vietnamese way of swarming through the streets like schools of fish is quite dangerous (a judgment attested by a very high rate of traffic fatalities), I also see that accidents occur much less often than you'd suspect after watching the chaos for just a short time. Hanoians don't want to crash and most of them have developed considerable skill at avoiding crashes. Knowing this makes it possible to lend a little trust to the "system" and, while not abandoning prudent vigilence altogether, at least find the courage to step out in front of a hundred oncoming motorbikes with a fair certainty they're all going to miss you…this time.

I went looking for the Hoang Ngoc Hotel yesterday because it was one of the hotels I considered booking before I arrived. When I saw it was only 10 feet wide I was intrigued enough to go in and ask to see a room. The hotel was actually quite beautifully designed and built, with efficiently laid out rooms, clean modern bathrooms, and built-ins of dark tropical hardwood. The quality of the place didn't tempt me to switch hotels, as I would have to pay almost twice my current rate for half the space. I was inspired, though, to start checking out other hotels in the neighborhood. I've learned that my hotel—at 20 feet wide—is one of the widest hotels around!

I ate dinner at a restaurant called Oriland. It was ordinary by Oakland standards, but extemely hightone for this neighborhood: booths covered in tasteful fabric, embossed beige wallpaper, full bar (Bailey's, Hennessy, Cointreau…), piped in samba music, electric fans, and a terrace shielded from the street by huge potted plants.

I would have pegged it for a tourist trap except I was the only Westerner in the place. I suppose these places also cater to wealthy Hanoians, of whom there must be a sizeable number. I get the impression from what little I've seen that neighborhoods here are less segregated between haves and have-nots than in the US. Apparently Vietnamese who come into money don't move to a better neighborhood. They just fix up the place they're in. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, here's what was interesting about Oriland: When the samba album finished, somebody put on the Best of the Beegees. That was followed by a rousing rendition of the William Tell Overture. I don't know what Vietnamese music sounds like because I haven't heard any yet. Here's another interesting thing: I had the curry chicken with steamed rice and it was really good. It came with a bowl of soup, a side of steamed celery, and some carrots cut up to look like roses. With dinner I had a tall beer, poured into my glass by the very attentive waiter with the bow tie. My bill, including the beer, came to $3.50. As is the custom here, I left no tip. Back home, $3.50 in a place like this would have got me a beer and an scowl from a stiffed waiter.

The beer I had was a Ha Noi, a local beer, obviously. It cost $1.20. For $1.32, I could have had a Heineken—or for $3.30, a Corona. I watched a Vietnamese customer drink 3 Coronas: conspicuous consumption, Hanoi style.

Also on the menu: fresh lemon juice with milk. Does this sound right to anybody? Maybe it was just a loose translation like the one I saw yesterday: "Wide selection of 6 dishes to fulfill your lunch with joy." On my way home from Oriland I passed JQK's, a squalid little eatery with one of those backlit signs with pictures of food that have faded until they look most unappetizing. JQK's slogan was "You name it, we serve it." I believe them. I haven't looked at a Hanoi menu yet that didn't mention either snake head soup or pig's trotters.

Backstory

2008-08-24T23:00:00.004+07:00

Through inattention or stupidity I seem to have begun my blog with chapter 2, leaving some readers scratching their heads over why I am in Vietnam with broken ribs but (unlike Adam) no wife. Let me backtrack and fill in the blanks for those of you who haven't been tuned in to this station lately.

In the spring of 2006, Cynthia and I flew to Costa Rica to explore the idea of spending our retirement years in a tropical paradise. Our goals were: consistently warm weather (no mittens, parkas, snow shovels), casual lifestyle (swimming pool, coffee shop, sightseeing), low cost of living (cheap housing, food, clothing). While Costa Rica scored high in those categories it also scored high in these categories: pollution, crime. I came home with serious doubts about relocating and Cynthia came home with no doubts at all—Costa Rica was out.

I think that trip underscored a basic difference in our outlooks. Since moving from Oakland to Charlottesville, I had given up my stressful computer consulting work to devote myself to the less stressful (and less lucrative) work of tutoring French and writing a book (about learning French). I was all about downsizing and finding a simpler way to live that would conserve the capital I had managed to accumulate during the dotcom boom in California. Meanwhile Cynthia's new Pilates studio in Charlottesville was doing well off the folks with big discretionary incomes that Charlottesville attracts. She was doing sessions with—and socializing with—tenured professors, stock brokers, attorneys, successful artists. Rather than downsize, I think Cynthia was looking to gear it up a notch and try to climb a rung or two higher on the ladder. Or at any rate, I think downsizing looked to her like losing ground.

That's a simplistic version, of course, of a more complicated story which I'll tell you over a glass of wine sometime, but the bottom line is that in the end we couldn't hold it together. We divorced in 2007. Cynthia remains in Charlottesville and I decided to relocate to Vietnam (like Costa Rica, tropical and inexpensive, but with much less crime). I'll be starting a 4-week CELTA course on September 8 to earn a low-level TEFL certification and then will try to snare a teaching contract at one of the many language schools in Hanoi.

I originally had booked a flight leaving SF on August 9, but a day before my departure, while running on a mountain trail in California, I twisted my right ankle and took a header on a downslope, falling heavily onto my left knee and rib cage. I bandaged my bloody knee and spent the afternoon icing my ankle. It wasn't until later that night that I discovered my sprained ankle wasn't the worst of my injuries. By morning I was experiencing excruciating muscle spasms from hip to shoulder every time I moved.

I cancelled my flight to Hanoi and tried to tough it out with handfuls of Ibuprofen, but after four days of steadily increasing pain I threw in the towel and had friends drive me to the nearest ER to get a shot of morphine. What I got, of course, was an X-ray and a prescription for Vicodin. Disappointed in a heartless American medical establishment, I rebooked my flight, wrapped my ribcage in an Ace bandage, and on August 17 flew to Hanoi with my pockets full of Vicodin, Ibuprofen, and cough drops (I would rather drink skunky beer than suffer a fit of coughing right now.)

So there you have it. My wife doesn't love me, the gods of trail-running hate me, guess I'll go eat worms—and who knows how to prepare delicious mint worm patties better than the Vietnamese. (This is no joke—I saw a video of it on Youtube.)

I won't prolong today's blog with details of my second visit to Language Link or my stroll through Lenin Park, but you can check out the photos I took at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/gregnelson0/hanoi3

Pho Ba Trieu (Ba Trieu Street)

2008-08-23T23:00:00.003+07:00

Take your shirt off and soak it in a basin of warm water for a few seconds and then lift the shirt dripping from the water and wring it out…but only use one hand. That's how wet my shirt was when I got home today from walking down Ba Trieu Street. Raining? No, just hot, sweaty Hanoi weather.

Thanh showed up this morning to see how I was getting along. When he stepped into my room, he shivered and told me it felt too cold. I have the thermostat set to 77F/25C. Thanh thought it would be better to bump it up to within 10 degrees of the outside temperature, which has hung around 90F this week.

When Thanh asked if I needed anything, I mentioned my three most pressing needs: pharmacy, bookstore, laundromat. According to Thanh, Hanoi has no self-service laundries. Furthermore, I shouldn't trust my clothes to any laundry other than the hotel service. He insisted on calling the hotel desk to have a laundry basket sent up and soon there arrived what looked for all the world to me like a bamboo trash basket a foot in diameter, a foot deep, full of splintery ends. Besides not wanting to snag my shirts in this basket, I also don't want to pay the hotel laundry rates: 50 cents per shirt, 60 cents for a pair of pants, 15 cents for a pair of socks (no price mentioned for unmentionables). Any American laundromat would be cheaper. Maybe I can work something out with a colleague who has a washer/dryer. (If I can find one. To judge by the volume of clothing you see hanging on balconies, a dryer must be a rare commodity in this town.)

Thanh showed me on a map where there is a concentration of bookstores around the corner from the Metropole. As for a pharmacy, he repeated what others have told me—you can find pharmacies all over town, just look for a sign with a cross on it. Then he offered to take me to one on his motorscooter, currently parked out front. I felt a bit apprehensive about loading my shattered ribs onto the back of what is essentially a game of Russian roulette disguised as transportation, but all week long I've watched octogenarians and pregnant women by the score put their frail bodies on the line, so who am I to say, "Not me, I'd rather walk."

The first pharmacy we found was about the size of a French elevator, so Tranh continued toward the town center until we found a bigger one—about the size of a newsstand. I could see through the window that all the merchandise was behind the counter and that, instead of looking for it, I would have to describe what I wanted (throat lozenges, Chloraseptic spray, Gold Bond powder, saw palmetto, mentholatum…). Given that the English-speaking staff at my hotel isn't sure what "four o'clock" means, I saw at once the absurdity of my quest and asked Thanh to drop me at a bookstore instead.

I happily browsed several bookstores but bought only a street map of Hanoi, for the main reason that none of the stores carried any English language books, although the quantity of books aimed at helping Vietnamese students master English was staggering. I was worried that I'd find English teaching materials in short supply, but it's obvious ESL is a serious industry here.

In the same neighborhood as the bookstores is a famous ice cream store called Kem Trang Thien. I looked in. Picture a low-ceilinged parking garage full of motorbikes, with an ice cream freezer in two corners, a broken and empty ice cream freezer in one corner, a collection of buckets and mops in the fourth corner, and dozens of young Vietnamese milling about eating ice cream cones. This is Hanoi's answer to Baskin-Robbins.

Since I was just a block from the Metropole and starting to sweat heavily, I thought I'd stop in, cool off, have a drink at the bar, maybe say hello to the American ambassador. I stopped in, but didn't do any of those other things because I could see right away that a drink at the bar was going to cost me as much as a day's stay at my hotel. The Metropole in Hanoi is world class and no lie. More intimidating than the Plaza Hotel in NYC, or the Ritz-Carlton in SF—or, needless to say, the Plains Hotel in Cheyenne.

This brings me to the part where I walk down Ba Trieu street, my shirt hanging closer and closer to my knees as it wicks the sweat from my body. Ba Trieu is a major street, lined with a motley assortment of businesses shuffled together at random. Next to a glass-fronted, obviously air-conditioned, Western-looking art gallery or camera store with track lighting, expensive furniture, and mahogany display cases will be a gritty-looking garage where an old woman in her pajamas is cutting the heads off fish and tossing them into an aluminum pot.

Along the way, I stopped into what might be the biggest pharmacy in Hanoi—the size of a Mrs. Field's mall store. Its display window featured several gigantic jars of whole ginseng roots soaking in brandy. Except for two cases containing orthotics, heating pads, and such, all the merchandise was behind the counter. I asked for something for a sore throat and was shown three products—lozenges from Germany, a paste from China, and lozenges from Thailand. The German packaging said in English: by prescription only. I bought the cheap Thai lozenges because they resembled cherry Sucrets—24 lozenges for 23,000 dong ($1.38).

Many Hanoi stores are no more than six feet wide. I was invited into a souvenir shop that had shelves on one wall, posters on a facing wall, and between them about three feet of sidling space. At the back of the store was an open door leading to a tiny windowless kitchen. The proprietor stood outside on the sidewalk to avoid blocking access to his own store. Every thirty feet or so, an alleyway appears, always occupied by two or three entrepreneurs cutting up meat, sorting cell phones, pounding dents out of motorscooter body parts, or just squatting in the shade and smoking. A lot of cooking happens on sidewalks here. Many eateries prepare their cuisine in aluminum cookware over a charcoal fire in a big tin can set on the ground. Although half the bike riders in Hanoi wear paper masks over their mouth and nose, on any city block you'll see lots of meat and fish just hanging out in bowls, exposed to sun, humidity, and exhaust fumes. Thanh warned me not to be tempted to try any of this street food.

The moldering ochre buildings thoughout Hanoi, legacies of the French occupation, are heartbreakingly beautiful and neglected. They're strung with so many electrical wires and clothes lines, they remind me of dolphins caught in fishing nets. And everywhere you look there are motorbikes. People here seem to live their lives on the streets. There are crowds on every block, sitting on little 6-inch plastic stools, smoking, drinking beer or tea, and eating noodle soup. Every block is teeming with people. But everywhere you look, motorbikes appear to outnumber people. If Hanoi's human population is 3.5 million, its bike population must be in the millions also. Motorbikes are parked three rows deep wherever the sidewalk can accommodate them.

The girls who cashier at the supermarket are something else. In the US you can really mess up a cashier by giving her $22.26 (instead of $20) for a purchase totalling $12.21. She doesn't see that giving back $10.05 is easier than giving back $7.79. The girls at the Vincom Towers market are just the opposite. They want your small denominations and they know how to get them. Today I gave the cashier a 100,000 dong note for a purchase of 98,500. Instead of just giving me my 1,500 change, she reached out and starting pulling small bills out of my hand trying to build up a payment of 108,500 so she could return 10,000 (or some such strategy). I demurred. I took back the small bills insisting I needed them for the bus. That's how I got my first 500 dong coin (worth 3 cents). I think I might keep it for luck.

Gordon, by the way—like some cats I could name—seems to have a thing for sweaty clothing. When I got back from my trip downtown, I hung my dripping shirt on a peg beside the wardrobe. When I retrieved it an hour later, Gordon jumped from the shirt to the wall, then jumped four feet onto a table and looked at me with a guilty smirk.

A day in the oubliette

2008-08-22T22:00:00.001+07:00

My hotel is having some renovation work done. Several of the 10 guest rooms have been gutted and are getting new floors, windows, and fixtures. Naturally this has involved a lot of drilling, sawing, hammering, pounding (my head), and grinding (my teeth). Up until today the work has been confined to daylight hours, but it's now 9:30PM and apparently the work is going to continue until the entire hallway outside my door has a brand new floor. This, I suppose, is what I get for not booking the Somerset Maugham suite at the Metropole.

You might be wondering why I don't just take a powder. Go someplace where the drunken laughter and hot jazz are loud enough to drown out renovations, honking horns, and cats in heat. Don't think that hasn't crossed my addled mind. I've been looking all week for the strength to return to Language Link and get myself invited out for some weekend carousing with those funloving pedagogues and goguettes.

To my chagrin, I woke up with a low-grade headache and even lower-grade diarrhea to go along with my throbbing ribs, sore throat, and still swollen and tender ankle. If Gordon were fluent in English like that Geico spokeslizard, I'd send him out to look for Imodium and a few more Vicodin, but I'm afraid Gordon is just out for himself. Time after time today I dressed up like I had somewhere to go, but I never got twenty feet from my bathroom except for a hurried excursion to the market for more bottled water and baguettes.

About the only thing I accomplished today was to read some of the other blogs being written by expatriates in Hanoi. There are a surprising number of these and every one I looked at succeeded in depressing me. Either the blogger is a handsome, athletic twenty-something zipping around on a motorbike picking up chicks, eating bats, drinking Irishmen under the table, and getting book offers for the ongoing tale of his thrilling adventures, or she is staying with a Vietnamese family and being driven to a different fascinating temple, village, tailor shop, or party every day. One blog is maintained by a couple who live at the Metropole (for the security more than the comfort) and blog about trade shows, opera evenings, and cocktail parties at the American ambassador's home. Aren't there any lonesome expatriates around here with painful hemorrhoids and threadbare pants?

Oh well, I'm going to bed and hope to wake up in a different movie.

Taking a bus downtown

2008-08-21T20:00:00.002+07:00

The air conditioner has changed my mode of life. Until last night, terrace door and window stood wide open—funneling in sunlight, moonlight, street noises, disquieting odors, mosquitoes, and hot, humid air. Now my room has become a cool, dim cave smelling faintly of Yardley soap, where socks and blankets have a purpose, where car horns are faint and distant, where hundreds of microscopic ants will either starve to death or start in on me during the night.

Whenever I start to miss my old pre-AC Hanoi experience, I can just step out onto the terrace. I did that just now and was reminded of how different things can appear when you take a second look at them. I told you earlier I could see five or six silver "beer cans" from my balcony. Looking again today, I saw no less than thirty-one.

I took a bus downtown this morning. It was pretty much like taking a MUNI bus in SF, with these differences: 1) it costs 18 cents, 2) the driver never really comes to a complete stop—you have to board or disembark while the bus is moving at 1 or 2 mph, 3) you can bump your head on the ceiling if you're taller than 5'10". The purpose of my excursion was to track down a computer accessory I need to transfer photos from my camera to my computer. (Seriously, how long are you going to stick with my little travelog if I never provide any pictures? Those six hundred pounds of National Geographics in your basement would have been recycled ages ago if they were text only.)

I found the store I had been directed to and bought the item I needed (pictures coming your way soon), but the store didn't have the Ethernet cable I also wanted. For that I would need a computer store. Okay, where is one, I asked. Nobody at the camera store had any idea. Nobody at the tourist info kiosk down the street knew, either. Or anybody at the local Highlands Coffee shop, although I did find out the Olympic event in which Vietnam won a silver medal. You're going to think I'm joking, but I swear this is true: Vietnam won silver this week in…weightlifting! Vietnam's only previous Olympic medal was a silver in taekwondo in 2000.

Eventually, I found somebody who knew where there was a computer store in Hanoi. He directed me to Vincom City Towers, the modern highrise shopping mall where I've been buying peanut butter and mouthwash. I was skeptical because I've explored that mall in some detail, but nobody else had any suggestions at all. So now the problem was how to catch a bus back to where I started. The guys at the tourist info kiosk didn't have a clue. I stopped into an upscale hotel across the street from Hoan Kiem Lake. (This, by the way, is tourist central in Hanoi. Caucasians practically outnumber Vietnamese in this neighborhood. I figured anybody connected with this particular hotel would be used to speaking English and giving directions to out-of-towners.) The desk clerk assured an incredulous me that no bus went anywhere near Vincom Towers.

I just came from there by bus, I said. Surely I can return there by bus.

He shook his head. No, that bus comes on a one-way street. You have to take a cab back.

You mean, I said, bus after bus comes up here from Vincom Towers and then all the buses just stay here?

Yes, he said. You have to take a cab back.

I left the hotel and found a bus stop about fifty feet away. Ten minutes later I was disembarking (at about 2 mph) across the street from Vincom Towers. I found the computer store on the fourth floor of the mall. It's actually a TV/stereo store that also sells laptop computers. The sales staff had never heard of an Ethernet cable, didn't have one, and had no idea where one could be found in Hanoi.

My sore throat is still worrying me, I've been a little nauseous all day, and as usual, the pain in my ribs lessens in the AM and then worsens in the PM. I've decided to revisit Language Link when I'm feeling stronger.

I read today in a newspaper that Vietnam has adjusted its poverty line upward in response to inflation. Two years ago, the poverty line was 6 million dong per year. Now the poverty line is 10 million dong per year in rural areas, 12 million dong per year in the city. For reference, I just paid 6 million dong ($361) for fifteen days in my air-conditioned lodgings.

Playing hooky already

2008-08-20T20:00:00.002+07:00

I hope my ribs heal soon. I'm almost out of Vicodin. Around dawn, the pain abated enough that I was able to lie gingerly on my right side for the first time in twelve days. When I woke up, I noticed a mosquito flying around my head, the first I've noticed since arriving in Hanoi. I easily swatted him to the floor and by the time I could lean down to look at him, he was being swarmed by tiny ants about the size of chiggers. Hundreds of them. What the hell am I paying Gordon for? I'm going to have to have words with him, but I'm sure he'll only pretend to understand.

I must remember to close the curtain between my desk and the terrace at night. When I came to the desk this morning I found the morning sun beating down on my computer, which had gotten way too hot to touch. I'm a little apprehensive about the humidity, too. Maybe I can find a safe place to keep my computer at the school.

Although there is a free Internet connection in my hotel room, I find it tends to flake out during the day. Right now, for example, I can't access my mail server (or any other URL). That might be another reason to keep my computer at the school.

I'm struggling to get a handle on the currency here. Vietnamese bills come in denominations of 500,000, 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000, 5,000, 2,000, and 1,000. I'm told there are also bills of 500, 200, and 100 and coins, too, but since I've been here I've seen only one bill under 10,000 and no coins. The supermarket cash registers have no coins and very few small bills. Small bills are scarce. The exchange rate right now is about 16,600 VND (Vietnamese dong) to the USD (US dollar), making the 10,000 dong note worth about 60 cents. The largest denomination—500,000 dong—is worth about $30.

Here's what happens at the supermarket checkout: Your total comes to 357,640 dong ($21.52). You give the cashier a 500,000 dong note ($30.00). She asks you for 8,000 dong more, so she can save her small bills. Of course, since small bills are scarce, you don't have 8,000 dong, so you give her a 10,000 dong note. She gives you back a 100,000 dong note, a 50,000 dong note, a 2,000 dong note, and a piece of candy to make up the 360 dong difference (2 cents). Places of business that don't have candy just round things off to the nearest denomination they can handle.

One of the teachers at Language Link explained to me how to take a bus to the city center. You have to be prepared with the fare amount of 3,000 dong. She didn't say how to get such small bills into your possession.

I told the people at Language Link I would come again today, but I've been feeling so poorly, I've decided to can it. My ribs hurt and I'm starting to get a very sore throat. Except for a trip to the shopping mall to buy water and mouthwash, I've spent the day in my room. I took a shower. I watched the US men's volleyball team win a close match against Serbia. I made observations from the terrace while identifying with James Stewart in Rear Window. I took another shower. I made a wonderful discovery: I have AC in my hotel room after all!

The AC unit high on the wall, which I had assumed to be broken, just needed a little love and understanding—mostly understanding. The key was to figure out which of the five apparently useless switches in my room was connected to the AC unit and to make sure this switch was in the correct position when the remote control unit hidden in the drawer was activated. I feel like I just got a telegram from Ed McMahon.

When I went to the mall for mouthwash I stopped at Highlands Coffee for a sandwich and a cup of iced coffee. Highlands is a very western coffee lounge—dark wood, overstuffed chairs, two floor-to-ceiling glass walls, one looking onto the mall, one looking onto the street, English language newspapers in a rack on the wall. According to the sports page, Vietnam has won a silver medal in Beijing. None of the waitresses could tell me what event was involved. Nobody here seems to have the slightest interest in the Olympics. Thanh admitted to me on Monday he only likes football (i.e., soccer).

Language Link

2008-08-19T20:00:00.000+07:00

I may have overdone the twisting, lifting, carrying, and walking yesterday. When I went to bed last night I found I still couldn't lie down and could no longer even lean comfortably against the pillows. The muscle spasms had returned and I was forced to resume taking my Vicodin. I finally dozed off around 2 AM and slept on and off until 6 AM. The sounds of honking horns and crying children faded away during these pre-dawn hours, but were replaced by the sounds of trucks, heavy equipment, pile drivers, jack hammers, and cats in heat. This city never sleeps. Speaking of heat, the temperature might have fallen off to 79F during the night, but the humidity remained pretty constant. I never once pulled the sheet over me or even thought of doing so.

After a breakfast of fruit, cheese, and leathery bread in my room, I stepped out to the terrace to take some photos. In a tiny courtyard three stories below me a chubby boy of 11 or 12 appeared, totally naked and unselfconscious. He filled a plastic basin with water from an outdoor faucet, squatted over the basin and proceeded to wash his bum with a rag. His mother appeared briefly, patted him on the head, and went back into the house. Later in the day I spotted a rat—a large one—sneaking across the same courtyard.

Somewhere a bird is whistling. I've been hearing it since I moved in. It doesn't sound like a bird so much as a human burglar signalling his accomplices with phony whistled "bird calls". I was suspicious at first, but the whistling went on for hours yesterday evening and has resumed again this morning. I'll try to get a photo of the specimen for Fred. I also heard a male tenor singing opera last night. Definitely not a recording, as the voice stopped and started at irregular intervals.

So far I haven't seen a single spider, cockroach, or snake, but there's a tiny gecko who lives behind my wardrobe. I call him Gordon.

I met an American woman at the supermarket today. She has lived in Hanoi for six months, likes it, but couldn't tell me where to find a pharmacy. The supermarket is in a highrise American-style indoor shopping mall—six floors of clothing boutiques, watch boutiques, perfume boutiques, jewelry boutiques, chain restaurants, and video arcades. But there is no pharmacy, no bookstore, no DVD/CD store, no gym, no movie theater. The supermarket carries no sponges, no paper towels, and no plastic bags. I bought a small plastic tub with a lid to keep my bread out of Gordon's clutches. Also, a fruit knife, some rolls of toilet paper I hope will be softer than the cheap stuff provided by the hotel, a plastic plate decorated with a picture of an ancient Vietnamese temple, a package of toothpicks made of plastic or fish bones (I can't tell which), and a washcloth with which to cool my fevered brow and sponge my sweaty body throughout each steamy day and night.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon I received a phone call from Hung, the hotel desk boy, asking (in halting English) if it was okay to clean my room. I told him I was about to take a shower and then go out, so could the cleaning be done after 4:00? He said yes, so I began my shower. As I was towelling off, I heard the sound of a key trying to unlock my door. I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door to find two startled maids standing in the hallway. I asked them (while gesturing) to go away and come back (another gesture) in 10 minutes (I held up ten fingers). Then I closed the door on their puzzled expressions. This was my first personal confirmation of something several guide books warned me about—the Vietnamese will assure you they understand what you're telling them, even if they don't.

Language Link, the school at which I will be training (and, very possibly, teaching) is three blocks from my hotel. You're walking along the street—the sidewalk is blocked with hundreds of parked motorbikes, piles of dirt, bricks, and lumber, and people squatting on tiny stools—trying to avoid getting run over while casting glances at the row of low-ceilinged storefronts. In an American city they would be storefronts, and in fact some of them hold piles of strange-looking vegetables, or hundreds of grimy, used cell phones spread on blankets, or a girl with a paper mask over her mouth cutting the hair of a boy perched on an overturned bucket, but a majority of them hold something even more ambiguous—a stack of bricks and a pile of sand, behind which a woman and a child sit on a sofa watching television, or half a dozen motorbikes in various stages of repair, buckets of tools and parts, and a man standing at a stove cooking dinner.

Then, suddenly, the row of storefronts is broken by some wide stairs going up to a modern glass-fronted building. Inside the glass front are rows of plastic chairs filled with young people waiting to be processed by one of six young women sitting behind a long table at individual computer stations. This is Language Link.

I ask to see Malcolm Young, the director of studies, but he's away. Instead I'm introduced to Kevin, a short middle-aged Brit with a foghorn voice, who takes me up to the second-floor teacher's lounge and hands me off to Evan, who, with his broad grin, looks like a young Hemingway. Evan shows me a wall of resource material available to all teachers and points out a small section of books on teaching methodology. He pulls out 5 or 6 items of interest and I ask if I might stay and look them over. Language Link is air-conditioned and most of the dozen or so people here in the teacher's lounge are speaking English. I'm in no hurry to leave.

During the next three hours I take notes on an interesting article about how English differs from Vietnamese and which of those differences give Vietnamese students the worst learning difficulties. At the same time I'm soaking up the atmosphere of the teacher's lounge and making the acquaintance of some of the teachers. All of them, without exception, strike me as attractive, intelligent, friendly, and fun. They are all busy grading papers, preparing lesson plans, culling resource materials, photocopying worksheets, and so on, but they still find time to ask about Evan's holiday, how John's new apartment is working out, make up songs about Sierra's love life, indulge in some goodnatured teasing, and share some chocolate with the new guy (me). I like it here. I like these people. Each of them has a plastic tub in which to keep colored markers, glue sticks, crayons, flash cards, etc. It's the same plastic tub I just bought to serve as a bread box.

It gets dark in Hanoi around 6:30 these days. When I finally left Language Link around 7:30 it felt quite late so I skipped dinner and went straight back to my hotel. I supped on bread and cheese and went to bed early.

Once again I had the experience of feeling considerably worse at bedtime than during the day. I still couldn't lie down or even semi-recline with any comfort. The sheets were clammy and any pillow I leaned against felt like a heating pad set to maximum heat. I dozed fitfully. Then around 3:00 I heard what sounded like steam escaping under pressure. I couldn't tell if the sound was coming from outside my window or from the hallway. I thought at once of the giant beercans on the neigboring rooftops. I can see five or six of them from my terrace. They look like 100-gallon silver kegs of beer but probably just maintain water pressure for each building. I was thinking one of them might have sprung a leak but I couldn't imagine how the noise could be so loud. The noise faded gradually over the next minute or two, but then came roaring back and I suddenly realized I was hearing the sound of a hard rain. I gathered up all my ribs and crept onto the terrace and marveled at the suddenness with which the clouds had released their contents.

Touchdown

2008-08-18T20:00:00.000+07:00

I expected the 12-hour flight from SF to Taiwan to be a night from hell, but it proved otherwise. I mentioned my broken ribs to a flight attendant who saw me struggling to lift my laptop case into the overhead compartment and in return she mentioned—offered—an empty row of three seats next to the mid-cabin lavatory. I raised the two middle armrests, gathered up all three complimentary pillow and blanket sets, and fashioned myself a cushy chaise longue on which to stretch my legs and elevate my feet while keeping my torso in a mostly upright position. I made it through the 12-hour flight without Vicodin, without alarming my neighbors with pitiful whimpers and groans, without suffering a fatal blood clot, and without flopping about the cabin in a desperate search for relief from restless leg syndrome. In fact, I slept a great deal and arrived in Taipei rested and practically painfree.

The computer at the boarding gate at Taoyuan Airport in Taipei was printing out passenger lists and flight manifests on a tractor-feed dot matrix printer, but otherwise Taipei's airport looked like any big city airport—with fewer stores and restaurants, maybe, but more potted plants. There was even a shelf of potted plants in the "Man Toilet".

The three-hour hop from Taipei to Hanoi was uneventful. I sat next to a Hungarian couple and we were served dubious cuts of pork over gummy overcooked noodles garnished with a hardcooked brown egg—brown clear through except for a dark green yolk. We arrived at Hanoi in a warm drizzle that didn't obscure a flat green landscape brimming with lakes, ponds, and puddles. The temperature was around 80F, but the atmosphere was like your bathroom when somebody has just finished a hot shower.

Getting through Vietnamese customs took all of 30 seconds. A skinny boy wearing an army tunic glanced at my declaration (blank except for my name, address, and passport number), stamped my visa, and waved me through. No words were exchanged. The Hanoi airport is half the size of the Oakland airport. It has two baggage carousels. I had my luggage on the curb ten minutes after we landed.

Thanh met me as promised. He recognized me from my photo and I recognized him from his. I hadn't expected him to come to the airport in a cab, though. Because of my injured ribs, Thanh let me sit up front with the driver on the way back to town. I spent the 45-minute ride to the hotel painfully twisted in my seat so I could keep up a conversation with Thanh. As I expected, his spoken English was inferior to his written English and we both had quite a struggle communicating. Thanh is two years older than me, a physicist who lived and worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He now works as a scientific advisor in Hanoi.

Rain continued to fall as we rolled past flooded fields and across the muddy river into the city. The highway is grade level pretty much the entire way and, though four lanes wide, has no median—just a low cement barrier along certain stretches. Pedestrians meandered across the four lanes here and there. Traffic, moderately heavy, was maybe 55% autos and trucks, 40% motorbikes and motorscooters, and 5% bicycles. The autos were a mixture of European-style compacts, mid-size sedans, and SUVs. I'd say there were more SUVs than small cars, but that might characterize traffic to and from the international airport more than Hanoi traffic in general. I saw no tractor trailers. A majority of the motorbikes and motorscooters carried two people. There were lots of rain ponchos and it was common to see the driver wearing a large one, the front of the poncho draped over the front of the scooter and the back of it draped over the passenger who rode along, dry under the plastic but unable to see anything other than the driver's back. We passed several fresh accidents and neither Thanh nor the taxi driver even gave them a glance.

The traffic circulation in the center of Hanoi was exactly as advertised—chaotic, ill-advised, dangerous. You get the feeling, though, that in Hanoi the reckless drivers are not motivated, as they are elsewhere, by belligerance, road-rage, ego, showing off, etc., but rather by a desire to get where they're going in the shortest possible time even if it means risking their own life and the life of everyone in their path. Everybody uses their horn liberally. They honk whenever they pass someone, whenever they approach an intersection, whenever they're in an intersection, whenever somebody gets within three feet of them, whenever they get within three feet of somebody else or intend to. As a result, Hanoi sounds perpetually like a wedding couple being launched on their honeymoon by the best man and a dozen of his drunken friends.

The architecture in and around Hanoi is a charming blend of Asian and European. I saw mile after mile of freestanding four-, five-, and six-story houses, tall and narrow (12-15 feet wide), elegant, many with cantilevered balconies, covered terraces, or inner courtyards, and red tile roofs with Oriental spires and flourishes, all of it apparently unplanned development—new buildings strongly resembling older buildings in style, but no two exactly alike. We also passed block after block of cavernous sheds made of corrugated tin which looked for all the world like garages or machine shops, but in whose dim interiors could be seen dozens of cheap chairs ranged around large tables and as often as not the chairs were full of shadowy figures looking like a bingo crowd during a power blackout. I'd love to know what was going on in those sheds.

Hanoi is smaller, closer, more crowded feeling than I had anticipated, even after looking for hours at satellite images of it on Google Earth. Even the huge, elegant, expensive Metropole Hotel fronts a narrow, grimy, almost claustrophobic street. That goes for my hotel, too. The lobby is tiny, the elevator must surely have come from France, and the place has no air conditioning. Neither does the neighborhood bank, the neighborhood supermarket, or the neighborhood restaurant where Thanh and I had lunch. The lunch was good, by the way. We had sticky rice, grilled pork, grilled fish, steamed celery and salad greens, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes—as much as the two of us could eat—plus green tea and two 20-ounce bottles of beer for a total cost of about $7.00. No tipping is the custom here. Thanh says if I become a regular customer the restaurant will probably start giving me a discount.

My hotel room is about 15 feet square with a tile floor and a thirteen foot ceiling. Queen-size platform bed with a very firm mattress. Desk with chair and Internet jack. Large mirrored wardrobe. Mini-fridge. Cable TV with 57 channels. Two bedside tables and lamps. Telephone. Occasional table flanked by two easy chairs. Private bathroom. Toilet with bidet attachment (picture the spray hose on your kitchen sink). Four by eight foot covered balcony half filled with potted plants. A six-foot wide window and a glass door that open onto the balcony. The room is clean and pleasant and is costing me about $25 a day. As an experiment, you might try sending me a letter or care package c/o The World Hotel, 137 Mai Hac De, Hanoi, Vietnam. (Don't send anything valuable or vulnerable to humidity.) I've paid in advance through the end of August and will most probably stay here until the end of September.

Did I mention the absence of AC? I'd gladly trade my bidet attachment for some. My balcony looks out on some of those terraces and inner courtyards I mentioned. This evening as I sit at my computer looking at the full moon framed in my giant window I can see lines of laundry hung to dry and hear fighting cats and mothers scolding crying children. On the TV in the corner, Val Kilmer's face is speaking Vietnamese. It's not terribly hot but it's extremely humid. I can see I'm going to be taking lots of showers..

Thanh insisted I buy some groceries for my hotel room while we were near the supermarket. The Vietnamese are no more apt to eat peanut butter than the French are, but the store was well stocked with peanut butter and I bought some, along with two baguettes which proved tougher than shoe leather. Big deal. They were only 25 cents each, and I got a package of 10 coconut cookies for 40 cents. I wanted a plastic knife for the peanut butter, but all I could find was a package of twenty. I bought the pack when I realized it only cost 25 cents.

Tomorrow I'll visit my school (just around the corner) and try to find a bookstore that sells English language books.