Happy News Year

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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.)