Sa Pa

Walking on the thin strip of soil at the edge of a mountainside rice paddy, before the terrace drops to the next level, is like tracing one step on a living ladder that connects the earth's bounty to humanity's kitchen. On our recent trip to the alpine town of Sa Pa, that's where Scott and I found ourselves – hiking the steep and recently harvested slopes where the rice we'd eaten the night before had first emerged from the soil.

Traditionally, Sa Pa is a trading post where inhabitants of the surrounding ethnic minority villages gather to sell crops and to search for a spouse at the weekly "love market." The vibrantly dressed minority people, especially the Black Hmong with their calves wrapped in intricate leggings and Red Dzao with their elaborate headpieces, often still walk the better part of a day to hawk their wares in Sa Pa, only now they're more likely to be targeting tourists for a sale than fellow villagers.

As a result, the hill people, who only recently started having to learn Vietnamese in school, speak amazing English, through which we could glean tidbits about their way of life. A 34-year-old mother of five showed me how she walks around running hemp through her fingers all day, preparing it to be woven and dyed with indigo into a traditional Hmong jacket. We saw the way they'd siphoned water from a waterfall to power a see-saw like rice husker and watched a rowdy group of boys take turns riding down a hill on a bicycle made all from wood.



We also saw the way tourism is changing the area – making it common for women who must have been in their sixties to offer to sell us hashish, but also providing young Hmong girls an opportunity to push marriage back from the customary age of 14 to 16 to allow them to work as tour guides for a few years.

Not far from the Chinese border, Sa Pa is also located near Tram Ton (Heaven's Gate) Pass, Vietnam's highest mountain pass at nearly two kilometers tall. Promised a decent road, we rented motorbikes to drive across it, only to find the road under construction that stopped all traffic for half hour periods while impatient drivers revved their engines ready to roar out in a chaotic pack as soon as we were let through.

Driving between wobbly minibuses and a precarious drop off was worth it, however, for the views of mountains that alternated between being bathed in a honey sunlight that showered glowing beams over the trees and being swallowed by a looming fog that hid the crags and made the scene seem so big that surely our little motorbike would be lost in the eternity of dips and lifts of earth forever.

Because we went late in the year, the fog was a constant presence in Sa Pa. For our final day hike, we traveled down into the valley and finally saw the river cutting through the rice fields and the villages tending them that had been sunny under the fog layer the whole time. While we carefully picked our way up and down the terraces, next to tiny women in plastic shoes skipping down the slippery trails with no problem, life went on around us. Children danced to music blaring from loudspeakers in schoolyards, women pulled bamboo three times their size down impossibly narrow paths and waterbuffalo grazed.

And as we came back chilled from the day, we'd open a bottle of wine, light a fire in the hotel room fireplace and then open the windows to let the smoke billow across our room and out into the night.

Street Food Thursdays

For the past month or so, we’ve been having weekly street food nights with a group of friends, where someone picks a new, delicious-looking dish to try and we all meet up to check it out. It’s turned into a nice way to sample Hanoi’s cuisine, which is really built around street food – and the tiny little stalls with child-sized plastic stools that sell it. Last night was Alison’s turn to choose, and she picked a place that specializes in cháo cá, or fish porridge. It’s basically creamy rice porridge with chunks of an unknown white fish, scallions and dill, and it’s surprisingly delicious. We had it for dinner, but it’s also a breakfast food (sort of like cream of wheat…except with fish…and MSG).

The first street food night was an outing to chicken street, which, like you’d expect, is a street that’s lined with giant charcoal grills that the vendors use to grill up skewers of chicken wings or feet (gà nướng), along with sweet potatoes (khoai) and baguettes (bánh mỳ). All the food is coated in this sugary glaze before it’s grilled, so it’s deliciously sweet – and then you dip it in a chili sauce that makes the whole thing taste like spicy barbeque. Mmm. Unfortunately, we recently learned that some of the chicken they use isn’t the freshest, and they scrub it down with laundry detergent to clean it up. So be it.

Some of the other things we’ve tried on street food Thursdays are: sticky rice (xôi) with various savory toppings, assorted fried dumpling-like things (bánh gôi, bánh rán mặn) and BBQ pork ribs (sườn nướng). Of course, this doesn’t include all of the street food we’ve had on our own: phở bò (beef noodle soup), bún riêu (sour tomato and crab noodle soup), bánh cuốn (rice flour pancakes rolled with mushroom and pork), bún chả (grilled pork with noodles and broth), phở xao (stir-fried noodles with beef and some vegetables), bánh chuôi (deep-fried banana) and bánh mỳ trứng (scrambled egg sandwich on a baguette), just to name a few. It’s absolutely amazing the variety of dishes that are available on the streets, and it’s been a great way to see the city and experience the culture. The deliciousness is a plus too.

If you’re curious about what some of these things look like or want more of a description, this website has a great street food section – just move your mouse over where it says “Street Food” at the top left, and you can click on any of the categories to see some examples. Careful though, it may make you extremely jealous. And hungry.

While Scott was flitting aroud beaches and tailor shops...

We knew it wasn’t binh thuong.

As we entered hour 14 of what would end up to be about two straight days of downpour – preceded and followed by more showers – my unshakably blasé coworkers insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. Yes, the drains had reached their limits hours ago, yes, we couldn’t cross the street to get to the closest café for lunch, yes, that woman was holding her baby above her head to keep it out of the water, but what else would a storm look like?

As my friend who hadn’t been able to escape her apartment watched the water creeping into all the shops on her street and heard the ceramic statute in front of her door shatter under the weight of the deluge, her landlady assured her it was all binh thuong: fine, normal, not exciting.

But the news was on our side. By the end of the weekend, reports were that the floods that hit the city were the heaviest in more than two decades. We’d received four times more rain in a week than the average for the whole month of November. About 20 people in Hanoi, and 120 internationally, were killed. With roads closed and almost 650,000 acres of cropland under water, produce was running out and food prices were quadrupling.



To live through all of that with no idea what was going on and everyone telling you it’s just a standard rainy day is an absurd adventure. Cars were creating wakes like boats before noon, motorbikes were up to their handlebars in water an hour later, and my boss sent an email that said maybe employees who had children to pick up could leave the office at 4:30.

Wading almost a mile home in the dark that evening, my housemate (Tim the snake-eating Canadian) and I tried not to identify all the soft, squishy objects getting caught in our sandals. Since our first floor didn’t flood overnight as expected, we felt gypped of the action and sloshed out again the next day to find our neighborhood lake severely overflowed and people spear fishing on the sidewalks. Take that, food shortages.



By the following night, I was able to get cocktails with the friend who’d been trapped inside by submerged broken glass. We were celebrating seeing the sidewalk again.

Whew

Last Friday I finally returned to Hanoi after a whirlwind trip to central Vietnam for work. In true Vietnamese (or maybe just VNAH) fashion, I didn't find out until the day before I left that I was going, and I didn't know how long I was staying until two days after I arrived. Turns out that I was away for about a week and a half, which is way longer than I expected. Fortunately, there was plenty to do and I got to see some new parts of the country.

I spent the first week of the trip in Da Nang, where we have several continuing projects and one new one starting up. There was a launching ceremony for the newest grant from USAID and quite a bit of showing the USAID folks around the rehabilitation clinic that we helped to start and that will be the hub of the new service network we're setting up in Da Nang. Of course, this was all interspersed with delicious local seafood and plenty of Heineken (strangely enough, that seems to be the high-class beer of choice among Vietnamese).

After a few days of work, I was granted the weekend off (unlike the last trip), and spent a day in Hoi An, an old city south of Da Nang that used to be the major port for the area until the river filled up with silt. The city is incredibly well-preserved, with tons of old homes, meeting houses, and pagodas, but it's also 100% tourists, which is a bit strange. The old part of town is also off-limits to cars and motorbikes for most of the day, making it incredibly glorious to walk around and giving a slightly more authentic feel, despite the hordes of Westerners traipsing about with cameras and guidebooks (me among them, although I forget the guidebook). Besides the architechture and history, the main draw for Hoi An is its clothing and tailoring shops. They're supposedly the best in Vietnam, and 3 out of every 4 buildings is either a tailor or a shoemaker. Despite my best efforts to resist, I ended up walking away with 3 suits, 4 shirts and 2 pairs of shoes, all hand-made within a day and of amazing quality. The total bill: $485. Crazy.

The real highlight of the whole trip came after Da Nang, when we drove up to the province of Kon Tum in the central highlands. Kon Tum was the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the American War, and is also a place where the U.S. dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange and napalm to clear the forests and expose the supply trails leading into Cambodia and Laos (Kon Tum is the province where Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all come together). Not only that, but the region is mostly ethnic minority groups, which have been suppressed by the Vietnamese government for some time (pretty violently around 2000 or so, when access to the province was drastically cut off for foreigners and NGOs). VNAH is starting a new project to assist people with disabilities there, in particular Agent Orange victims, so we met with all sorts of local government officials to sign cooperation agreements. Turns out that the head of the foriegn affairs department of Kon Tum celebrates signing an agreement with the chugging of beers at 9:00 a.m. No, seriously, I had to chug a beer at 9:00 a.m.

VNAH is also involved in an ongoing project with the Nippon Foundation of Japan to build primary schools in ethnic minority villages throughout the central highlands, and we attended the opening cermonies for two of these schools. In order to get there I had to pile into a Soviet-era jeep that could navigate the dirt roads leading to the villages, almost cracking my skull every time we went over a pothole. The people in these villages are incredibly poor, despite the land being very fertile - they're just completely cut off from the rest of the country and the government doesn't do anything for them. If they have a school, it's made of bamboo, with a tin roof if they're lucky, no heat, no lights and a dirt floor. But despite all of that, they were all some of the friendliest and most welcoming people I've ever met, excited to talk to me and willing to share their food (and jars of rice wine) with us to celebrate the inauguration of their new school. This is a photo of the ceremony, with the old school in the background:

From VNAH Primary School Opening in Dak Ro Nga

The whole region is stunningly beautiful, and very much like the Vietnam of Hollywood, with thick jungles, tiny villages, and green rice paddies all over. Certainly different from the modernity of Hanoi, and it made for an amazing trip. There are a ton of pictures up on the Picasa site, so I recommend checking those out to get a sense of Kon Tum (and Da Nang and Hoi An, of course).

Snake feast

We knew what we were getting into, but when it actually started to happen, we didn’t want it. It’s one thing to read about eating snake, but another to watch the animal’s heart cut out while it’s still alive.

We had taken the motorbike out for its first spin on the highway to reach Le Mat, the snake village. It’s just like the other handicraft villages outside Hanoi, but instead of making pottery, silk or conical hats for hundreds of years, its residents have perfected the art of cooking and eating snake. It’s basically a two street village, with modest houses surrounding a strip of grandiose snake restaurants.

We picked our eatery at random, and like all the others, it had shelf after shelf of reptiles preserved in rice wine, like an alcoholic apothecary. The main attractions, of course, were the three cages of live snakes, where we would have been permitted to choose our lunch from the slithering mass had we not already been dismissed as clueless Westerners. I’m sure my presence confirmed our obliviousness in the eyes of our hosts, as clearly the point of eating snake is to enhance male virility. Also included in the “good for men” category: watermelon rinds, cow penis and the more lethal varieties of rice wine. All the delicious, delicious fruits are for women, so I have some guesses about who devised the system.

The restaurateurs fished a snake about a meter long (three feet, you ignorant Americans) out with a hook and pinned its head down with their feet. Then, they were slicing out its heart and gall bladder, draining its blood and snipping off its head. It was very quick but very intense, and I wished the head could have come off first.



It couldn’t, though, because as the snake was whisked off to the kitchen, we were whisked off to our table where we were prepared shots of snake blood mixed with rice wine and, for our lucky friend Tim, the still beating heart. If a certain absurdly tall American tells you it’s easy to do that shot because it tastes like less strong rice wine, don’t believe him. Technically, it is less strong, because it’s full of blood-tasting blood. Like you bit your tongue hard enough to hit an artery. I had to chase it down with spoonfuls of rice (rice fried in snake fat) to get the taste out of my mouth because, this being Vietnam, there was no water in sight. You just wash down food with more food.

Next, the punctured gall bladder produced shockingly green bile, which was also mixed with rice wine and poured down the hatch. Impressively, the time it took us to do two pretty hesitant shots was enough time for them to prepare our first snake dishes. Within the next half hour to 45 minutes, they turned that not-very-substantial snake into a feast of a dozen dishes, including three kinds of rolls, breaded fried snake skin, powdery meat on a pancake and porridge. We also got to choose a complimentary infused rice wine, and we went with gecko because we figured it was the least likely to be endangered (the snakes are also farmed, not wild, so OK to eating). Gecko wine definitely tastes like a science experiment, no surprises there.



I think it’s a testament to my increasingly steel-like stomach that when I first got here, I’d feel queasy after eating just about everything, and now I’m downing snake bile with no problem.

Vroom Vroom

As I think I've mentioned before, one of the first things you notice about Vietnam, and Hanoi in particular, is the motorbikes. They're literally everywhere, including driving on the sidewalks during rush hour, and they carry everything - four people on one bike is fairly common, as are 10 of those 5-gallon jugs of spring water, crates of various animals (including pigs, chickens, and rabid cats), 20-foot steel bars, and pretty much anything else you can think of that would need to be transported across the city. Some people have Vespas and Vespa-like fully automatic scooters, but the majority have these semi-automatic motorbikes where you shift gears like on a motorcycle but without using a clutch. They're all fairly small (100-120cc engines), but are perfect for navigating the tiny alleys of Hanoi and cruising around Hoan Kiem lake with your lady friend on the back. And now that Alison and I are the proud renters of our very own SYM Elegant 100cc motorbike, that's exactly what we're doing. Isn't she great? So despite being terrified of all things motorbike related when we got here, we eventually warmed up to them and realized that they're incredibly convenient, especially for my commute to work. It's not that far, about two miles, but that's pretty miserable to walk in the heat and with the busy streets, and the public bus doesn't really stop that close to my office. So we decided to rent a motorbike. Driving home from the rental place was one of the more nerve-wracking experiences of my life, along with driving to work the next day in rush hour, but I pretty quickly got comfortable with the crowds and the feel of the bike - it's actually not that different from riding a bicycle, just way heavier and harder to balance. Alison drove for the first time last weekend, and managed to get around the block a few times without any incidents, so that's a good sign too. We're always really careful since we've heard plenty of stories about accidents and things, so don't go worrying too much about us (I'm looking at you, Mom).

The bike is definitely tons of fun, and it gives us a lot more freedom to travel around the city without being dependent on cabs (expensive), buses (annoying), and xe om (motorbike taxis -lots of haggling). And we actually do occasionally go cruising around the lake at night, Alison on the back. Although to be truly Vietnamese she'd have to sit side-saddle, and she's not quite there yet. Probably for the best.

Vietnamese Cooking for Dummies

After talking about it since before we left for Vietnam, we finally took a cooking class last Saturday. It was at a place called Hidden Hanoi, which apparently also does language lessons, walking tours, and dance classes (our cooking teacher, Linh, is also a belly-dancer). It ended up being just Alison and I in the class, which was great, since we both got to do a ton of actual cooking for all the different dishes. You can pick one of five different menus, all of which looked delicious, and we ended up with the street food menu of bun cha (rice vermicelli with grilled ground pork patties and sliced pork), nuoc mam cham (fish sauce soup with green papaya and carrot slices), and nem cua be (fried spring rolls). Here's the final product (and yes, we even made the little rose decorations out of tomato skins):

Everything was way more involved than expected, with tons of very thinly sliced ingredients, but we managed to muddle our way through pretty successfully and it ended up being really delicious. The spring rolls in particular had an absurd number of ingredients, and the rolling took a lot of time since they were so tiny (only a couple of inches long) and we had so much filling. After eating all of our creations, we had a dessert of mango, grapefruit dipped in chili salt, and green tea, and then got our little gift bags of long cooking chopsticks and copies of all the recipes so we can make everything once we get back home. And don't worry, we're already planning multiple Vietnamese food feasts for all the loyal readers of the blog.

Did I just bribe someone?

Last weekend we took our first trip to Ha Long Bay, a 3 hour drive east of Hanoi and a candidate for one of the new seven natural wonders of the world. It's certainly beautiful - mainland Vietnam ends at the port city of Ha Long, and extending out nearly 100km further into the ocean are over 2,000 limestone islands rising up in the bay. The bay is something of a labyrinth, and it would be incredibly easy to get completely lost in there for days. Fortunately the boat that we were on managed to navigate the waters just fine, and we made it back to shore safely after about 24 hours on board. Out in the bay we toured around for a while on the boat, stopping at one large island that had a massive network of caves (they seem to be big on caves in Vietnam), and also going kayaking and swimming. The kayaking was great - we were able to really get the feel of the bay from down in the water and explore a bit on our own (though still surrounded by the tourist boats). We even found our way through a cave to a hidden lagoon, which we were very proud of, despite it also being filled with other kayakers. Sunset in the bay was spetacular as well, with the sun fading behind green islands and traditional sailing junks. Here's one of my favorites:
We're certainly going to go back, mostly to see Cat Ba island, the largest island in the bay, which also has a small town and a national park for hiking and biking. I managed to take a good number of pictures before my camera battery died, so they're up on Picasa now.

However, this lovely weekend was nearly stopped before it got started by my being a bit of an idiot (yet again). In Vietnam, anytime you do or buy anything major, especially including staying overnight somewhere, you need your passport. Naturally, I forgot mine, and realized this about an hour into the bus ride to Ha Long. After consulting somewhat frantically with Alison and having her tell me that I probably wouldn't be able to get on the boat, I decided to ask the tour guide and see what happened. He didn't look too happy, obviously, but after a phone call he turned back to me and said something to the effect of "It's okay, you just pay for passport." Then when we got to the dock and everyone else was handing over their passports, the official says to me "No passport, you pay for passport." So I handed him a 200,000 Dong note (a little over $12), and miraculously, everything was resolved nicely and I was on the boat a few minutes later. Now that's an effective system.

Outreach work in central Vietnam

Last week I met the president of VNAH, Ca Van Tran, for the first time. We had spoken over the phone before I left for Vietnam, but I had never actually met him face to face, and he's now in Vietam for a couple of weeks. He lives in the U.S. but comes here every other month or so, doing outreach work, meeting with donors and the government, and generally moving a mile a minute while talking on one of his two cell phones (one's an iPhone, which he also uses to constantly send and read emails). After talking for a few minutes, he invited me to join him on an outreach trip to Da Nang, which is right in the center of the country (and home to the famous China Beach).


Most of my work for VNAH has been in the office - helping with a project proposal, editing articles for the newsletter, doing research on rehabilitiation practices. I've also gone on a few site visits around Hanoi, meeting with the head of the Hanoi disabled persons organization and the director of a vocational training center for young people with disabilities, and attended some meetings of local and international NGOs around disability issues. But I had never really seen the original part of VNAH's work, which is getting prosthetics and wheelchairs to the people that need them and can't afford it (which is almost everyone that needs one). This is what we were going to do in Da Nang - prosthetics and wheelchair outreach and delivery.


I didn't have much of an idea of what to expect when we pulled our van into the parking area of a health clinic in the town of Ha Lam, about 30 minutes south of Da Nang, and I definitely wasn't prepared for the 200-plus amputees that were packed into the single large room of the clinic, all waiting for the prosthetics that we were helping to provide. Most of them were men, and almost all had lost their limbs in the American war or from land mines after the war while working in their fields. More than a few were double and triple amputees, those missing both legs getting around using blocks of wood by moving one with their hand while sitting on the other. After Ca and a few other people spoke, I spent about an hour meeting and trying to talk to some of the people there, which was obviously difficult with my lack of Vietnamese. I was sitting with one man who had been using a homemade prosthetic leg made of bamboo, cloth, and twine since 1969, and was just now finally going to get a properly fitted one. Another man was using a leg made of sheet metal and wood, and this had caused an infection in his stump, which was now covered in yellow pus. As I was trying to communicate with these men, I decided to have them write down what I hoped would be their names and their stories, since I really couldn't get any information from them in Vietnamese. Once I gave one of them my notebook and pen, even more people started crowding around me, and when he was done, another person took the book and started writing, then another, and another, all just so happy to have someone listen to them, even if it was through their writing. By the time we left, I had notes from more than 30 of the men and women there, although I didn't yet know what any of it said. I did learn later that they had given me their names, their towns, their ages, and their disability, hoping that by telling me this they would finally get what they needed.

The whole event was just incredibly powerful. These people lived less than 20km from the third-largest city in the country, a thriving port town, and not one of them could afford a properly made prosthetic. One man that spoke a little English told me that 30% of the men in his town were amputees. 3 out of 10 men are missing at least one limb. That's astonishing. And from what I gathered from Ca, this is not even close to unusual; in fact, it might be a little low compared to some other provinces that were the sites of the most intense fighting during the war. Not only that, but on the whole, the government has completely ignored these people for years - it's only with outside funding (here from the Nippon Foundation of Japan) that they have begun to provide the most basic care for amputees in the rural areas of the country. Still, that's something, and now with a government clinic making the prosthetics and a private hospital equipped with rehabilitation facilities, hopefully things will start to improve. From what I've seen, though, I wouldn't bet on it. Vietnam may technically be almost out of developing country status, but this is just one example of how its health care, education, and social protection infrastructure is way behind its economic development, especially in terms of people with disabilities. And until that changes, outside aid is the only thing that's helping the people I met this weekend.

Also, the pictures from the outreach events are up on Picasa now.

I see you've played knifey-spoony before

I arrived back in Hanoi last Friday after spending two weeks in Australia with Jamie, visiting Adelaide and Sydney. There are a ton of pictures from the trip now up on the Picasa site, so if you're looking for a way to avoid work (like I am, since I'm posting from the office), I'd recommend checking them out. Especially the album on Featherdale Wildlife Park for some sweet shots of me and Jamie with koalas, kangaroos, and emus. And little kids, since it was actually just a petting zoo. But the best petting zoo ever.

Australia was a great trip, although it took a little while to get used to the cold, the clean air, driving on the left side of the road (and shifting with your left hand), and everyone not staring at me all the time. Adelaide is a small city, despite having 1 million people, but it's nicely laid out with a ring of parkland surrounding the downtown area. The best part is that it's right in the center of some of Australia's best wine producing regions - the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, and Adelaide Hills. Naturally, Jamie and I spent two days wine tasting and I flew back to Hanoi with four bottles of delicious wine wedged into my backpack, secured with dirty clothes. The wine regions reminded me of Northern California, with rolling green hills that are part pasture land, part vineyard, part olive groves (we also did olive and cheese tastings).

Still, the highlight of Adelaide had to be an afternoon trip to Mt. Lofty, a (fairly low) mountain on the outskirts of the city, where we heard there were good views of the area. After taking a public bus out to a park and ride lot where we planned to catch another bus to the summit, we learned that the summit bus only runs twice a day, and we had missed both runs. Well, we're already here, we thought, I guess we'll just have to walk the 3 miles up the road to the top. After about 30 seconds, we got sick of trudging along the shoulder of the road, and decided to give hitchhiking a try. So Jamie stuck out his thumb, and after one car of old women blew by us, another car pulled over and a hand waved us up the road. We probably should have been a bit more wary, especially since as the car pulled over and backed up a bit, it slammed into and up onto the curb, but we figured it'd work out. We're intimidating guys. We climbed into the back seat of the car (which was filled, strangely, with pillows and beer), and met the two guys who were giving us a ride. Or, more accurately, we tried to decipher their drunken Australian accents as they asked us which footy team we followed (Jamie mistakenly answered the Adelaide Crows, to which they yelled "Aww, no! Gotta be the Port Adelaide Power!!) and if we were in the Navy (um, what?). Fortunately we made it up to the top and they let us off, at which point we figured that was the end of them. But no, they found us again, which resulted in a pretty awesome photo opportunity. The guy on the right was the extra-drunk one, as you can probably tell:

Sydney was great as well, much more of an international (and huge) city, set right on a fantastic harbor and with much more going on than Adelaide. We spent a ton of time just walking around, every day stopping in the afternoon for beer and hot chips (french fries, most delicious in wedge form with sour cream and sweet chili sauce). Here's the requisite Sydney opera house photo:

We also took a day trip out to the Blue Mountains, about an hour and a half from the city, where we did some hiking (and beer drinking, naturally) and saw some amazing views of what we both agreed looked sort of like the Grand Canyon, if it were filled with trees. Massive sandstone cliffs dropped off into a wide valley that was covered in eucalyptus, and there were tropical birds everywhere. Other Sydney highlights were going to our first Australian Rules footy match (go Sydney Swans!) a ferry out to Manly Beach, and delicious meat pies (filled with beef and topped with mashed potatoes, mushy peas, and gravy).

And now I'm back in Hanoi, which is actually starting to feel quite a bit like home, motorbikes and all.

Khong biet tieng Viet

Vietnamese hurts my throat.

We’re on lesson three with our Vietnamese language tutor Duong (that’s right, Zoong, just like it looks), and I still can’t recite the alphabet. Not only can I not remember it, which he wouldn’t be cruel enough to ask me to do, but I can’t look at the letters on a piece of paper and identify what sounds they make.

The vowels are the worst. Sure, I can remember tr sounds like ch, x is s and d, r and gi all make a z sound (so this soup rieu dau is actually zieu zau, and it’s on giang vo (zang va) street). But there’s one “u” sound that no human mouth should ever be asked to make. I have never felt my mind go so blank as when I try to pronounce it, literally unable to imagine which throat muscles I’d have to employ to make a sound like an aroused bull trapped in a foghorn.

I can, however, say Nobel is Swedish and I work in a publishing house (only the least useful of those is true).

I can pretty much only say those sentences to myself, though, because my lack of vocal control makes me incomprehensible to the Vietnamese. It’s a tonal language, and what appears to be the same word, said in each of the six tones, is in fact six completely different words with different meanings. That makes the language a minefield for Westerners who might, for example, change the boy’s name “Dai” to “urine” by pronouncing it a tone too high, and a torture chamber for me, whose throat cannot stand being coached in tones for an hour and a half a week. It’s like I’m training to sing in an opera, and also to be a robot when I have to say several words of the same tone in a row.

Some of the vocabulary is fun, though. For example:

Carrot = ca rot
Car = O to
Beer = bia

On the street we do a lot of miming. Otherwise, we’re like infants, pointing at words we know and saying them to each other. Generally, we know food and animals, which are in the food.

“Rice!” “Rice.” “Chicken!” “Chicken.”

VNAH retreat part 2

Not much posting recently due to me being surprisingly busy with volunteer work and HGSE research, as well as my laptop's hard drive failing, which was unfortunate. It's currently somewhere with a computer technician named Quy who can hopefully install a new hard drive, transfer at least some of my files over, and have it up and running again. Sort of a hassle, but at least everything is backed up.

I did finally put up a Picasa album with photos from the retreat the other week, so check those out if you're interested in pictures of the beach, caves, and extremely cute Vietnamese kids. The highlight of the trip (besides the food) was Phong Nha Ke Bang national park. Here's us just inside the park entrance:

The park is sort of in the mountains, a little ways inland from the town of Dong Hoi and has an amazing system of caves that we got to explore. We took one of those boats (well, actually two since we were a huge group) behind us in the picture up a river to the side of a mountain, where we got out and climbed pretty high up some extremely steep steps to the entrance to the first set of caves, where we could wander around for a little while and check out the rock formations, which were really impressive. This is the view from about halfway up to the caves:

After the trek back down we all sat around for a while eating ice cream (at 10:30am) and relaxing. I sort of thought this might be it, but then we got back in the boat and headed further up the river, until we saw that the river actually went underneath the mountains through an opening that was only a few feet high and that the boat barely squeezed into. A little ways in, the passageway opened up into giant underground caverns that must have been over 100 feet high and absolutely stunning. The woman paddling the boat continued on down the river until we stopped at a sandy bank and climbed out again, spending some more time wandering the caves, which made the first set seem like little baby caves in comparison. The pictures don't capture the scale of it very well, but if you take a look at the album you can at least get an idea of what the rocks looked like.

Other recent highlights from Hanoi include starting Vietnamese lessons with our tutor Duong (prounced "zuhng"), playing some intense ultimate Frisbee with about 20 expats and Vietnamese on Saturday, and eating silkworms for lunch at work last week. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the silkworms.

Bad for you, good for the story

When in Vietnam, follow the calendar.

Scott and I arrived in Hanoi cocky and full of silly ideas about personal space, so when our gracious hosts offered us our choice of two perfectly good rooms in their lovely shared house, we said, no, we’d prefer to continue shamelessly exploiting their hospitality and the free air conditioning in their living room while we searched for our own apartment.

It should have been no problem. We had an appointment with Mr. Them, a real estate agent who said he had apartments in the areas we were interested in, on our first full day in town. After taking a long and expensive cab ride out, frantically miming at a woman until she sold me bread (because I was starving) and locating a building in what appeared to be a swamp, I found myself barefoot in Them’s office, trying to sneak little bites of bread (seriously starving) while learning he only had properties available so far away from the city center that if we lived there, we’d never explore anywhere else.

Still no problem. The Internet was full of listings for nice-looking, furnished apartments in our desired locations. Calling brokers and asking to see places prominently displayed on their Web sites quickly made it clear that there was kind of a problem. Maybe, at some point in the distant past, those apartments had been in their inventories, but they had nothing to do with what was currently available. The agents would take our numbers as part of their elaborate plots to make us think they’d show us something, but then really not call back, or call and cancel 15 minutes before the appointments. One did take us to a flat with a cute balcony shut off by an even “cuter” door that didn’t quite reach the ceiling.

We’d been sleeping on some random people’s floor for almost two weeks and were starting to feel guilty, when I got an e-mail from Scott saying he’d found a “totally sweet” apartment. Finally! Plans were set to move at 7 p.m. on Monday until Scott got a text (if you don’t think text message buzzing can sound ominous, believe me, it can) asking if we could move on Thursday instead, because, according to the Vietnamese calendar, there wouldn’t be a fortuitous day to move until then. We convinced Hai, the quirky PhD student we’d be subletting from, to overlook the universe’s warnings and let us in that night.

I have to admit, on first glance, the apartment did look pretty sweet. There was a grand piano in the living room and pillows instead of huge couch cushions to sleep on, so an improvement over the previous situation … until … Hai warned us not to open the industrial strength wooden shutters over the windows or rats might get in. Seemed a little strange, but I was willing to overlook it … until … we were laying in bed and heard little rodent feet running through the walls and ceiling. If asked, I probably would have said the four-footed guests would have been the last straw for me, but actually the incessant water dripping on our air conditioner that only started at night was more annoying. And the lack of hot water. And the power outages. Oh, and it was illegal for foreigners to live there, and Scott was attracting the usual amount of attention. There was some comic relief in the fact that he didn’t fit in the bathroom, though. I wish I’d gotten a picture of that, but I didn’t because…

We went crawling back to Mr. Them an accepted the first house he showed us. It’s nice and super Vietnamese, meaning very tall and skinny, down a crazy maze of alleys and decorated with vaguely French-inspired molding on the ceilings. Perfect. We were able to fill the other three bedrooms with roommates pretty quickly, but not before Hai randomly kicked us out of the apartment in the middle of the week we’d paid for while we were both at work, forcing our friend to move all our stuff to Hai’s parents house for us to pick up later and thwarting my plans for a hilarious Scott-hunched-above-the-shower photo.

Really, don’t challenge the calendar.

VNAH retreat

Since Wednesday night when we got on an overnight train in Hanoi, Alison and I have been on a staff retreat for the organization where I'm volunteering, Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped (VNAH). It's pretty amazing, I've been there a week and a half and we're now on an all-expenses-paid trip to Quang Binh province, which is on the central coast of Vietnam, a little ways north of Danang and the DMZ. What makes this even more awesome is that the one other American in the office isn't here, so it's me, Alison, 10 of my Vietnamese coworkers, and their families. That, combined with the fact that Dong Hoi is a pretty small town, has led to way more stares than usual, with most people that drive by us on motorbikes turning completely around to watch us as they drive past. Since we're the only people in the group that don't speak Vietnamese, we mostly just sit there and try to figure out what's going on, but my coworkers are all super nice and speak pretty good English, so they make an effort to talk to us too. So far we've walked around the town quite a bit - it's right on the coast, so it's gorgeous, and there are tons of little fishing boats scurrying around just outside our hotel - and today went to the beach, which was fairly hilarious. There are a lot of little kids with us, and they're naturally super cute in the ocean, plus Alison and I didn't know the Vietnamese protocol for beach-going, which led to us standing around for a while trying to decide if we should put down towels, go in the water, or what. Turns out that instead of laying on towels on the dry area of sand, everyone just sort of sits on the wet sand super close to the water and barely goes swimming. Still really nice though, the water was pretty warm and the beach was completely empty except for us - not quite the Jersey shore scene that we're used to.

By far the highlight of the trip has been the food (much like being in Hanoi, I guess). Obviously we've been getting great seafood since we're right on the coast, but beyond that every meal has been an absolute feast - it's always all 25 of us, spread out at a really long table with huge numbers of dishes scattered about and everyone eating a ton. There's no way I could do these meals justice with a description, so I'll just try to list what we had each meal - I think you'll get the idea. Here we go.

Lunch on Thursday: clams, squid, crabs, lobster, pineapple and cucumber with chili salt, rice, and two different soups.
Dinner on Thursday: eel with green bananas, frogs, fried frogs, French fries, chicken, water spinach, some kind of chewy minnow thing, crispy baked rice, and soup.
Lunch on Friday: wild boar, squid, unknown fish, pumpkin buds, grilled whole shrimp (with heads), assorted steamed vegetables, field crab soup, rice, and watermelon.
Dinner on Friday: hot pot soup with lots of different vegetables, squid, an eel-like fish, crabs, rice vermicelli, and watermelon.

All with plenty of Bia Saigon. So yeah, we've been eating well this trip.

New photos

About to go to bed after watching a screening of the original version of "The Quiet American" at Hanoi Cinematheque, where we are now members, but I thought I'd just post letting everyone know that there are now a few new Hanoi albums up on my Picasa site. So for those of you that are more interested in looking at pretty pictures than reading my stories, there you go. There's also a link to the photo site on the right side of the blog, and I'll try to post here whenever I add to it. Here's a little taste of the newest additions:


That's the pagoda where I was photographed by the Vietnamese family. And because this is the best picture ever, here's Alison in the Old Quarter last weekend:


All it cost us was 15,000 Dong (about $.80) for a bag of dirty pineapple to get that picture. Totally worth it.

Look! A giant!

There hasn't been much posting going on lately due to some extenuating circumstances, mostly involving apartment misadventures and my starting volunteering this week, but I thought I could squeeze in a quick story while at the office (related to Christin's "friendly white guy" comment, actually). Last weekend we went to a temple and pagoda near Ho Tay (West Lake), in the northern part of Hanoi. They were both really impressive, especially the pagoda, which had an incredible tower with carved buddhas sitting in it and is the oldest pagoda in Hanoi. I'll post some pictures once I'm on my own computer with internet access. Anyway, we were walking around the grounds of the pagoda, and I noticed these two little Vietnamese kids looking at me and then running over to their father (which happens a lot, the kids are super cute and just stare at me and giggle). So I didn't think anything of it, until the father came over to me with a camera. I assummed they just wanted me to take a picture of them, but in fact they wanted a picture of me. So one person in the family took the picture while I posed with two little kids and their dad, and now I'm the giant white guy in a Vietnamese family photo. I don't know if they mistook me for someone famous or just thought I was funny-looking, but either way, it was pretty awesome. More to come later on the apartment disaster, my volunteer work, and hopefully Alison's first appearance on the blog.

Mobile phones

One of our first tasks after arriving was to get ourselves cell phones (I recently learned these are only referred to as your "mobile" here), since we had no way of getting in touch with each other or anyone else, and real estate agents were highly put-off when we tried to give them the house phone number instead of our mobile. After talking to one of the girls we're staying with, we headed down to a place called Vincom City Towers, which turned out to be an extremely fancy five-story mall a little ways south of Hoan Kiem Lake. The electronics store was an entire floor and was really like a giant party - loud techno music, lots of flashing lights, and me standing around looking confused. We were able to point our way to the cheapest mobiles available (about $40), and then learned that we had to go to another store to buy the SIM cards that would actually make it work. Buying the SIM card was a bit more difficult, and we ended up with an unknown amount of money on our cards for an unknown price per minute or per text. Plus the phone menus were all in Vietnamese, including the instructions on how to unlock the keypad. That all worked itself out though, and service is great here. The only issues that I'm still having with the phone are that I have no idea how voice mail works (not too big a deal, most people just text anyway), and that phone numbers here don't seem to be standardized in any way that I can figure out. Our phone numbers are both 11 digits long, which is 1-3 digits longer than other numbers I've seen. When I've tried to call other numbers (real estate agents, restaurants, whatever), they're always written in different forms, some with various prefixes that I can't figure out if I'm supposed to dial or not. Then supposedly to dial a land line from a mobile you start with 04, but that only works occasionally. Fortunately I've only once ended up with a random Vietnamese person on the other end of my calls - and that was when I tried to use a calling card that I bought at the post office.

So this is what a blog looks like

Well, I'm making good on my promise to start a blog while in Vietnam for the next 7 months (or 13 months for Alison). Since my volunteer work hasn't started up yet and all I'm doing is a few hours a day of research for an HGSE professor, I figured I'd have plenty of time for telling stories on this thing. So here we go.

We arrived in Hanoi last week (Wednesday night for Alison, Thursday afternoon for me), and were fortunate enough to have some super nice folks from the U.S. and Canada let us stay in their house for a while until we found an apartment of our own. Here's the view from the balcony outside the living room we've been staying in:
We didn't quite expect to still be there almost a week later, but the apartment hunting hasn't gone as smoothly as we thought - although things are looking up at the moment, and we'll hopefully have a place by the end of the week. As far as our days go, Alison started work at IUCN on Monday, but before that we did a lot of wandering around and just absorbing some of the sights, sounds, and mostly smells of the city. It was all fairly overwhelming at first, with motorbike exhaust, meats grilling on the sidewalk, piles of produce, and yes, a woman skinning eels on the side of the street. But after a day or two it's starting to feel more manageable, and crossing the street isn't quite so intimidating. We've found that people don't really want to hit you if they can help it.

One thing we both were looking forward to before coming here was the food, and that's been fantastic. We've mostly had street food, which has involved bun cha (grilled pork and vegetables in broth with rice noodles), com rang (fried rice), a pork dumpling soup that we can't figure out the name of, and of course pho for breakfast (although I had that at a place called Dan's Grocery and Diner). The highlight though has to be a meal we had Monday night: seafood and chicken hot pot, which sounds fairly straightforward. Turns out it involved dumping every kind of sea creature we could think of (clams, octopus, squid, shrimp with shell, legs, and head, crab) and bits of raw chicken on the bone into a pot of water boiling at our table, followed by huge amounts of unknown vegetables. We must have looked extremely confused, because the waitress kept coming over and showing us what to do with everything we were supposed to eat. The rest of the wait staff sort of sat around watching us, I think mostly to see what we would do next. All in all an excellent experience.

And now we're about to head out for dinner and drinks at a place called Legends Beer, which is supposedly a microbrewery. Who knew?

--Scott