Friday, July 25, 2008
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.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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
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
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