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.”
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, August 8, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, August 4, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, August 1, 2008
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.
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