Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in thcaubob's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
5:34 pm	Listen to the Astronauts Who was it who said that it is important to eat breakfast in the morning? I think it was Niel Armstrong. Perhaps I am spectacularly wrong, but to deal in vague generalities is all an IR major is really prepared to do. The point: I ate breakfast this morning and I am really feeling it. Better, that is. I didn't eat anything yesterday and I was decidedly slower. So listen to the astronauts, eat breakfast in the morning. This brings up an important set of questions. How much egg consumption is healthy? My apartment consumes upwards to 70 eggs per week. That could be an exaggeration, but if it is, it probably is not far from the true figure. I think it is healthy to eat every other day. Dispute me, fine, you will be destroyed, destined to die in a cholesterol-ridden pool of egg yolk. So every other day. That begs the question, what do you eat for breakfast on the off days? The best think I can think of is Ramen noodles, and NO, not the 10 cent per gallon kind that is equal parts noodles, sodium and cancerous yellow powder that, admittedly, is delicious, I mean the kind you buy as noodles, boil them, and add what you want. Disclaimer, I am not a health freak. A few years ago I ate the cancerous form of Ramen almost every day. The taste makes me sick now. Suggestions? Point # 2, graduation. These days life eats like an ice cream cone dipped in crazy. The only reason I did the Live Journal thing today was so that I could write that metaphor, thought of it on the way home and didn't want to let it get away. It does tie in, because a few days ago, once all the school work for me was finished, I was circling around the house like a vulture over a carcass, but with no object. The work is over, so I am destined to circle forever... riiight. It was a stretch, that metaphor, but again it was based on reality. I really was wandering the house in a circle, without the slightest idea of what to do. I have a friend who is going to Mexico for a few weeks after graduation. I wish I had the money for that, because I need a vacation. I am going to get lazy for awhile, but then that fog will lift, and there will be something urgent to go rush off and do with an overblown sense of importance. Then that begs the question, what is important? My father told me a few months ago that he thinks I would have been an explorer if I were alive in the 16th century. I thought that was cool. He went on to say that I probably would have gotten lost, poisoned, scurvied or stabbed. Whatever the case, I would have ended up the late owner of the chest that those 15 pirates kept "yo ho ho-ing" about. Anyways, to me, it is important to travel, and I worry that I won't get it working in D.C. So I promised myself that I will get some travel done before grad school, somehow. We face another choice that I don't like, rather it is a lack of one. Either you take a really boring, uninteresting job for a year, or you go to grad school. I do not REALLY want to be an office manager. I don't want to be a paralegal. My problem is, you give me an inch and I will take a mile. Start offering me jobs, then I will want good jobs. Perhaps it would be best for me if I were downtrodden, forced to accept scraps of work when I get them, like they were in "Of Mice and Men." GRATUITOUS LITERARY REFERENCE. You saw it. Yeah yeah yeah, some of you find stable jobs that you like right away, I hate you all. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
6:51 pm	End of School I am a senior now at AU, I will graduate in a few weeks. My family is coming to DC to watch me walk down the aisle, almost like I am getting married, except my spouse is now poverty and she doesn't have any insurance. Tell me where I can sign a pre-nup, please. The school year is winding down. I was talking today with Chris from downstairs, possibly a future roommate, and I got the feeling that things here are ending. Our generation deals in one year commitments to different things and places, hopefully not people. You move away, but you should keep in touch if the connections you made in one part of your life really meant something. This is my opinion, and don't stay in touch constantly, that's clingy, but enough to maintain things. Every generation defines itself with something pithy you read about a few decades later in a magazine. The adjective for our generation is homeless. So coming back from Vietnam was rough. It was much more difficult than I thought it was, even while I was in the middle of the process. I suppose the coursework at AU that I have grown so sick of would call the process re-aculturation. Whatever, it was not easy. Good people of course get you through that. Thanks Jenna. I still go to the Vietnamese community center here in DC about every two or three weeks. We just got back from there. I bought a deck of cards from an old woman who runs a store there. She did not understand how I could speak Vietnamese and told me that I looked too old to be a student. I thanked her the only way I know how, by overpaying and leaving awkwardly. It was awesome. I am finishing up a thesis and looking for a job. There is such a large difference between life in the U.S. and life overseas. Frankly, I think Americans do not know what to expect from life. As Christians, we expect to live forever. In a free society, we expect constantly increasing wealth. We expect substantive, interesting work that positively impacts other people's lives. I have met middle aged men in Vietnam who are happy collecting bus fare fare from students all day. The students I know here are not capable of that. I don't think I could do that either, sadly. I am definitely not anti-American. It is too easy to be anti-American. It doesn't require much thought. It is easy to criticize but difficult to work to constantly improve something. In America, you can have almost complete freedom in interpersonal relationships. No other place in the world offers the same degree of relational freedom on such a large scale. Here you can be friends with and marry whoever you want. That is huge. There is more equality here, on a national scale, than anywhere else in the world. I don't want to get into this too deeply. Basically, being abroad made me look at the U.S. in an entirely different way, specifically the issue of race. I got to view racism in Vietnam from the outside. It is very different to be an outside observer. I think African American history is extremely poorly taught in America. I had no idea until I was a senior in college that until 1940 90% of African Americans in the U.S. lived in poverty. Why didn't I know that as a high schooler?? Why does African American history fixate on the stories of a handful of prominent African Americans? Why doesn't it talk about numbers: poverty rates, migration, population? Racism within history is part of the answer, complacency is another part. I restarted this blog because I don't think I can remember to email everybody often enough. So hopefully this blog will turn into a basic update on my life that you can read and email me if you want to know more. Unfortunately, it will include much of my gratuitous ranting. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 1st, 2006
4:05 pm	Last day in Hanoi Still in Hanoi. 24 hours from now I will be in Saigon, on the first leg of the journey that will eventually bring me back to good ole' terre haute IN, then shortly thereafter to Nantucket. It is making my head spin. I have been in Hanoi approximately 2 weeks since I had my birthday, and despite the tone anti-consulting of my last entry, it has generally been good. I have met lots of friends here. Just when I think I won't meet anymore, I went to this restaurant by Lake Hoan Kiem on one of my tea drinking/reading binges that can sometimes last 3 hours. (I am SO stressed out here) My waiter was a nice guy. I never looked at his face. He told me that, for a foreigner, I was really nice. He wanted to make friends. I thought, oh gosh here comes more requests for English lessons, or maybe he will be like the guy in Hue who said something similar but then text message stalked me for the next 3 days. For awhile I thought the waiter was gay. Especially when he STARTED HUGGING ME on the motorbike. I quickly remembered that is not abnormal for straight guys in Vietnam. I was wrong and felt sort of bad for pre-judging him like that. Son is his name. So he always looks up when I walk around shouting "What up son?," my standard operating procedure. Anyways, totally harmless nice guy. Not a stalker. He wants to study hydro-power. We ate tofu and shrimp paste twice. Nothing seals the bonds of friendship tighter than tofu and shrimp paste. We are going to keep in touch. Should I feel bad about pre-judging him poorly? I don't think so. You have to make so many judgements to be able to function here (anywhere for that matter). I guess I hope to remain open enough to re-evaluate initial judgements. Not prejudging things seems pretty impossible. Another great dinner involved one of my co-workers, one random Viet Kieu and one older guy from the foreign ministry. We went to Quan An Ngon, ate well, then went to a nearby too-gaudy cafe with free wireless. We sat there for HOURS waiting for my co-worker's younger brother who was studying in England, also named Bob. That was awkward. We had to fight. You think you know it all after one year in Vietnam, I heard when I just got here. I suppose I did this morning. Then I met my tutor and was reminded of my ignorance, my towering ignorance, once again. On the way to my dorm building, she asked if I wanted to go by a park with an island. I was in no hurry, so fine, we went. Somehow I have lived in Hanoi for nearly 10 months and totally missed this massive park with beautiful islands and cafes. It feels like Central Park in NYC, only pretend the homeless people in Central Park are allowed to build permanent structures out of trash. There are too many things to miss. My system is way too full of sugar right now. I will be lucky to avoid diabetes. I.E. I won't be missing the coffee. It's always the people. I am trying to figure out how to say goodbye to my friends. Buying them lunches is what I am dong. Tomorrow I am going to Saigon to say more goodbyes. You want to stay in contact. A promise to do that. You flush up and hope you really will. I feel like I have about 8ish close friends, from America. I feel like most people keep in close contact with about 5-10 people. If I can add one or two Vietnamese people to that group, then I will be very happy. I guess I shouldnt feel bad about leaving that one person, and that other person, because we will still be in each others lives, in some capacity. Its those other people who I want to keep in touch with, but just because of daily friction and waste, it won't happen. I am really sorry for that, cause those people have added so much to me. When we talk back in America, they will sound like legends, not ghosts, legends. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
1:27 am	Saigon and Hanoi I don't have much time left here, sadly. In one month, I will be well back in America, already on vacation with my mom and sister. I will be in Indiana for 4 days, then we will leave again, something like that. Since returning from Cambodia, I have worked on getting my mini-summer program established in Hanoi and spending some quality birthday time in Saigon. My mini summer program means working at Mekong Economics in June. Remember my entirely undeserved economist position? This is that. I don't really want to work in economic development. I don't really feel like re-spewing my rant against this industry right now, so I will leave it at that. Saigon was wonderful. I got to spend some time with Trinh, Phuong and Tuan. I also met the new people on my old program from last summer, CET. The city was vibrant as usual. It wakes up blistering and loud. Motorbike drivers shout louder in the south. Food is more expensive. Then it gets cold and the sky opens up on you and you are utterly soaked in an impossibly short amount of time. Still, the old woman's eyes tell you, as you negotiate the price of a disposable raincoat, you are a foreigner and you really should pay more. The crowd echoes her too. It isn't negotiation, it's decency, you're standing against a class. Power, obligations. I don't like it. I wanted to be dry. I paid her four times its worth, and put it on, soaking anyway. Meeting at Mekong. bad geography, the white people, Matt and I, are sittting on one side of the table. The Vietnamese are on the otherside. All younger women. I don't like the power situation developing here. Their more experienced female boss is sitting between us and them. We need to communicate project requirements. She wants to communicate them, we really have no business giving anyone guidence, thank you. She knows more then we do. It is very hard for us, she says after the proposal becomes a mess because of bad communication, for us to do a proposal because this is our first one. I am the youngest, here only part time. We all only saw half the table. we all got the email with the English instructions in it. he was livid, I was detached because I am only part time. I am detached enough to know that I absolutely hate the power dynamics. That is the main reason why I don't like development. That is the rant I want to avoid. I am not Santa Claus. I am not some benevolent provider. To look me in the eye like a human being you need to take care of yourself. No one can do it for you. Thats what every succcessful example of development illustrates. I am being too sensitive. Vietnam actually does very well in regulating and developing itself. Its the attitude I hate, never the reality, never the truth of the situation. Thats the key to being happy inside any situation it seems, is worming all the stolen pleasures, extra time, extra money, extra friends and extra coffee breaks you possibly can out of that truth without destroying it. Bet on honesty. Forget hubris. what I see in development, unfortunately, seems like a lot off hubris. We are all experts. If we weren't experts, you wouldn's ask us anything because you wouldn't need us. You need us, remember? Saigon will never quit changing. My favorite old coffeeshop from one year ago is gone. That old frayed wicker floor that looked like rats ate most of it is gone, so is that CD machine that played bad music at an absurdly loud volume. So is the waitress who was so kind to me when I first came in, but suddenly, inexplicably one day, she started ignoring me and ignored me for the rest of the summer. She was tired it seemed, head down on one of the tables when it was quiet. She's gone so I can't say. New restaurants successfully fought their way through that maze of corruption encountered by every start up here. They are manned by small armies of young English students, they have forgotten what is in stock so be prepared to wait. It happened so fast. While I wasn't looking somehow my watch got all the way to 2 O'Clock, when I needed to be at the airport and I wasn't ready to go. It must have been when Trinh, Tuan and I were at that vegetarian restaurant clowning around with a camera and making funny faces with our food. They are the salt of their earth, sophisticated without pride, they have what they have and their is no shame in it. They are not tour guides. Tuan is innovative, always ordering something different. Everyone says his motorbike is a clunker, and its the ugliest one I have ever seen. Trinh has been described variously, by others, as "a fount of patience" and "beautiful." But they are people. Everything is true, Hemingway says. The ability to partially view the world through their eyes is inestimable. I missed my plane. The woman was very unreasonable at the counter. I suppose I wasn't happy either. Trinh was very understanding about it. Three hours later I was on my way back to Hanoi, almost unable to think. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 15th, 2006
12:42 pm	Cambodia, end of CIEE It is! Now I am just "working" in Hanoi at Mekong Economics. I will be at Mekong Economics for one more month. Then I will go to Hong Kong for 5 days, buy hello kitty things for Ruben, and be home on July 12. Ok, the highlights, I am actually glad the program is over. That surprises me. I thought I would be sad about not really having anyone around. That might happen later, but so far things are good here. I am at work, if not actually working, for a good part of the day. Actually I am there more than I would like to be, but it'll show up on the ol' resume. Its really relaxing now. Honestly, it seems that Americans were putting more pressure on me than Vietnamese. Of course I often misunderstand things with my Vietnamese friends, but they expect misunderstandings. My American friends don't. When I disagree about something with a Vietnamese person, the idea is usually, ok, thats interesting, you just look at things differently. When its with an American, its usually, what? Whats wrong with you? I can't believe you don't think that. You mean you seriously don't want to go out drinking 'till we puke on the staircase? Are you retarded? Yes, I am retarded. It's not like that with all of them. We would all hate to generalize. It's just relaxing not explaining myself. That's why I think I will ultimately end up working for myself. Bad bosses make me angry to the point of revolt, thats thanks to so many of those baseball coaches I had as a kid. Man, some of those guys were idiots. Some of them were also great though. Enough of my psychology. The last month. As semesters are prone to end, the last one ended in a sea of confusion. People were making plans to travel in Thailand. Wondering who is going with who. I was working on a big project at Mekong, so I was gone a lot of the time from the scene at our dorm. We all had essays. You would walk back, sometimes climb over the fence late at night, and walk up silent concrete stairs to see people huddled in front of computers with faces like ghosts, lit with the same white, worried about the same things we worry about in America. All the sudden it was the final dinner and time to end the program in ... Cambodia (?) We often wondered what our resident director was thinking. So Angkor Wat, in Siem Reap, was the first order of business. That is an amazing monument. It is several monuments, and sadly I know nothing about it. Its like being in an art museum, in your finer moments you wish you knew enough about it to be interested intelligently, in your less fine moments, which probably compose most of your moments if you are like most people, you make dirty jokes. I got sick in Phnom Penh, must have been the kangaroo I ate in Siem Reap. I was told by my old director that sometimes they tell you it's Kangaroo, but really it's rat... I was quite dehydrated, and could only leave my hotel room for about an hour at a time before I got so tired that I had to come back. Re-hydration powder everywhere in the room. Confused tuk tuk rides to the doctor and back. Finally, stronger, a solo trip out to the killing fields. Beggars everywhere, missing limbs from the land mines. Heat that chastens your in-country arrogance, makes you wide-eyed again. Phnom Penh is a river street for most western tourists. You sit in big wicker chairs as charming people ask you what you want to drink. They tell you that in a few months they will go to Thailand, and in a year or two, if luck and money hold, maybe Australia to learn English. Go to America? Yes, of course I would love to, but the cost. It's out of the question. And after 9-11... The hosts turn, abruptly, and become monsters, whacking the dirty children that wander inside the river restaurants to sell you heaps of photocopied books and cheap sunglasses, others, simply, are asking for money. They shop owners whack and yell at them like they aren't people, which, sadly, in Cambodia they barely are. Beyond the river, inside the city, things get shaded by trees instead of awnings, traffic is a bit lighter and the sellers aren't as aggressive. At night most of the city is black and dangerous (treat it like you are going to Compton, our director instructed us when talking about Phnom Penh safety). In the daytime there are markets that echo the spectacular richness of the countryside. Bananas fantastically spilling everywhere, haircutters set up with a chair on the sidewalk, and a mirror on the wall. You beathe in the gutter's garbage that cooks in the sun I saw it when in between siem reap and Phnom Penh. Nic Dunlop wrote about it in "The Lost Executioner." This was the beginning of the monsoon when I was there, so the country didn't yet radiate like a neon sign, but there were no fences, no people. In Vietnam, there are 80 million living in two river deltas, that, when combined, roughly equal Indiana in land area. The Vietnamese country is a never ending crush of noise, hospitality, curiousity, strange stares, tables with tea, dubious looking chickens and too-small fields for rices, and the tombs that are inevitably in the middle of them. Cambodian fields are vast, palm trees swing up into the sky, solo, somewhere between giraffes and sky scrapers. Flatness stretches out to a dense thicket of trees somewhere off, cattle graze at the wild grass with nobody watching them, nothing keeping them where they are. Political signs adorn driveways, mostly the majority party (same one since '79) Sometimes you see some opposition signs, but those usually cover driveways leading to worse-looking houses. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
2:15 pm	The Motorbike Diaries Rather, the strange story about the foul tempered motorbike driver who lives near my dorm. That said, every motorbike driver except Tuan is foul tempered. Tuan shouts questions at you from two blocks away, and nobody on a sidewalk in Vietnam shouts. Thats what boisterous westerners do, but Tuan doesn't care about convention. He simply can't be restrained. Purple shirt, however, should be restrained, at least I thought so until yesterday. Purple shirt, we call him that because of his uniquely narrow array of wardrobe choices, is not a very good businessman. He knows very well that I live one block away from him. He sees Tuan nice to me, and he sees me being nice to Tuan. I overpay Tuan on purpose. Yet Purple Shirt insists on bitter negotiations before we go anywhere. Once he deliberately tried to charge me twice the real price and would not budge. Normally I don't care about 5000D, and thats all it was, thirty cents, but it was an issue of respect. We bargained louder and louder, verging on shouting. Purple Shirt wouldn't budge. Finally I just yelled "No" at him in Vietnamese, turned around and stormed away. That is highly uncharacteristic of me. I wouldn't have been mad if it were a one-time thing and I had never seen him before, but Purple Shirt had no excuse to be that inflexible as he knows I am not a tourist. It could only be construed as disrespect. I did the only thing there was to do. I ignored him for a month, walk right by. Don't look at him. He doesn't look at me. I wave at Tuan, go with Tuan. Purple Shirt broods into the heat. He lost business cause of that fight. Then, a few days ago, Tuan was not at the corner. It was just Purple Shirt. I waved him over and started the bidding low, braced for a an arguement and possibly a walk away. Purple shirt surprised me by agreeing right off to my first offer. We rode in silence. Upon arrival I paid him the price I originally intended to pay him, gave him 2000D more that is, and wordlessly walked away. I think peace has arrived. I have been travelling a lot. First was Nha Trang, and that trip was nothing short of amazing. I went with Spencer and met Trinh, her sister and friends in Nha Trang. We had an incredible time, and that is a trip I will never forget. Nha Trang is the perfect beach town. It is developed, but not too developed. The beaches and mountains are stunning. We went scuba diving, generously aided by our nervous, old French guide with an awesome flat top. I did like 15 cannon balls off the top of the boat and got a really bad sunburn. We ate lobster (the only lobster I have had since leaving the US, I know, poor me) on the street. There were also boat rides, trips to islands, and so on and so forth. If you turn on a lamp and put your head inside the lampshade, near the bulb, then you will have an idea of the heat and brightness you experience on a sunny day on the beach at Nha Trang. A trip to Nha Trang can me many things. I have never experienced an easy one. The first trip involved waking up at 6am only to discover I had been kicked off an overbooked flight, or rather, I was not in the computer. Vietnam Airlines will NEVER admit failure. I believe the Vietnam Airlines bureaucracy was trained by those prodigal office drones at American University (not you Suzanne Skillings, you have saved me countless times). This time, all the flights to Nha Trang were full. We had to fly to Saigon, then take a 12 hour bus to Nha Trang. That was made considerably better by the fact that Trinh was going on that bus as well, but after 12 hours on a bus you feel like half of your soul has departed your body. Spence and I were met at the Saigon airport by flash flooding. We tried to take a cab to Trinh's house, but the water was to deep for cars to drive down the streets. Our car was stopped in a truly hopeless traffic jam. Machines were crammed to the walls bordering the road. Our departure time was nearing. Spence and I did the only thing, we got out and started walking through the flooded streets. The water was up past our ankles. We had to be careful, always, not to brush our legs against the hundreds of motorbike exhaust pipes we were walking by, otherwise a nasty burn would result. Finally Trinh found us, standing on the side of the road, and we began a crazy run to the bus stop. We had little time, traffic was awful, and there was the flooding, so we made it to the bus stop by a combination of running, going in taxis and going on motorbikes. We smelled wonderful after we finally managed to cram ourselves into the bus, we smelled like relieved pigs. Trip #2 was to Son La. It also involved a dehumanizing bus ride, but only 7 hours each way. This one was kind of boring, although some craziness in a village did propel Spence, Greg and Charlotte to try to climb up one of the surrounding mountains. It was not that tall, but it was pretty steep. I climbed about half way up, then I realized it was a bad idea to keep going. It seemed like a really bad idea actually, because I had no idea where the others were. I just sat down on a rock, relaxed, thought for awhile, then made my way down. The other three muskateers were up there for a long time. Down at the bottom we were laughing about it, but they were not coming back. They were not coming back. A few started to worry. Finally they showed up. Greg first, then Spence and Charlotte later. All of them were completely covered in mud and had some pretty impressive cuts. They were shaken. Greg and Charlotte almost took falls that could have injured them seriously. With that in mind, Greg and Spencer decided to climb another mountain last weekend. I had to stay in Hanoi cause of homework. Greg got angry at the whole situation, because some German tourists almost got in a fight or something, I don't know exactly, so he didn't go up. Conner and Spence went up. They got lost. Finally an ethnic Hmong man found them frothing at the mouth and babbling incoherently, clambering over a tourist's freshly killed corpse in a frenzied state of hunger and moral abandon. Some of that is true. I have two large reports to write, and a project at my internship to do. That's what keeps me busy these days. May 28 our group goes to Cambodia for a week, then that's all she wrote for CIEE. Time is a blur. I plan to spend my birthday in Saigon, with good people down there. And then a few days in Hong Kong before finally coming back to Indiana in July. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 9th, 2006
4:37 pm	Journey's end, spring break that is Oddly, for me, this year, my largest journeys have had unplanned beginnings and endings in Da Nang. The winter trip, that went all the way to Singapore, included at the end a dead afternoon in DN, laden with bags and utterly exhausted, because of an unforseen visa foul up, a delay, full flights, and DN being the only available place in Vietnam to enter. That winter trip began in DN, on a rainy, hot December day, as a frantic search for a visa we didn't really need, the Lao one. Mistaken information again, a foul up, the price is an afternoon in DN. This time, flying back to Hanoi from Cam Ranh in South-Central Vietnam, magically, my name was not in the computer, along with that of one Arielle Birney, forcing us to come back to HN via Da Nang. We are currently watching the time pass in Da Nang, another afternoon here. An afternoon here, however, is nothing to complain about. The town is real. People here will treat you like a real person instead of a large wallet after some initial conversation. There are not the obnoxious and pointlessly similar tourist gift shops everywhere, in fact I haven't even seen one in DN. The food is fantastic. Just south of the city is the old China beach, beautiful beach, and huge. Hoi An is 30 miles south, Hue is 100 miles north. DN is the perfect place to live if you want to immerse yourself. The mountains around the city also give it a really impressive setting. But, when one speaks of really impressive settings, one can't leave out what I like to call the Vietnaemse riviera: The coast from Dong Ha to Nha Trang. Thats a huge stretch of coast, a little under 1/3 of the country, but that is where we just spent our 10 day spring break. Battle sights dominated the northern half. I saw tanks rusting along the side of the road. I saw one tank turret rusting right on the beach, waves crashing over it for 30 years. We went to Khe Sanh battlefield, and there two American war vets who fought at Khe Sanh (the biggest single battle of the VN-US war) and were returning for the first time, described what it was like back then. Both men were in their late 50s. The first was from Florida, stayed at Khe Sanh for 13 months, described seeing friends die, being cut off, seeing friends saved, watching bombs fall from airplanes, and being misunderstood. I don't know how many times he cried as he told us. He apologized too when he started crying. He said it helped him to describe what he saw. Again, this was his first trip back to Vietnam since the time he fought there. He sung the praises of the military, and we understood that it was the formative experience of his life. The second man approached quietly while we were speculating on the location of the former airbase, (the NVA/PAVN never shut it down and were thus never able to win at Khe Sanh like their predecessors, the Viet Minh, were able to cut off and destroy French troops at the battle of Dien Bien Phu). His voice was scratchy from God knows what, and it sounded like he suffered when he spoke. He had brilliant white hair, pulled behind in a pony-tail, and he told us about less horrors than the first man. Instead he described why he thought the war was a mistake. They were reasons from books, reasons all of us had read before. You could tell he utterly believed what he said, and he described himself as a "killer." He warned us of the parallels to Iraq and Iran. He was intellectually very sharp, and much more concerned with current events than the first man it seemed, but he also cried. The two mindsets and emotional displays given by the two men is a great example of what I really like about Vietnam: you have to be prepared to turn your own thinking on a dime, because no two people you talk to will be thinking the same thing. To relate to them, if you can relate to them or if you want to, you generally have to do quite a bit of mental footwork to figure out where they are coming from. It's very exhausting. Another thing I will never understand is the hospitality of this country. Hue, riding a bicycle down Le Loi, middle of town. Woman, middle aged, comes up to me and we begin talking. My first thought, is she a prostitute? No, not dressed that way. Second, what is she trying to sell me? Nothing, she has nothing. She explained she was on her way back from the market. As a tourist, as I obviously was, would I be interested in seeing a pagoda near her house, okay, whatever. I follow, and follow and follow, eventually we are 7 ish miles out of town, in the hilly countryside. We were talking the whole way, pretty normal, variously strained, I learn about her family. She hints that I should marry her eldest daughter. This is normal here, understood to be a joke. I meet her husband, one of the real reasons why I was brought there. The pagoda is out of the picture for the time being. He is a really nice guy. 51, same as dad. He studied English when American marines were there in the 60s, and he still remembers a lot of it. I was the second foreigner he's spoken to in years. We talk about everything for an hour and a half, half english, half Vietnamese. Then hop on the bikes. To the pagoda, really to the bunker, the American/French/South Vietnamese bunker that is right near the pagoda. He tells about the valley as it was during the war. I see a hill in the distance, once occupied by VC. I see that it is half forested, half not. He explains that so much Agent orange was dropped on the hill that it is still mostly defoliated. And, that hill in the distance hadn't been de-mined yet. Our hill, the one we were standing on, had, he assured me. In fact, he worked on de-mining for three years after the war. Nevertheless, I stuck to the paths, the very narrow paths. The lush green of Vietnam was often dirt during the war, dirt hills, dirt plains, courtesy of Agent Orange. I met the rest of his family, including my intended wife. Played soccer with his children, including his other daughter who spoke english brilliantly. Then dinner time, very simple because they were poor. Then I spoke with his Anglophone daughter for 20 minutes. His wife comes out and explains to me that the family is very poor, and anything I can spare is appreciated. Eventually they would like to raise 50$, I gave them 12$. Then went back. I was wondering all day if an ask for money was coming. Who is the demon here? The family? Were they manipulative? Was I at fault for being suspicious, in spite of being touched by their kindness? Was I at fault for wanting to create an ideal family in the countryside, poor yet noble? I think to do that would be to ignore reality. It was not perfect, but I felt like we were all honest with each other. It's easy to do that when you're just passing through. The indication I have that there was something more than the mercenary at work is that they invited me back. I have a standing invitation to spend a few months in the Hue countryside, courtesy of some economically vulnerable, clever, kind and honest people. Spring break is over now, in a few hours its back to Hanoi, and back to not having afternoons free to update my livejournal. Current Mood: thirsty (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 18th, 2006
8:28 am	Conde Nast, Vietnam As the title would indicate, this is not going to be a story about academics. In the past two weekends, not this weekends, my group and I have been to beaches in north and South Vietnam, Saigon and Halong Bay, in addition to normal activities in Hanoi. First a brief description of the world in Hanoi. The weather is gradually getting better. Spring in Hanoi is generally this soggy misty grayness that hangs in the air, I'm told, until April. Temps are getting warmer, usually about 60*, real degrees, don't give me any of that French-i-fied centigrade bull... wash. America. Classes are not too hard, to put it mildly. Heavy on the independent study, not too serious about the readings. Lots of cafe action. Hanging out with the tutors quite a bit too. That is my priority this semester, getting to know as many of the Vietnamese tutors, and Vietnamese people in general, as I can. There is a tendency to fall in the buble lifestyle here at luxurious A2 government run (and observed) guesthouse. Pretty sure the main guard is the po, not saying anything. Vietnamese is hard, but that's kind of like saying the AU student government is a stupid annoying waste of time that makes me strongly consider a career in torture (not you Frye), both are givens that don't require a whole lot of elaboration. Two weekends ago we organized a trip to Mui Ne, southern beach I wrote about earlier. This time the group was much bigger, we had to fly to Saigon and then charter a bus. Randomly, when we landed in Saigon, we were walking through the backpacker district and looking in through the big, open picture windows of Allez Boo at 2am who did we see? Our esteemed director, a little funny that one, but I still think slightly better than the last monument to hubris who "directed" CIEE Hanoi. And, I invited Tuan, Phuong and Trinh to go, you may remember those names from summer last, but only Trinh was able to come. That, naturally was awesome. And the story unfolded like it unfolded last time. Same bonfire on the beach with the same, speach slurring Euro-trash. Side note, Euro-trash love me (Eric and Joanna, you are not Euro-trash). I just gave a whole motley blond, unwashed group of Swedish hipster globo-trekkers, with impeccable music taste, an address last night and suddenly it was like we were friends. That would probably last until one of them checked out my "pad" only to discover that my furniture has nothing to do with the sort of minimalist modernism that Nordic people hold so dear, and that would be the end of that. Nevertheless, at MN we did find an empty beach, minus the three odd fishermen in the distance. Spencer Lowe, an awful human being, Trinh and myself, in a boasting fit that really got a little out of control, elected to try to swim to this rocky island out in the bay. It actually didn't look that far away. I wanted to train for it, but they thought I was stupid. Sophie was with us, and quietly terrified that we would disappear beneath the swells (all of 1 feet high). Out in the murky deep it occurred to our party that the three of us all had open wounds from bikes tipping over and crashing (deep sand, embarassing story), and that if this portion of the admittedly treacherous South China sea were infested with sharks, the three of us would be perhaps the easiest, and definately the most multilingual, of possible prey. We passed it off like it couldn't happen, the boastfullness not yet worn away, and continued out. We turned back like two minutes later and I seriously considered building a sand castle, but finding motivation in short supply, I decided instead to stand in shallow water and jump into waves. Fast forward one week to Halong Bay. Morning ride through the stark, upright, dramatically steep limestone hills topped with uncontrollable mops of green scrub. Breakfast with a gracious old Vietnamese guy at a national park guesthouse who very politely asked me to drag the rest of my rich friends to his place of business. Late morning walk through said national park. Beautiful, steep, a little dangerous because Vietnamese safety experts (uncontrollable laughter) elected to put in steep metal ladders to help you get over the steep parts. Ladder links get a bit weak when they rust. Late afternoon kayak trip through those limestone islands that rise out of the green sea and look like, according to the Vietnamese, the scales on the back of a dragon. At night, we bonfired again. And also had to pay a sort of bribe to the helpful and enthusiastic bureaucratic official who efficiently decided to watch us for three hours and helpfully told us that there was no more wood to be found for our fire in up in the forest on the hill. We should look for wood, instead, in the ocean. Back in Hanoi, getting ready for a huge trip, by bus, train and airplane, from Phan Rang to Hue, spring break in a week. Best of luck everyone (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, February 20th, 2006
1:50 pm	Late for class And the reading is not finished yet. Nobody really did it, so no huge deal. Yes, the new semester has officially started, along with Vietnamese class, a new one, along with another teacher who is the bane of my existence. Every other word I speak is spoken incorrectly. Thats the way it goes in this language. But its good. And my new group has 20ish people in it, which means its huge. So there is a lot of walking in impossibly huge groups down impossibly small streets in pursuit of the plastic chairs that characterize this country's sidewalk restaurants. Random aside: I was stuck in Laos for a day while going to Cambodia to pick up my student visa. You can't get them in this country, so to Phnom Penh. The plane broke on the ground in Vientiane. So Coner, Khanh, Ngoc and I were chillin' it pretty hard in this rotten hotel in Vientiane, eating what was perhaps that night the worst food in Laos, watching Lao women sing Vietnamese songs. The next day we were diverted to Bangkok on the way back to Vietnam. The new group is quite a mix. One guy, Reza, is currently in London interviewing with Deutche-bank, or whatever that place is called. One girl is Russian-born, and not without a soul like the late-teenage Russian mafia that lives upstairs. We blame everything bad on them, but we never stereotype, ever. I regret last night's dinner in the sense that I now don't have any money. 8 of us ate there, and it cost $160, which is crazy in Vietnam. I am interning again, this time with more sane hours. We just took a trip to Ninh Binh province which involved a boat ride. This was the most blatant example of racial discrimination I have ever seen. There is without doubt white privelege in this country. Whites are never questioned/harassed like Vietnamese- Viet-Kieu are. It was a beautiful river that wound its way through stark limestone mountains and rice fields. The whites were two to a boat, but all the Viet Kieu had to ride in one boat. So here we were stretching out, and the Viet-Kieu were all cramped, 7 of them, in a glorified row boat. They looked uncomfortable. Everybody felt uncomfortable. My rower was a college graduate who could find no other work. Someone here just told me that as long as you drink less than 8 cups of coffee a day, it isnt a problem. If I were to follow that advice, I would never be able to update my live journal in the future because my fingers would be shaking so badly they could not hit the right keys. Et Tu Will Cecil. Class time. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 26th, 2006
10:04 am	Adventures in Islam Attention PC folks: read everything before you complain Malaysia is an Islamic country, more on that in a minute, first a hotel story. I was in the most rat-holish of the rat hole guest houses there for three days, where, as I already mentioned, I was on the receiving end of some bug bites. I forgot to mention this huge cockroach the size of a computer mouse was traipsing around my room like it owned it. That is, until I pulled out my frisbee and repeatedly whacked it until there were two cockroach pieces and this layer of whitish roach goo in the middle. The night before we went to the National Mosque, we watched Team America World Police with some conservative Muslims from the Northeast of Malaysia, which is basically like dirka dirkastan. These guys were awesome. I think they got the jokes. They wanted subtitles on so they could understand everything and after the movie was over this crowd of Germans and Muslims and Americans was quite entertained. The next day we went into the Mosque and I had a stimulating intellectual conversation with a woman there. It did not, as you might imagine, go something like this. Woman: I'm oppressed, dirka dirka. Me: That's because your nationa, bakka bakka shakka, is not Christian, jihad dirka Allah. Woman: You're right, Muhammed Allah bakka sherpa sherpa, I wish George Bush had a brother, makka makka bakka, so he could rule Malaysia and make is Christian and perfect like America, makka makka. Me: Well guess what, jihad hakka hakka, he does, and he got his brother into office, dirka dirka, by disenfranchising some Jews, jihad bakka lakka dakka. Woman: Sounds perfect, sherpa shapa. That's not how it went. Actually she told me all sorts of interesting things about Islam and she gave me a this pile of literature on it. She may have been trying to convert me, I'm not sure. Beyond the whole Islam is a religion of peace shtick you get everywhere and really dont need to be told if you are a thinking person, the mosque was an interesting and even serence place. They had some large fountains that blocked out the chaos of KL. It was huge and could hold something like 12,000 people. And whatever they say, you never see terrorist coming out of Malaysia. That country is the most developed non-western country I have ever visited. English everywhere, Muslim Malays, Indians and Chinese, living, apparently, peacefully. I think the broad secret to racial harmony is that extremely unfashionable capitalist concept, fair economic growth. Exhibit A: Malaysia. That said, I like Vietnam better. Malaysia is so near the first world, it doesn't interest me as much as Vietnam. There are bigger questions here (I'm back in country). Flying to Saigon, hopefully, or Inshallah as the Musmlims would say, in one hour. And thank you Monica. You were great putting up with our delay in Singapore. I might even forgive the shopping incident. The Second Book of Tod is in the pipes. Current Mood: quixotic (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
9:36 pm	Going Back to Saigon And the trip is over. It ends here in Singapore. It ended at dinner in Little India. It ends when we step off the airplane. It ended when I got my new visa. Pick a date, I don't know when, but this travelling phase of my life feels quite over. And all in all, I'd rather be planted. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time and learned everything I could have seeing these places in so brief a time, but I would rather have seen them for a longer period of time. This shouldn't sound ungrateful. This was the most amazing trip I've ever taken. Beaches, jungles, mountains, golf, chinese chess, day long bus rides, train rides at night when the car is moving so fast and shaking so much you feel that it will fly right off the tracks. You can't sleep more than two hours at a time. That turns out to be good because you are forced up and down the hall to see the sun rise over the Isthmus of Kra. I want to go back to Vientiane, in Laos, where they have only in recent years decided to go through all the formalities of making a country. And Singapore is a great place. Like Vietnam but scrubbed clean. I will see dad soon. He flies into Vietnam January 29th. I counted, and at this little backpacker hole called Le Village, presided over by a man who speaks always with a cigarette in his mouth, I got at least 72 bed bug bites. They form constellations on my arm. That's all for this chapter. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
12:13 am	Locations Item 2) After Bangkok, the center of the backpacking universe, Karl, me and Uyen, whoops, that's Karl Uyen and me for all you grammar fans out there, you know who you are, took a very long train ride on which I found it next to impossible to sleep, to the Southern Thai city of Surat Thani. I had a very convincing headache, the kind of headache that convinced me that all I needed to do to get rid of it was eat a bag of potato chips. The sun was utterly blinding and it felt like the weight of the world as I got out of that monster of a bus we had to take from the train station to the beach. That's right, the beach, from Surat Thani we took a bus to the beach at Phuket. On Phuket I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting Cancun, Thai style of course, but a tourist-infested rat hole basically. It was pretty nice, especially the main town. We stayed in this hostel that had housed volunteers after the tsunami. We saw no tsunami damage. Though I did see some pictures of what it did, and the damage to the very beach town in which I was looking at the pictures, was incredible. After Phuket we flew to Penang. Penang is a lot like Phuket, except its in Malaysia and there is a bit more traffic on Penang. Generally, we liked Phuket better. Though the food on Penang is one of the few places I will admit has better food than Vietnam. The food in Malaysia has generally been out of this world, but Penang was the best of the bunch. You have Indian, Arabic and Chinese here. The result of the mix is very very good. So I am eating pretty much at all times. Then we went to the Cameron highlands, which was my favorite part of the trip so far. It is a very little bit like Sapa, but much more developed. It's full of Land Rovers. Karl and I also played golf, and that was awesome. It was a bit expensive to rent clubs ... and the people there were pretty stuck about the fact that they were playing golf. I was parading around the place in a pair of shorts (really swimming trunks) and a pretty well foul smelling t-shirt. K was similarly attired. The whole rest of the place was total Khaki and collared shirt. Though, thankfully, the collars were down. So yes, in the greatest British style, Karl and I finished a round of golf just as the sun was setting over the Cameron Highlands behind us. Though we returned home a little less imperially. We had no idea, specifically, how to get back to our hotel, so we started walking towards our town. We were on the verge of hitch-hiking when we saw a hamburger stand. That was awesome. Then we were on the verge of tears when we figured out we still weren't back yet. Then Karl was about to run into this hotel to try to plead tearfully with our guesthouse to come pick us up from the side of the road. Then we saw a bus that conveniently was going to the exact place we wanted, flagged it down, and got on. Strange. Next was the jungle, Taman Negara, means national park so they say. We went hiking on this amazing canopy walk. We were I dont know how far off the gound, but we were walking through a junge canopy. And I saw some wild pigs on the ground and took pictures. Definate highlight. Then when we finished the canopy walk we decided to stalk the pigs and get "really close" and take some more pictures. I scared the pigs off. Long story short, I got some leaches (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
11:47 pm	The Book of Tod (and everything else) It has been far too long since I have done this. The advantage of this sort of situation is that I have a few things to put down here. Hopefully I can remember it all. Item 1) The Book of Tod The Dead Sea Scrolls, so I have read, were found in a cave in Palestine (Israel, or whatever) not so terribly long ago, though they sat in that dusty location for a very long time before they were brought out into the public. I suppose the Book of Tod is somewhat similar. All these events happened in Northern Vietnam in mid-December of last year (one month ago, but this sounds way more dramatic). Only now are they brought forward here, for your edification. I do not claim that this story is of a Biblical nature, it isn't moral, though Tod may be a prophet. Tod, I must add, is not his real name. It had to be changed for the sake of the innocent. We were thundering down a road outside of Thai Nguyen, quite a long distance away from Bak Kan, our intended destination. And when I say thundering I do mean the sort of apocolyptic approach that scatters chickens. Tod, always quick to hear and respond to nature's call, instructed me, no urgently he instructed me to get hold of our bat-out-of-hell driver's attention, make him pull our chariot of death to the side of the road, and let the Prophet relieve himself. That I did, with all the expediency I could muster, and we eventually roared to a dusty halt outside of a rather learned man's tea stand. It was an undistinguished building, but the proprietor was an economics major, who, to the probable disgruntlement of all feminists everywhere explained that his prosperity, found after graduating university with the aforementioned economics degree, evaporated after getting married. I drew no conclusions and Tod proceeded to relieve himself, after instructed on the appropriate location for this action with by rather sweeping gesture from the impoverished proprietor. I tried to talk to the poor chauvanist for as long as I could, before I myself succumbed to nature's call and followed the prophet's footsteps, or what I thought were the prophet's footsteps, to the proper place of urination. I returned from my activity to the rest of our party huddled freezing around a pot of what the Vietnamese say is the finest tea in the world, Thai Nguyen tea. Tod expressed a bit of consternation on his face. I didn't understand it. I would have understood it before he relieved himself, but given the order of events I was perplexed. I decided to resolve my own perplexity with a brief interrogation of the prophet. He simply didn't understand, he related staring into his tea cup the way a surgeon stares at a sick patient on the table, he didn't understand why there was not a hole in the bottom of the lavatory toward which one should direct whatever form of excrement one is expelling. I assured him that I used that same facility, and that hole was present as sure as the sun was shining. He assured me that it was not. I was on the verge of mounting an investigatory expidition out to that very spot to resolve the matter, then the truth fell on me with the force of the crumbling walls of Jericho. The prophet had peed in the shower. It was a grievous error, and after a fit of laughter that might well have echoed all the way to Japan and made that strange country believe, if only for a moment, that it was suffering another earthquake, we realized that the impoverished proprietor undoubtedly realized where Tod had chosen to relieve himself. Our guide pulled off a feat of masterful escape artistry by paying the bill and explaining to the silently aggrieved owner that terribly important things were pulling us further down the road. I myself did my part by offering the wedded economist a chocolate pastry I bought from him only 10 minutes earlier. With the grace of the Buddha himself he refused, and our party piled itself back into the black chariot of death. With a snarling roar of gears we left the man in a cloud of dust, and with a bit of a mess on his hands. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 31st, 2005
3:55 am	Closer to India Greetings to todo el mundo, Writing today from this classic Bangkok backpacker's hostel/restaurant/internet cafe/travel agency in the heart of backpacker's Bangkok, which is a city unto itself. Imagine one of those egg incubators, except you walk into this sort of incubator. You walk into it a vaguely well-intentioned, secretly practical, liberal arts major, always a liberal arts major b/c this sort of thing makes an engineer's head explode, and you walk out a hardened communist, dreds scraping the floor and with an unquenchable hunger for banana pancakes. What on earth is the deal with banana pancakes? Why do backpackers like this stuff so much? It tastes like a pleasant sort of mush because they don't make pancakes correctly in Southeast Asia, generally speaking. Why on earth don't you eat Thai food, or Lao food? We came here through Laos. The we I speak of is myself, Karl and Uyen. I met these folks at various stages of my own voyage of discovery that began in June. We specifically arrived here from Laos, and when you go from Laos to Vietnam you cross a major cultural divide. The faces are different, the temples are different, the writing on the sides of the temples is different, no Chinese characters. The languages on this side derive from Indian languages and so do the scripts. Even the Tai/Tay/Thai living on the Vietnamese side of the divide write their ancestral language in China, which is closer to their ancestral Chinese home. But once you're over the divide, and this much closer to India the monks wear a different color (orange instead of dark brown) and follow the Indian Theraveda form of Buddhism instead of the Chinese Mahayana and here are rarely seen traipsing about on motorbikes which leaves little opportunity to shout out that immortal observation, like you do so often in Vietnam, "MONK ON A MOTORBIKE." It never gets old. Bangkok is a massive, unequal, towering boil of a city. It's hot here, unlike Hanoi, for my last three weeks in Vietnam I was more or less constantly cold. That was b/c of my dorm room, but I won't reopen that ugly and closed chapter of my life. You see skyscrapers and beside them the golden towers of Buddhist temples reaching almost as high. You breath the same smells you breathe in Saigon in the summer but here you also breath more dust and more smog and you always breathe heat. So it's New Years and "they" say that Bangkok can be a bit nuts on New Years. Updates coming soon. And Rice you totally called it, I actually am working in a sweatshop, I'm really just here on business. Feliz Navidad. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
9:16 pm	Attention similie hunters... 'Cause I've got a new one for you. It starts and ends with dental floss. Well, the reason I start this one by talking about dental floss is because my supply ran out sometime 'round about the place where my short term memory ends and my long term memory begins. When a problem crosses that crease in your brain, that's when it's time to do something about it. So I started by walking the half-block distance to my point man's place on the corner. He operates a large closet of a store, yet he stocks most products necessary for surviving the rigors of a semester in a Soviet-built appartment block, including sarin gas to kill the man-sized rodents. Well, he's got everything but dental floss. Vietnam, it must be noted, is a highly civilized place, but this is a nation toothpick users. At this point I decided to take the dental floss bull by the horns and go to the most westernized supermarket in town, Citimart. You walk in the mall where Citimart is located and you think you're dealing with the kind of suburban sprawl that gave rise to such late 90s cultural commentaries as "Mall Rats." It's that suburban. But then those iron laws of supply and demand Vietnam tried so unsuccessfully to subvert back in the bad old days brought me screaching back to reality. There wasn't any, hence the similie: "as rare as dental floss in a Vietnamese supermarket." I don't want you to think too much about that one, I just want you to popularize it. The word on the street, actually the word on my business card (apparently I have business cards now), is that I'm an economist. Apparently the Vietnamese know so little about capitalism as to think that I am somehow qualified to say anything worthwhile about that subject. If you hear that the economic variety of the Asian flu has broken out again ('97 was the first), you'll know who to blame. I actually wasn't "hired" by the Vietnamese. I am an intern at this company called Mekong Economics that does consulting work for embassies and NGOs. So in a few days I will be "guiding" some Australian students to Quang Ninh and Bak Kan province to interview fisheries workers as part of the evaluation of this massive Danish aid project. It gets complicated b/c that is smack in the middle of finals and all the goodbyes so I had to nightmarishly reschedule those and have this early, hectic goodbye dinner that I just got back from that all the CIEE and many of the EAP people were nice enough to attend. After that: I train to Da Nang on 23 December, then go to Vientiene, Laos on 26 Dec., then Bangkok on something like Dec. 29, then Phuket about Jan 4, then Penang in Malaysia Jan 7, then we take a nice slow meander down the west coast of Malaysia to end up in Singapore sometime 'round Jan 22. Flight back to Saigon Jan 25. chill with very much missed friends from Saigon for a few days, then meet dad in Saigon Jan 29. We travel together to Hanoi via Hue and Hoi An. Hopefully we squeeze in a round of golf with dad about feb. 4 with my australian boss. He is a really cool guy with a motorbike that dominates. Then dad leaves Feb 6 and I start round 2 here Feb. 7. Planning that was one of the most complicated things I have ever done. I'll be travelling with two friends from Saigon, Uyen and Karl. Good folks. But who gets the gold star? Marissa Newhall. Sorry everybody, she gets it. Why? Hopefully, barring any sort of pandemic or related catastrophe, she will visit me here before I come back this summer. The cool points are gonna be out the window. I have one more final before this hectic round of madness is finished. I only have two pages left and I've grown to despise the act of writing this paper more as the distance between me and the appointed 15 page finish mark gets smaller. I arrived here this evening with the firm intent of finishing this thing, which explains the live journal entry. One more thing. I absolutely loathe my room. Only two more nights till that experience is over. The floor is so cold it drains the goodness from your soul. The hot water in the bathroom never works. Never. It took me about four months to figure out how to say "my hot water isn't working" in Vietnamese. It almost took that much time complaining to the embittered guardsmen downstairs with his wicked dogs before he told the maintenence guy to fix it, and I mean fix it well. Because each time I complained, it worked the next morning, but then it would break immediately. I have absolutely no idea what he did to it so that it worked for about four hours and then broke again. Maybe he just took the ice cubes out of the water heater for awhile, then the next time I came back through the main gate after 9:30 p.m., the narcoleptic gate keeper got so angry that he threw them back in there again. So I complained properly a few days ago, I went through the CIEE administration. There must have been a maintenence guy in my room the whole day. There was that much ice in my hot water heater. Hot water situation aside, my bed is about as soft as wood. I know because I slept on a wooden bed this summer. Oh yeah, it does wonders for your back. That was sarcasm. My window won't really close all the way, and there's this rat that seems to make absurd little rat noises outside of it for the first five minutes after I've turned the light out. Why doesn't it make noises when the lights on? What kind of rat is that? I figure it's the gatekeeper kind. Man I hate that guy. My mood, you will notice, is thirsty. How is that a mood anyway? With me, it's just a protest mood against the absurdity of it all. Current Mood: thirsty (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
7:31 pm	Happenings I wrote this a few days ago, so that explains the time difference: Yo, now we've made it to Lao Cai, and it stinks. Lao Cai (border town) was destroyed in '79 by the Chinese when they decided to launch a little raiding party in this direction. The town has recovered and was rebuilt, but it is not a pretty place, utterly full of prostitution. There are not prostitutes on street corners though. Vietnam is not that obvious about its social problems. The city is full of dubious-looking massage parlours and "rest houses." But, entirely safe, and right now I'm sitting in an okay internet cafe near the train station. We leave for Hanoi in 1 hour. But my research, and I'm sorry, this is the boring part, was to prove or disprove that minorities suffer in school from instruction in Vietnamese, a language they don't speak. We spent three days in an ethnic Tay village, and two days in another Tay village. The Tay language is really similar to Vietnamese, so no problems there, but the Dzao and Hmong who live in the hills above have problems learning Vietnamese. It was a beautiful valley. We walked there from Sapa, 6 hours. Julie and I walked out to the preschool, where the language instruction starts. We stood away from the door because an obvious presence, especially an obvious white one, draws the attention of the kids, who are all just about the cutest kids in the world. We heard Tay children singing the songs in Vietnamese that were among their first encounters with the language they will need to prosper in this country. Nobody doubts they need to learn Vietnamese, it is just a question of how. For the Tay, the current system works, but not so for the Hmong and Dzao. A group of us interviewed a teacher, and over lunch one of the guys there, Vietnamese math teacher of 23 or so found out I like badminton. That was exactly what he wanted to hear so I came back later that day to play him. It was cold but no wind. We put bamboo poles into the ground and he proceeded to completely demolish me. He was a pro. After my debacle, he told me to invite our group back to the school later that night for a party. Well night fell, we were all exhausted, dinner being served, and it's quarter to seven. So Alex was nice enough to walk with me to go find the teacher and tell him we would be late. We get there and we find no trace of my teacher, the rest of them are crowded into one of the tiny teacher's dorms watching a soccer game. If they knew of the party, their faces didn't register. Alex and I rather thankfully hurried back to our stilt house to eat dinner (I've slept in stilt houses the last 5 nights). We were glad because that day was thanksgiving, and if we found the guy the length of the talk would have certainly forced us to miss dinner. The last night in the village my friend and I wanted to do some shopping. We heard there was a woman in town who made clothing and gifts so we walked down the main street, really the only road in the whole valley, looking for her. She was there, at 8 when the whole village was dark, hunched over a loom weaving away. I wasn't even sure it was the right lady but we asked her and she quickly ushered us into her stilt house. The floor of a stilt house creaks loudly when you walk on it, because it is made of bamboo. It's impossible to be stealthy and that is the only thing I dislike about stilt houses. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I ever make enough dinero, or dong, to build my own house, it's going to be on stilts. So we walk on her floor, and the woman brings out a few goods and is a very nice lady. I went to town, finished about half of my christmas shopping. Which will, I hope, be headed America-ward in a huge box in about 3 weeks, and my friend also bought a serious load of stuff. So we dropped about 1/20th of this woman's annual income on her in about 1.5 hours. It wouldn't have taken so long, but she was a fierce bargainer. The asking price for my pile of goods was 220,000VND (15ish$). So by all rights of bargaining she should have dropped it to an even 200. No dice. She gave me 210, so I sat there staring at her while my friend attempted to get more out of this shark of a woman. My friend got hers down from 230,000 to 215,000. Ridiculous. We continued staring, really stuttering because this almost never happens. We finally decided to buy it where it was because it is fairly unique stuff, and we were talking about relatively small change (from 210 to 200 is not a big deal). So done, but it was late by then. And the lady asked us to stay the night in her house. We did it. My first night in a strange Tay lady's house, and I lived to tell the tale. I also took several showers, and lived to tell the tale. The showers in areas without real plumbing systems turn into exercises of endurance. One must endure the cold, because you pour your shower out onto yourself from a bucket of deathly cold water. It is always the worst just after you wake up and the water runs down your back. But then, after you are dry and clean and eating breakfast, usually dressed in ethnic Hmong clothing, you feel great. Plant yourself on the stilt house porch overlooking the mountains and your hands around a coffee mug, you feel like you're in a coffee commercial. No plumbing, septic tanks, I guess. So no real toilets. We had the squat variety and apparently you're supposed to pour water into the things before the "waste" will be recycled. How on earth was I supposed to know that? I figured you were supposed to turn this little knob. I turned it, nothing happened. I was tired so I just sort of figured I'd let the situation sort of "marinate." It was dark outside so I tried to stealthily make my way back to the house. I was caught by the next person, and they are still making fun of me because I was confounded by the squat toilet. Squat toilets are an endless source of amusement. They have these feet marks, I guess, but (name deleted, not me however) didn't get that the marks were for your feet. (Name deleted) thought you were supposed to sit on them. Little gross? Yeah, I think so. There's more, contact me directly for details. The next day we walked another few hot hours to the next village that was quite a bit smaller. In the first village we would be eating dinner and Hmong women would be in our hotel, in the dining area, trying to sell us things. The second village was newer to tourism, the road just opened recently, and there were no products available for tourists at all. Nobody tried to sell me anything the whole time. We walked further into the hills the next day and came across this group called the Ha Luu, or the Sa Pho, depending on what you call them. I've been told Sa Pho is an offensive term, but everyone there called them Sa Pho. They are extremely poor and generally do not speak Vietnamese very well in school, according to a Tay teacher. Tay teachers were rare, most of them were majority Vietnamese. On the way we were invited into a Dzao man's house. While our extremely nice group leader (really, not sarcasm, he was a great guy), proceeded to have "a little" rice wine, we ate the best smoked pork I have ever had. Our director behaved in an interesting manner on the way back. He started bowing to some Dzao children, and word has it he told them he was Chinese. I'm pretty sure that if that really happened, it was the rice wine that told them. It was a great trip. I just feel beat up right now, and drained. I think we walked an average of 4 hours a day up and down hills on dirt paths. The food was good, and the Northern Highlands are breathtaking. Our Hmong guides were also great. So (pronounced something like "Show") can't say my name. She calls me "baaw," which is the Vietnamese word for cow. I probably can't say her name either, so no big deal. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 27th, 2005
4:47 pm	Sapa part II Last week began on Sunday. We were supposed to be going to Ha Giang. We departed at 7am all permits in order. Arrived in some nameless town that was hot and dusty in the low hills north of Hanoi and ate lunch for an unusually long time. Coner and I played pool and were utterly abominable at it. People were laughing at us, but that is not unusual for one attempting to learn Vietnamese. Back on the bus half an hour after we were supposed to, Gerard, the calm director, told us the Ha Giang People's Committee revoked our travel permitt. So it was a four hour drive back to Hanoi through the incongruous late November heat. Monday morning was a replay, but this time up an hour earlier. We were headed back to Sapa. The we I mention is my Ethnic Studies class. The objective of the trip is to complete this project that will total 80% of our grades. My project is simple. I read that ethnic minorities in the northern highlands do not speak Vietnamese well. School is conducted all in Vietnamese from grade 1. Dropout rates get high because the kids dont know what is going on in the classroom. So my project was to interview teachers and parents connected with minority schools. I talked to teachers in Tay, Dzao, Sa Pho schools. Some Hmong kids were involved also. The Tay are like Thai, the Hmong and Sa Pho are really really poor, and I dont know how to describe the Dzao, but they are slightly wealthier than the Hmong. Okay, it appears this will get cut short. I need to leave. Night train back to Hanoi. Later everyone, finish this update later. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
8:43 pm	Happy Thanksgiving We have a librarian here named The An. He is 21 and a third year student, just like me, except he is studying something a bit more practical, information technology. He and I just ate dinner in one of the food stalls on the street outside and they were playing the Vietnam-Singapore soccer game on TV. When I took the bus back in from West Lake I saw tea houses spilling students out into dark streets. All of them sat on red plastic chairs in a riot of movement and cheering and straining to see the tiny, distant TV presided-over, rather grandly, by the middle aged woman who owns the place. Half a block down the rode my bus drove past their fathers and uncles spread out a bit more at the nicest coffee shop in Bach Khoa (my neighborhood), watching the same game with a bit more subdued air. I was at West Lake before, studying Vietnamese in a floating coffee house. West Lake is huge and quite a breeze can work itself up over the surface area. Sitting on the boat tonight was the first time I felt justifiably cold in Vietnam. The sun set, and it was nice watching it. The part of the lake near the shore is covered with two person peddle boats shaped like swans, and just before I left two women peddled up one of the swans and ordered coffee by the side, from one boat to another. Two weeks ago we went to the Central Provinces: Hue, Hoi An, and Da Nang. I really like Hue. Hoi An is a beautiful town, lots of fun, and Da Nang is neat because there are hardly any tourists there, but Hue is special. Hue is really like two cities, Hue, half of what exists today was built during the Nguyen Dynasty (abt 1800s) on one side of the river, and is walled, the other half was is the modern city on the other side of the river. I had a great time riding around the walled city, which is quite large. There are hardly any cars in there, so you can ride and (gasp) admire the place. The pace of life is much slower, and the food is wonderful (ahem, Bun Bo Hue). To get into the walled city you have to ride over a moat and (of course) through a 15ft thick wall and that's just awesome. There are rice paddies actually inside the city, and it also is blanketed with temples. I got restless after awhile (we were there for four days), so I rode out of the city. The city is small enough so that this is not hard, down the road that hugs the river. Temple after temple lined the riverbank. I rode up a hill and at the top of it was a pagoda where someone tried to make me stop my bike and pay and get out and go through the whole deal. I kept riding, shouted some mangled Vietnamese phrase at him, and started down the hill. Then came countryside and small villages, still the river was on the left. No more temples, but fields, big fields started to open up, and eventually I made it to the hills you can see from the city. Hue was almost through fall and into winter when we were there. The light had the dull clarity American light takes on when it's fall and past the time the cold has set in, but in Hue it's always hot. It's hot and clear in the winter, with no haze in the sky. Also, nobody understood my Vietnamese. So that speaks volumes. And in Hoi An, that city of tailors, I rode to the beach. And in honor of E. Mills, I consumed a Fanta on the beach and took a photograph, which can be viewed, along with lots of other new photographs, at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rhb0506vietnam/my_photos So Thanksgiving is coming soon, and next week we will be travelling again. It seems that we are travelling constatly. That is partly true, and I always write before we travel because I know if I don't new memories will replace everything I want to say. So next week we are headed to the farthest north province in Vietnam, Ha Giang. That province is mostly ethnic minority, and it is a trip sponsored by my ethnic minorities class. We will be going with 15 or so students from the U Cal system, and spending nights with ethnic minority families. So I really have no idea what to expect. Ohh yes, there is something else I can't help but mention, our good friend H5N1, avian flu. Rule one, foreigners do not talk about being afraid of the bird flu in Vietnam. That is not cool. Now on the news and in signs around the city I see it mentioned, so I don't mean to say the govt is doing nothing about it. What direct signs have I seen of the scare? Well the first thing I noticed was breakfast food. I usually eat egg sandwiches, though as a concession to the current situation I've switched to this meat sandwich sort of thing. Well the other American in my language class was eating a meat sandwich too, and she always eats egg sandwiches. Neither of us said anything, but we both knew. It sounds stupid yes, but it's true. All of my realizations are food-related. There is another popular food here called banh bao, excellent steamed dough with meat and (usually) eggs on the inside. Well, nowadays there's no egg on the inside. And there is no fried egg served in the food stalls anymore, and no chicken either. But the atmosphere is definately not panicked, and neither am I. Take care everyone, hope you all have nice Thanksgivings. Current Mood: thirsty (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
8:59 pm	Sapa and back Last weekend we went to Sapa, and it was great. Before that something happened in my ethnic minorities class that I have to mention. Our professor brought in a guest lecturer. He spoke in Vietnamese the whole time and one of the students in class translated. I was tuning out, it wasn't interesting, wasn't interesting, I was in my own world, then. He starts talking about the "21 negative characteristics of Vietnamese people." Supposedly the "Vietnamese national character" contains 21 flaws that this intrepid professor has managed to catalogue. I thought I was in the Old South listening to some apology for segregation. He said things like all Vietnamese are stingy, competitive, arrogant, egotistical, too individualistic, then he said Vietnamese never take responsibility for anything -too communal, then he said Vietnamese people are prone to taking crazy risks. This happened in an anthropology class consisting of about 22 people. Roughly 20 of them were of Vietnamese extraction (most Viet Kieu). That was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in a classroom. That was the day before we left for Sapa. We took the night train and I love those things. I almost made a terrible mistake and went to the wrong trainstation, apparently Hanoi has two. But that was averted, then we all made it safely into our train cars wondering about the supposed cold in Sapa. It is famous for being the coldest place in Vietnam. We were full of bravado, "ah, it'll be a welcome relief... I hope it's cold, it's been four months since I've felt cold." words to eat later. We arrive in Sapa at some crazy hour like 4 in the morning. It was dark and the next thing I remember I was sitting in a very crowded van driving south into the mountains from Lao Cai. The mist rose, and eventually it hit the clouds which weren't very far above us by the time we could see them. We were driving into green hills with pine trees growing right next to palm trees. On the edge of the road you could see water running down the hill as we drove up, and from the rock face beside the road you could see hundreds of little waterfalls pouring out. When the windows were down we could hear the water running from inside the van. It was like driving through a song. The valleys were large and minority villages were down there, all brown and clustered together. Sometimes you could see towns of ethnic Vietnamese (aka Kinh) near an ethnic minority village. The Kinh towns were made of cement. The houses were long and you could see motorbikes on the roads. The minority villages were tiny, wooden, and nobody was outside. Then we arrived into Sapa, the major tourist town at about 5:30. From our hotel we could see the tallest mountain in Vietnam, called Fanzipanz (yes, it's pronounced fancy-pants). We had to get ready to start hiking at 9:30, but first I decided to walk around town with a few people. Eric, one friend here, is an ethnic Hmong. The first thing that hit us when we walked out the door was a crowd of Hmong women, aged maybe 10 to 60, selling the standard assortment of Sapa tourist fare. Eric though, could speak Hmong to them. His family is from Laos. They walked from Laos to Thailand after the war ended in Vietnam. The Hmong, of course, helped the losing side. Eric's family eventually made it to Los Angeles. The girls mobbed him. He had a crowd of twenty or so women clustered around him, all clad in elaborate, dyed-indigo dresses and leggings. Their hands were blue from the dye. Eric could have married any of them. Two Hmong girls of 18 years old were our tour guides for the hike. The speak Hmong, Vietnamese and English. We walked 12 kilometers to Ban Ho village, full of ethnic Tay (very similar to Thai). We walked up and down hills, across rivers, across fields, though new looking villages and old ones. We also passed a sad village and everything there, even the people's clothes and the dog I took a picture of, was the same shade of brown. On the outskirts we passed a school. It looked proud because it was built right into the side of a mountain, defying the jungle beside it. The kids beside the school were playing in a field of dirt. Half of them were wearing shoes and they all asked for pens as we walked by, why pens? I don't know. Then we walked past the school and two kids stood in front of us before the path dropped down the mountain and followed the rocky remnant of a stream. I was ready to smile and deny them what they wanted, but then I saw the belly of one of the kids was distended. The kid was malnourished, and he didn't ask for anything. One was only half clothed, only a shirt. We ate lunch on the side of a waterfall, we stumbled exhausted into Ban Ho at 430pm or so. Next I was out of a cold bath I scooped from a plastic tub and we were eating the food our tour guides made for dinner. We stayed in a stilt house, the nicest one in the village. A nice man named Chu Sin owns it. The village looked okay, because it has money from tourism. For me this ended the "is tourism a good thing or not" debate. Chu Sin made us all sing at night. He said we couldn't go to bed until all the foreign males sang. It was embarrasing. The next day I woke up, walked across the bamboo floor that is, I think, the loudest possible floor one can walk across, and found rain out the door. That meant a muddy walk back. We all had walking sticks, but some of us still slid down these mud shutes that parts of the path became. Everyone took it well. I didn't fall too badly, but I may as well have. If you could see how dirty my clothes are... And it was cold. This is where we ate our words from before we got on the train. Some of us were doing this hike in flip flops. Eventually those came off and some people walked up barefoot the same way the Hmong kids do. We were stopped once, exhausted and vaguely triumphant in a field part of the way up one of the hills. Then a rather well dressed Hmong man passed us with his child strapped to his back. He was spotless. I couldn't even see mud on his shoes. Eventually we made it back, tired, yada yada yada. The other interesting thing was the motorbike ride to the Chinese border. The houses at the bottom were Vietnamese, but as we went up the mountain, freezing and flying, the houses started to look different. All the sudden you could see Chinese characters written all over the door frames. It definately seemed like a border. More new pictures will come soon. Next week we'll be in Hue/Hoi An/Da Nang. AND I am getting a new language teacher. So Cruella Deville is soon to be history. Vietnamese final in two days though, so we're not too excited yet. Take care all. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
10:46 am	I had a smashing time at the silk village Why did I just say smashing? Really it was an inside tribute to my new British friends who surely will not read this. They are from the University of East Anglia and there's six of them and they live in this smashing house in one of the alleys near the Economics University. They're all studying developmental economics, and I just started that class this week. So as class ended I was standing with the British in an erudite circle, with tea cups in hand provided by our Australian professor, and then Ash said, "I think we'll be headed down to the Lake District for a bit of dinner." I thought that was a rather smashing pun, and by the time I caught onto it, the British were tittering away at how awfully clever Ash was. They of course just arrived and know nothing about the city, which puts me in the position of all-knowing tour guide. A power I am sure not to abuse. I also used "smashing" because our time at the silk village (I just returned from there), was a complete disappointment. I had visions on the way there of a brief escape into the countryside I've been told is really not that far at all from Hanoi. Instead the "silk village" amounted to an alley lined on one side by about 15 silk shops, each a clone of the one beside it. On the other side of the street there was nothing other than a few shacks selling tea because it abruptly dropped off into a fetid, standing ditch of water the near bank of which was covered with trash. I brought my camera along because I was excited. Recently I realized that solo photography expitions through Hanoi are extremely rewarding. Actually my first one was with mom, she was recently here. So I did get some good pictures. My Mondays and Wednesdays are atrocious. I take Vietnamese in the morning at Bach Khoa University, see my tutor for 1.5 hrs in the afternoon, then ethnic studies in the afternoon at The University of Social Sciences and Humanities, followed by a mad dash to the Economics University for 2 hours of developmental Economics. That coupled with Hanoi traffic makes Mondays and Wednesdays a test of endurance. Last Monday I saw the worst traffic of my life. I started on a bus for university, on schedule, which requires walking out my door 45 minutes before class begins. I was on the bus without incident. It was quite crowded, which is usual, with only standing room. We go through maybe three major intersections. At the second intersection the bus stopped cold, caught in a net humans perched tensely and silently on top of hundreds of motorbikes, inching through every possible cranny of road. I stood up and counted five busses completely stopped in traffic. It was dark, but the scene was eerily lit by motorbike headlights reflecting off the backs of the humans in front of them and light drifted upward like the moon was beneath the road. The bulk of busses blothced the wriggling flecks of human and white and glared at them with whiter headlights that looked like angry, frustrated eyes. I figured that busses were going nowhere that day, and I anticipated more traffic at the next intersection, so I got out when the bus finally made it to its stop. By this time I was nearly late to class. I walked for awhile, on a stretch of road I have never walked, and the street was lined with flower sellers because the next day was a day for women. Girls a little younget than me would thrust brightly wrapped bundles into my face and smile though a few words in English, insisting I buy, and pretending to be hurt when I shook my head. The area is poor and the sides of the road are covered by the bricks of torn down, demolished buildings. I turned away several motorbike drivers because they were calling for fares right outside of a bar. Finally I found the type of motorbike driver I like to go with, middle aged and thin. This indicates to me he does not drink much and probably has a family, which indicates to me a that I can expect a certain level of caution from him. We agreed on a low fare and drove into the next low rumbling swarm at an intersection set inside of a construction site. This intersection is always the worst, and that day, perhaps there was an accident, I do not know, but motorbikes clogged the road entirely and spilled out into the rubble covered dirt on the side. We were on this shoulder, and at one point we hit a rock. The driver couldn't swerve because the motorbikes were too thick on both sides. We had to go over the rock. He gunned the engine two or three times, and we weren't doing it. So finally we both had to push with our feet, and push carefully so they wouldn't get run over or burned by nearby motorbike exhaust pipes, and finally we got over it. I paid him more when he got to school. He was an off duty mechanic with two children, 42. So here one can learn as much going to school as one can learn in school. I am going to SAPA next weekend and am excited. There will be more pictures soon. I've discovered that my camera has this black and white feature on it which lets me take the most indulgently nostalgic pictures possible. So get ready. It's like an emo song in picture form (that was for you AJ). (3 Comments |Comment on this)