Weasel Coffee Lovers

Cathedral at Chartres

2011-01-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

Today we met up with Ilene's aunt and uncle at the Montparnasse train station to take the 70 minute trip to Chartres and see the cathedral. I chose this among the possible day trips because it is on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list, and I have a policy to see as many of those sites as possible ever since I realized that some of my favorite visits in Vietnam coincidentally were World Heritage sites. I've collected about 20 so far and have about 800 to go.

The cathedral was as spectacular as promised. We happened to arrive just as mass was getting ready to start and the last stragglers from the surrounding village were hustling to get in. They seemed to be OK with us tiptoeing around during the service, though it did mean the gift shop was closed. It was interesting to think that the people of this town have been praying there, burning incense and lifting their voices up to the vaulted ceiling continuously for 800 years. Some things won't ever change I suppose. The kids in the choir, for example, spent most of the service twisting around in their seats and punching one another.

We were lucky to see it in the slow season. The cathedral and the route up from the train station are ringed with souvenir shops and bus parking, all of it agreeably empty on a Sunday in the middle of January, and I could imagine it crowded with tourists and having a lot less fun.

That's probably part of why we enjoyed the walk around the old medieval part of town more than the guidebook led us to expect. Perhaps if you were on a grand tour of Europe and had seen several other medieval towns, this one would be nothing special, but it was a first for us, and we had it to ourselves for the afternoon.

After we returned to southern Paris, we said goodbye to Ilene's aunt and uncle -- hoping very much to see them again soon -- and then raced off to squeeze in our last destination for the trip -- Montmartre in the north of the city. Unexpectedly, it had the most crowds of all, I think because everywhere else in the city everything is closed up on Sunday. Lots of buskers and mimes and other entertainers were out on the steps leading up to Sacre Couer, and lots of people were out enjoying the late afternoon soon.. We got some good pictures of the city, found the spot where the big reveal was filmed in Amelie, hit the souvenir shops and headed back to the hotel.

That's it, except for whatever adventure getting to the airport tomorrow presents. We did as much as humanly possible without giving up sleep entirely. The food has been our only disappointment, but c'est la vie. You can't do it all. Next time it will be a food-focused visit.

-Robert

Catching up

2011-01-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

We started out today with a long walk down to the Marais neighborhood to explore some of the older streets in the city. Our timing was off and shops weren't open until later, so we missed a lot of good chances to spend money. The shop windows really call out to us here, and it's a good thing I don't know enough French to read or we'd never get past all the bookstores we pass.

The rest of the day was devoted to catching up with family. Ilene's aunt, who we hadn't seen in more than 10 years, lives in Germany with her husband, who we hadn't met before, and they took the 3-hour train ride to come visit us. We had a very nice time getting re/acquainted and swapping travel stories as we covered a lot of ground together around the city. We had lunch at a place they recommend near the Eiffel Tower and then walked along the Seine back to the Tuileries gardens to the Orangerie. (Sunny and in the low 50's today.)

The Orangerie is a seemingly under-appreciated little museum with two nice reasons to visit -- a small collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings in a very nice space and the 8 panels of Monet's Nymphae. They are enormous paintings that he designed especially for this space, and they have a powerful effect in the 2 large oval rooms. Again, we felt quite privileged to get the chance to see them.

Next we went across the street to have coffee in the smart shopping district north of the gardens and the Louvre, to do some more window shopping and then say goodnight. Ilene's aunt and uncle are joining us on a day trip to Chartres tomorrow, which I expect to be the highlight of the trip.

-Robert

Another country, another riot

2011-01-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

I'm exaggerating, but we did cross paths with world events in a minor way today, reminding us of my adventure with the riots in Bangkok last April. You may have heard that there is a lot of popular unrest in Tunisia right now. It's getting major play on CNN International anyway. When we left our hotel this afternoon to explore some residential and less touristy neighborhoods (i.e. Belleville), the President of that country was still hanging on to power. As we walked around we came across a small demonstration of a few hundred Tunisian expats apparently in support of the street protesters in Tunis. The shouting in French that we could make out included the complaint that Sarkozy is an accomplice. By the time we got back to the hotel the President of Tunisia had fled the country and on his way to Paris.

We had a less ambitious agenda today and hopefully found our grove. It certainly led up to our best dinner so far. We started with a visit to Saint-Chapelle in the morning, a 13th-century cathedral founded by Saint Louis, famous for the beauty of its stain glassed windows which make up almost all of the exterior walls.

From there we hiked down to the Latin Quarter to visit the Musee de Moyen Age -- the Museum of the Middle Ages. We were disappointed that the section built over the 1st century Roman baths was closed. We did get to see some very cool tapestries, including The Lady with the Unicorn, which is actually a series of 6 tapestries.

We walked around the neighborhood of the Sorbonne for awhile looking in the bookshop windows and then tried out an ice cream shop that's supposed to be famous. It's been warm enough that we can take our coffee breaks at the sidewalk tables.

Then we took a nap to try and get on the right sleep schedule and to have the energy to hunt down a decent dinner. We can never nap for long in the daytime here because there's an elementary school below our window that has about 7 recess breaks a day I think. It sounds like the kids are in our room sometimes.

In the evening we hiked around Belleville and got chased into a cafe by the rain to have some hot chocolate. We eventually made our way to a proper neighborhood family-run restaurant. Maman running the front, Papa in back, heavy doses of plain peasant food with heavy gravies and sauces, fromage blanc with raspberry sauce for desert and a neighborhood kid who came in for awhile to sing pop songs for tips.

Tomorrow we expect to have a family reunion with an aunt of Ilene's who is visiting Paris for the weekend.

-Robert

Art out the ears

2011-01-13T11:54:00.001-08:00

More of the similar today. Still getting over the jetlag, we slept through the alarm and got a late start. We went to the Guimet Museum of Asiatic Arts first to see what was collected from places we've traveled to in Asia. It was curious to find that both we and artifacts from the Champa ruins in My Son have made the journey from that mountaintop in Vietnam to this room in Paris. We also re-acquainted ourselves with the woodblock prints that we saw so much of in Japan years ago.

After that we went by foot across the Seine, under the Eiffel Tower (not up it) and back east toward the center of town. After lunch at a bistro in the diplomatic district, we went to the Musee D'Orsay, which picks up in the mid-19th century where the Louvre leaves off. It's housed in a renovated fin de siecle train station and is on a more human scale that makes it much easier to appreciate the art. We saw some of the best-known -- and quite moving -- works from the French Impressionist and post-Impressionist eras. We didn't see as much as a typical visitor might, though, because a lot of the space is closed for renovations right now. We did enjoy quite a bit the special exhibit, which was on the career of Jean-Leon Gerome. One of his gladiator pictures in particular looked very familiar as soon as I walked in the room and saw it. I stood staring at for a long time wondering where I had seen it before. It turned out to be on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery where we've see in many times.

That took up all of the day and was enough art for us. We spent the evening walking up Boulevard St. Germain, checking out the shops and looking for someplace to eat. We still aren't having great luck with the food, being too disorganized, tired, distracted, illiterate in French and cheap to do much better than to fall into tourist traps. I'm still getting by on a lot of croque monsieur and croque madame. It's not healthy, but I figure I'm burning plenty of calories with all the walking we're doing.

Tomorrow we have a medieval history day planned.

-Robert

From ca phe to cafe

2011-01-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

Our Southeast Asian travel blog is temporarily relocated to Paris. Instead of ca phe sua da, we've been having a lot of cafe, (which is a single shot espresso here.)

We arrived at our hotel with no trouble at mid morning on Tuesday and with the usual jet lag. Taking a lesson from our trip to London when, eager not to waste a minute of the trip, we sleepwalked through Westminster Abbey on the first morning and remember nothing about it, this time we took a little nap first.

We started off with an easy trip to Notre Dame Cathedral on Tuesday afternoon, and it was an incredible privilege to be in one of the world's oldest, largest and most beautiful buildings. It's difficult to describe what it's like to see something so grand for the first time, and I expect it will end up being the highlight of the trip.

This morning we started off with the Louvre, thoroughly intimidated by how much there is to see. Despite it being the slow season now, we found it plenty crowded in the galleries, although the only line we've experienced is with the coat check. I hate to imagine what it's like during the busy season. In all honesty, it's very difficult to let the art make an impression in an environment like that, and I've come away from other museums more charged up from the experience. We managed to see a large portion of it including all the most famous highlights. Winged Victory was my favorite. I've heard so often that the Mona Lisa is smaller in person than people expect that I expected it to be smaller than it was.

After we felt thoroughly dosed with art, we walked the distance between there and the Champs Elysee, down the length of that, up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and all the way back again. And then, at twilight, back into the Louvre for another dose of 18th and 19th century sculpture. (It's open late on Wed. night and still crowded then, too.)

The view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe was fun to see, though we're not having great weather for it. It's been overcast all the time and drizzling some of the time. But it has been warm enough that walking around outside is comfortable. We've even eaten at a sidewalk cafe and had crepes sitting on a park bench.

We haven't had great luck with the food yet. It's difficult to coordinate the guidebook recommendations with our budget with the sightseeing destinations. The perfect place is never just outside the museum. I've been eating a lot of ham and cheese sandwiches.

We put in 10 miles easily today, and out legs are killing us. We have a similar agenda for tomorrow. We got one of the 4-day museum passes -- Wednesday to Saturday -- and have to keep up the pace for it to work out as a legitimate bargain. It does save some standing in line for tickets, though that's not too much a concern during the slow season.

We're having a lot of fun and learning a lot. Ilene says she understands Saigon better after seeing Paris -- how much the colonists were trying to recreate Paris there. None of the legendary rudeness yet. Lots of patience with our lack of French. I got the bartender at our local brasserie to talk football with me. I've been discovering how much "travel" in my mind is equated with "travel in Vietnam." I keep having to remind myself that I don't have to be anxious about knowing where my next source of drinking water is going to come from -- that even though I'm not at home I can still get water out of a tap whenever I like.

I'm getting tired of espresso and tried to get a "French press" style coffee. Nobody knows what I'm talking about, though. That's my mission for tomorrow.

-Robert

Che

2010-06-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

This isn't my first post about che (pronounced jay-uh), but there seem to be more kinds than I'll ever have a chance to try. Some are almost as firm as cakes, most are like a tapioca pudding, and my favorites are more like watery beverages and very refreshing like a sweetened iced tea. On English-language menus, it's often called "sweet soup," served either warm or chilled, and the one pictured here looks at a glance like lentil soup when it is ladled out. It's made with different kinds of sweetened green or red beans, cooked in a kettle over a charcoal brazier, poured over ice and has coconut shavings on top, garnished with a shake of oil from banana leaves. It costs about 25 cents and the shade of the ancient banyan tree is thrown in for free.

-Robert

Ca Phe Sua Da

2010-06-04T01:14:00.000-07:00

Vietnamese style coffee and condensed milk. It's the best part of any afternoon here.

-Robert

Cao Lau

2010-06-03T00:51:00.000-07:00

Cao lau is easily my favorite Vietnamese dish, and it's so frustrating that you can only get it in Hoi An and surrounding area. The well water in the region is supposed to be the secret ingredient, and so far no entrepreneur in Saigon seems willing to challenge that perception.

There are some Vietnamese who have heard about this dish their whole lives and never had it because they've never been to Hoi An. It's one of those things that people go to a lot of trouble to pack up and carry home with them on airplanes to deliver to homesick transplants or to the unititated. Which our friend in fact did last week -- his carry-on bag included the fixings for 10 bowls of cao lau for his family who had never had it before, the broth in a recycled water bottle and all the rest in plastic baggies ready to assemble.

The pork is braised and is generally attended to more carefully than in other dishes (no gristle!) The rice noodles are made with a special lye solution that give them more chewiness and texture. The fried pork rinds give it a lot of flavor like croutons in a salad. It's served with only a little bit of pork broth, so it's not really a soup like other noodle dishes, which is a nice change.

And I think I've got a lead on what might be one of the best possible versions. That's because we go there with our friend who is a life-long resident of Hoi An and a born ambassador and tour guide who knows everyone in town. We've been back to this place a few times, and I love it. I didn't write down the details, but they're there in the picture if you look closely enough. To any other travelers reading this, that's the place you want to track down.

-Robert

Hue-style cuisine

2010-06-02T00:48:00.000-07:00

These are some examples of Hue-style dishes. I haven't learned the names of each one. Most of them are based on some kind of rice flour wrapper or paste that is gummy in texture, filled out with shrimp or shredded pork and cooked by steaming. The one that looks like a yellow cake is a kind of pork-loaf similar to a pimento loaf. For almost all of them you spoon Vietnamese fish sauce over them. (That's the sauce made from fermenting sardines in clay jars in the sun and then pressing the mash to get the oil. Like with olive oil, the first pressing is most prized.) This isn't my favorite style of food here, because the texture of the rice paste is a little off-putting, but I do like the ones in the tiny bowls with dried shrimp and fried pork skins. It's like a good bar snack.

-Robert

Pix from Hoi An and Hue

2010-06-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

Photo highlights from the side trip to Hoi An and Hue are in the slideshow on the right and here.

Hoi An and Hue

2010-05-31T20:03:00.000-07:00

Our most memorable and special experience on our previous trip to Vietnam was going to Hoi An with our friend who is a native there to visit her family, and we've been looking forward to a return visit on this trip. The best part is breaking bread with locals and getting to experience life off the tourist trail. This time we were invited to tag along on a family expedition -- 15 people total in a rented van -- to visit relations in the countryside, tour some caves, hitting the historic sites in Hue and than return for a full day in Hoi An.

We ran into some bad luck, though, and had to let the group go ahead of us from Hoi An for a couple days while Ilene rode out a case of food poisoning. We missed the country cousins and the caves and took a bus to catch up with the rest in Hue on the third night.

Hue was the capital of the country during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the citadel of the royal forbidden city and a lot of the royal tombs still remain along the Perfume River in the city center and in the surrounding countryside. We spent a full day touring those with our friend's family, as well as hitting some of the famous local cuisine and the market to buy souvenirs like tea and chili paste.

Then it was back to Hoi An for our last night. Hoi An is a small city on the coast that at one point was an international trading port until the river silted over, and the old town still shows traces of the Japanese and Chinese influence there. In the morning our friend organized an odd little boat excursion around the island near the old town. It was on a tiny skiff that seated the four of us and the ferryman. When we first got in, we were being paddled by a toothless old man and after awhile we came across another boat being paddled by his brother, who was missing a leg. They traded places because the one-legged brother, about 5' 4" and 80 years old, was the stronger paddler. Ilene and I couldn't take the guilt and took up paddles ourselves and tried to get us around the island a little quicker, but it was still a solid hour of work.

The main reasons we returned to Hoi An were to enjoy our favorite local dishes and to go to the beach. It was my only day at the beach in 6 months despite traipsing all over southeast Asia within spitting distance of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Two years ago when we came here we went to the main town beach, well-known to tourists, and our friend also took us to another beach where we were the only foreigners. Since then, word has gotten out and there are plenty of tourists there now. There's plenty of room for everybody, but it was nice to have the bragging rights before.

The other thing that has changed in two years is a serious erosion in infrastructure -- both metaphorically and literally. The monsoon season last year brought disastrous flooding to Hoi An, and the streets are still unusable messes in some places. Electric supply also seems to be falling further behind demand. Our experience -- four power cuts in three days -- may be just chance, but we do hear anecdotally that this is becoming more common throughout the country. It's pretty disheartening to come back from a hot day seeing the sites, planning to lay down in front of a fan, and to see that the hotel lobby is dark again.

As before, the best part of the trip was spending time with our friend's family. She has the most photogenic nieces and nephews in the world, and her sisters and sister-in-law are fantastic cooks. They put on a couple of delicious spreads for us. You gotta love it when you hear a chicken clucking in the kitchen on your way out to the beach and then find a chicken dinner waiting for you when you get back.

-Robert

Bun Bo Hue

2010-05-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

This is Bun Bo Hue, a dish nearly as common as pho and which I prefer and eat quite often.
Bun = rice flour noodles. Bo (pronounced baa) = beef. Hue = Hue style. The pink ball is crab meat and is my favorite part of it. After innumerable bowls of it here in Saigon, I finally had it in Hue at a place that is supposed to be the best place to get it. It was crowded with domestic tourists. But everyone in our party agreed that it wasn't anything special and you could find just as good in Saigon.

-Robert

Ilene at work

2010-05-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

Ilene is winding up the semester here, which means that her students have been presenting their final projects. She does a lot of presenting herself, usually working seven days a week to touch as many audiences as possible.

On Sunday last week she had an all-day workshop for the faculty and administrators at her university, followed by newspaper and TV interviews, followed by a banquet. On Monday, she presented "book donation" to the university library. (Fulbright gives grantees a budget with which they choose and purchase books for the host university.) By the end of the day Monday, all of the flowers visible in these photos and more were wilting in our apartment, which happens a lot.

Almost as cheap and plentiful as tropical flowers here are big plastic banners, so just about every room she steps into has a big sign introducing her. There's almost always a bust of Uncle Ho off her shoulder like in these photos, too.

The top picture shows her moderately crowded American literature class of about 45 students. That's the one that meets at 6:30 a.m. The bottom picture is her intercultural communications class of 90 students. Pretty difficult learning environment, as you can see. What I love about that picture (and several more added to the "misc." slideshow) is how it shows the main difference between Vietnamese and American college students. American students almost never drop the posture of being too cool for school. Vietnamese students give everything they've got, though I'm sure having Ilene for a teacher has something to do with it.

-Robert

Night life in Saigon

2010-05-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

We had a few social events in the last week. First, we met a new friend that I made during my visit to Kuala Lumpur. She's an English teacher in Thailand. She and her colleagues came to Saigon last week for a recruitment fair (Many Vietnamese students find Thai universities a good compromise between price and quality.), and Ilene and I got together with them for dinner to talk education. Next trip to northeast Thailand we should have a personal guide to help us connect.

Next, we had a little New Haven reunion. Our friend Aly and her colleague Ryan, who work for the Hole In the Wall Gang organization, were here for a few days to plan a summer camp that is nearby. (She has a job that is the envy of all of Westville, traveling to several countries around the world to help organize camps.) We took them to our favorite place at the night market and decimated a couple of grilled red snapper. It was nice to catch up on New Haven gossip and to spend a couple hours speaking straight-up American English at our natural speed.

Last Friday, we went with a friend to see a band that I have loved for a couple years called Dengue Fever. Highly recommended. They ultimately put on a great show, but unfortunately, it was one of those Vietnam things with sketchy details and a lot of discomfort along the way. We had to wait through hours of some kind of battle of the death-metal band impersonators. Ilene eventually gave up and went home without me, and I put my ear plugs in and watched Saigon's body-piercing set party. It cracked me up when one of the bands paused to play an actual melody, the same-old song that we heard every night out on our last trip, "It's My Life" by Bon Jovi. As you can see in the video, it's no less a crowd favorite than it was two years ago.

-Robert

Pictures from Singapore and Malaysia

2010-05-08T03:16:00.000-07:00

I have a photo album up of the trip to Singapore and Malaysia here. You can also link to it from the slideshow on the right.

-Robert

How to save money in Kuala Lumpur

2010-05-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

When you go to the KL Bird Park, before you buy your ticket, go directly to the restaurant, which is in the treetops of the aviary, and have lunch on the veranda. By the end of it, you'll probably have had enough of the birds and feel like you don't need to pay the entrance fee to see some more.

Despite all the signs saying not to feed the birds, they've obviously been tamed. I had some kind of black bird with a bright orange and yellow markings hop on my table and pluck the chicken out of my curry before I could react. This was on the placemat directly in front of me -- less than an arm's length away. If I was looking at a caged bird I couldn't have been closer.

The waiter brought me another serving, and I moved to a table further from the rail, but I was still menaced throughout the rest of the meal by a hornbill and a half dozen storks. And to think of all the hiking in leech-infested forests and bicycling through rice paddies that I've done to see their kind from a hundred yards away.

-Robert

Malaisia

2010-05-03T05:38:00.000-07:00

Some trips just don't go well. I'm going to cut this one short and head "home" to Saigon in a few days instead of attempting to continue on a comprehensive tour of peninsular Malaysia.

It's hard to put my finger on the problem, especially since I was so gung ho for this a couple weeks ago, but it's fair to say I'm not feeling like the benefit is worth the costs. The loneliness and inconveniences and discomforts are no worse than my other extended trip, but I'm having trouble getting below the surface and feeling like I'm learning or experiencing anything. So much walking around looking at things without understanding and not connecting holds less attraction -- this week anyway.

There is one discomfort that is greater here: I'm further south than I've ever been except Singapore last week (when we took cabs everywhere), and the sun is really oppressive. From about 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. it takes all my will to step out of a shadow.

What I've seen of Malaysia so far I really do like, though. The few people I've talked to have been sincere and friendly. I'm in Melaka (a.k.a. Malacca), which is an interesting place historically. It was a Portuguese colony almost as far back as Columbus went west. Arab and Chinese traders were leaving their mark before that. The Dutch kicked out the Portuguese, and the English kicked them out, and Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants have been arriving all along. You can see the marks of all this history in the oldest parts of town. There are European buildings here older than any structure in North America, including a church where St. Francis Xavier was interred for awhile. It was strange to stumble across that and find Malay Muslims posing for pictures in front of it.

I'm disappointed in myself for not forcing myself further down the trail to see if the spirit returns in another location. But I feel like I've had enough. I'm moving on to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow for three nights and have a flight booked for Friday.

-Robert

Singapore

2010-04-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

Ilene and I are in Singapore for what are really her only days off during the Fulbright project. It takes something of an adjustment to handle being here. On the one hand, prices are comparable to what we'd experience on a long weekend in New York, which we can afford and shouldn't worry about. On the other hand, they are astronomical compared to what we are used to and the budget we've been living by in the rest of Southeast Asia, and we have trouble making the mental and emotional switch. We spent more on taxis yesterday than we spend in two months in Saigon.

We're also somewhat awed by the comparative luxury of it. Singapore seems like a miracle next to everyplace else we've been in Southeast Asia. The cleanliness and order and economic activity all feel a little overwhelming and we stand around gawking like tourists. Frankly, skimming around on the surface in our touristic way, it feels like paradise.

I love how genuinely multi-ethnic it is. Walking around Little India and Chinatown and the Arab quarter (which is underplayed in the guidebooks if you ask me) is a lot of fun. We can hear the call to prayer from the Mosque across from our hotel room and smell the cooking from the Indian restaurants in the street below.

The best part so far has been the food. Mainly we eat at hawker centers, something like the food courts of an American mall, except that instead of chain restaurants with facades signifying different ethnic cuisines, these are all mom and pop stalls whipping up the real deal. We split up and collect Indian samosas and Malay laksa and Thai curry and Chinese soups and rotis, pratas, etc. and some fantastic coffee and tea, each for about 3 Singapore dollars per serving, and meet back at one of the tables in the center to feast. I told myself I was going to treat myself to a dose of familiar Western foods while I was here, but I've been having too much fun at the hawker centers to get around to it.

On Wednesday we went to the Singapore Zoo, which is gorgeously designed to get you a good look at the animals. We could walk around below most of the birds, apes and monkeys, and you have to watch out that they don't wizz on you. I could watch the African storks soaring around all day. Seeing the very rare white tigers was once-in-a-lifetime. The Komodo dragons were a lot bigger than I ever imagined.

Back in our neighborhood for the evening, we stumbled across the Museum of Chinese Opera, which is really just a tea shop with a lot of photos of opera stars on the wall. It would be like Lombardi's in the West Village calling itself the Museum of Italian-American Heritage. We sat and had a pot of tea and some cake while a woman played several numbers on a kind of Chinese harp. She asked about us and our travels afterward and answered my questions about scales and time signatures on the music she was playing. The harp has just a five-note scale, but an amazing variety of technique is possible on it.

Yesterday was our luxe city respite day. We walked around the botanic gardens and the orchid gardens and then hit the Orchard Street shopping strip, which makes Fifth Avenue and Chicago's Miracle Mile look dowdy. We had dim sum for lunch between a few of the malls, and when the afternoon rains hit we used the underground passages to get down the street to a cinema and saw the new Marin Scorcese movie.

More museums today, and I have to find the bus station to buy my ticket for the next stage. We split up tomorrow -- Ilene on a flight back to Saigon and me to wherever the bus goes in mainland Malaysia.

-Robert

April 30, 1975

2010-04-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

The holiday coming up this week is pretty significant -- 35 years since April 30, 1975, which is known around here as Reunification Day. Westerners usually refer to it as as the Fall of Saigon.

The iconic images of that day to Americans are of helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy, landing on crowded naval carriers and then being shoved into the sea to make room for more evacuees. To the North Vietnamese, the American evacuation was a sideshow, and the iconic images in Vietnam now are more like the one included here -- of the tanks smashing into the gate of the presidential palace.

The park in the photo is still a park, a few blocks from our apartment, where young people gather to make out in the evenings. Two blocks up the street, at the end of the park,towering over the Notre Dame Cathedral, is Diamond Plaza, a modern shopping mall and office building. On the top floor is the gym we go to, and from the treadmills there we can look down this street. The gym is our largest extravagance here, an overpriced respite from the heat and noise. Being from southwest Missouri, I always say hello to the people I've met there who went to college in Oklahoma -- oil industry people who now work for Conoco Phillips, which has offices in the building. (Another oil connection: After 1975, the Vietnamese government used the U.S. embassy as the headquarters for Petrolimex until the resumption of diplomatic ties.)

After my workout I like to go to a French cafe on the edge of park to get a ham and cheese sandwich, probably my second-biggest extravagance here, and watch the comparatively sane traffic. As I was sitting there today, I watched workers setting up bleachers and scaffolds in the street, which had been closed off in preparation for public celebrations this Friday. I'm curious to know what that includes, so I'm disappointed I'll miss it, but we'll be away on a holiday during Ilene's only real break during the school term. (May Day is also a holiday here, and the two days together make for a four-day weekend for most workers.)

In going away, though, we're not so different from any other Vietnamese I've talked to, who all seem to have an attitude about it pretty much like the attitude most Americans have about Memorial Day; if they can't make it to the beach, then it's a good day to hit the sales at Diamond Plaza and see a movie. Green Zone, the new Iraq War movie, is playing.

-Robert

Evening out with friends

2010-04-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

We went out with friends to celebrate our friend's birthday -- dinner first, then donuts, which in Saigon is a sit-down affair. I think it's funny how whenever I go out for comfort food like donuts, ice cream, or pizza I'm always the oldest person there. In Vietnam, it's mostly teenagers who eat these foods.

Our friend brought her intensely photogenic niece along. If she looks familiar, it's because she resembles her older brother who was the star of my photo collection from our trip two years ago.

In all of the pictures after that last one with the donut, she only appears as a blur streaking around the adults at the table.

-Robert

Pictures from Thailand and Laos

2010-04-13T19:08:00.001-07:00

I have an album of pictures up from my trip to Thailand and Laos. You can link to it from the slideshow on the right or go directly to it from here.

In summary

2010-04-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

It's only been 19 days, but somehow during this time . . .

I've had flight delays, bus delays and train delays. I've been let off on the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood and in the wrong town. I've had my chain come off. I've had tuk-tuks breakdown mid-route. I've ridden VIP, first-class, second-class and too low class to bother charging money for. I've been bitten by mosquitoes and by bedbugs. I've been attacked by leeches. I was hit in the crotch by a kid who was irritated I wouldn't buy gum from him. I had a train porter intent on goosing me every time s/he passed down the aisle. I've weathered the contempt of several French people. I've been laughed at and yelled at. I've been chased out of alleys by stray dogs. I've been in sand storms, thunderstorms, power outages and a state of emergency. I lost my hat. I lost my water bottle. I lost my way. My ATM card stopped working. I ran out of repellent. I ran out of q-tips. I got sunburned. I strained my back. I banged my head numerous times and wore a long scab across the top of my head most of the trip. I had vertigo from too much motion and tripped over my bed. I ate peppers so hot that I had the hiccups for hours. I had a traditional Thai massage. My new hat has an ugly salt stain around the brim, and I've developed a constant craving for potato chips. I've been forced to drink instant coffee. Worst of all, I've been forced through necessity to eat bananas, and I really don't like bananas.

But it was a good trip. I wish I was young enough to keep going for a few more weeks.

-Robert

Eyewitness to injured at Bangkok protests

2010-04-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

From the perspective of an ambulance rallying point at Phrapinklao Bridge in Bangkok, it appears that the police got the worst of this evening's confrontation with Red Shirt protesters. I saw approximately 60 people loaded into ambulance boats to be ferried to hospitals, and the injured police outnumbered civilians about 2:1. A few of the injuries appeared quite significant. Earlier in the evening, crowds on the bridge had unguarded access to several military vehicles on the bridge and vandalized them. One American couple I talked to said they saw protesters near Khao San Road throwing "molotov cocktails" and firing guns at the police.

First, these caveats: I don't speak the language, I don't know the ground, I talked to almost no one, and I tried to honor the spirit of my promise to my family to stay clear of the protests by keeping some distance when the action came to me. My understanding of what I saw is necessarily very limited, and the broader pictured painted by the professional media is already different from what I observed in one spot.

I didn't get close enough to get very good pix in the dark. I have some video but won't be able to upload it until I'm at a better computer set up.

At about 5 p.m. Saturday, I walked out on to Phrapinklao Bridge to see if I could observe the protests in the distance down Phrapinklao Road, which was closed to four-wheel traffic. (Motorbikes and tuk-tuks seem to be able to go into barricaded streets.) About that time, some protesters were beginning to cross on foot toward the rallies. About 6 military vehicles -- buses, jeeps and trucks -- were left unattended on the bridge, apparently by police or soldiers who had walked into the city earlier. Navy boats, some with cannons, were patrolling below the bridge, and a military helicopter flying over the protest area occasionally came near. The pedestrian traffic began to accumulate to jeer the boats and helicopter and then began to vandalize the vehicles parked there -- tires flattened, wires ripped out from under the hood and water poured into the oil reservoir. Children were playing in the driver's seats of the buses. Later in the evening I saw one of the buses on fire.

At about 7 p.m., ambulances, usually a pickup truck with about 4 medics riding in back, began rallying in the street underneath the bridge, heading toward the protest sites and returning with the injured to carry them to ambulance boats waiting at the pier underneath the bridge. About 5 boats were queued up in the water at a given time.

Police or soldiers in riot gear were the significant majority of who I saw brought in. Many limped to the pier under their own steam, their injuries not apparent, presumably affected by tear gas. All the police I saw had riot gear -- usually still wearing shin guards and shoulder guards. I saw two elderly men short of breath, which I also assumed was from tear gas. Many other injured were carried on stretchers. Some were quite bloodied up. I saw one civilian being given chest compressions. Two civilians were laid down on the cement to be bandaged instead of being taken directly to the boats, and their hair was soaked in blood. One police or soldier apparently had a broken leg that needed to be splinted before he was moved.

For about one hour, I counted about one arrival every 3-4 minutes. Beginning about 8 p.m. and for about 30 minutes, the arrivals started to pour in more frequently. There were usually more than 2 ambulances on the scene at a time, and it was quite chaotic getting the injured to the boats. Sometimes, a tuk-tuk or hired motorbike would arrive with passengers who were apparently asking after the wounded and then running down to the pier. About 8:30, the ambulances on the scene began to leave without unloading their injured and other ambulances raced by without stopping, presumably to another rally point or hospital.

It began to quiet down under Phrapinklao Bridge at that point. In places the pavement was stained with blood and littered with rubber gloves and bandages. Piles of shields, batons and other riot gear were left behind.

As of 10:30 I can still hear an occasional siren on Phra Athit Road.

I never heard any explosions or gunfire from where I was.

I also saw signs of violence earlier in the day. In a taxi on the way to Phra Athit Road ffrom the northern part of the city at about 3 p.m., the taxi got stuck in a traffic jam near the western end of Si Ayuthaya Road, which was blocked to four-wheel traffic. As I walked a few blocks south through the jam, I couldn't see the protests in the distance. An ambulance became stuck in the traffic near there, and while it was stuck, a motorbike driver came up Si Ayuthaya with a passenger holding a bloody bandage to his head. When a medic jumped out of the ambulance to help him in, I could see that his shirt was already bloodied from a previous case.

During that time, some local people were standing around on the sidewalk watching in the direction of the protests and listening to handheld radios, looking more concerned than they had earlier in the day and yesterday. But for the most part, the rest of the city has seemed remarkably unaffected by the protests in their midst. I've had 3 different taxi drivers seem genuinely surprised after a month of protests to find themselves stuck in traffic. Street markets and other commerce are carrying on like normal, even quite near the protests. Whenever a few soldiers are seen waiting around, nobody pays any attention to them. Tonight, just beyond the line of ambulance boats and navy boats, regular dinner cruise boats continued passing back and and forth. Some TVs and radios in public places are tuned to the news coverage, but not all.

Over the past couple weeks in the north and even in Laos, I frequently saw people gathered around televisions in bus stations and cafes to watch "red shirt TV," the channel broadcasting the protesters speeches. That's the same channel that the government forced off the air two days ago and again yesterday after the protesters briefly took control of the TV station and had it back on the air.

-Robert

Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk

2010-04-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

You know that weird problem when you meet your close friend's other close friend for the first time and you get off with the wrong foot with each other and it never really gets sorted out but hardens into real animosity? They're probably perfectly nice, and it's probably just the result of a simple misunderstanding. But you can't help it. You just don't like that person very much, and you have to try hard to get along civilly with them when circumstances force you together. And they probably think the same about you.

That's me and Ayutthaya. I think Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk.

Even a state of emergency beats hanging around there. I caught the first minibus out this morning to Bangkok.

-Robert

Khao Yai National Park

2010-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

The pair of shoes I brought that were supposed to last the whole trip and serve for town and trail are now the color of leech guts. I think I'll do some shopping when I get to Bangkok.

I left the weird little camp in Nong Khai on Monday morning not sure where I was going. I had a couple destinations to the south in mind and headed for the bus station armed with too little information and hoping for the best. I found a bus to Pak Chong, the jump-off point for Khao Yai National Park and grabbed that. Unfortunately, it was a local, second-class bus and took 10 uncomfortable hours. Plus the porter put me off in the wrong town a little north of Pak Chong. For awhile I had no idea where I was. I spent another hour wearing my backpack on the back of a motorbike at highway speeds before I got to the guest house.

I have to say, for any other travelers headed this way, I second the recommendation of the two guest houses mentioned by Lonely Planet here -- at least on the grounds of friendliness and helpfulness. The place I landed at didn't have enough guests for a tour the next day, and very generously steered me to the next hotel, even though it lowered their chances of eventually getting up enough for a tour. The owner also gave me a lift to the train station this morning.

The day-long trek in the park was incredible. It was a slow, quiet hike in the morning through jungle and hilltop grasslands, mostly on the look out for birds. Our guide was a genius at setting up his telescope in a hurry to give us a look, and he had a knack for working the controls on strange cameras to get pix through the telescope. We spotted long-tailed broadbills, great hornbills and wreathed hornbills (which make a tremenoundous whooshing sound when they're flapping their wings), macaques, a family of white-handed gibbons and tons of butterflys. I spotted one insect that our guide had never seen before, so I'm going to pretend I discovered it until I learn otherwise. I had a kind of pincers on the tail that grabbed at a stick when we prodded it. We played with a cottony-looking kind of caterpillar that can jump from its perch and float off in the wind.

And we saw leeches. So many that our guide was kind of freaking out. I had more of them on my shoes and ankles than I could count sometimes, and in places the ground was so thick with them it looked like beard stubble. (They stand on one end and wave the other end in the air looking for something to jump on.) I foolishly wore black pants, so I couldn't tell if they were getting above my leech socks or not. We got out the industrial strength DEET that I was carrying and did an experiment and determined that it helped, and I emptied my precious supply sharing it with the pair of Swedes I was with. They were built like Olympians and perfect in every other way, so I doubt leeches would bite them anyway.

The leech socks seemed kind of besides the point when we went looking for crocodiles. We spotted one, but only the bottom half of it. The other 5 feet were in the shade where we couldn't see it from our distance. We also spotted baby and adult monitor lizards, which looked tough enough to bully the crocodiles, and Indonesian water dragons.

After lunch we had a long rest at a gorgeous waterfall. Not safe for swimming, unfortunately. Then the rest of the day and early evening was spent driving around looking for wild elephants. They are common enough in the park that sightings are frequent, but we didn't have any luck. We did see guar, sambar deer and barking deer and more birds and primates.

It's a gorgeous park and was a privilege to see it. I would love to get deeper into it on an extended stay. I missed seeing the nightly exit of masses of pink-lipped bats, which would be in the tour on a second day.

My train leaves the tiny Pak Chong station for Ayattuya in a few minutes, and that should be my last major stop before a few days in Bangkok and flying back to Saigon.

-Robert

Vientiane and crossing the border

2010-04-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I couldn't connect with Vientiane. I was there from late on a Friday to early on Sunday, and the whole time the place seemed deserted and lifeless to me, like the financial district of an American city on a Sunday. Maybe that's how the downtown is, and there's probably a little more hop to the place out past the circle of monuments in more residential districts. But it seemed strange to me that there was almost no street life along the riverfront. There was no night market to speak of. This morning at breakfast, across from the cultural hall, I counted minutes going by without a single vehicle passing. This is a totally unfair way to judge a community, I know. It just reminds me of how hard it is to really learn anything about the places we visit without having a local guide to help us connect.

I decided to cut the visit short, but I did find enough to keep me busy for a full day. Haw Pha Raew, a former temple now used as a tiny museum of religious relics, was interesting. Across the street Wat Sisaket was especially beatiful. When I nodded hello to a monk there, he wanted to chat for awhile to practice his English and get my email and had his friend take his picture with me. They were visiting from a town in the south, taking in the city sights themselves. (Monks go on vacation, too, I guess. In Luang Prabang, I felt bad about getting up early to mix with the famously obnoxious tourists taking pictures of the famously picturesque morning march by the local monks to beg for alms, until I saw another monk -- presumably visiting from out of town -- taking pictures himself.) I explored the gifts shops and picked out a few things that can survive the backpack. I stopped into a well-known silk shop -- Carol Kennedy Designs -- and talked with the shop clerk for awhile. She tells me Carol is from Connecticut, too. I went out to the suburbs Wat Sok Pa Louang for some more meditation practice. I stumbled across a nice little Japanese restaurant and ate very well there. I loved most of the hot Lao coffee I had, by the way. The iced coffee, not so much. The Vietnamese still lead in that category.

This morning I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to the Friendship Bridge, 20 km out of town, and I wasn't sure we would make it. It seemed slow and a little sick sounding from the start, and we did break down about 10 minutes into it. I sat under the canopy while the driver disassembled some of the guts and got it going again. It's about 45-minutes by ailing tuk-tuk, probably 20 minutes in any other vehicle. I didn't see any other westerners at the border crossing, and I did a lot of wandering around in confusion, once walking through a checkpoint without getting checked.

I'm at a rustic traveler's camp in Nong Khai, Thailand for now, pretty and quiet (in a small-town way, not in an abandoned-capital way, like Vientiane.) Pushing on south tomorrow.

-Robert

To the capitol for provisions

2010-04-03T05:38:00.000-07:00

I'm in Vientiane for provisions and a haircut. Yesterday I spent a long 10 hours on the bus from Luang Prabang, an exhausting ride with constant winding on switchbacks on a narrow mountain highway. I swear there wasn't a 100-yard straightaway or a bridge the whole way except for a brief period on a valley floor near Vang Viang. I feel like I did a thousand ab crunches just holding myself upright in the rocking bus all day. The scenery was as weird and dramatic as advertised. Today was all about laundry, chocolate and freshening up. Luckily my hairstyling needs are as easy to communicate here as in Vietnam.

I could have had a tougher trip, though. Along the way, I met Jim Harris, a retired school principle from Wausau, Wisconsin who had been traveling by bus for three days. He was in the far northern interior where he camps for 6 months a year working to find and clear unexploded ordnance from villages and farmland. (He's also been a big help pointing me to a hotel and other sites in Vientiane.) Check out the nonprofit organization he and his wife started at www.wehelpwarvictims.org.

-Robert

Luang Prabang

2010-04-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

Laos might be trying to tell me something. I had another run-in with the weather yesterday. The guest house where I'm staying is an old Chinese shop-house style building overlooking the Mekong with a balcony. There's no glass in the windows, so I keep the shutters shut, and it's dark as a tomb in there. Yesterday I woke up from a nap to the sensation that rain was starting outside. I go out to the balcony to collect my laundry, and I though I had stepped into a hurricane. The flying debris from the trees drove me back inside, and I was watching the action through a crack in the door when the transformer on the pole across from the balcony blew it's circuit breakers and threw off a shower of sparks. Now it's dark in the whole building, and I grope my way downstairs to sit with the hotel staff while they watch from the doors. Once it died down, people got to work picking up the chairs and tables and potted trees that got tossed around the street. I sat down with one of the kids who works at the hotel and watched the clean-up while we swapped life stories. He wanted to know what happens to airplanes when they encounter a storm. He can't imagine they survive, and I explained it the best I knew, though I don't really get it either. When I went out later, the electricity was out all over town, and when it came back on, I assumed it had at my guest house also, but I returned about 8 p.m. to discover our block was still in the dark. Now I'm in a hundred-year-old wooden box full of lit candles. Thankfully it didn't last. I sat on my balcony in the dark for a couple hours listening to the neighbors chatting with each other and watching the electrical crew work on the transformer.

Luang Prabang has atmosphere coming out the wazoo. Because it's a Unesco World Heritage site, all the old quarter is well-preserved, and it does feel like stepping back in time if you squint until you don't see any tourists. It's fun walking around the side streets early in the morning and the evening sampling the food and checking out all the galleries and shops. Yesterday I hiked up to the top of the hill in the center of town for the views of the mountains and the two rivers and then hiked on the old bridge over the Nam Khan to explore the some of the poorer neighborhoods.

Today was a cycling trip -- 33 km in 6 hours. I was paired with an out-of-shape Afrikaaner who never made it to the top of any of the hills without walking. To be fair, it was a pretty tough ride -- that's the second time the "easy" outing was about all I could handle. We visited several rural villages, had lunch in one, visited a silk factory and took a dip in a nice swimming hold in the Nam Khan. At one point I hijacked the itinerary so we could visit the village school and we stood outside the windows of the three small classrooms disrupting the lessons. It was just before lunch break, thankfully, and when the class monitor came out to ring the bell -- an old car wheel that she banged with a rock -- a cheer went up inside, and the children walked home singing songs together and yelling "bye bye" to us.

I am dog tired, but loaded up with calories. I've been eating the most delicious salads and fish and tofu dishes. Tonight I had grilled water buffalo skewers.

Next up, a long day of traveling by bus to Vientiane to spend a few days there.

-Robert

Slow boat to Luang Prabang

2010-03-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I'll ever be able to convey how fun this has been. I feel so fortunate to be getting this experience, despite an unadvertised hike and an unadvertised swim during our cruise down the Mekong River.

On Sunday morning I left Chiang Mai, Thailand by van with a lot of reluctance. The night markets and the atmosphere of the old city and the sois in the morning made me want to stay awhile longer. The drive was about 6 hours through the mountains heading northwest to the small town of Chiang Khong on the border with Laos at Houayxai. I took a room at the $6 bungalows where the van put us off, and I started to regret that I was taking three days of surface travel to get where I was going. The further into unfamiliar territory I get, the more I become part of the package tours and well-beaten paths, and my traveling companions are mostly kids 15 years younger who don't often make a great first impression. And most of the conversation is strangely repetitive -- how far, how long, how much. I'm the odd man out not just because of my age but because of how short my trip is -- only two-and-a-half weeks. Most of these guys are on the trail for 6 months or more, spending weeks and months at each stop. They think taking a $6 room for myself is extravagant.

One girl from Belgium told about meeting someone from Liverpool, and they've decided to travel together for awhile. She says casually, "We've been through a lot together." It sounded like a platitude, but then she went on to list several misadventures, any one of which would have made me call off my trip -- motorbike wrecks, sleeping in hotel lobbies, run ins with the police, stitches, stolen passports, cellphones, cameras. "At least I didn't get me ATM card stolen," she said. "Though I did lose it later on."

I didn't have the confidence to hoof it down to the ferry in the morning and navigate my way across, through immigration and onto a boat. I signed on for the package. Because I signed up late, I was regularly two steps behind for awhile. Passports usually get sent through in a batch, and mine wasn't in it, so my group and guide ferried across without me, got a tuk tuk to the slow boat without me, etc. After awhile I started to think my name was, "Hey-he-made-it."

We shoved off at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, about 80 of us I think, but there was plenty of room to move around. The boats have a handful of comfy seats up front, first come, first served, but the consensus after awhile is that sitting there makes you less sociable. Most people move around a lot getting to know their fellow passengers. Some of them, I was just as glad not to know -- the ones laden with bottles of counterfeit Johnny Walker and Stolichnaya or who showed up glassy eyed after meeting up with the tuk tuk drivers in the shadows the night before. But I had a good time playing guitar with two lads from Leeds, talking literature and movies and politics with 2 kids from Slovenia, talking American football with a Danish girl who had been an exchange student in South Dakota. There was only one other American on the boat and a few Canadians. Everyone wants me to answer for Bush.

We had a lot of time to talk -- 8 or 9 hours each of the two days to cover 300 kilometers, and by about noon on the second day, I had to resist a persistent urge to jump in and swim the rest of the way. But the views along the way were unforgettable. I'm tempted to describe it as a wild river, but I know that technically that means an un-dammed river, and the effects of damming upstream in China were the most prominent feature. We rode low in the riverbed, poking along slowly from one side to the other to find the deepest channels.

But it looked wild to me. Enormous rocks and sandbars and beaches bordered us on each side, and the mountains walled us in. We saw almost no signs of habitation -- presumably the villages were just out of sight over the bank. But every half hour or so we'd come across a handful of people doing some kind of work down at the bank -- fishing, digging for shellfish, washing clothes, panning for gold. There was a constant haze from the slash and burn field prep on the mountainside.

About half-way down the first day, we had a little bit of an adventure. The water was too low, and the captain pulled in along a sand dune and started gesturing for us to get out. I should say, this is one of the few situations I've been in where none of our guides spoke any English. For two days we were dependent on speculation and sign language. The only passenger who was a local, a monk, started hiking down river over the dunes, and the captain kept yelling "Go!" So we followed the monk. (Our guess was that the captain needed to lighten the load to get over the rapids, but it turns out we actually needed to hike down to another boat that met us below the rapids, and our bags were ferried down on skiffs.)

We hiked over the riverbed for about 15 minutes and were having a good laugh about our little adventure. "They didn't say anything about this because at the guest house." I remember pausing to take a picture of the long line of us strong across the rocks. Then a few minutes later I turned around to take another picture, and I see a rain cloud squeezing down the valley toward us. A minute later we're in a sandstorm unable to see where we're walking, and then a minute after that we're in a downpour. It was the first drop of rain I had seen in about 12 weeks, and I had forgotten there was such a thing.

Just about then we arrive where the next boat is waiting at a sandbar just across a tiny little puddle that we'll have to cross over. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat is banging into the skiffs and pulling against its mooring, which is just a stake in the sand, and the captain and the ferryman are all yelling at one another. The gangplank is wobbling all over the place, and everyone is afraid to climb it, so traffic is backing up on the sandbar. As we get down to the bank, it turns out the puddle is deeper than expected and people are going up to their thighs. In a flash, like an animal instinct perhaps, all the European men have their pants off. It was like a United Nations of weird underwear. Some people are tripping and going down in the puddle. I saw one girl who had a streak of sand across her teeth and gums before it was over.

I got across safely with my camera dry, but like everyone was caked in wet sand. Once we got on the boat, because the tarps had been let down the sides, it was too dark to see, and we were like panicked cattle looking for our backpacks to find our jackets. Once we got underweigh, and the rain stopped and the tarps came up, we were pretty cold, which is something else I had forgotten could happen. Later on we talked to some people traveling upriver, and they said they got hail, so I guess we were lucky to miss that.

We put in for the night at the half-way point, Pakbeng, a trading post for carrying goods from Thailand into the interior. There are only 200 families there, the one road is only half paved, and they just got electricity a couple years ago. Down by the river, almost all the activity is guest houses and restaurants for the boats full of tourists. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to look around the village any. It was pitch dark by the time we were done showering and feeding on second helpings at the cafes.

The 9 hours the next day was less eventful and even a little bit sunny for some of it. More great scenery, long passages with no sign of life and the regular reminder of big the world is. We arrived at Luang Prabang just at dusk, and the town makes a great impression that way.

-Robert

The root of all suffering is desire to get up and stretch your legs

2010-03-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

Sunday a.m. here. I have a bus ticket to Chiang Khong and am leaving Chiang Mai shortly, with reservations. I had a good time the last couple days.

Yesterday I hiked over to the other side of the river to check out some temples there and to wander the quiter residential streets. The soi -- lanes -- off the main streets are fun to explore. They are mostly residential, except in the backpacker areas where a lot of homes are converted into guest houses and internet cafes, and most of the homes have nice gardens. I stopped at one little patio cafe run by Indian immigrants and had a really refreshing masala iced tea. I'm definitely going to find the recipe for that.

Back on the river I signed on for a short cruise on a scorpion tail boat. It's a corny tour for 15 dollars, just a few miles total all in the city limits, looking at architectural highlights along the river. We saw a couple of enormous beautiful Banyan trees estimated to be over 500 years old and that had dozens of Kingfisher birds roosting in them. We stopped at a little canteen and had some great delicious rice and lychee juice.

The upside of these overpriced tours in the off season is that you can get the guides off their patter and talk to them a little and to any other guests along. I thought I would have the boat to myself, but at the last minute a couple of Australians showed up. One was a professor and the other a grad student of peace studies in Melbourne and they are in Thailand for 8 weeks for a retreat at a conflict resolution camp of some kind at a Buddhist monastary. They said they are quite isolated and wearing white pajamas the whole time and not seeing much of Thailand except for their fellow novices, but they got a one-week furlough to run roughly the same path I am taking in two weeks.

In the evening I went to the Saturday walking street, which is what they call it when they close off a street for a market (on a Saturday.) The vibe at this market is very different from what I've learned to expect in Vietnam. There's a lot more variety and originality in the arts and crafts and a lot less cynicism. All the vendors seemed to enjoy being there and were having a good time talking to customers, which was mostly locals instead of tourists. It's a good thing for my budget that I'm carrying everything with me on my back, otherwise I would have spent a fortune on souveniers. Everywhere you go, there are musicians and dancers performing for tips. The best part of the market was sampling from all the different food stalls. A typical serving was either $.17 or $.34, so for about $1.50 I sampled about 5 different dishes I had never heard of or seen before.

In that same neighborhood, I went to Wat Sisruphan were they have informal conversation tables with the monks and quick introductions to meditation, where we learned to get in touch with our suffering. I had a head start; see my previous post on my difficulty sitting on the floor.

-Robert

Countryside tour

2010-03-26T04:47:00.000-07:00

This morning after breakfast I started trying to organize a tour for myself outside the city. The feature activity around here is treks to hang out in the villages of the mountain tribes that still live in the area. I would really like to see that, but the tour operators give the impression that its all pretty boilerplate and structured, not to mention smarmy, and I don't really have time anyway. I'll see about trying something like that in Laos.

But I wanted to see the countryside a little, so negotiated an itinerary and price with a sorng taa ou driver. The main public transportation source here is a kind of freelance cab consisting of a small red Japanese pickup truck, usually about 20 years old, with a kind of roof over the bed and two benches. The drivers try to put together a bunch of passengers going the same way, but it's the slow season here, and there's usually only ever one passenger.

I'm lousy at haggling and vastly overpaid for this trip, but at least I got to sit in the cab with the air conditioning and my driver's collection of B.J. Thomas CD's. We spent about five hours together talking politics and life stories. He's pretty frustrated with the current government both on the practical grounds that they're all talk and don't do anything (i.e. poverty and jobs) and on the principled grounds that they didn't get in power by democratic means. He's refreshingly (compared to Vietnam) keyed up about the insult to democracy, and he wants to see an election. He didn't say so, but I got the impression he's in favor of the protests that are off and on in Bangkok in recent weeks.

He's 60 years old and remembers growing up in Bangkok when everyone traveled either by bicycle or on the canals. He prefers Chiang Mai. He worked at a U.S. army PX during the Vietnam War. He lived in Saudi Arabia for four years doing construction work and then went to Libya for the same but broke his contract after 6 months because there was no food he wanted in the markets. His son is a driver like him. His daughter just graduated from Chiang Mai University and teaches English at a local high school. His mother is 82 and still strong, and she lives with him.

Our first stop was Was Phra That at the top of Doi Suthep. Mt. Suthep is supposed to dominate the landscape, but it's so hazy here, from the seasonal burns by the farmers mostly, that I didn't know there was a mountain until we were driving up it. Judging from other pictures I've seen, I missed getting a great view from the top. The temple was really interesting with all the vendors selling snacks and incense and prayer bells along the steps climbing up to it. Around the outside, children from programs teaching traditional dance put on performances for tips.

Next we drove north of the city to the Mae Sa waterfalls. It's the dry season, but these still have a little action to them. It's a series of 10 short falls along a path of about a mile or two that I hiked up pausing along the way to check out each of the pools. I picked out the one that looked best and on the way down put to use the fancy traveling pants and lightweight pack towel I brought, zipping the legs off and getting in for a dip.

Lunch was one of the stands at the park entrance selling grilled chicken and fish and spicy papaya salads. My guide dropped me off back in the old town section of Chiang Mai at the City Arts and Culture Museum, an old royal administration building converted into a city hall and finally into the museum. It focuses on the history of the city, which I'm glad I learned about, because I didn't get before how it was planned out and why it has so many temples. (I'll just refer you to the Chiang Mai entries in Wikipedia and Wikitravel.)

I loved my dinner last night at Taste From Heaven so much that I returned again tonight to try some other dishes. Plus they have free internet for customers, which is kind of weird for a proper sit-down restaurant, but here I am.

Another day in Chiang Mai gleaning what I missed, I think, then the bus to Chiang Khong on Sunday to cross into Laos on Monday.

-Robert

Beg bugs!

2010-03-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

It was a very short stay at that first guest house.

From Saigon to Chiang Mai

2010-03-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand about 9:30 this a.m. after about 26 hours straight of travel. Air Asia did not impress, and I've had a few unique travel hiccups to go along with the usual delays and annoyances. I had a few hours between my flight to Bangkok and my train out, which I planned to spend exploring around the train station, but I got lost looking for Chinatown instead of getting lost in Chinatown, which is the usual point. My ATM card isn't working in Thailand for some reason, so I've had to dip into my plans C and D for cash.

I had a second-class sleeping berth, upper. Once the beds are made up, these are in the style of sleeper cars you see in old Hollywood movies like "Some Like It Hot." I don't believe they used real cars for those scenes, though, unless Jack Lemmon is under 5'9". What is it about me and the rail systems of Southeast Asia that I can't stretch out in my bunk? The transvestite who was our attendant must really suffer. She was 6'3" easy.

Before the beds are made up, the bottom bunk is two bench seats facing each other, and I was seated with a Belgian massage therapist who spent the last two months snorkling around peninsular Thailand, getting tattoes based on her own drawings of lotus flowers and meeting some really great people. I wasn't one of them, apparently, because once the train was moving, she wanted me to take an empty seat so she could fold down her bunk early.

Most of the train trip was in the dark, but the last few hours were after dawn, and it was nice seeing the countryside, though it is awfully dry. Chiang Mai is in the foothills of the mountain frontier with Burma, so we were climbing low hills through a lot of it. In the morning I talked to a couple from Holland while we watched the scenery, and they congratulated me on Obama finally signing in universal health-care coverage. I had to break it to them that it wasn't quite that yet.

I'm at a guest house run by . . . well, this was going to be the third story in a row about a northern European! I better cut it out. Let's just say that there are a lot of signs tacked up at this guest house. I have all the information I need in order to do the right thing.

More about Chiang Mai when I've caught up on sleep and formed a proper impression. Pictures are going to have to wait until I get back to Saigon.

-Robert

Inflexibility

2010-03-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we get invited to have dinner at the homes of friends and colleagues, which has been wonderful. One of the charming parts of family life here is that meals are often served on the floor like this. I knew from experience on previous trips that I didn't have the flexibility to do this comfortably for even ten seconds -- or any of the other socializing that is routinely conducted while crouching or sitting on the floor -- and I really tried my best to do a lot of stretching in advance and while we are here. But I'm not smiling in this picture -- I'm grimacing in pain. And we haven't started eating yet. I was hobbled for about three days afterward.

This meal a couple weeks ago was at the home of one of the young faculty Ilene works with. She and her husband, a college instructor in another field, share a small apartment --3 rooms the size of the one you see here in a remote district of the city-- with the wife's college-aged sister, a new baby, and a live in nanny, who is a widow from their hometown. That tells you something about the relative costs of real estate and labor here.

All the food shown here is terrific. The salad seen in closeup I want to mention especially. I forget the name, but we have it pretty frequently. The gray pieces that resemble pork are actually the inside of the rind of jackfruit, fried along with the shrimp. There's usually something cool in it like lettuce, along with peanuts, onions, hot pepper slices and some fish sauce. You eat it by spooning some onto the white crackers, which are made from rice flour.

-Robert

Happy Women's Day

2010-03-07T21:39:00.000-08:00

Well, this explains all the street vendors in HCMC selling roses all of a sudden.

International Women's Day (IWD) is marked on the 8th of March every year. It is a major day of global celebration of women. Started as a Socialist political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries, primarily Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet block. In many regions, the day lost its political flavour, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love for women in a way somewhat similar to a mixture of Mother's Day and St Valentine's Day.

from Wikipedia

Surface Impressions of Phnom Penh

2010-03-06T23:27:00.000-08:00

Ilene and I and our friend Tuan spent a few days in Phnom Penh at the end of the last week. The main purpose was a conference of English teachers in Southeast Asia that Ilene and Tuan attended, and as usual I just tagged along for my own pleasure.

I liked the city a lot and wished I could have stayed longer. For sightseeing, it can be exhausted pretty quickly and I would get bored before long, but as a place to live and work, it compared favorably in some ways to Saigon, at least in the very brief time I had to form an impression. With work to keep me busy, I think it would be an interesting place to spend some time. Some of the differences are just because it is smaller than Saigon, like Chicago has a saner pace and more elbow room than New York. But I guess it also compares favorably to some smaller cities in Vietnam I've been to. It had an openness to it that's hard to put my finger on. (In a very important way, the country is measurably more open, being a multi-party state.)

The poverty there is appalling even compared to what we're used to seeing in Vietnam, and on the bus ride back, Saigon, a city that usually seems to me to be pretty down-at-the-heels, appeared positively thriving from the fresh perspective of a couple of days in Cambodia. Still, the little I saw of Cambodia gave me the impression that it was poised for a leap forward. I saw so little of it that I should probably keep my mouth shut and not try to form conclusions, but to give just one example, I was struck by the apparent contradiction of a country that could afford to provide so little education but where the level of foreign-language ability seemed to surpass Vietnam's. Or, despite the poverty, how it was still possible to buy certain creature comforts that aren't available at any price in Vietnam. Books, for example.

An anecdote to illustrate. I stopped at a literacy program called Open Book on Street 240 and chatted awhile with the French woman who operates it. It's a kind of book bank and drop-in tutoring center for children, and it's filled with used and donated books -- the kind of stuff I've been collecting since my last trip to Vietnam and struggling without success to get here since the customs laws forbid me shipping them to Vietnam. Then she showed me another part of her enterprise -- the children's books that she publishes. They are translations from English or French into Khmer or vice versa of existing children's books she finds useful for the instructional programs. She sells them to other schools, using the proceeds to help distribute more books for free. She has published about 20 titles this way in the last few years.

When I saw them I thought back to a related experience I had in Vietnam on my last trip when I became acquainted with the owner of an art gallery. She publishes catalogs of the shows they put on, but that has been a far from easy experience. She has to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucracy, paying tributes along the way to get all the stamps and approvals and tolerating revisions to her copy so that every artwork finally ends up with the same bland descriptions. In Vietnam, every artwork as an illustration of the spirit of the people resisting the foreign aggressor. This is after she has already done her best to self-censor at the beginning of the process. At the literacy program in Phnom Penh, I asked how she was able to get her books published. She just did it, she said. She didn't need anyone's approval.

Well, that was my big learning experience, and this entry was supposed to be about the sight seeing. I went to all the temples and museums the guidebooks recommend and loved them. I hung out with the religious students at the temples who wanted to practice their English conversation for awhile. We went to the night market where the shopaholic came out in Tuan. I had breakfast every morning on a rooftop cafe overlooking the neighborhood Wat and watched the monks parade out in their orange robes with their rice bowls to beg for their daily food. I wandered the streets for hours as I do in every city I visit, buying innumerable bottles of water and making myself a spectacle on odd streets where tourists don't have any business. I loved riding in the tuk-tuks. I walked along the riverfront park as the moon rose and watched the population congregating for exercise and prayer and ice cream. I avoided the sites commemorating the genocide, but it seemed you could feel the loss and mourning in the air still. It reminded me of the raw-nerve feel of New York City about two years after 9/11 -- the occasional sense without it being said aloud that something terrible happened here. It felt like everyone was under age 30, as if everyone had been conceived in grief.

I tried as much of the local food as I could, but it was hard to get out of the tourist rut, and we had a lot of crummy food, too. I didn't learn a word of Khmer. I didn't see anything outside the capital except from the window of our bus on the highway to the border crossing. I'm reminded again of how fortunate we've been in Vietnam to have local connections who help us get out and see things that that foreigners usually don't. I wish it could always be that way, but our initial experience in Cambodia was necessarily much more limited. I hope I can go back sometime.

-Robert

Rock Star in Asia

2010-03-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

Ilene Crawford, a rock star in the TESOL world of Southeast Asia.

New photos up of Cambodia trip

2010-03-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

I put up a new slideshow on the right hand column of photos from our Cambodia trip. Also, you can click to it here.

Really Stupa'd

2010-02-27T00:46:00.000-08:00

We're safe and sound in Phnom Penh. Ilene's been at the conference, and I've been touring every Wat and Stupa in town, overdoing it and overheating as usual. Of course, we're away from our own computers, so pictures have to wait until we're back in HCMC.

-Robert

Happy Tet

2010-02-13T07:29:00.000-08:00

Have a happy Tet and much luck in the year of the tiger.

Easy Riding near Dalat

2010-02-13T02:23:00.000-08:00

The guidebooks recommend an outfit in Dalat called Easy Riders, a co-op of motorcycle riding tour guides that all wear the same blue and red jackets and hang out at a cafe across from the Dreams Hotel and, as is customary with any successful enterprise here, have their brand diluted by copycats. Did we get genuine Easy Riders? Impossible to know for sure. But we did feel like we got good guides and a good bargain. We hired a pair of buddies at $23 each for the day, got on the back of their Hondas and set off in to the countryside.

Actually, I think we might have got special treatment, either because we were lucky in our choice of guides or because, like everyone else in Dalat, they were charmed by Ilene. Outside of downtown Saigon, people are quite taken by her ability to speak Vietnamese. Before long, all the tour was being conducted in Vietnamese, and I wasn't learning much of anything. They have a standard route to different sites in the countryside, and at the first couple stops we saw other Easy Riders and their passengers, but before long we we popping into visit families our guides knew. We stopped at one wooden house along the highway on a hunch that the family there would be making a special meal in preparation for Tet. They were not, and they looked annoyed when we showed up in the doorway to interrupt their lunch, but our guide announced, "She speaks Vietnamese!" (I understand that much Vietnamese myself.) And they had a long conversation about how this miracle occurred.

Our primary destination was Elephant Falls (pictured below), which was beautiful and powerful (and this is in the dry season.) We stopped at some neat temples, a strawberry farm, a coffee farm, to tour a silk factory, to visit a guy who makes silk worm nests, another guy who makes brooms, flower farms (one of the primary products of the area), and an abandoned U.S. military airstrip.

The area is beautiful but is unfortunately marred by the sight and smell of trash fires and random roadside garbage dumping. The Vietnamese we talk to about these and other social ills, like the traffic, always express annoyance at their fellow citizens. The bad behavior is "in the culture" they say, and people need to be educated about correct behavior. Our guides were a couple of old-timers who had seen a few things, and it's always interesting to talk to those guys about life in Dalat over the last 60 years. I think it's better if I save that for another time, though.

-Robert

Hiking Pinhatt Mountain

2010-02-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

This week we went to Dalat for three nights. It's a small city originally founded as a retreat by French colonists, and it is refreshingly cool there. It's in the central highlands about 300 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, but at a much higher elevation, with dramatic valley drops and beautiful scenery. The cool temps can be deceptive, though -- it's still a tropical sun up there and wears on you.

Since the city has a reputation for being a tourist trap with few sites to keep you busy, our plan was to spend the first two days on side trips into the countryside and use the last morning before our flight home to see the city, but I had a bad case of traveler's tummy that kept me in the hotel the last 24 hours, so we didn't see much of Dalat itself. Luckily we got in our two excursions first.

We stayed at Dreams Hotel, which is recommended in the guidebooks, and that's the second time I've had good luck that way. Owners that are nice and outgoing and helpful make all the difference, and the people at Dreams were terrific. The woman who ran the place with her husband and children and grandchildren had all the flight and bus schedules memorized and seemed to know everyone in town, and she saved us a fortune on a taxi to the airport by calling in a guy she knew.

Our first trip, pictured here, was with Phat Tire, an "adventure tour" company that puts together mountain biking, kayaking and trekking (i.e. hiking) trips. For hikes, they list easy, moderate and difficult trips, and we assumed there was some grade inflation to scare away people who tend to get ahead of themselves, but thank goodness we chose the easy hike, because there was nothing easy about it. It was 14 kilometers total, with plenty of up and down before we started the ascent of Pinhatt Mountain. (No one was ever able to explain the name to us.) The next day I was suffering.

As with other trips we've taken in the past, we had our personal guide for the whole thing and a driver to drop us off and pick us up. The first picture is from the trailhead, overlooking Dalat. The second picture is of a reservoir -- Tuyen Lam Lake -- that we ascended to after a couple hours. It's known as the most beautiful lake in the area, and everywhere we walked we saw the signs of development -- roads cut through the forest for new resorts, big areas cleared for golf courses, billboards advertising the tract housing that will be going in.

The other pictures are approaching the mountain, the ascent and at the top. If you look at the picture from the summit, where we started is on the ridge between the lake the city beyond it.

After so much time in Saigon, the quiet and clean air felt a little unreal. It's the dry season now with no fog and not much in bloom and signs of grass fires everywhere. There are a lot of other pictures that tell the rest of the tale in the slide show on the right -- our guide, Minh, preparing a picnic lunch with the supplies he hauled, Ilene feeding an elephant at a park back at the lake, taking a boat across the lake to our pick up point.

Next up, our motorcycle tour around the countryside with the Easy Riders. Check back tomorrow.

-Robert

Cam Ly Airfield

2010-02-11T19:55:00.000-08:00

This is the remains of Cam Ly Airfield, a hilltop runway a few kilometers from Dalat that was the drop point for U.S. troops operating in this area after 1968. Our motorcycle guides took us by here on our tour of the countryside.

-Robert

Ups and downs in Dalat

2010-02-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

We returned last night from an eventful trip to Dalat. I want to tell about our hike in the mountains and the motorbike tour, but recovery is going to take awhile. In the meantime, check out the pictures here, and please check back.

-Robert

The most expensive bowl of pasta ever

2010-02-07T22:44:00.000-08:00

The other day, I accepted a challenge from friends to make a dinner of American food in our apartment. The first problem with that was the limits of the kitchen -- no oven, a propane camp stove that I didn't know how to turn on, and no pots, pans or anything else larger than a saucer, no cutting board, no counter space, and no way to communicate at the markets. The second problem is my limited repertoire. I like making desserts -- in an oven. And it's been more than 10 years since I made any kind of chicken, beef or pork dish. When I cook fish, it's usually on the grill.

So, brainstorming what I could make on a stovetop with minimal complication with ingredients I could buy here and that might taste plausibly foreign to our Vietnamese guests, I settled on pasta, which I was able to buy at great expense at a market here that specializes in "gourmet" import food. They also had sauce in a jar, but I was pretty sure no one would be impressed with that, and I didn't have the gear for a homemade sauce. So I decided on tossing it with olive oil (again, not easy to find) and pan fried fresh Mekong River shrimp that I marinaded in cajun spice, which I found in the import market, along with cilantro and bell peppers. I found some really good looking Parmesan, but it was being sold by the gram, so I decided on a bland feta cheese. There were no greek olives, so we settled on cocktail olives with pimento. Desert was Pepperidge Farm cookies, which I think really are almost like homemade.

The whole affair was a reminder that travel is the art of compromise. Can you see from the picture that I'm using an aluminum teapot to cook the pasta in?

The one thing that wasn't a compromise was the bread. I found a bakery here that is the real deal. (Schneider's on Pasteur across from the palace, if you're in the neighborhood.)

The whole thing took me about five different shopping trips over a few days, and the least expensive ingredient was the kilo of shrimp.

This was actually an "iron chef" kind of party, and after the pasta (which our guests picked at very politely), Tuan prepared fried spring rolls and all the fixings.

Which was familiar territory, but he did introduce us to one new item -- a kind of soft drink prepared on the spot with a syrup from tamarind juices, mixed with hot water, then poured over ice and the chewy pits of tamarind and sprinkled with peanuts. It was very sweet and tasty. I wish I had gotten the name of it.

This wasn't even the most exciting part of the evening. Don't ask about the plumbing disaster that unfolded in the middle of it all. I'll just say that washing the dishes was also a reminder that travel is the art of compromise.

-Robert

Every little bit helps

2010-01-25T00:30:00.000-08:00

When it comes to understanding how money works here, my meter seems to be off. At home, I've spent a lot of time helping to communicate the message that when it comes to philanthropy, every little bit helps, but sometimes I can't understand how so little a little bit here can mean much. I'm assured that it does.

Yesterday, we joined a day-long "charity trip" organized by the English conversation club that we've been involved with. This kind of thing happens a fair amount before Tet in the way Americans might contribute to toy drives or food drives before the holidays. This trip was to a hamlet in the province of Ben Tre, which is in the Mekong River delta about three hours drive from here. (Ben Tre is famous for two things -- the sweetness of the coconuts and all coconut products and for a battle in 1959 between Vietcong guerrillas and the South Vietnamese Army that is generally considered the first battle of the civil war. The heroine of that battle is memorialized with a street named after her a block over from us in HCMC.)

When our friend Tuan invited us on this trip a few weeks ago, he said they were hoping to raise 3 million dong -- about $170 -- to buy school supplies for the children at an elementary school we were visiting and that there were about 120 pupils. They have been passing the hat at the weekly English club gatherings. I assumed that, as often happens here, I had misunderstood in some way, but I heard right. Four busloads of us went six hours round trip to distribute what by my reckoning were pretty modest gifts.

This was on a Sunday, and all the kids turned out in their school uniforms along with teachers and the principal and a lot of their parents and grandparents. When we arrived, they were all lined up in the school yard to yell "Hello!" The kids mostly eyed us suspiciously, and then the college kids organizing things started the games and loosened everyone up. There was singing and poetry recitations and bags of salty snack foods and balloon inflating contests. Parents stood in the ditch outside the school yard wall peeking over the edge and laughing. Most heartbreaking was girl about 12 years old standing outside watching. She was too old for this school and, I suspect, any other.

Finally all the "dignitaries" lined up (that's me and Ilene, a couple other foreigners on the trip and all the senior citizens) and the children were marched by us one rank at a time for us to hand over the goods -- a plastic bag for each child with two notebooks, a box of crayons, a few pencils, a pencil case and a plastic toy. If you went to Big Lots and bought what all this in bulk, it would have cost you about $1.50 per child to do this. It cost more to keep my hydrated for the day.

Like me, the college kids were taking a lot of pictures, and even from the position of my comparative wealth, I could see how enormous a gap there was between those city kids and the children we were visiting. With their cameras and cell phones and fashionable jeans, they looked almost foreign in that setting themselves. And these are people who I feel embarrassed to let know that I sometimes treat myself to a $4 cheese sandwich when I get homesick.

I was talking afterward to an older woman who had joined the trip. She is a school administrator who is really smart and accomplished, but I think in her whole life she will never be able to buy the trans-Pacific plane tickets that we buy routinely. From her perspective, it was wonderful to be able to make these gifts. How, I asked her. How poor could you possibly be that so little could be meaningful?

Those notebooks and pencils are a lot, she insisted. Their parents just can't afford it. The school tuition is free. The school clothes were donated by someone else. The plastic bag of school supplies are make-or-break. As it happens, that represents about a half day's income for a household in rural Vietnam. She was inspired herself to get more involved with this school. She wants to see if she can get them some books. (You can see in the slideshow on the right that there aren't any books in the classrooms.) Or some training for the teachers who she guesses are following the model of whatever meager education they got themselves in similar circumstances.

I've also spent a lot of time with nonprofits at home communicating to donors that you get back more than you receive, and that's always the case here. It's good for the spirit of course, but this time we got paid back immediately with a fantastic spread of food at a neighboring church. They set up a dining room in the driveway, hung up some tarps for shade, fired up the kitchen in back and stuffed us with shrimp and chicken and coconut and rice all raised in the delta. You wouldn't believe how good this food tasted.

-Robert

Little to report

2010-01-22T00:45:00.001-08:00

Please do keep checking back. The initial set-up weeks are on the boring side, but we expect some adventures to report on soon. Ilene is off on one now, and we've got a trip to the Mekong Delta this Sunday.

We've been establishing work routines and getting to know our neighborhood better. I'm getting used to the noise (or going deaf) and can usually sleep through the morning rush. This week, we had a couple days of uncharacteristic gloomy rainy days when the laundry wouldn't dry. That's over now -- the afternoon heat is killer.

The whole city seems to be holding its breath for or preparing for Tet. The park outside our building is the site of one of the many "flower festivals" in the week of Tet, and a little bit of progress is made each day stringing lights and building the decorations.

Ilene taught her first class on Monday and felt it was a good start. She's in Vung Tau now, a resort town on the coast a few hours southwest of here. It's a conference of all the Fulbright scholars currently in Vietnam. She returns tomorrow, and I'll try to get her to write a little about that. She's super busy. (In addition to everything else, she conducted an interview earlier this week via webcam with the committee at SCSU that will hopefully recommend her for promotion to full professor.)

A big chunk of our time is taken up with just holding together body, soul and home, like pioneers. Laundry and dishes and shopping and every other kind of housework needs to be done in small batches without letting anything build up. We only have 2 of any utensil. (Well, four chopsticks.) Slowly we acquire the the necessities and comforts there wasn't room for in the luggage allowance. Everything takes a little longer to accomplish because we don't know the routines here, then a little longer because we don't have the language skills to ask, then a little longer because everything takes a little longer here. The hunt for bottled water alone is something I have to concentrate on daily. Also chocolate.

A particular example of friendliness

2010-01-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

It's pretty common for us to end up in conversation with strangers over a certain age -- war veterans or older. Usually it's when one of us is eating alone in a little shop where a tourist wouldn't typically be and end up seated next to one of these men alone. If I make eye contact and nod hello, they say hello in English and ask where I'm from. Ilene reports that the same thing happens to her.

These guys end up being enthusiastic conversationalists, interested to hear our perspective and to practice English that has been rusty for thirty-five years. Occasionally they are Viet Kieu -- that is, Vietnamese who have moved abroad -- and who came home for retirement or on a work assignment for the American or Canadian companies they now work for. Typically they worked with Americans in some way during the war, which usually means they had a hard time of it in the decade after. If they aren't themselves refugees who have returned, they almost always have children or other family living in the U.S. ("You know Louisiana? You know Maryland? Cali?") They often have complementary things to say about Americans. (The stereotypes here are often that we are "sincere" and that certain other nationalities I won't name are "not sincere" or "shallow.")

They're always curious why we're here. They're impressed that we're teachers. They're amazed with Ilene's Vietnamese. They're surprised to find us eating at a street stall and wonder if we always eat Vietnamese food. They run through the list of American celebrities that they like and don't like. (I'm sorry to say that the votes against Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Oprah and Tiger are so consistent that it looks like racial prejudice. Everyone likes Obama, though.)

They always try to pay my bill. That happened on the day we moved into the apartment when I went downstairs to find lunch. Yesterday, something like this was unfolding, and as soon as we got into conversation with the guy, I started waving for our bill so I could pay it before we had a chance to become friends and he offered to pay for us.

Ilene and I were together this time, and the guy was much older than usual -- maybe late 70's. He greeted us at first, somewhat hopefully, in French. His French is much better than his English, he explained, and whenever he had trouble thinking of or pronouncing a word in English, he tried it in French to see if we could understand him that way. He grew up in French colonial schools and spoke with a certain amount of regret for the educational system that has been lost. He's a retired educator himself and doesn't think much of kids these days or the schooling that they're getting.

He lives in the neighborhood, and before we left we exchanged phone numbers and agreed to get together soon.

Working routines

2010-01-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

No tales of adventure the last few days. We are starting to establish work routines. Ilene will hopefully write some about her job soon. The class I am teaching met for the first time last night. I started work on the next book on Monday, so I have been putting in a writing session in the morning and spend the afternoons on errands. Today I go in search of haircut. Wish me luck.

-Robert

Classical concert

2010-01-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

Last night we went to a concert at the opera house for the first time. (This picture is from a previous trip.) The occasion was to meet with another Fulbrighter who Ilene had so-far only corresponded with by email. She introduced us to a nice new restaurant I think I'll be spending a lot of time at and arranged for tickets to the concert, which was an east-meets-west kind of program. The Symphony Orchestra of the Ho Chi Minh City Ballet performed and guest soloists were from China, Korea and Japan. There were orchestral pieces composed by Chinese and Vietnamese featuring a kind of Vietnamese bamboo xylophone called T'rung and a Chinese lute called Pipa as well Terrega guitar piece adapted for Pipa. The event was a fundraiser for the Saigon Times Foundation, which supports "industrious students with disadvantages." It was a much better performance than what we attended on our last trip at the Conservatory, though this too was proceeded by a 15-minute lecture on the important connection between art and social values.

-Robert

Salsa night

2010-01-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Last night we painted the town red. Increasingly, Ilene and I feel like chaperons on these outings, though the young people we're running with don't need much looking after -- they drink the minimum and a late night ends at midnight. One of our friends has been taking salsa lessons and has become a regular at the Caravelle Hotel's rooftop bar where a Cuban band plays a couple nights a week. The crowd is a mix of hotel guests and young Vietnamese. The band jumps off stage to lure people on to the dance floor. The Japanese businessmen grab the asses of the hostesses. The middle-age Westerners try to get the phone numbers of the young ladies. The big screen TV runs a slide show of hotel services -- massages, drink specials, breakfast buffets, sightseeing tours. Every few minutes, a picture shows a smiling young man dressed in the costume of a Vietcong soldier popping out of one of the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the popular destinations for war tourists. Towering above on every side of the patio are the skeletons of the next generation of hotels and office towers. The sparks of the arc welders working late on Saturday wink inside.

Well fed

2010-01-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

We had breakfast today at the home of our friend Tuan. One of his innumerable sisters runs a restaurant out of the front room, and she is a fantastic cook. She specializes in "broken rice" -- short-grain rice with a variety of heavier dishes with gravy, such as barbecue pork, stewed tuna steaks or hard boiled eggs. We had a sample platter and went away stuffed.

This kind of room facing the street is a combination formal receiving room and garage. (You can see the family altar and a motorbike in the background of the second picture.) It's pretty common to run some kind of small retail operation out of these rooms -- a quickimart or a small dining operation like this. She told us she has 100 customers per day, and basically what you see in the glass case in the background is the whole set up. Other sisters help at a stove in the kitchen in back, and the stock is delivered in small quantities by motorbike. I counted three deliveries while we were there. The breakfast rush is children getting breakfast on the way to school, and the lunch rush is laborers on break and some kids out from school.

I lost track of all the cousins in the household, but I do know the six-month old girl is the child of the brother whose wedding we went to in 2008.

Setting up house

2010-01-07T03:06:00.000-08:00

I wanted to get some video or pictures to show the apartment before I told about it, but it's going to be a few days before I'm that organized.

So, we are in an old apartment building directly on a well-known traffic circle/landmark a little north of downtown. Very Vietnamese in style -- nothing like the towers built especially for the comfort of expats. 1 bedroom with a large living room and kitchen area and very simple furnishings and utilities. (The water is in cisterns above a drop ceiling and a pump turns on every time you use a tap or flush to keep the cisterns full.) We have tiny little washing machine and hang the clothes to dry out the back window. In front, we don't really have a view out on the street -- the unit is recessed a bit back in the building and the gallery outside our bedroom window belongs to the next unit, so we keep those curtains closed. In back we look out over a jumble of alleys. We like the location a lot, but it's a little noisier than I had hoped. Until I get used to it, I'll be waking up with the start of motor scooter horns about 5 a.m. If I really need a respite and feel like blowing a lot of money, a large Western-style department store with a bakery and movie theater is very close.

Our landlord is really sweet. She put in a lot of time helping the get the internet situation resolved and doing other little favors. She's a professor of law at a local university.

Between us, Ilene and I have carried 8 arm loads of essential supplies from the Co-op Mart a couple blocks away -- linens, brooms, fans, toilet paper, groceries, and everything else essential that wouldn't fit in the suitcases. It's looking pretty homey now.

That's been exhausting, and the week of traveling and apartment hunting was exhausting, and I guess I didn't realize it until now, but the month-long sprint preparing for the trip was exhausting, so we've hit the wall the last couple days. I've been laying on the couch eating Ritz crackers and special dark chocolates all day. Hopefully we can get some rest for a fresh start on Monday, but our social calendars between now and then are already packed.

Tonight my lack of language skills tripped me up again like it has in the past -- I accidentally ordered twice as much food as I intended, and at a pretty expensive place, too. It's always embarrassing to sit there and watch that second plate of food being carried out while it dawns on you how you screwed up the order. The good news is that I finally have an overload of protein in my belly, and I should be feeling better soon.

Settling in

2010-01-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we're getting settled. A fuller description later. We don't have internet in our apartment yet, so our ability to get online and check email, etc. is limited to when we go to a cafe with our computers.

We signed the contract and paid for the apartment Monday night and moved from the hotel on Tuesday and started setting up our new place. It's been a long week of little sleep and lot of uncertainty and a lot of literal heavy lifting. More about the apartment when we have more time online.

Ilene and her colleagues had their first meeting with their counterparts at the university here re: the exchange/State Dept. grant and came away very enthused. She's scheduled to start work on the Fulbright on Monday morning.

More shopping for apartment needs, finding a gym, retrieving books from the consulate, etc. in the next few days.

-Robert

Twain on Forex

2010-01-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious. It takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are made in reis. We did not know this until after we had found it out through Blucher. Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast -- said he had heard it was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet . . . . In the midst of the jollity produced by good cigars, good wine, and passable anecdotes, the landlord presented his bill. Blucher glanced at it and his countenance fell. He took another look to assure himself that his senses had not deceived him and then read the items aloud, in a faltering voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes . . . .

"'TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED REIS!' The suffering Moses! There ain't enough money in the ship to pay that bill! Go -- leave me to my misery, boys, I am a ruined community."

. . . . [The landlord] glanced from the little pile of gold pieces to Blucher several times and then went out. He must have visited an American, for when he returned, he brought back his bill translated into a language that a Christian could understand . . . . $21.70. Happiness reigned once more in Blucher's dinner party. More refreshments were ordered.

--The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain

Apartment hunting

2010-01-02T18:21:00.000-08:00

It's been a hectic and exhausting first two full days, and today is mostly devoted to sorting through the storm damage and trimming our sails for the next few days.

Many uncertainties remain, but it appears we have an apartment that we will be able to move into Tuesday morning. Our friend Chung was a fantastic help acting as unpaid renter's agent, local guide and translator in a twelve-hour marathon yesterday. She set up appointments to look at several apartments with three owner's agents, and we crisscrossed District 1 in a total of 8 taxi rides. There were numerous misunderstandings, incorrect addresses, and surrealist rabbit holes. We made our selection and began serious negotiations, which resembled something like the game of telephone using actual telephones and a language barrier for spice -- Ilene and me to Chung to the agent to the landlord's sister to the landlord, who was supposed to be on holiday but I'm beginning to think is somebody's alter ego.

Once we came to terms, we piled on motorbikes (we also accomplished buying our own new helmets) and took a long trip out into District 2 to the landlord's sister's place, which was on the 14th floor of an apartment tower with a gorgeous view of the sunset and a serious AV set up. Cans of Ba Ba Ba and Pepsi were passed around and we sat down to write up a promissory note to sign a contract later when the landlord returns. During this process all of the misunderstandings that were seeded during the game of telephone bore fruit and the deal nearly fell apart. (Most worryingly, they insist on being paid in U.S. currency, which I didn't bring nearly enough of and which I thought was impossible to acquire here. I'm now told otherwise, so tomorrow's errand is to navigate of the international banks downtown. If I don't succeed, we're back at square one.)

As for the apartment itself, I'll tell more after we move in and get pictures. Suffice it to say that we avoided the lure of a foreigner's enclave and that the word "charming" will be often used -- whether sincerely or ironically remains to be seen.

As usual, jet lag has us dropping like stones at about 9 p.m. and waking up at 3 a.m. We lay in bed quietly out of courtesy to the rooster who lives across the street from our hotel, and when he starts his day we get up and start ours.

We acclimate quickly, though. We heard via Skype this morning that it's snowing in Connecticut, and it felt a little like news that aliens had landed. I couldn't quite imagine it. 28 Celsius and cloudy here, all day, every day, with humidity to beat the band.

-Robert

Innocents Abroad

2010-01-02T18:13:00.000-08:00

On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations of gas burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the sidewalks -- hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation, and laughter everywhere! We found the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, and wrote down who we were, where we were born, what our occupations were, the place we came from last, whether we were married or single, how we liked it, how old we were, where we were bound for and when we expected to get there, and a great deal of information of similar importance -- all for the benefit of the landlord and the secret police. We hired a guide and began the business of sightseeing immediately. That first night on French soil was a stirring one. I cannot think of half the places we went to or what we particularly saw; we had no disposition to examine carefully into anything at all -- we only wanted to glance and go -- to move, keep moving! The spirit of the country was upon us. We sat down, finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called for unstinted champagne. It is easy to be bloated aristocrats where it costs nothing of consequence!

--The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain

Ready, set, go

2009-12-29T05:55:00.001-08:00

Thanks for checking in! Our flight departs in about 24 hours for our 2010 trip to Vietnam. If you're catching up with us for the first time, here are the basics.

Ilene will be working on two projects in Saigon. First is teaching at the University of Pedagogy in their foreign languages department, a.k.a. the Fulbright project. Second is establishing an exchange program between that university and hers, a.k.a. the State Department grant project. She expects to have several work-related side trips to conferences both within Vietnam and in the region.

I'm working less hard. I'll be starting another novel and working on that, but I won't be passing up any opportunities for adventure that will take my eye off that. I'm also going to be teaching an informal English class at a community center, and I plan to do some extensive solo trekking in other Southeast Asian countries. Roughly, I plan to stay close to Saigon until the end of March, and then embarking on side trips. (Goal: 50k words drafted by then and another 20k drafted before my return.)

We hope just living and working in Saigon will be an adventure, and we hope our friends there will invite us off the beaten path a lot. Expect to see a lot of news here about country homes and family celebrations and, as usual, clothing mishaps. We'll probably have a few words to say about the food and coffee.

We're staying roughly 6 months, give or take, probably longer for Ilene and shorter for me. See you sometime next summer!

-Robert

Friendliness and other last thoughts

2008-08-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

We're back home now and missing Saigon a lot.

We're both reluctant to attempt any kind of summary about our trips--to say that "Vietnam is a land of" anything in particular. But it's fair to say that, despite a political and economic environment where people find it difficult to use all of their skills and ambitions, Vietnam has tremendous gifts. Particularly in the familiar and easy way that people get along, whether it's parents and children or strangers in a cafe.

At the speech contest where we were judges, we asked one teenager a follow-up question on her speech about the importance of a strong national identity. She had said when people think of Italy, they think of its fine art and she gave some more examples like that about other countries. We asked her, "What do you hope people in other countries will think of when they think of Vietnam?"

"Friendliness," she said. That idea wasn't in her prepared speech, but it came to her instinctively. And our experience supports her hope. Friendliness is what we think of when we think of Vietnam.

We're also reluctant to attempt a summary, because we expect to have an ongoing relationship with the country and our friends there, with as many more trips as our budgets and schedules will allow. We anticipate returning in September 2009 for a five-month stay. So, there will hopefully be more posts on this travelogue at that time. Please check back to see.

-Robert and Ilene

Last goodbyes and back home

2008-08-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

We started back home on Wednesday, Saigon time. It was a late flight, so we spent the day making the rounds to our regular haunts and saying goodbye. Many of our friends met us at the airport to see us off, just like in the days when a plane trip was a big deal.

Except for a small tribute that I had to pay at Vietnamese customs to let some of my souvenirs through, we had an uneventful journey from Saigon to Tokyo to Washington, D.C. to Hartford. We had the same experience as on the way over of excellent, friendly service from the Japanese airline and security personnel and appalling rudeness and cynicism from the U.S. airline and T.S.A. employees.

Despite starting out at bedtime and traveling for 30 hours, I had my usual trouble sleeping on the plane and arrived home a zombie. I made a quick inspection of the house (all OK) and slept for 12 hours straight in a glorious absence of construction and motorbike noise. Now I just have jetlag and culture shock to get over, and if you happen to see me in the next few weeks, I hope you'll forgive me any weird muttering or outbursts.

-Robert

Our favorite restaurant in Saigon, vegetarian, Vietnamese or otherwise

2008-08-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

UPDATED: Unfortunately, we're going to have to find a new favorite place. Tram Huong is no more. We're back in HCMC for our 2010 stay, and we headed straight here for dinner, but found it had closed up.

We had lots and lots of delicious food, but one restaurant emerged as our favorite place to go over and over. We loved the variety, the quality, the quiet, the price and the super friendly family that runs it.

It was a favorite based on its own merits, I think, but I may be prejudiced a little by the fact that it was our own discovery, unknown by any guidebook or any friend, and we never saw another tourist within two blocks of the place.

But I don't think success will spoil them so I'm glad to draw attention to it, and I hope you'll consider a trip to Tram Huong at 150/26 Nguyen Trai in District 1. (If you don't know how the addresses work, that means it's at #26 in an alley that starts at #150 off Tram Huong street . The other end of the alley is on Le Lai Street. If you're in the backpacker's ghetto, the easiest thing to do is to walk across September 23rd park to Le Lai. If you're downtown, you'll want a cab.)

It happens to be a vegetarian restaurant, which is what made the sign catch Ilene's eye initially. I assumed that means the family are committed Buddhists, and that probably has something to do with the very peaceful vibe.

We ate there probably three times a week, always ordering enough to take leftovers back to the hotel, and we never did exhaust all the choices on the menu. Some favorites included the different versions of grilled tofu gluten, the five-color stir fry, grilled eggplant, pumpkin soup, fresh springrolls, fried springrolls, banana blossom salad, enoki mushroom soup, simmered jackfruit, lemonade, orange juice and cafe sua da. We usually ordered the small versions of 3 or 4 dishes and spent about $5.

-Robert

Favorite places-Sozo

2008-08-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

I don't love Sozo for the cuisine particularly-- though everything I've had there has been tasty--but for the vibe. It's a great relaxing place, with really friendly staff. Plus you feel good spending money there, because it's an enterprise that provides job training and educational opportunities for impoverished families. If you're in the backpacker's ghetto and need a light refreshment, try Sozo instead of Highlands coffee or any place like that.

I particularly like the verandas on the second and third floors with views of the traffic on Bui Vien Street. They have some computers so you can check email and a small library of left behind books.

I know they have a menu of Vietnamese food, but I never looked at it closely because I always went straight to the cakes and brownies and sandwiches, which were the closest approximation to baked goods at home. I also liked getting a package of chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies from the case in front to take away whenever I was passing by.

-Robert

Street children in Saigon

2008-07-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Vietnam has an incredibly young population. The median age is 26 years, compared to 36 in the U.S.

And to western eyes the large number of children here are much more apparent. For one thing, they have a lot more independence--getting themselves to and from school, for example--and with very few playgrounds, gymnasiums or youth programs, the sidewalks are where they spend their free time. Just a few minutes ago on the way home I cracked up watching two kids playing inside the glass booth of a street side ATM machine.

Another reason you notice kids more is that life here isn't separated into nuclear families in individual homes apart from the workplace. Almost any building you see is a combination home and shop or restaurant, and if the children aren't working in the family business, then they are playing in it. The typical shop does double duty as a nursery and the shopkeeper is also a childcare provider. At our favorite restaurant last Sunday afternoon, we waited for our meal while listening to the big sister in a loft above the dining room singing a lullaby to a crying baby while mom was busy in the kitchen. The baby had better luck tuning out the street noise and falling asleep than I do.

The worst part about Vietnam for us is seeing the number of children essentially employed as beggars. It's over 20,000 in Ho Chi Minh City, and at least two families of them work on our street.

One is a pair of sisters, about 12 and 8, who I assume go to school since I only see them at night and on school holidays. They walk a regular circuit between three hotels and one expensive restaurant on the block. They have a slouch-shouldered way of walking from one entrance to the next, never changing the expressions on their faces. The older one leads the younger one, and when someone exits one of these buildings she flips the cotton cap she wears off her head and holds it out. When she gets the shake of the head no she flips the cap back on her head again and moves on. Everyone on the street--the man who manages the taxi cue, the woman who runs the coffee stand, the heavily made up young women, only a few years older, waiting in the doorways of the beauty salons--ignores them, and they ignore everyone right back.

The other group on our street includes a little boy in a vintage wheelchair. His brothers push him up and down the street like demons, bouncing him over the curb and into traffic in a way that terrifies me to watch. When they see a tourist, they race toward him and use the wheelchair to block the path. The other day I came back to the hotel and saw them parked on the sidewalk in front, peering through the glass doors. I braced myself, but they ignored me when I went passed, totally focused on something inside. When I got inside, I realized that they were watching the television mounted on the wall, which was showing American professional wrestling.

Some children assist their parents or other family in begging (or selling gum or lottery tickets.) Babies ride on their mother's hip, holding out their hands like they've been trained, and when they're old enough to walk, the adult spots the mark from a distance and nudges the child to go make the solicitation.

Last week I saw a girl about 9 years old helping a man old enough to be her great-great-grandfather. He was blind and playing the flute as he shuffled down the street. He wore old pajamas, and the top had a large hole near the hem which the girl used as a handle to pull him along, holding out her hat in front of her as they went.

One time I saw a boy about 14 years old taking care of his older brother who appeared to have Downs syndrome. This was at the small playground in the park near us where every night more children then you can imagine pack into it and somehow all get along. The two teenagers sat on the curb nearby watching the crowd carefully, and whenever a child or parent left behind a plastic juice bottle or water bottle, the younger one got up to retrieve it. The older one sat and guarded an old plastic fertilizer bag they used to collect their haul, and when his brother returned with a new bottle, he got up and squashed it underfoot.

Most street children don't go to school at all, and those are the kids we met while tutoring for an organization called Thao Dan. Our group of kids was between 7 and 13 years old and they can't read or write in Vietnamese, but the older ones speak English as well as almost anyone we've met, having picked it up on the street.

When our class at 5:30 in the evening, their day was just starting. Their jobs are to hustle in various ways in the backpackers ghetto from dinner time until the last drunks drag back to their hotels about 3 a.m. Then they travel back out to their homes in remote districts of the city and sleep until the next afternoon. The social worker at Thao Dan tells us that their parents keep them out of school to work like that.

The kids we met this way are amazing. On the one hand they were completely unfamiliar with the habits of taking turns and listening to the teacher and not touching the teacher's stuff. On the other hand, they seemed desperate for whatever it is we were doing with them. When Ilene read a picture book to them last night, I never saw children so entranced. They beg us to come back the next day and they cling to us when we are there, fighting with one another over who will sit next to us. They are full of energy, shouting out answers, proud to show off what they do know, never too shy to guess when they don't know. And they all have a disconcerting confidence for their age, like they are 10 years older.

When we dismiss class, which is held in a borrowed room in the neighborhood People's Committee office, they show off how they know to shake hands and shout "See you later! See you tomorrow! See you next week! See you next year!" They run out the door and by the time we exit, they've already merged into the economy of the street. We see them in front of the bars and cafes along De Tham and Pham Ngu Lau working their hustles.

Last week, we were having dinner nearby and a boy about 11 years old who we know and who is my favorite one in the class came in selling cigars. For the most part, restaurant owners let anyone come in to pester the customers as long as you have something to sell. The typical routine involves going from table to table and holding the merchandise in front of each person's nose until they shake their head no about three times and then moving on. About half way through the dining room our student spotted us and just gave a grin to acknowledge me but didn't come to our table and didn't do any of the friendly showing off he does in class. He ducked out quickly like he was embarrassed for me to see him that way.

Of course, on the street like that each night, they are incredibly vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. When I pass motorbike drivers who whisper to me "You want very young girl?" I know that before long these kids may be who they are talking about. So when I see the backpackers chatting with the kids like they are mascots or characters in a heartwarming movie about lovable street urchins, it makes me pretty fed up with tourists.

Ilene and I can't help wondering if the more English we teach them the more valuable they become to their families on the street and the less likely they are to go to school. With more time, we would . . . . well, without the language and local knowledge and the contacts, there's not a lot we can do that would be effective. Are we going to persuade their parents to send them to school? After nine weeks, we're still not much more than tourists ourselves, and undoubtedly I got more interesting stories out of our classes than they got education. For now, this is an issue that I know a little bit about but haven't found a real way into. As with everything here, I observe without really understanding what's going on.

But I can say that the people at Thao Dan seemed eager to have the help we could offer, and I assume that means there's some value in it. If you're in Saigon and want to volunteer, I suggest stopping by a bookstore and buying a pile of the simplest math and English books you can find and a box of pencils and stopping by the Thao Dan office. If you're on your way to Vietnam, fill the extra space in your luggage with coloring books. They run a lot of other programs besides these ersatz classes--street outreach, shelters, drop-in centers--and they're always building their supplies for gift baskets they distribute during Tet.

When it comes to charitable donations in Vietnam, it's hard to know what to do to make sure a gift will be used as intended. There is no such thing as a 501c3 here, and there aren't the same systems for financial control and accountability that we are used to at home.

But Thao Dan passes the sniff test for me and Ilene. We generally have the philosophy of "do your givin' where you're livin'," but we are starting to consider Saigon our second home, and we're doing what we can to support Thao Dan. If you're interested in supporting their work from afar, we suggest an electronic money transfer service called Xoom. Or you might consider supporting the work of an organization with a presence in your home country such as (in the case of the U.S.), The East Meets West Foundation or Save the Children. Or if you have experience with any charities here that you recommend, please share it in the comments.

We hope you've enjoyed reading our travelogue. We actually have some more fun posts to catch up on even though our trip is over, so keep checking back.

-Robert

Cooking class

2008-07-28T01:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we took a cooking class at The Vietnam Cookery Center. It was dorky and expensive but we had fun, even if we didn't necessarily learn a lot. All the prep work is done in advance and a platoon of staff delivers ingredients in front of you in little bowls so all you really do is assemble them. I think with the recipe book they provide I'll be able to make some tasty dishes, though. The best part for me was that we made caramelized fish in a clay pot which became my favorite dish on my first visit.

You can do the class only or the class with a market visit. We were already very familiar with Cho Benh Thanh, so we could have skipped that. Then it's a fairly long ride out to Ben Thanh District to the cookery center. They have prep stations set up for about 20 people with the head chef in front. They walk you through making a salad, a main course and a soup, and then you retire to a big dining table and eat all that for lunch as well as rice and desert which they make for you.

They have a good shtick of making it sound like a tough course, mixing in lots of trivia and having a graduation ceremony at the end where the chef makes a big show of signing the diplomas. All-in-all, it was easily the most professionally run and least disorienting tourist experience we've had here.

-Robert

Going away party

2008-07-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Sunday night we threw a party at a banh xeo restaurant to try and say thank you to some of the people who have been so helpful and kind to us during our visit. We tried to do something special, but of course you can't spend enough money to repay the generosity we've experienced. We were very sad to say goodbye.

-Robert

Favorite places--Pizza

2008-07-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

One in a series of posts about our favorite places in Vietnam.

"Favorite" is the wrong category for this discussion. Pizza in Vietnam should be regarded only for its medicinal value in cases of mild homesickness. Bread and cheese are two ingredients too uncommon in the cuisine here to expect them to be done well. And there's so much cheap, terrific, fresh Vietnamese food that for the same money, you could try 3 neighborhood cafes until you found a lunch you liked. So why bother?

Well, because sometimes after a certain number of weeks of unfamiliar experiences--good or bad--on a hot day when the honda om drivers seem particularly relentless, you crave the sensation of something familiar on the tongue. And if you're familiar with the sensation of room service pizza from the Executive Suites off I-80 in Erie, Pennsylvania, you're in luck. You can get that here.

I had days like that a few times (Ilene has more patience) and tried a couple pizza places. By no means did we make a comprehensive tour, and we never did get around to Annie's, which is touted in the guidebooks and online forums as the best in town. We did try a place that we were told was the favorite of Vietnamese kids. In fact it was the only time on the whole trip we ever had to wait for a table. But it was terrible. I can understand why the kids were so eager to squirt ketchup on it.

The place that I tolerated the best is called Cappuccino's, at 86 Bui Vien. Service is super slow (I assume because the toaster oven can only hold one pizza at a time), and the only patrons are tourists, so it's a good a place to practice your English.

Pictured are the Greca and the Tres Colores. They weren't that bad, and after one or the other of them, I could leave with my belly full and ready to take a fresh run at life in Saigon.

-Robert

Wildlife spotting in Cat Tien Park

2008-07-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

The wildlife spotting at Cat Tien National Park was less than advertised. The kinds of large mammals--wild water buffalo, large cats, elephants, primates and of course the Javanese Rhino--are just highly unlikely to be something you encounter on the typical guided tour that stays close to the park headquarters. In fact, one guide told me that no one had EVER seen the rhinos in person--that they've only been spotted via camera traps.

Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun and did see a lot of smaller wildlife, including one very close call with a monocled cobra. We also spotted one real-life example of the mascot of this website, the Asian Civet Cat, as well as lots and lots of civet poop.

We used Sinhbalo Adventure Tours and again had a great experience with them. They driver and our guide--Huy--picked us up at our hotel early on Friday and then picked up another traveler--Hermann, a high school P.E. teacher from Austria. We drove about 4 hours to get to the park entrance. First you take a simple ferry boat across the Dong Nai River. We checked into our room, which was about the equivalent of a mountain lodge in a national park in the U.S., except you share it with more lizards. We had a delicious lunch in the canteen and then a siesta. My one complaint is that for all the trouble and expense I would rather have gotten underway on our first hike sooner than 2:30.

Gearing up for the hike includes putting on leech socks and leech repellent. The socks are similar to gaiters, made of cotton and worn inside your shoes and over your pants. Then you smear the repellent like a barrier around your calf. They were absolutely necessary--long pants alone won't cut it. Ilene and I and everyone one else we hiked with found at least half a dozen leeches on their clothing. The leeches I pictured beforehand I guess are aquatic leeches and didn't resemble these at all--at least not before they had a chance to fill with blood. They look like very tiny worms, and they stand upright waving one end in the air and they have an amazing ability to spring from that position. Anticipating them was creepy, but in the end they were harmless.

Huy joined us for the hike but handed us over to a ranger--Trung--who was very knowledgeable and friendly and did a great job of spotting various insects and identifying trees and bird cries and so on for us. I wasn't able to record the names of most of the trees. One large variety is called a Vietnamese Redwood. Much larger than those are a kind of tree where the roots stay near the surface and make spectacular ropey waves. That's the kind the two of us are standing in front of in the picture above. Another neat plant was taro, which are the very large green leaves pictured below. The coolest thing is the strangler vines. They set their roots into the top of a tall tree and then start sending the vines down and taking over. Sometimes you find a kind of woven basket of vines in the shape of the tree that used to be there before it died and decayed.

It was in the middle of the first hike that we encountered the cobra. We were walking in file, with Trung and Ilene ahead. They apparently stepped over it, because I first spotted the movement as I was stepping over it. I got a good look at it behind my heel and then me and Hermann, who was behind me, were both yelling "snake!" It was between black and dark grey and about as thick as the handle of a tennis racket. I got one glimpse of its head and then it was straightened out and moving really fast toward the brush. I kept trying to move my eyes ahead to see its head again but it moved so fast I only kept glimpsing near the tail. I estimated it about 1.5 meters and Hermann says 2 meters. Trung never saw it, but based on our descriptions, he says it was a cobra. When we spotted another much smaller and harmless snake later and hollered, Trung about jumped in a tree.

After dinner, we had the night safari. You pile in the back of a jeep rigged with benches, and a ranger drives quite recklessly down the paved roads while another ranger stands in back and shines a powerful spotlight into the trees and grass. When he sees a light reflecting back out of the eyes of something, he raps the hood of the truck, and the driver screeches to a halt. The animals mostly just watch warily unless we're too close, and then we have to look fast as they scamper. We saw a civet cat this way, one mouse deer, and a couple dozen sambar deer.

The next day we took a jeep to a drop-off point and from there took a 10km hike to the crocodile swamp and back. We spotted a couple interesting birds on the way and also while resting at the ranger station at the swamp. We encountered some macaques, which our guide spotted but we never did. We could only hear their cries and see the tree tops rustling.

We were back at the camp by lunch time, and after that and showering, we ferried back over to meet our driver. We had a good time getting to know our guides along the way. Huy and his wife had twin boys five months ago, and they hope to move to her parents' house in the provinces to open a pharmacy, which is her profession. Trung is a genuine conservationist who has worked 15 years in jobs like this. He is the one person we've met with some ind of academic expertise whose English was good enough that we could learn about it. He hitched a ride back to Saigon with us, because he had an English exam, which he needs to pass to get licensed to be a tour guide, which he would like to expand into. We dropped him off at a crossroads in the suburbs so he could have dinner first with some family and then we plunged into the city traffic for the last push and were home in time for an early dinner.

-Robert

Snakes and leeches!

2008-07-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

We're safely back in Saigon from our hike in the forest, without even a mosquito bite, but with a tale to tell about narrowly missing much worse. We'll write after we catch up on sleep. In the meantime, enjoy the photos in the slide show on the right.

How to cross the street in Saigon

2008-07-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

I just realized this text and this video together make it appear that it's a video of me crossing the street. Not at all. It's taken as I walk halfway around the inside of the traffic circle at Cho Ben Thanh, from the Sept. 23rd Park side to the start of Le Loi Avenue. A few seconds of it show some people as the cross the street.

1. Stand upstream of a local, and do what they do. (Note this only works on a one-way street. Otherwise, when you get to the opposite half of the street, you're the one who's upstream.)

2. Wait for a large vehicle or a crowd of motorbikes to cross and take advantage of the temporary jam.

3. Look both ways and then look every other possible way--360 on the horizontal and vertical planes. There is no such thing is a lane or a way or even a street, really. Streams of traffic can develop behind you on the sidewalk you're stepping off of.

4. Do keep moving steadily and slowly. Establish a pace and let everyone see it. After that, even if a truck is bearing down on you, ignore you're instincts to dart, stop, or jump back.

5. As you are moving, "take your space" as they say in soccer. Ignore the lifetime of training of waiting until the traffic has passed. Instead, step in front of the traffic wherever there is a space and take it away from the vehicle coming toward you. Crowd that vehicle toward your front forcing it slow down to get around you safely. When the stream eventually gets too choked in front, it will start breaking behind you.

Favorite places-Nhu Lan Bakery

2008-07-25T01:26:00.000-07:00

One of several posts to featuring some of our favorite places in Saigon.

Nhu Lan Bakery is more of a favorite of Ilene's than of mine. She and another traveling companion discovered it on an earlier trip and it became a regular place for the two of them, and it's about the first place Ilene wants to check in with on each visit now.

I don't know what this kind of restaurant is called in Vietnamese, which there seems to be at least one of in every neighborhood, but the atmosphere most resembles a New York deli like Katz's, except with table service, as well as take-away. There's always a strong local vibe and the staff have a no-smile, seen-it-all attitude. Cheap, plentiful, fresh food is the main attraction, as well as watching the hustle. Nhu Lan in particular always has a hum of traffic in the evening of people examining the cold cases on the sidewalk to find a dinner to take home or seated on the stools inside gobbling something before a night class.

They have a big variety of a kind of meat pie made with sweet, flaky, pastry-like dough and stuffed with various meat or sweet bean pastes. Also lots of banh mi--sandwiches with shaved meat or poultry. Ilene's favorite dishes--fresher than in most places, in her opinion--are the spring rools and banh cuon, moist rice flour wrappers stuffed with spicy ground pork and dunked in fish sauce. I love the fresh fruit juices and shakes. Most dishes are about $1.25.

On the side is a small grocery of things dried or canned that are good to stock the hotel room with--jars of sour or salted plums, for example, which Ilene is addicted to.

Nhu Lan is at the corner of Ham Nghi and Cong Tru not far from where Nguyen Hue butts into the river. While you're in the neighborhood, head one block west to find the entrance to and stroll through the "old market" that operates on Ton Tham Dat Street.

-Robert

Trekking in Cat Tien National Park

2008-07-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

We leave early in the morning for a two-day hike looking for wildlife in Cat Tien National Park. We'll be back late Saturday local time. In the meantime, you can learn about the park here:

http://www.namcattien.org/

Ilene's Vietnamese language exam results

2008-07-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ilene passed her language exam, of course. That's her tutor, Tuan, getting the news with her. He's translating the fine print on her certificate for me, and like everything else in her scholastic career, it basically says she's the smartest kid in class. (Not that past experience helped her feel any more confident beforehand. When she's in the old folks home she'll probably worry that she's not fully prepared for bingo.)

Kidding aside, this was her main goal of the trip, and she worked super hard on it. The certificate actually says she passed the equivalent of a five-month course of study, even though it was about 1 month with Tuan in January 2008 , 2 months this summer and a lot of homemade self-guided study in the meantime.

-Robert

Chua Giac Lam--Giac Lam Pagoda

2008-07-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

Note: For most of the blog entries, there are many more pictures in the albums on the right. (Usually the one titled Vietnam 2008.) In this case, there are several especially nice pix of the trip to this temple.

Today I visited Giac Lam Pagoda, which is in a more remote district than most sites I've been to in HCMC proper. (20 minutes by taxi from District 1.) I saved it for near the end of my trip when I'm getting overly familiar with everything in walking distance of our hotel. It's one of the larger temple complexes I've seen and there was no sign of any other western tourist. It's definitely worth the trip if you have a morning and about $4.50 in cab fare each way to spare.

The guidebook describes it as the oldest temple in the city. I assume it's the institution that is the oldest and not the building itself, which is a modern structure. In fact, they are in the process of constructing a new temple adjacent to the current one. Of course, there's a collection box for that and for ongoing operations and their charitable programs, and I always take along all the small bills I've collected to contribute.

This morning when I visited, there was some kind of ceremony going on involving a nun--an initiation, perhaps. (One of the drawbacks of making my own way on these visits is I don't learn much that isn't plainly visible, so most of the time I'm just guessing at what's going on around me.) It was shortly before lunch time, and a couple of the long tables in the dining hall were set, and a lot of monks were hovering around checking in on the ceremony and waiting for it to conclude.

One thing I got a kick out of was discovering the source of the music that accompanied the chants. It was all coming over a loud sound system. I assumed the melody line, in the five-tone scale recognizable from most traditional music in the east, was coming from some kind of old-time zither or lute. When I came around the corner of the Buddha alter in the main hall, I saw that the sound was coming from an old purple Fender Stratocaster, played by a monk sitting cross legged on the floor. He was shredding the bottom two strings, and the drummer was going at it pretty hard too. Everyone once in awhile the drummer laid down his sticks and picked up a zither, and he had a way of playing a loud wooden knocker with his tapping foot while his hands were busy.

The building behind the main temple is a mausoleum with hundreds of small cubicles for the ashes of the deceased. Two funerals were going on in separate corners when I stepped in, with a few family members gathered around a chanting monk while they loaded up one of the cubicles. Each one typically included an urn with a photo of the deceased and the kit they'll need in the next world--paper money, joss sticks, tea cups. Many of them had personal mementos, too. Near the back of the building, the photos were from decades ago and near the front, they got more and more contemporary. One that caught my eye had a remote control race car with a Power Rangers doll riding in it, and a little plastic replica of a desktop computer--favorite past times I assumed of the little boy whose picture was on the urn.

-Robert

Don't tell our mothers . . . Motorbiking video

2008-07-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

Our mothers are going to be appalled, I know, but we ride motorbikes a lot here. It's more or less necessary if you're going to keep company with anyone local. They think we're crazy for spending money on taxis when there's always a motorbike to be squeezed on to the back of. And there's always a fuss with finding us spare helmets, since it's a law now, so if one isn't at hand our hosts sometimes suggest that the police won't stop a foreigner without a helmet, but I insist we find enough.

On this trip, each of us riding behind a friend, we're going out to dinner on a Saturday evening with relatively light traffic. This give a little sense of the lawlessness of the roads. But even that is changing rapidly. You'll see that we're stopped a couple times at traffic lights, and those were nonexistent or totally ignored on our previous trips. But in general, there is no such thing as yielding the right of way, and the most operative law is that might makes right.

-Robert

Rocking Out With the Youth of Saigon-Part II

2008-07-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

Turn down the volume on your computer speakers before you play this video, because it rocks hard.

Actually you'll want to turn it down because the audio quality is very poor. The mic on my camera was overwhelmed. But I wanted to show this very enthusiastic crowd enjoying themselves at a nightclub. I take back what I implied in an earlier post about the reserved way kids listen to music. They apparently just hadn't heard their favorite song yet.

This is a cover of Bon Jovi's "It's My Life," and twice now we've seen people go nuts for it. This is in a club called Live Acoustic in District 3. It's a large room set up cocktail lounge style with a fair sized stage and pretty high-end furnishings and decor. Like the other place we went to, there's no cover, but the drinks are about 4 times the usual price. It was super crowded, mostly with people college age.

The band came on about 9 and was still going at 11 when we left with our ears ringing. Their repertoire was the power ballads of Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses, Bryan Adams and some of the lesser metal bands of the 80's. A lot of nostalgic songs about the regrettable transition from carefree adolescence to complicated adult relationships. "The Summer of '69" and that kind of thing. The singer was a dead ringer for Sean Lennon, but did a fair impersonation of Axl Rose.

When the band started, there was an air guitar champion in front already too drunk for his friends to control. He was on his feet and shouting through all the songs. Two private security guards who looked like retired army to me came out to him about four times to warn him. Then they hauled out his less drunk and less obnoxious sidekick, kicking and screaming, as a last warning. Then they finally led him out relatively peacefully. (I put the camera away for that, and you'll notice that there are no police or military in any of my pictures, even though it's not easy to point a camera in Saigon without capturing someone in uniform.)

The heckler had everyone on edge, and when he was finally gone, the crowd really loosened up. This song broke the seal, and after that point the singer stayed away from the mic and let the crowd take lead vocals on the rest of the songs, the lyrics to which they all knew by heart.

-Robert

Censored

2008-07-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

I saw a reference to a report by the U.S.-based NGO Human Rights Watch and went online to find out more. But their website is one that is blocked at the virtual border by the Vietnamese government. I can't read it on this end. If you are some place with more choice in your reading matter, you can see see what Human Rights Watch has to say about Vietnam here: http://www.hrw.org/asia/vietnam.php

The laws of censorship and logic aren't usually fellow travelers, so it shouldn't surprise me that some other sites--presumably equally embarrassing to the Vietnamese government--are accessible on this end:

http://vietnamlist.blogspot.com/
http://www.vietnamhumanrights.net/IndexE.html
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/regions/asia-pacific/viet-nam

-Robert

Update on the mix tape challenge

2008-07-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I posted about trying to come up with a single CD of essential American music to share with my friends here. I failed miserably at getting my choices down to just one disc and ended up with a two disc version.

You'll see that, though nothing in my original criteria said it had to be rock music, I completely neglected anything jazz, swing, tin pan alley or what might be called "standards." Consequently, I ended up with a thread that tries to tie together anything that might be characterized with a jump, backbeat or groove--blues, country, r&b and rock. Gospel and more hip hop ought to be in there, but there are some gaps in the library that is on my computer.

Here is what I ended up with. What would you have included, and what would you cut from this list to make room for your choices?

-Robert

Disc 1

Robert Johnson—Ramblin’ On My Mind
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—So Let’s Rock
Big Mama Thornton—Hound Dog
Elvis Presley—My Baby Left Me
Patsy Cline—Walkin’ After Midnight
Chuck Berry—No Particular Place To Go
Aretha Franklin—Chain of Fools
Otis Redding—These Arms of Mine
Wilson Pickett—634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)
Help Me Rhonda—The Beach Boys
Bob Dylan—Quit Your Lowdown Ways
Simon & Garfunkel—Baby Driver
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas—Heatwave (Love is Like A)
The Velvet Underground—Sweet Jane
Al Green—Tired of Being Alone
The Jackson 5—I Want You Back
Talking Heads—And She Was
Willie Nelson—Georgia On My Mind
Yvonne Elliman—If I Can’t Have You
Joe Jackson—Is She Really Going Out With Him?
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts—Bad Reputation
Prince—Kiss
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band—10^th Avenue Freezeout
Violent Femmes—Blister In the Sun
The Cars—Just What I Needed

Disc 2

R.E.M.—The Replacements
The Replacements—Alex Chilton
The Pixies—Here Comes Your Man
The B-52s—Love Shack
Nirvana—Come As You Are
Weezer—Photograph
The Fugees—Killing Me Softly With His Song
The Old 97s—Jagged
Aimee Mann—That’s Just the Way You Are
Lucinda Williams—Drunken Angel
Wilco—Outtasite (Outta Mind)
Liz Phair—Polyester Bride
Fountains of Wayne—Radiation Vibe
Gillian Welch—Pass You By
Ben Kweller—I Don’t Know Why
Rufus Wainwright—Oh What A World
Gwen Stefani—The Sweet Escape
Beyonce—Get Me Bodied
Neko Case—That Teenage Feeling
Kanye West—All Falls Down
Santogold—I’m A Lady

Hai Lua--seafood restaurant near Cho Ben Thanh

2008-07-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

I'm more interested in grilled seafood here than Ilene is, so Hai Lua isn't her favorite place, and when we met a local here for dinner, she wasn't terribly impressed, so I suppose there are better places for more refined palates than mine. But I like it a lot and get a kick out of it because of the people watching at night. Try and sit up wind, though. It can get smokey near that grill.

Hai Lua is one of about 7 full-service restaurants that each night are constructed on the streets on either side of Ben Thanh market. About five p.m., each day, the streets get cleared of traffic, and trucks pull up and unload an army's worth of tents, tables, chairs and portable kitchens. This one is on the east side, about three back from Le Loi Avenue.

We've also gone quite a few times to the one "next door" called Sao Dong, which is a favorite cheap hang-out among the twentysomething urbanites we've met in English Club. The rice soup and Thai seafood soup there are good, the lemonade and other juices are cheap, and we usually get out of there for about $2.50 each for a big dinner.

Hai Lua is more expensive--about $5 to start with a whole grilled fish, like the red snapper pictured first. It took me a few trips to figure out that you are supposed to order these family style with other dishes in support rather than ordering a single fish for yourself. One time I went there by myself when Ilene was busy and when a giant rainstorm broke out, all the customers got squeezed in under the tent, and I was seated with two young women who were too shy to speak English with me. They kept staring and giggling at the whole fish and enormous plate of steamed morning glory stems in front of me. Complex carbs and low-fat protein--I figured I was doing pretty good, except that it would have fed five people, and the absence of rice was pretty unusual in a Vietnamese meal. Finally a man next to me--an immigrant to California back home to HCMC for a visit--translated for us. He said they were wondering how I had learned to order Vietnamese food . . . a polite way, I think, of saying what they hell did I think I was doing.

While we waited out the storm, I got to talking with my translator. It turns out he owns all the Dominos Pizza shops up and down University Avenue in Berkeley. He says he was a Colonel and helicopter pilot in the South Vietnamese air force and moved to the United States in 1975.

I still haven't figured out how you're supposed to deal with the bones when you order fish like this. I know that sometimes you're on you own, and sometimes the wait staff takes care of it, even for locals. The picture at the bottom shows the fish we got the other night when it first arrived and after the waitress dug two spoons into its back and expertly removed the spine and all the bones in one tug.

-Robert

Misc. updates

2008-07-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

1. These pictures are from a wedding Ilene went to last week--the co-worker of a friend. The friend and her sister arranged to have an ao dai, the outfit she's wearing, made for her. That involved a trip to the silk shop to pick the material and then to the dress-maker's shop to pick the design and take measurements. A very generous gift. Ilene has a sequel to the underwear stories she posted on our last trip, but she's been too busy to write.

2. I went to the Reunification Palace the other day, which was very interesting. Unfortunately, I left my camera at the hotel. The palace is important in the cultural memory here because it's the site of the very last moments of the war, where the government of the South surrendered. For Americans, the iconic image of April 1975 is of helicopters leaving from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, but for Vietnamese, the iconic images are a few blocks away at the Reunification Palace. After the first tank smashes through the front gate, a tank gunner runs across the lawn and up the empty front steps with the flag of the provisional government clutched in his fist and appears on the roof a couple minutes later to raise it in place of the South Vietnamese flag. That was the end of 35 consecutive years of war against the Japanese, French and Americans.

Ilene has told stories in the past about how her visit to the Reunification Palace in 2003 was notable for how unfriendly and creepy the guides were. It's another sign of how fast things are changing here that my visit in 2008 was the opposite. It most closely resembled Western standards of all the museums I've been in here. (There was the occasional dead cockroach trapped inside a display case, but that's par.)

3. Last week we started volunteering at a charity for street children called Thao Dan, teaching English two evenings a week. More on that another time.

4. This city of 8 million is starting to feel a little small. Twice over the weekend we unexpectedly ran into people we knew. Or they spotted us, anyway. We do stand out a little.

5. Ilene has her big Vietnamese test this Friday and is quite preoccupied with that.

6. We bought tickets for a two-day hiking trip in Cat Tien National Park, next Friday and Saturday. This is a relatively new kind of tourism here, so we're looking forward to a really unique experience. We're using the same "adventure tour" company we used for the bike ride in the Mekong Delta last year--Sinhbalo. The cost includes a driver, a guide, meals, a bungalow room and leech repellent.

-Robert

The (not so free) speech contest

2008-07-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

Ilene and I got co-opted the by the state the last two Sunday mornings to be the guest judges at an English speech-making contest at the Culture Labor Palace. A frustrating aspect of it was that the participants had to submit drafts in advance for approval from the director. One consequence of that was a tendency to blandness in the arguments in the first round. (Though no blander than the average U.S. freshman essay, which suffer other cultural pressures.) Also, I found myself censoring my follow up questions for fear of leading people into territory that would embarrass them.

Apart from that, it was fun and very impressive. We had 15 participants the first week and 7 finalists today. It was open to all, and it was mostly girls and young women from 14 y.o.a. to late twenties. In the end, the winner was the youngest, mostly because her pronunciation most resembled the foreign cable television programs she is growing up with.

Despite the free-speech restrictions, the finalists all showed themselves to be very thoughtful analysts of their country--anxious about the future without being fearful of change, with a refreshing sense of personal responsibility. Ilene and I both left with the impression that if these women get an opportunity to use their talents, they're going to kick butt.

The fan favorite was the 15-year-old girl in her school uniform--her nicest outfit, I think--and the best part for me was seeing how proudly her father claimed her afterward when he introduced himself to us. It was obvious that he had rehearsed saying in English, "This is my daughter."

At the end, Ilene and I were expected to give some advice, which was humbling considering that I usually flub speeches in my native tongue. And it was no fun picking only one winner to get the prize--1 million dong, which will cover a semester of college tuition here and will cover a movie and popcorn and soda for four back home.

[Note for other travelers: Connecting with this English conversation group was the smartest thing we did to meet people and learn more about Vietnam. I strongly recommend volunteering to go be the guest native-speaker at one. You'll leave with invitations to all kinds of real-life experiences for as long as you're in town. If you're interested, leave a comment here, and I'll suggest someone you can contact.]

-Robert

Video of meat market

2008-07-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the very poor quality of this video. I hope you bear with it, because it gives a little bit of a sense of one of the most interesting ways to pass the time for an American here, which is to walk through a meat and fish market that operates VERY differently from anything at home. This is late morning when it has quieted down quite a bit. Earlier, you would have trouble navigating through the sides of beef and pig carcasses being hauled on shoulders, wheelbarrows and motorbikes and the buckets full of it being slid around on the path. It was about 95 degrees F when I shot this.

It's shot at Cho Ben Thahn--Ben Thahn Market--which is the largest market in Saigon. The very back end is fruit, flowers, then the meat and fish stalls you see here, and you'll see a quick long shot of the interior where everything else imaginable for home and personal use is sold.

My favorite part of this is about half way through when a fish decides to liberate itself. Can you spot it?

-Robert

Rocking out with the youth of Saigon

2008-07-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

I finally got a chance to experience a little live music and youth culture. I kept putting word out there, and finally some people in the English Club who are interested in rock music arranged a night out.

This video is at a place called Cafe Yoko, well-known here I think, in District 3, near Tao Dan park. It, and all the other places I've heard about with live music at night, are called "coffee shops." There is a bar, but juice and soft drinks are the norm, at about four times the usual price, and the under-aged are welcome.

The band behind the singer is the house band, I think, and stayed up through a set of about 90 minutes while the singers rotated. First up was an older woman who seemed like a den mother to the regulars. She sang jazzy/swing versions of Beatles songs. When the woman in the video came in the door, the first singer made way and left, to another coffee shop, I suspect. This singer focused on ABBA and Alanis Morissette songs, including "Ironic," which . . . . oh, don't get me started. They layers of annoyance with that song go down forever.

After her the main act came on, and he worked through a list of rock classics--All Along the Watchtower, Little Wing, Sultans of Swing, more Beatles--and it got progressively louder and more rocking as it went along. I enjoyed it a lot, and the band was really good. When they were done, a three-piece blues rock combo came on while most people payed their tabs and left.

Most of the people there were in their 20s and a few had just a little more edge to them than anyone else I've met. I saw one tattoo, one piercing, one ponytail, one beard, and lots more cigarette smoking. And as you can see, they sit politely throughout--no dancing and no fists raised in the air. We were out the door and heading home by 10:45.

-Robert

Culinary adventures in Hoi An

2008-07-09T00:15:00.000-07:00

1. I neglected to get pictures of a couple of our best meals in Hoi An, including multiple bowls of the famous local specialty, cao lau. Don't miss it. I'm not enough of a gourmand to describe all these soups are different, but believe me, they are . This one is made with a thicker noodle, much like Japanese soba noodles, and must have something other than rice flour in it. It has a wheatier taste to it. Another special ingredient is a kind of crouton fried in oil. The broth has something else going on in it that distinguishes it from pho and bun bo hue and others, but I don't know what it is. Our friends tell us that that cao lau is available in inferior forms in Saigon, but I suppose it's worth seeking out there if you aren't going to be in Hoi An.

2. The other local specialty is fin fish or sea food grilled in banana leaves. That's a shrimp version pictured below. It's grilled with a salsa of green onions and garlic and slices of some kind of root similar to ginger but milder. The dish is called ca naong la chuoi.

The best part of going to a beach town is eating on the beach:

3. Pictured above is a snack made of mashed up sweet potato, baked in a fire pit in the sand and kept warm up over the grill. It's called banh dau xanh nuong. You pay about 50 cents for four of them, served warm on a paper napkin.

4. These whole steamed squid are a seasonal specialty I assume, because they are pregnant with roe. The eggs solidify into a filling inside the tube of the body. You chomp through to eat the tail end. That reveals the strip of cartilage that was spine, which you then pull out like a ribbon and then either eat the rest piece by piece or suck out the roe first. It's called muc com.

5. Rice soup with fish. We've had a terrific hot rice soup with grated spices on top a few times and had it again the beach. Before, pieces of white fish have been part of the soup. In this case, you order them separate, and add fish from the plate to your bowl of rice soup. That's the whole steamed fish below. It's called chao ca.

6. We also had steamed corn on the cob on the beach, though there's nothing special about the location in this case. On any sidewalk in Saigon in the evenings you'll find women pushing carts with steaming kettles in the base and unhusked corn tucked into a strainer above. At the beach, we bought a plastic bag of them before settling under our umbrellas and snacked on them before ordering the rest of the meal.

Naturally, all of these are served with a variety of fish sauces, sea salt and lime, chili peppers in soy sauce and so on used for dipping.

Spelunking on Marble Mountain near Hoi An

2008-07-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

"Spelunking" is an overly grand term for our exploration on Marble Mountain, but it was a fun vocab word to teach our Vietnamese guests. I think there was only one passage in the whole place where we scrambled on all fours for a couple yards.

The area actually has several mountains, and the one that most people visit is called Thuy Son. It's about halfway in between Da Nang and Hoi An, right on the strip known by Americans 40 years ago as China Beach.

When you approach, Thuy Son resembles West Rock in our home of New Haven, so, except for the heat, it's a similarly strenuous climb--about 20 minutes up on a steep stone staircase if you didn't stop at all the temples and souveneir vendors on the way up.

Scattered around the top are several caves with high ceilings and open-air chimneys. They're all filled with a variety of Buddhist alters and statues, and most have one or two rooms behind the largest room. A flashlight isn't strictly neccessary, since sunlight pours into most rooms, but some of them are dark. Lots of bats call the caves home, of course.

Also at the top is a panoramic view of the beach and villages surrounding, and the headlong development that is going on in the area is very apparent. The sounds of dozens of hammers and saws at once can be heard ringing up from the valley floor.

We arrived about 8:00 a.m. and had a nice time exploring for about 90 minutes without getting hassled too much by touts. When we left at around 10 a.m., it was getting a lot more crowded.

We rode out there on the backs of our friends' motorbikes--about 30 minutes from Hoi An--and it was interesting to see a country highway that way. We had a little bit of an adventure on the way when the motorbike I was on got a flat tire. We pushed it about 50 yards until we came to a roadside repair man. You see these everywhere in Vietnam. In the cities, they set up shop on street corners and lean two tires upright against each other, wrapped in brightly colored paper, to indicate that they are open for business. The equipment is just a tool box, some batches and a bicycle pump, and the fancy ones have a gas-powered compressor to speed up the work. On this country highway, it was more like an actual shop in front of the mechanic's house, and we sat under an awning drinking tea with his grandmother who must have been 90 years old.

-Robert

Cham ruins at My Son and river cruise

2008-07-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

During our visit to Hoi An, we went to see the Cham (or Champa) ruins at My Son. (Not to be confused with another My Son District to the south where the hamlet of My Lai, infamous in American history, is located.)

The Champa were an ancient civilization throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand and Java. Through the early second millenia A.D., as ethnic Vietnamese started to unify the country, the ethnic Champa were pushed out or assimilated. My Son was the intellectual capital for the Champa kingdom.

We got there by taking a budget tour operator--cheap, but not the kind of intimate experience that I wrote about earlier. It's the kind of thing that western tourists only do, and one funny thing is how the two Vietnamese friends with us kept getting mistaken for foreigners. For example, they would initially be charged the foreigner's price for everything, and then there was a lot of backtracking and refunding when the tour operator realized he had compatriots on his hands. (Almost everything here has an actual price and a foreigner's price.)

It was about 50km by coach bus to the entrance and gift shop. You hike about 10 minutes to a rally point to get a jeep a little further up the mountain. Then you hike for about 90 minutes through the forest to about five different sites like the one pictured. Some of them are closed off for archaeologists to work on. There is limited opportunity for actually learning much from the tour guides, so if you are going you'll want to study up on Google, Wikipedia and your guide book before you go.

On the return, we opted for a boat trip. The coach bus dropped off about half of us on a tour boat that cruised on the Bu Thon River back to Hoi An. It was relaxing and cool under the awning.

Along the way, we stopped at a "handicraft village." These are communes set up with government support with a lot of people working on the same industry--silk weaving, candy making, etc. This one was wood carving, on a small island on the Bu Thon River. Frankly, it was pathetic. This one was worst than most, but all of them show the unintended consequences of ghettoizing any kind of land use from other uses. (I'm always an ambassador for mixed-use zoning, and next time I come to Vietnam I'm bringing a stack of Jane Jacobs books to pass out to my friends here.)

What you see at a handicraft village like this is about a dozen shops and studios, a lot of shopworn merchandise, the faded signs of some government investment that happened years ago, and a lot of people resentfully dependent on the small number of unimpressed and hungry tourists who are being force-marched through by the tour operator.

Again, Julie arranged the one authentic experience out of the visit. When the tour guide gave us 15 minutes to look around, everyone else just shrugged and headed back to the boat to wait. Julie took us to a back street and found a little shack that served as the neighborhood refreshment stand. When we showed up back at the boat with plastic baggies filled with shaved ice and coffee, we were the envy of the group.

-Robert

Che!

2008-07-06T03:19:00.000-07:00

This is Che--pronounced JAY-uh. This version of it we enjoyed on the streets of Hoi An is one I hadn't had before and which I much prefer to the version that is often offered as a treat in Saigon. Both have in common tapioca and a kind of sweet bean paste that is used in lots of deserts here. This one has just a little of those ingredients swimming in sugary water and ice cubes. It was very refreshing on a hot afternoon.

Ilene is crazy about the kind we have here in Saigon. It's more like a tapioca pudding--thick like a very sweet yogurt. You usually get it to go in a little plastic bag with a spoon and it's pretty common for friends to show up a grocery sack full of them as a gift.

-Robert

Our "homestay" in Hoi An

2008-07-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

Over and over, the friends we’ve made here have been incredibly generous to us, and our trip to Hoi An last week takes the cake. As always, the money our friends spent treating us was negligible to us but quite a lot to them. What we’ve valued even more is the first-hand, authentic experience of life here they’ve made possible for us.

In this case, our main host was a friend who for discretion’s sake I’m going to call Julie. She grew up in Hoi An before coming to Saigon for college. It’s a small city of about 20,000 people, and she and her parents and brother and sister who still live there (with a lot of nieces and nephews) know everybody. Julie arranged to move us smoothly around town meeting with this and that old family friend and seeing the town like a local.

Her parents and siblings were very welcoming. Unfortunately, the plan for us to stay with them fell through, since when they took our passports down to the commune police station to get permission to have overnight guests, it wasn’t granted. We ended up sleeping at a nearby hotel, but only for a few hours each night since we were always up late and up early to spend time with Julie’s family.

Getting there was a breeze on the Vietnam Airlines flight. (About $100 round trip.) It’s about 70 minutes from Saigon to the Da Nang airport, and we never got much altitude so we had a good view of the countryside. From Da Nang (near where China Beach is) we had a hired driver for the 50 km to Hoi An. The coast highway drive was depressing since the beach along the whole route is walled off for ugly tourist resort/ghettoes that all seem to be about one-quarter finished.

We got to Hoi An about 9 a.m. and spent the first morning walking around the old town center. The town is unique in Vietnam for a couple reasons. First, it was a major port for Japanese traders before Japan cut itself off from the outside world in the 1600s. Second, it was untouched by the bombing of WWII, the war with France and the civil war. There was plenty of Chinese and French influence also, but while we walked around, Ilene and I were struck by how similar it felt to old Japanese towns we had been in. In fact, there are probably more genuinely historic Japanese buildings here than we saw in similar sized towns in Japan, since earthquake, fire and the bombing of WWII has destroyed so many there.

Many of the oldest structures serve as homes for the current residents and as open houses for tourists. You have to buy a ticket to enter the town center, and you get four stubs for admission--a la carte--into those houses, handicraft workshops, temples and traditional Chinese meeting houses, which were kind of all-purpose community centers for the Chinese merchants living here. In addition to hitting our allotment of these, we also stopped at other inns and food stalls to sit down and have tea with Julie’s family friends.

After a nap at Julie’s house, she rounded up borrowed bicycles from her neighbors and we rode out into the countryside to a farming village where tourists are invited to visit.

In the late afternoon we took another bike ride to Cau Dai beach, a little outside of town. We arrived just in time for sunset and a spectacular storm on the horizon. After a swim we “showered” with buckets of water out of a communal cistern (35 cent charge). We returned to our mats on the beach, where most of Julie’s extended family joined us, and we started ordering boiled crab and other seafood from the vendors who run back and forth from the water front to camp kitchens set up back in the palm trees. That was only an early supper. After we biked back to the house, they hit us with another feast of ban xeo, served family-style on the tile floor of the living room.

The next day was mostly taken up with a tour to My Son to see the Champa ruins. More on that another time.

On the second afternoon, we bicycled out to a different beach. Julie says people just started using it since a new road was built a few years ago, and I don’t see it mentioned in my guidebooks. We didn’t see any other foreigners there, so it was the kind of place where everyone stopped and stared at us. At one point, Ilene and Julie were trading tongue twisters (“Sally sells seashells . . .”), and when Ilene tried some in Vietnamese, a group of strangers gathered around for the show. We joined in a soccer game with a couple kids and quickly attracted a couple dozen more. As with other places we’ve been, every child shouted hello to us as we passed. Most of the children there swim naked, and the sea was bath-water warm.

Again, we had a couple more culinary discoveries that I’ll write about later, and again a lot of Julie’s family showed up, including her 80-year-old father who took a swim before dinner. (Her mother was at home working on yet another giant dinner for us.) Three waiters committed to our group hustled out food like a fire brigade. We were about seven adults and seven children grazing on various fresh seafood dishes, iced tea, ice coffee and beer, and at the end of the party I saw Julie’s sister pay the equivalent of $12. That’s how much Ilene and I would pay to rent two beach chairs in Delaware.

The next morning was mostly taken up with a trip to Marble Mountain. (More on that later.) Then, with our departure imminent, Julie’s sister took us on a very hasty trip to buy souvenirs using the friend-and-family discount at places where she knew the shopkeepers. When we rode back to the house on the motorbikes, balancing our cargo like natives, the driver was waiting for us with the trunk open, and Julie’s parents were at the curb fretting about us missing the plane. We hit the pavement in stride, tossed our souvenirs in the trunk—the same with our waiting luggage, packed with all the laundry that Julie’s mother had done for us—and, humbled by how far we were from being able to express our gratitude, we jumped in the car for a white-knuckle ride back to the Da Nang airport.

-Robert

Pirate economics, au courant

2008-07-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

One very common sight that I normally don't notice anymore are street-level art studios where shifts of painters crank out stacks of copies of famous western art--the Mona Lisa, all the impressionists, Kandinsky, etc. These two examples made me stop and smile, though. The Bansky copy suggests multiple levels, since a defining quality of his work is how temporary it is.

And as far as I know, the new Batman movie isn't out yet. If it was, I would see vendors selling pirate DVD copies outside my hotel. But the publicity photo of Heath Ledger taken during production and that has since been attached to all his obits has already become iconic enough that it's being copied here in oil on canvas.

Pirating creative works and clothing designs is so common here it's almost impossible to buy something that isn't pirated. I've never seen a legitimate CD store, but stores selling illegal copies for about 60 cents each are everywhere. If you wanted to buy a real La Coste shirt, Levis jeans, Adidas shoes or North Face backpack, you couldn't find it, but trashy copies are available on every corner.

Similar story for books. What I notice there is how the vendors selling cheap photocopies of The Quiet American or In Retrospect by Robert McNamara is that it's the same limited selection from each vendor, that it's the same selection as when I was here a year ago and that there's no overlap with the government-run bookstore. For example, Thomas Friedman's books are popular at Fahasa but are not sold in pirated copies on the street. The CD and DVD selections, in contrast, stay fresh. Given that, and how none of the books are really "black market" in the sense of being contraband, I get the impression that the pirating comes with a lot of official approval.

-Robert

Video of Marble Mountain

2008-07-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

We're back from Hoi An and busy making camp in our hotel room again. We have a lot of amazing stories to tell when we catch our breath. In the meantime, enjoy this short video clip of Marble Mountain--a site about 30 km from Hoi An with several caves at the top and several temples, including this one about half way up. It's not an especially intersesting temple--we've been in dozens--but the location is amazing, as you'll see. And I wanted to give a sense of the vibe when you stop by a temple.

This was taken with the very rudimentary video function on my point-and-shoot camera. Apologies for the quality of it.

-Robert

Tuan's birthday party

2008-07-03T23:40:00.000-07:00

Our friend (and Ilene's Vietnamese teacher and colleague in teaching English classes) had his 27th birthday party last weekend. His sisters cooked a feast for him so he could invite all his friends. (Mostly cute girls.) We got him the Oxford Idioms Dictionary.

As usual, I mistakenly assumed the food on the table was all their was and filled up before even half the meal had appeared. The highlight was a Thai style tomato and chili pepper stew with seafood. Plus, it cleared my sinuses. For desert we had a "freshbought" cake that tasted like it could have come from Stop & Shop.

After lunch we went around the corner to the neighborhood karaoke parlor for a couple hours. I just missed getting a perfect score and a prize singing "Eight Days a Week." If I knew more Air Supply songs I'd be able to participate more.

-Robert

Departing for Hoi An

2008-07-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

Today we are departing by plane for short trip to Hoi An, the ancient trading port in the central coast region, and My Son, where the ruins of the ancient Cham civilization still stand. Here are the wikipedia entries where you can learn more about them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_An
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Son

We're returning July 4.

-Robert

Much Luck, Much Children

2008-06-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

The most memorable part of this trip to Vietnam has been my return by train from Hanoi to Saigon. It was one of those chaotic, immersive, roll-like-the-locals-roll experiences that is the goal of travel for many people. I wouldn’t trade it away, but I hope I don’t have to do it again soon.

At my 1 p.m. departure from Hanoi, I was the only person in my cabin, and I started to think that was preferable. On the way up, because absolutely no one else spoke English and my cabin mates were kind of cold fish, it was a little awkward the whole time. I wanted to experience life in Vietnam, but I also thought 30 hours to myself to watch the scenery and read my ragged copy of Jane Eyre would be fine, too. Reader, I did not have the cabin to myself.

After a few local stops, I got my first cabin mate. She sat in the opposite bunk and didn’t say a word and didn’t look up enough for me even to nod hello. I thought, “Here we go again.” It was really hot, and she was obviously distressed from getting her luggage on, burrowing in her bag for tissues to mop her brow. I kept sitting there grinning at her, waiting for her to look up so I could say, “Xin chow!”

Then, when the porter came by to tell me something about my dinner order, she popped out with a translation in excellent English. She said she hadn’t said hello before because she was embarrassed by how hot she was. We got to talking and became friends, and I depended on her for conversation and translating the rest of the way. She was super nice. She goes by Suzie with her English-speaking friends.

Suzie grew up on a lychee farm in a province near Hanoi and had gone to college in Saigon and is still living there, studying banking and working for an import/export firm. She was returning from a visit home, weighed down with fresh-picked fruit from the family farm, a pile of which she promptly made a present of to me. (Delicious!)

One funny thing about Suzie is how preoccupied she was with her cell phone. At one point it stopped working for some reason, and she could not let it go. She would put it away in her bag and then every five minutes get it out again and examine all the buttons and say, “Oh, I’m very worried about my phone.” Like it had a high fever or something. She eventually got it working and she had a massive collection of photos, home videos, and pop tunes stored on it that she used to entertain the other passengers.

Suzie had ridden 50 kilometers that morning on the back of her uncle’s motorbike with all her luggage to the train station and waited four hours for a train and had gotten on this one without a ticket. The porter (who I suspect was running some kind of side business selling empty seats and SRO rides) had sold her a ticket for a coach seat and told her to rest on an empty berth in my cabin until the other ticket holders got on.

Next, the passengers in the opposite bottom bunk arrived—a mother and her five-year-old daughter. Suzie sat with me to pass the time, and we got to know the others. I was carrying a package of Pokeman cards to offer as a gift, and I got a big kick out of it when the girl replied politely, “Xin com on, bac”—Thank you, uncle—and she spent several hours playing with those.

A boy in the cabin next door spotted the cards eventually and asked for some and kept trying to get in my backpack to find more. He was a bully and a show-off who wasn’t much fun to be around, but he attached himself to me for some reason and I couldn’t shake him. He had a horrible rash on his leg that made me desperate to keep him out of my bunk without being rude, but no luck. I eventually distributed out to him and several others all of the Werther’s butterscotch candies I had with me, and kids were carrying fistfuls of them around the train the rest of the day. I found several of them stuck to my luggage on the floor at the end of the trip, spit out down there whenever a meal time came.

Finally, the occupants of the two top bunks showed up—two parents with four kids under seven. When they appeard in the doorway, Suzie said brightly, “Much luck, much children,” which I took to be a translation of an ironic expression about the coincidence of good fortune and large families. Judging by the sounds in the bunk above me during most of the trip of the mother retching into a bucket, I suspect more luck was on the way.

So that made nine ticketed passengers in the four beds in our cabin, plus Suzie, plus frequent visits from the Pied Piper next door and his growing parade of followers. Eventually, night set in, parents and children piled together family-bed style, the lights were dimmed. Suzie couldn’t find the porter who sold her the coach ticket, and she didn’t show any signs of leaving. She didn’t seem to see anything immodest in it, so I took my cue from the rest of the passengers and we stretched out in my bunk head to toe, quite cramped, and I slept fitfully, trying to keep from falling off the edge.

Starting with dawn the next day, our cabin steadily degraded into a soup of spit out fruit pits, spilled milk and dropped rice grains. The girl across from me at one point threw up in her mother’s lap and bounced back fast, eating everything in sight after that. Later, while her mother napped, she amused herself by taking sips of water and spitting them on the floor. At one point, my bag of groceries became fatally contaminated, and I abandoned it to the elements and hauled the rest of my luggage up into the bunk with me. Above us, the two parents, one of them sick, juggled their three youngest back and forth across the aisle, and when one parent had to go to the bathroom, the oldest sister, who never stopped smiling the whole trip and never said a word, held on to a couple of her siblings to make sure they didn’t fall off.

We pulled into Saigon Station at 9 p.m., only 10 minutes late, thank goodness, and I asked Suzie to translate while I made a big speech about how glad I was to meet them all and good luck and so long. I about broke my back helping Suzie haul all her fruit out to the taxi queue, and after my own short taxi ride, I was never so glad to see the business-class hotel that had seemed so cramped when we first arrived in Saigon.

In all seriousness, there is something special here about the intimacy and companionship between parents and children, which Ilene and I have noticed before. It was lovely to see it up close during the train ride—how comfortable everyone is in their skin, how little scolding the children need, how infrequently they get crabby or act out or demand amusement. There is much bad luck here for some children--begging on every street, horrible birth defects, primitive supports for handicapped children, limited opportunities for all the recreational and social activities we assume are necessary for healthy development. But I hope I'm not romanticizing that poverty when I say there are other gifts most families have here that we lack. It’s something I've been trying to put my finger on, and I'll continue trying to describe as I give it some more thought.

-Robert