The (not so free) speech contest

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

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

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

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

"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

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!

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