Chua Giac Lam--Giac Lam Pagoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our "homestay" in Hoi An

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

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

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

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

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

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