On the road again

I'm travelling again, heading north with my friend Otto from Prescott. We're now in Hoi An, an ancient city that's now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of it's beauty and traditional architecture. Otto arrived in Saigon about one week ago today, Thursday, and Otto, Hoa, and I left for Nha Trang the next afternoon. We had a great time in Nha Trang, a beautiful beach town. We rented scooters one day and travelled around the area, first stopping at the Cham towers right in town. Champa was an ancient kingdom of Central Vietnam that was conquered by the Vietnamese who came from the north during the 1500 and 1600's, I think. It was a Hindu civilization heavily influenced by India (that's redundant I suppose), similar to the Angkor Kingdom of Cambodia. The Cham people are still around, and I talked to a Cham family at the towers for a while. The adults and the children still speak their own language, as well Vietnamese, like many of Vietnam's ethnic minorities, and this family, at least, can also write Cham and wrote a few words -- "tower," "eat," and something else -- for me in Cham in my travel guide. After leaving the Cham towers, we headed up the coast, visiting a pagoda with spectacular ocean views, then on to a series of waterfalls in a small forest preserve north of Nha Trang. It was fun. We did some hiking to get to the falls, and Otto and I swam in the pool below one of the falls.

Another day we paid $9 each for a boat trip to go snorkelling near one of the islands. It was a great trip. Visibility in the water was good, and we saw a lot of interesting coral and fish species.

On our last day in Nha Trang, we rented bikes in the morning and rode to the pagoda with the big Buddha on top of a hill, then went to the beach. At the beach we paid a woman to grill some some giant prawns for us, which were delicious. All three of us also got massages on the beach, which was fun. I enjoyed talking to the women, as I often do, about Otto, how he's single, handsome, and strong and healthy at 61. Maybe he'll take a home a wife.

On Tuesday, we left Nha Trang. Hoa had to return to Saigon to work, but Otto and I took a bus to Hoi An. We're having fun here. It really is a beautiful place. I'll try to get some photos posted soon. Hoi An is know for its tailors, so I agreed to have a linen shirt made for me for about $7. I'll pick it up this afternoon.

Otto and I took a ferry to one of the islands this morning. It was an interesting place, and it was nice to be away from the tourist areas for a while. The island was very beautiful, and they grow a number of different crops, including corn, rice, and fruit. We watched a kingfisher diving for fish in one of the ponds, men plowing fields using water buffalo, and women harvesting rice by hand. Last night, we wanted to go for a boat ride, but didn't want to take one of the tourist motor boats, so we found a woman, with her daughter and mother, paddling one of the traditional single-oared wooden boats. The women are amazing the way they oar these boats. The grandmother was old and was chewing betel the whole time, and had the black-stained teeth that is the result of betel-chewing. I think I need to try it myself. We were out just before sunset and took some photos. I hope some of them are good.

Anyway, it's been fun, and I'm sure I forgetting a lot of things that I meant to include. I should do this more often so I don't forget so much. Tonight is the full moon, which is the time here in Hoi An for some special celebration -- we'll find out tonight what it's all about.

Let's try this again

OK it's been a while I know. For a while there it seemed that nothing terribly new and exciting was happening, so we weren't posting new blogs. Of course, we're always learning new things here, and we should have been posting all along. I'll try to post something once a week from now on -- probably over the weekends.

Anyway, there have been some significant changes here. Hoa quit teaching at Clever Learn, effective last week. She'll be working for University of Oxford Press, which seems to be the biggest player in the teaching English market (which is big here), this summer, travelling around southern Vietnam, teaching Vietnamese teachers of English how to use the UOP materials and giving them some new ideas, which are greatly needed, about teaching.

And I'm no longer working at the Vietnamese law firm. They decided having me work part-time wasn't working out well for them. They said they want me to return full-time after spending a few more months studying Vietnamese. I'm not ruling that out yet, assuming they're serious about wanting me to return, but I'm certainly not sure that being an associate in a law firm is what I want to do here. The biggest disadvantage would be the hours: officially, 8:30 am - 7 pm weekdays, plus a couple of half Saturdays per month; unofficially, I'm not exactly sure, but I know one lawyer there who was regularly pulling all-nighters. I'm not quite sure what kind of part-time job I want in the meantime. Teaching English may be a good choice, at least for now. The money's not bad, and I'd still have plenty of time to study Vietnamese.

Our friend Otto, from Prescott, is arriving here in two days. We're really looking forward to travelling with him. And we just found at that Lisa and David, also from Prescott, are coming in July. We're very happy that friends are coming to visit; we really didn't think we knew anyone with the time, money, and interest to come here. I hope Otto, Lisa, and David all have a good time here and like Vietnamese food.

Hoa's in Buon Ma Thuot (I can never remember how to spell it, probably because it has another name, something like Ban Me Thuot). I just say it fast, with the right tones, and people understand me even though I always forget the exact spelling and pronunciation. I didn't go, although I've been wishing I had. It's a long, 4-day weekend -- for Independance Day and May Day I believe. I didn't go mainly because I wasn't up for travelling by "xe do," the inter-city buses very rarely used by us (soft) foreign travellers. Also, I wanted to get a start on looking for a job, before leaving to travel with Otto. But I really haven't done much yet. (Don't tell Hoa.)

What have we been doing for fun lately? Not much. Just going to the cafes, which are very popular here, studying, and reading. I've been playing basketball again for the past three weeks or so, after suffering two injuries, a slightly sprained ankle and a pulled hamstring, each of which kept me off the court for about 3 or 4 weeks. It's really been too humid and hot for basketball -- maybe 35-36 C, whatever that is -- but I've been playing anyway, getting dehydrated, and then having a bad headache for the rest of the day just about everytime I've played lately. It is cooling off a little because the rainy season seems to have set in early -- it doesn't usually begin here in HCMC until June.

Hoa fired her tennis coach for being a jerk (he was starting to scream at her when she made mistakes) about a month ago, and she hasn't started playing again. Neither have I, but we both should.

We've both been reading some really good books. I just finished Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, which was one of the best novels I've read in a very long time. It's set in a Jewish Community in New Jersey in an America where Charles Lindberg has been elected President on an America First, stay out of the European war, platform. Interesting, and scary.

Hoa and I both read The Tortilla Curtain (the author's name is T. Con-something or another Boyle). Anyway, it was also a great novel, about a rich part-time natural history writer, part-time stay-at-home dad, who lives with his real estate agent wife in a wealthy new foothills development in So Cal that is being "invaded" by the native animal species and Mexicans. The critics compared it to Tom Wolfe and Steinbeck: but it's not full of dead-on dialogue like both, funny like Wolfe, or as weighty as Steinbeck, but still interesting and relevant.

And I've now finished three books about Vietnamese history, but I'm getting hungry and want to go to lunch, so here's the short version of my conclusions on modern Vietnamese history: it was all, well mostly, or at least largely, France's fault. Just remember, you're not paying to read this.