Guest Blogger, Lisa; Part II

The place I resonnated most with was Hoi An, a beautiful city near the beach. Parts of the town were filled with pagoda-style Chinese Buddist temples, which Hoa and I visited on our last morning there. Hoi An was a busy trade center in the last century, and conducted lots of business with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. Subsequently, the existing architecture is informed by many cultural influences. The people we met were also exceptionally open and warm. Hoa took us to a wonderful gallery space, where we met a painter who is making a living selling his art. Again, I was really attracted to the ink drawings on rice paper. The artist invited me to do a couple of paintings with him the next day, which I gladly took him up on. He was such a sweet man. A self-taught artist, he painted scenes from Hoi An, cats, and women dressed in the traditional Ao Dai (long tunics with matching silk pants typically tailored to fit the wearer.) I'd sure love to apprentice with this artist, as well as the tailors we met where Hoa and I had some clothes made!!!! In the 2 days we stayed in Hoi An, I went to Tan Toan the Tailor no fewer than 6 times!!!! Hoa and I designed a couple of summer tops for her, a curdory orange and magenta (deep pinkish-purple) skirt with a sewn flower, for me. I'd like to say it stopped there, but nooooooo-- I also had a pair of cropped kelly green spring pants made, a turquoise silk Chinese-inspired top, and lastly, in fewer than 3 hours, a periwinkle (light blue-violet) Ao Dai made, which we picked up at 9:30 pm, the night before we left (SMILE!). Also while in Hoa An, we met Chloe,a fantastic woman from France who was an engineer in Mali working with Mailian folks to keep their water clean. Her husband works with Doctors without Borders, and her 7-year old twin sons are fluent in an African language, French and English. They attend the local school in the afternoons, and play with friends outdoors till dinner time. Chloe says, it is a challenge for one of the sons to wear shoes when they are visiting relatives in France. Finally, we went on a boat tour in Hoi An to some smaller islands, one of which specialized in carpentry, wood carving, and boat construction. Beautiful furniture and boxes shaped in the form of waves, and slim wooden boats with eyes on each side!

From Hoi An, we spent one day in Da Nang. Our "tour guide", in his fifties, married late in life to a woman who's been teaching for 30 years. They have two young children who keep him busy. Due to the fact that he had worked for a U.S. doctor during the War, he was limited in terms of current employment opportunities. This was also the case with our tour guide in Hoi An, and many of the cyclo drivers, who take tourists around in makeshift bicyles and motor bikes. Both served time in re-education camps and are blacklisted from any of the more secure government jobs. Da Nang was unusually spotless and corporate. Apparently, there is strict legislation about littering. We went to 2 musuems-- the Ho Chi Min museum which spoke to the wars against the U.S. and the French, and a Cham museum that had amazing stone sculptures of lion-dogs, elephants, and Hindu-inspired goddesses.

We concluded our stay with a delicious late sushi dinner at a mall in Ho Chi Min City with Tom and Hoa! I ate till my belly ached, 'cause sushi is a little spendy here, and David and I can only afford it annually.

In terms of general impressions, I was really struck by the aesthetics of food, clothes, architecture and art (both indigenous Champa sculptures, as well as more contemporary ink drawings). These art forms seemed to have a nice balance of the contemporary being informed by the traditional. Secondly, the freshness and variety of the food. We ate no processed foods period. The fruits were stunningly beautiful-- the colors and textures, not to mention the flavors, were works of art in and of themselves! Third, I was struck with "what communism looks like", and how it manifests itself differently in various countries and cultures. For instance, while Vietanam is deemed a communist country, there is a ton of private enterprise, particularly in the south. Further, medicine and education are not socialized there, and Buddist temples, suggesting obviously freedom of religion, are prominent in every town we stayed (but I guess Russia has always had tons of orthodox churches too). Fourth, I was impressed with the stories of the folks that served time in re-education camps-- their resilience, resourcefulness, and capacity to to remain open and not bitter, was astounding! Our favorite English saying in Vietnam was "same, same, but different", to me it suggested a larger concept of this not being so fixed in time and space-- prices of things, time according to the clock on the wall, etc. I personally found it liberating, 'cause I knew I wasn't in control (HA!)

Tom and Hoa are GREAT guides, mentors and teachers!!!! Our experience in Vietnam was very enriched through their guidance. thank you soo much Hoa and Tom for making our summer, and giving us memories that will stay with us for a lifetime!

Lisa

Starting a Business / Guest Blogger, Lisa Kaiser

We're starting a business! When we were thinking about coming to Vietnam, someone, I'm not sure who, maybe Otto from Prescott, it certainly sounds like something he would say, told us just to tell people we were going to Vietnam and it would happen. He was right.

So: we're starting a business. We've been talking about it for a while; well, Hoa, especially, has been talking about it for a while. We're going to start a business teaching English for the workplace. Probably most of the classes will be held at the offices of the companies that hire us. So we will not need classrooms of our own, and we should be able to keep overhead low. We decided that working for other people teaching English was never going to make us much money and would become a little boring pretty quickly. So, here in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, we have decided to start profitting from the labor of others by getting contracts with the businesses and hiring other teachers to do at least some of the teaching. We may begin by focusing on hotels and restaurants; Hoa has already been meeting with people at one of the biggest and most succesful coffee house chains in Vietnam.

My role: being the white face of the business, which is important in Vietnam, especially for English training. I am perfectly capable of fulfilling this role, although I really should buy some nicer clothes to make people think I'm a responsible, professional adult. I'm also the "big picture" and "idea" guy. I have already come up with, within seconds of being asked by Hoa, a terrific name for the business. (This will have to remain a secret until we have our business license.)

Hoa's role: everything else, including all the real work. I'm just kidding of course. But developing curricula is obviously something she is much better qualified and better able to do than I and is something that needs to be done immediately. So this will be one of her priorities.

We welcome advice from all of you. Neither of us has ever started a business before. But we really think this should be a relatively easy, low start-up cost business to get into. And it could be pretty lucrative. That fact that Hoa is considered "overseas Vietnamese" (and therefore subject to some preferential treatment over other foreigners by the government), that I am more obviously a native speaker of English, and that we both speak some Vietnamese (Hoa quite a bit) all should help us get this going.

I'm still enjoying teaching at the university. We've really had some interesting discussions about environmental ethics (and ethics in general) and utilitarianism and animal rights, among other things. Today we talked in one of the sections about "lifestyle choices" to protect the environment, which is discussed in the book. The idea, for example, that someone who can afford a car or motorcycle might choose to ride a bike out of concern for the environment was entirely foreign to them. Right now, the vast majority of Vietnamese are understandably concerned with improving their material standard of living, but soon many will reach a standard of living at which they may begin to think more seriously about improving their quality of life. Actually I was suprised to hear that most of my students think that the average resident of HCMC has adequate housing that satisfies their "needs" and that increasing the standard of housing would be fulfilling a "want." I suspect they may be overestimating the standard of living of the "average" person and may be assuming that they are average when really their standard of living is far above average. Anyway, it's certainly interesting for me to be talking to students in the developing world about issues like this. We've also discussed recently Utilitarian arguments for considering the "non-human" great apes (as the animal rights people describe them, in a scientifically accurate way it seems to me) -- chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans -- to have the rights to life and liberty and for the middle-class and wealthier people in the developed world to donate substantial portions of their incomes to charities providing the necessities to the poorest people of the developing world. (If you're curious there are articles by Peter Singer about these topics at www.project-syndicate.org) I'm surprised that most of the students seem to agree with ideas like these, or at least with ideas such as animal rights. I expected that people in the developing world would think it's a waste of time to be concerned about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world.

I also usually enjoy teaching at the language center, but, for some reason, I don't really look forward to it the way I look forward to teaching the class at the university. I probably won't continue there too much longer, but we're pretty darn cash-poor right now so I should continue for a while I suppose. Although I won't be able to continue there beyond about a month and a half anyway, because I only have three months from when I began there to get a TESL certificate of some kind, which I'm not going to do. I originally told the people at my language center I couldn't work beyond mid-July (because of the university position), so they shouldn't be surprised. In the fall I probably will get more hours at the university.

That's enough for now.

Now, here's our guest blogger, Lisa Kaiser who, with her husband David, recently visted us here in Vietnam:

"Reflections on trip to Vietnam David and Lisa Kaiser took from 7/14-7/22

Hoa's parents and several folks in Prescott have asked me to urge Hoa and Tom to update their articulate and exciting BLOG. Inquiring minds wanna know what's the "haps" in Vietnam. With that in mind, I promised Hoa I would compose an entry on my reflections of a trip David and I took last week to see Hoa and Tom in Vietnam. Here we go . . . . . . . . . . . .

We arrived in steamy Ho Chi Min City late Friday night, July 14th (late as in late at night, and our flight was also late-- it must have been around 10:45 pm). Tom picked us up and took us to a guest house within hundreds of yards to his and Hoa's new apartment, where they had only lived a week or so. The couple who owned the home Ms. Loan and Mr. Thang Loi, were extremely gracious and kind. Mr. Thang Loi spoke 5 languages, including some English (thank goodness!), and at 15 yrs of age fought in the Cambodian Revolution. He had 4 children, two of whom had recently lived, studied, and worked abroad, but were home for the summer.

While Hoa was gone on business-- presentating and training teachers on English instruction in the classroom, Tom met us in the afternoons between his teaching gigs and we ate well at side street mom and pop places and a restaurant near the tourist district. Man-- the blends of lemongrass, cilantro, beef and noodles still make my mouth water. David asked that I get a Vietnamese cook book immediately--'cause he's already missing the food. This will come as a surprise to Hoa, who took offense at David's ordering a steak and fries in Da Nang, our second to last day in Vietmam (SMILE!)

Tom also took us to some contemporary gallery spaces. One in particular exhitited a retrospective of this amazing contemporary Vietnamese painter, draftsman, pastel artist-- who created eloquent figure studies w/ Sumi-e ink on rice paper, and equally beautiful seascapes in watercolor and pastel-- really reflective!

It is worth noting that Tom is darn proficient in Vietnamese! His intonations sounded "dead on" to me, and more importantly, folks seem to understand him just fine. He claims however that he speaks better than he comprehends others when they speak.

Juggling two part-time jobs~ teaching youth English, and an environmental ethics class with adults, Tom has his hands full but is seemingly energized by the students, content, and challenge of career change. Hopefully, Tom and Hoa's respective new jobs and schedules will allow them to do some more traveling in Vietnam, it is quite a LOOOOOONG country, and so much to see in the way of diverse terrain, architecture, people/cultures, etc. as we found in the short time we were there.

The evening before we took off to hither and hon to explore other parts of southern and central Vietnam, Hoa and Tom took us out to this smokin' (literally and figuratively) restaurant, that specialized in goat. One of Hoa's cousins and another cousin's girlfriend, Mariko-san from Japan, and Tracy and Maggie from China all came and we shared a nice big table together. The food was of course, to die for! Afterward, we went to a sophisticated and saavy cafe for tea and coffee, and said good-bye to Tom for the remainder of the week. The next day, Our close friend and expert tour-guide Hoa took us to many a town and village in southern/central Vietman requiring-- motorbikes, boats, trains, buses, and even an airplane ride back from Da Nang to Ho Chi Min City on our last day. I tell ya, Hoa's skills in managing multiple tasks, destinations and people have only become more refined since her arrival to Vietnam.

Our first excursion out of Ho Chi Min City entailed a 6-hour bus ride to Nha Trang, in which David sat several rows behind Hoa and I. While Hoa slept, I watched a pretty surreal and fairly bizarre film which I'll affectionately refer to as Mechanical Girl. While I could NOT understand the dialogue as subtitled text was in Chinese characters, and verbal sound was dubbed in Vietnamese, the springs that would pop out of mechanical girl's hands prior to putting her boyfriend in the dryer were pretty innovative (SMILE!). Now whenever David does something I don't like, I threaten to "turn Mechanical Girl on him".

Arriving at Nha Trang close to midnight, we strolled on the beach, and were invited to join a circle of 20 year old college students/waiters and waitresses in the sand for a mini party. We all shared a "wine" made of liquor and punch from a Heinneken (SP?) bucket with several straws. These young men and women were soooooo sweet. They shared some fruits and dried squid with us, inquired about our stay, and where we were from. We sang a little, and prior to our leaving, I was donned with a grapefruit skin hat-- no joke, the grapefruits are sooooooo huge there, the peeled skin was even large enough to fit my bobble head!!!! The following day, we rented motorcylcles, drove out to some amazing cascades, Buddist temples, and then went to and art museum that featured both ancient works of the Champa people, a group of people who live in Vietnam of Malaysian and Chinese ancestory, as well as a contemporary sculptor whose work is influenced by the Champa. The Terra-Cotta fired pieces of women, children and family were really fun, engaging, friendly, and had incredible form! The prices were extremely low by our standards, and Hoa had her eye on a couple, just in case she and Tom move into a bigger place. That evening we ate at a Turkish restaurant, with sexy waterpipes that you can smoke tobacco from. The Turkish owner spoke of commonalities between Turkey and Vietnam in terms of celebrations, and histories of rebellion and self-defense for autonomy from outside powers. Hoa, of course interpreted a great deal for us, and got us to many a destination safely. We also travelled on a small tour boat with folks from Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia and Canada. The 20-something tour guide referred to Hoa as his little sister. Several folks thought David and I were Hoa's parents, probably 'cause we look so much alike (psyche! I wish). This small electric blue wooden boat, not only had charm, but had a rock band too. The tour guide was the lead singer and knew songs in Vietnamese, Spanish and English, and the cooks and captain played electric guitar and drums made out of large plastic containers tied together with rope. The bench seats we were sitting on were folded down flat for the stage! I loved it- it was my favorite part of the boat ride! If that wasn't enough, the boat stopped at beaches, aquariums, etc. David's favorite part about Nha Trang was meeting an internationally renowned photographer whose work was breathtaking!!!! Thank goodness for Hoa, who engaged the photographer in conversation for a good half hour. This man was not only a talented artist, but a GREAT storyteller, and extremely personable! David bought a print of his entitled "Raining", and yes, we will no doubt have to take down one of my paintings to hang his print up (SMILE!)"

LISA KAISER

TO BE CONTINUED


PS

To: Hoa's Mom, Me Huong:
From: Tom

Co Lisa da viet den de nuong. Co de nuong o "SF Bay Area" khong? Khi chung con di ve my, se rat nho di an de nuong vi di an de nuong vui lam, ngon lam. Hien nay tuan nao chung con cung di an de nuong. Con xin loi chua biet dung "Viet Key" de viet bang tieng viet dung.

Teaching in HCMC

I see that it's been over two months since I've posted anything here, and I seem to recall saying last time that I would try to do weekly postings. Well, I'm going to try again.

Things have been interesting here in the city. I started teaching English about a month and a half ago at one of the language centers. I have six different classes, and the students range from around 4 (I've never asked how old some of the kids are in the class with the youngest kids, but a few of them can't possibly be older) to 17 years old. The classes with the younger kids are fun, but very tiring. They can't really do much on their own, so I have to be constantly teaching. Teaching Vietnamese children English, as you probably would expect, is rather different from providing legal advice to the mentally-ill, the drug-addicted, and, sometimes, the simply morally-deficient people who find themselves in the criminal justice system. But who knows, maybe I'll will incorporate the use of bear-children puppets into the practice of law if I return to it.

Teaching English can be fun, but I prefer teaching at the university. Although teaching at the university certainly involves teaching English as well. I'm teaching in an American university program that uses the facilities of one the Vietnamese universities and offers students American university diplomas. Strangely, the university is North Central University, located in Prescott, Arizona, where we had been living before we went to Vietnam. NCU in the US is really an online for-profit university, much like the University of Phoenix. The course I'm teaching now is "Environmental Issues." I was hoping we would use a book of readings, perhaps some pro and con articles about the threat of various environmental problems and possible solutions. But instead a book had already been selected that is really a textbook on environmental politics in the West, probably intended for upper-division political science courses. (It was probably chosen only because it's the only textbook on the environment in English that was available here.) The chapter titles are things like: "environmental philosophy," "green political thought," "green parties," "policy instruments and implementation," etc. I think the average US university student would find it very difficult to understand; for my students it must be completely incomprehensible. I've selected a few of the chapters to use, but will have to come up with other materials to use in discussing the issues we should discuss like climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, etc.

Last week I did some basic critical thinking stuff with my classes and also talked about what we mean by environmental issues. I also thought that if we were supposed to cover advanced topics about Western politics, we really needed a short introduction to the basics of Western politics, so I talked about the political spectrum and the political parties of the US. The students seemed to enjoy this and really didn't know much about the parties and their positions. I tried to avoid anything that could offend the government here, although I did mention that in the west the spectrum is often described as being horseshoe-shaped with the extreme left (which I described as "Soviet-style communism") and the extreme right (fascism) coming close together in some ways. But I didn't (and won't here) say much more than that.

This week, at least in one section, we began the chapter on environmental philosophy, a subject that I've had some interest in over the last several years. Again, it seemed that before beginning to discuss environmental ethics, we needed to talk a little bit about ethics in general. Even in the section with the more fluent English, I felt I need to take some time just to make sure they knew what I mean by "ethics." But I suppose even in an introductory philosophy course in an English-speaking country, you'd begin this way. I asked them about the sources of traditional Vietnamese ethics and I didn't get much of a response. But when I mentioned Buddhism and Confuscianism, they knew what I was talking about, and could give examples. One of the students mentioned the many Vietnamese sayings about ethics. I asked them for an example, and they agreed an important one is "uong nuoc nho nguon," "drink water, remember the source." (I understood the "drink water, remember . . ., but didn't yet know "nguon," "source" The topic for the day being environmental ethics, I was happy and thought they had given me a saying about protecting watersheds, but really, I learned from the students, it's about being grateful to the people who provide you with things like food and water.

I was becoming concerned that the students, all business majors, would find topics like this boring and a waste of time, but we actually had a pretty good discussion, which is unusual for a couple of reasons: 1) class discussion is not an important part of Vietnamese education (regurgitating on the test what the lecturer has said in class seems to be the emphasis) and 2) for most of them, their English is not at a high enough level that they feel very comfortable talking about things like this in English. We were able to find some connections between pretty abstract western philosophical terms, like ecocentrism, and strains of Vietnamese culture, like Buddhism. For example, when discussing whether non-human species have intrinsic value (the position of the ecocentrists), one of the students pointed out that Buddhists generally believe non-human animal species have souls and therefore have intrinsic value.

Well, I've gone on too long already about class, but I have to mention that I had the opportunity (for a reason that would take too long to explain, but I will say it had to do with alleged biblical sources of anthropocentrism mentioned in the textbook) to tell the story of Noah's Ark to Vietnamese university students, a majority of whom were hearing it for the first time.

I'm home alone. Hoa's travelling with our friends Lisa and David who are here visiting from Prescott. They're in Hoi An right now, which I'm sure Lisa, especially, must really like, given all the traditional arts and crafts that are practiced there. I couldn't go because I had to work. They'll get back tomorrow night (Friday) and then fly home Saturday. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend a lot of time with them, because I'm working and they're only here for about 9 days. But we were all able to go out for grilled goat, one of my favorite dishes, and goat hotpot, with Lisa and David, Hoa's cousin's girlfriend (also Hoa), one of Hoa's second cousins from Dak Lak province ("Dung," which is pronounced more like "Yoom"), our Chinese friend Maggie, a another young Chinese woman who taught with Hoa at her old school, and our Japanese neighbor, who we just met. It was really fun, and Lisa, who lived in Japan for a little over a year, was able to brush up on her Japanese a little bit. Thinking about grilled goat is making me hungry, so it's time to go eat.

Tom

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.

An Tet O Vinh Long

Celebrating Tet in Vinh Long

We just got here yesterday, and it's nice to be back. It's much quieter and more beautiful here than in HCMC. We're going to look into getting teaching jobs here in Vinh Long. There are now two English school here that have, or want to have, foreign teachers. Unfortunately, both are now closed for Tet. We think we'd like living here. We might get bored at times, but I think life here wouldn't take the extreme swings that it does, at least for me, in Saigon. There are days that I love Saigon and days that I hate Saigon.

It's especially beatiful here (and it Saigon too) because of the flower markets that are set up for Tet. The sidewalks along the streets around the guesthouse are now full of flowers for sale. The beauty is marred a little, though, by all the motorbikers cruising for flowers. In Saigon, the flower markets are in the parks, closed to motor vehicles, and are therefore more pleasant.

We just had lunch at the guesthouse with Uncle Han. I told him that I wanted to invite him and the rest of the men of the family to bia hoi -- the cheap draft-beer joints that sometimes also have pretty darn good food. Hoa reminded me to tell him that if we went to bia hoi, I would pay. This is important because they never let us pay for anything. Uncle Han responded by saying if we went to "bia om," he would pay. I'd never heard of "bia om," but eventually I realized that "bia om" is the alcoholic equivalent of "ca phe om," the coffee houses where you pay a little more than usual for your coffee to have a pretty girl sit in your lap. I asked if they have these places in Vinh Long, and he said there are many. I'm pretty sure he was kidding about us going.

I've been playing a little tennis. I went with the guy whose house we're living in to play again at the Reunification Palace. After we played, we all went to a restuarant ("Huong rung" -- something like "forest smell", but I think its sounds a little more poetic in Vietnamese; I haven't looked it up but "huong" may be better translated as something like "essense") that specialized in wild meats. We ate a number of different cuts of some kind of wild dog. And I can be pretty darn sure it really was dog, although not necessarily sure that it was wild dog, because I was fortunate enough to get the head, which was definitely dog-shaped, and perhaps terrier-sized. We also drank too much vodka and beer. I got to practice a little Vietnamese, but a couple of these guys spoke pretty good English so it was usually easier to speak in English. All the people, about 5 men and 1 women, were from Hanoi. So they were telling me that I should learn to speak correctly, meaning speaking with the northern dialect, for example saying "zuh" insteading of "yuh" for the "gi's" and "d's." Most people in the South seem to agree that the Northerners speak more correctly. But one of our teachers said that there is a "Vietnamese standard" taught in the schools that none of the regional dialects quite achieves. The Northerners I've met disagree. One of the men at dinner is a cop, who shares the cocky attitude and belief that he should be able to have as many girlfriends as he wants with many cops around the world. He's been telling me he would teach me how to get a Vietnamese girlfriend. When I told him I couldn't have a girlfriend because I already have a wife, he apparently thought this to be a common American attitude and said that we are a "backward people." I thought this was really funny, but he probably didn't intend it to be entirely a joke. The rest of the group is much more low-key and have told me not to listen to this guy.

Tet is only a few days away, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Tom

Xin Loi -- Sorry

Sorry it's been so long, nearly a month, since we've posted anything. Many of you probably have heard that things didn't go too smoothly in Hanoi. The short version is: Hoa left a bag containing her passport and our camera in the taxi we took from the train station (after returning from Sapa) to our hotel. We had no hopes of recovering the stuff since we didn't even know the name of the cab company and our attempt to find the cab at the train station failed. So we went to the US Embassy, where we were told that we needed a report from the Vietnamese cops. I think they said this would be necessary to get a new visa from the Vietnamese. So we went to three different cop shops, each telling us there was nothing they could do for one reason or another. At the third station, very near our hotel, the cops didn't speak English so they went across the street to get someone to "interpret," or rather, to simply tell us there was nothing they could do. The girl said it was "too hard" for the police to write a report. I said, no, you must not understand. It would be very hard to go find the stolen property, but that's not what we are asking for. We are simply asking for a piece of paper that says we reported this stuff stolen so we can get a new passport and visa. She still said this was "too hard." Hoa suggested I go back and get someone from the hotel to see if they could help.

While I was gone, Hoa continued to try to get a report. Now the girl said the police were "too busy." Hoa was getting a little frustrated at this point, especially since there were cops standing around doing nothing and the cop sitting across the table from her was reading the paper. So Hoa snatched the newspaper out of the cop's hands and waived it around saying, "they are not too busy, they're reading the paper!" Fortunately for Hoa, the cop thought this was funny.

Anyway I got back with the guy from the hotel, who somehow worked things out. So Hoa wrote out her statement in duplicate and got one stamped by the cops. We had our report. The next day we went to the embassy and Hoa paid her $100 and applied for a new passport.

Here's where things get crazy. About two days later, Hoa got up very early, about 4:30 am, when the train from Sapa was arriving, to see if she could find the cab. I was still asleep and didn't even know she was going. Now, this is really Hoa's story, and I'm not sure she's ready to tell it. So, the short version is she found the cab and the driver. The driver initially denied knowing what she was talking about, but eventually admitted he had the stuff. And, to make the long, fairly scary story very short: eventually he gave her the bag, including the passport and camera. He had deleted all our photos, probably 150 or so, and taken a few of himself and his family. So we lost all our photos from Sapa and Hanoi and Ban Me Thuot, and most of them from Cat Tien National Park. (I'd already posted some of the Cat Tien photos on pbase.)

I'll just say that given everything that had happened, Hoa was afraid of this guy and wanted to leave Hanoi asap. So we flew back to Saigon that night.

Travelling was fun, but it's good to have a home again.

We're back to studying Vietnamese at the Teacher Training University. It's going well. And it looks like Hoa has a job with an English school very near our house. She'll probably begin right after we get back from celebrating Tet in Vinh Long. I'll probably end up teaching English too, which I think I'll like a lot.

Things are going very well again, but I had a bad week last week. First I got the flu, which I haven't had in years. Then I started to feel a little homesick. I had a dream about skiing that may have helped trigger this. I even started to crave Western food for the first time. My cravings were definitely satisfied. First, we found a place called "California Burrito," that's pretty similar to the slighly upscale taco shops of So Cal and the SW like Rubio's. It was definitely the best Mexican food I've had here. Then, a couple days later, we went to the Texas BBQ in District 3 for the first time. Now this was the best Western food of any kind I've had here! I had the "Carolina pulled-pork sandwich," fries, coleslaw, and grilled corn on the cob. Hoa had Jamaican jerk chicken wings. And we had banh tao kem, otherwise known as apple pie and ice cream, for desert.

We've also been meeting some interesting people. And we both started playing tennis again. Hoa's taking lessons at the big, French-colonial era sport center. And I went with the owner of the house where we're living to play at the court at the Reunification Palace with a bunch of people he knows. He and I played doubles together. You'd play one set, then sit out a sit to let others play, then play another. We ended up playing three sets. It was the first time I'd played in about five years, so I'm still sore. It seemed pretty strange to be an American playing tennis with a bunch a Vietnamese people on the grounds of the Reunification Palace. If I'm remembering this correctly, the Palace was the "White House" of the South Vietnam, and the end of the war is considered to be the day in 1975 when the North Vietnamese tanks rolled through the gates. Things have certainly changed a lot over the past 30 years.

Time to get going.

Tom

In Nha Trang

We arrived in Nha Trang two nights ago, and we're leaving for Ha Noi tonight on the train. It's been raining ever since we left Da Lat. We haven't seen much because of the rain, but we have eaten some good seafood. We'll have to come back sometime when the weather is better. We did go to the Oceanographic Institute, which has a pretty nice aquarium, yesterday. We walked about three miles to get there and got pretty much soaked in the rain. We took a cab back to town and went to a restaurant the cab driver recommended, which probably wasn't a good way to find a place to eat, but it was delicious. We had a seafood hot pot -- lau, the kind you cook at your table -- with a crab and squid and fish and who knows what else.

We had a very interesting trip from Da Lat to Buon Me Thuot. We took a bus, and the scenery was absolutely spectacular the whole way. Things got interesting when we got within about 25 km of Buon Me Thuot. The road was so flooded, vehicles could not get through. We waited on the bus for only about 10 minutes before we were told to get on a boat that would take us to the other side of the flooding. The boat was a little scary -- overcrowded and no guard rails to prevent us from falling or being bumped overboard. We got to the other side safely though. We waded through some more water, then came to a van that was already overcrowded -- there was no way the three of us -- we were travelling with Sonne, a Dutch woman we met in Cat Tien Nat'l Park -- could get on the bus. The driver apparently said he would be back in 45 minutes, but that couldn't have been possible. We started looking for another ride. We ended up riding on the back of an open-bed transport truck with a few Vietnamese people, but the driver stopped about half way and went into a cafe. We learned he was afraid of getting in trouble with the police for hauling passengers -- I don't know why. One of the Vietnamese women had a cell phone and called for a cab, which worked out fine.

We spent the night in Buon Me Thuot at a hotel, because it was too late for Hoa's family to come get us. They live on a farm about 30 km or so outside town. The next morning we went to the farm. Hoa's aunt Khanh has 10 kids, all adults. Most are married and have children, so it's a huge family. I think Hoa wants to talk about the time we spent in BMT, so I'll just say that although life on the farm is more difficult than in other places we've been in Vietnam we had a great time, the family was very nice, and I enjoyed my short time of picking coffee.

Tom