Photos of pho and other sightings

Houlton, Maine

2009-03-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

I spent three days and two nights in Houlton, Maine, the red spot on this map. Here's what wikipedia says: Houlton is a town in Aroostook County, Maine, on the United States-Canada border, located at 46°07′32″N 67°50′23″W / 46.1256°N 67.8398°W. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 6,476. It is perhaps best known as being at the northern terminus of Interstate 95 and for being the birthplace of Samantha Smith. (Samantha Smith was that precocious peacemaker who died in a plane crash when she was 13 in 1985. Also, I was up there to help the 2010 census get an updated people count.)

I left yesterday evening, and as I was driving down Route 95 at dusk, looking at the orange slanted sunlight hitting only the top of the trees, I thought I would like to live up here. The roads have so few cars you can practically do a u-turn without bothering to check for oncoming traffic. (But the occasional semi-trailer does come around, barreling along at 80 mph.) The low hills are covered with fields, patches of blue forest and solitary old farmhouses. The people have this funny habit (as do other people in small towns): They'll note you as a stranger somewhere doing something ordinary -- like working out at the gym or taking a walk or having coffee at a cafe -- and then, if they happen to run into you again, they'll say, "Hey, I saw you at ____!"

Houlton has a different feel from southern Maine; or rather, it's more intensely southern Maine except with fewer trees. But it's really far from intense!

Downtown Houlton.

It was bitterly cold when I was there.

This picture below was taken of Route 1 in Houlton 10 years ago. Today, just a decade later, this strip looks like Route 1 anywhere: it's built up with chain restaurants, gas stations, expanded car dealerships and motels, a Wal-Mart, Shop N' Save, Mardens, et al. The latest economic boom is really obvious in this rural outpost. That illusory economic boom, rather. The photos below are of the big Irving gas station and truck stop on the strip.

This kid below is the third generation of Yorks running the biggest car dealership in Aroostook County (on Route 1). They just invested $3 million to add an addition to handle their rapid growth, which, this guy told me, has been based on giving out subprime loans over the last five years to cash-poor car buyers. Revenues (up to now, that is): $20 million. Employees: 50.

Here's Houlton's town manager (below) holding up hand cuffs made at the local handcuff factory, Smith & Wesson. Ten years ago he was given these cuffs, the factory's 3 millionth made in 20 years. Smith & Wesson just made its 6 millionth cuff a couple weeks ago. They're the biggest supplier of handcuffs in the world, helping policemen, totalitarian regimes and S&M devotees everywhere!

This guy below, along with three other businessmen who became friends at Iraq war protests in northern Maine, are starting a new company. They plan on buying canola and mustard seed from local farmers to press into oil for salad dressings and tractor biofuel. (The oil is exactly the same for both uses.) This man was lovely, gentle and mild, with a hint of humor.

This young couple, who both have engineering degrees from a respectable university, are starting a potato Vodka company in Houlton to rival Maine's second potato Vodka maker, Cold River Vodka. Their potato vodka, they say, will have no flavor. I like the idea of starting a company with a product that has no discernible characteristics -- is invisible, odorless and flavorless, and yet still sells for $19.

A Graham Ave. restaurant

2009-02-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

Vanessa's mom and Lebanese boyfriend Bo last summer opened a restaurant on Graham Ave. in Williamsburg called Odara, which serves a mixture of Brazilian and Lebanese food. Vanessa and I went in tonight -- stopping in for a respite from the rainy, cold night -- and just asked for some hummus and spinach and chickpeas, but we left with about seven pounds of food. The restaurant is struggling in the recession though, and Bo says he needs to sell it.

Clara, Vanessa's mom, said tonight that all of life's experiences come with some price, and sometimes the price is really big, almost unbearable. But she didn't make us pay any price for our dinner, and the food was delicious!

Watery rhythms: the Saigon River, the lunar calendar, floods, flowers and Tet

2009-01-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

While not as frequently romanticized as Vietnam's Mekong River or the Red River maybe, the old Saigon River forms a pretty ribbon through the city. And because its current is relatively brisk, its smell is not as heavy and rotten as the smaller city canals.

I took a bicycle ride down a crumbling, narrow and peaceful lane alongside the Saigon River today (my last day in Vietnam). The lane's in District 2, or Quan 2 on the map. (You'll have to click on the map and then zoom in for a better picture. I can't find a better map unfortunately.)

Waiting quietly on the river were both oceanic vessels and a few smaller boats carrying coconuts, bonsai trees and other agricultural goods for sale at the millions of street markets in Saigon. I biked this lane yesterday, too, and as far as I could tell, none the boats had moved at all during that time.

Funny how sea trade is so mysterious from an outsider's perspective. It's impossible to figure out what's going on behind the hulls and inside the steel containers being loaded on and off the ships. But I imagine the worst -- as I bet Maine State Senator Susan Collins, who's head of the Senate Committee of Homeland Security, does as well: the trafficking of humans beings, drugs, weapons and crude radioactive material for bombs, among all the other black market goods sneaking in under the tax radar.

The most active object on the river was this boat above moving at Mach 2, skimming the top of the water in its rush. I've never seen anything like it, but I presume it's not an uncommon kind of speedboat. I just wonder who was riding in the thing. Maybe a politician? Perhaps a Vietnamese smuggling tycoon?

The lane next to the river was quiet and shady, with an occasional bicycle or motor scooter passing me. People were drinking cà phê and green tea by the (deliciously non-smelly) river, under the trees lining the road, sitting on a sidewalk turning into mud due to the stress of being regularly flooded.

This house, across the lane from the Saigon River, still hasn't dried out from the recent full moon and high tide.

Vietnamese calendars list both lunar and solar dates because both are still important and practical here. (Lena's dad, for instance, didn't know his solar calendar birthday until he was quite old and looked it up on the Internet.) The traditional lunar calendar is vital in Vietnam for a couple of reasons. First, families need to know the phases of the moon so they don't miss the date they must lay out food and burn incense for the ancestors (the 15th and 30th of the lunar month).

Also, for those living in flood-prone areas -- and as far as I can tell, most of Saigon is in chronic peril of flooding -- it is somewhat reassuring to be able to predict when their living room will become a rice paddy, even if they can't do anything about it. Lena's dad says that the river rises with the tides two or three days after the full moon, the seas being dragged along by the fading, falling moon.

The most recent full moon was the 11th, and when I opened our gate two mornings ago I saw that the alley across from us had turned into a long rectangular pool. In Lena's house (which belongs to her parents and is about 500 meters from a river), the floor had to be raised three feet to protect it from the river water, which simply rises up from the sewer through the earth and into people's homes. Lena's parents got so frustrated they eventually moved out.

This poor home below is across the lane from the Saigon River, and next to a stinky canal -- double trouble.

Tet is coming up at the end of the month, Jan. 26, the first day of the new lunar year. (This is Lena's calendar below. If you click on it, you can more easily read the lunar and solar dates.)

People are already starting to get ready by buying traditional sweets and food to serve guests (manic socializing goes on during Tet). Even more lanterns are being strung up on the streets and flower sellers are bracing for their busiest time of the year. Lena says many wild flowers blossom after Tet. A few are already out, like these yellow trumpets.

Tet doesn't just bring in the new year, it also marks the start of Vietnam's so-called spring. It's quite funny to me that spring is heralded here with such fanfare, despite the winter being so mild and warm, and fresh fruits and vegetables being so plentiful all year round! (But spring is exciting everywhere I guess. Perhaps it's the concept of renewal and temporal change that's most interesting.) Also, although I am hardened by the extreme seasons in Maine, here the spring does mean less rain, clearer skies, more sun and hotter temperatures.

Anyway, goodbye wonderful, fascinating, difficult and eternally strange Vietnam!

The environment

2009-01-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

Recycling here works like this: a woman comes around with a wheelbarrow to collect what you have so she can turn around and sell it to factories for their operations. Like all the street peddlers, she announces herself with a unique call. The peddlers' calls form a kind of street music, and when there are several working close by, like early in the mornings and between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., the calls become especially melodic. (The roving masseuse, though, comes after dark and roams the streets until about 11 p.m., rubbing what sounds like cymbals together -- which are actually beer bottle caps on strings tied to his bicycle wheels.)

This woman does this work to supplement her and her husband's income as farmers. They're raising two young children.

Going native: And this is what I wear to combat the city's pollution when I ride on the back of a motorbike. I also optimistically wear this mask, despite it being completely ineffective according to local doctors, when I ride my bicycle. Plus sunglasses. It's the mosquito look. (For the full mosquito effect, check out Lena below!)

More street scenes

2009-01-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

An almost full moon -- it was a like a scene out of the movie The Letter! Except Bette Davis did not have to deal with all the droopy, dangling electrical wires all over the place. (Here they are relatively taut and straight.)

A shrine still smoking in someone's doorway. The shrines to ancestors, or perhaps a god or two, are set up in the middle of the month and the end of the month, on the full and half moon. Last night was the full moon, but sometimes the incense smokes for two days, according to my source. The fragrant smoke cleanses the air, allowing for renewal and better luck next time.

A woman preparing a few bagfuls of che, which should be lighting these girls' faces up with anticipation, but they are unmoved for some reason.

All different types of delectable che ingredients (che being a good synonym for the ability to turn any food into a dessert), from chestnuts and water chestnuts to rice balls filled with mung beans (I think), to rice and beans, everything loaded up with sugar! Good thing the Vietnamese eat so many herbs and drink so much green tea to counteract the possibility of contracting adult-onset diabetes!

Rice probably absorbs extra glucose. (I mean, to be fair, our diet contains oodles more sugar.)

These young boys play Vietnamese music loudly from a pushcart filled with discs in hopes of selling CDs to people who, inspired by hearing the tunes blaring outside their windows, come running out in their nightgowns to snatch up a newly pirated CD for 5,000 dong. The brothers say they're 17 and 18, but they look younger. And they mentioned their parents live in the country, so they're not technically "street kids." They make about 70,000 to 100,000 dong (17,000 dong equals $1) a day. Lena and I bought some hardcore dance numbers.

The banana lady down the alley. Actually, she's not just a banana lady, she's got all sorts of specialties, like little shriveled eggs that look like miniature yellow boats that are really boiled eggs fried with herbs and meat. And she cooks up a good and greasy banh xeo, the Vietnamese crepe, which is made from rice flour, turmeric and coconut milk, and filled with shrimp, fatty pork and bean sprouts before being fried. She also makes fresh spring rolls; a thick banana-and-coconut pancake that fits into your palm and only hints at sweetness; and a roasted banana treat that's wrapped in sticky rice and banana leaves before being set on a portable grill. Often, she's grumpy. But tonight she's in a good mood. By the looks of it, she has very little nibblers left after a successful day of feeding!

The ladies who run this stand -- they cook up fried rice and stir-fried stuff -- have the best display around. Although those leaves could use a bit of refreshing.

Street scenes, night, Binh Thanh district

2009-01-11T07:25:00.000-08:00

Down the street from us, and across the big thoroughfare, is a couple of lanes with cafes and pubs strewn with Christmas lights and lanterns.

A study in blue!

And a study in green.

A study in red.

Oh fruits!

2009-01-11T03:32:00.000-08:00

The fruit line-up: miniature mangoes in a bag, milk fruit, gauva, rambutan, sapodilla.

The syrupy sapodilla. Sapodilla tastes like canned pears, or like melon marinated in maple syrup and honey for weeks. But you have to be careful, because if you eat an unripe one, it will dry your mouth out, as if it were a thick paper towel.

Milk fruit has juice in its rind that's a creamy liquid, like coconut milk, which you have to massage into the fruit before cutting it open. The fruit is wet and sweet, but not memorable.

The rambutan, here placed on a flower for cheesy effect! The name means hairy cherry, and tastes a bit like a lichi.

The market and street scenes, around 4:30 p.m.

2009-01-11T02:09:00.000-08:00

The dark truth about fruit

2009-01-11T00:14:00.000-08:00

Here's some more delicious Vietnamese fruits:

The dragon fruit, which grows from a cactus vine. The pink skin is rubbery, with green scaly spines, and the flesh is watery and light, almost flavorless, although it has a bit of a tarty zing. The best part of the fruit is the many crunchy black seeds inside, like poppy seeds, which make eating the fruit akin to the experience of munching on a bagel, almost. Perhaps there is a better metaphor. There are supposedly antioxidants in dragon fruit as well. They are beautiful to look at, inside and out, more beautiful to look at than to eat, really.

The custard apple, below. In Vietnamese, this fruit is called Na, and Lena explains that her name is made up of two fruits: the Asian pear (Le) and the custard apple. The custard apple is delicious, but somewhat hard to eat because of its many hard black pips. Around the pips and underneath the bumpy, green rind the custard apple contains surprisingly creamy flesh, softer than a coconut, which tastes mildly sweet, much like a coconut does, but with a dash of apple butter and lemon meringue mixed in. Quite yum!

Coconuts. Riding my bicycle around the streets of Saigon, inhaling all the fumes and dust, and getting very thirsty, I often stop by a roadside stand to drink the juice of a young coconut for a burst of revitalization. The seller chops open a hole at the top and I slurp down a cup or two of the barely sweet liquid through a little straw. (Flickr photo below, and random web photo of custard apple above. Will get my own on photo jaunt I'm going to take this evening. The coconuts I drink from look a little different.)

Coconut water is evidently very healthful, with all these life-affirming properties:

Keeps the body cool and at the proper temperature.
Orally re-hydrates your body; it is an all natural isotonic beverage.
Carries nutrients and oxygen to cells.
Naturally replenishes your body's fluids after exercising.
Raises your metabolism.
Promotes weight loss.
Boosts your immune system.
Detoxifies and fights viruses.
Cleanses your digestive tract.
Controls diabetes.
Aids your body in fighting viruses that cause the flu, herpes, and AIDS.
Balances your PH and reduce risk of cancer.
Treats kidney and urethral stones.
Boosts poor circulation.

But the dark side of fruits is that I have been eating so much of them that I have broken out, and Lena says if I want my pimples to disappear, I have to stop eating the fruit and all the sweetened coffee with sugar-laden condensed milk. All of which is "heating" my body and causing horrible disfigurement. But I only have a few more days left, and there is still so much more fruit to eat. Dilemma.

Street scenes

2009-01-09T21:40:00.000-08:00

This woman pushes her talking scale through the streets, weighing and measuring people for 2,000 dong. The hat comes down on your head, and the machine reads your measurements and then gives you its verdict. It thought Lena should gain 20 pounds!

Women tending to flowers for a garden in the super posh area of District 7.

Architecture, straight and crumbing

2009-01-07T04:55:00.000-08:00

Here are some of Saigon's colorful buildings, wide enough for a small room per floor. (I like the one that is teetering a bit.) They remind me somewhat of Dr. Suess cartoons. And by night.

These houses have been abandoned, taken over by the river.

A church that looks like it wants to be a pagoda, or vice versa?

Street peddlers

2009-01-06T03:32:00.000-08:00

Lena and I are working on a story about street peddlers for AsiaLIFE, the glossy English rag in Saigon. (I'm freelancing for the magazine! Very exciting.) We're chatting up every roving peddler who comes by our door as they make their winding, daily rounds through the many miles of Saigon's back alleys.

The peddlers push their heavy carts or ride their bicycles laden with baskets from 5:30 a.m. to late at night, covering up to 50 kilometers a day, calling out what they have to offer in these nasal, sing-song cries. Even the Vietnamese have a hard time deciphering what exactly they're offering, since their words are often distorted to slip more easily from the throat.

Today we talked to an ice cream man, a soup maker and a young man selling bananas. We mean to interview one of the women who pick up garbage for recycling, as well as to the roving masseuse, who claps cymbals together to announce his arrival. We'd like to talk to the CD guy, who blares copyright-infringed music from speakers attached to his bicycle, and to the man who sells a special kind of rice dumpling and uses a loud, scratchy recording to advertise and save his voice.

The most these peddlers make each day is $7 or $8. The least they earn is $1 to $2, enough they say to buy food for the day. But all told us they appreciate the freedom of their job; they like to roam the city on their bicycles, making whatever left or right-hand turn they please. They just wish that every day, they made $8.

This ice cream seller, whose name Lena wrote down in her notebook (she's gone out!), is 42 and been selling ice cream on the streets for 18 years. He started out working for an ice cream factory in Saigon until he decided to launch out on his own after a few years. He still buys his ice cream from the factory. On a good day he makes 70,000 dong a day, about $4, he says. He has a family in the central part of the country who are surviving on his farm. He sees them every three or so months, more often during the rainy season when no one wants to eat ice cream. For us, he dribbled condensed milk over our cones, each 3,000 dong. (And he sells durian ice cream!! Lena told me too late or I would have ordered it.)

Here's a few photos of the cute banana seller.

This man is 27, unmarried and works in three districts. He sells bananas -- 11,000 dong for a bunch -- and coconuts that he buys on weekly trips to the south. He's from the north but came to Saigon after following some friends. I don't know more details...Lena's in charge here and she's gone out to see a movie!

Here's the soup seller, selling sup cua, a kind of crab-meat stew with quail eggs and mushrooms. It's delicious and spicy. He and his wife, who cooks up the soup, both sell sup cua by the cup for 5,000 dong. But his wife has a permanent spot on a sidewalk somewhere, whereas he pushes his soup from a motor scooter. About four years ago he was working as a mechanic, but then the government decided to build a new road through an ancient outdoor market where his wife used to make a good living selling her soup. Her income dwindled, and so he quit his job to support her business. He admits that he makes more money selling soup, 100,000 to 150,000 dong a day, than he did as a mechanic, but that it is not really a natural job for him.

A technical Bon Appétit entry coming up!

2009-01-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

Today I enrolled in a cooking class with three other students -- a friendly Australian couple and a strange, laconic Spanish guy -- for $40 a pop (and sizzle). That amount of money would have funded my diet here for a month, or more. But I feel as though I learned a few valuable tricks to make food taste Vietnamesey, a skill I hope to replicate back in Maine kitchens -- that is, if I can find dried ear mushrooms, black fish sauce and green mung beans.

The chef started off by explaining our ingredients, which the school had prepared prior to our morning class so we didn't have to do any manual labor other than stirring sauce with our chop sticks, pouring clams into clay pots, rolling a spring roll or two, and ultimately eating our creations.

Here at my station are, from left to right, the ingredients for spring rolls: red chili, garlic, purple shallots, green onions, salt, pepper, dried chicken powder pellets or bột thịt gà (the healthy, modern version of MSG), and coconut water. They were carefully arranged in delicate porcelain bowls (which still doesn't justify the class fee, I don't think). In the big bowls are tamarind sauce (made by soaking tamarind pulp in warm water for 10 to 15 minutes) and lime juice. And you can't see the black fish sauce and soybean oil at the back. Spring rolls have a lot going on, evidently.

To begin, we first made a light but spicy dipping sauce, which included sugar (there's sugar in everything). We also mixed in lime juice, fish sauce, garlic and chili.

Important note: This sauce is for the fried rolls only, which are like splashy ballroom dancers compared to their fresh-roll cousins, the clomping contra dancers. The fried rolls have so much more pizazz and flash! (I'll explain a bit more later.) The slighter fresh rolls require a sauce that's a bit heavier, to balance their insubstantiality, made with a base of yellow mung beans.

We had to cook up this mush for the rolls, which included mushrooms, dried shrimp, pork, taro (which can be replaced with turnip or sweet potato), and boiled crab meat.

Oh dear! I have no photo of the next important step. We laid out our flimsy round rice papers and dribbled coconut water over them, which supposedly gives the rolls their golden color when they're fried. Then we placed a dollop of the meat and mushroom mush in them and rolled them up before dropping them into hot soybean oil.

Here they are when they're done. But there's yet a few more steps before one is allowed to bite into them. They require fancy adornment, a few spangles and glitter.

The Vietnamese eat their fried spring rolls with fresh herbs -- sweet basil and mint, for example -- and roll them up with iceberg lettuce and white rice noodles. White rice noodles are cooler and more refreshing than normal pasta; they are like the sorbet of noodles.

The garnish, pictured above. There were probably orphans out back cutting up the tomatoes into these beautiful lotus-like flowers.

Here's a roll that's ready to be rolled up in lettuce leaf, mint, basil and rice noodles before being plunged into the dipping sauce. Although I'm not entirely sure about this, it seems that every tendency a food has toward a certain flavor or consistency has to be balanced with its opposite. So something fried and crunchy must be accompanied by ingredients that are simple, light and fresh. Fruit, especially sour fruit, is often joined here with salt and chili. (I've been told though, that this doesn't exactly counter the strong flavor, but rather brings out its undertones; in the case of tangy fruit, the salt-chili mix coaxes out its reluctant sweetness. The earthy, steadfast herbs might reinforce the fleeting crispness of the salty fried roll, which so instantly disappears in your mouth.)

Next, for our main dishes, we made coconut rice, caramelized pork in a clay pot, and sweet and sour clam soup with dill. Below the chef is pouring coconut water over the rice before steaming it in a clay pot. (It's also a good idea to cook rice with ginger if you're in poor health, we were told. And though I was heartily warned not to do it, I think steamed rice with coconut juice and ginger sounds deliciously reasonable.)

Below are the stages of caramelizing pork. Instead of pork, you can easily use any miserable meat substitute!

First, we cracked open our miniature red chili, a dramatic start to a dramatic dish.

Then we added other ingredients, including that salty dried chicken powder and caramel syrup (which the orphans made for us, but it is easy to make the syrup with sugar and water, or even sugar and coconut water).

Once you start cooking the pork in a clay pot, you have to add more sugar to caramelize the sauce. When the pork is done in about seven minutes, you sprinkle sliced green onions and a dash of pepper over it, and serve it with the delicate coconut-steamed rice.

But before the grand chow-down, we had to make sweet and sour clam soup with dill, a dish that comes from the north, probably influenced by the Chinese.

Here are some tomatoes, sour starfruit (which are considered a superfruit because they are so high in antioxidants), chopped green onion, dill and a red chili. In the bowl are small, white clams.

Not sure why, but the instructor made a big deal out of using a stirring spoon made from coconut. Every detail probably makes a drastic difference to the refined palette! To make the soup tarter and less sweet, you add more tamarind sauce and salt. For a sweeter flavor, you add more sugar.

Anyway, tart, sweet -- the soup was unbelievable! A supersoup! The instructor advised us to eat it when we were fighting off colds and other bugs.

Here's the final result above.

And for dessert, we ate a kind of che. This one has sweet boiled bananas (they're boiled in their skins with a dash of salt), tapioca, coconut milk and sesame seeds.

Bananas are everywhere; evidently there are 28 varieties in Vietnam. Here's a big one that's about to go into the steamer, much to the chef's delight.

And the course gives out certificates at the end, a cutesy move that still doesn't justify the price. But the food was very yumsicles. Even the tormented, neurotic Spanish guy seemed somewhat moved by the dishes. Hopefully they will reinforce his will to live!

And for all of you who made it through this lengthy post, I will reward you by making you these dishes, plus a sweet mung bean and seaweed chè when I come home!

A surprising neighborhood in Saigon

2009-01-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

If you cross the bridge close to my neighborhood, you pass onto this island called Binh Quoi, a quiet world cut off from the teeming city.

Here are the backsides of the island homes along the river's edge, taken from the bridge. These houses might actually have pleasant fronts; often less care is taken with the home's rear when it's facing a smelly, pestilential river!

The island's western edge is crowded. But as you go farther east, it turns into a scene you might find in Vietnam's countryside miles away from the city, with dirt lanes and small farms.

The track narrowed, until it was wide enough just for a bicycle.

The cityscape was never too far in the distance.

The ubiquitous plastic bag! It shows up a lot in my photos, like Waldo.

This pond had a crust of mint-green algae.

The people living in the house above could step out onto their porch in the morning and catch their daily livelihood. Their little pond was bubbling with fish bobbing to the surface for bugs.

A small shop where I bought a rice cracker flavored with chili and fish oil, which smelled like it actually might have been river water. I ate the cracker anyway!

It's hard to see, but there are two little grungy dogs protecting their home here.

The animals are often grimy. I suppose the environment is so dusty and unclean that animals, despite their strong instinctual compulsion to groom, cannot stay on top of their feathers and fur. Even the herons have dirty wingtips, the pure white symbol so often associated with pastoral Asian scenes.

Grungy ducks.

A grungy water lily, or is it a lotus flower? I have shown restraint in taking photos of water lilies up to this point!

Decadence for the undeserving

2009-01-02T05:03:00.001-08:00

I have gleaned that one is supposed to visit a spa while in Saigon. I'm not entirely sure why: Lena says its because the spa services -- the massages, facials, waxes, manicures and body wraps -- are cheap. But they're not that inexpensive. Regardless of my unsure justifications for this splurge, I decided that Lena and I should spend the afternoon in one and chose L'Apothiquaire, in District Three. She was up for it!

We had a 75-minute massage, then sat by the pool under a heavy layer of gray clouds for a half hour.

When the depressing sky became too much, we headed for the steam room and sauna and tried to sweat away the impurities that are currently clogging our facial pores.

Lena, by the way, said the massage was "orgasmic!" I thought it was pretty good, like a warm cup of green tea.

The spa itself was in a beautiful four-story French colonial villa. Some other decadent and likely undeserving person lived there once.

It was huge, with many rooms and winding hallways that turned corners into secluded courtyard patios surrounded by flowers. Muzak was being constantly piped into the various "treatment" rooms.

The case of the mixed-up fruit

2009-01-02T03:17:00.000-08:00

If you read my entry below on the durian, you'll know I've been wanting to dedicate a lot of poems to this mysterious yellow fruit I've been eating every day. After googling "Vietnamese fruit" to identify it, I decided it had to be the durian. That's when I also discovered the extreme opinions people have about the controversial food, which seems to unfailingly inspire passionate outbursts of either devotion or distress.

But Lena told me this morning I had misidentified the fruit! The yellow thing I liked so much is the humble jackfruit, which elicits no emotional response whatsoever, as far as I can tell. (I believe the jackfruit and durian might be related, though.)

You pull these plump, buttery morsels of sweetness from the jackfruit rind and chew them, making sure to slip the big seed out first.

Mystified now by the durian, however, I hunted one down today, finding a batch for sale by the side of a major road in District Three. The vendor, who was smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee, gladly sold me one for more tha $4. Expensive -- the price of four bowls of pho.

As soon as she cut the thorny rind open, I smelled the infamous odor that reportedly can cause people to gag several meters away. The durian is outlawed on public buses, I think, for this reason. I grew worried; the smell wafting my way reminded me of an old musty cushion peed on some days earlier by a bad cat.

The lady placed in front of me a lump of yellow mush that looked like an omelet made with some exotic animal's mashed-up brains. A thin layer of mucous glistened over the solid gelatinous mass. Despite my forebodings, I launched in and ate a bite. Oh the vile thing! It was too much! It was like eating something that had been ripped out of a dead cow's intestines and regurgitated by a vulture. It had the consistency of a slug, and I had to rip long shreds of it off, like decomposing tentacles, to properly finish the thing. But the woman was watching me and smiling and I ate as much as I could. (Sorry about all the references to dead or slimy creatures -- I am completely overcome!)

I thought I would vomit. The fruit in Vietnamese is called "one's sorrows" -- quite fitting.

Here's what those naysayers had to say about this hideous fruit (snatched from Wikipedia). I had disregarded them as desensitized Westerners prior to sampling the horrible durian.

British novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."

Chef Andrew Zimmern compares the taste to "completely rotten, mushy onions."

Anthony Bourdain, while a lover of durian, relates his encounter with the fruit as thus: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."

Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says: "Its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock."

I will stick with the jackfruit, which is really so delicious. Like a crunchy banana candy, truly the pinnacle of evolution.

Vietnam and climate change

2008-12-31T04:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday as I was walking home from a day out shopping, I got caught in a torrential downpour, which is odd considering it's the dry season (Note: these are not my pics. I didn't bring my camera with me.) These abnormal storms are convincing Lena and her parents that the end is nigh. Thankfully I had my flimsy lavender poncho to slip over me and my backpack, which helped at first, but eventually the rain seemed to sneak in through the porous thing and I got soaked, blinded and demented (causing me to jump onto the wrong bus and head 15 minutes in the wrong direction. Today the rain ruined my new haircut.)

And my shoes! My L.L. Bean low-cut hiking boots quickly became waterlogged as I waded through one-foot-high water coursing down the streets and gutters, carrying with it whatever snatched goods offered up by the city, from cabbage leaves to motor oil to even more odious fluids and smears, ugh.

Because the rain was falling after dark, and the city is still relatively dimly lit after nightfall, the scene took on a slightly nightmarish hue. The water that suddenly filled up the streets looked to be burning under the weak lights of all the motor scooters. And everyone was hooded in their dark rain cloaks, heads down against the onslaught. Very Apocalyptic!

Speaking of Apocalypses: Vietnam is looking at a sorry future when the climate warms up a few degrees. A Gaurdian reporter recently wrote this: "Which country will be most affected by the steady rise of the seas? Which country could see more than a tenth of its population displaced, a tenth of its economic power crippled and a tenth of its towns and cities swamped by the end of this century? The answer, which may surprise you, is Vietnam, named by the World Bank as the nation with most to lose as global warming forces the oceans to reclaim the land.

Just a one-metre rise in sea level would flood more than 7% of the country's agricultural land, and wreck nearly 30% of its wetlands, the bank says. (If you click on the first live link you can read what Oxfam says will happen to the poorest of people.) The government claims it's preparing for the catastrophe.

A wished-for ode to the durian fruit

2008-12-31T03:08:00.000-08:00

I bet Pablo Neruda, had he ever sampled a durian fruit, or sầu riêng ("one's sorrows"), would have written an ode to the common thing. To eat the buttery yellow fruit is a novel experience for someone from away, and it has inspired many writers over the centuries. It tastes like a dose of amber honey that's been cooled to form a smooth, firm but pliable candy. Every time I leave the house, I keep my eye out for a street vendor selling the fruit pulp, which comes from a head-sized, thorny husk. Picture yet to be taken!

Here's a rousing excerpt stolen from Wikipedia from the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (one of Darwin's predecessors), writing in 1856, who goes so far as to call the durian "perfect." (I wonder what else he considered to have evolved to its final stage of enlightenment? I would guess an avocado.) And he calls it worth making the long trip over here. (I agree.)

“

A rich custard highly flavored with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. ...It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience.

And here's another:

Writer Mai Van Tao (who is this? I can find no reference to this person)...Oh well, someone once wrote, "The fragrance of Durian is a mixture of smells which come from a ripening jackfruit and that of a shaddock [something like a grapefruit over here]. It can also be compared to the strong smell of foreign-made cheese and is rich as a hen's egg. ...Those who have not enjoyed the fruit before may find it hard to eat. But once they have tried it, they are likely to seek it again.

The consistency is somewhat like a creamy cheese. In fact, the fruit, which is the color of egg yolk, would be lovely with brie and eaten on a piece of thin, toasted brown bread, light like a cracker. I will miss this fruit. (Like everything, it has its naysayers. I'm excluding them.)

A vain post, but one that has some cultural undertones to redeem it

2008-12-31T00:39:00.000-08:00

I wish I had brought my camera along with me to document my walk home from the beauty parlor, which took me across a greenish-brown river that smelled like industrial byproducts and bygone sewage, but which nonetheless had a certain foul, putrid charm to it, as did the homes teetering on the river's edge. I thought my nose was going to fall off as I breathed in the rank air, and stinging tears popped out of the corners of my eyes.

Speaking of pretty-ugly, I got my hair cut and highlighted at Duc's Design. Lena guardedly recommended this salon after getting her hair cut here (she's got a glamorous mane), with the warning that Duc has a penchant for cutting women's hair so they end up resembling Korean rock stars.

(Below: This is BoA, South Korea's Britney Spears.)

Duc is a fast-moving, middle-aged hair stylist with spiky hair that has a hint of maroon mahogany to it. After ensuring that I wanted yellow highlights and not white ones, Duc first trimmed my hair while making intense faces in the mirror -- narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips, and pausing periodically to measure my facial dimensions with his fingers -- and then he dyed it. This is what it ended up looking like! (After my sweaty walk home during which I also got caught in the rain, that is.)

Certainly no BoA. The highlights are shiny and gold, almost brittle. They look very fake and very great!

The cultural undertone was this: a head massage went with the haircut. In Vietnam, when you get your hair cut, you get your head rubbed and tapped as well. At times the massage felt like water torture -- the hair dresser put a wet towel over my face and poured water on it -- but it was overall quite relaxing, and she gave me Q-tips pre- and post-massage to clean my ears. Perhaps the Vietnamese believe that beauty is not just superficial, but requires a certain serenity and surrender as well?

Postscript: I will not be surrendering to Duc's highlights, but will likely get them amended back home so they look more sun-kissed, less frosted.

Ever more orphans

2008-12-28T01:39:00.001-08:00

Here's some pictures of attractive, well-dressed people paying attention to orphans.

A study in orange

2008-12-27T05:40:00.000-08:00

More color studies that cannot legitimately be considered studies, I'm pretty sure!

The leaves are changing! Perhaps this means we're in some kind of autumn? When Tet starts -- around the end of January -- the country shifts into spring. This means winter, Vietnam's odd hot autumn/winter, lasts from October to January? I'm wildly hypothesizing here!

Encountering an elephant

2008-12-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

I walked a few kilometers north of a nature preserve I had wanted to visit (Yok Don National Park, pronounced Zok Don) after the park attendant told me I would have to hire a guide for $20 -- which I didn't have on me -- due to the park's proximity to Cambodia, a reason I really didn't understand.

I got hot and sweaty walking along a long road, but at last reached the Daklak Rubber Company plantation -- a wondrously weird dead end.

I couldn't make sense of this plantation whatsoever. It appeared to be a posh retreat type of place where rich city people could rent villas with thatched roofs by a small lake and ride elephants through a few paths that weaved among the rubber trees. The place was pretty much abandoned, except for me, some workmen, two men standing waist deep in the lake fishing and a family of elephant caretakers.

Although I saw no evidence of it on this day, I think rubber might still be harvested here, made from tree sap. (Here's a little info on rubber trees!) The Daklak Rubber Company's head office is in Buon Ma Thuot, I think. (For more on this city in the Central Highlands, read the entry below.)

One of the cottages had a herd of cattle grazing in the yard. (I believe these are traditional Mnong longhouses.)

Along my wanderings, I stopped by to stroke the trunk of a humongous and gentle (tolerant, rather) elephant -- the first time I've ever been so close to one!

The elephant had many folds in its thick, cool skin, tiny bristly hairs growing out of its trunk, and bright orange eyes. Why does an elephant have so many wrinkles? Rudyard Kipling says the wrinkles, at least on rhinos, came about after a Parsee man took revenge on one that stole and ate his cake, by slipping cake crumbs under the rhino's skin as the animal bathed. (The rhino had slipped out of his skin to take a swim.) The crumbs tickled him so much the rhino created great folds in his skin as he rubbed and rubbed, trying to ease his torment.

I think someone should use elephant wrinkles in an anti-Botox advertising campaign.

A study in greens and yellows, and a sense of misrepresenting the country

2008-12-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

I am not sure if I can get away calling these photos "a study," since no painting went on, just walking. I walked by these bright rice paddies Friday on my way to the very peculiar Daklak Rubber Company tree plantation about an hour's bus ride outside of Buôn Ma Thuột, which is a city north of Dalat. (I had the best coffee of my life here! Unbelievable! So strong and delicious! I felt it cure of me some unnamed lurking malaise, at least momentarily.)

I feel a bit guilty because all my photos depict a lovely Vietnam, which exists of course, but the reality is that a lot of the scenery is abject and dismal. I am beginning to feel an obligation to add here on this blog something that more accurately represents what I see walking around or from the window of my bus. Like this photo below, which is not even that bad -- more of a hybrid of less-than-lovely (the garbage-strewn street of a poor village) and arguable beauty (as in the uplifting mountain views)!

I suppose this is true for all places -- the human habitation of the planet is mostly grotty. And the grime, development and debris is only interrupted by a quick glimpse of something more beautiful (unless you have that aesthetic that appreciates the allure of ugliness, which is a lucky gift I think).

A hike up Lang Biang Mountain, near Dalat

2008-12-25T08:46:00.000-08:00

Views. For most of the hike, I walked through a cloud, but it was clear at top.

2008-12-25T03:55:00.000-08:00

I rented a motor scooter for $5 in Dalat and rode through coffee country and then beyond into mostly uninhabited hills (recognizable from Vietnam War footage in all sorts of films!). For long stretches I was the only vehicle on the road, such a rarity in this country that feels as if it's sagging under the weight of its huge crowded population like a thin and smelly old mattress. (Sadly.) The air was cold, but the sun occasionally came out -- at last I've seen the sun, and even blue skies, in Vietnam. I stopped off at a large unexpected botanical gardens, hidden in the middle of nowehere, which reminded me of the Coastal Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, except this one had many bonsai trees instead of rhododendrons. Besides the three or four sets of young Vietnamese couples canoodling between the flower beds -- the woman wobbly in their heels on the stone pathways and always giggling (I think it is very feminine here to keep up a constant sweet chortle) and the men following behind and snapping photos -- the garden was quiet and almost otherwordly. Behind the gardens, I followed an overlooked trail to a river's edge, coming across horses and buffalo grazing together. If you zoom in on the last photo, you can see the horses running after they catch my scent. I took a nap by the river; no one came by.

A crazy wonderful house in Dalat

2008-12-23T04:04:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I explored a house that was a mix of a tree, a tree house, a termite mound, a ski lodge, a Las Vegas casino and Viet Cong tunnel.

I got there just as dusk was falling so had to run around taking photos in the waning light. The house – it’s called Hang Nga Crazy House – is in Dalat and was designed by a woman called Mrs. Dang Viet Nga, my hero! (And the daughter of Uncle Ho's successor, Truong Ching.) I wish more architects felt so unrestrained. It would be so easy to decorate our streets with odd, ingenious and perhaps tacky buildings (the last quality a potential liability with architectural creativity), but we (as in most cultures) sadly remain sticklers for the conventional and drably traditional.

The house (or rather houses...there were at least four structures) unfortunately is not very photogenic. It’s so chaotic, with so many bits and pieces interlacing and flying out in all directions, that it doesn’t translate well into one-dimensional photographs.

Here are walkways above the gardens, allowing you to travel along narrow, twisting branches like a squirrel.

Below is a little gingerbread cottage in the tropical alpine garden. (Dalat's altitude is 4,920 feet above sea level and built up by the French who left a chalet imprint behind.)

Here's one of the hallways wrapping around the inside of the bark of a fake tree. The trees were filled with nooks for bedrooms and little studies.

A nook!

Cutlery for the monsters when they arrive.

The mysterious garden, noisy with many belching invisible toads, revealed this illuminated spider's web after dark.

Lots of haunting sculptures around.

A tour through Lena's spartan home

2008-12-22T00:25:00.000-08:00

The orange living room. That's old furniture that used to belong to Lena's grandparents. Everything is set very close to the ground.

The kitchen counters are also quite small, they come up to mid-thigh, or thereabouts. Lena has a wonderful rice cooker (the plump white gadget on the far left).

Lena painting.

The movie room on the second floor. Lena has a projector.

My bed!

The balcony outside my bedroom (on the right). Lena's bedroom is on the left.

This pic is for anthropological purposes: I have yet to encounter a shower curtain in Vietnam!

Washing machine, bike and laundry hanging out to dry.

So that's that. I like it here very much and am relieved to have found Lena!

A moving market

2008-12-21T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is a little market near Lena's house in the Binh Thanh district. If this were a video, you'd see a lot of squirming going on in these buckets. All the fish are still alive. As I was checking out the specimens, one of the fish jumped out of water and started sloshing around in the gutter.

Those are live lumpy frogs in the net.

I really love the fruit here. I eat the pineapple and papaya chunks with a spicy salt the ladies always serve, presumably for health reasons based on yin yang principles. (I wrote about this a long time ago but am bringing it up again because I am still fascinated by this business of eating salt with fruit! Salt spiced with red pepper no less.)

More pics from Go Vap orphanage

2008-12-19T22:33:00.000-08:00

I spent some time with the terminal kids today, as Stephanie calls them, the ones who are waiting to die in the orphanage. Some of them have been in there for years. I am always amazed by how a few of the more alert kids immediately react when a stranger walks into the room, as if they can feel the air shift with your entrance. Their eyes follow you until you connect with them, and then they smile hugely trying to invite you their way. As soon as you rub their tummy or pet their head or pull their ears -- which is pretty much the extent of activities you can do with most of them -- they start squirming and giggling. It's enough, it seems, just to be touched. But I'd say only a third or fewer are responsive (although I have a feeling if you tried to interact, some of the motionless children would start stirring. Next visit I hope to get up the courage to approach them.)

This little boy looked like an old man, and even had smile lines between his brow. I couldn't believe it -- wrinkles on a small child.

This poor boy was moaning and crying. I was too frightened to interact with him, which I feel horribly about. What disease does he have, where he is permanently coiled like this -- Mum?

Hoi An, and its environs, by day

2008-12-19T04:00:00.001-08:00

(Note: In my fatigue yesterday I kept calling Hoi An Hanoi in my blog entry below! Sorry about the confusion! Two very different places.)

I peddled around Hoi An yesterday, deciding to explore the local area rather than take a bus to the My Son ruins 50 kilometers away to see some Cham temples and monuments -- what's left of them, that is, after the Americans pretty much decimated the ruins during the war. (A tough decision and I'm still debating whether I made the right choice -- wracked with self-doubt as usual!)

Besides karsts, the Vietnamese are keen on their Cham ruins. (The Champa kingdom extended from central Vietnam down to the southern delta between the 7th and 15th centuries, and the Cham grew wealthy with maritime trade, exporting sandalwood (I love sandalwood incense and perfume!) and slaves (less fond of slaves). Part of the Vietnamese fascination with the Cham people, besides I think the whole autochthonous allure, might have to do with their sensual, enigmatic worships of a form of Shiva Hinduism (Shaivism), which they picked up by doing so much trade with India. (Later, after exposure to Arab traders, many Cham adopted Islam. Fickle. Too bad Christian evangelists never got their hands on them.)

Anyway, that's all about the lost trip I never took. Here's some photos of the lowlands around Hoi An.

My bike!
A little home on the banks of a greenish brown river. The sky is forever overcast here. Did the Cham people enjoy clear skies, pre-smog? Or is this monochrome sooty sky an eternal meteorological phenomenon in Vietnam? I'm going to look into this today. One picture I did not include here is the beach -- it's mind-bogglingly gross, strewn with litter and all sorts of crap. Rather sad. As Laura Winthrop said (the girl who insures travelers against being kidnapped), "Plastic bags have been the worst invention for the planet of all time."

Here's some traditional pottery made in a neighboring town of Hoi An, called Thanh Ha. Ceramics -- much better than plastic.

Little chicks in the market. Other fowl sightings of the day: people carrying chickens and one duck upside down ready for slaughter. And I saw a group of men circled around two red and blue cocks, watching them fight. I stopped and looked for a while -- thankfully, the cocks seemed more intent on circling each other with their necks entwined rather than doing any serious damage. (Although one cock did have a bit of a nick on his back that the other bird kept going for. Mmm, sad.)

Back to lovely Hoi An.

I found the K'port of Vietnam!

2008-12-19T03:12:00.001-08:00

I got off the bus in Hoi An (sorry! I kept calling the city Hanoi. Tired.) and stepped into a dark city with narrow, muddy streets lit up with thousands of lanterns. The city is charmingly ancient and teetering on the edge of being moldy and decrepit. But overall it's remarkably well preserved; the government has made sure the city keeps its enchantment so as to reel in the tourists and then milk them of their dollars.

That's OK; it really is. As soon as you leave the luscious, silky downtown of Hoi An and hit the grungy back alleys, it's apparent the people here are still poor. But the Vietnamese merchants' relationship with tourists is uncomfortable. I'll get into this later.

Hoi An, besides being the capital of lanterns, is also the capital of tailors. Every other shop is a clothing store. The sewing ladies often stand on the street and beg you to enter as you walk by -- and the clothes are so beautiful it's hard to resist. They'll size you up and make you whatever you want in one day, for between $15 and $35 mostly. Everything looks enticing: the silk dresses, women's blouses, men's suits, warm wool jackets. Confronted with so many glossy, glimmering smooth and satiny things, in every color imaginable, I actually felt a little sick to my stomach! I didn't buy very much because I didn't bring enough bags. And the photos below don't quite do the trick. It might be because the styles here in my photos are a little outdated.

The woman above was sweet, but I have found people who want your money in Vietnam to be quite aggressive. I can see it bothers other tourists, too. The cyclo drivers, the moped taxi drivers, the restaurant hostesses, the store merchants, the street stand ladies -- they all pester you as you walk by: Please madam, buy something! Do you want a taxi? One hour for bicycle? Welcome, come in and buy something to eat! I wonder if maybe every Vietnamese person who wants to go into business should be required to take a class on international etiquette, so they understand that they're probably losing business by hassling foreigners who mainly just want to be left alone to their private, non-communal, individualistic and miserable selves!

Drippy old stone walls: The Nguyen empire

2008-12-18T04:42:00.000-08:00

I made a brief stop in the city of Huế as I meandered back down south. Huế was the seat of the Nguyen dynasty's Vietnamese empire for 143 years until 1945, when the last emperor, Bao Dai, gave up his throne and handed over power to President Ho Chi Minh.

They were the last great ruling family, and so are tinged with a bit of nostalgia here. But they must have millions of descendants since every third Vietnamese person I meet seems to have the last name Nguyen. (Update: Wikipedia says 40% of the Vietnamese are called Nguyen: "The Nguyễn Dynasty awarded many people the surname Nguyễn during their rule, and many criminals also changed their surname to Nguyễn to avoid prosecution. Thus, many people having this surname are not necessarily related.")

The city was pretty squalid. But I took some photos of the citadel, the emperors' huge walled-in enclosure, which included a Forbidden City! The Forbidden City was once off limits to everyone except the emperors, their concubines and a few trustworthy eunuchs. I never figured out which part was the forbidden part. I did wander into some offices and a lady told me I wasn't allowed and pointed toward the door.

I made a guess at what must have been the Forbidden City and have noted it below.

There were some hedge animals, but I don't think the restorers put a great priority on them, considering how they came out. They're probably nothing like the hedge animals of the Nguyen golden age.

What is this supposed to be? It looks like a cricket?

The sideways dragon was also perplexing. Maybe it is supposed to look as if it is about to take off and soar, a fitting motif for the Nguyen empire? I'll look into this more.
Costumes below.Two very different dragon faces on two outfits, for two different moods maybe. (The seam here makes the dragon look a bit googly-eyed, but the effect must have been intentional since the robe was stitched for a king.)

The Forbidden City! Maybe. It had that feel, though.That's the Forbidden City peeking out above this monster's tail.

I don't know if this romantic path was part of the Forbidden City. I hope so.

And this was once a little cottage in the middle of a small island surrounded by a moat set within the citadel -- maybe, maybe not part of the Forbidden City. This also could have been the place where the Nguyens wrote down their imperial thoughts.

The walkway stones were very slick with moisture and mold. Tourists were constantly slipping, most catching themselves before they fell on their bums. I bet in the old days, the Nguyens had 50 men at least to keep the stones scrubbed dry.This replica of a royal ship (that probably floated down the Perfume River in Hue) reminded me of our infamous little boat that went over the Hiram Falls! Was it called the U.S.S. Enterprise? I can't quite remember.

More karsts, this time by land

2008-12-17T03:29:00.001-08:00

I started off biking down a little lane behind the town of Ninh Binh, south of Hanoi, which turned onto a path along a dike and eventually, after I crossed a couple of bridges and biked down a cow path and through a watery cemetery, I ended up on a wide truck road that was nearly empty. The road twisted for six miles through a hazy landscape of karsts. My bike is below. Every few hundred meters, I passed a little pagoda set into the rocks; this one was surrounded by water and only accessible by a raised pathway.
There is something very haiku-ish about three white blossoms on a dying tree in front of a pagoda! The red flowers would make an inferior poem to the white blossoms, I think.

Little homes.

I am not sure why, but a shot of boats tied up together is the quintessential tourist photograph, no matter where in the world it is. It's like the universal symbol for touristhood.

The sun gets very full and heavy and red at dusk. And it sinks very fast.

Here's a miniature-pagoda grave in the cemetery I passed through. Maybe traditional architecture here mirrors the landscape a bit?

Disclaimer: I photoshopped these a bit because they were quite blown out in the haze! I'm sure there is a better setting for this kind of light.

A few more Halong bay photos to wrap up

2008-12-16T04:42:00.000-08:00

Here's some hazy pre-sunset photos that aren't that spectacular -- you need to be in an overnight boat to really see some colors! Above are some of the hundreds of tourist junks that take visitors around the bay. The tour operators are all faintly crooked, and worsen the suspicions of tourists by wearing cheap, dark suits and playing cards and chain smoking on the boats all day.

Inside the karsts

2008-12-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

Inside the limestone karsts are a few humongous holes! This cave was filled with smooth, cold rock drippings, rock pools, and a fantastic light show that made it seem like an Epcot Center showpiece.

Here you can see a the head of a fleeting friend I made, Laura, from New York City, who works for a firm that insures high-value business travelers in case they get kidnapped and are held for a high ransom or get caught in the middle of a civil war skirmish and need emergency evacuation, and other such emergencies.

Halong Bay blues

2008-12-15T06:09:00.000-08:00

Vietnam is really into its karsts in Halong Bay. They've been named a World Heritage Site twice and had they not been served up with so much blasé touristy attitude, they would be really beautiful.

Ok, the industry around them does not detract fully from their pure loveliness. In the slight haze that hung over the sea today -- which painted everything in the same palette -- each receding layer of rocky outcropping assumed a slightly paler shade of blue.

There are several small communities of businesses and homes in the still waters between the limestone karsts. Even a Sacombank branch -- a big Vietnamese bank -- was floating out there.

A traveling shop. Coconut peanuts were 2,000 dong.

A fisherman's bounty.

Dog update: I've seen a lot of these dogs sniffing around the place up here in the north. They're the same dogs people eat. And the breed clearly serves as pets because they're always hanging around homes and shops without leashes and wagging their tails.

Hanoi Part III

2008-12-14T02:23:00.000-08:00

Hanoi has a lot of beautiful architecture -- leftover French colonial stuff and the modern variation on this -- with an enormous amount of stringy vegetation draped over balconies. I didn't take many good photos of it today (a lot of it has to do with being nervous showing off my camera and clearly being alone.)

But here are some other people's photos that I took from flickr that I can relate to.

Hanoi Part II

2008-12-14T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Vietnamese like songbirds. Supposedly McCain's POW nickname was Songbird because he gave the Vietnamese so much information.

But the birds aren't always happy -- some don't sing, and others neurotically flutter around their cage all day, like the restless blurry prisoner above. But I knew one who lived across the alley from me in Ho Chi Minh City that tweeted regularly and I think cheerfully.

Here's something else pretty: lotus flowers. The flowers, I learned yesterday, are used in a variety of remedies, treating everything from syphilis to smallpox. I cannot figure out when or why the flowers bloom; I've seen it happen just twice in the past five weeks in a pond in Ho Chi Minh City.

Hanoi Part I

2008-12-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

I just arrived here last night and already I can tell I vastly prefer it here to Ho Chi Minh City. In fact, I think I love it here! It feels older, and the streets are narrower, less crowded, less overwhelming and filled with stores selling silk, wooden bowls, lanterns, Buddhist tchotchkes -- everything that's irresistible to tourists. Plus, it is ever so slightly cooler, which makes walking around (in a t-shirt and shorts) much more comfortable. The people, though, find it frigid and I have seen some fur-lined parkas.I wandered around this morning. Here are some photographs. More to come.Hoan Kim Lake above with the Turtle Pagoda. You can walk all around the small green lake, or park your wheelchair by the water.

There is some rivalry between the northerners and southerners, with the southerners assuming a faintly superior attitude overall. But I've so far found the northerners to be much more genial! They also seem to be a bit louder and more emotional, although those are the classic attributes generally ascribed to southerners.

The market on Pho Hang Bac, a little street, below. Prices are higher here, by quite a lot, and people speak more English -- I assume because Hanoi is more popular with tourists?

Dried fish and spices. And myriad styles of tofu below.

Fancy home or something more significant? I can't tell! It's frustrating that so much of what I see is mystifying!
This photo is back lit, but it shows one of the gnarled ancient trees that hang over the streets; one of them I saw this morning was bending so low it almost grazed my head.

Much of life seems to happen in the streets. And a few house cats I saw get to check it all out, but they can't stray farther than their leashes.

A snack. Banh chuoi chung -- it is some kind of fried banana cake, but it's not sweet. Quite delicious and filling! Here I must put a plug in again for Vietnamese food: the mangos, pineapples, peanuts, coffee -- it's all so delicious, always, you never buy a bad piece of fruit here. No bad nuts! It really makes sense to live in a climate where you can grow fresh, outrageously yummy food year round. I wish Maine were more tropical.

This entry should follow the Traditional Medicine Museum entry below but I messed up

2008-12-12T22:44:00.000-08:00

Warning: Ethnographic phalli ahead.

At the Museum of Traditional Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City, my tour guide led me to the rooftop where we entered this little pagoda.It was a replica of a Cham temple. The Cham are an ethnic minority spread out around Southeast Asia -- although in Vietnam, they're concentrated in the southern part of the country. Most Cham are Muslims but a minority practice a unique religion that resembles Hinduism. (I think this is mostly correct info!)

These women here are holding up a large linga symbol, a phallic sign of fertility. I missed most of the juicy details because my tour guide's accent was too thick for me to catch much. The linga dominated the center of the small pagoda; here is its basin.

This plaque reads: "The symbol of belief in sex. The belief in the wish of multiplication of the nature and the people."

I am not sure I believe in the wish of multiplication of too many more people.

I loved this gentle statue of a woman holding a jar, which was tucked away in the corner.

Below is another linga, adorned with many jutting boobies. And that's my reflection, ogling them!

The Museum of Traditional Medicine...

2008-12-12T21:35:00.000-08:00

was open today! And so I walked through the gloomy entrance, the only visitor here this Saturday morning.The building was dimly lit with weak lanterns, and the natural light was filtered by elaborately carved wooden screens, doors and shutters. The railings and stairways were also made of this satiny black wood, which was laden with traditional Vietnamese characters and pictures.

This sign above means long life.

And this symbol stands for happiness, according to my tour guide.

The place basically felt like a shrine to these two old farts below: the founders of Vietnamese medicine.I believe on the left is Tuệ Tĩnh, born in 1330, and the other guy is Hai Thuong Lang Ong Le Huu Trac, who lived in the 1700s and wrote a 66-volume encyclopedia of traditional Vietnamese medicine. Vietnamese medicine is a distinct practice from Chinese medicine, although it's heavily influenced by it.

Traditional Vietnamese medicine uses a lot of aromatic herbs, mushrooms (I'll get to this below), acupuncture, manipulation of Qi energy, and a sprinkling of superstition, like putting turtle stones underneath a stairway's first step, which is supposed to carry you through a long, leisurely-paced life.

Animals of all sizes and temperaments can get bottled up in alcohol and stored in these jars above, my tour guide explained. The museum had a long row of statues depicting the many animals used for medicine, like leopards, deers, snakes, buffalo, elephants -- a number of which I believe are long gone now.

This was a family tree of sorts of the top 500 best Vietnamese doctors of all time. For some reason, there was a blind man being helped by a little boy at the center of the carving. I could not understand the tour guide's explanation.

Okay, coming up is a hugely important mushroom in Vietnamese medicine: Lingzhi (hence the size of the picture).

Here it is in tea form. It's the Mushroom of Immortality, the herb of spiritual potency, and can be used to treat cancer and other diseases. I had a small cup at the museum and it tasted delicious. I will bring some back for the family so we can all be tumor free for a while. And anyone else who wants some, let me know!

Obama and the Vietnam War

2008-12-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

Here's the lead of an article I read in the English daily today:

"HA NOI — Secretary of the Britain-Viet Nam Friendship Society, Len Aldis, has sent a letter to US president-elect Barack Obama, calling on him to bring justice to Vietnamese Agent Orange/Dioxin victims and their families in his first term in the White House."

The article continues, "Aldis called the use of 80 million litres of the toxic chemicals by US troops over large parts of Viet Nam a crime. He said it left a legacy that had traveled down into the third generation of Vietnamese and soon into the fourth."

I suspect that each new U.S. president receives a similar letter, which is quickly tossed into the dustbin.

Although the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange claims that some 3 million Vietnamese people are living with deformities or diseases caused by Agent Orange, the U.S. government continues to withhold compensation for the victims -- despite long-ago promises made in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords to give $3.5 billion in aid. Supposedly children in the affected areas are still being born with birth defects, and there's plenty of hideous photographs and preserved fetuses shown as proof of AO's debilitating effects at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. For very upsetting pictures, go here.

Of course, Washington says there's not enough evidence to link the cases of children born with extra thumbs, cancers, mental retardation and cleft palettes to the deforestation chemical. According to a liberal weekly from Australia called Green Left, Michael Marine, Washington’s former ambassador to Vietnam, claimed just last year that “we still lack accurate research on the causes of many disability cases in Vietnam. It doesn’t mean that I believe and am sure that the people I met aren’t dioxin victims. It only means that there hasn’t been any scientific basis to ascertain the truth.”

Marine continued: “There are two things I want to bring up, which is deformed newborns and malformation. There are many factors that cause these such as nutrition, heredity, disorders caused by engaging in particular professions, or even [their] parents’ age.”

I really hope Obama decides to find a bit of money somewhere to help. I'm amazed that Vietnam has forgiven the United States for the war and our post-war neglect, but I'm grateful nonetheless.

Karaoke night

2008-12-11T04:36:00.000-08:00

Down this strange cavernous bar hallway with its fake stone walls that trick you into imagining you're in some kind of fantastical grotto, and behind the glass door, a bunch of mostly native English speakers sat on soft couches, drank countless beers and sang Karaoke for hours tonight.

They're all the student-teachers in my class. It did not take too long -- just a few drinks and several packs of dried prawn snacks -- for the group to succumb to the quintessential Asian night out: singing and singing and singing.

This is Ben. He graduated with a degree in peace studies from the University of Bradford. I didn't realize it at first, but he actually does know how to create calm.

That's Marta -- she's Bulgarian, dresses in shiny red and black satin pants, and has shockingly blond hair, which is supposedly a no-no in this culture but no one has ever said anything pointed about it to her. When she first introduced herself to the group, she described herself as "Mysterious Marta."

Doug and Lize, from Ottawa, Canada. They're retired and they're newlyweds -- they married this summer. They're traveling the world together for a few years on the savings Doug piled away as a nuclear engineer. Once during class when we had to use an example of the present continuous, he turned to Lize and said, "I'm looking at a beautiful woman."

Lena and Ben. Lena's the one who found the karaoke bar, which is called Nice, on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. I think at this point they were singing Strawberry Fields Forever. The Beatles make perfect Karaoke-night songs as all their lyrics seem fitting for evenings like these:

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

Always no sometimes I think it's me, but you know I know when it's a dream.
I think, er No, I mean, er Yes but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
!!

Sorry, I couldn't resist another graphic entry about alley food!

2008-12-07T01:21:00.000-08:00

By the way, Happy Birthday to MUM!

I have to say it again, this woman at the end of the alley is a wonderful cook.
She is on the corner of an alley and De Tham street -- I will try to get the name of the alleyway so future Saigon travelers can find her. Today she whipped me up some yellow and white rice noodles and morning glory greens, and sprinkled an eggy noodle-type thing on top with peanuts and dried hot-pink prawns.

Here is the even closer close-up. Funny that food from this perspective looks vaguely obscene and somewhat unappetizing! Maybe it's the proximity to delight?

The Museum of Traditional Medicine...

2008-12-06T21:28:00.001-08:00

...was closed today. I'll have to go back next Saturday.

Meanwhile, I stopped in at a pagoda. Many fake animals here; it finally dawned on me that all the animal sculptures might have to do with beliefs around reincarnation? Or a reminder to practice loving kindness for all living things.

And here are some more little souls.

I walked down a street filled with pet stores, or rather people selling dogs and cats in cages on the sidewalk. They were definitely meant to be cuddled and not cooked!

These dogs were lucky and got to sleep on top of the cage rather than inside it.

A French Vietnamese jazz concert with senior citizens

2008-12-06T03:43:00.000-08:00

Lena picked me up for an afternoon jazz concert at the French Cultural Institute -- which is the place in Ho Chi Minh City to watch really good movies, according to Lena (all French subtitled in Vietnamese, however.)

The musicians turned out to be French chanteurs, most of the them in their 60s, with one Vietnamese-French guy in his 70s.

One duo sang a slightly jazzy version of Yesterday, by the Beatles. In a French accent, the singer below with the biggish hair introduced a shocking number of "zzz's" into the song.

The youngish Vietnamese-French woman second from the right in the pic below had the most powerful, beautiful voice and sang a song in Vietnamese, a sad song about a man who had cheated on her. Her shoes, which you can't really see here, sparkled in the stage lights and looked as if they were encrusted with diamonds.

Afterward, we went to a posh bar down the street and saw a famous Vietnamese film director. But Lena couldn't remember his name. Here's Lena and Thanh Thanh, who works for the BBC in Vietnam, which, despite its BBC initials, is controlled by the state. She's working on a documentary about sex workers and protected sex, and she's filled with stories about pole dancers, transgendered performers in Hanoi, and the good advice the prostitutes have given her about pleasing clients! (She says they say it's all about conversation.)

And to top off my cultural afternoon, I returned home to Ngoc Hotel to find Chau's paintings drying on the table. I think they're lovely. She says they're knock offs. And she wouldn't let me photograph her.

Saturday morning baby trip

2008-12-05T21:54:00.000-08:00

Stephanie rounded up people this morning to visit the orphanage again in Go Vap. This time I spent some time in the "Older Toddler Room," with the kids who truly are the unwantables. I'm not sure why some kids make it out of the orphanage and some don't -- like the healthy, bright boy above who latched onto my legs and wouldn't let go (until I took him to the hallway swing with two others).

These three kids could have kept swinging for hours. They sat here subdued and quiet as I pushed the chair back and forth.

Children with deformities or disease, it's more obvious why they never made it home with someone. The boy on the right couldn't walk unless he was holding onto your hand. His knees are dirty and bruised from crawling around on the floor. He was, though, very affectionate with the other children, who would let him hold onto them as he tried to stand up and move around.

Walking into these rooms is hard. The children -- the ones who are alert that is -- jump to attention, make eye contact, smile hugely and lift up their arms, some of them with a look of panic that you're not going to notice them.

But then there are the kids who assume people won't notice them.

When I first arrived the boy below was tied up in his crib, with a piece of rope around his ankle. I have no idea why. The nurse undid the knot when I said I wanted to pick him up. He's tiny, the size of an infant almost, although his face looks much older.

This boy could not speak -- I don't think anyone has taught him language -- but he tried to communicate with me anyway. He kept saying, "cuckoocuckoocuckoo," and every time I repeated this back to him he started squirming with laughter. He also made another noise, "tchitchitchitchi." I'm not sure what the difference in meaning was because when I said "tchitchitchitchi" back to him, I got the same giggly response. I taught him another sound, "rah," which he repeated back to me but seemed somewhat doubtful of.

Some kids from the last visit were gone, like this baby above (who a fairly paternal and nurturing reader of this blog decided should be named Roland). Stephanie says he either was at the doctor's, had been adopted or had died. I assume he didn't die since he was one of the more robust babies in the room. I actually think it's likely someone snatched him up because he's so cute.

Today at the orphanage a loud, rude American lady was baby shopping, bound I think to make any small child's life more miserable than had he or she been left at Go Vap! (But I was glad to see an American there after reading the NYTimes article about the difficulties Americans face adopting Vietnamese babies.)

Several conversations about dogs

2008-12-04T02:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in class, a Zimbabwean student-teacher named Pippa told me she was going to return to Zimbabwe after the course ends next week. "I'm not attached to Vietnam," she complained, and then listed a few reasons for her disfavor -- one of which was the practice here of eating dog. I asked her how many dogs the Vietnamese really eat, and she frowned and said, "A lot. You're probably eating it in your pork curry."
"So the little dogs tied up in my alley, will they be eaten?" I asked.
"Most likely," she said.
I was reminded, too, that early on in my stay here, I had been kept awake by a baying dog for about a week. I told Pippa that when I finally began to get accustomed to it, the crying stopped one night and never resumed.
"You see," she said.

Later I asked Lena, my friend who was born here, whether the Vietnamese eat a lot of dogs. She seemed slightly put out that I had brought it up and said, "No, not a lot. It's very uncommon." She paused, though, and added, "In the north, they eat it a lot more. But in the south" -- where Lena is from -- "no, not very often."
"The dogs then here, the ones I see tied up, they won't be eaten?"
"No, no!" she reassured me. But then she said that dog-snatching in the north was occasionally reported and that she had personally heard of people whose dogs had mysteriously vanished.

Since this conversation, I've noticed many more small dogs in the alleyways and a few more on the streets where they keep some women vendors company. They are often very small -- Chihuahuas are popular -- and very surly. Perhaps this helps keep the dog snatchers away?

Tonight I asked Vien -- the hotel owner's son -- whether he liked dogs. He didn't know how to answer the question at first. "What breed?" he asked. So I clarified the eating breed by making hand-to-mouth gestures. (Pippa the Zimbabwean told me that during one of her first lessons she had to teach "likes and dislikes." When she asked the class whether they liked cats and dogs -- a discussion question posed innocuously by the English textbook -- the students wanted her to clarify whether she was asking about dogs or "hounds," and Pippa, who is a vegetarian, said she got a bit upset.)

When Vien was satisfied I was talking about food -- and after he had told me his favorite breed of dog was a bulldog -- he said that he had eaten dog last Sunday at a restaurant with his friends. He says he probably eats the meat once a week -- but clarified that the dog he eats is bred on a farm, and he showed me a picture on the Internet that I can't find now, but it looked like a tough and scrappy yellow dog that you might see in northern Maine hunting with the locals.

However, the plot thickens. I just ran downstairs to ask his sister Chau what type of dog is bred on a farm to try to bring up the same photo. After a confusing five or six minutes of conversation that involved a lot of drawing of dogs with little ears, big ears and floppy ears as I tried to pin down the Vietnamese name for the dog that's raised for meat, she finally said, "No, no. No type. Because in Vietnam we eat all dog."

According to wikipedia and a few other Internet sources, Vietnamese men in particular like to eat dog because it's meant to enhance virility. Consumed at the end of the month, like Vien did on Nov. 30, dog is also meant to bring good luck.

There's much more to investigate around dog eating! More to come. I read about an animal rights group in China trying to discourage dog eating there, and in Vietnam, Vien said there's plenty of people who don't think humans should be eating the type of animal they also like to keep around the house as a surrogate family member.

Cà phê sữa đá and 'cà phê sữa nóng'

2008-12-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

Cà phê sữa đá means iced coffee and 'cà phê sữa nóng' means hot coffee. I've mentioned the Vietnamese coffee a few times already, but I believe this drink could be one of the reasons why Vietnam will inevitably ascend to global powerhouse. It's powerful and fortifying, rich and black, almost syrupy. And it's more addictive than any other caffeinated drink I've had -- and that means sales! It's brewed strong and straight into a cup and mixed with condensed milk. (Although you can request to have it without the milk.) You have to get used to swallowing almost the whole cup in one slurp -- the Vietnamese prefer espresso-sized portions -- which means that the Americans I know are constantly buying small coffees throughout the day to equal one healthy cup of Starbucks.

Mrs. Trang, pictured here, makes her living selling coffee to the locals living in this alley. I think she must be a single mom because I never see any man around. She has a little daughter about four years old. Her coffee is especially delicious, and she sells you a small amount in a plastic cup with a straw for 5,000 dong.

The French hooked the Vietnamese on coffee, and eventually, thanks to government subsidies, Vietnam became the world's number two coffee producer after Brazil, according to Wikipedia. Privatized enterprise in the last few years has now also supposedly boosted the quality of the beans, and Vietnam's gourmet coffee is starting to spread, and is exported widely in southeast Asia.

The coffee is grown in the micro-climate of the Buon Me Thuot region in the central highlands. I can't find a good map at the moment and must run to class! The blue section gives a rough indication of the location of the Central Highlands.

The alleyways

2008-11-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to convey a sense of some of Ho Chi Minh's back alleys. This is a work in progress since I struggle with bringing out my camera in fear of irritating people. (Or getting my camera stolen.) My photos here also don't quite get at the calmness you find when you turn into one of these winding mazes off of the crazy, congested streets outside.

The alleys feel relatively quiet and still but there's an enormous amount of activity going on, starting at dawn and continuing well after dark. Every door is open, and people always seem to be hanging around in their front living rooms -- many of which have been turned into some kind of business, like a store, food stand, coffee place, Internet cafe, beauty salon, laundry service, tailor, etc. And people spill out of their homes into the alleys, squatting on these ubiquitous tiny plastic stools, eating and drinking and talking, or just sitting by themselves.

So these photos aren't too beautiful; I took them tonight hurriedly because I felt self-conscious, and at one point I was scolded, which made me feel horrible. A difficult task!

Lots of babies

2008-11-28T21:33:00.000-08:00

I went to the Go Vap Orphanage in Ho Chi Minh this morning with Stephanie and Alison, two women who work for my school. Stephanie goes every Saturday morning and is always looking for people to join her. We held and fed the babies, said hello to the terminally ill children and walked by the corpse of a baby who had died and was covered with a sheet. The kids were desperate for our affection and attention.

When we put them back again into their metal cribs, they cried.

This room below, pictured in the next two photos, is reserved for the kids who are going to die. Many of them had Hydrocephalus, a few had Cerebral palsy and Spina bifida, and others I think must have had cancer. Stephanie at one time was a medical school student, so she was trying to diagnose the children.

Stephanie says many of the children are abandoned by prostitutes. Some are left behind by parents who can't afford to keep them, especially if they're ill. Due to official wrangling between U.S. and Vietnam, and tight laws meant to protect children from being sold to parents or traffickers, it's difficult for Americans to adopt Vietnamese kids.

This flower -- an Iris it looks like? -- was growing outside the orphanage.

(I didn't bring any babies home with me, by the way!)

More che, and a day for the dead

2008-11-28T06:34:00.000-08:00

This che -- swallowed yesterday after lunch -- was thick with licorice jellies, and on top you can see specks of a black seaweed. Other ingredients: unidentified little dough balls that looked like fish eggs with a black speck in the middle.

Here's Lena: my source for all che facts!

Vien, the son of the hotel proprietor, tells me that twice a month, his relative here (someone other than his grandmother but he didn't clarify) offers up a few plates of food outside the front door and burns incense for the family's ancestors. (Vien is studying acting at the university, but he and his sister both dutifully help their mom run her two guesthouses.)

I saw several of these little shrines on my way back from school today. I wonder why incense is burned? Does the smoke purify the environment so souls can return to earth?

Maybe Daddy, Grandpa, Cammie, Grandaddyaddy and Grannieannie all would be pleased if we cooked them some food and laid it out at Mum's place (as long as we kept Ben from eating it first).

Here's what wikipedia says about the tradition of burning incense: "Incense fragrances can be of such great strength that they obscure other, less desirable odors. This utility led to the use of incense in funerary ceremonies because the incense could smother the scent of decay. Another example of this use, as well as of religious use is the Botafumeiro, which, according to tradition, was installed to hide the scent of the many tired, unwashed pilgrims huddled together in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela."

Xin chao em!

2008-11-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

Cecily is not Vietnamese, nor is it likely she's ever eaten Vietnamese food or seen a rice paddy or probably even considered this place in her rabbity little two-year-old's head, but I am going to include her nonetheless in my Vietnamese trip blog because I think she's cute and I miss her!

(Xin chao em is "hello little girl" ... but there is a missing accent.) If there were more Cecilies, I'd be very pleased. But here in Vietnam, there are many more little boys than little girls. Viet Nam News, an English language daily, ran this story recently: Births put yin and yang out of balance.

The paper says, "Males are beginning to outnumber females so rapidly in Viet Nam that an estimated 3 million men are likely to have difficulty finding a mate in about 30 years. Statistics show the ratio was 105 boys for each 100 girls in 1979. This increased to 107 boys to each 100 girls in 1999 and 112 to 100 last year."

The story hinted that ultrasounds and abortions were behind the trend, and indeed, the aborting of female fetuses is a tragic and persistent problem here. But there may be more than misogyny behind this mystery.

In 2004, a Harvard graduate student, Emily Oster, became "intrigued by several small-scale studies ... that suggested that if either parent was a carrier of the hepatitis B virus, the couple were more likely to have male children," the New York Times reported in 2006.

Oster's continued research revealed that countries with higher rates of hepatitis B in the 80's, such as China and India, also tended to be the countries with the highest number of missing women. Oster concluded that hepatitis B could account for about 45 percent of the "missing women" in China, Egypt, western Asia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

The NYTimes is quick to point out, though, that the widespread distribution of the Hep B vaccine should have reversed the sex ratio imbalance. But in fact, the male-female imbalance in Asia has only become worse in recent years.

The Times continues, "The chief reason, it seems, is ultrasound: if a fetus is female, she is more likely to be sex-selectively aborted. Ena Singh, the assistant representative of the U.N. Population Fund in that country, describes the misuse of ultrasound as 'an unholy alliance between tradition and technology.'"

"While Japan breaks the trend with signs of girl preference, countries like Vietnam are joining the ranks of the girl avoiders: in one province there are 128 boys for every 100 girls. Such numbers have led analysts to worry about rising violence, more trafficking of women for marriage and more prostitution."

"Population experts caution that valuing girls may take a cultural sea change. Perhaps the more than 20 million lonely, surplus men predicted in China in 2020 will be the ones to bring it about."

Viet Nam News noted that some appear to be optimistic about the gender discrepancy. (I have often noticed a positive lilt to articles in this paper.) "My two daughters will have an abundance of choices, not like the girls of my generation," it quoted Nguyen Viet Ha, 30, as saying. The accountant also speculated that the imbalance might make Vietnamese men "less self-important."

And the paper interviewed the seemingly dotty Professor Le Thi, who researches gender and families at an unnamed university. She saw the relative paucity of women as an opportunity for self-improvement (although I don't quite follow her rationale). The paper paraphrased her as saying, "Women would do better if they worked to perfect their attractiveness to the opposite sex rather than waiting for men." She told the reporter,"My research finds that women’s morality is most appreciated and followed by a stable occupation and good health."

The newspaper summed up: "Women were born with their looks but had countless ways to perfect themselves."

So here's hoping that Cecily will pursue those countless ways to perfection! Just kidding! We love you just the way you are!

The many wonders of che

2008-11-26T03:43:00.000-08:00

My days are filled with mostly boring ESL stuff, so I am forced to write about small things I notice on the street. But focusing on the everyday stuff, the nibbles and bits, is one way toward everlasting peace I've heard! I have discovered che (I bought it for 25 cents from a street stand) and once again I'm struck by this feeling that though Americans adore their sugary coffee and other dessert-like drinks -- a desire whetted undoubtedly by the rise of Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts -- the Vietnamese are so much more advanced than us on this front.

Che, sometimes also called the rainbow drink, is basically the equivalent of a shake you might have for dessert, but it's also very refreshing and packed with good, but not certain, prospects for health. (I've neglected the accent on che. I have to figure out how to do accents in my word program.) It's wildly popular here.

Lena tells me there are many varieties -- almost an infinite number of them it seems -- but the one I had, pictured here, contained seaweed, tapioca pearls, sugared black beans and green mung beans, ginger syrup, a mint green sticky rice mush, licorice and jelly. The whole assortment of small, chewy things was topped with a few spoonfuls of coconut milk. My drink was served with ice, but you can find hot varieties as well: like hot yam che. Other ingredients can be red beans, pomegranate seeds, dates, lotus seeds, dumplings, mango, water lily bulbs, grapefruit, bananas, and the list goes on and on.

A rainy start to the winter monsoon

2008-11-25T03:51:00.000-08:00

This boy stood here contemplating the torrential afternoon rain shower in Ho Chi Minh City for many minutes.I hope this cute little boy does not break out in a rash. (Note: He several times lay down in the puddle after splashing around; he didn't fall, like one viewer thought!)

Why is it still raining? The hot, dry season should have started already, complains Lena, who is from here. She worries that climate change is messing with the monsoons. But I'm wondering if the downpours we've been having for the past week are not too abnormal because we're still in transition?

Vietnam’s winter monsoon– the dry season -- starts roughly mid-November and blows around until the end of March. The arid winds start off cold, born from icy high-pressure zones above eastern Asia before arcing over Siberia and China. They carry a chill with them to northern Vietnam, according to the book “Vietnam: A Natural History.” (No chill for the weary in the south, however! Except from my delicious iced espresso with a splash of condensed milk in the morning. Pic of the woman who makes it for me to come. She runs a little coffee bar out of her home two doors down in the alley where I'm living.)

The summer monsoon gets going from June through September, with moist winds streaming up from the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Thailand southwest of here toward China’s mid-section. Along the way, they dump heavy daily rains onto Vietnam. Summer is typhoon time, as well.

A mundane shopping trip, with no pics of any stores

2008-11-23T01:06:00.001-08:00

Lena, who is from Vietnam and went to university in the states and is studying to be an ESL teacher, took me to a cheap place to buy clothes called Saigon Square, and later to Lucky Plaza. The shopping excursion wasn't very lucky. Along the way, we saw this fat furry sausage on the street. Here's a close-up.

Below is a pic of Ben and Lena, which I've included to tell Mum about Ben, who was a peace studies student at the University of Bradford and knew about Grandaddyaddy. Lena's helping Ben with some of the tonal sounds of Vietnamese here. We met him for lunch at his cousin's cafe, which had an exciting, extensive menu of dishes that it didn't actually have the ingredients for, such as a brie, artichoke and pesto sandwich. It did have rice, beef, chicken, tofu and green beans, so that is what we ate.

Finally, Lena and I drove down this street lined with party banners. She said there was some type of government conference going on. The party is not terribly popular here. The banner says something like, A warm welcome to the delegates from the Fatherland Front Office.

Oh, last but not least on this uneventful, overcast day, I am including a picture of my very simple hotel room after having requests from both Mum and Brian to see it (I'm not sure why, but that's OK, I appreciate the interest!). It looks quite drab, but it actually has its charms. Below this pic is a view at night of the bright Buddhist shrine in someone's apartment as seen from my window.

Dried squid, koh muc (spelled without accents)

2008-11-21T22:35:00.000-08:00

I've had a request to identify these hanging flags with dangling tentacles. Mrs. Loan, the owner of my hotel, has explained that these are dried squid cut in half and dried in the sunshine. You can eat them -- maybe nibble on them? -- with beer or wine. I've yet to try one!

Toxic air pollutants and beauty ideals

2008-11-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

The air in Ho Chi Minh City is a potent mixture of fly ash, dirt, diesel smoke and dried raw sewage, according to The Word, an Engish magazine printed here. Before reading this article, I had figured I was breathing in mostly exhaust and perhaps an assortment of factory emissions, so I was a little put out to discover dehydrated fecal matter was another airborne possibility! Consequently, the Vietnamese try to protect themselves by wearing face masks when they ride their scooters. The Word says, though, that most of these masks don’t help, and you really need a particulate respirator.

Women in particular go to great lengths to cover their faces, arms, necks and hands while they’re on their bikes, partly to try to prevent inhaling the toxic smog, and partly because they’re chronically concerned about maintaining the whiteness of their skin. Mrs. Trang, who is one of my students and took me to play tennis this morning, explained to me that the Vietnamese woman’s never-ending battle to obtain and keep her pearly skin in this hot, (mostly?) sunny climate does not help attract men. She’s decided (and at 62 years old, her observations are worth something here) that men don’t care much whether their girlfriend is light or dark, and that the only ones who notice skin shades are other women. (Mrs. Trang’s opinion was almost immediately contradicted by a 33-year-old female tennis player who said, out of earshot of Mrs. Trang, that men are indeed more attracted to women with pale skin.)

As far as I can make out, the men, when they make an effort to notice at all and risk looking up and around in this jammed city, seem to pay most attention to well-dressed women, especially women in heels and hot pants!

Banh mi and some rice stuff

2008-11-20T04:55:00.000-08:00

Today I had banh mi (spelled here without accents) for breakfast, a Vietnamese sandwich that is one of the few French customs the people here decided was palatable enough to adopt and adapt, along with strong, dark coffee (which is often served with sweet condensed milk on ice, way better than those thick, sugary Starbucks drinks! But just as gruesomely bad for you). For more on banh mi and the system justification theory, read this review of Kim's Cafe in Portland, Maine by a political theorist/food critic gone amok.

Okay, truth be told, banh mi is a whole lot of bread with not so many ingredients inside. (If you order it without meat. But I found a stand that sells one with cheese, veg, pickle and chili for about 60 cents.) Even better than banh mi is this dish below. (Warning: glistening sliminess ahead.) The woman with the food stand at the end of my alley makes these rice patties and cakes that she then serves with this sauce pictured here (I'm going to research this in greater depth this weekend. I know there's chili and green onion in there.) Although the rice patties are fairly bland, she slightly sweetens the thicker rice cake with coconut milk, and then sprinkles peanuts over the whole kit and caboodle. An Australian woman I met tonight who was sitting and eating here says she has only ordered meals from this one spot since arriving in Ho Chi Minh two days ago. And then she admitted she only travels to eat, which sounds reasonable, otherwise there is little reward for such a hugely tiresome endeavor.

Yin yang, more food

2008-11-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Beware, photos of grotesque dishes below that were really delicious but look hideous here!

The other day I had lunch with some other foreigners and we were served french fries with a small dish of salt to accompany them. Someone dribbled the salt onto the fries, and only when we bit in did we realize that we had been served sugar. As I chewed I decided it was not awful, the salty fry with the sweetness. Two days later, I bought a bowl of fruit for breakfast and the woman made up a plate for me with a small amount of salt flavored with hot pepper to go with my pineapple and papaya. (Left on dish.) It wasn't so good this time.

This woman cooks at the end of my alley, and she makes the most delicious unidentifiable food! ...Although I'm zeroing in on the ingredients. It probably doesn't have enough vitamins and minerals to keep me from contracting Dengue fever, but it's yummy. (This photo is washed out...very smoky and I am finding that I can't upload edited images for some reason.)

This seems like it might be a fairly reliable essay on Vietnamese food.

An exemplary comrade

2008-11-19T05:40:00.001-08:00

I'm quite busy in my course and being a touch confused. Here's an odd story in the daily English language newspaper.

SOC TRANG — A farmer in the southern province of Soc Trang has been
nominated for the Guinness Records Viet Nam, because of his 30-year
obsession with the life and times of President Ho Chi Minh.

Nguyen Van Nhung, who lives in Thoi An Hoi Commune, Ke Sach District
has spent the last three decades collecting Ho Chi Minh memorabilia,
including over 1,500 photos, thousands of articles, paintings and
poems by the national icon. "I've been fascinated with Uncle Ho since
I was a child," Nhung says. "My grandmother used to tell me stories
about him, as did soldiers stationed in our town. I developed a deep
respect for our leader when I was quite young."

As a poor farmer, Nhung often worries about getting enough to eat, but
he insists his library of President Ho documents is his solace in
life.

To read more: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=03CUL181108

Ominous clouds

2008-11-18T04:54:00.000-08:00

We watched this huge storm slip by Ho Chi Minh City without causing a ruckus; it merely produced a smattering of rain drops. The dark clouds moved fast. Here's one of the few articles I could find about the storm...I can't search for any news with Google's new function and a few times I've been denied access to certain web pages that seem fairly innocuous to me.

HANOI - TROPICAL storm Noul, or Red Sky (or possibly Sun), unroofed homes, destroyed crops and sunk more than 100 unmanned boats in southern Vietnam, but spared Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong delta rice bowl, the government said on Tuesday.

The storm was downgraded into a tropical low pressure system as it made landfall late on Monday, after authorities earlier issued storm alerts, called ships ashore, closed schools and evacuated about 90,000 coastal residents.

Two people were killed during what was the tenth major storm of Vietnam's typhoon and storm season when they were electrocuted while preparing a house near the resort town of Nha Trang, authorities said.

Vietnam has repeatedly suffered heavy storms this year which brought the worst flooding in decades to the capital Hanoi in recent weeks, while tidal surges have inundated large areas of Ho Chi Minh City.

The rains that hit Hanoi and north-central Vietnam this month, killing at least 82 people, also destroyed more than 180,000 houses and 245,000 hectares of winter crops, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

The Vietnam Red Cross and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on November 12 launched an appeal for four million dollars (S$6.1 million) in relief aid for nearly 300,000 people in northern Vietnam, VNA said. -- AFP

A sweaty hike to a sacred spot that might or might not pay off

2008-11-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

Here's an long and admittedly boring account of a hike I took this weekend! (Pics below.)

I took public transportation Sunday to go west, toward the Cambodian border, where the sole mountain of this region is located. I headed to the local bus station, which was teeming with people of course, and then waited in suspense for more than 45 minutes to see whether my bus would arrive. It did; the bus driver hardly stopped for me to jump on before swinging back out into traffic.

The ride went on and on, through the endless congested sprawl of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, before reaching the countryside. I was given some bad information from a well-meaning passenger to get off at a market in the middle of nowhere. But there are many ways to the same destination, and I was ushered to another ramshackle green bus to continue on toward Nui Ba Den, or Black Lady Mountain. The mountain was named after a young Buddhist girl living nearby who killed herself rather than get married. Years later, a Buddhist priest living on the mountain claimed to have seen her ghost and built the Black Virgin pagoda halfway up the mountain in honor of her spirit (according to a couple different Internet sources). (I did a quick search to figure out how the mountain came to be, scientifically speaking, but couldn't find anything right off.)

I was glad for this bus detour through the backroads of Vietnam because I got to see, finally, rice paddies, cattle, herons and a lot of duck chicks swimming in the watery landscape. The colors are beautiful, yellows and greens of all shades, and the water and its reflections seem to add another dimension to the whole scene. Halfway through the ride I looked to my right and could see Nui Ba Den rising like a blue gumdrop in the hazy distance, a geographic anomaly in the flat, waterlogged land. (No photos; I didn't whip out my camera because I was too self-conscious. Must work on that.)

When I arrived, I hopped on the back of a shady taxi driver’s moped (he later got very angry with me when I demanded he stick to our agreed-on fee) and traveled the last three kilometers to the mountain, which is now a park with a 50 cent entrance fee. Little about this place has been left in its natural state, and I started trudging up the stone staircase to the pagoda, passing the trinket and drink stalls and small shrines along the way. Old woman in flip-flops and people in smart clothes were all walking up…the Vietnamese are not put off by a sweaty, steep climb like the Americans! Despite all the sideline attractions and many climbers, the hike is still peaceful, with wide shaded steps and glimpses of views every once in a while.

Like the other park I visited Saturday, this one had many fake animals (and a few captured ones in a small zoo, like a long, fat python and an alligator). Many native mammals in Vietnam are endangered -- at least 42 mammals, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Vietnam. But at least we don’t have to worry about preserving fake ones or their habitat.

Here’s the pagoda. The trail continues to the summit, which I'll do another day. You can't see it in this photo, but many of the pilgrims (or tourists) are hanging out on the benches around the shrine, somewhat spent from the hundreds of steps just taken.The inside. In the last picture, you might be able to make out that the monk is smoking a cigarette while he fiddles with the statues.
That is a neon halo behind the buddha's head that flashes different colors every few seconds.

At first I thought it was odd the monk was smoking inside the pagoda, but then I saw this Buddha on the mountain.It seems to me he is the Buddha of vice? He is also wearing hipster sneakers and his daemon looks like it wants to eat some small creature nearby.

Some of the people along the route asked me to take their photo.

These little girls put their fingers in their cheeks when I asked them to smile.

I met this puppy on the stairs.

And I took a picture of these chicks hanging out together on some beach chairs.

Saigon at night

2008-11-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

An afternoon in the park

2008-11-15T07:08:00.000-08:00

Today I spent the afternoon at a park near Ho Chi Minh City with Ruth and Patrick. Urban parks across the world have a common appeal: they all, or I assume most, offer a highly designed, placid sanctuary away from the ceaseless activity and weird humanity of a big city. But this park, despite having the recognizable serenity, beauty and gently curving pathways of many others, was a bit unusual. Mixed up in the place were ornate Buddhist shrines, tiny gingerbread cottages for rent, and big fake animals, as well as skeletal real ones locked up in muddy pens (I didn’t take photos of the real animals because I knew some people reading this would not be able to stomach such pitiful creatures. So I took pictures of the fake ones, which were pretty cute.)

2008-11-15T07:06:00.001-08:00

Pre-park: breakfast in Saigon. I have had a request for photos of meals, which often seem to come out as badly as photos of people caught mid-bite (at least mine do). But here is my breakfast today, and though it looks oily, too orange and has big chunks of carbohydrates floating in it, it tasted like hope and change in a bowl! Yum! Next to the bowl is the French coffee the Vietnamese like; they brew it into your cup on the table. The breakfast menu listed this dish as bread with curry, $1.10, and it was gingery, coconutty and curry-y. Really the best curry I’ve ever had. And I like eating curry with bread. Brav-Oh!

2008-11-15T07:05:00.001-08:00

As a snack for us to take to the park, women at a street stand chopped up grapefruits, which have these tough, thick green rinds.

2008-11-15T07:03:00.000-08:00

A taxi driver’s good-luck charms.

2008-11-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

The taxi driver drove us out to a park a bit north of Saigon called Buu Long Mountain. I’ve added a picture of the park’s Long An (Dragon Lake), which is the reason why Buu Long is nicknamed “Halong Bay of the south,” after the famous Halong Bay in north Vietnam that makes it into almost every Vietnamese tourist promotion. (Halong Bay has the jutting limestone rock structures with hairy grass on top that are often photographed at sunset with traditional boats silhouetted against the sky.) But these rocks are really no comparison.

2008-11-15T06:54:00.001-08:00

We caught a newlywed couple just outside the park.

2008-11-15T06:52:00.001-08:00

The bride’s dress was the same color as the park’s dragon gate.

2008-11-15T06:50:00.001-08:00

This park felt empty; there were hardly any people in it. I did see two stray cats, though, the first I’ve seen in Vietnam.

2008-11-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

The Vietnamese like their religious idols bright, colorful and preferably plated with gold.

2008-11-15T06:32:00.000-08:00

The park had many surprises, such as this Jurassic Park corner. A few couples were kissing on benches, half hidden by trees and reptilian snarls.

2008-11-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

Down the hill was the lake, where these flirtatious swans were waiting.

2008-11-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

Ruth and I rented a swan for 30 minutes to paddle around. It is remarkable what people do to be entertained. But I was sufficiently content in the swan on this lake, for a short time at least, to believe that the creators of this experience were very skilled.

2008-11-15T06:05:00.001-08:00

While we drank some orange juice at a lakeside cafe to refuel after the rigorous swan paddle, we watched another newlywed couple being photographed.

2008-11-15T05:59:00.000-08:00

The bride was beginning to look a bit weary by the end of the shoot. As soon as it was over, the bride and groom ripped off their traditional clothes and the groom lit up a cigarette. (Lu -- I am adding this other photo showing how the photographer reached into the frame of my shot to grab the bride's head and tilt it just so.)