An exemplary comrade

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

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

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

An afternoon in the park

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.)

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!

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.