Princess Vespa and Company

Lone Starr: What is this?  I said 'take only what you need to survive...'
Princess Vespa: It's my industrial-strength hair-dryer, and I can't live without it!

Spaceballs (1987)                          



When I was young I went on a mission trip with my mom to Mexico*.  During the orientation, the trip organizers pounded the notion of the "Ugly American" into us.  "You do NOT want to be an Ugly American!"  They said this because even though we would only be two miles inside Mexico, we would find ourselves in another culture entirely, and we would encounter poverty like we'd never seen in our cushy, sheltered American lives.   

*Yes it's true.  Mom forced me to join her on a Christian mission.  Spending a week amongst Jesus-Lovin' Southerners in 120 degree heat wasn't a sunny prospect for 17-year-old me.  I whined and moaned for months beforehand.  This may be the only time in my life that either parent has ever forced me to do anything (other than the usual room cleaning and dishwashing that comes with becoming a contributing member of society).  She was right.  That trip (and the two subsequent ones I took during following summers) was one of the most profound experiences of my life.  I found that I could ignore the religion (no one expects a 17 year old boy to sing "Awesome God") and just appreciate doing something good for someone for no reason other than it is the right thing to do.

Last week I had to spend the night away from home with my coworkers for a series of lengthy meetings.  Two people who work on the project from our home office in the US flew over for these meetings.  In order protect the largely innocent, we'll call them Man and Woman. 

Princess Vespa is my new name for Man.  If the humor found in this monicker is lost on you, feel free to stop here and go watch Mel Brooks' 1987 classic Spaceballs (go ahead, I'll wait).  I’ve known a lot of soft and whiny people in my life, but I have never met a man as wimpy as him**.  During our one night stay he:

• complained at least a dozen times about the heat, but appeared at the meetings in a long-sleeved black shirt, black pants and black shoes, when he knew we would be standing outside for hours and hours.  You are not Al Pacino.  Or Johnny Cash for that matter.
• complained about the hotel we were booked in starting before we even checked in.  It was rustic, yes, but by no means crappy.  You would think we were staying in the Bates Motel the way he was dreading it.  This is a four-star beach resort, mind you.
• asked “what rooms are available” when we checked in, despite knowing that rooms had already been assigned before he came to town.  Then insisted on being shown his room before accepting it.  You're just going to have to take my word for it when I say there aren't any places nicer than this around.  There's not a Hampton Inn at the next exit.
• went through a laundry list of issues his room had last time to the front desk clerk.  He bitched breathlessly and at length while half a dozen people waited quietly behind him in line; as if we all don’t have these same issues; and they were keeping the “good western rooms” secret from him.  Bear in mind that these complaints came at the tail end of a day when I got up at 4:45am to make the 6:00 ferry and spent the next 14 hours either traveling or sitting in high-pressure meetings and presentations.
• The bathroom is open to the outside!
• I had to take a cold shower!
• My bed had mosquito netting!  There were mosquitos IN my room!
• The bathroom had live a gecko on the wall! 
• What kind of hotel has to provide guests a can of Raid inside their room?
• "This place is a fucking dump."

It was embarrassing to watch Man interact with the local Vietnamese.  It was like being nine years old, going to a friend's house to spend the night and having the friend get into a yelling match with his parents.  You (or at least I did at the time) want to crawl into a corner and die.   He complained loudly and continuously to us in front of the hotel staff, who all speak English; laughing about what a stupid and backward place it is at check-in, dinner, breakfast and checkout.  He did this while holding the four (FOUR!) bags he brought for a ten day trip.  He carried more luggage than Woman.  He had more bags than I brought when we moved to Vietnam (I had three). Dude, it’s VIETNAM.  It’s like this whole other culture.  This is a beach resort not a Courtyard by Marriott with Wi-Fi and desk lamps and plush carpeting and mattresses manufactured specfically for that particular hotel.  Frankly, I found the hotel to be a pleasant change of pace from the filing cabinet we live in in HCM.  It was kind of like going to camp on the beach.  The only thing missing was the campfire smell.  Here's a small list of things I noticed:

• My room was SILENT.  No cars, no people talking, no hammer drills or jack hammers - nothing.  If you live in a city, this is a big deal.
• The bathroom of my room was larger than most hotel rooms I've stayed in with a tub, separate stand up shower.  The bathroom was landscaped around the shower, between the shower itself and a tall cement wall.  No one could see in, but it was like standing alone in the jungle taking a hot shower.
• I was less than 100 yards from the ocean.
• My room had a porch where I could sit and enjoy a view of the ocean.
• We had dinner ON THE BEACH.  Not in an adjacent restaurant with an ocean view, but on the beach; sand under your toes, sea breezes, waves crashing, local seafood being grilled 10 feet away, and never ending tubs of icy cold beer.  Bug spray seemed like a fairly small price to pay for this spread.
• 20 yards from my room was a salt water pool (I didn't bring my suit, so the answer is no)
• It was all FREE - Eat as much as you want, drink as much as you want, sit as long as you want, it's on us.

My sense is that this we are intentionally put in a rustic place so that people are forced to leave their rooms and mingle with each other.  You put up with minor inconveniences so that you can appreciate the beauty of your surroundings.  Wouldn't you rather walk on the beach and make friends than sit in your hotel room, eat lukewarm room service and answer emails?

** I later heard a story that last month when Man and and Woman were here (no this is not their first time in Vietnam or staying at that particular resort), they almost missed their flight home because Man was waiting in his room for the valet to come and get his bags.  I wish I was making this up.  They were in town for seven days and he wouldn't lift his own bag.  Man is 6'-6" tall, at least 18" bigger than any Vietnamese person I've met in eight months, and he can't lift his own bag.

All of Man's complaints came only after we watched Woman have a tantrum when she realized "her" (not our) driver took the local guys back to their further away and less nice hotel with her luggage in the trunk of the car.  She was literally stomping around saying “what the fuck was he thinking?”  She was doing this in front of our whole team, plus the few guys from other companies that were still around.  Woman is a VP and head of her particular branch of the company.  Way to set an example for the local staff!  Her display was so childish that one of my colleagues also based in Vietnam turned to me and said, "I'm not riding in the car anywhere with that bitch.  I'd rather sleep in my office."  Her bag was an hour away.  This does not constitute an emergency.  You can actually wear the same thing to dinner that you wore to work (I did it and I felt fine the next morning).  Sure enough, once we got to the resort, she refused to leave her room and come to dinner until her bag returned and she could change into her “dinner outfit.” It ended up being a fortunate occurrence, because she was then able to make a grand entrance in front of everyone when she did finally appear (45 minutes late) at dinner.  

It was crazy to me how bad they were at traveling and adapting.  They looked ridiculous.  It was clear that the muckity-mucks from other companies who were also there for the meetings wanted nothing to do with either of them, and we too wound up looking ridiculous by proxy.  I cannot explain why we have the two highest-maintenance people in the home office working on the project that requires the most flexibility and “go-with-the-flow-ness.”  It’s fun to watch them struggle and refuse to adapt and overcome when no one else is around.  If outsiders are around then they (and by association, we) look like spoiled children.

I wasn't going to write about any of this.  It's not good to spread negative energy around, and frankly, I don't know who reads what I'm writing.  I decided to write about it because we are leaving on Saturday to spend three weeks in the US.  I am both excited and terrified.  I literally cannot wait to see my friends and family, to see our house and eat in our favorite old haunts (my heart gets racing and I can't sit still more than usual).  My fear is what if we don't like what we find when we return to America?  Culture shock works both ways, and I think we're in for a big one.  Since moving I've discovered a paradigm shift occuring inside me: 

We celebrate when things go smoothly rather than complain when things go wrong.

When was the last time you went to the store and felt excited when they had everything you wanted to buy?  I don't think I ever had until I moved here.  Things always go wrong here.  You learn to expect it, and then be pleasantly surprised when things go right.  Your priorities tend to shift when you determine success or failure by thinking, "I didn't get hurt" or "that didn't make me sick;" rather than, "I had to stand in line" or "traffic was bad."  Traffic is always bad.  You always have to stand in line.  There will always be a gecko or a roach or ants or mosquitos or some combination thereof in your room.    The first store rarely has everything you need.  You will get caught in the rain without a rain coat.  You will wade in calf deep water to get to work sometimes.  The motorbike is going to break down.  Someone will pass you and splash water all over your work clothes when you're 2 minutes from work.  This is called life, not inconvenience.  Shit happens.  It's a bumper sticker for a reason.  You can let it paralyze you; or you acknowledge it happened, shrug and move on.

I used to whine and moan about those inconveniences (and I still do sometimes), but more and more I find myself finding that even the bad things have a lot of good.  My hotel room had mosquitos I had to kill before I could get in my mosquito-netted bed.  There were geckos in the open air bathroom.  I have to take a cold shower two or three days a week when I'm sleeping in our house.   I had to get up at 4:30am to catch the ferry to sit in alternately hot and stressful, then cold and boring meetings for two days.  But I also saw this:

It's been a while since I set foot on American soil, but from what I can remember, people tend to sweat the small stuff.  Getting the wrong soda at the drive thru is a morning ruining issue.  I hope we don't find America to be any less amazing than it's become in my head after all this time.  Alternately, I hope we don't become "judgy expats," because I don't miss being bombarded by advertising every second I'm awake.  I don't miss the never-ending parade of lifted trucks, Affliction t-shirts*, faux hawks, muscle heads, trucker hats, Republicans (except my brother -love ya bro), skinny jeans, rhinestoned cowboy gear, country music, the word "ain't," McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, Subway, Macaroni Grill, Applebees, Chiles, TGIFridays, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco, Best Buy, Bed, Bath & Beyond.  There were moments when I longed for a few things on that list, but it's been months since it happened.   That American landscape is not what makes me excited about returning, and we're about to be dropped in the center of Instant Gratification Land -Las Vegas.  How will we react?  Will it be just like we remember, or will we be like so many slack-jawed foreign tourists we used to mock; both awed and disgusted by what we find?

*I literally just had to sit and think for a full minute to remember the name of those god-awful shirts.  Who pays $70 for a t-shirt? 

It would be easy to say, "Well it's only been eight months.  It's not like we've been gone eight years."  But I distinctly remember being shocked by the outsized everything in the US after spending just three weeks in Piedras Negras, Mexico, which is just two miles from the Texas border.  It's amazing that people can have so little and be so close to a place with so much.  Now I'm coming back after ten times that period and from 10,000 miles instead of 2.  I wonder if it will feel just as strange when I step of the airplane and think "this is home" as it did when I stepped off the plane eight months ago and thought "this is home." 

Stay tuned and find out.

Taxista

Dear Silence,

This hasn't been a very strange week.  There have been developments, but none that I can comment on here.  I can tell you that the vast majority of my work week was spent riding in a car to and from meetings (3 hours each way).  After living here for eight months (happy anniversary to me), riding in a car has become something of a novelty.  I'm not counting taxis, because taxis are weird, covered in plastic like a 50s couch and smell like popcorn.

This popcorn smell is one of two things I can't explain about taxis.  It's not a good smell either, although I'm not really a fan of the smell of popcorn anyway.  I'm fine with eating it, but something about the smell of your kitchen after popping a fresh bag in the microwave is nauseating to me.  Only the microwave kind, not the stove kind.  My guess is this stomach turning feeling stems from a day in middle school when I scrapped all the plastic butter left in the empty bag out and ate it while watching MTV.  I then spent the next 12 hours vomiting and losing the will to live.  The fact that my mom had the same virus before me had no bearing on my connection between plastic microwave popcorn butter and gut-tearing heaves and uncontrollable tears. 

The inside of a taxi smells like if you took that barrel of popcorn you received as a Christmas present from some company representative with whom you have occasional dealings*, ate half of it, put the lid on and let it sit in a humid garage for a few months. It's a smell you can feel in the back of your throat.  When we first moved, I actually felt under the seat for an opened bag of kettle corn trying to figure out what it was**.  There was nothing there.

*These are the only people that give flavored popcorn as gifts, right?  Nothing says "I have no idea who you are or what you actually enjoy" quite like a greasy, keg divided into a pie of butter, cheese and caramel popcorn.  It's not a complaint, just an observation.  I can throw down on some cheddar cheese popcorn.

**Which totally brings me to my favorite Vietnamese taxi freshener: the pineapple.  This is not a little cardboard cut-out that dangles from your rearview mirror, but a very real and very sad looking pineapple rolling around the floorboards of your vehicle.  So if you're looking for an environmentally friendly car-freshener, I highly recommend chucking a pineapple in the back seat and letting it age.  You'll be shocked how good it smells, until it doesn't.

The other thing I can't explain is the Hennessy Cannon.  Protective dashboard ornaments are something of a requirement for cars here.  I understand the idea behind Buddha on your dash, but have no idea what the significance of a mini-bottle of cognac in a rolling holder made to look like a cannon and stuck to the dashboard of a moving vehicle holds.   I've sat in the front seats of a number of taxis with this particular ornament and studied it, but still cannot discern what it does.  Perhaps it's there in case you're in a jam at happy hour, or if you have a close encounter with a bus.  I suppose you never know when you might need a soul fortifying shot that can only satisfy the needs of iced out hip-hop artists and Vietnamese taxi drivers.  I have never ever thought to myself, "I could really go for some warm cognac that's been sitting on a sunny dashboard for six months right now*." 

*In fact, I've only had Hennessey one time.  It is my personal philosophy that liquor should be enjoyed with only one mixer: ice.  After one sip of a glass "Henny" as the rappers call it, I poured 3/4 of a can of Sprite into my glass.  I don't even like Sprite, but it helped that foul devil-spawned beverage. 

And here's the strange thing:  I seem to be the only person who finds the Hennessy Cannon strange.  Everyone I've mentioned it to has either never noticed it, or doesn't care enough to ask why it's there or what purpose it serves.  Being an industrious fellow who spends 8-10 hours a day sitting in front of a computer, I Googled that shit.  NOTHING.  I couldn't get an image searching for "hennessey cannon" or "hennessey dash ornament" or "hennessey car ornament" or "hennessey air freshener."  Although I was treated to a healthy dose of candy cars, random freaky porn and strange looking people (how do you do it internet?).  Even the world wide web, where useless information goes to mold, doesn't care enough about the Hennessy Cannon to bother explaining it.  I couldn't find one reference to a Hennessy Cannon in or outside a Vietnamese taxi.  I suppose that it's not all that important if I didn't immediately feel compelled to take a photo of it either.  In fact, once I stopped to think how weird it was, I stopped seeing them.  The Hennessey Cannon has become something of a Vietnamese unicorn for me because so many people give me a crazy look when I mention it.  At least now it's on the internet, so the next person won't feel weird, alone and isolated like I do.  I'm doing my part.

Just for the sake of argument, let's say it is an air freshener.  It probably is.  It answers the function question, but creates many more questions.  Why is it a Hennessey bottle and not some other adult beverage (Smirnoff Ice Car Freshener anyone)?  Why is it set up to look like a cannon, when it could just sit on the dash like a normal bottle?  If you buy it to make your taxi smell fresh, why do all taxis smell like nasty old microwaved popcorn?

Am I missing something here?  I think getting to the bottom of this mystery is as good a reason as any to learn Vietnamese.  If you know anything about the origins of the Hennessey Cannon dash ornament please share it with me. 

When I started writing this I was writing an introduction to post a story I wrote in August.  I guess that will have to wait for another day.

The Decline of Civilization

Ha! I bet you were thinking, "well it was fun while it lasted, but he's run out of things to write after one month."  No sir I have not run out of things to write or say.  The truth of the matter is that the semi-beloved laptop on which I write these posts went viral on Tuesday night.  Not viral in the good I-got-a-million-hits-on-YouTube way either, but the soul crushing, losing everything you didn't know you loved way.  I thought that people only got virii on their computers when they looked at creepy porn.  Well they don't.  Apparently they also lurk in innocent looking worksheets used to teach youngsters the parts of the microscope.  I guess the joke is on me because my laptop is now a brick until I can get it back to the US.

Which brings me to this:

In a world where we need to put "Do Not Attempt" disclaimers in commercials showing cars skidding around on ice is it really a good idea to put this on a product that is applied to one's body?  Not to mention that this is not EXTREME deodorant, it's Old Spice.  I'm not twelve.  I don't need to be entertained with amusing visuals while applying the deodorant in the morning.  What's more troubling is that someone got paid actual money to write this.  I can just picture a bunch of guys sitting around a room trying to figure out how to write a catchy description of deodorant and coming up with this.  My guess is that the original one said that the "stench monsters" were replaced with " fresh, clean scent elves" when some suit who makes money per year than I will see in my lifetime read it.

"'Scent Elves?"
"Yes it's funny." replies the midlevel executive who wrote it.
"It's not funny, it's gay.  Our product is marketed as MANLY."
"Well what if the 'scent elves' were 'masculine,' 'masculine scent elves'."
"Yeah that's better."

I like to wear Old Spice because it is ridiculous, but I'm not down with it being ridiculous like this.  I miss the days when nothing was EXTREME.  Apparently even here in the third world it cannot be avoided.

I suppose I should congratulate the Old Spice executives because they just got me to repost a picture of their product on my blog... Good job guys. 

We're all doomed.

Amusing Weekend Photos



Precious Moments - Zombie Edition



This must be the lesser known Republican version of the original...

Hand Washing Optional

You Want Fries With That?



The view from our bedroom on a day when it floods.  Unfortunately when this happens, you do not get to stay home and watch TV all day.

 Everyone has days that try your pationce.  Those days when it seem like nothing goes right, and every time you look up after fixing one problem, another arises?  Generallly you just want to get back in bed, curl up in the fetal position and pretend you never got up.  We had one of those yesterday morning. 

Before we begin, I should remind everyone that it's not abnormal to have a housekeeper here.  After we moved into our giant house, we tried (that is Reyna tried) to maintain the house by herself.  I mean, we had a three bedroom house in Vegas, and it was really no problem to keep up.  The difference is that our new house is five stories tall, and the laundry room is on the fifth floor (fourth floor if you're Vietnamese and count G, 1, 2, 3...).  We spend our lives at home climbing and descending stairs, and are out of breath more than I care to admit.  After a month of playing catch up, we broke down and hired a maid.  Yesterday was Ms. Ha's first day.  It's mildly depressing that a 49 year old woman can handle a job that kicks the butt of two 30 year olds.  She was supposed to come at 7:00 so she could get our house key before we left for work, but I guess she was eager to get started after her tour of our house two days before because she rousted me out of bed at 6:30.  When I opened the door, I noticed that our street was flooded.  This in itself is not cause for panic. We live in the "flooding district."  This means that periodically (depending on the moon) for around four months a year, the street will flood up to about mid calf with river water.  This happens with the tide, so the street will flood for a couple hours and then recede.  Sadly this is the price one pays for a river view and a big house with cheap-ish rent.

So I let Ms. Ha in, and she started cleaning while Reyna and I got ready to leave for work.  I was ready before Reyna, so I went down to start her bike.  There is a process in itself even when it isn't flooded.  Open the front door, walk out, unlock the padlock and take it off the gate, undo the bolt latch, lock the padlock and remove the key, back the bike down into the water, put the kick stand down, walk back up the ramp (without slipping -trickier than it sounds), lock the front door, lock the padlock (on the inside, so it looks like your home), secure the bolt latch, get back on the bike, start it and drive away.  On a flood day there is no way to do this without getting your feet wet. This means you have to bring spare shoes to work, because you don't want to walk barefoot in the water and the street (yuck), nor do you want to sit in wet shoes all day.  This also means driving the motorcycle with flip flops on.  This isn't a big deal on Reyna's bike because hers is a proper scooter.  You dont' stradle it like mine, you sit like you're sitting in a chair.  We'd already agreed that we would ride in together.  Reyna has had some trouble getting her bike to start lately, but we finally figured out how to reliably kick start it when the electric starter isn't working.  I wheeled the bike down the ramp that leads up to our house, through the calf deep water and around the corner to a dry spot where I could kick start it without splashing water all over my jeans.

After about 35 tries to kick start the bike, I realized, as sweat rolled down my nose that I'd left my helmet in the house.  Reyna had already locked up and was standing with her wet feet and rolled up kakhis patiently waiting for me to get the bike started.  I took the key out of the bike, walked back through the water, up the ramp, unlocked the gate padlock, undid the bolt, locked the gate padlock, removed the key, unlocked the front door, kicked off my shoes, walked over the floor that Mrs. Ha had just finished mopping with my wet feet, got my helmet, walked back, put on my shoes, closed the front door, locked it, got on my bike and started backing it down.  As I was backing it down, my foot slipped and I almost fell.  I managed to stay upright, but wrenched my back (ouch).  I put the kickstand down, walked back up the ramp, got the padlock, closed the gate, locked the padlock, relatched the bolt latch and walked the other bike through the water (my bike also has to be kick started) over to where Reyna was standing*.

*Allow me to digress here for just one moment.  On Friday morning, I woke up with a cough and scratchy throat.  This isn't unusual because the air outside is about the same quality as a smoky bar most days.  I get this little bug about every 6-8 weeks and it lasts for 4-5 days.  So here I am sick, coughing, snotty nose, standing in ankle deep water sweating and trying to kick start a motorbike... And people complain when McDonald's won't give them an Egg McMuffin at 9:05 in The States?  Yeah...

"Whatcha wanna do?" I asked.
"Well I gotta get this fixed today because I gotta to get to work tomorrow while you're gone." Did I forget to mention that?  I have to leave town on Wednesday for work and will not be back until Thursday evening.
"OK... I'll give you a ride.  It's fine if I'm late."

I left Reyna with the bike, and rode through the water to the mechanic we've been using lately.  There was only one guy there, so I had to wait for a few minutes while he finished fixing a car tire before yelling over to his buddy across the street.  His buddy followed me back to the house (how's that for service, they come to you).  I showed him what was wrong.  He tried to start it a few times, jumped back on his bike and drove away.  We stood there looking at each other.  As we waited, our neighbors and landlords noticed we hadn't left and came outside.  I showed them what was wrong with the bike and asked if they could help us translate to the mechanic that the problem isn't the battery but the alternator.  They smiled and nodded, but in that "I-don't-know-what-you're-saying-but-it-would-be-rude-to-tell-you-no" way that happens all the time*.  The mechanic returned a few minutes later with some tools and removed the battery from the bike.  I called one of my Vietnamese speaking work friends and asked him to explain the problem to the mechanic.  After that conversation, and ten minutes of charades-playing, I thought he understood.  Then he took the battery, put it under his seat and drove away.  I turned, stunned, to our landlord.

"No worry, no worry. He come back!" he said when he saw my concerned look.  "He go to get friend push bike ."

*Tangential Note that Bears Mentioning - Giving your mobile number over the phone to a Vietnamese person is one of the most prevalent (and irritating) examples of this phenomenon.  In the US, there is a rhythm to the phone number (dat-dat-da...dat-dat-da...dat-da...dat-da).  Here there isn't, mainly because there can be a three digit variation in the length of phone numbers here, so you never know how many digits to tell them at once.  I've tried the US rhythm and they always get it wrong.  Always ALWAYS have them repeat it back to you, especially if they don't get it on the first try and you have to start over.  Example:

Me:  The number is 321 .. 432 .. 66...98  (no this is not my phone number, stalkers)
Them:   Okay  3..2..1..4..2..6..
Me:  No, 4-3-2
Them:  OK, 432...3..2..1..4..2
Me:  No, start over... (rinse, repeat, ad nauseum)

We waited and looked at our watches compusively another ten minutes before he returned with a buddy.  The new guy got on Reyna's bike and steered, while the first mechanic drove his working bike and pushed the non-working bike with his foot.  Vietnamese tow truck in action.

We watched them tool away, and then got on my bike.  There are a couple reasons why we ride Reyna's bike when we go places together.  Hers has a 125cc engine and a more comfortable seat.  My bike only has a 100cc engine and a manual transmission.  This is good because it rarely breaks down and is super cheap to fix, but is murder on the hands and arms in heavy traffic. It also sits up higher than Reyna's bike, which is great when the neighborhood is flooded, but tough to drive slowly with a passenger because of the higher center of gravity.  I was also wearing flip-flops, so I could deal with the flood water, and shifting my bike with flip flops on can be challenging. 

As we turned up an adjacent street, the one that floods the least in our neighborhood, we found our way blocked by a taxi.  I honked.  Nothing.  So I tried to ease between the curb and the taxi*.  When I got to the rear axle of the taxi, the driver decided that would be a good time to move forward.  The tire missed my flip-flopped foot by about 5mm.  As he pulled forward, he also pulled towards me to open up a space on the right side of the car.  We were on the left, and were nearly pinned between the car and the curb.  I managed to back the bike up and get around the right side of the taxi.  Because of all the flooding lately, the edges of the street get slick with algae from the river, and I nearly slipped getting around the other side to.

*Bear in mind that this is the flooding area, therefore curbs are about a foot high to keep water from coming into people's houses.  If you hit it, or get pinned between the curb and another larger object, you are booking a one-way ticket to broken ankle city, and get river water in the wound.

After forty minutes we managed to escape our neighborhood.  The next task was to get Reyna to work.  We both have to cross a bridge to get to our respective offices, which is currently under repairs (if you've been following along lately, you'll remember that fact from the New Normal story).  Traffic is unbearable in the mornings.  Between going less than one mile an hour, you are constantly choked by exhaust from the tens of thousands of motorbikes trying to cross in one lane of traffic.  We have started taking a different way to work, which is slightly longer, but the traffic moves a little more freely. 

I remembered as we went under the offending bridge that my bike didn't have enough gas to get either of us to work, so we had to stop.  Getting gas here is not like getting gas in America.  There is no queue.  There is a pump operator, and whoever can get closest and have his/her gas cap removed first gets gas.  It's like a chess match deciding where to pull up and when to remove the gas cap.  People are constantly cutting in front of you.  We're getting better at it, but by no means are we experts.

We managed to fill up in under five minutes, and were soon back on the road.  As we turned in the direction of work, we found that the new street was flooded in much the same way as our neighborhood.  What began then was another forty minutes of choked gridlock traffic.  This traffic had the added benefit of being fraught from beginning to end with floodwater.  In our neighborhood, the flood water is consdidered "clean."  We don't live on a busy street, and we're very close to the river.  This was an altogether different experience.  The puddles were approaching black with grime and each had a slick of oil on top that reflected colorfully in the morning sun.  We were also constantly starting and stopping, so my left hand was constantly in a state of operating the bike's clutch.  After about ten minutes I felt like my hand was going to fall off.  After 20 minutes my hand was having an out of body experience. After 30 minutes, every time I worked the clutch, it felt like lightning was shooting up my arm. My shoes and feet were soaked and freezing because we were moving.  People were dodging around us, getting up on the sidewalks, which are cracked and potted, so water splashed on us from passing commuters.  My biggest fear was falling.  With Reyna on the back of the bike, the stability factor had decreased markedly.  It's not easy to ride slowly with a passenger on the back, especially in traffic, with cars and bikes everywhere. Try it sometime.  It's not fun.  We weaved around, and I wore a fair amount of tread off my flip flops, but we managed to make our way through.

With relief, we turned onto the the big highway and got out of the traffic long enough for me to shake and flex my clutch hand.  We fought the rush hour traffic downtown (which was normal bad, not really bad) and I dropped Reyna off at school.  I then circled the block, and backtracked for ten minutes so I could get myself to work.  I collapsed at my desk at 8:30 in the morning and realized it was then time for my day to START.

My hand still hurts...

Happy Thanksgiving

Is it time to talk about work?

dis·il·lu·sioned/ˌdis ə ˈloo ZHənd/

Adjective:

Disappointed in someone or something that one discovers to be less good than one had believed.

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, alright? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.

Bob Slydell: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Today the fourth of my closest friends was either let go or resigned in the last two weeks. They were all happy to go, but I am left with few friends; to say nothing of the amount of work that isn't getting done because I'm so bummed out. At what point in owning a company does letting people go cost more than it saves? I can't bring myself to work. I feel sick. Since we moved, I find that I feel sick on most American holidays. I must have pooped 50 times on July 4th (it's kind of funny now, but at the time it was agony).

My professional life appears to manifest itself in two emotions. Depending on the day I either desperately want to walk out, or I desperately want to not be fired. Most days when I wish to not be fired it's because I want to leave on my own terms, and not be escorted out the back door by security. Note that neither of these emotions have anything to do with actual work. I don't feel stress, worry, excitement or motivation. That's because the environment that I now find myself discourages productivity. It's one bombshell after another. For those right-brainers out there, this is crippling for the output of this creative person. Curveballs are fine, bombshells are not. In a creative endeavor it's important to distinguish when and where to save dollars and when to spend a little more to get through. If the company isn't smart enough to make an effort to keep the four people who walked out in the last two weeks what does it say about me? I suppose my only hope is that no fuss will be made when I finally decide I can't take it anymore; so I can stand up and be counted with the people, and I have undying respect for them, who walked before me.

The sad thing is that I want to care about the project(s) I'm working on, but I can't bring myself to work on them. I want the project(s) to succeed, but I don't care enough about the company to bear down, or even make an effort. This is due to the cycle of increased work hours, increased responsibility and decreases in pay. The only thing that gets me through the day is my own reputation (vain though it may be). So I sit and write, or read articles online to pass the time while I wait to answer questions from clients. It's their opinion of me that matters. My company has already made it abundantly clear that they care not for my well-being or happiness. Looking at the project files fills me with emptiness. It's hard to not feel nihilstic about everything I have to do when there is a parade of people making their way to or being shown the door. I have already been subjected to threats that I will be replaced by a person who was previously fired for gross incompetence if I don't fall in line. So my contribution, my ability has grown from marginal to meaningless, while my responsibilities increase as more and more people pack their belongings and make for the exits.

I think the company failed to consider a few things before moving people out here. First, when you send people to where the work is, you're sending them where the work is. My company's projects are not the only ones going on around here, so they can get away with treating employees only so badly before those employees seek greener pastures and better situations. The other thing they forgot is if a person can successfully transition from living in the US to living in Vietnam, then that person has already climbed a bigger mountain than the challenge presented by finding a new job. Getting through the move and settling into an entirely new life is the hard part, not arriving on time and dying slowly at a desk.

And isn't it appropriate that all of this is happening during the holidays? Nothing like having your closest remaining work friend get laid off and sent home to remind you that holidays are about family. I still have Reyna here, but the rest of my real family is thousands of miles away. So when all of you VPs and team leaders are bellying up to that table on Thursday, do take a moment to remember the people you sent to Vietnam, who worked on Thanksgiving, went another month without family, didn't get turkey, or even a home cooked meal. Remember that their sacrifices do have value beyond dollars bills. It's not just troops who get sent away and miss the holiday season...

Duck Jam

How many times has this happened to you?  I will admit that it's nice to see them alive for once instead of cooked and hanging upside down on a hook with it's head still attached.  Perhaps our friends at Sparboe Farms could take a lesson from this...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/18/mcdonalds-animal-cruelty_n_1101519.html

The New Normal

The route from my office (A) to our new house in District 2 (B)

Many days we have an apocalyptic rain storm at about 16h30-17h00, and yesterday was no different. What is different is that we have moved from a five minute drive to work to a 25 minute drive to work in the morning*.  In order to save money and sanity, Reyna and I have been riding to work together. My office is on the way to her school, so I drive us to my building, and then she drives the last bit to hers. On days when Reyna has to work late, I sometimes call Khanh, my old faithful motorbike taxi driver (xe om from now on, it's just easier to write than "motorbike taxi"). Khanh drove me most days when we lived five minutes from work. It's just easier to snooze on the back of the bike while someone else drives than it is to struggle through the morning rush hour yourself. During that six months we developed a little friendship, or at least as friendly as a 35 year old guy who speaks literally six words of Vietnamese* and a 60 year old guy who speaks little to no English can get in the course of a series of 5 minute rides on a motorcycle. I also love that his name is Khanh, even though I never have the opportunity to yell, "KHAAAAAANH!" in my best Kirk voice.

*An interesting side bar --we actually live closer now to our work than we did in the US, but it takes longer to ride our gasoline powered motorbikes in the traffic here than it took for me to ride my me-powered bicycle to the office in Vegas.  This is why I'm fat...

**here is the entire extent of my Vietnamese vocabulary after eight months (there will be a quiz at the bottom of this post):
cam on - Thank You
wo jai - Turn Left
wo phai - Turn Right
da - Stop or Ice depending on pronunciation
mot, hai, ba, ZHO - One, Two, Three, IN (what you say before drinking in these parts)
xe om - Motorbike Taxi (I guess if I wrote it in the post, I know it, but I've never actually said it out loud to a native speaker.)
chay  - Vegetarian (I can't pronounce it.  It sounds like a cross between "guy" and clearing your throat.  I have to write it down if we're in a restaurant )

When we moved away from downtown, Khanh and I exchanged numbers. He told me (I think) he normally works mornings, but if I call him ten minutes before I'm ready to leave work, he'll come pick me up. The first week he called me everyday at exactly 5:30. Usually I wouldn't answer, and after a week or so he stopped calling. Now I call him. I called yesterday at around 5:30 and he answered sounding really excited to hear from me. I only need a ride maybe once a week these days, so I suppose the extra work is something of a treat for him. Sometimes I don't call because I don't want to drag him away from his evening right before dinner to drive my lazy ass home, but he really doesn't seem to mind.

Ten minutes later he came scooting up in the darkness and as he rolled to a stop exclaimed, "Heeeeeeey Jeff!" This is not normal. Usually it's a "good morning, Jeff" or "how are you, Jeff?" I said hello and climbed on the back. There is little to no drainage around Vietnamese roads, so after the daily rain there tends to be many puddles to dodge and the road stays slick for some time. The roads were definitely wet. As we made the turn onto the highway, I realized that today was not to be a normal ride home. Khanh was FLYING through the rush hour traffic. He barely stopped honking from the moment we left the office until the first roundabout (see map). All the while, I hung onto the back and prayed he wouldn't have to stop suddenly. I've looked at the tires on his bike. Bald would be an understatement. We hurtled through the traffic at speeds approaching 100km/hr*

*I know 62mph is not fast in many places (I'm looking at you Vegas), but here it feels like death is imminent at that speed.  I dont just attribute that perception to the traffic either.  Most things in Vietnam appear to be at least twenty years old.  Anytime I let one of my bikes out and get going, I feel like the wheel is going to pop off at any moment, and that's a bike I ride nearly every day. Bear in mind that when I "let it out" it's on an open road with no one around, not rush hour traffic.

As we reached the stoplight at the second roundabout, just before the Saigon Bridge, the light changed. Khanh wasn't going to stop (traffic signals tend to be more suggestion than anything unless it's a very busy intersection), but the people in front of him decided to stop. He noticed a little too late and slammed on the brakes. The bike fish-tailed on the wet road, and we had what I can only describe as a "Matrix Moment" while the bike was at an angle and temporarily out of control, sliding along the pavement.  I thought "brace for impact." I didn't wonder if my $6 helmet would protect my head, or what would happen to Khanh's flip flopped feet.  I didn't jump, my heart didn't skip, I didn't grab onto Khanh, I just thought "brace for impact."  Khanh didn't go "whoooah, like he normally does when we see multi-bike pile ups.  He righted the bike and that was it.  It was the most nonchalant close encounter with pavement I've ever had.  We pressed on through the roundabout and headed for the Saigon Bridge (cau Sai Gon on the map if you're following along at home).

I'm sure I'd read somewhere that construction was about to commence on the bridge, but hadn't realized that it was scheduled to start that day.  While I sat slowly dying at my desk, little Vietnamese workers had been systematically blocking three of the four lanes of traffic.  When I saw the gridlock I figured we'd be stuck for thirty minutes, but Khanh weaved, honked and cursed his way through in about five. My arms were bumping handlebars next to us no matter how hard I tried to keep them close to my body. There were multiple times where I could have licked a bus wall or the grill of a Chysler 300, we were so close. We rode on the sidewalk part of the way up the bridge. While we were on the sidewalk I watched a kid on a bicycle try to ride between two signs mounted in the sidewalk. His handlebars crashed into the sign posts as we squeaked around between the sign and the curb. I wasn't afraid or nervous we would crash, no, I was impressed that Khanh was even attempting these maneuvers.  I thought to myelf, "this guy has balls the size of  most people's heads."

Khanh swerved off the sidewalk and crossed through the designated motorbike lane, which is separated from cars and trucks by a concrete barrier we missed by millimeters, and into the single lane of traffic containing the cars, trucks and buses. He did this despite police standing at the spot where the lanes separate and darted into the less congested street. On our way over the bridge, he rode on the wrong side of the road. This isn't overly strange, I ride on the wrong side of the road regularly, except we were on a one lane road with a bus to our right and one coming at us. We swerved between the two vehicles with about ten feet to spare, while both Khanh and the buses beeped on their horns.  By this point I was an inanimate object. I was locked up from the neck down. Pretty much the only thing I could move were my eyes and my head, but I was too focused on what was happening in front of us  that it never occured to me to check the sides.  I was in the "passenger zone." The road was wet, and I was certain that if I made any movement , I would send us sliding underneath the approaching bus, which would have clearly been my fault.

Finally, thankfully, we pulled up to the house. I jumped off the bike, turned to Khanh and said, "you want to come in for a beer?" There is a little history here. The first time he drove me to the new house, he dropped me off and said "I come in and we drink bia?"  (It is worth noting that the word "beer" trancends cultures.  Vietnamese for beer is "bia.") I told him I didn't have any, but resolved to keep a few in the refrigerator from then on for these occasions. Looking back on it now, I realize that I asked him because we'd just had an experience together that was extra-normal.  At the time, I didn't realize it.  It was just another ride home, and I was looking forward to having a beer with this strange little man.  I understand now that I wanted to celebrate the fact that we had both lived through the previous 30 minutes.


 He said, "Me come in to drink bia?" I said yes, and he drove his bike into our little parking area. I unlocked the door, went inside and turned on the lights. It was then that I saw Khanh's face in the light for the first time. He was out of breath from walking up the three steps to our house, eyes totally blood-shot. I'd just gotten a ride from a guy who was totally blotto. I then realized that I'd already asked him in to have a beer.  It would be incredibly rude for me to not let him have one, especially the first time I'd ever invited him inside. I took two out of the refrigerator, got some glasses and poured the beers.  He walked inside amd saw our cat.  "Me-yo, Me-yo, Me-yo!" he said, and picked up our helpless cat hand held him in his arms.  I could see the look of terror in Q's face being held by a drunken stranger, but he behaved himself and jumped down at the first moment he could. Khanh and I said "cheers" and clinked glasses.

After he took his first noisy swig of Heineken and said, "You like kar-a-kee?"
"What?"  I have to be careful that I don't do my usual indignant "what?!" I am known for in certain circles.
"Kar-a-kee!"
"I have no idea what you're saying."
"KAR-A-KEE!" and  he held his hand up to his mouth.
"Karaoke?"
"Yeah! Yeah! Kar-a-kee!"
"I don't think Reyna would like me to go to karaoke with you guys."*
He gave me a knowing smile. 
I declined as politely as possible. He slugged down his beer in about five minutes, looked at me and said, "I have one more?"
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"I have one more, yes." he replied. As we drank the second beer, he kept clinking glasses with me and saying, "I like you Jeff, I like you." I told him I like him too and I'm glad he still drives me even though we moved away. He finished his beer (more slowly this time) and got up to leave. I walked him to the door. When we got outside, he turned to me and made the universal "I-am-going-to-give-you-a-hug" sign, with arms outstretched coming towards me. I didn't know we'd reached this point in our friendship, but he grabbed me and kissed me on both cheeks. "I like you Jeff."
"I like you too. And thank you for driving me home."
"I see you tomorrow?"
"Maybe. I'll call you."
And with that, he cranked up his bike and sped away, honking.

*Karaoke in Vietnam is not the same as it is in the US.  Not only do you get a private room for singing with your friends, but each karaoke place (store? purveyor?) has a little harem of girls.  You pick a girl and she is your karaoke partner for the night.  She will sing with you, laugh at your jokes and if you play your cards right might do a whole lot more.  Women are not even allowed to enter a karaoke hall alone or without a man.  Why do I suddenly feel like I'm ruining this for  ten thousand expat guys?

I relate this story to you because up until this morning, I hadn't given a second thought to the events that transpired over those two hours.  It was just another day, just another ride home, just another beer.  As time passes we forget how different our lives have become.  Things that would have defined days as strange or significant in the US now pass regularly as ho-hum.  It is one of the goals of this blog to document those "everyday" days that really are anything but.  I am doing my best not to lose sight of where I came from, which helps me appreciate where I am and how far we've come.

Metro

Went to Metro today, the Ho Chi Minh City equivalent of Wal-Mart. In the US we loathe the Wally-World, and have done our best to avoid Metro. It was only the second time we've been there since moving. Sometimes, though it is nice to be able to find everything we need in one store. It's funny that I said that because in order to cook dinner tonight we still had to make trips to the farmer's market and the supermarket in An Phu. I suppose we're just getting used to going to three to five places before getting everything we need for one dinner. Now that we've moved to District 2, at least the places are nearby and there is significantly less traffic than our old place in D3.

The Metro is really just like a Sam's Club. You can't simply walk in. You have to have a member card. In order to get a member card, you have to have a sponsor. We don't have a sponsor, so anytime we want to go we have to get a copy of our passport made at the customer service counter. Then make our way to the entrance, fill out a form, get a temporary card and get the card scanned. If it sounds like a lot of hassle to buy some laundry detergent, it is.

The portions of food they sell also trend towards Sam's Club-ish. I want to make spaghetti tonight so I went to the cheese aisle. I could only buy a 1kg block of Parmesian Cheese (or larger). That's 2.2 pounds of hard cheesy goodness for those of you new to the metric system. For a visual learners, the block of cheese was about the size of a medium sized adult thigh, or the size Ronald's hands in the photo below. We'll be having cheeseless spaghetti this evening...

Despite trying really hard to look and feel like a giant western box store, Metro still feels Asian. This is mainly due to the profusion of rice cookers and rows of tanks containing live fish. These are not fish to take home for pets, mind you (although I suppose you could keep a mackarel as a pet), but fish you can pick out of the tank, have scaled, gut and cut while you shop. Show me a Costco with that option. At least you know it's fresh. I wanted to see a guy with a big net and an impatient shopper trying to pick the perfect fish out of the 75 or so swimming in the tank. "No not that one, that one." But alas, no one was buying while we were in the fish area. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing the "seafood aisle" containing almost nothing but live animals. It's kind of like going to the pet store, although you know they're all destined to be eaten. I only saw one tank with a dead fish in it. Pretty good for this part of the world.

We crammed our single shopping bag to near bursting and rode home in true Vietnamese style: motorbike fully loaded. Reyna held the box containing our new pans while I held the bag of groceries between my legs. We saved ourselves a $3 taxi ride that way.

Were you looking for white big chiles? chiles? big chiles? or green big chiles? I can't remember what you usually put in the salsa.

The MSG aisle. or, if you're Vietnamese, SUPER SPICE! I hate to think how many bags of this I have unknowingly ingested in the last seven months.

At least we manage to stay away from this place:

Tell me that's not the creepiest version you've ever seen. We have moved to a country that is blissfully devoid of Mickey D's (this one was in Bangkok). I think it's always a good idea to stay away from clowns with hands larger than their faces.

That is a large bag of my favorite chips. When I say "large" I don't mean the size you buy at Sam's that has a drowning child warning on the side. It's the large Euro size. For the uninitiated, the price is VND 197,000 or TEN DOLLARS. You can have this bag of chips, or 6.5 bowls of beef pho at Reyna's favorite spot. I'll be eating many bags of Lay's chips when we return to the US. This was at the An Phu Supermarket, not Metro. Metro wouldn't dream of having chips this sophisticated. They carry things like Pringels (not Pringles, "Pringels" the Chinese Version) in flavors like Kung Pao Chicken and Prawn and Dog (not really).

Speaking of dog, while riding to the Metro we passed a lady on the side of road who usually sells live ducks. Again this is not for purposes of pets, but to take home and eat for Sunday dinner. It always looks like she fed the ducks Valium before putting them out because they just sit in a listless line sucking down exhaust fumes from 10,000 passing motorbikes while they wait for someone to take them home for dinner. Today she had a fully cooked dog. I'd say it was about beagle sized. The weirdest part was that it was standing in a box. It looked like it had been posed as if about to start running into the street. If it's head had still been attached, it would have been peering out from the box. It's good to know that we can still be surprised as we close in on a year in Vietnam.

I promise I will start writing about restaurants soon. I'm still getting into the swing of this blog thing. I'm not sure who I'm making this promise to since I've told exactly one person I've started writing this and I know she hasn't looked at it because I only told her, "I started writing a blog." Not the name of it, not the URL, nothing.

At the Market

Inside me, I think that an animal goes through a
lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to
be killed. That whole situation is really messed up for animals, growing up in
those little cooped-up pens. I just don't think it’s worth eating that animal.
I think animals should be free. There's so much other food out there that
doesn't have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death.
-Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine

Food was without a doubt my biggest fear moving to Vietnam. My relationship with food
throughout my adult life has always been tenuous both physically and intellectually. For the first time I questioned whether the rationale for my vegetarianism was reason enough to maintain it in Vietnam. My beef was with the American industrial complex, not the consumption of meat itself. Also, even though I had mostly conquered the “sick feeling” I got from dining hall food in college, I has always choices based on avoiding foods that made me feel bad. I was now set to move to a third world country where just washing an apple in the sink can make you sick for
days. It made me anxious, which made me feel sick, which made me worry about being sick in the same cycle I’d had in college. It became so bad that I discussed seeing a psychiatrist about my fears with Reyna in the months preceding our departure. I arrived in Vietnam, scared and nervous, two days before Reyna. The trip over had become a confirmation of my worst fear; that I would be alone. Reyna is the intrepid one, not me. And here I was, stuck in a foreign land alone. The very first day, I called Alfredo who worked in our Vietnam office to help me through my first day. Alfredo would not have normally been my first choice of first day Vietnam companions because there were a couple other people I knew better from Las Vegas who had already relocated. As luck would have it, they were both out of town that weekend, it being a holiday in Vietnam. He and I had only met twice before, and had spoken to each other for less than five minutes before that day. Alfredo met me at my hotel and walked me around the
neighborhood. As soon as we turned off the street where my hotel sat I was lost. Every block looked the same: dirty and crowded with people and motorbikes. We walked until I thought I
would keel over. Alfredo must have thought I was insane because I kept saying that I wanted to stop and get a beer somewhere. After 24 hours of travelling and the added stress of Reyna getting stuck in LA had taken its toll. I’m not proud to admit, but I was desperate for a cold, soothing alcoholic drink. He took me to a bar called Phatty’s where I enjoyed my hesitant first taste of Tiger Beer; an Australian lager, not unlike Budweiser that is sold in nearly every bar in Vietnam. It felt fantastic to have something so familiar in my hand after days of our home not feeling like home, traveling and landing in this strange new place. The Tiger had the added benefit of soothing my fried nerves enough to order my first meal in Vietnam. I had vermicelli noodles with vegetables and it tasted fantastic. That night he took me to a Thai restaurant which was also quite good. Almost immediately I started feeling better about eating in Vietnam.
That feeling was put almost immediately into jeopardy when I went to work the next day. I had a
conversation with Mike, a two year veteran of our Vietnam office about food. He said that eating wasn’t really that big of a deal, but it was important to get my shots. He also said that I ran the risk of getting worms from the produce in country. I felt the good feelings regarding eating in Vietnam instantly drop from my stomach to my colon as I quietly excused myself from the conversation.
Reyna arrived two days later and, in the way that totally fit her character, we walked to the first outdoor restaurant we found and sat down. We were pouring sweat even though we’d only been outside for 15 minutes, but I was so happy to see her I didn’t care. The first two days alone had felt like weeks. We sat at a tiny table, on tiny chairs and ordered beers. The beers
were warm, and our server offered us ice. I was still way too wary to accept ice from a community bucket, preferring to safely drink my beer at outdoor temperature, but Reyna happily obliged and received an ice cube the size a Volkswagen to cool her beverage. She also ordered food, which totally blew me away. I have always been so careful about eating. If it comes between choosing between being hungry and eating questionable food, I will
always choose hungry, but she is so fearless. Her spirit of adventure gives me the courage to try new things almost every day. Unfortunately on this particular occasion, her eggrolls contained pork. We stayed in a hotel for the first three weeks in HCMC. The Kingston Hotel is situated two blocks west of the Ben Thanh Market, the largest and busiest market in the city. It is a strange and interesting place because it’s not only where locals go to buy all manner of goods necessary for day to day life, but also a tourist attraction where curious foreigners go to experience
how 98% of the world shops for food. As always, Reyna was the more adventurous one, and expressed excitement about going to the market. I’ve never been a good shopping buddy. I fully admit it. I can remember one particular instance when Reyna expelled me from a Ross department store because of my bad attitude and negative reaction to the narrow aisles overflowing with a mishmash of knick knacks, junk and obese patrons. I have a tendency to ruin the shopping experience for others with my urge to leave a storethat either isn’t selling things I’m interested in buying or is frequented by people I find distasteful. So I tried my best to be a good sport about experiencing the Vietnamese market. I was a miserable failure. On our second weekend (the first being spent, in its entirety, apartment hunting) we walked the two blocks to the market. Reyna had visited a couple of times and assured me that it was worth the walk. It
was hot. By the time we made the six minute walk to the market itself, we had already stopped to buy a large bottle of water and had both sweat through our shirts. When we lived in Vegas, I had gotten out of the habit of wearing underwear because I would always forget to pack a pair in my messenger bag when I rode my bike to work. That habit was now literally biting me in the ass. It
was hellish. I don’t think it was on purpose, but Reyna guided me through the meat market on our way in. If her intention was to put me off my lunch, then she exceeded expectations. Animals in various states of deconstruction were everywhere on hooks and metal
tables. I couldn’t decide what was worse, the collections of hog snouts, the entire legs of unidentifiable animals waiting to be chopped and sold or the baskets of fish that created a stink that punctuated this personal chamber of horrors. I stopped suddenly as a small Vietnamese woman rinsed off her bloody knife in a stainless steel bowl and then dumped the contents into a trough running down the middle of the walkway. She didn’t seem to mind the water splashing
on her bare feet, nor did she notice that my flip-flopped feet were also in the vicinity of the stream of detritus. It was so hot that I wanted to climb out of my skin to cool down. I prayed silently for a sudden downpour to wash away the heat and the smell. That was my introduction to the market. It’s interesting to me how little thought we give to how our food is handled in the US. There are codes and ways of doing things that are second nature to us. We pass through our lives rarely noticing the pains taken to ensure the safety and cleanliness of our food. That is, until we are standing in a place where there are no codes. Imagine walking into your local Safeway or Albertson’s on a hot summer afternoon to find that the electricity has been out for the last 48 hours, so inside the store is now as hot as the parking lot you just traversed. As you walk into the store, you notice that it’s crowded with shoppers who are all talking at once in a language you don’t understand. These shoppers aren’t just walking, though, they’re also riding motorcycles through the aisles, grazing past your sticky body and spraying plumes of hot, acrid exhaust at both you, and the items that you wish to purchase. You head for the butcher to buy the meat you promised your significant other you would bring home and fight your way through the horde of people slapping, grabbing, hefting, and pinching cuts of meat to find the
butcher squatting on his cutting table. He wields a knife the size of your forearm, mere inches from his bare feet, chopping and passing out the meat while collecting money from the
customers as he goes. There is no soap, no hand sanitizer, no latex gloves, no refrigerated tank with steaks hermetically sealed and arranged neatly on Styrofoam pallets for you to
peruse. You choose your desired cut off the hook on which it hangs by grabbing it and handing it to the butcher. It’s you, your 20 sticky and hot new Vietnamese friends all sweating and grabbing, the butcher and the flies, which are everywhere. As we moved past the meat and entered the covered part of Ben Thanh market, I realized just how good I’d had it in the narrow aisles of Ross. Where the aisles of the American retailer were populated with a few overweight women occasionally squeezing past each other, the Vietnamese aisles were about half the size and choked with dozens of people jostling and haggling for all manner of goods. A barrage of children approached us trying to sell us toothpaste, plastic bracelets, fans and all manner of cheap Chinese crap, all jabbering and clutching with hot clammy hands. We shooed them away, checking to make sure our wallets were still intact, and ventured deeper into the market. It was a strange and bizarre experience. There is no clear arrangement of products. There are blankets next to shampoo next to rice next to fruit next to incense next to dishes. After about ten minutes trying to process the mayhem around us, I was overwhelmed. I just wanted out. I was so hot, so
over-stimulated and claustrophobic that I felt I couldn’t breathe. I apologized to Reyna and said that I just couldn’t do it and needed to leave. I think she felt the same as me because she acquiesced immediately and we hastened to the air conditioned comfort of our hotel room and drank liters of bottled water. That was the first and last time I ventured into a market
for three months. The experience was overpowering and intimidating. We rode past them periodically, and I could smell the fish stink even from the window of a moving vehicle. After three weeks, we left the hotel and moved into our apartment. Our new home is located one block from another, not quite as large, but still big market. We stayed away from there, preferring to eat out at the restaurants we had become familiar with while kitchen-less in our hotel room. After five weeks, Reyna took a trip around Vietnam with a friend who planned to spend
a year traveling in Southeast Asia. During their trip, they took a day long cooking class, which included a guided tour of the market in Hoi An. She returned to HCMC armed with a mango peeler and a newfound determination to prepare meals at home. She started to go to the market
regularly to buy produce for our modest attempts at cooking. These attempts consisted almost entirely of weekend breakfasts, eggs scrambled with vegetables purchased at the market.
Weekend breakfast has always been a special time for Reyna and me. When we met, she worked nights as a server in a bar. I’ve never been a night owl, so our courtship revolved principally around breakfasts. Every Saturday and Sunday morning we would roll out of bed and have
breakfast at Egg & I on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas. We’d spend the time discussing our separate lives or watching the bizarre parade of patrons in the restaurant: families with way too many children, clubbers still dressed up and out from the night before, ancient couples and us. Once she moved in with me, we started making our own breakfasts, although we were usually too lazy to put forth the effort and simply went back to Egg & I. Before meeting Reyna I had never been much of a breakfast eater mainly because I refused to eat eggs. Spending time eating breakfast with her, however, helped me discover the simple joy of eggs for breakfast, a cup of
decent coffee and lively conversation. I knew it was love when I found myself flipping bacon with a fork so she wouldn’t have to get out of bed to enjoy her weekend morning ritual.
Back in Vietnam, we cooked with things that Reyna had already purchased at the market. Usually she would run down to the bottom of the stairs, buy a baguette from the food cart across the street and we’d cook. I think she knew that I was uncomfortable with the thought of a hundred hands on the food I was eating, and handled the acquisition of food alone. The food
appeared, and I didn’t ask where it came from. It was a fine and ordered situation.
One Sunday morning, soon after Reyna got her first job, had worked hard all week and all of Saturday, she offered to run to the market to buy ingredients for breakfast. On this particular morning, for whatever reason, I offered to accompany her. It was still overwhelming, but I made a conscious effort tostay in my body and think through the experience. While Reyna hunted through things, I stood and stared at the pork section. The pork section consists of a row of barefoot women squatting on tables with large wooden cutting blocks. People walk, or
inexplicably ride their motorbikes (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that),down the aisle squeezing and prodding the meat. At first I was disgusted. I don’t want to eat things that have been sitting out in the heat all day, with flies buzzing everywhere, and have been handled by multiple strangers before making its way to my refrigerator. As I stood and stared, a woman selling woks across the aisle from the meats touched me on the arm. She motioned for me to stand out of the way of the river of people passing and grabbing. I stood next to her safely out of the way of passing motorbikes. As I stood there I realized, like I have so many times in the past few months, that this is how the vast majority of people in the world buy food. They are not the disgusting ones, we are. We devote an unbelievable amount of energy making our food as sterile and impersonal as possible. In an American supermarket meat counter there is nothing to make one think “cow” or “pig” or “fish.” There are no faces in our supermarkets past the smiling face of the butcher. There is something incredibly sick about that. It’s like the supermarket doesn’t want you to actually associate the steak with the big-eyed, mooing, cud-chewing beast that stands in the fields as you drive past on your way to the store. Most of the world doesn’t buy food that’s prepackaged and sitting neatly in their grocer’s freezer, they look it in the eye. They spend time interacting with the person who grew the food, slaughtered and cut up the cow and personally carried it to where it sits waiting to be purchased. I stood with my mind spinning. I’ve never thought twice about opening the freezer door in a supermarket and pulling out a Lean Cuisine that I can pop in the microwave later and have a fully prepared meal in 10 minutes. Who made that? Where does it come from? Preparing that Lean Cuisine must be an incredibly complex process; from acquiring the raw ingredients, to preparing the meal itself, selecting the proper packaging, adding the right amount of chemical flavoring to ensure that the advertised product tastes something like the title of the dish, to shipping it frozen to my local supermarket. Somehow in my brain, that process has become less foreign than a person raising a pig, slaughtering it, cutting it up and selling it at a market. I was caught entirely off guard by the simplicity of growing, harvesting and selling. I thought about my friends in the states who are more comfortable opening a box of Corn Pops than they are eating an ear of corn on the side of the road and how sad that is. I thought about going with my brother, Kenneth, to an orchard in Florida and buying oranges to take home for my parents at Christmas. I wasn’t entirely comfortable eating something that had been so close to dirt just moments before and realized that I am no different from my Corn Pop eating friends, despite my efforts to “eat healthy” and “low on the food chain.” The fact that the corn on the side of the road is “dirty” but the box of cereal shipped from a factory in New Jersey is somehow cleaner and safer made me feel like a fraud. I was reminded of my high school physics teacher. He was considered one of the
“cool teachers” due to a Name That Movie Clip game he had devised along with a
few others we played in class every week. It was his way of making a less than palatable subject and making it fun. One of his favorite sayings was, “Physics is the science of thinking really hard about really simple things.” We were simply out to buy groceries for two meals, and I found myself reexamining choices I made almost fifteen years ago. Living in Vietnam has stripped away the glitter and convenience of my life in the US causing me to reexamine things
in an entirely new perspective. Walking through the market, I found myself wanting to experience it the way I had when I was a child, a simple assortment of food and nothing more. As Americans we have a way of taking simple things and complicating them in ways that are unnecessary and at times seem downright counterproductive, all in the name of convenience. Clearly I had forgotten that there is a vast difference between what is convenient and what is simple. By all accounts we are extremely privileged people in Vietnam. We aren’t rich, but we can do pretty much whatever we want whenever we want. Living in a third world country has turned out to be nothing like I expected. I find myself spending my days thinking about things that seemed pedestrian before my move. I am finding, however, that these new and sometimes troubling thoughts are what make us grow as humans and draw us together despite our differences. I started to feel that I could let the inconveniences of this place either frustrate me, or accept them as opportunities to understand more about myself. That choice has brought with it a peace that I would have never known without coming to this place and sharing my life with these people.

Mission

Hello Emptiness!

They say that the vast majority of blogs on the Intertubes never get written in. I have tried once before at keeping one and failed. Well THIS TIME will be different. After writing eight reviews for Trip Advisor, I thought to myself, "Self, why don't you write this someplace where you can easily access it?" And thusly, The Tattooed Vegetarian was born. So with a shout out to the Chudy family and their Burger Blogs, we're off like a prom dress.

My wonderful (and patient) partner and I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in April.I've noticed since moving that there are thousands and thousands of blogs about food and restaurants, but almost none that fit my particular mileau: The Vegetarian Expat. My hope is to mainly talk about food and the struggles and revelations therein, but will sometimes serve as a place to put my random musings.

Today marks seven months in this strange land. In that time we've had some intense and bizarre experiences which I hope to relate to you in this here blog. Despite being a marginally successful freelance photographer, I've not been moved to take many photos since we've been here (beyond what I took for work); instead I've been writing. My guess is that there will be a flurry of posts in the beginning and then I will do my best to maintain some kind of regular posting schedule. I think we should get started by looking backward for a few posts. I have a bunch of writing that I did when we first got here that I shared with almost no one beyond my father. So let's enjoy those first, step into the shallow end of the pool, shall we?