There's a Light that Never Goes Out

Do you see this light?  We turned it on Friday evening while we were relaxing on the couch after going out for a fancy dinner at The Deck.  Later when we decided to make our way to bed, I walked over to the dimmer to turn the light out just like I'd done every night since we moved into the house.  Except this night the light stayed on.  I turned it on and off a few times with no change at all.  Today is day four. I did a little time lapse photography experiment with this light's mate about a month ago, and it burned out after three days of constant running.  This light was on with it then, and is still going this time.  That's seven days of constant running if you're scoring at home.  Seven days of nonstop operation from a lamp that was likely manufactured by an underage child in China, and then brought to Vietnam as a reject lamp that couldn't be sold in the western market.  This has never happened to me before, and I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about lights.  The function of a light switch is to complete a circuit.  When the light is on, the circuit is completed, when off, it's broken.  That is a physical change!  It can't just suddenly not work, can it?  The dimmer still clicks and acts like it should, the light simply doesn't respond.  Maybe it just wants to make sure no one steals the cat food.

or maybe it just really likes The Smiths...

Fahawesome

I don't know why I feel the need to apologize for only writing once last week.  I've let everyone down!  I'll try to do better this week.

On Saturday we went to the big book store Fahasa (389 Hai Ba Trung, D3).  Reyna needs to go regularly to get supplies for school and, for the first time ever, I was looking for a book as well.  At five floors Fahasa is by far the largest book store in the city. Most of the books are in Vietnamese but the fourth floor contains a decent number of English language books.  When I say "Engligh language books" I mean exactly that:  books that teach you the language of English.  It's filled with dictionaries and all levels of workbooks.  I had to resist spending money on a work book that teaches flight attendants to speak English.  I flipped through it.  Brilliant.  It had all these exercises with pictures of oxygen masks and fire extinguishers, which you then had to match with the appropriate emergency words in English.  Oxygen Mask goes with "Cabin Depressurization" and  Life Raft goes with "Water Landing."  If it hadn't cost $10, it would have come home with me. 

The section containing English books that would be considered "for fun" is pretty weak.  I suppose it's not weak at all if you're obsessed with Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, but everything else is either a novelization of a screenplay or "young people classics.*"  I don't understand why they don't just stock regular books that are written for people at a certain reading level.  Perhaps reading Treasure Island as it was originally written would be a good goal rather than reading the fifth grade version.  My guess as to why they have so few is that they can't compete with the book bootleggers down in the backpacker area.  They sell bootleg copies of books for about 1/3 the price if you're willing to haggle with them.

*You know, those books that are dumbed down versions of classic books.  Hey are you too stupid or too bad at English to read Pride and Prejudice?  Well I have just the thing for you!  It's Pride and Prejudice written at a fourth grade level!  Come to think of it, maybe they should sell more of these in the US.  Young Classics: When the Cliff's Notes Are Too Hard. 

Anyway, my favorite part of Fahasa by far is the fifth floor.  It contains the most confusingly wonderful mish-mash of things.  When I die, I hope heaven has an unending floor of crap that rivals the fifth floor of Fahasa.  They even have a pottery painting section.  Every time we go I ask Reyna if she want's to paint a piece of pottery, but she always says no.  And why paint pottery yourself when you can buy an unbelievable array of crap that's already finished just a few feet away?  While Reyna busies herself with colored pencils and pens and things, I like to wander around in the housewares.  I remembered to bring a camera on Saturday. Here's a few Fahasa gems you might like to get for your family.

 

I realize that I'm doing a little Beavis and Butthead channeling here ("It says 'use on wood' huh-huh huh-huh") but this really made me laugh.  Let's see if I can think of a children's book title that makes me want to read a book less than The Hole.  How about  The Grate  or The Drywall? Not to mention that the "hole" on the cover isn't all that hole-ish.  It just looks like a smiley face to me.  If you click on the picture, you'll notice that everything other than "The Hole" is in Vietnamese, but the actual text of the book is in English.  It didn't hurt that this was sitting directly beside a stack of Decision Points by George W. Bush.  At least they have everything organized appropriately.  It's really a shame that the book isn't called A Hole rather than The Hole.



Rainy day outside?  Kids getting bored being stuck int he house all day?  There's nothing quite like a rousing game of Monkey Nuts!  Clearly this game was created by a deranged uncle.  I can just imagine a baby sitter showing up to watch a child, and before the parents leave, the sitter says, "Hey, after your parents leave we can play Monkey Nuts!"  Sirens and cool steel of handcuffs ensue.  Also consider the game contains a bunch of small plastic pieces that look like nuts.  This game is intended for four year olds. If you feel like you need to practice your Heimlich Maneuver, or if there's a kid down the street you don't like with a birthday coming up, you might want to consider Monkey Nuts. 



This is a two-for-one.  Now you are no longer relegated to simply showing your O-Face when you pick up that random stranger at the pub.  No.  Now you can also present them with a shining O-Face momento to commemorate that special night.  Picture this scenario:  Couple meet, hook up and then make arrangements for a second date.  When the guy arrives the following exchange takes place:

Man:  Hey I brought you a gift.

Woman: Oh how thoughtful!  [opens the package to find the porcelain o-face.  Pause. A beat.] What is it?

Man: I thought you might want something to remember that killer blow-job.  I've been thinking about it all week.  I'm super excited about our date.

[Woman exits, audience hears the sound of doors slamming offstage. As the lights fade we hear the sound of distant sirens]

Scene

Nothing says, "I enjoyed sexing you, and would like to do it again sometime" in a creepier way than giving this as a gift.  Come on, you laughed.  Admit it.

I couldn't decide if that's better or worse than the not-so-subtly racist "black guy playing the accordian" figurine behind the O-Face, so I took a photo with both.  They have an entire collection of "black guy doing X" figurines.  You can decorate your whole house!  The only thing that would make the figurine even more offensively amazing would be to place a banner at his feet that reads, "Shine Yo Shoes?"  When I was in high school, I dated a girl whose mother collected little figurines of black people.  She called them "Niglets."  Really I should have known right then that the relationship wasn't going anywhere.  I guess when you're sixteen and desperate to touch a boob you overlook that sort of thing.



I only took these three photos, but there is so SO much more.  Aisles and aisles of strange and incomprehensible knick-knacks.  I have to pace myself.  I get so overwhelmed by the amount of amazing crap that I start to sweat when I'm in there.  Most places like this don't allow you to take photos, so I have to be stealthy.  I don't know what I would do if I got banned from Fahasa.  I could fill up am 8Gb memory card with crazy shit from just this one store.  This is what makes it FAHAWESOME, but it's also why I don't have more photos from living here.  Everywhere you go, you see fifty things that are photo-worthy.  If I spent my time documeting everything I saw that was strange or noteworthy, I'd never get anything else done.  I didn't find the book I was looking for either. 





Attempt at Useful

In addition to writing about the randomness of living in Vietnam I would like to make the occasional attempt to post information that's actually useful.  Plus someone commented (woohoo!) asking me if I had any advice for someone getting ready to move here. I have in my posession some emails that I wrote back to my home office shortly after our arrival.  We were dumped in Vietnam with little to no information about anything.  We had to find our own apartment, learn our way around and where to buy things necessary for survival with little to no help from other people.  Most of what we learned was by accident.  What follows is an only slightly modified version of an email I sent back to my home office for future transfers.  In my case it was entirely ignored, but perhaps someone here will find it useful.  I've added updated commentary which appears like [this] after the comment.  The origninal (non-italicized) text was written after ten days in Vietnam.  Clearly I was freaked out.

·         You can’t ship yourself technology (hard drives, photography equipment, computers, etc.).  If you need something here, it’s  best to bring it with you.  I am operating without any catalogs because I decided to ship them to myself rather than bring them with me.  [We received a shipping allowance to move, so we jam-packed three boxes that were to be shipped by my office.  No one told us about the electronics shipping, so it was all wrapped up in with sheets and towels and catalogs and other things we wanted.  The day after I arrived, I had to frantically call back to tell my company not to ship the boxes.  Otherwise we would have lost everything.  I had a few friends bring necessities when they came over, but you can't really ask someone to carry a 40kg (84lbs.) box for you.  In the end, we had to hand carry this stuff back with us when we returned to the US for the first time.  We ended up paying hundreds of dollars in baggage fees.  I guess the silver lining is that when we went back through the boxes after seven months in country, we found we'd packed a lot of stuff we would have never used or didn't need.]

·         Standard security deposit on an apartment is three months’ rent, plus you have to pay the first month when you move in.  For a $1000 apartment, that’s $4000 up front before you can set foot inside your place. [I'm being slightly melodramatic here, because the standard security deposit is two months rent plus the first month.  So the reality would be $3000 for a $1000/mo. apartment.  You can find rooms and roommates on the cheap if you're flexible.  We didn't have a ton of options because there was two of us and two cats.  Regardless it's still a shit-load of money to pony up if you landed without a lot of cash.  And here's why:]

·         You need a local address or business card to open a bank account.  I don’t have a local business card, so I can’t open a bank account.  Since I can’t open a bank account, I can’t rent an apartment… [most landlords want that security deposit in dollars.  You can't withdraw dollars from an ATM here.  To get dollars you have to go into the bank and withdraw it from your account (if you have an American dollars account -you have to specifically ask for it).  If you don't have an account, tough shit. Time to work on those negotiating skills.]

·         If you travel alone to VN, there is a 0% chance of finding an affordable (nice) apartment close to the office for less than $1500/mo. in the allotted two weeks.  Reyna has looked at apartments every day since she got here, and has only seen two that are decent, but they’re significantly more than the allowance the company is giving for housing.  I can’t imagine finding a place on my own in two weekends. [Two things:  The key phrase here is "in the allotted two weeks."  Also it's important to define the word "nice."  Nice in this instance means an apartment that is comparable to where we were living in the US (i.e. Modern and Western with a couch that isn't wood or wicker).  We also needed a place that was big enough for two people and two cats.  It would have been easier to find a place for just me, but then I would have had to leave three of my favorite things in the US.  It took three weeks to find an apartment that we could afford, stand to be in for more than five minutes and was within walking distance to my work.  After three months we knew enough about living here that we decided to move out and into a house.  We decided we'd rather live in a better neighborhood and have a longer commute than stay in our small, cramped one bedroom apartment.  I spent three MONTHS looking for the house.  We decided to move in July and actually moved in October.  It takes time.  We like it a lot, but it's still nowhere near as nice as the place we lived in in the US.  The longer you're here, the lower your standards get, so we find that we're happy with it despite it's many problems.  If you desire nothing less than equal to your current western place, then you're looking at $1500+ in rent.  Also, if you plan to start work immediately, it's a good idea to make sure the housing situation is settled.  I never had time to look once we moved, and Reyna got stuck with the whole business finding the first place, which was stressful as hell.  Plus all the agents stuck her with the taxi fares.  We used an agent for our first apartment, which worked well enough.  I tried to use a different agent to find the house.  They probably showed me 80 places. I only saw two I really liked, and both were more than we wanted to pay.  In the end Reyna found our place on An Phu Neighbors, the neighborhood Google Group which has turned into quite a life-saver].

·         Toiletries are extremely hard to find.  Bring toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant with you. [They're actually not that hard to find if you know where to look.  There are nice supermarkets in all the big shopping malls (Vincom, Diamond Plaza and Parkson).  Once you know that, you're fine.  But coming from the US, thinking to look for deodorant next to the American Eagle is not a logical thought progression.  It doesn't help that to get to those supermarkets you have to walk through an arcade and a bowling alley.  It's surreal.  The thing to remember is that your standard "western" brands, especially in toothpaste (Crest, Colgate, etc.) are manufactured in SE Asia instead of Mexico or wherever that stuff comes from in the US, so it all tastes just a little different.  If you're very set in your ways and like things just so, it's best to bring this stuff with you.]

·         EVERYTHING takes longer.  You can’t  just walk to the store and buy X.  Especially if the thing you want is not a “normal” item.  Google hasn’t documented every square inch of this city, so when you find an address for something, you can’t be sure if you can trust that the place is actually there.  And if it IS there, you can’t know if the cab driver will know how to get there.  It’s difficult to know if it’s alright for me to spend half a day finding things instead of working.  [I would put this in the "I'm freaking out because we just moved here" category.  The first few weeks are totally overwhelming. Google Maps is actually quite useful, although you still have to hunt around for things sometimes.  You can also use Diadiem.com, which is like the local version of Google Maps.  It's handy for finding little tiny streets, of which there are many.  Over the weekend I needed to find a CR2450 battery for a camera accessory.  I had to go to five places to find it.  And when I did find it, it was in the most unlikely place.  I would have never ever looked there if someone at Nguyen Kim hadn't given me the specific address.]

·         Pretty much everything you buy here must be paid for in cash.  [Yep, still true.  Do not think you can "do" Vietnam on your credit card.   That is, unless you want to take out cash advances on your credit card constantly. A friend of mine who came to visit learned the hard way, and I had to loan him money throughout his stay. Other things to consider are when you take out that $3000 to move into your first place you will have to carry it across town in your pocket or backpack.  Not fun.  There are places that accept credit cards, but many times the employees see them so rarely, they don't know how to work the machine, and they inevitably make a mistake (read get your card blocked).  I spent six months with blocks on both my credit cards because I couldn't bear the thought of paying to sit on hold with the credit card company.  When we went back to the US, I called them and explained that I lived in Vietnam and occasionally needed to make large purchases with the card.  That seems to have solved it.  Overall it's a good thing because we got out of the habit of using  credit cards, therefore we rarely buy expensive stuff.]

·         HSBC bank here and HSBC bank in the US are not related, and are not affiliated with each other in any way. [That pretty much says it all.]

·         Lunch time is siesta time here, so no errands can be run at lunch time. [A little dramatic here, but not totally untrue.  If you need to pick something up at a local shop at lunch time, it's not out of the ordinary to find the proprieter of the shop dead asleep on the floor.  The bank goes down to one teller between 12 & 1, but most locals don't go to the bank at lunch anyway (they're busy sleeping too) so there's usually not a line.]

·         I wish I’d had a local cell phone ready to go on the first day.  We couldn’t start looking at apartments because it took three days to get a local cell phone.  So basically, we missed the entire first week just getting our feet under us and getting everything together to start looking.  [Again, if you are being transferred for work, have this arranged beforehand, especially if you have a deadline for finding a place to live.  It will make  a HUGE difference.  I corresponded with one of our new hires before she arrived, and this was the #1 piece of advice I gave her.  So far she's the only person to be transferred and find an apartment in under two weeks.]

·         You can plug an ungrounded plug into the wall anywhere with no problem.  You need an adapter for grounded plug. [Okay this requires a little explanation.  You can plug anything into the wall here (US plug, Euro plug, Chinese plug) HOWEVER the voltage is 230V.  What does this mean to you?  Things have multi-voltage wiring (they will say 120V-240V somewhere on them) will work fine.  This means your computer, cell phone charger and most newish electronics are good to go.  If you are bringing electrical things that don't accept varying voltages (hairdryers, fans, electric razors) prepare for a little show with sparks or smoke or both.  Ladies, I'm sorry to report that your Infuser 3000 hairdryer will not work here.  It'll either blow up the hairdryer or destroy the plug in your bathroom (which is sadder?  I'm not sure, but both suck).  As far as grounded plugs go, offices tend to have them, but houses and apartments that aren't specifically designed for westerners generally don't.  You can buy power strips with grounded outlets on the cheap.   We brought three adapters with us and they're collecting dust.]

·         Have someone who knows you’re coming into town, so you aren’t completely alone the first day.  Perhaps recruit someone (that speaks English) to meet the new person, and make sure the driver is there to pick you up.   It’s scary as hell the first day if you’re alone.  No one came to the airport to pick me up because I arrived on a holiday weekend.  I took a gypsy cab to the hotel, which cost about three times what I should have paid.  I didn’t know it was a holiday weekend until I got here.  That would have been good to know beforehand.  [Me being bitchy, but still true.  No one came to pick me up at the airport on the day I arrived, even though I was told a car would come to meet me.  It was also about 150 degrees outside.  I moved from the desert in the US and I've never felt heat like here.  I was already stressed to the max about moving because I had to leave Reyna behind in LA with the cats (we'll save that one for another post).  I found myself suddenly alone and in a foreign country. 

        Now, if you find yourself in the same situation, here's what I recommend.  Walk out the little T at the airport where the masses of people are gathered to meet their parties and turn LEFT.  Try not to look too "deer-in-headlights" (harder than it may seem) as you pass the 47 guys asking you if you want a ride somewhere.  They will hassle you less if you appear to know what you're doing.  You'll see a line of actual taxis queuing about 20 yards (or 15m if your not American) away.  It's right where the pick-up area ends and the normal street begins.  Go there and find either a Mailinh or Vinasun taxi if you can.  Sometimes  you have to wait.  If you arrive at night, you have to cross the street and walk into the parking lot to find the Mailinh or Vinasun taxis.  Or, you can just pay three times the price and have a gypsy guy carry your luggage and drive you in his personal car.  When I arrived I paid US$20 for a ride to my hotel, which didn't really seem unreasonable because the same ride in the US would have cost more.  He got me.  Negotiate the price BEFORE you get in the car.  If he tries to rip you off and charge you more than the price you agreed on, you will have to yell louder than him.  That's always worked for me in those situations.]

And those were my first freakouts.  Here's a few other things to chew on:

• One of the most invaluable resources we found the first week was The Word magazine.  The Word and Asia Life are both filled with excellent information every month.  In the back there's always a decent map and listings of hundreds of places to eat around town.  We may have starved without that.  And here's the best part.  It's free.  If someone had told me about it beforehand, my first stop after I landed  would have been a bar to pick one up.

• Facebook is blocked.  There are two ways I know of to get on.  Using a remote VPN is the way most people access it and comes with the least headaches, but also generally costs money.  You'll have to ask one of your new friends how to do it because it's too complicated to explain at this point in this post.  If you have an iDevice (iPhone, iPad etc.) you can download the Opera browser app and access FB that way.  It's limited, but if you just want to update your status and check messages, it does the job.  If you're a status updatin', photo postin' fiend, then you probably want to consider a paid VPN like Astral.

• No Pandora, no playlist.com, no slacker.com, no Hulu, no streaming ESPN video, no Netflix.  You can access these things with a VPN service, but the internet here is quite slow.  Even YouTube takes patience.  I also had to open a new iTunes account after moving because my old one got blocked when I tried to make purchases from here.  If you're like me and demand a steady flow of new music coming into your life, then I recommend the Band of the Day app for iPads and iPhones.  It helped.  I think the Vietnamese people have declared war on music that isn't either shit pop or home-grown oddness.

• If Tiger beer makes you unbearably gassy, try it with ice.  The ice knocks down the level of carbonation and keeps you from getting super bloated drinking it (not that this happens to me -it happens to a guy I know, okay? Jeez).  Plus it keeps your beer cold longer.  I used to know a girl that drank PBR with ice and I always gave her a hard time about it.  That girl was onto something.

• It took me about six weeks to get numb to the traffic enough to try driving  a motorbike.  That seems like a reasonable amount of time.  Being able to drive myself around was a gigantic step to making Vietnam feel like home.  You're supposed to have a driver's license, but I don't.  As long as you drive a smallish bike and don't drive like a goddamned maniac, you should be fine without it.  I got pulled over one time, I paid a little fine and went on my way. 

See, if you ask questions, I'll answer them -albeit in my own long-winded and roundabout way.  Hope that helped Daitka (I see you).  Oh and one more thing Daitka. 

•  You're right, there are lots of tasty vegetarian places around town.  I don't go more often because my friends rarely want to go.  I don't like forcing people to bend to my dietary choice, so I try to find places where everyone can find something tasty.  That way they can eat, and I can manage.  If I hadn't done that, I couldn't tell you that El Gaucho, the Argentinian steakhouse on Nguyen Sieu, has fabulous pasta.  In addition, I find that many of the vegetarian places offer the same food.  I like it, but don't want to eat it all the time.  Plus, when I do eat it, I always feel like I'm eating something that is intentionally bland.  Vegetarian Pho is good, but clearly not as good as the real deal, otherwise there would be a lot more vegetarian Pho places.  Finally, the vegetarian places aren't always easy to find if you don't speak Vietnamese and really know your way around.  There's one right around the corner from our house that we've never been to.  We just found our usual haunts before we noticed that place.  I blame The Word and Asia Life.  As for my favorite vegetarian restaurant in town (so far), it's The Loving Hut - 152 Nguyen Trong Tuyen.  Expansive menu, cheap and good.  I'll try to spend a little more time on the blog mission in the future.  Thanks for reading!

On Killing Nostalgia

So this question has been rolling around in the back of my head lately (and was prompted by your comment yutzyjbear* -I see you): Why do Americans believe our lives would be better if we had lived in the 1950s?  Why am I nostalgic for a time I didn't even experience?  I remember having that feeling when I was a kid and watched Happy Days.  I wanted to be them, I wanted their lives.  I, and any other person my age with parents who grew up in the 50s, have heard how when they were kids they could get lunch, a soda, a movie ticket and popcorn for $1.25.  Those were the days, and it actually sounds a whole lot like an episode of Happy Days.  Well I'll tell you, we now live in a place where we can get lunch, a six pack, and buy a movie to take home and watch on the couch (and then keep forever) for about $5.  It's a pretty similar situation. And when you start to look around, you realize that there are many striking similarities beyond the cost of things.  Things like men are almost always well dressed, and women are expected to cook and be subservient to men.  We are living in the glorious 1950s right now, and it's not really all that glorious.  We like it, yes, but it's not Happy Days.  We work our asses off.

*That must be a real bitch to spell to people over the phone.

I spoke with my Dad last night and he was talking about how Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney keep calling the house to get them to vote in their upcoming primary.  It seems to me that American politics (which I swore I would not discuss in this particular forum, but here we go) spends a lot of time looking backward to the "Golden Era."  The age of prosperity, the time when everyone was happy with a home and a white picket fence and an American Dream with 2.2 kids and a Chrysler in the garage.  They want us to believe they can manufacture the 1950s for us.  The Republican Party sells almost nothing other than the idea that we can all have a house, a car and marry Donna Reed.

Those politicians calling my Dad pontificate about protecting small businesses and watching out for the "little guy."  Problem is that the "little guy" in the US was slaughtered long ago in the name of convenience.  Our lives in Vietnam are not convenient.  Even though we know where to find most things at the store now, we still don't have an oven or a microwave or a clothes dryer.  Heating leftovers is a total pain in the ass, and we have clothes constantly drying on our bannisters.  Every place we shop is run by a "little guy" and most of the time it sucks.  The little guy doesn't have an unlimited supply of Old Spice in the warehouse up the street*.  I realize now that the thing I missed most about the US after we moved was the ease; the convenience of everything.  I think I've said that before, but what it meant is all new.

*I'm dealing with this problem right now.  The Old Spice supply at our supermarket is gone, and I only have about a quarter inch of deordorant left.  The only kinds the supermarket is currently carrying are roll on and spray, both of which I hate.  Roll on pulls out the underarm hairs and the sprays all make you smell like the old guy in the club wearing a shiny shirt. Reyna has already made the roll-on switch, but I'm a holdout.  Do I go on an afternoon-long weekend adventure to find deodorant?  I haven't decided.

You see, Americans tend to desire convenience more than we desire to do the right thing.  It's easier to walk into one store, buy everything and then face a 30 second struggle to carry 125 plastic bags from the car to the house.  When we lived in the US, we shopped at Target rather than Wal-mart because Target was good and Wal-Mart was bad.  At the end of the day they're the same thing: gigantic box stores that make it impossible for small businesses that offer a similar service to exist.  Small businesses do still exist here and there, but it's a rarity and generally a specialty shop that people go out of their way to frequent. Even then it's only a miniscule percentage of people.  I'm certain we would go to Metro, the big box store in our neighborhood, for everything if we didn't have to take our passports, have a copy made at the customer service counter, present it at the store entrance and fill out a form before we can enter the store.  We won't do it because, you guessed it, it's not convenient.  We can just walk into the other grocery stores and pay more for less.  Are we making the right choice?  Are our shopping habits preying on child labor and unfair business practices?  I have no idea, because in Vietnam, you don't talk about that sort of thing. 
Not talking about things is at the root of nostalgia. Take a look at Penn State and Happy Valley, Pennsylvania.  Happy Valley is the boutique butcher shop of that region.  It's not a big box store city like Philly or Pittsburgh.  It's a tiny enclave of what Americans perceive as authentic and "the way it's supposed to be."  People don't go to Happy Valley because they need socks or laundry detergent. They go because it represents something that we've been indoctrinated since birth to believe we want. They go because to be there makes you feel like you're a part of something rare and special.  Even the football team isn't just a sports team used as a tool to structure men's lives, build character and aid focus.  It's an iconic representation of "football team" complete with throwback uniforms and, until this year, a coach that had been at the school since the Golden Era.  The reality is that it's nothing more than guys playing football, just like every other football team in the nation. 

I've never been to Happy Valley, but I did go to college in a 1950s-ish small town in Kentucky.   You see in the 1950s, Happy Valley, my old college town and in Vietnam there are things that people just don't talk about.  To discuss the rampant homophobia in my college town is to soil the image of the town.  It would be impolite for me to tell you you're a monster to your face.  No one wins.  You think I'm a jerk, and I still think you're a monster.  In the end, what we've built suffers from our open hostility, and pretty soon we're just another redneck town.  Best to keep that stuff inside and tucked away. 

You don't hear a lot of news coming out of Vietnam about child predators or serial killers.  This doesn't mean they don't exist.  And it definitely doesn't mean they didn't exist in the "Golden Age" Americans appear to long for and politicians love to promise.  People at Penn State, my college town and many other places across the US get so caught up in protecting that image; that "we represent the thing everyone else wishes they had" feeling, they miss the darkness lurking under the surface.  Enter Jerry Sandusky. I contend that the reason Jerry Sandusky was able to commit and get away with his alleged crimes for so long because he lived in Happy Valley.  To call him out publicly would be to destroy Happy Valley's image.

Politicians in the US, and especially the Republicans, depend on this nostalgia because if we don't have it we might notice what they're doing.  They want us to believe that they have our best intentions in mind and while we're sleeping, they're busy "taking care of things."  It's a slight of hand.  I'll sell you an idea that not only doesn't exist, but never existed if you don't ask about what I'm doing while you're busy buying my idea.  The politicians are getting rich.  How did Republicans convince people that don't have any money that they want to pay for health care?  CONVENIENCE.  Threaten me with standing in line, and I'll pay extra to avoid it.  If I have to pay for it, then I must be getting something that's better or more exclusive.  If it was free I wouldn't be special.  I won't be the "little guy" anymore, deserving of extra protection and rights.  It's really kind of genius when you think about it.  Illegals in America get free health care, because it exists as Medicaid.  American citizens do not use it because to do so would mean associating with illegals.  The notion being that if someone can't be bothered with staying in the country legally, then they must be bad.  If everyone had free health care, then I would be lumped in with those "unsavory" characters who don't currently have health insurance.  We can't have that can we?

The reason I didn't feel nostalgic at the Super Bowl is because the feeling I thought I would tap into by going never actually existed.  When I watched the Super Bowl I wanted to connect with that feeling of being an American.  I believed sports could do that, and I would cite Landon Donovan's goal against Algeria in the World Cup as evidence.  I was disappointed for ten days because I didn't get that connection, that surge of energy.  The fact that only became clear to me recently is that there is no inherent connection between sports and patriotism unless I choose make that assignation.  The US does not have a monopoly on patriotism through athletic achievement, although at times it seems like we think we do.  Donovan's goal was not the embodiment of the "never say die," "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "make lemons out of lemonade" construct.  And nothing about it was especially American.  All nations possess this sense.  It was just crazy exciting, unexpected and dramatic, and he did it while representing my country. Those things are not exclusively American.  Neither are any of those other cliches Americans, including me apparently, like to drag out to illustrate how iconically "American" an event was.

I then realized that despite what we've been sold for the last XLVI years, the Super Bowl is not a cultural event, as much as companies would like you to believe it is.  The Super Bowl can't generate a connection because it's just a game. The event itself cannot assign meaning to you.  A cultural event is something that springs forth organically and is so intriguing and magnetic that people gravitate towards it naturally.  The Sixties in America was a cultural event.  The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall were cultural events.  The concussion issue in football and other contact sports stands to become a cultural event. The Super Bowl is the opposite of that.  It's a big, fat profit engine that mega-corporations and billionaires use as a vehicle to launch new products and prey on our need to feel like we're part of something special.  You can't schedule a cultural event, and you can't force me to have a connection regardless of who sings the National Anthem.  The Super Bowl can only set the stage for me to connect.  Everything else is just smoke for profit.

So I guess the crushing depression I felt from the "non-stalgia" was actually a gift.  They say the biggest growth comes from the most difficult times.  Allowing myself to feel really bad and empty for not having the appropriate response to a particularly American event was an important step.  I foolishly thought the depression meant there was something wrong with me.  "A real American would have felt that happiness..." In actuality I was releasing myself from the bonds of my own indoctrination. 

The Y

The Asean Basketball League... oh sorry, The Air Asia Asean Basketball league has come onto my radar.  Reyna had to work late last night, so I swung by the local pub on my way home to have a beer and dinner.  Generally there are friendly folks at the bar to talk to, but last night I found myself between two French guys (they were speaking French, they could have been from someplace else) and two guys engrossed in their laptops*.  This left me in front of a 46" flat screen television showing an ABL matchup between the Indonesia Warriors and the Bangkok Cobras.

*Since when is it okay to sit at a bar and work on your laptop?  In a bar fine, but at the bar?  I would worry that my computer would get wet...

At the time I wasn't overly excited about the game, except that the basketball was awful, which drew me in.  It was comical how bad the players were.  The game was fraught with missed layups, drives and kick outs that do not lead to shots, airballs and bricks.  One player missed six freethrows in three consecutive trips down the court.  It was an epic of incompetent basketball.  I was especially intrigued by the player of the game, who's name was shown in the post game interview as Thomas Steven Demon.  In an amusing quirk, because of the way they order names in SE Asia, his jersey says "Thomas" on the back.  Wouldn't you love to watch an NBA game and have a guy's name shown as "Doug" on the back?  On the ABL website his name is shown as Steven Demon Thomas, so I don't actually know his real name.  At the end of the day, it's not surprising he was the player of the game.   He's 6'-5" and everyone else in the game is Asian.  Other than the occasional Guinness World Record tall Asian and Yao Ming, they're all shorter than me.  Even in a professional basketball leage, I'm a good height for a forward in SE Asia.  Too bad I suck at basketball.   I enjoyed the hell out of it.  In the end, the Warriors, behind Steven, or Thomas, Demon's 24 points and 17 rebounds won.  The final stats revealed that the game had also included 35 turnovers.  Amazing.

I went home, spent some time with Reyna and went to bed at a reasonable hour.  During the night I dreamed I would start writing a column about the ABL, because the coverage is pretty lousy for something that is broadcast internationally on an ESPN affliate.  I mean the biggest news of the last two weeks apparently is that one player couldn't play in an away game because he had the wrong number on his jersey, and that number didn't match the number listed on the roster.  I guess no one in the arena had a pen.  How could you not follow a league with news like that? I also noticed that my hometown Saigon Heat, an expansion team this year are 0-6 and in their closest game this month, they lost by 14 points.  I still might write that column, because I like writing about sports; and when I sat down to write this post, that's exactly what I was doing, but this came out instead:

I grew up in the same country as the NBA and played three full seasons of organized, competitive basketball (3rd grade, 6th grade and 7th grade).  After playing at the local Y when I was 9, it took me another three years to recover from the psychological trauma.  I can't impress on you how shy I was as a kid.  When I was in first grade (the first time -I had to repeat), I wet my pants three times in the same day because I was too shy to ask the teacher to use the bathroom.  That is shy. And I can't believe no one said anything to me that day about it, not my classmates, not my teachers. For me, playing basketball at the YMCA was like putting a guy who lives in his parent's basement and steals movies off the internet in prison with a bunch of murderers and rapists.  It was hell.  To this day, whenever I smell that gymnasium "YMCA smell" I get nervous, and my stomach gets all liquid-feeling.  This is probably why I prefer physical activities that occur outdoors.

You see, I went to private school from the time I was 6 until I graduated from college.  There were things that happened at The Y that I just never saw.  In my day to day routine kids didn't talk back to adults, or yell and scream, run around naked, play with themselves in front of other people, or not appear to know how to sit quietly.  My dad taught at the school I attended (and is the reason I was able to go to private school in the first place -thanks Dad (no really, thank you)) and my mom worked part time in the library, so they were always around.  Playing basketball at the Y in third grade was probably the first time I ever did anything on my own. Mom and Dad were not around. 

An unfortunate side effect of having working parents and practice at the Y was that I had to ride the bus.  This was a trauma of a different sort.  It seemed that people in my school, who spent the day acting like normal kids would completely lose their minds as soon as they climbed onto the bus.  The second they set foot on the rubbered floor, their voices tripled in volume and they would vibrate like a wind-up toy.  It wasn't hard for me to sit down and shut up because I was too paralyzed by YMCA anticipation and stress to speak, let alone bounce around.

We were always the last to arrive at the Y for basketball because Mr. Wilbur, the bus driver, would have to spend at least 15 minutes getting everyone to sit down and shut up before we could leave.  This was a tough task and the scene tended to devolve into him yelling incoherently at us.  Mr. Wilbur's tenure as the Y-bus driver ended when one of my classmates spit on him.  Mr. Wilbur snapped and smacked him.  I can't say I blame him.  That kid was a shit.  He would eventually leave us for boarding school. He returned to our school a few years later after he was expelled from boarding school for spitting on a referee in a soccer game.  He had a thing about spitting apparently, because I also remember him spitting on our 4th grade teacher the next year.  He also holds the distinction of being the only person I've ever punched in the face.  And this should come as a surprise to no one; he was a red head.

It is my contention that a school bus is like a can of soda.  It bounces around and winds up the kids just like a shaken soda can.  This occasionally results in vomiting, but usually just makes youngsters outrageously rambunctious.  By the time everyone converged on the locker room, the contents were explosive.  I had a dedicated locker with a combination lock where I placed my school books and clothes during practice.  I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but operating a combination lock while surrounded by a bunch of naked and screaming future gang bangers (or so it seemed at the time) when you're 9 was intensely stressful.  Sometimes I'd have to wait for the locker room to clear out before I could focus and unlock my locker.   We even had the obligatory obese kid, whom everyone referred to as "Tonka."  I never actually saw him play basketball, or do anything else besides sit naked in front of his locker and stare into the middle distance, but I remember him being a lot more popular than me.  All the while the coaches would be on patrol, trying to keep the kids on schedule by twirling their whistles intimidatingly around their fingers and yelling.  When they weren't yelling, they were blowing their whistles.  In my nine year old brain it might as well have been combat.

Most of what I remember is coaches alternating between yelling and praying, and the whole thing was run by a guy we called Coach Squeaky.  I never knew his real name. One time I witnessed a different coach whip a ten year old kid with the lanyard of his whistle in front of about 150 kids.  That was pretty awful, but I remember other kids, bad kids, being as terrified of Coach Squeaky as I was of them.  Coaches could yell and whip kids with whistle lanyards in front of all their peers, and it was still preferrable to being sent to Coach Squeaky.  I don't have a recollection of anyone ever giving words to what happened when you got sent to see him, and I hate to speculate, but clearly it was bad. Kids would do horrible things, get sent away, and then sit in dazed silence for the rest of the day.

Basketball practice was broken down into three parts.  Full league practice, team practice and chapel. In full league practice we focused on fundamentals, dribbling relays, passing drills, that sort of thing.  This was not so bad because I could stand in line with guys from my school that were less intimidating.  In team practice, we broke into our respective teams and did other stuff, like layups and whatever else you learn when you are a 9 year old learning basketball.  These two things seemed to last for hours.  In hindsight, it was probably less than an hour.  I can't recall the name of my coach or the name of anyone else on my team, but we were called the Huskies and were forced to wear the most god-awful powder blue t-shirts as our uniform.  I think we would have looked less gay if we'd played in jock straps and chaps.  We won our first two games and lost the rest.

After basketball practice was chapel.  This was the time that I dreaded most.  Chapel took place in, and I'm not making this up, a room with cinder block walls and a padded floor.  No windows and only one door that was always blocked by a large and imposing coach.  With 150 kids and half a dozen coaches crammed into this room, I'm happy to report there was never a fire.  Chapel meant that the coaches had to get these 150, 9 year old boys to sit quietly for a few minutes while someone, I guess, spoke about The Baby Jesus and character building.  Then we would sing a song.  I can't remember all the details because what I remember is coaches losing their minds on kids and kids screaming for no particular reason.  There was always a 15 minute argument between kids and coaches to decide what song we would sing, or if we didn't sing loud enough.  Some kids would get singled out for not singing, which was my worst fear.  I sang in my quiet way, hoping to not be noticed.  Logic tells me there was more than one song, but the only one I remember goes like this:

1,2,3 the devil's after me (clap, clap, clap)
4,5,6, he's always playing tricks (clap, clap, clap)
7,8,9 he misses every time (clap, clap, clap)
Hallelujah, Hallelujah Amen

9,8,7 we're on our way to heaven (clap, clap, clap)
6,5,4 to live for ever more (clap, clap, clap)
3,2,1 the devil's on the run (clap, clap, clap)
Hallelujah Hallelujah Amen

After that we would play a game.  The game usually consisted of rolling around on the floor in some form of simulated hand-to-hand combat.  This could be totally made up, but the way I remember one game going was as follows.  The coaches would choose ten or so boys, and the rest of us would lie down on the floor.  The chosen boys would try to walk from one end of the room to the other without the boys on the floor pulling them down. Doesn't that sound like fun?  Lie down in a cramped room with 140 kids who just spent the last 90 minutes playing basketball and try to tackle other kids by their ankles.  When they inevitably fall, where do they land?  Yes, on other people.  It was basically a chaperoned stampede in a concrete room.  Generally I tried to get out as quickly as possible, so I could sit quietly against the wall away from the maelstrom.  Then it was back to the locker room to pack up and go home.  The whole thing took two hours, but felt like days. 

It took the next three years for my mother to convince me this atmosphere is not directly related to learning the game of basketball.  She convinced me to sign up to play a season at the County Booster Club, which played and practiced in a gym that was straight out of Hoosiers and not in a good way.  There were places on the floor around the stands that were roped off because the hardwood was in danger of collapsing.  In middle school, especially private middle school, perception is everything.  If you're not playing in the cool city basketball league at the Y, then you're playing in the redneck county basketball league and will be judged accordingly by your peers.  Overall it was a much better experience than the Y, but I was too ashamed to admit to anyone that I played in the other basketball league in town.  I was the only kid from my school who played there, and I don't remember anything about my team other than we had red uniforms.  Oh and one more thing.  During a certain game I was charged with guarding the other team's best scorer.  I guarded him like my life depended on it.  I guarded him so well, that I even played defense when we had the ball.  I managed to keep the kid from scoring, but I didn't do much in the way of scoring myself.  As a matter of fact, I can't remember scoring a single basket ever in that gym.

The next year, I played on the school 7th grade team, and we occasionally had to practice in that same Booster Gymnasium.  I was thankful that I'd never told anyone in my class that I played a full season there because all they did was talk shit about what a dump it was.  That eighth grade team had 35 players on the roster, which had to be split up into teams of 7.  Different combinations of teams would play in each game.  When the rosters were released, I saw that I was placed on one of the crappier teams, and would play in fewer games.  I pretty much gave up on basketball after that.  I was already a good soccer player (which we'll save for another YMCA post) on the travel team for the city, so I said I wanted to focus on that in high school.  My mom maintains to this day that I had ability in basketball, but I'm pretty sure she's just being a loving mother. 

My brother was in seventh grade and played in the same basketball program.  His memory is completely different from mine because they practiced in a different gym.  Where I could only manage one season of torture by basketball, he played for three.  As far as I know he never had to visit Coach Squeaky.

The Sounds of Silence

Dear Crushing Silence,

I took the week off...  I needed to recover from the overwhelming depression that the Super Bowl and my non-stalgia brought with it.  I've also reached the blogging crossroads where you realize that no one really gives a damn what you're writing.  I'm pleased with the writing I've done, but must come to grips with the fact that it's completely up to me, not the demands of my 1-3 regular readers to determine what material is or is not included in the blog.  So I spent some quality time reflecting, drinking, sitting staring at walls and riding around on the motorbike (sweet new background image, eh?) last week trying to decide how to continue this thing. 

I think everyone starts writing a blog with dreams of becoming the next Julie So&So who wrote the Julia Childs blog, got a book deal and was played by Amy Adams in the movie depiction of her life.  Watching the little ticker tell me I'm close to 1000 views per month went to my head a little, and I made the mistake of trying to reach out to the mysterious 1000, the very light green on top of Russia on my stat map.  People in Russia are reading me!  How cool is that?  It's come-back-down-to-Earth time.  No one is reading; and if no one is going to read, what is the point of writing?  Thus, I am going to write about whatever I want.  You're not reading it anyway, so I'm not sure why I feel the need to justify my decision. So I'm just going to practice.  Write whatever I want. 

I needed to get that out.  Onto the next inane entry

Superbowl... Monday? - Non-stalgia

Well I did it... I dragged my ass out of bed at 5:45 this morning to head down to the local pub to watch the Super Bowl.  Now I have the pleasure of sitting at my desk for another 7 hours.


I took my time getting to the bar this morning.  American football is treated with extreme indifference here in Vietnam, so I didn't expect today to be any different.  Wrong.  I arrived shortly before the opening kick-off to find that there was not a single seat left in the place.  I was forced to stand through the entire first half, until a woman with an actual job had to leave.  The rest of the atmosphere might as well have been Vegas.  People clapped and cheered after every play, and why shouldn't they?  It was a good game.


I think the thing that struck me is how insignificant the whole thing felt.  I was sitting watching this bastian of American culture and it felt incongruous to our new lives.  Moreover, the importance placed on the game itself in the US was made to feel outsized and ludicrous.  I've never been totally okay with professional athletes making more money in an afternoon than I make in 5 years, but now it feels grosser than usual. 


When I stopped eating meat, I had cravings occasionally.  Eventually though, I realized that I had forgotten what things like steak and chicken taste like.  I tried a bite of chicken in November for the first time in more than ten years.  It didn't taste like anything. We are in a similar situation now.  It's funny to think that when we first moved to Vietnam, we searched for things that reminded us of home.  Now when we try to touch that nostalgia, we find that the thing we longed for is not as great as we remember.


I managed to assuage my guilt over having three bloody marys before 8am on the morning of a workday, but now I just want to curl up under my desk, George Castanza style, and have a nap.

I wrote that yesterday and wasn't sure where it was going, so I gave up.  So much for my "post every weekday" streak, but I suppose the only one keeping score on that one is me. Over the course of the day I tried to figure out how to finish it.  I wasn't sure what I was trying to get at.  I reread it this morning and this sentence stuck out: Now when we try to touch that nostalgia, we find that the thing we longed for is not as great as we remember.

On Friday night Reyna had to work late, so I went to the pub and had a beer.  It's nice to go down to the local bar alone and chat with the other westerners that live here.  This is a very pleasant change from living in Vegas.  You just never know what you're going to meet, but most everyone is friendly.  On Friday I met a middle-aged couple from The Netherlands.  We talked for about ten minutes or so, then they left to sit at a table to eat their dinner.  I assumed we were done chatting, but twenty minutes later they sidled up to the bar and sat next to me again.  They told me they'd ordered cheese fondue, which sparked a conversation in which both lamented the absence of good Dutch cheese here in Vietnam.  They got misty eyed talking about Sunday afternoons eating super strong Dutch cheese and drinking port.  They love living in Vietnam, but they really miss those afternoons.

Then they turned and asked me what I miss about the US.

My first response was, "friends and family."  Kind of a no-brainer to which they laughed and said, "other than people, what do you miss about living in the US?"  I sputtered and false-started about four times then I looked them in the eye and said, "Nothing.  I don't miss anything about living in the US."

How can that be true?  I spent the rest of the weekend thinking about that conversation before I got up to watch the Super Bowl on Monday.  If you've read this far, you've already read my feelings regarding that.  Those two events have led me to realize that the thing I miss about living in the US is the nostalgia I had when I longed for things.  The days when I would sit and daydream about that first Capriotti's sandwich, or watching my Georgia Bulldogs play a game*. 

*I did both those things while I was back in the US at the holidays.  The Capriotti's was insanely salty and the Dawgs lost their bowl game in a heartbreaker.

We're two days away from celebrating living in Vietnam for ten months.  It's amazing how fast it's gone and how far we've come.  Last night we had burritos for dinner.  There were a few hiccups, where we didn't have certain ingredients we thought we had, but it was a relatively painless experience.  I couldn't help but think back to the first time we had burritos.  Reyna had to go to five stores, spent untold hundreds of dollars and then spent hours cooking.  The enjoyment of cooking the dinner was totally ruined by the fire alarm in the building ringing every minute the entire time the stove running.  The security guard even came up to our apartment to yell at us for setting the alarm off repeatedly.  By the time dinner was ready, she didn't want burritos anymore, just to sit in the air conditioning and have a nap.  That evening, even though it was hard is one of my favorite memories of our first few months in Vietnam, and the struggles we had.  Every day was strange and difficult. 

We've really settled into this place and made it our home, but that's also the problem.  The parts of my life that I look back on most fondly are the times when I struggled and the times when life was difficult.  I don't remember the day I finished my first century bike ride nearly as vividly as I remember trying to do it the weekend before; riding fifty miles before realizing I couldn't make it, and then suffering through 30 miles home.  There were times when I thought I might actually die that day. Coming that close to the edge of my own ability and recovering gave me the strength to go out a week later and finish.  Experiences like that are the ones that define us and shape our character.  It's very odd to find that the nostalgia I carry now is for things that happened in Vietnam rather than things that happened before we moved.

This feeling creates a strange dilemma in my head.  Where is my home?  I've always considered the US as home.  We refer to it as "home" in conversations sometimes, but that's about it.  So does that mean that Vietnam is now "home?"  I have no idea.  If I let myself believe that I find myself feeling guilty about letting go the home I knew for 34 years before moving away.  How can a 34 year relationship just "poof" and disappear?  But it seems that's exactly what's happened.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm looking for another challenge.  I've adapted and overcome the difficulties of living in Vietnam.  I know where to find soap, toilet paper, tortillas and tomato sauce.  I know where to go to find a custom motorbike, how to call a taxi and get them to come to the house, where to shop for a decent couch, how to spot "sketchy ice," how to drive around without fear of dying and how to not get lost.  Those were the challenges of 2011.  It's time to find a new one.  That way I can look forward to the new challenges rather than focusing on my "non-stalgia."

Harry Potter Told Me Too

Though it's not really my style to post things that I didn't create, but I really like this song.  I would have never heard it, but it was Daniel Radcliffe's pick on my Band of the Day app.  I'm fairly sick of most of the music I brought with me to Vietnam and things like Pandora don't work here.  You have to get creative if you want to hear new music that is both in English and not on the V Channel.  So I share it with you.  Why aren't these guys huge?

Happy Sunday.

If you don't like it, I apologize.  Here's some Bieber:

The Tamago Sushi Experience

Right.... It says in the title of this blog that there will be musings about food.  I've been intensely negligent on that front.  I also learned last night that this blog is going to be posted on an expat website (http://www.expat-blog.com/) so I figured it might be a good idea to offer up information that is actually useful.  Although, in my own defense, a pilgrimage to The Urinal Box is worth your time.  

I tend to be a little wimpy about trying new places, but there just aren't that many places that serve really good vegetarian food. Wait.  Let me rephrase that.  There aren't many places that serve things that aren't ramen noodles with vegetables as their veg offering.  I'm fine eating that, but a little goes a long way.  I get tired of it quickly. An additional consequence is that, because I don't eat meat, I miss out on the vast majority of Vietnamese fare; which I'm told is excellent.

I think it's impossible to live here and not soften the rules on your particular brand of vegetarianism if you plan on eating out.  There are a lot of excellent restaurants where the vegetarian offerings that simply aren't great (Refinery* anyone?).  When you order them they kind of taste like an afterthought.  Sounding good on paper but being quite bland.  To that end, I've found myself eating fish at certain places.  I'm not sure if that forces me to relenquish my V-Card, which I held with an iron grip for over ten years in the US, but it's just the way it is.  Sometimes you're just stupid if you don't go with what a restaurant is good at preparing. 

*I kind of threw Refinery (74 Hai Ba Trung, Dist. 1) under the bus a moment ago, which is unfair.  Yes, their vegetarian main course menu option ( brown rice with eggplant, goat cheese and a tomato mint sauce**) falls on the lame end of the taste spectrum; and their various gnocchi specials generally fall somewhere between uninspired and good-but-I-don't-know-if-I'd-order-it-again; but the blackened swordfish is fantastic.  I'm mildly disappointed that they don't make it as spicy as they used to, but I learned the hard way that you can ask for it to be prepared the old (spicy) way.  I shed a tear on the toilet the next morning, but going down it was sublime.  The swordfish at Refinery was the first time in almost 15 years I'd ordered a piece of cooked fish for dinner (sushi was an occasional indulgence before we moved, but that's it).  Unfortunately, when I called my EPA employed mother to brag that I'd done it, her response was, "You ate swordfish?  That's the worst possible thing you could have ordered!  They're at the top of the food chain; the worst mercury bioaccumulators out there."  Well Mom, the mercury must be doing something because it tastes gooooood.

**I like brown rice, but it is rare that I have a dish at a restaurant that both includes brown rice and tastes like anything other than, well, brown rice.  Yes it is flavorful for rice, but I'm going to need a little more than a bowl of rice with a half-assed topping.  In Refinery's case, the whole thing is just dense as hell and kind of eats like a brick.

Anyway, Reyna wanted sushi, which is not exactly rare.  I eat sushi here because I love her and she loves sushi.  I, however, do not love the sushi here.  I prefer the gigantic rolls in Vegas to the little makis you get here.  This is probably due to the fact that I don't particularly like the taste of fish, but if you disguise it with enough spice and "fixins" I'll eat it and enjoy it.  As it happens, there's a sushi joint right around the corner from our house -Tamago.  We had avoided going to Tamago because there had been an uproar on the An Phu Neighbors Google Group about them raising their prices when we first moved into the neighborhood; and, because the new Sushi Bar 3 is about 10 feet from my office.  Basically we hadn't heard anything positive about the place, but also didn't know anyone who had eaten there.  On Wednesday night, however, as we sat and ate our hundredth meal across the street at Pendalasco, I promised Reyna we'd have sushi the next night.  We ended up at Tamago mainly out of laziness.  We'd already driven home, and didn't feel like driving back into town for dinner.

We sat outside on the patio, which is quite comfortable.  Considering that there was only one other table there when we arrived at 7:30, I felt like the tables were rather close together (more on that later).  I had already made up my mind to have something other than sushi rolls for dinner.  Our server came around about 15 seconds after we sat down and asked us what we wanted.  This was not a, "what would you like to drink" call, but a, "let's order some food" call.  I was feverishly searching through the menu to find a noodle dish that didn't have chicken, pork or beef.  No luck.  Reyna ordered her obligatory rolls, edamame and miso soup.  I ordered a miso soup, a beer, and then there was a pregnant silence while I tried to find a vegetarian noodle dish.  Finally, after two minutes of standing and waiting, the server said, "are you vegetarian?"
"Yes."
"We have a vegetarian menu, you want to see it?"
"Yes!"

Score one for Tamago!  I can't remember another place that has an entirely separate vegetarian menu, although it would be quicker and easier to simply include it in the normal menu.  Why send me into a "this place has no non-meat dishes" panic unecessarily? I found a noodle dish on the veg menu and we settled in.  Drinks came and we chatted about this and that.  Reyna's rolls and the edamames came out in less than five minutes.  Quite impressive.  Reyna ate and I waited.  And waited. And waited.  Reyna finished her first round and my food had not arrived yet, though I had managed to eat all the edamame and finish my beer.  The edamame had good flavor, but was overcooked, and a little soggy as a consequence.  I'm not a real stickler for firm edamame, but apparently some people are. A group had taken the table next to us, ordered the same thing, and sent it back for being overcooked.  I guess there's a first time for everything. 

Finally after about thirty minutes a small plate of noodles arrived.  As the server placed it in front of me I asked for another beer.  She nodded and walked away purposefully, but the beer never came.  My noodles were good, not great.  I'm going to assume they weren't prepared with it, but they had a distinct A1 Steak Sauce flavor.  Not neccessarily a bad thing, but for the price, I expected flavors that are a little more exotic and vegetables ranging beyond two types of cabbage.  Note to Tamago:  If you're going to have a special vegetarian menu, and make your vegetarian bretheren feel important, make good vegetarian food.

As I was eating, Reyna's second round of rolls came (yes she had time to order, eat and order again in the time it took for me to get my food).  We finished about the same time and dedicated our energy to tracking down a server for my missing beer and a menu.  We got one's attention and asked for another beer.  This one managed to bring menus, but not the vegetarian apocrypha, and the beer continued to be MIA.  I'd been sitting with an empty glass on the table for nearly an hour.  We worked through our miso soup, which was very good*. 

*I didn't realize until we moved to Aisa how difficult it can be to find miso soup that both tastes good and is vegetarian.  In the US it's pretty much a given that miso soup is meat-free.  Definitely not the case in Vietnam. We've had miso with okra in it, fish heads, pork, chicken and many other "surprises."  I'd actually stopped ordering it, but asked our server to make sure it was vegetarian.  I'm glad I did: yum.

We sat, unintentionally eavesdropping on the insufferably pretentious conversation eminating from the edamame sender-backer's table (remember how I said the tables were to close together? Here's your proof)*.  Finally, the manager came over to our table to check in.  We then had fantastic service.  She got the beer and asked if we wanted more.  I'd had my eye on the Tofu Gyorza, so I ordered it, but they didn't have it.  At this point I was ready to go home and eat leftover pizza, but the manager actually recommended a dish; Fresh Tofu with Honey and Sesame Glaze over Rice.  I said sure.  She recognized that I was ordering off the vegetarian menu and recommended something.  Nicely done.  No fumbling around sending minions to fetch the other menu. 

*I think complaining about pretentious overheard conversation in a blog about food (especially this particular blog) has something of a "pot and kettle" ring to it, but there you are.  If you want to debate the connections between Facebook and the Russian mob talk quietly.  If they can infiltrate Facebook, they can infiltrate a restaurant in the chi-chi part of town that's open nightly.   You never know who's sitting at the a-little-to-close table next to you.

My next round came quickly.  I think the manager realized that I'd had to wait a long time for everything and put the hammer down in the kitchen. The dish didn't score any presentation points.  It was slimy in both the tofu way and the sauce way, but had a very nice, delicate flavor.  I would order it again (assuming it came less than an hour after I ordered it). 

Overall the food was good, but I didn't get the feeling we'd indulged.  However, when the bill came, we paid like we had.  Now I understand why all the An Phu Neighbors were up in arms about the price hike in the fall.  It was close to double what we would have paid for a similar meal at Sushi Bar, and more than double dinner at Sushi Deli.  I would not say the food at Tamago was better than either of those places.  Atmospherically it's considerably better than Sushi Deli, but that doesnt justify the price.  Especially considering that 80% of my meal was spent without anything to eat on the table.  I don't mind paying and going out for fancy dinner, but this was neither fancy enough or good enough.

So let's do a little rating here.  Out of five stars:

Food ***.5
Service *
Atmosphere ***
Veggie Friendliness ****

Who would like it:  The sushi version of people that order the Gotta Have It! size at Cold Stone Creamery, live in District 2 and don't have access to transportation.

A Silent Hero

Let's take a moment to discuss this.

I walk by this box pretty much every day.  I think it's some kind of electrical box that controls the streetlight on the same corner, but that's just a guess.  It looks like there are other boxes on the corner for that. It may not serve any mechanical purpose at all, but it does serve another potentially greater purpose. From what I can tell, this box is the most popular urinal in Ho Chi Minh City.  This non-descript box sees more dick than a Dutch hooker.  I'd say three times a week I walk past a guy actively micturating on it, the other days, it's just the remnants.  The last time I saw a guy actively using this recepticle was, well, yesterday. 

So the question is why this box?  What makes this box extra special?  Is it because it's on a corner and easily spotted from the road?  Perhaps it's because it shields the reliever on two sides, where a tree or just a wall only offers one, or none at all.

When I pass and see the rivulets I can't help but marvel at the Vietnamese ability to pee on pretty much anything at anytime.  My personal favorite is seeing children running and playing in the park, while an oldish man relieves himself on a nearby tree.  It's downright pastoral.  This is not tucked away on some back alley, mind you, but is located here:

For those readers currently living in HCM, you can make your own pilgrimage!

If you're too lazy to click on the map to view a larger version, this is pretty much the center of District 1, also known as Downtown.  There is essentially a non-stop parade of cars and motorbikes in, not one, but two directions.  This includes people sitting and waiting for the light to change at the intersection.  Traffic tends to stack up here at rush hour, so you can picture hundreds of people sitting at this interesction at any given time of day, but especially at 5:30.  Pretty wild.

The thing that is most striking to me is just how often there is more than one puddle here.  It's hot here everyday.  Liquid on the street does not last long.  As you can see from the photo, I only just missed at least two people when I arrived.  Do you think they made eye-contact? And it's not as if I scouted The Box for weeks until there was a day with two puddles.  I didn't wait for the leaves to fall just so to make this photo.  I'd passed it so many times, seen the evidence and smelled the smell so often that I was moved to document it.  How many times in your life have you had to urinate so badly that you just went on the ground?  You didn't find an obligatory McDonalds or get up while the seat belt sign was still illuminated, no, just whipped it out and let it ride. 

I can tell you that this has happened exactly once since I've lived in Vietnam.  It was my first trip to conduct company business outside of Vung Tao.  I'd lived in Vietnam roughly ten days.  A couple of us finished before our coworkers, so we hit a local restaurant to kill an hour and have a pre-departure cocktail and snack.  I made the fatal error of ordering a second beer (it was so hot and the first one was so good!), which I then had to rush through because the meeting ended.  Consequently, there was no time for a break to use the facilities.  About halfway into our three hour journey home I was floating.  I silently told myself that I could make it another 90 minutes.  I think this feeling is the same for everyone.  You notice the urge, so you put it out of your mind.  Then you find you can't stop thinking about it.  Then you find you can't stop squirming.  Inevitably this happens in as bouncy an environment as possible -for example, a 12-seat Sprinter Van over rurual Vietnamese roads.  Don't be fooled by that Mercedes logo on the front.  The Sprinter van is a plastic-seated nightmare on a long journey.  Add an incapacitating urge to pee into the equation and it's on par with a medieval torture device.  Given enough time you start to have very real and very serious conversations about the repurcussions of just going where you sit (I'm not the only one am I?).

 "Can we please stop for a bathroom break at the next good spot we see?" I squeaked, for fear that the pressure applied to my bladder by the movement of my diaphragm would unleash the hounds.
"Where do you want to stop?" Asked one of the managers.
"Anyplace with a bathroom...?" I said, clearly not understanding.

You see, public restrooms are not easy to find in Vietnam when you're outside the city.  They don't have things like rest stops or fast food chains or hotels with lobbies like the ones we're used to in the US.  There are no exits.  There are no blue signs to tell you what's coming up.  Walking into a store and asking to use the bathroom here is akin to walking into a Wendy's and demanding access to the back so you might cook your own square burger in the US.  It just doesn't happen.  Or maybe it does happen when you can converse with the locals, but I draw the line at playing "piss charades" with a non-English speaking stranger. So I too was relegated to hitting the side of the road.  In my own defense, I will say that I had the driver stop in a brushy area so I could have a little privacy.  I jumped out and sprinted behind some tall grass and got started.  Once the initial relief had passed, I managed to look around.  The looking around part only comes when you're suffering from the extreme bathroom emergency, because you find yourself standing in one place long enough to contemplate your surroundings.  In my surroundings I noticed the following details, details that I hadn't previously noted in my panic, about where we'd stopped:

1.  I was about eight feet from a house
2.  This patch of ground I was christening could be construed as their yard.
3.  There were half a dozen children playing less than ten yards from where I was standing.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.  Never have a second beer at the bar in Vietnam unless you're going to have time to get rid of it before a 3+ hour car ride.  And, even in an extreme emergency, give a cursory survey of the grounds before unleashing the dogs of war.  In the US, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a public restroom.  Really I should know better.  I found myself wishing I'd chosen a spot with privacy on two sides rather than just the road side.

Which brings us back to our friend The Box.  I find it difficult to believe that there are that many potty emergencies going on at precisely that location at any given time.  I've never seen a child using The Box.  Surely a full grown man can recognize, before leaving someplace, that a bathroom break might be neccessary prior to departure*.  

 *If I'm in a bar at the airport before my flight, I know that I should hit the head before my butt hits the seat.  I can't put my hand on the supporting text, but I believe there is a scientific corollary that states "If you have 2+ beers at the bar and don't pee before boarding a plane, you will be stuck on the tarmac (read unable to get out of your seat) for at least forty minutes, and then the flight will be bumpy and the seatbelt sign will remain illuminated."

I know it's not entirely normal to feel affection towards an inanimate object that isn't soft and/or fluffy, but I feel it for The Box.  What kind of life must it be to sit and receive a constant barrage of urine when that isn't the task you were built for?  Urinals are designed and built for this sort of thing.  They love it, look forward to it, have mechanisms in place to handle it, but The Box has nothing.  It must be a tough life.  If that box could talk, it could tell you things.  Maybe next time I pass, I'll put a rearview mirror tree on it's handle.  Although I'm not sure I can stand to get that close.

But then again, I've only lived in Vietnam for about ten months.  Perhaps The Box was the site of a horrible transgression in the lengthy history before my arrival; a transgression which resulted in creating a long-standing tradition of holding it until you get to this particular corner?  I can say with confidence that this is not the site of the Burning Buddhist Monk, because that has a slightly grander monument than a nondescript box on a street corner.

And since I've spent time wondering about the history of the box, I've spent time wondering how it came to be such a popular spot considering it appears to house electrical equipment.  If presented with an array of places with which to take refuge from a swollen bladder, electrical gear would be at or near the bottom of the list.  Somewhere in the vicinity of bear trap and land mine.

In conclusion, I'd like to address The Box itself.  Box, I know that you do a thankless job.  But I want you to know that your work and silent dignity you portray in performing it has not gone unnoticed.  In a world where people expect things instantly, it's good to know that you're there serving a greater purpose; shielding us on two sides from the indignity of urinating in public.  You aren't just an antiquated electrical junction box, no.  You answered a much higher calling long ago.  Quietly taking care of us all in our times of need.  It may not be fair, but let's face it:  "We want you on that wall.  We need you on that wall." 

Yep, this is the sort of thing I think about....