Tape Really Can Fix Anything

My normal blogging hours have been all taken up this week.  Believe me, I'm not happy about it either.  Here's a quick one to get you through this rough patch.  With a little luck I'll have more free time tomorrow.  Since I've been so busy, I present to you two amazing Vietnamese Adventures in one post.

Part 1:  Tape Really Can Fix Anything

Monday evening I had a meeting after work with a guy.  I scheduled it for that time because Reyna has a lesson after work, so she gets home late too.  After chatting with my guy for about an hour about this and that, I texted Reyna to see if she was home yet.  Her response was something along the lines of, "Yes I'm cleaning up our flooded kitchen."  I'd been home before my meeting and the kitchen was normal looking, albeit for a few dirty dishes in the sink left over from the night before. 

When I got home half the dishes were done and the drain pipe had separated from the pipe that attaches to the sink.  This is not the first episode of this occurrence.  This is due to the fact that the non-sink pipe is held in place by the friction of a few wraps of electrical tape around the sink pipe.  The larger pipe that drains the water out of the house slips onto the electrical tape.  It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that a large volume of water rushing down the sink drain can and will at times dislodge the larger drain pipe. 

After a long day of work, Reyna was sufficiently frustrated by the situation and left me to coordinate the sink fixing with our landlord neighbor.  A friend of ours has a saying that I completely agree with.  It goes like this: "Vietnamese people are brilliant at fixing things so they last for a week before breaking again."  Things last just long enough for you to not blame the current breakdown on the craftsmanship of the last mechanic, handy-man etc.  So I walked next door to get the landlord.

Ngo, our landlord, is in his sixties.  I don't actually know how old he is, and he doesn't look to be a day over 52, but I do know he flew helicopters for the Americans during the Vietnam Conflict.  So that has to put him older than 50s.  He also has two grown kids.  One lives with him, the other is married and lives with her husband in Nepal of all places (and we though Vietnam was outrageously foreign -yeesh).

I figured fixing the sink would require a trip to the hardware store.  Nope.  He ran over, looked at the "leak," zipped back over to his house and returned with a roll of electrical tape.  He had the sink working again in less than ten minutes.  Here he is in action:

I challenge any American over the age of 60 to adopt this position.  I'm only half that age and I can't do it (curse you torn ACL!  You're really getting in the way of my yoga).  Note the fix-all roll of tape next to him.  I like that he is wearing the same outfit my father wears to bed while he fixes our kitchen sink.

The finished product.  You really have to click and enlarge this one to get the full effect.  Since the roll of tape alone failed after five months, we now have the wire safety.  I intend to monitor the effectiveness of the wire safety in the coming months.  Stay tuned crime stoppers.

You may have also noticed that there is no tape showing on the outside of the pipes.  That would be sensible.  The tape is wrapped around the sink pipe and the drain pipe sleeves over it.  It's a friction fit.  He had to adjust the amount of tape two or three times before he achieved the ideal compression.

Problem solved.

I was reminded of a time when I visited my brother and helped him finish remodeling his master bathroom.  There were three of us.  My bro, me and his neighbor, an older gentleman who worked as an electrical contractor up until he retired to my brother's gated community.  While we were working the neighbor accidentally started cut into the drain pipe for the bath tub.  Later that week, we had the whole bathroom finished and ready for operation except for the pipe.  We couldn't think of a way to access the pipe to fix it.  There simply wasn't enough room.  So I took some rubberized plumbing sticky tape and wrapped the nick about 40 times.  We then patched the hole in the kitchen ceiling, and my brother moved down the street about six months later.  I've occasionally wondered about the state of that pipe in the eight years since I "fixed the leak."

Part 2:  Attack!

On Wednesday I had to travel to my weekly out of town meeting.  I followed my usual travel-to-small-town-where-there-is-no-vegetarian-food protocol by stopping at the bakery on the way out of town to stock up on bread.  It's not the healthiest thing to eat all day, but it keeps me from getting hungry and comes with the added benefit of making it possible to work through lunch.  I got two croissants and a loaf of freshly baked ciabatta bread.  I ate the croissants on the three hour car ride to the meeting and put the rest in my bag.  I then crossed the street to the An Phu Supermarket and bought a big bottle of water and a bag of cheddar cheese Goldfish*.

*Cheddar cheese Goldfish are one of my absolute favorite foods.  It's safe to say that goldfish crackers were the cornerstone of my diet for about four years between finishing college and getting a job that paid more than $250 per week.  My personal record is that I've eaten an entire gallon-sized carton of goldfish in less than 24 hours.  I can put them down.

I arrived at the site of the meeting three hours later.  It started as I walked in, so I got out my laptop and set my bag against the wall of the conference room.   It was a long meeting, and the majority of topics did not concern me.  I spent most of the time reading and responding to email and looking at ESPN.com or Grantland.com (two ultimate work time-wasters)*.  Occasionally my area would come up and my opinions would be roundly ignored or I'd get yelled at.  It's the nature of the beast, I suppose.  At about the two hour mark, I decided I needed to take some notes.  Since I always have my iPad at work, I prefer to take notes on that, but it was still in my bag.

*Why was I farting around on the Internets rather than posting in my blog you ask?  I'll tell you.  One time I wrote a blog entry out by hand while I was in the same meeting.  When we got back to the office the next day, two people asked me independently what I was working on during the meeting.  Almost no one I work with knows this blog exists, so I made up some story about chronicling this or that.  Since then I've been gun shy about blogging during meetings.  People tend to notice when you write non-stop for an hour.  It's not typical "email behavior."  I prefer to fly under the radar.

I turned to open my bag and was met with a swarm of about 50,000 ants.  They immediately moved onto me as I sat in silent shock.  I managed to brush them all off, close the bag and return my attention to the meeting.  As the participants droned on and on, I kept turning around to survey the damage.   There were ants EVERYWHERE. 

You know that feeling when you feel a little tingle, and the tingle is confirmed when you find a little critter crawling on you; then for the next ten minutes you feel invisible critters on you?  I was suffering from that very issue while sitting in a big and important meeting.  People must have thought I was battling a sudden onset of Turret's as I brushed and scratched.  I'm already the badly dressed TatVeg in the group, so I suppose there is very little behaviorally they'll put past me, but it was still embarrassing.

Finally we got to the last page of the meeting agenda.  I scanned through it for anything I might be needed to comment on and found that I was finished.  I grabbed my ant-ridden bag, holding it at arms length and carried it out of the room.  It took me 15 minutes of shaking and stomping to rid the bag of ants.  Even after I got back inside, I was still finding them on the bag and me for the next two hours. 

I have no idea where they came from.  I like to think that I would notice ants on my food while I'm eating it.*  So I'm pretty sure that there weren't any ants on the two croissants I ate earlier that morning.  But still it's amazing to me that I can sit indoors and go from an bag ant population of zero to 10,000 in less than two hours.  How is that possible if they're not there to begin with?  I've kept a watchful eye on that bag ever since.  I didn't even bring it with me to the office today because I don't want the ants attacking me while I'm driving.

*Reyna will kill me for telling this story, but one weekend in our old apartment we bought a bag of Hint of Lime Tostitos.  That sort of thing is a big treat, since a medium sized bag costs around $5.  "Do not let me eat this entire bag" she instructed as she tore it open.  She ate some chips as we chatted and I took them away from her, curled the bag top and put them in the cabinet.  Fast forward to the following weekend.  We were getting read to watch a movie and Reyna said she wanted something to snack on.  She went in the cabinet and found the forgotten bag of HoL Tostitos.  She whooped, skipped back with her bag of chips and sat down next to me on the bed.  She opened the bag as the movie started, so her attention was on my laptop.  I heard her chomp down on the first chip.  A beat. Then she screamed, jumped up and ran to the bathroom coughing and gasping.   She'd just eaten an ant laden Tostito.  And when I say "ant laden" I mean the surface of the chip was alive with ants.  The bag was almost nothing but ants.  I ended up throwing away about 80% of the food in our cabinet because ants had gotten into just about everything. This story came up while I was telling her about my bread infestation from this week and she confided in me that HoL Tostitos are not the same since the incident.

Since You've Been Gone

Continuing the theme of celebrating our one year anniversary of leaving Las Vegas, I bring you some writing from December.  We flew back to Vegas so that we (and by "we" I mean "I") could stay a week longer in the US and Reyna could see her family.  We also needed to make sure my house, currently being rented out, was not getting torn apart by the tenants.  Since I only get two weeks of vacation a year, I worked in the home office and then had two weeks of actual vacation.  I wrote the following in the middle of the night after my first day of work. The jet lag was extreme, so I spent the entire day in a walking coma and then couldn't sleep at night.  This is what a 12 hour time difference does to a person.

I remember walking out of the home office in April the day we left to move to Vietnam thinking, "This is the last time I ever have to work in this pit of despair."  It was an excellent feeling  until I realized that if I wanted to spend more than 10 days in the US, I'd need to spend at least a little time in the home office again.  I stay in touch with a few people that still work there occasionaly, and the picture that's been painted for me since my departure has not been sunny.  It was with trepidation that I walked in for my first day back in 8 months.

The first thing I noticed was the darkness.  The office is in a converted warehouse and contains no windows.  Actually that isn't entirely true.  The warehouse part is true, but the office is actually day lit.  Problem is, someone decided it would cut down on HVAC costs if they installed a drop ceiling.  Nothing says "high-end" and "classy" like an office with no windows and a drop ceiling with suspended linear fluorescents from the mid-nineties.  It didn't look like any of the lights had been maintained since I left, about half the fluorescent tubes either out or in varying stages of flicker.  I turned to my boss, who was walking next to me and said, "you guys actually work in here?"
"Yeah. what do you mean?  What's wrong with it?"
"Clearly you've spent way too long working in a windowless office." I said
"Pfft." He shrugged and walked in front of me to our desks.

To say the office environment is oppressive would be an understatement.  There are cameras everywhere, and everybody speaks in whispers for fear someone might hear them talking about something other than work. The whole morning I felt like I couldn't do anything right.  I first got in trouble for not clocking in because I didn't want to have to stand for five minutes cycling the clock-in touch screen to the Vietnam page while 37 people waited in line behind me.  The person that called to complain about my clock-in error had already come down to my desk to say hello.  It's not like she, along with everyone else in the office, didn't know I was there.  Then I couldn't log into my email account.  When I finally did, all my emails were gone.  I later found them all in the "deleted items" folder for reasons the IT guys couldn't explain.

I couldn't get anything done because of the parade of people wanting to talk to me.  The most commonly asked question was, "Are you back for good?" I couldn't decide if this was asked in a kind of excited, yet sick anticipation that I would say yes and be doomed to misery like them; or, out of pity that I got called back into the den of unhappiness.  Everyone looked sunken-eyed and beaten.  It was so sad to see these people that I like and care about working in such inhumane conditions.

In the afternoon, the phone at my desk beeped and a person who's name I didn't recognize asked me to report to the conference room.  In the conference room I found a welcome back committee in the form of my boss and the HR director to write me up for sending the following things over company email.

1.  A "hang in there" kitty picture
2. A picture of Chuck Norris
3. A quote from The Breakfast Club ("that's the last time Bender....")*
4.The phrase "SEVENTEEN YEARS BITCH" - Just to clarify, this was in reference to a woman (who I'm buddies with) who has actually worked for the company for 17 years. I wasn't calling her a bitch, I was calling the recipient of the email a bitch, to which he laughed his ass off. 

*The quote in it's entirety: "That's the last time, Bender. That the last time you ever make me look bad in front of those kids, you hear me? I make $31,000 a year and I have a home and I'm not about to throw it all away on some punk like you. But someday when you're outta here and you've forgotten all about this place and they've forgotten all about you, and you're wrapped up in your own pathetic life, I'm gonna be there. That's right. And I'm gonna kick the living shit out of you. I'm gonna knock your dick in the dirt."  This was all extra sad since "I'm gonna knock your dick in the dirt" is one of my boss' favorite sayings.  He didn't mention it in the meeting when I was getting written up though. 

Apparently these emails, which were received with gut-busting hilarity  in Vietnam, are not allowed in the home office.  According to the paper I signed, a little good natured ribbing and fun contributes to a hostile working environment.  I explained the context of the emails while my jury also laughed.  They too thought what I'd written was highly amusing, then they wrote me up anyway.  It's possible that they chose to write me up because everyone else copied on the email thread has been either fired or resigned on their own volition.  I'm the only one left.

I then had to go apologize to the "17 year" woman, who also thought the emails were funny.  It was all very confusing.  I almost got fired on my first day home because my superiors do not allow humor.  No wonder everyone's miserable.  The corporate environment does not have time for smiling!  Shut your hole and work.  The reprimand worked, because the moment I returned to my desk I started to worry that I would actually be fired for some other even dumber reason.  I was scared and uncomfortable like everyone else for the rest of the week.  If I'm going to be fired, I'd like it to be for something I did willfully (like write publicly about this incident), not over an email I sent almost three months ago.  I'd actually forgotten about it completely  until I was shown the print-outs.  I hope someone passed a garbage can later, saw the emails in there, and was totally offended.

I never did clock in, either...

Here's a few additional details about that day. 

• When I reached my desk for the very first time it was covered with about an eighth inch of dust.  I guess my arms sitting there for four years kept it sufficiently dust-free in the past.  I spent the first twenty minutes of the day cleaning the space so that I could sit down and attempt to work.  It concerned me that my boss has been sitting next to this pile of dirt for the better part of a year.  His lungs cannot be happy about it.
• In all my time in Vietnam, I have never encountered a gigantic unflushed turd in the office bathroom.  This was a weekly occurance in the home office when I worked there full time.  Sure enough, I found an orphaned log in the toilet about the size of my arm waiting for me on day three.  It was so big I had to go tell an adult (ironically the "adult" I told is four years younger than me, but he's a parent, so he's an official grown up).  I was too intimidated to flush it.  The strangest part of that is that Vietnam is supposed to be the place with the lousy plumbing.  I feel like I've written about this before... It haunts my dreams.

Top 5 things people said to me on the first day which range from maybe they actually miss me, to these people actively hate me:

1. Are you back for good or just visiting?  I already covered this, but for the sake of this list we'll This was usually done in what I attribute to the misery loves company principle.  It wasn't asked with any real desire to hear the answer unless the answer was, "I'm back for good because working in Vietnam is even more unbearable than here."  I was sorry to disappoint them.  We have windows.
2. What's it like in Vietnam?  How do you answer this question while standing in a cube farm with walls that only come up to chest height?  How do you summarize eight months of struggle for survival and character building challenges to a person who spends 10+ hours a day in a windowless room?  How do you describe the heat to people who haven't broken a sweat in years and live where the humidity never gets over 20%?
3. Do you like it there? This is never asked with genuine curiosity, but with incredulity.  "You like it there?"  As if I've just said I like to lick sidewalks.  I admit that I took a lot of pleasure by responding "It's a hell of a lot better than here."  I think this harkens back to the "Americans believe that everyone else in the world thinks and wants the same things they do."  Living here can't possibly as fun and rewarding as sitting in a poorly lit cave and receiving a paycut every nine months can it?
4. What is wrong with the Vietnam office?  This is not generally my first choice for openers when I haven't seen someone in a long time.  I usually go with "Hey! What are you doing here?" or something that makes it at least sound like I'm happy to see that person.  Apparently I'm in the minority.  It was almost like I'd been gone for only a few days.  Like I was sent over to get things straightened out and came right back.  Dude it's been EIGHT MONTHS.
5. Are they finally closing the Vietnam office?  I wish I'd made this up.  Nothing like running into an old friend, a guy who plays in the same fantasy sports leagues as me and have that be the first thing out of his mouth.  Next time I see him I'll say, "Hey did all your friends get fired or laid off yet?  Because those guys were total morons. You weren't actually friends with them were you?"

After 5 days I felt the same sense of relief walking out of the office that I'd felt when I left after four years.  As of this moment I have no plans to return, but the reality is that it's only a matter of time.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the company of the vast majority of the people occupying that office, I just have no desire to ever set foot in that building ever again.

As I sat in the taxi riding home from Tan Son Nhat Airport, I found myself watching the traffic and thinking, "I'm home" with a smile and a sigh.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I haven't liked anything I've written lately.  I think it might have something to do with the books I've been reading.  Those authors are so much better than me it makes it hard to get motivated sometimes.  But as I stated in my very first post, most blogs don't get written in, and I refuse to fall into one of those.  The only way to get better at something is to practice.

We are fast approaching our one year anniversary of our move to Vietnam.  It's amazing to think about how much our lives have changed during that year.  It's amusing to think about the fear I had about moving here.  It's not like other countries are inhabited by aliens, but that's exactly how it felt. 

Here's an exerpt from an email I sent back to the home office in July:

And it IS hard to live out here.  Harder than I ever imagined.  It’s not just hard, it’s dangerous and it’s lonesome.  I really think [person living in Macau whose name has been removed] has it worse than me, mainly because she can’t drive.  She’s pretty limited in where she can go.  She lives on an island.  She needs a $500 visa to go to China, or she can take the ferry to Hong Kong.  HK is huge and confusing much like HCMC.  I think it just takes so much energy to go there and find something it’s not worth it after a while.  I can imagine that she feels isolated and alone a lot of the time.  We deal with it too.  It’s easier to do nothing than fight the world to do something that is a cheap imitation of home.

The video I put on YouTube is funny and crazy, but I do that every day.  People in the US say things like “you never know, you might get hit by a bus.”  Well living here, that is a very real possibility.  I doubt anyone there thinks “I could die today” every time he steps out of the house to drive to work.  I do.  I live with that every day.  What would happen to Reyna if I died going to the job site or got hit by a bus on my way to work?  Or worse, Reyna could die.  She has to drive more often and much farther to get to her jobs than I do.  Two weeks ago, I gave her a ride to work because her motorbike broke down.  On the way we saw an accident.  I’m going to guess that someone did get hit by a bus.  All that was left was a broken helmet, two flip-flops and a puddle of blood and brains in the street.  That is everyday life here.  I came less than an inch from being hit by a taxi last weekend.  I came less than a foot from being hit by a taxi in Macau. What are risks like that worth?  What if someone did die?

Then there’s a million little things.  When was the last time you got absolutely soaked to the bone?  That happens to us multiple times per week.  We have rain gear, but it doesn’t matter.  Just tonight, we drove through a driving rain storm to have dinner for Reyna’s birthday.  We sat at a super nice restaurant, soaked to the skin and pruned, ate and then a rain-soaked 20 minute ride home.  You spend more than half your life here wet, either sweating or getting rained on.  That doesn’t make anything easier.  Have you ever been stuck at the office because of rain?  It happens to me at least once a week.  We’re all just sitting around, sometimes for hours, waiting for it to stop raining enough to get home.  When is the last time you got sprayed in the face with water from a person passing you, or had a truck drive by and soak you with water from a puddle?  Living out here is HARD.

 We are looking for a new place to live.  After someone across the street  died and a band played without stopping for five days straight, we decided we need to move to a quieter neighborhood.  Getting a decent place to live is EXPENSIVE.  In four months I have looked at exactly one place that even comes close to meeting my standards as a home, or an escape.  Rent? $1500 a month, which is on the low end compared to what a lot of people pay.  I can’t afford it.  To add insult to injury, the guy showing the place told me that teachers from the international school live in the adjacent house.  Their benefits outstrip mine.  Depressing.

When I read that I can feel how sad I was.  I sent that email at 4:02am five days before my 35th birthday and three months after we moved.  Those first three months were incredibly rough.  A couple of those things didn't play out like I expected them to when I wrote that email, though.  Mainly, we were able to find a place to live that was both agreeable and affordable about 10 weeks after I wrote it.

I've spent time since then wondering if the constant comparing and contrasting between living here and living in the US is uniquely American.  Some people (non-American people) believe that it is.  I'm semi-inclined to believe them.  It is a uniquely American trait to believe that everyone on Earth thinks and wants the same things that Americans think and want.  Not everyone is suffering under the iron fist of communism like many American politicians would have you believe.  Not everyone looks across the ocean and says, "those guys have it made!"  That has been one of my biggest realizations from the last year.  It's better to spend time doing stuff than to think "If I had X, then I could do Y."  I spent a lot of time thinking that when I lived in America.  "If I had the Sports Package on DirectTV then I could watch Champion's League" springs to mind.

Being an American and reading that email makes me realize how much more persistent we are now than we were when we first moved.  In the US, if it's not in the couch cushions it's not worth looking for.  It's Spend-Ten-Minutes-Looking-For-The-Remote-Rather-Than-Walk-Up-And-Turn-On-The-Television Syndrom at it's best.  If you'd told me I would go an entire year and order less than two things on the Internets* eighteen months ago I would assume I died early in the year, yet here we are.  Where we once lamented what we were forced to live without, now it seems that we are focusing on what we gain by taking this opportunity.

*I'm choosing to not count Kindle e-books here.  You don't order them and wait for them to come in the mail.  I did buy an iPad online, but it got delivered to our office in the US and then a coworker brought it to me in his luggage.  So it took like a month to get to me**.  I'm not sure that counts either.  Other than that, nothing.

**Living here will definitely teach you lessons in delayed gratification.  I ordered my bicycle more than a month ago and it's still not here.  It's only coming from Singapore.

But our lives are still our lives.  We still have bad days, still have cranky moods, still feel lazy and don't feel like fighting the traffic to go to dinner.  But it's no different from when we lived in Vegas.  Sometimes we really wanted to go to Burger Bar, but the desire to hear each other speak was more important.  We still feel the same frustration when we need a certain ingredient for dinner and can't find it, but our endurance is much higher.  We are also better at shrugging and going without, and you know something, our lives aren't any less rich.  If anything it's forced us to adapt and overcome.  Not being able to find the exact bicycle is, in the grand scope of life, not that big a deal.  Getting on the bike and, you know, riding is what's important.  Of course that didn't stop me from spending entirely too much money on a fancy bike.

I've stopped making mental lists about what I plan to do and buy when I return to the US.  I've lived without them for a year, so they must not be that critical for happiness or survival.  What we need to live has been redefined and I'm happy with the outcome.  I chatted online with a friend of mine in Virginia earlier and he was telling me about all these great beers he's been trying lately.  He said he'd get me some and send them to me next time I'm back.  I thanked him and said, "don't worry about it."  He must think I've gone insane.  I love beer like it's a family member.  Or at least I did when there was more than two kinds around.  I don't actually require 347 kinds of beer to sit and enjoy one.  Isn't that strange?  I will admit, though, that a St. James Gate Brewery Guinness Draght would still hit the spot right about now.

Anyway.  I like this better than anything I've written in the last month and that's why I'm here.  I could go on, but I won't beat this horse any longer (today).  We'll talk again soon search engines.

Epilogue:  And as if on cue, my phone just rang.  It was Reyna calling to tell me that her bike broke down on the way to pick me up.  I could tell she's mildly exasperated, but her demeanor was more jokey than anything.  "Guess what?  I'm not going to be there in ten minutes because I'm walking my bike to the mechanic on the corner of Dien Bien Phu and Le Quoc Dinh.  I'll let you know what he says."  How many Americans can you think of that would respond like that?  I'll answer for you: NONE.  But that's a part of our lives now.  It's not a day ruining affair when the bike won't start anymore.  Our bikes break down, we pay $3 to get them fixed on the corner and then we get on with our day.  Isn't that novel?

Rant in A Negative

It's a new week.  Since I'm scheduled to be in town the whole week, we can get down to some serious writing.  I spent the whole weekend thinking about what I wanted to write about, so this should be at least semi-deep-thought-ish.

I had to take the 6:45am ferry to Vung Tao for work on Friday.  Despite being forced to arise at 5:30 to make this trip, I actually prefer the early ferry mainly because the boat is a little bigger.  Sometimes I like to stand outside the cabin in the little smoking section and watch the ships pass.  The size of the ships compared to the width of the river never fails to amaze me. 

We arrived in Vung Tao, disembarked, walked through the terminal and outside into a beautiful morning looking for our driver who would take us the rest of the way to our destination.  As we looked around we noticed two men talking.  One was sitting on a motorbike and the other was standing with a strip of what looked like metal in his hand.  It didn't look like they were arguing, but a few moments later, the man lifted the piece of metal and smacked the guy on the motorbike across the back.  It didn't look like the blow was all that forceful, and sometimes Vietnamese men like to wrestle around in the street.  At times what is actually playful joking can look like fighting.  I didn't think much about it until the man struck with the metal again, this time much harder.  Once he started hitting the second time he didn't stop.  He hit the man across the back and shoulders four or five times before hitting the defenseless man, who was not attempting to fight back but protecting himself from the rain of blows, in the head. 

Even though we were standing about 20 yards away from the action, there was a loud crack as the weapon connected with the beat-ee's head.  Immediately he put his hands to his head as blood poured from the wound in his forehead.  The beator must have sensed things had progressed far enough because he folded up what I now saw to be a pair of aluminum nunchuks in his hand, walked to his motorbike, placed them under the seat and drove away.  No one made any effort to stop him. 

I've never seen so much blood.  One of the eight or so security guards who had been standing around watching the beating fished a hankerchief from his pocket and gave it to the bleeding man.  Another one helped him off his motorbike, which he had been straddling during the entire scene and wheeled it out of the way of passing cars while the bleeding man staggered to a bench outside the terminal building.  None of the six to eight security guards made any attempt to break up the fight, but rather watched until the man with the weapon decided he was finished and left the scene. 

I watched the whole episode slackjawed.  When the area began to dissapate, we found our driver, whose car sat directly behind where the assault occurred.  I found myself stepping over an eighteen inch soon-to-be puddle of blood to reach the car door.  As I passed, I really wanted to snap a quick photo of the blood on the street, but I figured that would be rather tacky, so I just avoided it and went on my way.  I suppose that means you'll just have to take my word for it that it actually happened.  We drove through the puddle on our way out of the ferry terminal.

When we sat down in the car, we asked the driver what happened.  His response was, "It was about love."  The whole altercation according to him was over a woman. 

I spent the rest of the day, and a good portion of the weekend thinking about what happened.  This is not the first time I've been witness to a beating in the street since we lived in Vietnam.  And when westerners gather to recount those tales, it's usually in a, "Isn't this a crazy place to live" huff.  We tend to use these public scuffles as evidence that as westerners we are somehow more civilized or above that behavior.  We use diplomacy, not violence, to solve our problems.

Then on Saturday I read this

For those of you too lazy to click a link, it tells the story of Trayvon Martin, a 13 year old kid in Florida who, while returning home from a convenience store to buy candy, was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain.  Trayvon was (gasp!) black and the shooter was white.  Trayvon was also unarmed when he was shot, unless you count a bag of Skittles and a can of Nestea as weapons.  When the shooter (who's name I'm not going to make more famous by mentioning it here -it's the victims we need to remember) saw Trayvon in his yard he called the cops.  Despite the cops telling him to do nothing, he stepped out on his front porch anyway and shot the child.  So far the shooter has not been arrested claiming that he shot the 13 year old in self defense.  Really?  You're 28 and he is 13.  Did this require a firearm?

I'm not here to get into a debate about gun control, but compared to that, a fight in the street resulting in a headwound requiring stitches feels pretty minor, yet as Americans, we insist that we are somehow better or more civilized than other countries.  That is annoying, but what is way more annoying is that I had to hunt around to find an article about this incident.  It happened more than ten days ago, so it's now off most people's radar.  The incident has not sparked any discussion of gun control in America.  Does a person with an alarm on his house inside a gated community really need a firearm to protect himself?

Do you want to know how I protect myself?  I'm friendly.  I don't treat people like shit, I don't look down on them for disagreeing with me.  I don't yell, I don't fight and I try to be respectful of other people and their opinions at all times.  If someone wants to break into my house it shouldn't be because they have some sort of vendetta agaist me, they want my stuff.  And my stuff is just that, STUFF.  My laptop is not more valuable than your life no matter how much of a scumbag you are.  If someone comes into my house with the intention to kill me, well then there's nothing I can do about that.  And frankly, the odds of that happening are so slim that it doesn't warrant owning a weapon.  How many people have you met who deterred a would be criminal using a personal firearm?  I've never met anyone, and I've lived in a lot of places.  Bringing a loaded pistol into my house makes my home a lot more dangerous than the threat of being attacked by nameless and faceless criminals.  People that own guns under the guise of protection are living with the notion that they actually need protection.  And the word that describes a person that needs protection is FEARFUL. 

In Vietnam guns are illegal.  The only place I ever see guns with any regularity?  The US Embassy.  I walk by it a few times a week and there are always guards stationed outside; some with AK-47s (oh irony) and some with pistols in their belts in addition to the widest sidewalk in the city and foot-thick steel reinforced concrete bollards between the street and the concrete walls surrounding the embassy.  I also walk by the Austrian embassy almost every day.  It's a house.  You ring a bell and they buzz you in.  Is all this security really necessary?  I can't really imagine any scenario in which someone might need to be shot outside the US embassy, but there they are anyway making the US look more important.  You may be thinking to yourself, "yes, but our embassies have been attacked in the past, so it's important for them to be protected."  You'd be right, our embassies have been attacked in the past.  But rather than say, "we need guns to protect them" perhaps we should ask ourselves, "why were they attacked in the first place?"  Is it  possible that constantly showing the US as grander than you and possessing things that are normally illegal tends to breed resentment? 

Thinking about that got me to thinking about this:  Americans hate, hate, HATE to be helped or be made to feel helpless.  Myself included.  Someone recently mentioned how irritating it is when they're fishing around in their wallet for taxi fare and the diver tries to reach in and help.  This action is automatically received by Americans as an attempt to rip us off rather than help.  No one's motives are ever pure or in the spirit of just being friendly.  If someone wants to reach in your wallet, then they want to steal your money. 

So can someone explain to me why if we hate to be helped or made to feel helpless so much, why is it that we insist on helping everyone else?  Why is there an overriding sense of "America knows what's best for you" around the world?  This is at the heart of the backlash to the Kony 2012 movement.  It's just like Americans to think that it's up to us to solve the world's problems, just as long as no one interferes while we try to solve our own.  Somehow it seems appropriate that the guy who narrated the Kony 2012 viral video was picked up by the police over the weekend for running around in the street in his underwear, screaming incoherently and masturbating publicly.  He's too busy solving the problems of others to worry about his own. 

And why should anyone receive this "aid" without a healthy heaping of skepticism?  If we can't stop shooting black people in our yards at home, how does anyone expect us to stop that from happening in other countries?

End of rant...

Just so this post isn't a total downer, here's proof that I didn't make up that sign I talked about a couple weeks ago:

I want to put a witty caption here, but the sign stole my thunder.

And for those of you playing at home.  The light is STILL ON.   This has to be some kind of record.  Three weeks and counting.  Good luck in your office pools.

Misadventure

Let me take a moment to apologize to the search engines and metacrawlers for my nearly week-long blog absence.  You see I was sent to Macau on a documentation expedition that was meant to last for about 30 hours, but managed to take three days. 

I should really know better than to prepare as if my quarterly Macau adventures will go as scheduled.  The first trip I made was to last five days, but lasted ten.  It seems I will never learn because instead of packing to expect the worst, I packed a shirt.  I left all various electronic device cables beside the bed and flew off into the morning sunrise on Monday. 

Traveling to Macau from HCM may sound like a short, exciting jaunt, but it's anything but.  There are no direct flights.  The schedule is:

• Depart from the house at the usual time.  Even though my flight isn't until 1100, I have to leave the house at 0730 because there's no way to gage how long the taxi ride will take.  Experience tells me that it should take around 30 minutes, but this time it took closer to an hour.  This was despite the fact that Reyna drove me to the office to catch the taxi, which is about half the distance to the airport from our house.  [Time check: 0900]
• Arrive at the airport.  First, I have to get my tripod wrapped up so I can check it.  I never had to check the tripod before in the US (land of paranoid travel security), but I'm not allowed to carry it on here.  This will come back to haunt me.  Though the vast majority of consumables are significantly less expensive here than other more developed countries, the few meters of plastic wrap to secure the mostly unbreakable tripod costs $5.  Then I have to stand in line to check in.  No Internet check-ins for international flights silly!  Plus, strange though it may seem, the Vietnam airport is not littered with kiosks where a swipe of a credit card or entering a confirmation number will generate a boarding pass.  Here you have to actually talk to people. [Time check: 0920]
• Work through security and immigration.  This was actually kind of fun on Monday because I was joined in line by the members of the Malaysia Dragons of the ASEAN basketball league.  I know I said earlier that I'm a reasonable height for a guard in the SE Asian pro league, but that's not the case at all.  For once my vegetable tattoos were not the recipient of the most stares from other people in the queue.  That accolade went to the 6'-9" Brian Willams standing next to me in line.  We even went to the same college.  Nice guy.  [Time check: 0945]
• Pitch a tent at the gate until my flight leaves at 1050.  This time is usually reserved for calling my parents.  You never know what's going to happen when you get on an Asian operated airplane.
• Fly to Hong Kong.  Land at 1350 local time.
• Buy a ticket for the HK-Macau ferry.  This is where things get annoying.  Because I had to check my tripod, I cannot take the 1500 ferry.  I have to give a minimum of two hours for my checked bag to transfer from the luggage belt to the ferry terminal.  This pushes me onto the 1700 ferry instead and leaves me to mill around the no-man's land between the gate and the immigration line to enter HK.  It's like being stranded in the desert.  There's a crappy Chinese place, a coffee place, about a dozen duty free shops and an electronics store.  That's it.  The only place to sit down is in the coffee place, but you have to order to do so.  Generally all I want to do is read my book, but it's nearly impossible to find a place to sit where people aren't loudly conversing in a language I don't understand.  It also doesn't help that my company decided it would be a good idea to brick my cell phone whenever I travel out of the country.  If something were to go wrong at this point in the trip, I'd be totally stranded.
• Board the ferry at 1645.  By this point I'm usually sad.  This trip was no different.  Usually this is the moment I realize that I forgot to pack a pen.  As the ferry bumps through the water, the boat attendants pass around the immigration slips that must be filled out and presented upon arrival in Macau.  Incredibly I remembered to ask the ferry ticket agent if he had an extra pen while I was in the airport.  I was smug sitting with my pen, but then the attendents didn't bring around any forms.
• Arrive at Macu ferry termnal at 1745 (or so).  The entrance to the immigration area had changed, and since I hadn't received an immigration slip, I marched right to the window and presented my passport.  I couldn't believe my luck.  The line is ALWAYS at least 20 people deep (mostly due to the fact that I have to stand in the back and fill out my form while everyone who remembered a pen -or traveled with a woman- rushes to the front of the line).  Of course, the procedure hadn't changed.  I was directed to the back of the room to fill out my form with my newly acquired pen.  By the time I turned back around, the line was 40 people deep.  Somehow everyone else received a form, because they were all clutching them tightly as they stood patiently waiting for their vacations to begin in earnest. [time check 1810]
• Wait for luggage.  One would think that after waiting in the immigration line for 20 minutes, the baggage handlers could move the 30-odd pieces of luggage the 100 yards from the boat to the luggage area.  Nope.  I stood for another 10 minutes waiting on my goddamned $5 plastic-wrapped tripod.  And there is no carousel like at the airport.  When the bags are wheeled out on carts, there is a mad rush as everyone struggles to squeeze their bodies through the throng, and then wheel out a 75lb suitcase.  It's amazing no one loses an appendage in the crush.
• Get a taxi.  As soon as I stepped outside I regretted not bringing a jacket.  I've been to Macau at least a half a dozen times, and the weather has never been anything resembling cool.  I nearly always find myself sweating through my Hanes and daydreaming about removing my socks.  Not this time.  It was about 50 degrees (F) when I got outside with the sun setting beyond the casino high rises.  I shivered in my short sleeved shirt as I waited in the queue for my taxi.  When I fell into the back seat and conveyed my destination to the driver I noticed the window of the car was open.  It blew on my all the way to Grand Lisboa.  [time check 1830]
• Arrive at Macau office [1845]

It is at this point that I was due to start work, but as I sauntered into the office, I was greeted by the three remaining people with a surprised, "what are you doing here?"  Despite the orders for my trip coming from the highest possible source, no one had been informed of my imminent arrival.  No arrangements had been arranged with the site I was to photograph (had you guessed yet?) and no security clearances secured.  Begin domino effect:

Did you see how long it took to get to Macau?  It's the same on the way back.  Because I couldn't shoot on Monday night, I couldn't leave on time Tuesday morning.  Even though my flight was booked for 1520 Tuesday afternoon, I have to leave Macau at 0930 to jump through the endless ferry hoops to get to the airport.  So I missed my Tuesday flight.  There was no guarantee that I would get a seat on the Wednesday flight either.  I spent the next hour frantically trying to Skype back to the Vietnam office so I could tell them I wouldn't be in the office on Wednesday and possibly even Thursday.

One of my Macanese colleagues offered to give me a ride to my hotel.  I guess he noticed me shivering on the way to the car because he dug around in his trunk and produced a purple puffy jacket for me to wear during my stay.  The jacket made me look like a cross between the Michelin Man and a spokesperson for Fruit of the Loom, but I can say that it's been a long time since I've been so grateful to look so ridiculous.

Cut me some slack, I'd been wearing those clothes for three days.  Note the empty luggage rack.  That doesn't really excuse the state of my hair.  Mental note: get hair cut this weekend.

I checked into my hotel as usual and the lady at the desk seemed slightly put out when I told her I didn't have any luggage.  I left my camera case and my still-hermetically-sealed-in-plastic tripod in the office.  Upon arrival in my room, I realized that I didn't have any internet access.  Normally on these trips I bring my laptop and plug it into the broadband, but since this trip was supposed to be quick, I'd left all that stuff at home.  I watched ping pong on ESPN and went to bed.

Tuesday morning was cold and foggy just like Monday.  I put on the same clothes I'd worn the day before, put on my Bubblicious jacket and mosied back to the office.

I managed to gain access to the site on Tuesday morning and get my photos finished in a few hours.  Then I sat and waited until Wendesday morning to turn around make the trip back.  I left the office at 0930 Wednesday morning to catch the ferry back to HK.  My flight wasn't until 1535, but for whatever reason, the ferry people require you to arrive at the airport 3 hours before your scheduled departure.  Unfortunately the 1230 ferry (which would be ideal) doesn't arrive in HK until 1315, which is twenty minutes past the three hour cut off.  You cannot even buy a ticket for the ferry without the three hour window.  Therefore, I am forced to take the 1030 ferry and sit in the airport for hours waiting for my flight.  Luckily, this leg of the trip includes a bar.  I wasn't able to enjoy the one place in my section of Asia that serves Murphy's on draught because I was absolutely freezing.  I spent most of my time in the airport wandering around trying to find a long sleeved shirt. HKIA sports a gigantic shopping mall replete with Burberry, Coach, Ferragamo, Chanel, Emporio Armani, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Zara, Louis Vuitton, Bally, Ferrari, Hermes, Prada, Lamborghini, Valentino, Versace and Hugo Boss.  You can get a custom tailored suit and a $6,000 bottle of booze, but you can't buy a nature scened or hunting dogged $15 sweatshirt for a freezing Tatveg.  I'd already spent two full days looking ridiculous.  I would have happily worn a Taz shirt or even an Affliction hoodie I found in the garbage if it meant a respite from the chill.  Sadly there was nothing.  At least nothing I was prepared to lay down $400 to keep warm for three hours in.  So I suffered through.  I walked into our house, beaten but not broken, at 1830 Wednesday night.

This morning I awoke with a sore throat.

Land of Confusion

This morning as I was riding my motor bike to the office, I was passed by a guy wearing a black jean jacket.  The fact that it's 80 degrees with 90% humidity is not the story here.  The story is that embroidered on the back of the jacket in black thread it read, "1 DAY RELAX JUST HAVE."  It got me thinking about all the amazing things we've seen since our arrival in this strange land.  Nearly every day we see something written on a tshirt or a helmet that is just, well, odd.  Normally it's easy to suss out the intended meaning when you see amusing English (or Engrish as they say on the Internets), but sometimes it's not so easy.  For instance I saw a shirt a while back that read, "Use Day Good With You."  I have no idea what the intended meaning is.  Most of the time we see people with funny shirts or other garments we're driving, so we can't really take pictures, but I do have a few. 



This is a sticker I saw on a motor bike parked in the parking lot by my office.  Do you think Nike knows of this sticker's existence?  Is this a Nike sponsored product?  Google Translate told me that Da Qua means "past", but I asked one of the Vietnamese guys in the office what it means and he told me Da Qua means "feels good."  I think we can all agree that this takes the sticker's meaning to a different level.  I have no idea what purpose the monkey serves.  I also have no idea why someone would feel compelled to stick this on their motor bike.  I suppose they could have been taking a cue from the "Calvin Peeing on [insert logo or object you dislike here]" stickers that appear on the rear windsheilds of El Caminos and lifted trucks in the US.  There's really nothing that announces "I am a Jackass" quite like the Calvin stickers.

I just hunted through my phone to find a photo of my favorite sign in Vietnam, but I can't find it.  At a construction site I visited they have a HUGE sign that reads, "Our Objective Is No Accident."  I know that the project is both owned and operated by native English speakers, yet no one felt the need to proofread the sign.  Of course your objective is no accident, it's your objective.  Is it more stupid than people saying someone "loved to laugh?"  I'll leave that up to you.  Have you ever met anyone that didn't love to laugh?  I'd like to take this opportunity to tell everyone that I plan on Living My Life and It Is What It Is. 

Ah the ubiquitous Snake Wine.  You knew it would make an appearance.  This isn't just any old wine with a snake though.  It also has at least one gecko in it and a bird (with feathers).  Sadly, the "wine" has grown too murky for the bird to show up in the photo, but I'm told that's when it's best.  If you look closely, you can see one of the feathers at the bottom of photo. I really can't imagine any scenario that would make me want to drink this.  I don't care what it does, that is not going in my body.  You can take this tonic home with you for a mere $100.  It's a bargain really.  And while you're being disgusted by that, consider this:  Is drinking this any creepier than ingesting a pill that makes your dick hard?

Come on Vietnam Airlines!  You're a huge corporation, the largest airline in Vietnam.  Surely there is a native English speaker somewhere in your company you can use to proofread your GIGANTIC sign.  Someone really should have snuck up there at night and put up a giant porn picture over one of those travel photos.  Would you write "spread we are" into a Google search?  No you wouldn't.  My guess is any reference to Vietnam Airlines would be pretty far down the list.  Still, I was sad when they took the sign down.



Don't you just love Christmas?  This pastoral setting was at the Legend Hotel where we ate Thanksgiving dinner (that's the only time I've ever been in the Legend Hotel).  I had to drink the VND800,000 entrance fee because all they had for me to eat for Thanksgiving was salad and cheese plate (again -Damn you Vietnamese Buffet!).  I thought the fire feature was especially nice. Then I looked closer.

 

Is that a Halloween fire cauldron in the fireplace of the Christmas decorations on Thanksgiving?  Yes.  Yes it is.

Hey Americans, before you start getting all uppity and elitist about how great you are and how backward and stupid things are in Vietnam, perhaps you'd like to explain this:



I can't find the words to write how much I detest you headlight eyelash... Anthropomorphizing cars in movies isn't enough for you?  How's your Beanie Baby collection coming?  I took this in the parking lot of a Sam's Club.  Of course I did, don't act like you're surprised.  One thing to note is look how smooth the Sam's Club parking lot pavement is!  I don't see a single ill-covered pothole in this photo.



And what kind of person would I be if I didn't include a life sized Hello Kitty statue?  This monster is in the C Gates at the Taipei airport.  Do you see that actual person standing next to it?  That's for scale.  This Hello Kitty is as big as me.  And yes, this statue is guarding the entrance to an entire store of Hello Kitty shit.  But, as you can see, even Hello Kitty is sick of herself. She's getting on a plane.  I've done actual research into the popularity of Hello Kitty in Asia, and I still don't understand it.  The shit is everywhere.  And let me just make sure we're clear on this, Taipei Airport:  I can buy a Hello Kitty shirt, shorts, pants, hat, socks, shoes, helmet, backpack, pen, pencil, pen and pencil holder, notebook, folder, greeting card, stationary, high bounce ball, low bounce ball, bowling ball, bicycle, toothbrush, comb, toothpaste, hair brush, asprin, alka-seltzer, trail mix, book, DVD, Blu-Ray, plush stuffed kitty, hard porcelain kitty and a sign for my bedroom but I can't buy a beer?  Taipei Airport, we need to talk.

 And finally....



Have you ever looked at a piece of sushi and felt compelled to laugh?  Smile, yes.  But laugh?  I don't think so.  And what is the cube?  I've never seen sushi that looked like that.  Was this drawn by a fourth grader? Because fourth grade girls are the only people I know to draw "tongue sticking out" smiley faces.  And could they have drawn a piece of sushi and made it look less appetizing then the one right there by the question mark?  It looks like a cat turd on a rice patty.

 Well I hope you laughed a little because these things bring me a lot of joy.  They also bring a fair amount of confusion, but confusion seems to be the spice of life these days.  There are so many more things I've seen and either haven't had a camera or haven't had time to get it out.  I'll keep looking though.  Have a good weekend.

Slice O' Pie

I eat a lot of pizza.  It's safe to say that it's my favorite food, but it's also borne from necessity.  Pizza places are generally always safe for the vegetarians.  I don't think I've ever been to a restaurant which has pizza on the menu that didn't have at least one without meat.  Pizza is the refuge of vegetarians.  At least it is for this vegetarian. 

Our last meal before moving was to get pizza at our favorite place in Vegas, Grimaldi's.  I even took a photo and posted it on Facebook because I feared it might be the last pizza I would have for a while.  Happily I was wrong.  Saigon is filled with good pizza joints, so here's my totally biased and unscientific review of pizza in town.

Dominoes (Unworthy of address listing) - Even when we lived in the land of Dominos I didn't eat there.  There was a time in the mid 1980s when Dominos was the only game in town.  That time has passed.  In the US Dominos is one of the biggest contributors to Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group based in Colorado Springs, CO.  FoF's goals are generally consigned to persecuting gays and banning gay marriage.  I haven't even set foot in a Dominos since we moved, and you shouldn't either.  The new one on Le Thanh Ton is especially silly, since it's sitting within a one block radius of three other, much better, pizza places (4Ps, La Hosteria, and Scoozi)

Pizza Hut (stand on a corner and turn your head, you'll see one) - Not as bad as Dominos, but I've never liked their pizza.  I can handle them politically but not palatally.  Why would I eat at a place I've known my whole life?  I don't and you shouldn't either.

Mekong Merchant (23 Thao Dien, D2) - I was all stoked to try their pizza after their Parma won Best Delivered Pizza when The Word did their pizza breakdown.  I can't have the Parma because it has meat.  I'm stuck with the Veggie Pizza and the Mediterranean.  Neither are anything to write home about.  There are two ways to do a vegetarian pizza:  either put super bold flavors on it (pesto, onions, garlic, etc) or put cheese and a few complimentary toppings (goat cheese, tomato, basil).  Mekong Merchant pizza has a ton of toppings.  The Veggie sports spinach, pumpkin, peppers, mushrooms, pine nuts and a bunch of other stuff.  There is little cheese to speak of, which is really what makes a pizza.  The whole thing kind of mushes together into general disappointment because no flavor stands out.  All the toppings are extremely mild and the mushrooms tend towards rubbery (I can't stand rubbery mushrooms).  We still eat there because the atmosphere is fabulous and the wine is really good.  The pizza, sadly, is not my favorite.  Luckily, the Vegetarian Lasagna is pretty good (not as good as mine, but good and a lot less work).  It takes about 45 minutes for it's clay pot to cool down, but it's tasty.

Sarpino's Pizza (125 Ho Tung Mau, D1 or The Manor) - I've eaten at both Sarpinos' and both are tasty.  Sarpino's pizza probably comes the closest to making crust like we find in the US.  Thick, but not Chicago Style.  It's a nice change from the constant parade of thin-crust Italian pizzas most places serve (this is not a complaint, just the way it is).  Sometimese they go a little light on the toppings, but overall it's good.  The best part about Sarpino's is the size of the menu.  They have about ten different non-meat pizzas.  I haven't tried them all, but the one's I've had have all been good.

Bernie's (19 Thai Van Lung, D1) - It's not a pizza place, but they have some of the best pizza in town.  The roasted vegetable pizza is fantastic.  They roast their own vegetables, and the pizza, though not very big is loaded with toppings and cheese.  The crust is crisp (as long as the power is on).  They also have a margarhita pizza that's good, but not as good as the roasted vegetable.  I also get the green olive pizza sometimes.  It's supposed to come with salami, but they're always happy to make it without and it's great.  Many times altering the pizza by removing the meat kills the overall experience.  This one is an exception.

4P's Pizza (8/15 Le Thanh Ton, D1, or Behind Thai Express -walk up the alley to the right of Thai Express, turn left at the dead end and it's at the end of that street) - If you can find 4P's Pizza you're in luck.  Despite being difficult to find and relatively new (only 3 months or so) we still had to wait 30 minutes for a table on a Saturday night.  I was skeptical about Japanese Pizza, but I was floored at how good it was.  They don't have many vegetarian options, only two that I can remember.  There's a basic margarhita and one called four flowers.  I tried both.  Really really good.  The crust is the best I've had in Vietnam, and possibly the best I've had ever for the style.  The crust is fluffy and soft, not chewy like normal pizza crust.  It was fabulous.  I highly recommend the four flowers.  It tasted different from any pizza I've ever eaten.  It's both beautiful and delicious.  I couldn't get anyone else to try it because it looked so weird.  Too bad for them.  More for me.

Scoozi (6 Thai Van Lung, D1) - If you're a sucker for Italian style thin crust pizza, then Scoozi is the place for you.  It also doesn't hurt that they have 2 for 1 specials all day on Sunday.  For the first six weeks or so after we moved to Vietnam we went to Scoozi every Sunday.  While they don't have tons of vegetarian options, all are eligible for their specials.  The ingredients are fresh and the tomato sauce is excellent.  Probably the best tomato sauce in town.  I'm not really a sauce guy so when I like your tomato sauce it's a big deal.  It's a good thing the sauce is tasty because the toppings tend to be a little sparce for my taste.  But I'm not going to complain too much about a pizza that comes with actual fresh mozerella on it.   I'm particularly enamored with their Capiscum pizza, which is pretty damned spicy.  You'll want to closely monitor your beer intake while you eat it. 

Pendolasco (36 Thanh Huu Dinh, D2 or 87 Nguyen Hue, D1) - I've only been to the Pendolasco in D2.  There's no reason to drive into downtown when we can walk to one of the best pizzas in town from our house.  And here's the crazy thing: they only have one non-meat pizza on the menu and I've never eaten it.  I created my own and now I eat it at least once a week.  If you're a vegetarian in D2 looking for a pizza that will knock you on your ass, go to Pendolasco and order a Paesana pizza with Pesto instead of ham.  They'll probably give you a funny look because you're not me, and then blow you away with their pizza.  Like Scoozi, Pendolasco's pizza is thin crust, but they really pile on the toppings.  When I ordered my altered pizza for the first time, it came with about 500g of pesto sauce on it.  I was thrilled and I kept ordering it.  Everytime it comes like that, tons of pesto, buttery spinach.  All around YUM from start to finish.  I ate this pizza (again) last night and it was so good, I had to write a whole pizza blog post.  When you finish your pizza, get a shot of their homemade Lemoncello to finish off the meal.  You'll be happy you did.  Or, if you're like me, you can buy a bottle of Lemoncello in their adjacent shop and play I-Just-Finished-Eating-at -Pendolasco at home.  It's not quite as fun at home, but it's still damn fabulous.

I'm sure the two of you who read this and live in HCM will disagree with everything I've said here.  Feel free to do so and then tell me about your favorite Saigon pizza joint.  I can never have too many places to stop for a slice o' pie.

Metro II: Electric Boogaloo

This is not a pet store

Over the weekend Reyna and I hosted a dinner party.  HCM has excellent food, but there is one ethnicity that is woefully underrepresented: Mexican.  I know it must come as a shock to know that there are no Taco Bells, Guadalaharas or El Pollo Locos, but it's true.  And for the reader or two located in Vietnam know this: REFRIED BEANS SHOULD NEVER EVER CONTAIN LIMA BEANS.  Consequently, Reyna volunteered to cook a Mexican feast for us and a few friends.  After we agreed to host the party at our house, we realized that we needed a few things beyond the standard tortillas, beans, meat and cheese.  We don't generally have more than one person at a time over, so we didn't have enough plates or glasses.  So we jumped on the bike and went to Metro.

Before we moved I dreaded going to the big box stores.  Not anymore.  I'm like a kid in a ball pit at The Metro now.  Going to The Metro is like jumping into the swimming pool filled with foam at the gymnastics gym*.  The whole experience is so oddly incongruous to everything else in the city, apart from other Metros around town. 

*I know you had a friend growing up who had a birthday party at the gymnastics gym.  I admit I was skeptical at first, but my god.  I went to a lot of birthday parties growing up, but I can't remember anything more joyous than jumping face first into the foam pit.  When I lived in Vegas, my roommate had been a bigtime gymnast in college and is now a coach.  He took me to his adult class a few times.  Everyone else in the class was flipping around and looking beautiul and lithe.  I was like the little fat kid.  While everyone else did punch back flips and tumbling runs down the trampoline path, I tried to do a handspring.  I never could do it.  I did manage to jump in the foam pit a dozen times, and I'm happy to report it's still as fun as it was when I was six.  I wish I had one at my house.  I think I'd be a lot less of a curmudgeon. 

Before we left I decided I should bring a real camera so I could properly document the experience.  When we got our temporary card scanned, the card scanner lady took my camera, put it in a plastic bag and stapled it shut.  So much for preparedness.  Luckily I still had my phone so all was not lost.  Here's a couple other photos:

Stacks on deck. Skinned Frog on ice.
We can pop bottles all night
Baby you can have whatever you like
I said you can have whatever you like.
Yeah
Late night frog, so hot and so right
I'll gas up the grill for you tonight and baby you can have whichever you like
I said you can have whichever you like
Yeah
Shouldn't these be behind glass or something?  Could I at least have some tongs?



Have you ever asked yourself, "I wonder what it would look like if I cooked a chicken without first removing its head?"  The answer is something like this.  I'm glad it's not my job to arrange the chicken heads so that they're all in the same position.  Seeing these things does beg this question: How do they kill the chickens if they don't cut their heads off?  I'm not sure I want to know.  The most fascinating thing is the chicken stoma.  You can see it in the upper left hand bird.  What is the purpose of that?  Were these chickens smokers?  I have this image of a chicken covering the hole with a wing so it can cluck, and keep the gravel it eats from falling out of the hole.  You have to admit that the idea of a wheezy chicken is pretty hilarious.

One area where I didn't take a photo and am now kicking myself is the beef section.  The beef is all quarantined in it's own refrigerated room.  That's not the interesting part, though.  It's hot in Vietnam all year round, so walking into the thirty degree meat locker can be a shock.  To combat this, the Metro provides coats for it's patrons.  Half the people wandering around the beef stock are wearing bright red coats with a METRO patch on the back.  Beside the entrance is a coat rack with a dozen more.  Genius.  I suppose the next time I'm really jonesing for some cool weather, I can just go hang in the Metro meat locker in a sweatshirt.  Hey, it beats buying a plane ticket to Dalat.

You know how under normal dinner party people offer to bring items to help out?  Well that happened, but instead of saying "dessert" or "drinks" we had our guests bring sour cream and ice.  We didn't know where to find it.  We figured, they've lived here longer than us so they probably know the secret spot to find this stuff.  Nope.  They had just as much trouble as we had.  But we did learn a valuable piece of information:  Sour Cream and Creme Freche are essentially the same thing.  Don't be fooled by the fancy french name.  I'd rank this discovery on par with the realization that Goat Cheese and Chevre are basically the same thing.  Exciting times!

Overall a grand time was had by all.  Reyna, of course, was hyper-critical of her own cooking, which was fabulous.  We sat on our rooftop terrace, drank margaritas and gorged ourselves.  Later in the evening a chocolatier showed up with his company's locally made chocolate bars* for us to sample.  Delicious.  We talked late into the night, and I'm sure we drove the neighbors crazy, but it was wonderful.

*This is one of the greatest things about living in Vietnam.  There are little independent companies making all kinds of killer food.  The weekend before we met a guy who makes cheese.  That's his job.   Cheese Maker.  Another friend of mine is thinking of starting a business making hot sauce. This is a fantastic country if you have the entreprenurial spirit.

___________

On an entirely separate topic, I got an email from a reader* suggesting that Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow may have split up because of the sexual side-effects of performance enhancing drugs.  I have to admit that I'd never really considered that possibility and it got me to thinking. 

*Do you have any idea how much I loved writing that?

No one much talks anymore about the fact that LA and his first wife, the wife who sat by his side through the cancer and the first four Tour victories, split up when he was poised to tie the consecutive Tour wins streak.  I've always assumed that this happened because Lance suddenly realized he was a celebrity and could bang other celebrities.  Why stick around with your aerobics instructor wife if you could be nailing Sheryl Crow?  Aerobics instructors don't get famous (except for Denise Austin: still hot after all these years.  How do you do it?  Oh yeah -aerobics). 

I think this goes along with my Lance Armstrong is an Asshole theory.  All his ex-teammates hated him so much that they'd do anything to beat him, including cheat.  Also, there is very little I loathe more than writing a book about your struggle and spending entire chapters lauding your wife, and then dumping her two years later.  Exhibit A: Lance Armstrong It's Not About the Bike.  I guess it was about the bike, huh Lance? 

Or maybe the ladies just get tired of sleeping with a guy who's had his testicles removed?  Maybe that's how he won seven straight Tours.  No nuts getting in the way of his peddling stroke.  Those seats are narrow, you know.

Intercontinental Planetary

Yesterday evening I arrived home from work a little ealier than a normal Wednesday.  Usually Wednesdays involve travel to and from Vung Tao for work.  I spend six hours in the car to do about 15 minutes of work.  Good times.  Anyway, I'd just changed out of my fancy clothes and into my couch sittin' clothes when the phone rang.  It was Reyna telling me that she'd secured two free passes to the buffet at The Intercontinental Hotel.  The Intercontinental is one of the fanciest hotels in town and a ticket for the dinner buffet runs around $60 per person.  Needless to say we'd never been.

Since I am the Tattooed Vegetarian I feel compelled to tell you that the Intercontinental Buffet does not have a vast offering for the non-meat-eating minorities amongst us.  If you are one of those people who says they're vegetarian but eat fish and chicken every week, then you're all set.  Loads of seafood.  Though I occassionally eat our little sea creature friends, I didn't last night.  This is probably because I'm not completely down with the entire notion of the "buffet."  It's just way too much food.  It's like an invitation to get too full and too drunk.  But what can you do? I always feel like a jackass eating salad at a buffet.  It kind of defeats the purpose of buffet style dining if you have four plates of salad*.  Instead  I ate about 3/4 of a pound of cheese for dinner and drank many flagons of the free-flow Bordeaux in order to feel less guilty about wasting a $60 ticket on cheese (and a big blog of Tiramisu.

*Plus I learned a valuable lesson about this many years ago. In my younger, less experienced days, I bought a bag of salad and some Paul Newman Ginger Miso salad dressing (which is the most delicious non-homemade dressing I've ever had).  I brought it home and made myself a big salad.  I ate it, enjoyed the hell out of it and decided to have more.  Next thing I knew, the bag o' salad was gone and I was satisfied.  Later that evening, I went and had a few beers down at the local pub.  While I was there I got to chatting with a woman I worked with.  Well one thing led to another and we walked back to my place.  Things were starting to get interesting when the beer/salad combo dropped.  I politely excused myself and walked across the hall to the bathroom.  It wasn't pretty nor was it quiet.  This happened FOUR times over the next hour.  Strangely it didn't work out with me and the young lady.

We managed to drag our asses home and I promptly fell asleep on the couch.  An undefinite amount of time passed when Reyna suggested we move upstairs to bed.  I complied.  This morning my stomach feels like I washed down a cinder block with a gallon of battery acid.  I think I can safely say that I've never felt fatter than I do right now.

And that's what I really want to discuss here.  When we lived in Vegas, I was doing my best to maintain my only slightly out of shape figure.  But we moved, and I left my bicycle hanging in the garage of the house.  After ten months I've watched my waistline expand to grandpa proportions.  Is there anything worse than running into someone you haven't seen in awhile and having them go, "Wow! You've gained some weight!"  Actually there is.  Here's three very specific things that are worse:

1. Wearing a belt.  There was a time in my life where I collected odd belts.  I have two favorites.  One is a USA tooled belt.  The buckle depicts an angry skeleton draped in a rebel flag brandishing a rifle.  Beside the skeleton the buckle reads, "I'll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands."  The other belt is tooled with crosses and reads Jesus Saves around the leather.  It has a huge brass BORN AGAIN buckle.  It was a gift from a friend (shout out to Harp!)  Before you close your browser and never return to this page, know that I wear them ironically.  Or should I say I wore them ironically.  They still fit, that isn't the problem.  The problem is when I sit down, the buckles cut into my ever-growing stomach.  This makes activities like riding in the car for six hours between HCM and Vung Tao; or sitting in front of a computer dying a slow death for 10 hours a day downright unbearable.  I've been relegated to wearing a cloth belt becaue it's the most comfortable.  Very depressing.
2. A few years ago I had a conversation with a buddy who has a paunch similar to mine.  He was telling me that the worst part about getting fat was bending over and feeling the band of your underwear slowly fold over.  At the time I had no idea what he was talking about.  He was right, and the feeling is exactly as he described.  I'm not sure if it's because he told me about it beforehand or not, but it is a disgusting feeling.  Even my underwear can't handle my newfound girth.  It feels like you're underwear is saying, "Oooooooooh, you're fat." as it slowly flips into it's new position.  You can almost hear the fabric sigh.  When it happened for the first time, I thought of my friend, and then panicked.
3. I remember having a conversation with my brother, who travelled a simliar path about ten years before me.  He said, "the other day I looked at myself in the mirror and said 'I am no longer a catch.'"  He's still a super swell guy, but the ladies don't come a-runnin' like they used to.  I know exactly how he feels.  There isn't anyone on the street looking at me and thinking, "Oh yeah, that's coming home with me."  I should use my Jesus Saves belt as a rosary, get down on my knees and thank the baby Jesus that Reyna hasn't run away from me screaming like the woman in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

When we moved to Vietnam we told ourselves we'd get skinny living here.  Think about it.  How many fat Asians have you met in your life?  Not many.  How wrong we were.  Beers are 1/6th the price and we can afford to eat in all the fancy restaurants.  I used to ride my bike to work every day and played on two to three soccer teams.  All of that got left behind when we moved.  Now I'm scared to get on a scale.

In order to combat my ever-expanding waistline I've launched my own Gut-B-Gone campaign.  I bought a pair of running shoes on Tuesday and went for a run that night.   It nearly killed me.  How embarrassing to feel near death by running for one minute, walking for two inutes for a total of 20 minutes.  But I did it.  And I'll do it again tonight.  Baby steps, right?  The running is also in preparation for the arrival of my new bicycle.  I broke down and spent entirely too much money on the bike I've always wanted*.  It should be here any day now.  Between those two activities, I'm getting my ass in shape.  If I can just manage to steer away from eating a wheel of cheese and two bottles of wine for dinner at night, I should be fine.

*Well almost the bike I've always wanted.  I've dreamed for years about owning a Cervelo, but you can't realistically get them here.  To have one, I'd have to fly to a shop that sells them, buy it and carry it back with me.  I swore I'd never own a fucking Trek back in the Lance Armstrong**  TdF era, but that's the only brand that the only bike shop in Vietnam carries.  Besides, Cervelos have basically doubled in price since 2007 (the  year I started lusting after an R3).  They've become the new Trek.  You make do with what you can find.  I can remember when the Trek 5900 was THE bike if you could afford it.  Lance's bike on 4 TdF wins before Trek launched the Madone line.  If you had $5K you could have the same bike.  Now the top of the line Trek retails for $12,000 (the answer is no, this is not the bike I ordered).  You can buy a Toyota for that.

**Can we all agree that there's no way ANYONE could win seven straight Tours de France without cheating?  Can we agree that, to a man, every single one of his old teammates has been busted for doping since leaving the team? (except for his best pal Freddie Hincapie, but he was never really a huge star).  I recently rewatched the footage of Armstrong dusting Ulrich on the Galibier in the 2002 Tour (you know the one where Lance looks at Ulrich and says something like "you ready to go?" and just takes off? That one).  Jan Ulrich was one of the strongest riders of that generation, and he got busted for doping the following year.  No one that isn't cheating could just ride away from a guy like that.  Let's just look back at the last few winners of the Tour shall we?

2011 - Cadel Evans - Still racing.  Took him twelve tries to win the TdF
2010 - Alberto Contador - banned for doping stripped of title
2009 - Carlos Sastre - retired after first TdF win.  Raced in the tour 12 times before winning.
2008 - Alberto Contador - currently banned
2007 - Alberto Contador - currently banned
2006 - Floyd Landis - Disgraced for doping.  Excommunicated for whistleblowing on LA
1999-2005 - Lance Armstrong - Supposedly clean.  Raced in 11 Tours and won 7.
1998 - Marco Platani - Banned for doping
1997 - Jan Ulrich - Banned for doping
1996 - Bjarne Riis - Admitted doping

Is there anything that sticks out as odd on this list?  You bet there is.  Two crusty old guys have won without getting caught after ten or more tries.  Everyone else who has won in the last 20 years has either been eventually caught or admitted it later.  All except for Lance, that is.  I understand that his story is very inspirational, but the truth really should come out.  I think I want it to come out because I think he's a dick.  It's taken me ten years, but I finally decided that just because Lance Armstrong is a dick, I shouldn't hold that against Trek.  He made that company. Or should I?  But I digress...

I'm giving myself a year to get back to my graduate school fighting weight of 160lbs.  I guess I'd better get busy.  I'm sure you will hear more about this in the future.  Consider yourself warned.

Oh, and yes --the light that won't go out is still going strong.