update stuff

Tuesday

2009-04-28T22:44:00.002+07:00

Writing yesterday's update reminded me that traffic is a perfect subject for one of these "miss about Vietnam" entries. The odd thing is, I don’t know which kind of entry to include it in. I feel pretty ambivalent about it. So I'm going to do both: what I will and also won't miss about Vietnam (volume five and five): traffic. Before coming here, we were warned. Maybe warned isn't hysterical enough. Everyone had plenty to say, usually in a wide-eyed and high-pitched aside. We usually laugh this sort of thing off, but arriving here we discovered the situation really is terrifying. It took months to get comfortable navigating around town by foot. The sidewalks are as dangerous as the streets. Nearly everyone has a Saigon Birthmark: an oval of waxy second-degree scar about muffler-high on the calf. Everybody knows someone with ten stitches in their brain or gravel embedded in their face. But that's Vietnam: its spaces constantly, maddeningly, numbingly, chaotically cram-packed, jacked-full, overwhelmed with endless, odorous, hot, heavy traffic. Twenty-four. Seven. Nineteen months later we still talk about it all the time. Everybody does. But this subject, fact of life, force of nature eventually does become understandable. Scooters are just metal pedestrians to me now. I feel as safe walking with them as I do with any crowd. I never look for traffic lights to cross the street anymore. I hardly look for traffic. (It's easier to cross between intersections because the scooters cross at crosswalks.) Once we've left Vietnam, I'm going to miss the adrenaline rush of walking around town, the relative safety of slow-moving traffic which might leave my leg burned. But I'll also enjoy coming home to pedestrian right-of-way and regulated crosswalks. And scaring the hell out of people who are coming to Vietnam. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-04-27T21:42:00.000+07:00

Earlier the traffic was nuts. Well, it's always nuts, but this was the worst I've ever seen six o'clock traffic get: backed up from the light at Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai and Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa Streets--for as far as I could see from our front door. When traffic halts on these roads it's incredible. Scooters just pack so amazingly densely, thousands of colorful helmets wedged into everyplace, including sidewalks. Of course, we'd already asked the man to hail us a taxi, so he was out there trying to move heaven and earth to get one over to us. We couldn’t walk through there, anyway. Eventually, a cab turned down the one-way road beside our building, so we were irritated about having to catch a metered ride in the wrong direction. Dinner, when we finally got there, was nice. Afterward, we decided to even the score by walking home, allowing us the illusion we'd gotten our money's worth for a round-trip ticket. It had rained in the meantime, and was breezy. One of Reunification Palace's sidewalk trees had blown across the road. Several men were breaking it apart with their hands, headlights streaming around them. Hopeless. The trunk was as round as a plate. No chance this was the earlier obstruction, though, certainly this had happened during the dinner storm. On around the corner onto Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, we came across a burnt-out car laying in the road. Probably a taxi. It was dark by then, and all that ash camouflaged everything until we were much too close. The doors and hood gaped, the rear fender and tank were scattered pieces across the road. It was a spooky thing, hard to see, wrong. How long did it sit there? The rest of the night felt weird. [Cavin]

Friday

2009-04-24T23:36:00.000+07:00

What I won't miss about Vietnam (volume four): small things. Too-small things, actually. One of the reasons it's difficult for me to cook family-sized meals here is that I'm deeply lazy and also going out to eat is both easier and more exciting. Also, it's difficult to gather together the groceries I'll need, since the produce is across downtown, the fishes are in the market, and the dry goods are in a District Three Co-op. Even if I was dedicated enough to do all this running around, I'd still be buying tiny, one-day portions of each item from teensy shelves at minuscule stores. I stock the dinky larder and pint-sized refrigerator with half-sized things. Milk and juice come in stackable one-liter boxes. Rice and beans in sandwich bags. Cereal boxes are the size of hardback books. This makes it nearly impossible to buy enough groceries for several days at once. I can handle running weekly errands, but hitting three stores every day is too much. Luckily, restaurants are very affordable--but the plague of smallness persists. Not portion sizes, mind. This is a service town--portions are large and come on massive plates or in cavernous bowls. But restaurant tables are all unbelievably small so they can be wedged into the crannies of each tiny dining room. The size of coffee shop tables: the round ones like an extra-large pizza, the square ones a Scrabble board. These come littered with small things which nevertheless steal space from those huge plates and bowls: bamboo placemats, dishes of salt and pepper and chili, toothpicks, flower vases, sugar, fish sauce, chopstick blocks, soup spoon holders, cocktail menus, burning candles. Specialty restaurants have additional things. It took me weeks to realize this country doesn't have napkin dispensers. It came as a relief. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-04-23T22:33:00.000+07:00

Recently, I was mentioning how I've put off doing expected tourist things around town; but if I ever do want to get around to doing them, my deadline is fast approaching. With this in mind, I let Sunshine take me to the water puppet show tonight. It was a neat show, and I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud at times. The stage is a small pool bisected by a backdrop. In the semicircle behind this screen, puppeteers manipulate long submerged poles attached to the bottoms of two-foot puppets poking out of the water in the semicircle up front. In this way, water puppetry inverts my admittedly untutored expectation of the form, in which characters dangle from manipulators overreaching a curtain. During the show it occurred to me that water puppetry was a really excellent format for Vietnamese tradition. Obviously it's storytelling from four thousand years of seaside villages, paddy agriculture, and flooding; but also it's the nimble manipulation of fine details handed impeccably down from ancestral times. Not only does it take the crisp and full-bodied athleticism of a martial artist to push and pull the show along, but each of these puppets are hand carved. In a country that prides itself on the crystallized stasis of its creative output, a puppet show is like the jack of all trade shows. And yet I wonder what really has mutated since the eleventh century, as if it would be possible to navigate whatever grapevine Darwinism has escaped the best efforts of those powers dead set against the very idea. I presume the plastic sword the golden turtle god Kim Quy takes from Lê Lợi as he rows around Hoàn Kiếm Lake, for example, was not plastered with reflective metallic holographic stickers back in the old days. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-04-22T22:31:00.002+07:00

Something I won't miss about Vietnam (volume three) is, yet again, a flipside to the positive article I posted yesterday. I've heard there are service classes in Vietnam, where people are actually taught how to wait on westerners. This is pretty important. There's a gulf of cultural nuance separating Vietnamese clerks from expatriate customers. Without guidance, things can fall quickly apart. I wouldn't hazard an example here. Being squarely expatriated, I have no idea how far the locals bend to interact with me. I imagine we meet rather closer than the middle. Xin cảm ơn, Việt Nam. As odd as life can be here, I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would be without so much effort being paid to making me comfortable. But as well as alleged public service classes have indeed softened bumpy intercultural relations in many respects, there's still a thing or two missing from the syllabus. One: western shoppers don't like the hard sell. I know things are difficult, and many vendors find themselves in direct competition for my money. When I'm glancing down the row of jackfruit vendors, for example, I can understand the impetus to be louder, reach farther, and attract my attention quicker than neighboring salesmen. But this has the opposite from the intended effect. I'm attracted to vendors who don't force my interaction. Two: western customers are uncomfortable making servers wait. It takes a long time to read a fifteen-page menu, even if there are large color pictures. I know it's important for you to be ready the moment I make my selection, but it makes me nervous when you hover behind me. Also, I know it might seem unlikely, but dogging me around your clothing store, muttering routine pitches for every noted item, is only driving me away. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-04-21T23:27:00.000+07:00

Things I'll miss about Vietnam (volume four): service. I thought of this after rereading yesterday's "backpacker district" update. Probably that pestering of street vendors is the impression I'd have taken away with me back when I strapped all my belongings to my back and traveled for months at a time staying in septic four-to-a-room budget hostels. In that case, "service" might have appeared in an opposite kind of article. As it is, I live here. I travel through other areas staying in well-appointed medium- to slightly high-end accommodation, and eat in restaurants where people don't usually try to sell me drugs at my table. So my impression of Vietnam is one of wonderful service. Compared with the USA--where bored transient labor eyeballs any customer desultorily from the counter, where actively offensive representatives perpetrate heroic one-upmanship of inept unhelpfulness after keeping consumers on hold for hours, where big conglomerates bully paying customers into spending extra money to be targeted for invasive research practices and then go to court protesting complaints--there's little chance I'd bitch about any service falling short of battery. But in reality I'm faced daily with people who feel like it's their job to entice me to spend my money at their establishments. Hoteliers who check me in from the comfort of an overstuffed hotel lobby chair, putting a drink in my hand. Attendants who smilingly serve in-flight meals on merely forty-minute rides. It's a bittersweet revelation. I'm forced to remember that, in reality, I'm doing them a favor, keeping them in business with my customer interaction. I'm reminded that they have jobs because they are able to please customers. This would only be sweet, except that I'm returning home in two months, where I'll be expected to pay for the privilege of ingratitude again. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-04-20T22:21:00.000+07:00

During our stay in the Vietnamese megalopolis of Hồ Chí Minh City, I've done almost nothing of a tourist nature. Two days ago marked the nineteenth month of my stay here, and time is getting short. But I've only been to two zoos, a water park, one pagoda, and an art gallery. In all that time, I haven't quite managed to visit the much ballyhooed history museum (located at the zoo), the supposedly fine City Museum, the harrowing War Remnants museum a block behind or the Reunification Palace across the street from our apartment--or any other thing that Lonely Planet lists to do in this city. Am I lazy? Or is this analogous to finding it difficult to select a book once I've arrived in a library? With everything available at all times, it's easy to these things next week, you know. This week is always booked. About a kilometer southwest of my house, there is an area Downtown, around Phạm Ngũ Lão Street, which is commonly referred to as the "backpacker district." This is either because of the high population of bars and hotels and luggage stores there, or perhaps vice-versa. I don't pretend to any causality. But either way, it is this part of Saigon that many travelers see foremost, and the impression they get of town. This is funny since, whenever I go there, I am surprised how the whole area bears little resemblance to the rest of Hồ Chí Minh City. Usually I'm there visiting art shows in closet-sized art galleries. But this weekend We met some friends at a little pan-global eatery that happens to include some pretty good, if not altogether accurate Mexican food. While we were eating, roving vendors pestered us to buy gum, travel guides, luggage, marijuana. Tableside service! [Cavin]

Friday

2009-04-17T23:30:00.002+07:00

It's been forever since I did a movie review here. I'm not doing one now, either. But I made time to watch a movie last night after Sunshine went to bed. I finished in the gym early so I'd be left the leeway. It's not usually this much fuss, but I wanted to watch There Will Be Blood,* which is long enough to require some planning ahead. So shortly after two, I made a half-sandwich and a bowl of cereal, plugged my earphones in so I wouldn't disturb my neighbors, and spun a DVD we'd borrowed from one of Sunshine's coworkers. The first thing I noticed: this movie was shockingly well filmed. I am not a fan of Paul Anderson's usually cruddy emo formalism--ugly is the new beauty!--but here the tone was naturalistic, even nostalgic, all golden sun and epic sweep. Attention to incidental details was obsessive, but throwaway. Far from being driven by a host of Anderson types--mores sleep in an environment where everybody sucks--the movie tracks the rise of an obsessive but direct gentleman who actually works to achieve his brutal success in the early oil trade, doing battle with hucksters and taking responsibility for his actions. ...oh hell, I don't know what all he does. After being unpredictably Merchant-Ivory--I didn't know Mr. Anderson had it in him--the probably pirated disc puttered-out, leaving me hanging only five hours into the movie. I imagine the denouement of There Will Be Blood, what with there having been very little blood up till then, throws the proceeding into a rather different light. Who knows? Will I sit through the whole thing again someday? Will I go to my grave never guessing what happens after the ham-fisted transition that heralds the movie's final act? [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-04-16T23:27:00.002+07:00

Let me put this out there right up front: currently, my life is pretty cushy. I live in a country where eating out every single night is actually cheaper than buying groceries back where I grew up. I live in an apartment that comes staffed with a full-time housekeeping crew. Since all of this actually saves us money--we don't even buy dish-washing detergent, we don't even own a broom--it means we can even afford to hire an incredibly cool woman to cook for us once a week. Frankly, we save a lot of money when she buys our groceries, too. There is still a little distasteful, but completely sanctioned, nationalist inequality going on around here. I would feel ridiculous snarking about any of this, so it is important that you understand that snarking is not what I'm doing here. I'm just talking. About how the cook's been making some pretty oddball food, lately. Here one recent two-course example: one rich and wonderful Italian or Creole type of soup, with spicy beans and a rich tomato base, that was served right beside a platter of wok-seared salt-and-pepper Asian squid, with nước mắm and lemon, that was supposed to be wrapped in lettuce and basil leaves. Both of these dishes were excellent, but they made a rather weird combination. This week she made us a wonderful clarified cracked pepper soup with vermicelli beside a heaping plate of hot, garlicky gnocchi glued into a mozzarella and tomato sauce mass--if I've made this sound a lot like a heaping plate of cheese tots, well, that wouldn't be incorrect. There have been times when Tuesday nights were a delight of restaurant-quality food served up on our very own coffee table. Lately they've been more of a delight of oddball cultural apophenia. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-04-15T23:24:00.001+07:00

This is another side to yesterday's post. These are some things I'll not really miss about Vietnam (volume two) when it comes to restaurants. One: the excellent food occasionally comes with the addition of flavor-enhancing scoops of monosodium glutamate. While I'm convinced that the western demonization of MSG is completely based upon a slight allergic reaction suffered by a slim margin of the US population, it's hard to convince myself that I have not been poisoned with Borax whenever I eat phở or bún or some other bowlful of food brimming with this traditional chemical. About halfway through the meal, the skin on the back of my next starts heating up. Soon, the outer layers of my body seem to be rising off my musculature like Marilyn's white dress. Twenty minutes later it's over. Two: there is something about southeast Asian beer that gives me a headache. It's too bad. Nobody is about to confuse the local brands--Saigon, Tiger, 333--of being award winners, but I prefer them to most Mexican beers. They are light, drinkable, and surprisingly good with food. But every time I drink even one of these beers, within half an hour, my head feels like it's been blown full of cold talcum powder. This is not necessarily isolated to Asia. There are beers at home that do the same thing: Miller products, for example, most beers proclaiming themselves "cold filtered." But back home most beers do not give me a headache; and even here the situation is slowly improving. Sometime around this latest Tết, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam began allowing the importation and sale of American Budweiser beer, one brand I have no trouble drinking. But it's weird when the universally accepted and costly premium quality ideal is Bud in a can. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-04-14T22:01:00.000+07:00

After talking about Mexican food yesterday, it's time for more of what I'll miss about Vietnam (volume three): restaurant food. It's perfectly reasonable to suppose that I cannot get better Vietnamese food anywhere on Earth than I can right here in Hồ Chí Minh City. It's never been my favorite kind of food, actually. At home I liked Vietnamese okay, but I preferred more Indo-Asian traditions like Thai food to the Sino-Asian likes of China and Vietnam. Not that I have minded being trapped here with the best Vietnamese food in the world, of course. Not one bit. When I do eat Vietnamese, it's always impressive as hell and I get things I'd never even heard of back in North Carolina: crispy fried turmeric pancakes packed with seafood and onions, grilled shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane, salt and pepper squids resting in a delicate web of white noodles ladled with acute fish sauce, spicy grated salads with boiled quail eggs. But it's important to point out that I don't eat Vietnamese food even every week here. The fact is, all the local restaurants are very good. It's a great food city. The same care and attention, the same high quality ingredients and impeccable cooking expertise, is evident in any old place. The Vietnamese are known for industrialized repetition. Sadly, this can mean the shifty handicrafts practices: thousands of hands trained to perfectly replicate the same lacquered bowl or marble statue over and over again. This makes for pretty crappy cookie-cutter souvenirs, but a very stable garment industry and a whoppingly impressive series of impeccable kitchens. So the Italian and the Mediterranean and the Spanish food here is great. And since the proper eastern ingredients are on hand, the Indian and Thai and Japanese and Korean food is exquisite. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-04-13T23:19:00.002+07:00

Saturday the CDC threw a Burrito Night party. This sounds like a story that should really end with a punch line, but no. Everything went exceptionally well considering the difficulty finding Mexican staples here. No black beans, no chilis arbol, no jack cheese. Vietnamese Mexican food isn't right: often so laden with chopped mangoes it smacks of a luau. But given these odds, the CDC party was mighty successful. I was immediately strong-armed into making the margaritas. There's no triple sec here, so I had to experiment. It turned out okay, I guess. I certainly drank a bunch of margaritas, even if nobody else did. Here's the recipe I lit upon: pour six ounces of tequila for every two ounces of fresh lime juice and one oddly-shaped spoonful of sugar into a blender. Splash in orange juice like last time. Toss in some ice cubes just to cut it. Blend till it stops rattling. Pour over ice and make a face when you drink it. Mmm. I walked out of there upright, but I totally blew the nightcap. We'd been invited to stick around for gin and tonics. All the tequila was gone already. I made the drinks. I poured escalating amounts of gin into each glass, over ice. Then I added a little of the remaining lime juice to each. Perfectly. Then I was asked a question I've totally forgotten now, which I answered. Then I topped each glass off with gin and gave 'em a stir. I thankfully realized what I'd done before serving them, none of these drinks being at all fizzy. Hopefully no one else noticed, but a lot of gin went surreptitiously down the drain in fixing it. Nobody complained. I wonder if the CDC will ever invite me to another party? Rimshot. [Cavin]

Friday

2009-04-10T22:12:00.002+07:00

The flip-side of yesterday's Update: what I won't miss about Vietnam (volume one). It turns out not to be the temperature so much as the tilt. Yesterday I talked about how I've fallen in anticipated love with the rotating system of rainy and hot seasons. Before coming to Vietnam, I assumed rain would be my reward for toughing though a climate that never really cools. And it's true. I used to hate any day above x degrees--and almost every day here is that. I knew, going into this thing, that I'd desperately miss winters. But it turned out I missed seasons, instead. I managed to acclimate to the temperature fairly quickly and mostly forgot all about it. But the missing seasonal changes and attendant backward phenomena grated more as the months wore on. It was subtle, but it rankled anyway. Here it rains for months on end, but it does not usually rain when it should be spring back home. The month with the greatest combined humidity and heat is October, but the hottest month of the year is April. Everything begins to bloom at Christmas, continuing on through Tết in January or February. Some nasty and debilitating thing is always coming off the exotic flora here, rain or shine: several types of whirling pods--some the size and weight of golf balls--or something less evident which nevertheless makes my head and lungs close like a fist. But these things are nothing compared with the irritation I feel estranged from my own beloved spot on the tilt of the world. I cannot abide days that change by barely half a daylight hour over the course of a year, or twilights that pass in four minutes as a perpendicular sun flits around the corner of the equator. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-04-09T23:09:00.000+07:00

Things I'm going to miss about Vietnam (volume two). Rain. I sort of knew going into this that I'd like living in a country with a real rainy season. It has not disappointed. The weather is pretty predictable during the half-year monsoon, but I haven't grown tired of it yet. We arrived at the very end of the rains in 2007, so my first real understanding of the phenomenon is based on what happened from April to November in oh-eight: four or five thirty-minute showers each day. During the onset of each shower, the humidity is bumped down into the reasonable range by gusts of wind and cloudy darkness. After each shower the humidity rises with the sunlight, like boiling everything, until all of that recaptured moisture weighs down the atmosphere enough for it to fall again. When this happens right at nightfall, evening temperatures can hit the seventies and remain all night. It may be hot, but the showers are worth looking forward to. This ongoing routine, this definition of rain as a kaleidoscopic pattern covering months, rather than an isolated event, is an adjustment I've really loved making. And, interestingly, because hopefully, it is one I will retain after I am gone. Even the opposite season has its charms. Especially December and January, when evenings are breezy and often in the low seventies and days are sunny but dry. This year's rains began in fits and starts, earlier than last year. I don't know which is normal. There's plenty to like about the onset of the monsoon too, characterized as it is by big grandiose storms more reminiscent, but also more sustained, to the spring storms I am used to from home. These transitions can be unpredictable, with violently breathtaking hours of sustained science fiction lightning. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-04-08T21:50:00.000+07:00

Extra! Extra! Man Bites Dog! This is no neat switcheroo. The title is usually employed analogously to demark a journalistic trend of headlining breathless and unlikely scoops in lieu of more mature news coverage. That's exactly what I'm doing, too. In Vietnam, especially in the north, men frequently cook and then bite dogs. Animals are considered animals, and while dogs are frequently pets they are just as frequently meat. The fact that this is inconceivable in my culture can be equally mystifying to people here. Can this old saw of journalism mean anything, then, where stories of men biting dogs are as utterly routine as their opposite? Here's an article, published in March by the Public Library of Science, that I just couldn't wait to breathlessly report for its bizarre qualities. In two separate cases, Vietnamese men were admitted into Hanoi medical facilities presenting with similar symptoms: hydro- and aerophobia, intermittent spasms and agitation without attendant elevated blood pressure or temperature. In both cases they were diagnosed with progressive classic encephalitic rabies. Both died within the week. In each case, the cause of infection seems to have been their butchering and consumption of rabies-endemic species: in one case a dog, the other a cat. It's hard to believe any living virus could survive getting cooked--indeed, in neither case did family members at the same table get sick. Each victim even paid some uneducated attention to rabies prevention--had a dog bitten a man in some attention-getting story?--one man actually pulled the teeth out of the dog's head before butchering it. But each man eventually removed and cooked the animal's raw and virulent brain for some traditional dish. The full article can be found here, unillustrated, or downloaded in .pdf format¹ including a photo of cooked dogs. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-04-07T22:47:00.000+07:00

Eventually I would like to write a little bit more about Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (I'll eventually link that here.) I found it to be an exceptional place. It seems small after HCMC. It's mildly crumbling, with vividly repurposed deco colonial architecture populated by every kind of person I can imagine. I was unprepared. I really thought KL would be much the same as Singapore, with handy post-British city planning, with overbearing cleanliness and stricture, with endless shopping malls--a sanitized melting pot. But this was much different: the Chinese and Indian populations of the Malay Peninsula seem far more integrated there. Also people who looked like they were maybe from the Middle East, the South Pacific, Mongolia, Mars. (Also people who looked like they were from varying necks of the economic woods, too.) The mix was more than merely spatial--ethnic neighborhoods blending into one another more aggressively, and perhaps sloppier, than in Singapore--but extended neatly into the features of the people themselves. Many Malaysians seem so delightfully multiethnic that unquilting them becomes immediately Quixotic. The long Indonesian history and predominately Islamic culture lends a unique and beautified air to the cultural stew. Music and food traditions hail from everywhere: the south Asian jungle, the Hindu Kush, the wide swath of the Eurasian Steppes, deserts both Persian and Mediterranean. The environment was delirious, the streets dirty, the markets congested. The head-scarves of professional women were part of official police or government or fast food uniforms (official McDonald's head-scarves. I had no idea). Off duty clothing was lively and colorful. I was surprised how much I liked this capital city, and how much I want to return for the rest of Malaysia someday. Then, I'll remember how much I really want to have a camera along with me. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-04-06T23:43:00.000+07:00

Happy Hung Kings Day!* This year is only the third annual official observance of this newly-created national holiday. Since this meant we had a three-day weekend, we packed off to Kuala Lumpur and didn't have to return home until earlier this evening. That flight was a highlight of our weekend, maybe one of the most amazing things we've done during our stay here. We'd gotten off the ground forty minutes late due to a pounding storm which broke right as we were taxiing. And broke with the works: bright strobe lightning, porthole-rattling thunder, and blinding churns of opaque rain. "Heh heh," said the captain of that Malaysia Airlines seven-something-seven, even as I could feel wind actually shaking the parked aircraft, "we'll be sitting right here till this thing blows over." I sat there alright, refusing to look out the windows, but I could sense the storm hadn't more than slightly lessened when he'd crackled onto the intercom again and advised us we were taking off right now as he did just that. But it was somehow calming to shoot gracefully into the air after that, with nary a buffet or chop as we floated right through those flashing black clouds. Pretty impressive, Captain Malaysia. This calming effect became part of a confluence of events allowing me to do something I can't usually do: look out the windows. Also we were on the right side of the plane. Also, after all that, Captain Malaysia decided to cruise into town underneath the southern delta region's extensive cloud cover, affording some twenty minutes of dramatically-lit Mekong countryside crawling along beneath us just two to three thousand feet down, every boat and radio antenna and paddy and canal and conical hat clearly defined against one of the Earth's most iconic surfaces. Recommended. [Cavin]

Friday

2009-04-03T20:39:00.002+07:00

We're a little under four months away from moving home again already. Our return date is not set in stone, but it'll probably be something like July twenty-fifth. I spend a lot of time swinging back and forth between opposite impressions of the length of time we've spent here. Sometimes it feels like that time has passed very quickly, but sometimes the sheer amount of activity over the last eighteen months makes it seem like we’ve been here a lot longer than that. Our approaching repatriation makes me think about all sorts of things. I think about all the hoops we'll have to jump through to move home. Much of this will be related here over the coming months. I think about all the things we haven't gotten around to doing yet, some of which we'll try to cram into our remaining time. This will also be a predictable topic from now on. Besides whatever actually happens, I'm already imagining what things I'm going to miss about living in Vietnam once I'm relocated elsewhere. Also, I'm thinking about the opposite things. Before moving home from México, I remember noting several months worth of "lasts". The last time I did x, went to a party with y, ate z, etc. I suspect there will be some of that mentioned this time, too. With very little room left in this update, what's on my mind must be short. Once we have moved home again, I am going to very much miss hopping onto a quick flight and spending the weekend in Malaysia, for example, for basically the same amount of money I might've spent on a New Orleans road trip six years ago. So, since it's Friday, my leather bag is packed again and I've got a cab to catch. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-04-02T23:29:00.000+07:00

Not last weekend, but the weekend before, we took a trip to Cát Tiên National Park. It's a national forest preserve about a hundred fifty kilometers north of Hồ Chí Minh City. We have friends up there studying black-shanked doucs, an endangered species of Old World monkey found only in Vietnam and Cambodia. We had a really good weekend hiking and hanging out with them. This is one of the things that happened to us there. We'd just hiked the last leg of a ten-kilometer round-trip into the forest; we were waiting for our prearranged rendezvous with a pickup truck to take us back to the research compound. Where that trail intersects with the road there are two concrete benches. Two people can sit on each. There is also a sign that says "Crocodile Lake, 5k." We'd just done the return hike in about sixty-five minutes, far faster than we'd managed the hike in. We'd been a little nervous about catching our ride, see. All four of us were tired and took a seat. The bench on the trailhead side of the road was clear, but the bench on the opposite side was occupied by a dense cloud of wheeling butterflies. I sat with one of our friends on that clear bench--we'd gotten to the intersection first. Sunshine and our other friend, coming off the trail a moment or two later, sat in the butterfly cloud. This story is instructive. Butterflies are harmless and pretty and tired hikers can see them from across the road, lazily swirling in the air around a concrete bench. This is not the case with dozens of droning sweat-hungry bees. The moral? Sit in the butterfly seat. Anyway, here you can read everything else that happened that weekend in Cát Tiên Park. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-04-01T23:39:00.001+07:00

Here's an interesting item that came across the Update desk earlier this afternoon. It's a slideshow accompanying a BusinessWeek article¹ examining the possibility that the current economic downturn might force global companies to reduce or discontinue the extra compensations provided to employees working in remote or dangerous locations. One generally understood term for this is hardship differential. Chic and intrepid MBA newshounds sometimes refer to it as sweeteners. In an article championing the necessity of bonuses for hardship positions, I take exception with that label. To me, a sweetener is just a gaudy sack of junket swag doled-out as a competitive thank you or a dealership trick. A hardship differential is a wage-based pay increase measured to somehow fix issues brought about by isolation from infrastructure, sanitation, education, protection, and familiarity. Anyway, what I've linked above is really only the illustration: a slideshow entitled "The World's Worst Places to Work" based on a report commissioned by BusinessWeek from US human resources data compilation firm ORC Worldwide. I do not "take exception" with these findings so much as "mock them," at least based on the skin-deep analysis offered in the article. The constraints limiting this top twenty list are: no actively war-torn cities and no cities in the US or Canada or Western Europe. I wonder if they weren't trying to be neighborly, too, since Bogota and the Dominican Republic are the only western hemisphere cities mentioned. The DR? That's where my cousin enjoyed his honeymoon, for Pete's sake. And never mind the ongoing drug violence tearing apart northern México,² or that Haiti is plagued by gangs, poverty, and despair.³ The list seems to still be on-track at number one, after that it gets stupid fast. But you can almost see our house in the picture for number nine. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-03-31T23:24:00.002+07:00

I had a five-week vacation, Tết holiday, wonderful guests, and jetlag. Then another vacation for good measure. These exciting things preempted blogging for awhile. I'm trying to get back into the habit. There was so much happening that I also put off returning to the gym. For months that gym and I had a steady thing going on, a midnight rendezvous. Our relationship verged on abusive, and I frequently felt battered. But I loved that gym! God help me, I even looked forward to seeing it every day. Then over our vacation estrangement I think we grew apart. During much of last year that place was like an addiction; but I've become addicted to other rooms, now. It's been a real pain in my butt making myself go through the motions again. I tell myself I'm doing it for the kids. We're trying to talk things through, of course, to work things out. But the problem is me: I've weakened our bonds during this trial. Every relationship takes work, but it's been really tough on me. Why? Over months of disuse I didn't suddenly atrophy or suffer a cardiovascular decline. But I did forget how to run. Running is not, apparently, like riding a bike. I think the human body likes to run; but it's requiring practice to convince my body of this. It also takes practice to be effective. Since going steady with the gym again, I've become frustrated because I want to perform like I did back in December. My legs are strong, my breath is good. But I’ve forgotten how to get my feet down quickly and correctly. I'm out of synch, so I keep hurting myself. Also, the resulting treadmill abuse produces a nasty burning rubber smell, something I'll avoid personifying with relationship terminology. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-03-30T23:17:00.002+07:00

Sidewalks around town are slowly coming back together again. I haven't meant to harp on this, but it’s been a daily struggle. Right after Tết, the powers that be decided to tear them all up and replace them again. They did it all at once. I suspect this has something to do with a grand municipal attempt to circum-schedule both the big New Year celebration and the coming rainy season, which might begin in May. I also suspect, under the rules of good luck and godspeed, that this very schedule is why it's been raining at least once every week. I have a pretty platonic relationship with superstition. I pick and choose my beliefs in the least sexy ways. And like washing the car, leaving big dirty troughs along congested downtown motorways is just begging for rain. I came away from last year with hard and fast rules about the Vietnamese weather. During all of that first hot season, discounting the mercurial transitions from the rainy season, well, it was bone dry. I remember one big storm and one little drizzle. That's it. For the rest of those six months it didn't rain. I even explained, in no uncertain terms, to everyone who would listen: half the year it rains, and half the year it doesn't--a perfect two-season delineation you can set your calendar by. While I firmly hold that it's possible my one year history in Vietnam doesn't quite afford me the authority to wax so certain about these things, it's hard not to believe, when slopping though gravelly mud in the scooter lanes, edging past long muddy pools and construction equipment and stacked sidewalk tiles and roadway crew tents hung with drying laundry, that this rain has not been a direct result of city planning. [Cavin]

Friday

2009-03-20T23:37:00.001+07:00

(This is the fourth post in a week-long serial about our Valentine's Day vacation. This entry should conclude the run, so I can get on with more recent stuff come Monday.) We spent the last night of our vacation in Đà Nẵng instead of Hội An because I wanted to see the big city before heading home. Đà Nẵng is the largest town in central Vietnam. The funny thing is, it feels less cosmopolitan than any other place I’ve visited here. The nicer restaurants seemed pretty ho-hum, people were unused to travelers, and there was just very little flash. I didn't see much in the way of nightlife, traffic, or hipness. This is probably because the river bisecting town is pretty wide, and the old US Army base camp at Mỹ Khê, popularized by the television show China Beach, is on the opposite side from where we stayed. I guess that's where all the tourist dollars are spent, so all the attention is paid over there. This would also account for the lack of tourist-type services--cyclos for hire, roving juice vendors, shoe shiners; hell, the lack of tourists themselves--in our immediate vicinity. It was pretty refreshing. Đà Nẵng came off like a no-frills and workaday place, with an under-crowded Champa sculpture museum rescued Mỹ Sơn artifacts, a jungle coffee shop with caged myna birds, and an altruistic pizza shop staffed by the deaf. Our hotel was adjacent to the giant cement Sông Hàn swing bridge* spanning the Hàn River, and the night before we returned home I got to see it during operation, if not "watch" it "in action". It rotated slower than my eye could follow--about half the speed of my watch's minute hand. So that took about half an hour, I guess. Obviously. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-03-19T02:35:00.000+07:00

(This is the third in a series of daily posts covering our Valentine's holiday vacation to Hội An and Mỹ Sơn. Picking up mid-swim, now:) I shouldn't make light of visiting the Champa Indochinese Hindu temple site at Mỹ Sơn (which is pronounced mee sohn, by the way). It was very interesting. The temple complex there was probably begun sometime in the fourth century, even as the bustling Chinese seaport of Hội An was beginning to burgeon. It's interesting these two cultures thrived thirty-five kilometers apart. But Mỹ Sơn was protected in a fertile valley between converging mountain ranges, where it prospered, more or less, for ten centuries as the religious and cultural nerve center of a great southern kingdom before eventually being consumed by the emerging Việt culture. In Mỹ Sơn, each successive Cham king built greater temples and religious centers, had documentary artworks carved into the jagged brick walls, advanced civilization, etc., before each was then successively entombed there. Because of its longevity, it's possible to track the mutation of Champa religion from its roots to something more regionally synthesized. A thousand-year progression from nearly Hindu to budding Buddhism is illustrated. We only wandered around the site for about an hour, during which our guide advanced learned modern suspicions about the Cham people's everyday religious activities. Mỹ Sơn remains an awesome place. Time has ravaged it, ornate conical stupas have crumbled or toppled. Many of the structures were damaged during bombing runs in 'sixty-nine. What's left is gorgeous though: pink and gray brick draped with vines and spongy moss. Also it’s under construction. Several larger outlying structures are hidden within towers of scaffolding. All that said, it was impossible not to feel it was somewhat anti-climactic after visiting the much grander Khmer temple city at Angkor. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-03-18T23:24:00.000+07:00

(I'm still talking about our recent Valentine's Day trip. This is a sequel to the post preceding it.) We flew into Đà Nẵng after sunset on Friday the thirteenth, and hailed a cab south to Hội An. The driver tried to take us to the wrong hotel, but in all fairness the wrong place really did have virtually the same name as the one we'd booked. Still being fair: he only very mildly overcharged us, too. The right hotel was a lush courtyard affair on the palm- and paddy-lined riverbank between the town and the beach. Since it was already late we didn't see either until the next day. Both are beautiful. We've discovered yet again that we are not altogether typical tourists. Or maybe we are just really bad at tourism. Hội An is dotted with two-hundred year old traditional Chinese houses, traditional Chinese and Japanese temples, Museums explaining the interesting history and long-arrested nature of the place. We didn't do any of that. We spent our few days buying handmade shoes and clothing, eating and drinking in interesting modern fusion joints inhabiting century-old buildings overlooking the muddy river, and just soaking in the kind of bizarre juxtapositions that occur when a genuine and modern population inhabits a fetchingly preposterous and frozen historical space. Well, we did rent a guided tour of the nearby Champa ruins at Mỹ Sơn on that very hot Sunday. An air conditioned car operated by the hotel whisked us away first thing in the morning to the site, through several of the small towns that dot the Quảng Nam Province countryside. At Mỹ Sơn we wandered around the crumbling remains of fourteen-hundred year old buildings before returning to Hội An for passion fruit martinis in a riverside Mexican restaurant later that afternoon. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-03-17T23:33:00.002+07:00

More notes from the past: in mid-February we enjoyed a romantic Valentine's Day getaway to the pretty little riverside town of Hội An. This was a good weekend to travel, since the Valentine's weekend had been conveniently extended into three days by the actual federal Presidents Day holiday on Monday. The extra time was handy because it's not as easy as just flying to Hội An. That town has no airport of its own. Visitors fly to the nearest airport and then make their way some thirty-odd kilometers down the South China Seacoast to town. Hội An was a significant port already two thousand years ago, blossoming into a bustling multicultural hub for global trade by the eighteenth century, home to a significant population of Japanese, Chinese and European merchants. But during the Tây Sơn Rebellion, isolationist sentiment drove much of this foreign element away. When the European market was reopened by victorious Emperor Gia Long, he repaid French assistance with exclusive use of the port in Đà Nẵng, which became the next big thing. Unused, river access to port Hội An silted-up and the city fossilized over the following two centuries, becoming the kind of hamlet-cum-museum just catnip to tourists. This probably also protected Hội An from Vietnam's decades of war, which really ravaged its port replacement to the north. Today, the small city is populated by tourism and its fallout: chockablock with amenities but also punctuated by neat centuries-old stuff. A thriving garment industry is the one local factory production in evidence. Hội An has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 'ninety-nine. Its nearby beach is a little precarious, its unprotected waters ripped by dangerous tides for portions of the year. But it has that pretty tropical palm fringe you see in all the photos. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-03-16T23:29:00.002+07:00

We enjoyed a nice meal at Hoa Túc Saturday night. It's a contemporary Vietnamese restaurant located in the old opium refinery off Hai Bà Trưng Street. It shares a two-story French colonial building with several other places I've mentioned before, accessible off a dimly lit gravel courtyard down a gated alley from all the tony hotels. I had shrimp wrapped in mustard leaves and thin, lightly fried strips of sole on shaved sour mango. I also had a small chopstick epiphany. I've been comfortable eating with chopsticks for decades. Before coming to Asia I'd had no idea there was something left to learn. I remember watching Eat, Drink, Man, Woman in its first US art house release; my first chopstick epiphany hitting me in that theater while watching Taiwanese actresses spin soup noodles onto their utensils like thread onto a spool. A revelation: you could roll soba like spaghetti. I couldn't wait to leave the theater and try this myself. Saturday's eating-related realization was more immediate. I've discovered several chopstick weaknesses since coming to Asia. Stripping basil leaves off the sprig for my soup or spring rolls took a while to master. Peeling shrimp is still difficult. Saturday night I was again confronted by the difficulty of boning fish. Therefore my realization: just lump whatever whiskers of bone are too small to remove with chopsticks. The logic here is perfectly circular, of course: too small to chopstick? Eat them. Too big to eat? Get better with chopsticks. So a pretty tiny epiphany, indeed: an attempt to detect that fine line. Now I also need to master getting the fish into my mouth at the proper angle to keep from stabbing myself on sharp bones quite so often. But only an epiphany of anatomy will help me with that. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-03-11T23:58:00.000+07:00

I woke up this afternoon and took a long shower. I brushed my teeth. Then I spent ten minutes trying to fix my wet head so that the comb-lines didn't create some jarring pattern in the skull-cap of my hair. I had to slick it down completely or it clumped-up at the part, but that made the back into disco-era tentacles groping down my neck. Today’s post is about identification. When I left the house this afternoon I looked like a Bowery hobo done-up for a job interview. I walked straight to the barbershop. On the way, I was pestered by the cyclo drivers and coconut salesmen working the entrance to Reunification Palace. It was strange. These guys got used to us a year ago. Usually, these touts and salesmen just wave hello. Very few of them try to bother me anymore. I can imagine several reasons I was identified as a tourist today. Maybe I'd been forgotten over my lengthy holiday vacation. Or since: we've mostly been taking taxis lately because of the unmanageable sidewalk construction everywhere. Or maybe it's only that I looked like a man from another era, curling at the ends, a fish-out-of-water anywhere besides a seedy tractor-trailer cab. I'd been cultivating hair since November, so I had plenty for a grown-up haircut instead of the DIY buzz I usually get. It's the first time in a decade, I guess. The only problem was that corporate haircuts always look a little post-punker on me, whereas my mustache still looked a little leather-bar (or maybe Ned-Flanders). So I had to shave that off, too. This only solves one of today's problems, though. Now my own fiends, if they were selling coconuts at the gates of Reunification Palace, might not immediately recognize me on the street. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-03-10T17:10:00.002+07:00

Still talking about January, here. What I gather about Tết is it usually lasts about four days. Time to get out of town to wherever you call an ancestral home, cook a feast, enjoy the good luck of prosperous celebration, and then return home. Something like that. This year, the New Year was on Monday; obviously everyone began celebrating the weekend before. Count four days from Monday and it's also obvious that nobody was planning to come back on Friday, either. That's what we called the puente in México: that one-day bridge between a holiday and the weekend adjacent. Sometimes you have to work the puente, sometimes you don't. During Tết, many people leave Hồ Chí Minh City to go somewhere else. At the same time, many people arrive in town to celebrate. During the holiday, this equalized and things stayed crowded downtown. But as the week dwindled, those who'd come to the big city party were already leaving again. Meanwhile the puente crowd were enjoying their extra day off then weekend in hometowns across Vietnam. By the time Sunshine's family visited us Thursday night this city's population was at an all-time low. At least that's how it seemed to me. For two or three days it was really very easy to cross the street. Taxi operators could nudge their automobiles up past thirty on the big road to and from the airport. It was a bizarre feeling. It still looked like Hồ Chí Minh City, but change these two things and everything is just strange. I was concerned that Bill and Kate, our visitors, would go home with a misunderstanding about what life around town is really like, with its twenty-four hour never-ending streams of slow-moving traffic. Luckily, they were still around Monday when the status quoed. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-03-09T23:00:00.001+07:00

I returned to Vietnam at the end of January and was amazed how much had changed while I was away. The weather, for one thing. For some reason, the rainy season had lasted well into December last year, five weeks later than I suspect it usually does, so returning to dry and breezy, very sunny, eighty-degree Hồ Chí Minh City was quite a change, indeed. Also the hat store near our house had turned into a coffee shop. The empty brick building that used to be a Korean restaurant, even nearer to our house, had also become a coffee shop. There was also a new coffee shop next door to the ill-advised shark fin restaurant down behind the People's Committee building. Across the horizon, many of the buildings under construction were a lot taller than they'd been when I left. There were many new billboards sparkling on the skyline. I'd returned the weekend before Tết. Much of the city was already closed. Monday was the Lunar New Year. The whole length of Nguyễn Huệ, from the Rex to the Sài Gòn River, was blocked, even to scooters, and decorated with yellow flowers and bull sculptures. We spent our Saturday researching which restaurants planned to remain open over the four-day holiday. All the grocery stores were closed. Tết was Sunshine's week to be the emergency after-hours duty contact for work, a daunting prospect over a week-long holiday when all hours are "after". Since we were unable to really go out in all the celebratory noise, fearing a missed call, we stayed home on New Year's Eve. Speaking of sparkling on the skyline, we were still able to watch a pretty damn impressive fireworks display over the river just southeast of our living room window. Laissez les bon temps roulez.... [Cavin]

Friday

2009-03-06T23:57:00.000+07:00

I'll round-out this week's theme with a real-life illustration taken from my long Delta Airlines flight home in January. I didn't notice this week tended toward an overarching theme until the subject of this entry occurred to me. Just goes to show how the world grows beyond my ability to plan for it. I'm surprised I noticed at all. My last round-the-world fly-day had three legs, the long middle drive from Atlanta to Korea being about fifteen-point-five hours long. One saving grace: there was an empty seat between me and the quiet, middle-aged woman who had the window. She kept to herself, was very polite, and only asked me to get up to let her by twice. It was the next best thing to having the row to myself. What's this have to do with anything? I guess it's important to remember that no matter how thoroughly someone understandings another culture, how intimately they've immersed themselves, there's still a line dividing what really is and what is merely expectation. Becoming truly receptive to what's happening under conditions of absolute alienation will require letting go of speculation. Speculation is just a prejudice which, by definition, cannot be related to the unfamiliar, right? Our very competent, intelligent Delta cabin attendant was a western Caucasian. I don't want to speculate on her story, of course, but she was certainly very fluent in Korean. She addressed the sizeable Korean population onboard as easily as she spoke to me in English. She obviously knew her stuff. But each time she spoke in Korean to my neighbor at the window, that polite and quiet woman had to explain, in embarrassed English, how she was actually Chinese and didn't speak Korean. I'm not making a big deal out of one mistake, this happened half-a-dozen times. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-03-05T16:29:00.001+07:00

Whenever I fly to the US I live through a thirty-six hour day. I arrive twenty-seven averaged hours after takeoff, but also later the same date. This extra time is lost in reverse, of course. Worse, since return fly-days, often operating at a headwind disadvantage heading west (wavy equals great arc), take longer than flights the other way. Seoul-to-Atlanta last December was three hours shorter than Atlanta-to-Seoul in January. The name of this entry, had I posted it back when, would have been Thurdnesday. By the way: except for some obvious recent edits, I wrote this update on that flight, deep in the wtf hours of cabin night when nobody had any idea what time it was outside the plane. I keep myself alert by trying to figure it out. It's time where instead of time when: according to my watch, its ten pm today; that's twelve hours behind my final destination, where it's ten am tomorrow; and further from my layover, where it's already noon. I'm pretty close to the Date Line, according to the TV map, but what time is it in the Aleutian archipelago? In Vladivostok? Is it daylight out there? By my arrival in Vietnam it was already almost midnight, Friday. Real time, a thirty-odd-hour day. Thursday had been basically deleted for me, eaten by one long Wednesday morning ordeal. But even real time subordinates to curve time in the sky. I stayed up all night before boarding, so by my morning layover it felt late to me. But to those people who boarded the plane in Atlanta it was a little before lunch. No matter. Two hours after takeoff dinner was served, the shutters gone down, the lights off. It was nighttime all the way through Russia whether they liked it or not. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-03-04T23:50:00.000+07:00

There's very little I love more than walking aimlessly though streets teeming with exoticisms I cannot quite understand. This is a willful ignorance, meaning that I have, at times, purposefully missed opportunities to learn about the environment around me. It's just so interesting watching it freewheel in brightly-colored exclamations without justification or value beyond its differences from me. I imagine this is a fairly shameful admission of isolation, faintly lazy and colonial, a lack of commitment with my surroundings. Is it interacting when I reduce x to the sum of my alienation? When I'm done bouncing off a thousand years of culture, assimilated only to the ends of my aesthetic benefit, I'll return somewhere ironically familiar, right? But understand: were it not for the time and the money, for my thin roots and certain practicalities, I would maybe never alight at all. I'd go on freefalling through this whole oddball world with nothing to harsh my Zen beyond the mounting, jealously guarded wonder. From that I would emerge unhaunted by the usual specter of accounting for my lifetime or even any feeling of having wasted it. But whatever, because walking around this town has become insufferable. It's the nicest time of year, weather-wise, and they've gone and dug up nearly every sidewalk between here and everywhere else, replacing them with slippery cavities of stacked masonry and mud. But here's a recent Alice-in-Wonderland moment, anyway: walking through the nearby park the other night, I saw a lady hawking cartons of raw quail eggs from a shallow basket. She was attempting to sell them to the amorous teenagers who cruise the parks after hours. While I see this group as a likely target for niche entrepreneurialism, I'm not sure small and freckled raw eggs is what I'd choose to tout. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-03-03T23:53:00.002+07:00

I spent forty days and forty nights over the end-of-year holidays in the United States, from the afternoon of December thirteenth to the early morning of January twenty-first. Why so long? It had only been six-and-a-half months since my last trip home (a short stint compared with Sunshine's fourteen). But it made the most sense for Sunshine's shorter vacation to include a comfortable pre-holidays interval. Then I had a couple of dentist appointments I'd made the last time I was in town. These were necessarily arranged around the dental lab's slow turnaround for two different crowns, one a replacement, which had to be completed after the New Year. So this time home just got protracted. It happens. It was a wonderful trip, too--dentistry notwithstanding. I managed to catch up with many old friends and family in Kentucky and North Carolina--folks from as far away as Vietnam, Miami, and my distant past, or as close as my home-away-from-home and friendly neighborhood bar. As much as I loved spending my first Christmas ever with Sunshine last year, our estrangement from home was anxious and guilt-making. I was glad to spend the time with my other family again this year. As adapted to the southeast Asian temperature as I've gotten--those days that seem to be temperature-free have slowly crept up the thermometer--the sporadic mild-twenties chill of NC winter didn’t bother all that much (a slight inconvenience compared with Sunshine’s weekend in frigid Minneapolis), but I did catch a tree-day cold in the midst of which I had a hygienist appointment. Those are short, I said, talking myself out of canceling. So I arrived at the dentist's to discover I had two back-to-back appointments, almost four hours, struggling in the chair with a nose I couldn't breathe through. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-03-02T23:27:00.000+07:00

(I ended last week writing about things that happened months ago. I’m afraid that's how this week will begin.) When I count off the countries I've visited so far, I do not include Thailand or the Republic of Korea since we didn't step out of their respective airports. This was a particular shame in Bangkok, where our seven-hour layover would've been better spent fussing over visa applications with surly border officials in order to step into the Thai sunshine for an hour, then turning around to press back through invasive airport security to catch our connection on to India, than what we actually did: suffer an unfortunate day in the singularly awful new Suvarnabhumi International Airport. Our layover in South Korea's Incheon International Airport was far shorter, dwindled to under two hours after threading through transit-passenger security checks and back into the international gate. But Incheon's a great airport, indicative of ultra-modern and fashionable Seoul a short commute away. Candy-colored clothing stores and cartoon candy stores line a concourse overlooked by travelers' lounges and wellbeing parlors. It was a brisk and efficient place, clean as hell, indifferently globalized, and just packed with that urban cosmopolitan glitz I don't see back home. Alighting in South Korea was tantamount to flying into the future. I'm intrigued by Korea. It shares its only border with a hostile brother at the junction of Japan and China and Russia. It occupies a gray and wintry Asia I've never experienced. Outside the airport, the Incheon landscape--a man-made span between islands--was bleak as a highland links. Inside, in that brightly-colored future, teenage girls in overtly traditional costume worked the counter at the Authentic Korean Cultural Experience Store, but I didn't take time to go in and see what they were doing in there. [Cavin]

Friday

2009-02-27T23:59:00.000+07:00

Way back in December, in the early hours of Saturday the thirteenth, we boarded a Korean airplane for a holiday visit home. I used to keep track of the number of times I've flown in an airplane, but I can hardly do that anymore. An inaccurately hasty count has me taking off in thirty-seven different aircraft of seven brand-name carriers over the last eighteen months. With such practice, even minute details come to my attention if they differ sufficiently from familiarity. Stepping onto the really huge Korean 747 I noticed it was decorated for Christmas. Corsages of tiny red and green flora decorated cabin light fixtures all down the plane, pretty red bunting swung. Our plane was dressed for the prom. This was a first for me. Another first: when the safety demonstration began playing on the touch-screen monitors in the back of every chair, I noticed the prestigious demonstration plane in the video was identical to our, giving me the feeling I was taking Korea's most photogenic flight. Usually I watch the taped attendants buckling disembodied seatbelts in a far more advanced environment than the one in which I'm an audience member. That's assuming I'm on a flight technologically sufficient for television, of course. In December, even though some gross mismanagement prevented my seating arrangements from materializing--forcing me to sit several rows from Sunshine on that first leg to Incheon Airport as well as causing, I suspect, the disappearance of my special vegetarian meals throughout the entire twenty-six hour sky-day--I had a really comfortable five-hour flight. The flight from South Korea to Atlanta, while mercifully short compared to the HK-to-LA route I'm used to, was less so: we were evidently seated in the children's section of the plane. That's an experience woefully, sadly, exasperatingly familiar. [Cavin]

Thursday

2009-02-26T23:37:00.000+07:00

I'm not sure how long I can, in good conscience, go on calling this an update when all I talk about are things that happened months ago. So I'll try to pepper my reportage with new stuff here and there. This just in: Sunshine had a dinner engagement yesterday, but I wasn't all that interested in celebrating the anniversary of a successful local grocery chain. My interest? To enjoy soba noodle soup and a perfectly fried egg at my favorite downtown sushi bar. To heighten the experience, I meant to while away an hour or more over it. And drink sake. And read my adventure novel. Everything was coming up roses until I walked into the crowded little joint. That was when I realized I was sort of embarrassed by my book. This never used to happen to me, this worry about other people observing what I was reading. But recently, in the states, I was loathe to be caught out with a certain pop-culture vampire novel some collusion of jetlag and morbid curiosity had inspired me to take up. And then last night I spent a nervous few minutes hyper aware of the mostly naked Japanese stereotype kneeling on the cover of Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice--its title rendered, however inappropriately, in a goofy chop-socky font. Frankly, I don't know why I bother. It isn't as if that restaurant's shelves aren't stocked with pinky schoolgirl horror-romance comics. Plus, it's nearly impossible to ignore the game shows on TV behind the bar, revolving as they do around public nudity, freezing water, biting insects, and, in what amounts to some kind of heroic irony, the act of consuming unbelievably disgusting things. So I laid the book facedown and ate in front of the TV. Like every night. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2009-02-25T23:59:00.001+07:00

Some notes from November: Singapore's a really interesting city-state, ripe for tourists with interests in urban planning and certain concepts of utopianism. I'd thought I was over a cold, but typical cabin compression brought about a relapse lasting throughout our vacation. Luckily, the environment was pretty good for someone mildly sniffly, with plenty commercial comforts. Some things about Singapore: while the country is very compact, it's designed so that I could never quite glimpse the massive crisscrossing highways from the urban areas. Lengths of greenspace delineate and separate these things. Similarly, the nestled pockets of incredibly preserved British colonial enclaves manage to inhabit areas in and behind numberless malls without losing an iota of their cultivated museum charm. Singapore is a highly regulated city-state in other ways: street vendors have been collected into "hawkers' centers", public spaces are meticulously scrubbed, Christmas decorations follow municipal themes, and legislated fees for anti-social digression are rampant. Singapore is a "fine" city, the many t-shirts¹ say. There are heavy penalties for spitting, not wearing seatbelts, peeing in elevators. Everything is tightly controlled, yet I never saw a police officer. I think there's probably heavy fines for not turning yourself in. This systematic regulation is reason enough for one interesting aesthetic difference between Singapore and Hong Kong: while an eyesore of invasive street signs characterize both, Hong Kong's are mostly advertisements while Singapore's signs are usually helpful directions. We had a nice time. We went to the midnight zoo,² Haw Par Villa,³ and rode what may be the world's tallest Farris Wheel.⁴ For Thanksgiving dinner we ate at a wonderful place in little India. I had mustard greens. On our last night, I nearly broke my back crawling down into the harbor for a bad photo of the world-famous Merlion.⁵ I'm okay now. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2009-02-24T23:59:00.000+07:00

I'm talking about the past, here: back at the end of November, 2008, just days into the odd and unparalleled lapse of activity here in the Update Column, Sunshine and I flew to Singapore to celebrate, to the greater extent, our belated Anniversary--and to a lesser extent, the US Thanksgiving Holiday. When we got married I'd made explicitly sure our anniversary would never fall on Thanksgiving, a holiday I never loved. I lacked the foresight to realize this meant we will forever be putting off celebrating our anniversary until the upcoming long holiday weekend. It's ironic, sure; but so far we've gotten to celebrate twice every year. And so far celebrating has included traveling: Hong Kong in oh-seven and now Singapore on oh-eight. There is an affluent and tony city feeling to our anniversaries, a travel theme neon and commercial, surely christened by our maiden voyage to Vegas. Just a week before this year's trip we were still debating where to go: Bangkok? Malaysia? For no better reason than our theme we picked Singapore--a country so much like a mall that it actually goes on sale every year. It's lucky we did: the day we were slated to fly, a loose affiliation of elite society escalated recent protests over the Thai prime minister by capturing the Bangkok airport, trapping travelers inside and halting all traffic coming and going. Theirs is a complex protest, but it boils down to a rising concern that the prime minister is acting in the interests of recently ousted-and-exiled former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who also happens to be the current leader's brother-in-law. The closing of Suvarnabhumi airport happened early enough that we'd never have made it into Thailand to be trapped in the concourse. So choosing Singapore really worked out for us. [Cavin]

Monday

2009-02-23T23:59:00.000+07:00

Well hello there. Counting on my fingers, I see it's been precisely ninety-one days since my last post here on this Update column. That's exactly a quarter of a year, based on certain values of the words month and exact. In any event, this constitutes the average point-two-five year. I can't believe all that time has passed already. In fact, I spend many of these latter days marveling at how close we've come to when we'll be leaving Vietnam again. That'll happen even earlier than I thought back in November when I last posted, probably sometime at the end of July. Of course things have changed, why not? November was a quarter of a year ago. I did not indulge this lapse of communication on purpose. First we traveled to Singapore for our anniversary, and then we traveled home to the states for the December holidays. Happy belated Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year! I ended up staying in the US for several additional weeks to go to the dentist a couple times. Happy belated Boxing, Martin Luther King Jr., and Inauguration Days! Obamanation! I returned to Vietnam just in time for everything to close down during the week of Tết. Happy belated Year of the Ox! Overlapping that we had visitors for a week (happy belated Groundhog Day, Bill and Kate), and then it was time to travel somewhere special for the three-day Valentine's Day weekend. Happy belated Valentine's and Presidents' Days! And then, ever since Tuesday the seventeenth of this month, I've just been too lazy to post. This particular quarter of a year sure is filled with holidays. For the next week or so, I'll try to fill in some of the three months' worth of blank space between this entry and the previous one. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-11-24T16:42:00.000+07:00

Ugh. I came down with a slight cold Saturday and Sunshine came down with a slightly heavier one yesterday. Not a whole heck of a lot happened to us over the weekend because of it. We ate at a lot of comfortable pasta-and-soup type joints. We took cabs along walking distances. We played a lot computer games. Would like to waste your time the way I did all weekend? Okay. First, eat a large bowl of bucatini arrabiata and then go here. It's a game called Fantastic Contraption. The object is to move an object from one area of the playing field to a goal on the other side. To do this, you must create machines with what tools you're allowed: clockwise and widdershins-spinning wheels, axles of greater or lesser substance. The game can get surprisingly difficult when it becomes necessary, by the later levels, to move your object up, or to make a machine that goes one way to gather the object and then the opposite direction to deliver it. I have not yet completed the last two levels. Anyway, if these links work out right, here and here you can see two of the machine designs with which I successfully beat some of the easier levels. Once you click the links, it should take you to a generic-looking page where you will have to click start like you are beginning the game. But it will begin with a machine I created (click the big green button to see the machine in action). Sometimes these links don’t work, though. Okay, admin stuff: we are leaving for Singapore on Wednesday afternoon to celebrate our anniversary (and, I guess, US Thanksgiving). So things should be dark around here until next Monday. Hope everyone has a really nice holiday weekend. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-11-21T23:47:00.000+07:00

Tonight we went to see a play. The HCMC International Choir, in conjunction with a local dance troupe and the Saigon Players (the volunteer acting company to blame for bringing Monty Python sketches to a local bar on Talk Like a Pirate Day*) are staging Annie Get Your Gun all week. I didn't know what to expect. I was concerned that the Players, some of whom we know, were going to make an odd match with what I assumed was a professional choir and dance company. It all worked out equal, though; and without much funding or production equipment they managed to pull off the first off-off-off-off Broadway performance in Hồ Chí Minh City. But hey, I don't want to talk about the play. I want to talk about the theater, a white concrete horror reminding me, on the outside, of some treatment plant. Inside it was the similar to my high school auditorium, lent a prison je ne sais quoi by gray concrete floors and orange, spray painted seat numbers. We were in row thirteen, right on the aisle. The chairs themselves were red vinyl loafs of batting and wood; mine tipped me forward. But the best thing about the place was the wildlife: early in act one, I happened to notice a rat the size of a cinderblock duck across the aisle three rows ahead of me. Everybody noticed it. Throughout the play that rat scurried back-and-forth between seating sections, ducking around our legs. It was so large I could hear its feet click on the prison floors. I was impressed: nobody sitting around me ran screaming for the door. I put my feet up on the next seat, and waited calmly for the rat's next entrance. But I have no idea how the play ended. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-11-20T22:37:00.000+07:00

I've been going to a lot of things lately. Tonight's thing was easy: fifteen minutes in my own apartment building. We've taken to having monthly wine tastings in the lounge. These are always on Thursday nights. Because they are held in the lounge, I get invited, then re-reminded urged and cajoled, every day for a week. All day on Wine Day they busily run around cooking hors d'oeuvre, moving furniture around, and loudly wet-vacuuming beside my lounge chair. The first of these I skipped outright, but the lounge guys had worn me down by the following month. That Wine Night I hung out for fifteen minutes talking to the only fellow attendee I knew, Sunshine, while consuming cubes of cheese and awful Australian wine. Tonight was the same, except the wine was pretty good and the hors d'oeuvre were crusts of yellow meat and bread. Oh, but the event I've been meaning to mention is the Annual Consular Community Bazaar held last Saturday. It was awesome. All the consulates around town band together and throw a kind of upscale cultural flea market. New Zealand's table collects and sells used books. Spain had sangria, Japan some kind of oven-safe Tupperware, and Mongolia framed photographs of the horizon line. Australia had beer cozies, which worked out nicely because the nearby US table was selling cases of Budweiser. I've never realized how much a box of Bud reminds me of our flag. The bazaar was very crowded with people from all over Earth, many dressed in traditional costume. The ladies at the Kuwait table were very nice. We were left pondering whether it was legal for us to buy things from the Cuba table. They really looked like they were having a fabulous time, and the food over there smelled wonderful. [Cavin]

Anniversary

2008-11-19T23:59:00.002+07:00

First of all, happy anniversary to Sunshine, who married me two years ago today. Last night just as I was settling in to watch a DVD, I saw something strange. I'd made a sandwich. I'd unwrapped Jean Renoir's the Golden Coach. I'd plugged the headphones in. Suddenly I noticed a flash of light near the southeastern horizon line. It wasn't lightning, not last night. Welding is done at three am, but I'd actually heard this flashing too. An explosion? I peered out though the giant living room picture window, near as I could tell to where I'd seen the light. Then it happened again, but this time it was sparking over the horizon to the east, out another window. I could still hear it. I could--wait a minute... I could smell it. Then it dawned on me what I'd been doing when the whole mystery started: pressing the power button on our digital receiver--which then long and lovingly burned through its whole motherboard while I stood looking out the window at the reflection of its sparks. What a dork. Anyway, this year we're celebrating our anniversary already, having had a wonderful dinner at An Vien just a little while ago; next week, we'll be heading to Singapore for the four-day US Thanksgiving holiday weekend. An Vien serves the best Vietnamese food I've ever had; a claim which, at this late date, may actually be meaningful. I'd been there once before, with Sunshine's mother when she visited in October. It was raining that night, too. Our meal had been majestic, each dish served family style--as a full course shared by the table rather than an individual plate. Not really predicting this, we'd ordered what amounted to a five-course meal by getting one entrée apiece and appetizers. We were not complaining about it. For two full hours we sat there eating to an inspired level of discomfort. I've been fantasizing about that night's meal ever since, and was lucky enough to have a perfect excuse to go back tonight. In the rain again: Tropical Storm Noul is expected to hit central Vietnam sometime tonight, her rains and surges are already upon us, though we'll not be seeing any of her wind this far south. But about dinner: steamed fishcakes wrapped in tiny cabbage packages floating in soup; shrimp paste lightly battered and grilled around a sugar cane, wrapped in lettuce, basil and mint leaves, star fruit and lotus, tapioca. It was not a meal to be taken lightly, and I am still stuffed to the top. Sadly tonight's dinner, being an anniversary, was thirty-three percent smaller than the last one. I need an upcoming four-person special occasion, pronto. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-11-18T23:17:00.000+07:00

I had a nice triumph yesterday, after a show at Sunshine's boss' house. Coco York flew in from Bangkok to play at the event. Coco is the performer we accompanied to Huế during the cultural festival there last June. Last night, I met Sunshine after work, and we accompanied Coco out to District Two, where the party was being held. Initially, it was to be an outdoor party, but the forecast called for Typhoon Noul's landfall that afternoon, so the concert was moved indoors as a precaution. I was nervous about my shoes. The parties I've attended recently have all stipulated "smart casual" dress, and I'm uncertain what that means. To the US election day party I'd worn a tie and short-sleeved button-up, no jacket. To this thing, I wore a jacket and button-down, no tie. Which costume was "smart"? To each event, I wore my really nice shoes--the ones I keep in plastic bags, in a shoebox, in the bottom of my closet. I spent the evening worried about knee-deep flooding and the death of those shoes, but the storm never came. Heading home, our car had to ford several intersections standing in water, though, proving riverside marshes flood as easily with tides as rain. Later, safely returned to high ground, Coco and I walked down the street from her hotel to see what was doing at the downtown jazz club. I was approached by the ubiquitous shoeshine kid near the corner of Saigon Center. The sidewalk was littered with the Center's upcoming Christmas decorations. When the kid asked if I wanted a shoeshine, I just showed him the "smart" shoes, all shiny as hell, and damn if he didn't immediately shut up and go away. It's a first, a victory. I'm wearing these shoes everywhere. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-11-17T23:02:00.002+07:00

I had a weird feeling in the park Friday. It was around five. I'd just left the apartment to meet Sunshine before dinner. The first thing I had to do was cross the street. Rush hour can be amazing. Friday, it was actually safer to walk down the street than the sidewalk. The one-way traffic was directed and nearly at a standstill. Neither of those things were true of the scooters racing along the sidewalks in front of the Lê Quý Đôn Street School. So for the first few minutes after leaving our building, I didn't think about much besides staying alive. I've grown very used to Vietnamese traffic since arriving last year. I haven't relied on tactics like these in months, but today I walked a longer way, taking the safer route to the coffee shop where Sunshine waited. Therefore I was already halfway through the park before I realized I was having my weird feeling. I was chilly. The weather was clear and breezy. The temperature, with the wind chill, was somewhere in the very low seventies. I might have chosen to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt if I'd noticed closer to the apartment. As it was, I was marveling about feeling chilly in the tropics. I can't believe how habituated I've become. I spent the first thirty-four years of my life hating those forty-five day sunny double-ninety North Carolina Augusts (that's ninety-some degrees with ninety-some percent humidity; and, believe it or not, worse than the weather here in southern Vietnam). All that time, I fervently anticipated the two-month mild winters, with lows in the mid-teens. Now, I'm chilly before the mercury hits the sixties? Christmas vacation might be tough on me next month, but I should be normal again by that first really eye-opening Sarajevo winter. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-11-14T23:29:00.000+07:00

We had Indian food at Tandoor last night. Back when we arrived in Vietnam, we tracked down an empty boarded-over building based on positive restaurant reviews in Lonely Planet. This was Tandoor's old location. Weeks later, we discovered their grand reopening in District One. We've eaten there intermittently since. "Intermittently" because of three other Indian restaurants discovered in the meantime, two of which I like better than Tandoor (when I'm not craving southern regional cuisine). Enough history. Yesterday, we were led through the completely empty first floor dining room and seated in a second story loft. Friendly waiters took our drinks order shortly before the power failed. This wasn't surprising--inconsistent power is normal lately. It was hardly dark. Heavy traffic on Hai Ba Trung swung high beams to and fro across the room. The place got hot, though--that large, focal tandoori oven, packed with bright red coals, undid whatever coolness avoided the tropical suck in a country designed without insulation. The waiter only returned with our drinks, and to take our food order, after the lights came back on. Why? Certainly wood-fired cuisine doesn't require electricity. People began tramping down the stairs from the third floor. Dozens of people. Droves. Clowncars full. We'd been the only evident customers minutes before; now the restaurant staff were pushing every single table together into long clusters for the large, loud crowd that had been sitting out the dark upstairs while, incidentally, also sucking up all the staff attention. The power was still out up there, so they'd required relocation. It took a little convincing, but we finally made the manager understand that we'd be more comfortable up in the tropical dark than we were down with the banquet. But after that we finally had a nice southern Indian dinner. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-11-13T16:21:00.000+07:00

I occasionally spend afternoons in our building's lounge, where I can use the first floor wireless network while enjoying, among other things, a cappuccino. Connectivity has been haphazard lately; today it was difficult to get the internet working. I don't mind. It's been just as bad upstairs in our apartment. It's an interesting side-effect of the hydroelectric system in Vietnam. I'd imagined water power generation was a surefire way to benefit from a national climate with two six-month rainy seasons (batting back and forth, from north and south, over elevated regions in the country's center). Certainly everything works smoothly enough in the midst of these respective seasons. But at the beginning of each, when things run to the unpredictably wet or dry, the system becomes either over- or under-taxed, and brownouts routine. But the weather is so impressive! After months of near constant rain, the sun's poking through the clouds again. In October I saw stars in the sky for the first time since April. As I type this, it's sunny and warm outside the large first floor windows of the lounge. I have the sort of feeling I used to get in the Spring, buoyed by the freshness of it all (though something malignant is blooming, my sinuses reply). Two or three days pass without rain now, the eventual storms violent and unpredictable. It's a new world. Among the things I can enjoy in the lounge besides cappuccinos: margaritas. This is also new. I discovered the fact while troubleshooting today's internet connection. The lounge manager quizzed me about how to explain the steps of putting salt on the rim of stemware shaped just like an inverted sombrero. Much of our conversation revolved around the confusing fact that "salt" is both a noun and a verb in English. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-11-12T23:17:00.001+07:00

Sunshine didn't have to work over the Veterans Day holiday yesterday, so we started doing some Christmas shopping. It's still difficult to imagine that Christmas is happening. Half of that is because we are in southeast Asia, of course, where the decorations don't go up until around the time of US Thanksgiving and the weather is balmy and tropical. Some of it is because our scheduling has become increasingly flung to the future. We made all of our plans to travel home for Christmas so many months ago the whole holiday seems over already. Currently, we're planning things (dinner parties? Work conferences! Visitors!) up through mid-February. We are also distracted by issues pertaining to our months of repatriation, beginning as early as August '09 (and leading to our move to the Balkans in July, '10). It feels like we've moved past next Christmas, too. All the same, I'm really super juiced to be returning to North Carolina so soon: we leave almost thirty days, to the minute, after I post this. Anyway, yesterday we started the ball rolling on holiday shopping. What I thought would be an afternoon-long ordeal, complicated by the pestering realities of Bến Thành Market--which is located right on the cusp of Hồ Chí Minh City's highly toured "backpacker district"--only took us about thirty minutes. Some of that is because, nearly thirteen months after my first foray into the place, I've grown inured to those pestering realities. Another part is that after a half hour I was so loaded down it was already time to give up doing any more purchasing for the remainder of the afternoon. Since I can't, of course, write down all the things we bought, I'll leave you with this link, where you can go shave a Yeti instead. [Cavin]

Veterans Day

2008-11-11T23:51:00.002+07:00

Yet another case of environmental disconnection occurred over the weekend. It's just another one of those things I can frame as evidence of how strange life is here, but which I know is in reality more about me not having any idea what's happening around me at any given time. We were walking across the park, probably heading off to dinner (on either Saturday or Sunday night, I'm nonplussed to discover that I don't remember which), and noticed that municipal work crews were setting out rows and rows of plush red and gold chairs right in the middle of Lê Duẩn Street. The kind of chairs usually stacked in the corners of hotel convention centers. They were facing the gates of Reunification Palace. There were towering stacks of stuff under blue tarps (of what? Speakers? More chairs?) at each corner of the park. Traffic was being diverted, down tiny one-way access roads along the outer parameters, by cops in dull green uniforms. This is all merely par. It's also normal that, when we passed through there again on Sunday or Monday afternoon (about eighteen hours later), all evidence of anything big going down had been totally swept away. Here in HCMC, I frequently feel like something big is about to happen right after I leave somewhere, or has just finished before my arrival, or is maybe going on right now just one more block past my turn. Everyone is just so busy getting somewhere else, probably wherever the empty chairs happen to be. Something big must be happening. Very rarely, I catch a glimpse of the evidence that it's true. Like those empty chairs, ranks and files of them, sitting in the dark street waiting for me to move on by before they can get down to business. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-11-10T23:39:00.000+07:00

I haven't mentioned this yet, but I got an exciting new camera for by birthday. I've finally graduated to a pretty adult digital SLR, and can now be expected to capture images of a scientific quality equal to that of more serious photographers. I'll still be producing the same old artistic quality as before, of course--no snazzy new camera can change the idiosyncrasies of my eye. But the ability to trap, and to manipulate, light is now more squarely under my control. It's a little daunting, and I think I owe it to this new mature photographic tool to learn a lot more about the process than I already know. It's also daunting because I'm so far behind on the production of images I've already taken with my old camera. Looking at the website, I see that I haven't uploaded new pictures in forever. I still have some from last Christmas to finish, alas, before I'm finally caught up to the current year. This might make it seem like I don't use my camera all that often, but that's just not so: I'm so many thousands of frames behind in my photo projects that I don't expect to be showing any evidence of my new birthday present for a long time to come. While that gives me a comfortably long time to learn how to use this new birthday present, I'd be more satisfied if I could start showing off, for better or worse, right away. All of this reminds me that I did upload a new half-baked movie this weekend. It's from Cambodia and can be seen here. The only drawback about my new camera is that it lacks a video function. It's a mature photographic tool, after all, disdaining the gimmickry of single-lens reflex mpegs. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-11-07T22:36:00.000+07:00

Even though today's title is Alien Poltergeist Reality, it's still just as prosaic as usual. That title is only a list of today's elements in reverse order. A journal title. If it was a descriptive clause, a story title, that would be exciting. See: I covered the Reality part already. That's what I call prosaic. Since my birthday I've had trouble returning to the gym. Except for this trip to Cambodia (and the in-law visit, the trip up the Mekong, the long election, and most Saturdays), I've been exercising every night for months. Whenever I slightly lapse, I become concerned about how difficult it’ll be to begin again. Ironically, once I finally stop worrying, I find the workout itself to actually be easier than I remember it being before. Apparently, resting is a worthwhile part of exercising. Last night I ran four kilometers cold; what had been difficult before my birthday was surprisingly easy. What was difficult was making myself do it: going downstairs was harder than running. The gym is usually dark after ten pm. But last night the television was left on and the gym was bright blue. On screen was continuous footage of two men riding horses toward me along a trail, ebbing and flowing in relation to the POV. The show was silent, hypnotic, and as seemingly pointless as creepy static. The TV is too high to reach and I couldn’t find the remote, even in the unusually bright room. It made for an eerie run, and afterwards I could see my sweat patterns. Something learned from exercising every day: apparently my sweat is acidic. I never noticed when I was essentially inert. My new body is beginning to eat tiny holes in my gym clothes. This reality of bodily pH is somewhat unnerving. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-11-06T22:57:00.000+07:00

Yesterday was a great day. It was also a long one. Whenever I do something at six in the morning I stay up all night (especially on topsy-turvy election days beginning with a dinner engagement and ending at a sun-up party, in clothes the official invites refer to as "smart casual"). This certainly contributed to my feeling of setlag throughout yesterday. After the last few elections I was stunned this one played out so handily--ballyhooed, as it has been, owing to certain hot-button expectations that never really materialized into reality. What Bradley Effect? Indeed, the four hours set aside for the official State Department shindig was nearly enough to accommodate everything from Kentucky going red at daybreak to the President-Elect's rousing and almost content-free acceptance speech. By then it was lunchtime, thankfully; when eyebrows weren't going to rise over the election night drinking I usually do. I joined a Voters Abroad afterparty in the smoky backroom of O'Brien’s Bar and lived the whole thing over again via CNN's twenty-four hour recap. And the day frittered by. I returned to the apartment in time for housekeeping to kick me back out again. Surfing the web, I marveled that my home state, generally red as a happy circus balloon seconds after the polls close, was still undecided hours after the race was called (and, in fact, remains yellow as of this report). I was exceedingly happy to read this. When Sunshine got off work, we returned to O'Brien’s before sharing a celebratory meal at the nearby Refinery where I ordered something called an "Obamatini": coffee-infused vodka and crème de cacao, with unmixed heavy cream doodles floating on the surface. It looked for all the world like a Hostess Cupcake in conical stemware. Later on I slept for eleven hours. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-11-05T16:46:00.000+07:00

Today has been an interesting observation of situational incongruity, something I'd never experienced before coming to Asia; a concept I'm growing comfortable enough with to somewhat attempt coining here. I've been living twelve time zones from where I grew up for almost thirteen months now. So it's been quite a while since I've experienced that odd disconnection between the clock, measuring increments of solar movement in relation to the curve of our horizon, and my physical expectation of elapsed time based solely on observed habitual intervals. Jetlag is measurement incongruity: the time which has elapsed in memory does not align with the time of day. Right? Eventually the memory of elapsed intervals fades into an expectation centered around the clock itself, and jetlag fades. This morning I woke up at six for a party at the White Palace convention center. US Consulate HCMC was throwing an election day party. We got into our cab at seven and arrived at the venue thirty minutes later. The party started at eight am, just as polling closed across the US eastern seaboard. Usually, I follow election returns sitting at Café Europa's solid wood bar, beer in hand, "I Voted" sticker on my shirt, surrounded by neighborhood regulars. Early this morning, suit-and-tie US expats and Vietnamese notables piled into a room with twelve chandeliers and a brace of huge televisions projecting a red-yellow-blue map of US states and each candidate's accruing tally of all-important Electoral College votes. I was enjoying coffee and the circulating platters of local fruit-and-pastry breakfast fare. I was sleepy. Situational incongruity can be divorced from that memory of elapsed intervals characterizing the disconnection referred to as jetlag. It was a really weird setting, even after all this time: evening things done in the early am. How about "setlag"? [Cavin]

US Election Tuesday

2008-11-04T23:42:00.004+07:00

I hope you had a wonderful Halloweekend. And, hey, Happy Super Tuesday, too. All these memorable times are still aligning. I almost delayed this triumphant return from October's Silence of the Tomb^TM until tomorrow, when the US campaign trail finally reaches its conclusion. These events aligning already made me drop updating during October, after all. Sunday we returned from our holiday-focused retreat to the Kingdom of Cambodia, just in time for election stuff to steal our lives once more. That's why I almost returned here, triumphantly, tomorrow instead of today. But tonight we were invited to Sunshine's boss's house for a party, just a little while ago, an ostensibly work-related dinner which became an election-themed thing because it happened to align with the polls opening back home. It also turned into a pretty thrilling impromptu bourbon tasting, the unexpected revelation being a bottle of Baker's. So I'm returning early to provide the following uninstructive anecdote, which glibly fails to align, in any meaningful way, into commentary on US political events. The partygoers were staged at company headquarters, to be bussed out to the boss's house in the suburbs. I'd walked there in my dress pants and nice shoes. It was tropically humid, but it wasn't raining. By the time twenty-ish coworkers had piled into vans for the ride into District Two, I'd noticed a five-inch tear along the seam of my dress crotch. When did that happen? Had I mooned a thousand passing scooters along Le Duan Street, innocently leaning over? Did some protocol cover asking my hosts for safety pins? Should I just sit down all night, knees pressed together under my napkin; some porcelain ingénue? I managed to keep my dignity right up until this post, but it certainly made for a pretty awkward election celebration. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-10-27T19:39:00.001+07:00

Okay, okay--just for today I'm breaking The Silence of the Tomb^TM because I have several news items I really shouldn't put off mentioning. I'll do them in order. Sunshine's mom visited a few weeks ago. We took a relaxing cruise on a solid teak riverboat, going up and down various branches of the Mekong. On the day she left, my ballot for the 2008 elections was mailed; I'd cast my vote for the next president of the United States. So that's over with. Hope my candidate doesn't embarrass me over the next few weeks, huh? Last Monday, the twentieth, we received tentative word on our next foreign assignment. Since that still seems to be concrete one week later, I feel comfortable announcing it. But pardon me while I build suspense anyway. Tomorrow night we fly to Siem Reap in the Kingdom of Cambodia; Thursday, we'll celebrate my birthday at Angkor Wat. Then, after another month and a half, roughly, we'll both be heading to the US for the holiday visit home. We've finally got concrete word on that, too. Expect me to arrive in the Greensboro, NC airport shortly after one pm on Saturday, December 13th. I'll be around for all the traditional Christmas and New Year's Eve stuff, and then for a lot of January, too, doing what has also become traditional on visits home: going to the dentist. Even further into the future, then: because of the difficulty of Slavic languages, we'll possibly return from Vietnam as early as August 2009 to begin forty-four weeks of vigorous schoolwork. Then, sometime around June 2010, we'll be moving on to our next home in lovely, snowy S a r a j e v o, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post lasting either two or three years, depending how we play our cards at the time. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-10-03T23:56:00.001+07:00

This is how yesterday's Update began: "How I'd really like to use this blog, for the rest of October, is for exciting myself about a Halloween season I'll mostly miss out on." What I meant when I said this was that I wanted to write about horror movies all month. This blog is one of the methods by which I can connect with the holiday happening without me back home, and my DVD collection is another. But that's not what I went on to say, you'll remember. Unsurprisingly, what I began ruminating over was how the political situation, every four years, infringes on my ability to escape into the month of October. Inevitably, I ended up talking about the current worldwide economic reckoning. I thought I might try again today, but it's just starting the same way. Already I'm tending toward politics again. It's an unavoidable subject right now. Within the next few days I'll receive my absentee ballot and vote one month early--even that won't wait till November. Tonight, when I'd love to be taking about watching scary movies on TV, what’s on my mind is the taped vice presidential debate screened at an office party earlier this evening. That was also scary TV, frankly, but it wasn’t escapism. I'm afraid it's completely futile. Two years ago, I reviewed one horror movie each day throughout the month of October, but now I just can't stay on track. This year, I'm noticing the tendency to, for lack of a better word, blog. I'll not have this. In an effort to celebrate the distant fall, my favorite month, and the Halloween holiday, I'm going to observe The Silence of the Tomb^TM here on this website. I'll return Tuesday, November fourth after a short birthday vacation. See you then. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-10-02T22:52:00.000+07:00

How I'd really like to use this blog, for the rest of October, is for exciting myself about a Halloween season I'll mostly miss out on. There is some expat Halloween celebration here, I remember from last year, but all that's imported. Domestically, I'm on the wrong side of the planet for that sort of thing. Plus, we're tossing around ideas for a birthday trip at the end of the month, a trip somewhere else (Bangkok? Angkor Wat? Luang Prabang?), without even these tenuous probabilities. But back to the subject: while I'm able, I want to talk about those whimsically fearful things October inspires instead of the political subjects headlining this season. I suppose this is symptomatic of some existential apathy preventing a greater degree of intellectual engagement with complexity. The political state of the world is complicated--so demanding, such a drain on time and mind--that, when the need for understanding and action becomes really acute, my attention rebels. My excuse is flimsy and all too predictable: election years are an infringement on my holiday season. The economic crisis sweeping the globe has only intensified this. I mean, October is really much scarier this year. Today I noticed this quote in the New York Times:

"Supporting this [bailout] legislation is the only way to make the best of a crisis and return our country to a path of economic stability, prosperity and growth," said [Senator Harry Reid, Dem. NV, majority leader].

What? But isn't this 7x10¹¹ dollars of bail-out money, um, borrowed? Isn't that the problem? I know I'm thinking about this in the most ill-informed and simplistic way possible, but are our creditors about to buy our economy? And is this really a good investment for them? That doesn't feel like fearful whimsy at all. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-10-01T23:40:00.000+07:00

Happy first of October! Reports from North Carolina tell me it feels like a nice fall morning. Crisp, clear, and even a little chilly if the wind is taken into consideration. That's good. It's not so obviously October here. The sky is clear, so it's hazily sunny. It's also very warm, a fuzzy eighty-eight degrees, rendered somewhat cloying by building damp. We haven't had a storm in many hours. The air had that translucent yellow greenhouse glow all afternoon, making me feel like the world was trapped inside a cheap plastic squirt gun being ever-so-slowly reloaded. A storm must have come through this morning, sometime before I woke up. It was evidently powerful enough to scatter green leaves and seed pods along the streets lining the nearby park. Women, dressed in municipal orange, pushed carts along the outer lanes of Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai Street, using bundles of straw to rake the sidewalks. Squinting, this could seem kinda autumn-like, I guess--urban southeast Asian yard work. Standing on our balcony earlier, during the last few minutes of sunset, I could faintly pick out the smell of wood smoke in the air. This isn't all that surprising: people had erected temporary restaurants on the sidewalks fourteen floors below, cooking food in clay pots over fires built right on the concrete. This is a daily ritual along Le Quy Don Street, just to my northeast. That's because, sometime between five and six, the city-block-sized school there disgorges what may be ten thousand uniformed kids onto the surrounding sidewalks. A little industry crops up every day at this time: blankets are spread with school supplies, ice cream vendors honk* their wares, and little niche restaurants set out plastic tables and stoke up the pavement. It's carnivalesque, sure, but is it autumnlike? [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-09-30T17:36:00.001+07:00

Recently I got a letter from Sunshine's mother. She'll be visiting us next Thursday. She asked what she could bring us from the US. She regularly sends packages with stuff we can’t get here: Cheerios, Gatorade, hand lotion. (My mother too: US Campbell's soup flavors, Slim Jims, Twizzlers.) Mostly this stuff's for Sunshine. She's very attuned to her cravings. I don't know why, but I don't pine away for home products when I'm abroad. I don't obsess about M&M's or First Carolina Deli. Perhaps I'm just not very brand loyal. I have no problem substituting local things for old habits. The Gatorade above shipped just for me, though. Whenever someone makes Sunshine's mother's offer, Sunshine reminds me that I'm probably missing Gatorade. And she's right, I probably am. I certainly want it once I'm reminded. It's just that I almost never think of it without prompting. When I visit home, just looking around reminds me of many things I've been missing; but while I'm still here I simply don't notice. In my reply to that email, the only thing I could think to tell Sunshine's mother I was missing? Iceberg lettuce. Too bad she can't bring me a head of lettuce on the plane. All I see here is leaf. It's funny--back home I like leaf lettuce better. I'm digressing. I should try to remember stuff I'm missing, to have an answer for that question. But I don't really want to start something here. I don't want to begin obsessing over the products of old homes. I could be missing sopa tarasca from Pátzcuaro as easily as something from somewhere else (sorry, I couldn't think of another example). Eventually, I'll be missing Vietnamese stuff once we've relocated to [where? where?]. I could ruin my adaptability like this. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-09-29T23:28:00.000+07:00

Here are two facts loosely related to the newest half-baked video posted to my Flickr account (here). This isn't an interesting back-story to the dull movie. The video shows the Caravelle Hotel lighting up shortly after dark. It's just something I saw happen one night, noted the time, and filmed the following day. These two facts, then, are the things I think about when I watch the video now. The first: I've really been enjoying being outside at six o'clock recently. Over the last few days I've gone out and crossed the park right around at six pm. Since the equinox, the sun really has started going down earlier. It used to set at ten after; now it's pretty much dark, depending on the clouds, by six. But the lights all over the city are still running on bygone schedules. So at seven minutes after six, according to that note, all of the lights in the park, along the streets, atop the Caravelle Hotel, etc., blink on at once. Lately, between six-ish and seven after, things have gotten really dark around here, with a sort of close, exciting feudal quality reminding me of campgrounds or maybe safe neighborhood power outs. The other thing: our internet access has been iffy all weekend. Sure, our occasionally tenuous connection to the web has been even less reliable, but there have also been suspicious cases of seeming restriction: specific sites have ceased to function. What's odd is that we were forewarned. We are sorry for the inconvenience, according to that note, but some websites will not work this weekend. Weird. Blogger domains worked okay, for example; but Yahoo! didn't work at all: no access to email accounts or Flickr. Therefore, the video above, posted under the "Friday Matinee" label, actually appeared today. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-09-26T21:41:00.002+07:00

I don't mean to harp on this new gym hobby, but I have one last complaint regarding the running machines. As I’ve said before,* I run for distance every other day. I should use the word "endurance" instead of "distance". My lacking any real ability renders these less than tantamount. To keep myself within the appropriate zone regarding pulses, respirations, and pressures, I walk one quarter kilometer between every three-quarter run. Last night I repeated this formula for two miles (the infuriating playlist included: walking--Queen's We are the Champions anthem; running--Cyndi Lauper's sleepy True Colors; walking--the Stray Cats strutting; running--Ella bemoaning the regrets of Miss Otis). This process keeps me working usefully toward building cardiovascular tolerance. It's a process necessitating frequent slowing-down and speeding-up maneuvers while I'm still moving on the treadmill. My complaint is about the crappy buttons controlling the machine's speed. They are Star Trek-style buttons: futuristic flat and high-contrast pictographs easier to see than feel. They depress only very slightly. When activated, they work like clock radio alarm controls: press once, and the digital readout ticks along by one increment; hold the button down and the digital readout scans slowly forward, speeding up one gear if pressure can be maintained long enough. It's difficult to do this when my hands are slick with sweat. An even pressure is difficult to maintain on the arbitrary pictograph while moving. It's especially tricky at the dog-tired end of a three-quarter k run. My hand might wobble slightly while I decrease my thumping headlong strides, the button speed gearing down again and again, slowing the belt over intolerably longer periods, eating away that brief walking respite. Frankly, it's infuriating when I'm already keyed-up. There has to be some better kind of button for this machine. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-09-25T23:38:00.000+07:00

Sometime last week (was it Tuesday?), maintenance arrived at our apartment again. It's been a while. After many early adventures with building maintenance, lately they've begun to leave us alone. It's only because I ask them to fix stuff when we leave town--even when nothing's really broken. We've traveled frequently over recent months, providing time for crews to completely overrun our apartment, morning to night, day-in and day-out, without interruption. Their ladders and drop-cloths and piles of greasy and inscrutable little pieces have remained scattered about between activities without consequence. Their desire to tinker with our landscape, tweaking our whatnot, gets satisfied before our return. Due to this perfect system we rarely see them. But. We didn't go anywhere over the recent Labor Day weekend. They must've been jonesing for some opportunity to knock; finally their mounting tendency toward compulsive tinkering tipped into relapse Tuesday (or so). In fairness, it's possible maintenance dropped in because housekeeping noticed the dining room AC unit leaking into our bookshelves and called to have it fixed. Whatever. Starting last whenever, they’ve been in the apartment every afternoon (except Sunday). That first day they erected ladders and dropped cloths before turning the unit off and telling me they'd return tomorrow. They've said this every day since (except Sunday). Once they took the unit away with them. Once, they cut a large hole in our ceiling, covering it with empty rice sacks. Currently, that hole has been drywalled but remains unpainted; lightless overhead sockets stare emptily. Normally, I'd expect this hilarious episode to end by Tuesday (or so). Normally, the crew might then attempt switching their attention to other units, further into our territory. I'd try to stop this, but they may never even finish the dining room: that unit resumed dripping today. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-09-24T22:57:00.003+07:00

This post is about unrequited love and its near opposite, unrequited disdain. It's about making five minutes seem like forever. It pertains to my MP3 player. I run every single night. Lately, I've been pushing myself on the treadmill, breaking the previous night's records every day. I've progressed quickly to the edge of my ability this way. Good right? On even nights I sprint as fast as I can (not that fast) for almost a mile on the treadmill. On odd nights I run almost ten kilometers-per-hour for as far as I can (not that far). This is where the unrequited love comes in. I'm crushing hard on my MP3 player all over again. When I program it, I can forget the thud-thud-thud of my feet on the treadmill belt, taking my mind off the excruciating passage of time. There's nothing worse than paying attention while exercising. I run my "sprint" night distances all in a row, but the alternating "distance" nights are accomplished in three-quarter kilometer increments, with one-quarter k walks in between. This keeps me within my proper developmental range --cardiovascular-wise-- where my numbers won't spike or relax into diminishing returns. Five minutes running for every three minutes walking. This is where I get to the unrequited disdain, a feeling my MP3 player apparently harbors. See, I keep it on shuffle. During the walks, I get nice hard danceable stuff: Shonen Knife grinding out Cobra vs. Mongoose, Public Enemy trashing Arizona, the Cramps, Rob Zombie, Katie Jane Garside. You get the idea. But whenever I have to speed up to another run, suddenly I'm hearing the twang-twang-twanging nineteen-twenty blues in tinny mono, or the love-ballad from some unknown soundtrack, or Sinéad O'Connor whispering I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got a cappella, for god's sake. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-09-23T23:55:00.000+07:00

I'm not going to be able to tell it's autumn in Southeast Asia in the ways I normally look forward to. Between now and the longest night in late mid-December, the sunset will creep earlier and earlier into the day. At around thirteen degrees north latitude, however, there just isn't much variance we can expect to observe. Right now, so near yesterday's equinox, it gets full-on dark shortly after six-oh-seven. It's hard to tell when sunset is exactly--it's often stormy and overcast outside, making it seem night much earlier than it should. But six-oh-seven's about when all the hotel signs come on across the skyline. Last year, in late December when the northern hemisphere enjoys its longest night, I remember it getting dark shortly after five thirty. I can’t really remember when it got dark back in June, when the hemisphere suffers its longest day. At home in North Carolina, sunset will vary from eight thirty in the evening to five thirty in the afternoon over the space of autumn, a dramatic swing assisted in early November when Daylight Saving stops. Here, the biggest change will be sunsets I can see through the clouds. The temperature will be at their yearly coolest during the second, dryer half of fall--November to January, really--when we'll appreciate the breezy and temperate overnight seventies followed by the dry and sunny daytime eighties. Back home it might drop into the forties, maybe even sink below freezing occasionally, before the New Year. And as the trees are turning orange and red and yellow at home, their leaves beginning to pile up in people's front yards, the bright green and lush foliage here, finally peeking into long sunlight hours for the first time in four or five months, will begin blooming enthusiastically. [Cavin]

Autumnal Equiniox

2008-09-22T22:44:00.002+07:00

Happy first of fall! At 15:44:16 UTC, the Earth's celestial equator crossed the ecliptic plane. The celestial equator is, of course, the heavenward projection of our own zero latitude, which separates the northern and southern hemispheres. The ecliptic is the plane on which we circumnavigate the sun. There's about twenty-three point five degrees of separation between these imaginary constructs. Because of this, the sun now appears in declination, rising and setting from points beneath the equator. UTC are scrambled initials, the shorthand standing for Coordinated Universal Time--newfangled, atomic clockwork slang for the time zone known as the Greenwich Mean. That's the Atlantic half of the International Dateline; together they separate the globe into eastern and western hemispheres. UTC isn't adjusted for Daylight Saving Time. Because of this, three forty-four pm UTC is almost fifteen till five in nearby England. That's ten forty-four tonight here in Vietnam where there's no Daylight Saving policy; and about fifteen till noon back at home in North Carolina where there is. As the sun moves south over the celestial equator (also called equinoctial circle, of course), the number of dark and light hours in the day equalize. The sun seems to rise and set over the equator. It's obvious how this vocabulary is related. The sun hardly pauses, continuing to decline even further into the south latitudes. This will bring about the steadily lengthening nighttime hours, lowering temperatures, changing leaves, smell of wood smoke, long orange sunsets and deepening blue twilights, crisply cold air, piles of leaves, pumpkin and corn harvests, and eventual holidays of the northern temperate zone's elongating autumn season. This lasts until the nights are as long as they'll get, when the sun appears at its nadir with respect to the ecliptic, and the oblong season of winter begins. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-09-19T16:10:00.002+07:00

Early last night we was pitched up at a posh riverside local, an olde poppy refinery it were, me and Long Peg and Longer Jim and my mate Sunnie, tucking into fancified local fare when we were run down by one o' Sunnie Annie's shipmates, 'Teeny, who was to be moonlightin' later on in the tavern upstairs from where we sat. It was a surprise change-of-course, but not to be unwelcomed, and God surely knows we can't always tack against the hot winds blowin' us yonder. So later on, fatted on Spring rolls and lovely bitty morsels of fish-cakes stewed in greens, we mounted the steps to rough-and-tumble abovedecks. The evening's event was to be a south-seas performance of the sketches of the Britisher Troupe Monty Python, a comedie play enacted in some dozen parts. Me and Sunnie Annie walked in there with a pocketful of boon and back out again two hours later with a bellyful of what-have-you: Sunnie'd stuck to the standard tots in cola, whilst I guzzled island tea blends, if ye ken. And the plays were good, and the players, I'll be shivered--every man-jack one of 'em. But I tell ye, laddies, and look into me last eye and see if I be lying to you--and you may have that eye if I have--what a strong man's perfectly able to partake upon a wild night and still walk upright, and still swab the decks and still surf the portholes, can come back to confound that man while he's trying to jog his nightly one-and-a-half nautical miles on the old electric plank in the gym deep in his darkened hold. Aye, he persevered alright, to his everlastin' credit, but at a notch less than the five-and-a-third knots pace he's a-used to keepin'. [Cap’n]

Thursday

2008-09-18T23:19:00.001+07:00

Tonight, at eleven-something on September 18th, 2008, we'll have been here in Hồ Chí Minh City for exactly eleven months. Raise a glass. I mention this because it's probably as close to the halfway point of our stay as I'll likely remember to note. Juggling probabilities, this halfway mark is still about two weeks away: I assume we'll be about to return home eleven-and-a-half months after the eleven-and-a-half month mark. But there's some wiggle room: it's pretty certain we'll return from Vietnam sometime between the first of September and mid-October, 2009. Let's time travel twelve months from today: if we're not at home already, we will certainly be leaving shortly. Our stuff is already in crates working its way around the world. Our plants are earmarked for friends. Are we making desperate last minute travel plans to see places we've accidentally forgotten during our time in Asia? The recent goodbye parties have all been in our honor. Our next job position is a certainty. We know our training schedule in Washington DC and the parameters of our finite repatriation. Whatsisface is president. Probably, one year into the future, our schedule will be set, with wiggling room, clear through the year 2013. Of course, for some of these things we can rein-in the time travel a bit. We'll have a good head start on all of this knowledge of by the time we visit home for Christmas this year. We're working on getting the next job right now (Pristina? Banja Luka? Ljubljiana?), and expect to know something before December. We'll have a new president-elect by December, too. We're working on this, too (overseas voting forms were requested last week). Sheesh. Halfway or not, our whole near-future seems to rest on the decisions we make in the next two months. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-09-17T23:00:00.001+07:00

We ate a nice dinner at Au Parc tonight. Sometimes we go there just because it's blocks from our apartment. Those blocks make a nice walk around the park, less invaded by the chaotic bustle of other downtown areas. The park is a romantic hang-out: on any given night, couples canoodle amorously while perched two-to-a-seat on their parked scooters. Since the park is so popular after hours, it attracts vendors. Any after-hours gathering is sure to cause impromptu restaurants to be laid out on nearby blankets. Local coffee discos send waitresses out into the park to take orders. Ice cream and other carnival snacks orbit the area in bike-mounted coolers. Those endlessly circling bikes have funny horns meant to alert their possible customers: sort of like the music-box advertisement of beloved neighborhood ice cream trucks crossed with the obnoxious Dixie honk of the Duke Boys' Dodge Charger. It's impossible for me to describe. Just imagine a six-year-old's hectoring enquiry routed endlessly through an out-of-tune whistle pop. And we hear this little jingle all the time: we walk through the park to go pretty much anywhere. Sometimes I hear it from my apartment when the vendors are leaving for the night. I always hear the Tune throughout nice dinners at Au Parc. But walking home tonight was special, like a crazy dream. One of these bikes began following us, blasting its hectoring tune. Then there was another up at the nearest corner, and another coming at us in the crosswalk. Eventually, we were surrounded by half a dozen, converging on us from intersecting orbits, asking their Tune over and over and answering as often, a nerve-wracking round tempered by immediacy and distance and angle. We got out of there eventually; but I'm sure they're still circling the park, waiting. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-09-16T23:28:00.002+07:00

Sunday night we went to a public Mid-Autumn Festival celebration in the large park off Hai Bà Trưng Street near the top corner of District One. For a few weeks now, vendors have been setting up temporary stores around town selling Mooncakes and Mid-Autumn toys. These toys are mostly also lanterns, taking the forms of inflated fish or five-pointed stars or even lanterns. It's easy to tell which stores are temporary Mid-Autumn Festival stores (and which toys are the appropriate toys) because they are all bright orange. Along Hai Bà Trưng, or here and there up Nguyễn Thái Học Street, or anywhere else, long orange stalls have appeared overnight selling a vast array of each: toy lanterns in orange bags and Mooncakes in orange trays. Mooncakes are heavy ornate bricks of bread, roughly four by four, with the half-glazed look of wet bagels. Inside they're stuffed with candied fruits and beans and nuts and whatnot in a nearly endless assortment of permutations. The ones I've tried seemed faintly fermented, their tops marked A4 in red dye. The toy lanterns all have flashlight handles and run on AAA batteries. These stores look for all the world like drugstore Halloween aisles: rows of seasonal candy and trick-or-treat gizmos. By the time we got to the park Sunday night, we'd already passed several dozen delighted children toting lanterns, canvassing the neighborhoods around our apartment, looking for all the world like trick-or-treaters themselves. My homesick started aching a little in anticipation of next month, when I'll be here and Halloween will be back home. But I was excited too. At the park, technicians were setting up the stage show: three Miss Earth contestants handing out toys to needy orphans. Kids with lanterns teemed, oddly transgressive in the light of their battery-powered traditions. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-09-15T14:22:00.000+07:00

Happy belated Middle Autumn Festival! It feels odd to type that when true autumn is still about a week off (and by "true" I mean "solar", thus inflicting upon this column a cultural bias). And even on the lunar calendar, fall can hardly be described as nearing its midpoint. As a matter of fact, there's something I don't understand regarding the names of notable dates. But first, some facts: the Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival, or Mooncake Festival, depending on your colloquialism) is a harvest celebration of Chinese ancestry, prevalent in cultures sharing a Chinese history or cultural influence: Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, San Francisco, etc. It also has holiday cousins throughout east and southeast Asia, where plenty of the cultures are similarly, albeit sometimes distantly, related: Tsukimi, the moon-viewing festival in Japan; or Chuseok, the good harvest celebration in Korea, to name but two. No matter how distantly related, the festival is in honor of the beginning of the third lunar season, falling on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month (counting from February this year). The fifteenth lunar day is always the full moon, and is celebrated in one way or another every month. The Mid-Autumn Festival and its cousins are, like similar western harvest festivals, about feasts and ancestors. The holiday was last night, incidentally: September fourteenth; therefore this update is "belated". In Vietnamese the holiday is called Tết Trung Thu, which means "festival of middle autumn". So why the "middle"? I'm picking bones with my own native tongue too, frankly--a native tongue that itself dubs the winter solstice--that shortest day of the year--"midwinter", even though it actually marks the very first day of that final season in exactly the same way "mid-autumn" marks the first day of the third. What gives? [Cavin]

Friday

2008-09-12T18:11:00.001+07:00

This is about time-delays. Like when my internet is hardly working and I have a low-bandwidth conversation over my VOIP telephone. I talk, and then someone else talks, stopping short to listen to what I've just said. They begin to answer while I'm trying to answer what they were first saying. Bam, frustrating time-delay. I'm going to juxtapose things that have nothing to do with one another, sort of like that telephone illustration. Yesterday was September eleventh. I celebrated by getting run down by a motorbike. I'd been planning to write about how refreshing it was to be way over on this side of the world, where I wasn't reminded even once about the seventh anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington DC. I didn't want to do this because it would defeat its own purpose, obviously. But what else was I going to write about? Hey, I needed a haircut! So I crossed town to get one for blog purposes. It was shortly before eight pm, but my usual place was closed. Undaunted, I wandered around the haircut district looking for some other place. The other place I found wanted eleven fifty for a three-dollar cut. That haircut was time-delayed till today. Okay, I'll do the nine-eleven thing, I thought, any existential irony be damned. But then I was crossing the sidewalk and got hit by a scooter. The real subject of yesterday's post occurred to me while I was hopping around rubbing my left calf. The anniversary would wait until I could utter the phrase "no constant reminders" without ruining my own effect. But I'd forgotten that there's an eleven-hour time difference between here and New York slash Washington DC. Throughout last night, and much of today, I've been systematically reminded. Time-delay reminded. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-09-11T23:10:00.000+07:00

Every now and then, going down the road, I notice people standing in traffic brushing dirt off themselves. They've just wrecked into one another. They chat while pushing bikes off the road. Once or twice I've seen traffic moving slowly past a fallen rider, heard the crunch, or seen rubberneckers crowding around something obscured. The most dramatic accident I've seen: a scooter wedged so firmly underneath the engine of a taxi that the car's tires were off the road. And yeah, I can't believe I've never mentioned this: right after returning home last May, going to a birthday party at Big Man Beer, our own cab knocked over a skinny young biker in a dashing yellow jacket. "Don't worry," the cabbie called out to us or maybe the woman on the asphalt. I'm not sure which. She picked herself and her bike off the road. "See, everything okay," he told us or her. She dismissed us all with a gesture and scooted away. Honestly, it's all far less traffic violence than I predicted when I first saw the chaos here. At the time, I'd never have believed it would take till today to get run down myself. Well, I was crossing a one-way street, paying attention to some bikes passing a slow moving auto. Because they pass on the right here, these scooters were aimed right at me as I stepped off the sidewalk. I couldn't dodge past them and the car they were passing, so I backed up--onto the sidewalk again--where I was hit by a scooter heading the other way. Splat. I wasn't killed: her footrest tagged me in the left calf. I just have a large bruise, whereas she wobbled from the impact and sped on around the corner looking none too cool. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-09-10T22:33:00.000+07:00

Sunday we saw a movie at a multiplex on top of a mall in District Five. It's the second movie I've seen in Vietnam. I saw I Am Legend at the same theater six months ago. Having coffee before the show meant that we'd catch the Dark Knight, showing later, instead of Wall-E, earlier. We knew what we were doing. Both of us expected to enjoy the Pixar movie more than Batman, so a rowdy Asian theater experience seemed better suited to the latter. Batman must be the most re-imagined comic book hero there is. There's very little narrative consistency--in origin, temperament, look, even plot--in the source materials. Staging a new cross-media production need bear little resemblance to any previous incarnation, I suppose. It probably isn't possible to choose a traditional archetype for Batman anymore. The comics themselves are all over the map depending on era, author, illustrator, and intended audience. Batman has no canon. The gulf between Adam West and Christian Bale, both playing Batman, reflects this inadvertently. That said, how come my review--"the baroque villainy of an interesting and cleverly written clown blessedly steals the screen from a depressing and stiff rubber bat suit, which, in turn, serves to obscure what might have been a stock, if underwritten, performance by a hoarse lead more interested in the foppish curlicues of the titular character's alter-ego than any heady adventure"--describes both Sunday's Batman movie and the one I saw in '89? So what's actually new? Well, Gotham City's become a lot blander over nineteen years. Now the Joker looks like a grunge band leader, though Heath Ledger nearly disappears behind prosthetics and a good comic book geek impersonation--a trick of acting Jack Nicholson never embraced. Lastly, Asian kids are quieter than eighties kids. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-09-09T23:01:00.000+07:00

We arrived in Hồ Chí Minh City late on a Thursday night. That Friday we walked around our block, getting used to the traffic. There was a lot to see. We were tired and jetlagged and after one block we headed home to order delivery pizza from expat haven Chez Guido. We went to sleep shortly after dusk. That Saturday we walked some more, searching for a restaurant we never found. But we saw many more things. Sunday, we walked across the street into District One, first time for me, and down to Bến Thành Market. Bến Thành is pretty close to Sunshine's office. It's the crossroads of District One: to the west is the cheap backpacker "district", east is the upscale expat shopping area, and northeast are many of the larger government buildings. The market serves everyone. There's plenty of lacquered gimcrackery, remaindered clothing, prepared food; stuff for tourists and locals alike. Too many things. It's a dizzying spectacle, the sort of place I usually love. But that third day I wasn't up for the bickering pressure from each stall: fingers plucked at my clothes, voices shouted at me, desperate vendors barred my way. I didn't stay long. This last Sunday, we explored Bình Tây Market, first time for me, located on the close corner of District Six in Cholon, HCMC's vast old Chinatown. Bình Tây is much larger, older, and more awe inspiring that Bến Thành. It has two stories. It's terracotta roof tiles end in hand sculpted, glazed ceramic caps. Bình Tây spills out in canopied stalls which have leaked into the crevices of the surrounding neighborhood. A maze of things to see, more dizzying and plucky than the other market; but I was ready. There were star anise fruits the size of monkey fists! [Cavin]

Monday

2008-09-08T23:01:00.002+07:00

This Update's title is Having My Cake and Eating It Too. It reverses a popular aphorism, a cliché and torturous way of saying one must choose between conserving and spending one's resources. "I can't have my cake and eat it too." That seems like stricture: stay away from cake; or hedonism: eat other people's cake; or causal fallacy: any cake you cannot eat is yours; or something even more soporific: does one really command their own cake? But that's the problem with aphorisms. They've been cut to a catchy tune, thwarting any focused meaning. "Beauty is only skin deep" means what? Dwelling on vanities is shallow? Someone who isn't pretty can never be beautiful? Looked at the right way, "a friend in need is a friend indeed" can be followed to nearly opposite conclusions. What the hell does this have to do with anything? The problem with my title is that its analogy is broken. One cake cannot stand in for the accrual of resources any more than someone can adopt a policy of absolute retention. Realistically, we must forever keep eating our cake to survive; therefore, we must keep accruing it. The skill with which we negotiate this relationship between having and eating dictates our sustained viability. Now you are wondering if this Update is political. Not at all. My goals, viewed through the lens of this column, are to accrue experiences and to write them down. Both are important to me. The problem is, successes on any one side of this equation are ultimately pyrrhic. It's what the cake rule would teach if it wasn't inept: one resource must be tempered to cover competing expenditures, so success can be marked by prolonging the relationship. Whew. I've decided I'm not going to blog on the weekends anymore. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-09-05T23:34:00.001+07:00

First, anyone interested can find today's Friday Matinee Video (the fifth) over here. I moved it because I'm having trouble making my photo badges work properly. I imagined it might be Flickr's new video feature interfering with the widget, but I was wrong. This movie is about catching a scooter taxi ride with a baby. Second, I'd like to honor the guys from our building's lounge. I've mentioned they're shooting pool lately. For ten months, that little red table in the corner was mostly used as a snack buffet during tenant parties. But lately, whenever I go to the lounge in the afternoons, the guys are playing pool with the parking attendants, the maintenance guys, whoever happens to be around. The convenience store women watch. They laugh when I walk in like they've been caught. They all disperse immediately, leaving the balls where they've come to rest. That's not all. Last week I walked in to find them tossing around an empty white Malibu Rum bottle, practicing Tom Cruise Cocktail moves. They laughed and tried to disperse, but I got them to show me a few tricks: tossing the bottle over a shoulder, catching it on the back of a hand. I don't know the lounge guys' names, embarrassingly. They have nametags, but I ignore them because they're fake. In lieu of memorizing people's western nicknames I've learned nothing. I think of them as the "guy with glasses" and the "guy without glasses". The guy without glasses frequently shows me new card tricks. He's still learning. He turns around when he's doing the sleights, so I can't see. I bring this up because today was the guy without glasses' last day. He's going back to school after being here the whole time I have. I'll miss those tricks. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-09-04T22:31:00.001+07:00

I don't talk all that much about the weather anymore. Where I grew up it rained during springs and early summers, was dry late summers and winters. But I remember taking note of lengthy droughts when it should normally have been raining. I grew up with people who complained about droughts. They complained when it rained, too. I never complained about rain. This year's rainy season, in Vietnam, has grown so familiar that it's faded into the background. I rarely get caught in the rain, even though it happens several times each day. Last year, we arrived in Hồ Chí Minh City during the end of an unnaturally lengthy monsoon season, as I understand it. By November, it was raining only once a day, if that. That seemed like a lot, but it wasn't. As I type this, another storm is blowing up outside. It only stopped raining three hours ago. The constant cycle of humidity-bluster-humidity outside is misleadingly convalescent. It's as if the city's fever breaks several times a day; but this patient never heals. If I sound tired of this, I don’t mean to. I love it: whenever I notice the sky darkening in gradient stripes of gray clouds which then blur together into another forty-minute torrent, I stare out the windows or walk outside. But I don’t always notice anymore. It's the reason I don't mention it more often. Rest assured it’s rained nearly every day since May, whether I've mentioned it or not. It's only similar to my previous experiences in the indelibility of its absence. I still clearly remember Thursday, August twenty-eighth. Can you? The sky was deep blue that day, breezeless, puffy white clouds drifted aimlessly. It was so clear I could see the stars that night. It didn't rain all day. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-09-03T22:29:00.000+07:00

This blog is about the preservation of exoticism, something I think about frequently. Sometimes it's fun to sit in a restaurant, for example, having no idea what people around me are saying. Watching people talk in a restaurant is more exotic and mysterious than listening to them. Sometimes it's fun experiencing underdefined phenomena. This is how I justify having never learned any Vietnamese. Last night, just about sundown, we walked across District One to eat a nice dinner at the Refinery. It's named after an old opium refinery building on a muddy alley courtyard off Hai Bà Trưng Street. On the way there, we passed the gates of Reunification Palace, like we almost always do. Last night, the army was blocking heavy traffic along Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa and Lê Duẩn Streets, which intersect in cul-de-sac cum bus stop at the Palace gates. Hundreds of scooters lined the sidewalks of the park; regimented flag bearers lined Lê Duẩn Street for blocks, a dormant parade bursting with potential energy. Dinner was nice. I ate a fabulous tagliatelle à la mer, if you'll pardon the fusion, graced by tomato lentil soup rich enough to also dress the pasta. They make splendid manhattans at the Refinery. I had two. Nearby, an English teacher discussed universities with his graduate student. On the walk home, we were absorbed in conversation when the first uniformed sailors passed us heading the other way. They were all grim and middle aged. There were a lot of people in uniform. He traffic coming from the Palace was really heavy, but this time there were no police keeping it off the sidewalks. Threading our way through the vast gridlocked crowd was difficult. The show lights on the Reunification Palace grounds were doused. It took forever to get home. [Cavin]

National Day

2008-09-02T23:04:00.001+07:00

Happy Việt Nam National Holiday! It's interesting to slowly learn what different countries around the world celebrate in the name of nationalism.* In Vietnam, nationalism is commemorated on a different anniversary than I'd expected. Not that there aren't nationalist "reunification" celebrations in honor of the Vietnam's eventual integration after the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, but the official Socialist Republic of Việt Nam National Day Celebrates a short-lived step along the way: the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam on September second, 1945. Odd, huh? Quickly: at the very end of the second World War, Japan overthrew the government of French Indochina. For several months, US and Allied forces worked covertly within Vietnam to harass the Japanese flank while the imperial army was fighting its costly war in the Pacific. When Japan finally surrendered on August 14, 1945, it was agreed by the winners that they would withdraw from Indochina, leaving it intact for its long-time imperial masters. Instead, Japan made it possible for nationalist groups, including the Việt Minh under leader Hồ Chí Minh, to size the public buildings in many major cities, thereby thwarting the returning French. By the twenty-fifth, the colonial president Bảo Ðại was forced to abdicate leadership to Uncle Hồ who, on September second, delivered a rousing speech inaugurating a new sovereign Vietnamese nation that lasted several days. But the Chinese Army arrived to occupy northern Vietnam later in September. Then British troops arrived to occupy the south in November. The Việt Minh, choosing the devils they knew, began negotiating with the French again before the end of the year. It was a strategy that would separate the country but leave a sure Vietnamese foothold in the north, bringing about civil divisions leading to thirty more years of nationalist struggle. [Cavin]

Labor Day

2008-09-01T22:58:00.000+07:00

Happy Labor Day! Because of the holiday, we're having a long weekend. So far it's been pretty nice: we've done almost nothing but watch TV. A couple weeks ago we were hanging out at a local Irish pub with friends. The topic of everyone's vacation plans came up. The Labor Day weekend is even longer than usual because tomorrow is Vietnam's National Day. With four weekend days to fill, most everyone we know in this town had been planning to head somewhere else: Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore. The way pub conversations go: I was asked six times where we'd be going this weekend. Sunshine and I had been asking each other the same question for a couple months. We tossed around ideas when we were in Nha Trang six weeks ago, then in Dalat last month. There was even talk of my accompanying Sunshine on her business trip to Ha Noi last week. In the long run, I made the decision that I'd been traveling too much lately. I decided I really wanted to stay at home for once. This was sort of disappointing for Sunshine, who I believe would have preferred to go to Kuala Lampur or Angkor Wat or Shanghai during these four days off. It made for six pretty disappointing pub answers, too. But I feel like I've already been flying so much lately--and I know we'll end up going somewhere distant for my birthday at the end of October--that it just seemed like a good idea to take the long weekend off. We'll have visitors in early October and early December. We'll go back to the states for the Christmas and New Year's Holidays. We always just go go go. Eventually I managed to convince Sunshine we needed a vacation. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-08-31T23:45:00.000+07:00

After exploring around the backpacker district yesterday, we ate a showcase vegetarian dinner near the chaotic traffic circle south of Bình Thạnh Market. As I understand it, we were in the building of a popular local catering company which every now and then, for one month only, shows its stuff by opening their vast showroom to the public. The selected cuisine this month was vegetarian versions of traditional pan-Asian dishes. I don't usually like buffets very much, and this was no exception, really; but it really was interesting to see so many different kinds of traditional foods. This buffet was vast, arrayed on frilly tablecloths in two large rooms--a steam tureen and vat and crock pot landscape, all neatly labeled with the Vietnamese names of the myriad dishes. I was particularly impressed with the veggie shrimp dishes, mostly curried soups, with orange soy curls molded into the chitinous reticulation of a natural arthropod. To me, they tasted like firm gluten--some kind of savory Thai circus peanut soup. The fake sushi was also that bad. But many of the dishes were much, much better: tasty ragouts featuring eight different kinds of mushroom, bánh xèo and faux phở bò bars brimming with chili and basil and bean sprout sides; a whole table of tapioca dessert soups, noodles, or bubbles for tea; gallons of freshly squeezed lime juice. I had a really good time and learned a little I didn’t already know about local food. So what if the food we ate was a little sub-par? The very best thing about the whole experience was that the dining hall, at least for the hour we were there, was dominated by a large table of polite but dangerous-looking lilac-robed and bald Buddhist nuns who never looked at me or spoke. [Cavin]

Saturday

2008-08-30T22:12:00.002+07:00

This weekend we have the time to explore without the energy to travel somewhere else. Hồ Chí Minh City kicks ass, but it's easy to put off for other adventures because it's always right outside. Today was one of the rare times we'd set aside for getting out into our city. We explored around the backpacker district some. It's tongue-in-cheek to call this exploration, really. We live at the intersection of Districts One and Three. We spend the vast majority of our time around town roaming these areas. These main downtown districts look pretty distinct: leafy trees, wide open parks, relatively clear sidewalks. The majority of town looks the opposite. Most of Saigon's French Colonial remains are in Districts One and Three. What's funny about using the word "explore" is that we never left our base Districts. First we saw a little art show somewhere near the bridge to District Four. This was post-utopian sci-fi sculpture, in aid of post-cinema photo constructions--all very white plastic. Local art shows I've seen have something in common: a stifling little gallery with under ten pieces. It feels strange to make plans to go to a gallery--get ready, leave the house, hail a cab--only to look at art for seven minutes. Both women behind today's tiny reception desk had leather-covered motorcycle helmets I found very compelling. After the show we wandered around the mazelike alleys of the backpacker district. It's only a tongue-in-cheek "district": travel agents, luggage vendors, bubble tea shops, tourist expectations accumulated around the cheap hostels. But warrens of tangled alleys wend between the main roads, accessing three-chair eastern hemisphere restaurants, barbers, and other, darkly mutable exotic spaces. It may be totally alien compared to where I live, but it's less than a mile from our apartment. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-08-29T23:10:00.000+07:00

I'm feeling a little better today, thank you very much. This has been a most interesting cold. I'm still suffering some symptoms, but the generalized ick has gone away. I don't know if it's a benefit of exercising, or a characteristic of this particular bug, but the whole ordeal was pretty lightweight. Every single night during the whole thing I ran at least a kilometer and a quarter on the treadmill, most of those nights I lifted weights as well. Every day I woke up depressed that the cold hadn't "gotten bad" yet--I guess I was expressing concern that the hellish malaise that generally clobbers me the third day had yet to materialize. Now I think the whole cold is beginning to go away. I'm in a pretty good mood about this. I don't know if it proves I'm in better shape than I used to be, but it certainly proves that my gym routine has taken root: I never even thought about skipping a day. Tales from the gym: last night something strange happened. Often the lounge guys stick around after locking up to play pool. Once, I even heard balls being racked over my MP3s--three am and they were still here shooting a game in the dark. I've long since shrugged off concerns over the stealth of my midnight exercise. Having the staff hanging around doesn't bother me like it might've two weeks ago. But last night I opened the door to the gym and found a guy just standing there in the dark, doing nothing. Then, another guy ducked around the corner, saw me, and diverted toward the closed swimming pool. Both of these guys furiously ignored me, sprinting off in opposite directions the second my back was turned. I dare not speculate. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-08-28T23:09:00.002+07:00

It seems like every time Sunshine leaves town, I get sick. Sunshine left for Hà Nội on Tuesday afternoon; I woke up that morning with a cold. Certainly it's all in my head, but if it's psychosomatic then it sure comes with a lot of ectoplasm. I'm afraid that's going to be the most synthesized metaphor I can produce the way I feel today. Just like yesterday and the day before, this will be a post entirely composed of loose associations and wobbly logic, assuming I even try for those things at all. Bear with me, Goldilocks. Last night I felt too bad to leave the house, but Tuesday I straggled out for the typical sushi gluttony I reserve for nights when Sunshine is off working. I went to the same place I detailed last week in my "Rule of Four" post.¹ Last night I only ordered three things, so everything went marvelously. After a second trip to this place convention dictates that I should know the name; but I plead illness. Look, it's right there on Mạc Đĩnh Chi Street, right beside the most severely Denny's looking Korean fusion diner I've ever seen.² As of my second meal there, however, I am prepared to pronounce the place more expensive and less homey than my very favorite downtown sushi bar, but equal in price and quality to my second favorite (if maybe with a slightly less extensive menu). And they are working on the homey: yesterday the five waitresses pretty much formed a ring around my table where they could instantly respond to my every perceived whim. Well, just as instantly as possible given the rapid questions they were all asking me about the book I was reading, how long I had been in Vietnam, and the like. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-08-27T15:53:00.000+07:00

I've just read Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton's Democratic Convention speech, delivered a couple hours ago. I don't want to seem as if I am picking on the senator's message; I'm not really trying to rake semantic dirt over it, either. I liked what she had to say in a speech driven by the overriding need to repair a party rift created by a nominations race often characterized by seemingly bitter opposition. I think she spoke with grace, incidentally underlining the paramount curbing the dire economic situation Democrats are stumping to avoid. Okay. But in light of some eyebrow-raising racial allusions the senator and her husband have uttered over the recent campaign trail, I can't help but think that her citation of Harriet Tubman*--in an ostensible illustration of the historic power of can-do working-class vigor in pursuit of a righteous, healthy, and equal America--was a little bit thoughtless. From the speech:

Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice: "If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there's shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going." And even in the darkest moments, that is what Americans have done. We have found the faith to keep going.

In form, I think including this plays as overly speechy and a little trite. But I cannot help but also be concerned that the lingering analogy is that of a strong woman helping runaway blacks to achieve their goals. I am certain that the senator didn't intend to compare herself with Ms. Tubman during her rousing speech in support of her recent opponent, but maybe even chancing this mistaken impression (and commentary like this post here) was a little bit daft. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-08-26T23:50:00.000+07:00

Sunshine left town near the end of her regular workday, yesterday. Now she’s in Hà Nội for something or another. I was invited along, but I've been traveling nearly every two weeks since returning from the states at the end of May. Plus, it's hot in Hà Nội this time of year. Yesterday I met her after work and we ate a bon voyage dinner at Au Parc. On the way to meet her, I encountered a guy acting inappropriately. I make these little judgments frequently, to my shame. But I often see tourists in tiny shorts or old men macking on young Việt girls; it becomes second nature. This guy was different, more like a subway loony than a thoughtless twentysomething backpacker or dirty geezer. He was dressed in the pressed uniform of the imperial orientalist--khaki trousers and professorial tweed jacket, shoulder strap, pith helmet--and he minced down the street with a self-conscious gait characteristic of someone looking to divert the same attention his costume was drawing. If this was Hollywood, and nineteen thirty-eight, he might have had a stable of fez-wearing coolies carrying his steamer truck behind him. I can't imagine how he could stand the heat here. Not dressed like that. But he also wore a serene little smile through the tropical sheen of his plumb and swollen face. Obviously, my attention was already on this guy before I noticed what he was doing: as scooters passed him on the sidewalk, he'd make like he was swatting them--or barring their passage--with his rolled red umbrella. Everyone veering by was smiling, but I wonder if subway loonies know the Vietnamese smile nervously when they're embarrassed? Come to think of it, those shorts-wearing backpackers and macking geezers might not know about this, either. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-08-25T23:38:00.000+07:00

Yesterday there was a chili cook-off at another apartment building nearby. The last chili events I'd been invited to were in northern México. That sentence might make a reader think I was about to come over all haughty about chili, but this is not the case. Honestly, I have little regard for American chili--since I'm a vegetarian--and didn't even attend the cook-off in Monterrey. American chili? Texan really. The cooks at those Mexican competitions were predominantly from the other side of the Rio, and the Lonestar style predominated: spicy cubes of tender steak in vaguely differentiated gravy, cooked for days, qualified by a quantity of alarms. Surely none of these pots had ever seen a vegetable; frequently, they had to be trashed after the chili acids had eaten through their bottoms. Texans seem to think this is great, but it doesn't align with traditional notions of chili according to me and Mexican grandmothers. "Chili" literally indicates a sauce made of peppers, the heat incidental to the flavor. The meals are chili with meat or chili with beans. I make it from peppers and fruits, minerals and leaves. I use it with beans. Of course, my product is the diametric opposite of Texan chili: vegetation without meat. Most chili dishes judged yesterday in Vietnam were from a place somewhere between these two poles. There was, however, one totally veggie dish I enjoyed. It was made from beans and tomatoes and corn. There was also one Texas-style pot of rich gravy, chunky with hunks of meat so large that it came off as more of a steak barbecue than a chili, really. Of course, Tex might be onto something satisfying after all: that Lonestar entry swept the competition, a resounding victory for latter-day chili traditionalists on two hemispheres. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-08-24T15:35:00.000+07:00

Saturday we attended another farewell party for a friend who's leaving next week. We had a nice dinner at an Italian place in District One, La Hostaria (black ink pasta, prawns the size of my fist), before wandering over to a little Irish pub called Sheridan's, located conveniently next door. Inside Sheridan's, it was dark and packed with a heavily western crowd. We were adding at least another dozen-plus westerners ourselves. A very loud two-person karaoke band was also smooshed in there. As I walked past, part of the single-file conga line of our party crowd, those in front of me were already heading back out. They'd explored around and found no room to sit. A helpful waitress made her way to the head of the line and started leading it behind the bar. I was still dutifully following the snake into the recesses of a place I thought I'd be walking right back out of again. That's just the way we were all parading around the place; there was certainly no room to turn around and walk back out without first following the whole winding route. Eventually I noticed we weren't leaving at all, but heading to the back, to the bathrooms. For a moment this was pretty surreal: "well, we’ve got room to sit in here." But of course the stairs to the next floor were back there too, and there was plenty of room for our parade up there. I liked it. It was the sort of brightly-lit clapboard dive all too rare on Hồ Chí Minh City's expatriate landscape--full of water damaged surfaces, sports television, and dart boards. We had a great night, and I even managed to get a small potted Zebrina pendula out of the guy who was moving away. Score. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-08-22T23:27:00.001+07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I have recently added a number of new things to my photo sharing page. They are all pictures taken shortly before last Christmas around downtown Hồ Chí Minh City, showing a selection of the decorations that were up at the time. Some of the decorations are pretty standard department store window dressing, I guess, but some things are a little bit stranger. For example, one large diorama erected near the popular park just southwest of Reunification Palace along Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai Street boasted a Christmas ark, with Buddhist iconography on the sails, piloted by Santa and his trusty German Shepherd.¹ Over in the same area, behind a family of snowmen smiling over a stack of wrapped packages, stood an interested giraffe.² In another picture, Santa's reindeer face off against a band of sneaky looking polar bears.³ Everywhere there were chunky Styrofoam icebergs and cool-looking blue paint, an attempt to mask the fact that the temperature was in the high eighties Fahrenheit and tropically sunny that Christmas Eve. There's just something special about Christmas among the green trunks of fruit-laden palms. (And I thought it seemed weird in the sunny semi-autumn of northern México.) Those photos begin here. Also, here is another Friday Matinee video posted today, my first direct ode to traffic in downtown Hồ Chí Minh City. Don't get too excited before clicking, all my movies are pretty half-baked. I've managed to get the image in focus and exposed correctly at long last, which represents some improvement over the videos here and here. The intersection I filmed is two blocks away from our apartment, looking north up Pasteur Street from the corner at Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai again. The oncoming traffic in the video is crossing into District One from Three. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-08-21T23:04:00.000+07:00

On August tenth I lamented the passing of a number of restaurants around downtown, expressed as some litmus for active residential status. Certainly, I hinted, we must really live here. We can now wax crotchety about the good old days. One of the restaurants I cited was the fabulous Alibaba, previously on Lê Thánh Tôn Street near the river. I'll quote me:

"...the manager informed us personally one night that the restaurant was relocating. We were given their new address on new business cards, a map on the back and everything."*

I'd meant to take pictures of that lima bean green shoebox restaurant, but never did. Shortly after our warning, a metal garage-type door was rolled over the entrance. Then the whole shoebox building was knocked down. There's nothing left but a pile of bricks. For a month the relocation banner hung over a neighboring business, but eventually even that disappeared. Since then, I've sought the new location printed on those cards. Addresses can be wonky here. I've looked in widening spirals pretending the business card map was printed upside-down or backwards, rationalizing other corners they might've meant. But Alibaba was gone. The logical corner is a creepy cement tenement, the surrounding area a dark patch between brightly lit main roads. Earlier tonight we ran into that manager hailing us from the open doorway of his new three-week-old Alibaba Restaurant location. Apparently, he'd been totally conned, red taped, bamboozled out of thousands in down payments and useless business cards. For months his business has been homeless. Now he's recently reopened many corners away from that creepy tenement. He seems to have missed us as much as we've missed him. It's a better litmus for residential status: even after months restaurant managers still recognize us from across the street. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-08-20T23:45:00.000+07:00

Last weekend we went to a new sushi restaurant. Well, it was new to me. Sunshine had eaten there once during some work thing. Usually Sunshine wants sushi once for every five times I do; so weeks passed before we got around to trying this place together. I don't remember the name, but it's in the northern part of District One between Hai Bà Trưng and the canal, a leafier and more interesting area nearer to our apartment than my standard sushi-lined street. We walked to the restaurant in the pretty tropical rain. My reason for bringing any of this up is because someone was recently telling me all about "the rule of four". According to this somebody, diners can expect accurate service for up to four items of any order. When ordering more than four items, the diner can usually count on the excess plates being problematic: wrong, late, or totally disappeared. I often scoff at generalizations like this, especially here, halfway though my blog post about them. That night, we ordered six things at this new sushi restaurant: pickled plum rolls, a rainbow maki, tempura udon and miso soups, thinly sliced boiled octopus, and spicy tobiko. I'm not sure drinks are included in the "rule of four", so I'm not counting ours. Of these six dishes we only received the first four. This was a good thing, straightening out my tendency toward excess in a new sushi joint. Frankly, that rainbow roll was way bigger than any I've swallowed before. All the food was wonderful. When we received the bill, the two missing items, octopus and wasabi-ed roe, had already been scratched off. At the end of this blog post I'm still skeptical about this weird dinner "rule", but this certainly seemed premeditated at the time. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-08-19T15:39:00.002+07:00

I've never considered myself a gym kind of guy. Not because I dislike gyms, really. Actually, they're great: they have clusters of intriguing iron slab wire-and-pulley machines like interactive robot insect sculptures. They have oddly out-of-context digital technology still vaguely reminiscent of bicycles and canoes. Ramped beltways approximate walking and running reasonably close to the television and AC knob. What's not to like? I even like the careful rows of dumbbells, resting like autopsied Russian dolls along their iron racks. So, yeah, I can wax about the gym. The problem isn't the gym itself, then, but the hours. I frequently want to use a gym after midnight, when gyms are frequently closed. No, that's not it, either. There are plenty of twenty-four hour gyms. I want to use a gym while it's closed, to play on the machines like monkey bars, incorrectly, without supervision or self-consciousness. So a paradox: I want a gym that's open at night, but, you know, also closed. The coolest thing happened to me Friday. Thursday I'd spoken with the building manager about maybe keeping our little gym open all night. Previously, it had closed at nine. Friday night its closed sign disappeared. The lights were all still off--there was no announcement or anything like that--but the doors were unlocked and the computers powering the treadmills were on. I used to run every night in DC. In HCMC it is a little more difficult: not only is it usually raining, but the sidewalks are potholed and cluttered with roots and people selling magazines off a blanket or bowls of soup warming over pots of fire. Obstacles. What I did instead, before Friday, was go up and down my building's twenty-story stairwell. Let me tell you the closed-but-open gym is way more fun. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-08-17T01:37:00.002+07:00

Last post about our new houseplants, I promise. I already mentioned that we got corn plants, some tropical green things, and a miniature rubber type tree. Well, there was also a large pot of white and purple orchids. Orchids? Aren't these notoriously difficult to manage? I looked it all up online. Turns out orchid husbandry isn't quite as notorious over here where orchids live. The difficulty is in keeping them warm enough, with enough light, for them to feel comfortably at home. They shouldn't be over- or under-watered either, thanks. Thus armed with valuable information, I set out to grow prize-winning flowers. Actually, I left town for a long weekend. By the time I returned, many of the flowers had fallen right off that plant. Its spongy little leaves were laying morosely along the level of the dirt, a smoggy green. Crap! I think it was because the building staff turned on the dining room AC while we were away, chilling the poor dear. So then Sunshine looked up how to save an orchid. We put it into the fluorescently lit bathroom, where steam from the shower kept its dirt moist and where it was sitting right there on the windowsill for brightness. I cut the deceased flowering runners off right at their nodes and wired them loosely up above the leafy mass in the pot. Three days later the leaves were the right green again, somewhat perkier, and the remaining flowers were staying put on their stems. I think that plant is going to live--but then the woman who'd been promised the other half of our friend's jungle came and took the orchids away (along with the mini rubber type tree). Oh well. I'm not sure I needed potted flora of such an action-packed variety, anyway. [Cavin]

Saturday

2008-08-16T01:29:00.002+07:00

I'm still talking about our plants. We hadn't already gotten any houseplants because shopping's difficult, here. The plant stores are out there, sure, many near the bridge to District Two. But the rigmarole of finding them, judging the health and value of their products and negotiating a price--then securing a cyclo driver to peddle the heavy things back to our apartment--was daunting enough to postpone. Recently several of our friends moved out of town in the first really big personnel rotation since we arrived in Vietnam. One of our departing friends had a house full of really large plants. She'd already promised a couple of them to someone else, but I got the balance. As a matter of fact, on the day movers packed up all her stuff, I got them all. Since she lived on the very next floor down, it was easy to have the movers just haul her plants upstairs to our apartment. This was two days before we left town on a four-day trip to Dalat. I discovered two hundred pounds of potted plants in the hallway first thing after waking up that day: five-foot corn plants, green tropical things with large variegated leaves, maybe a miniature rubber tree? I hauled them all into the apartment first thing. Some of them were too heavy to lift, so I slid them along the floor watching the carpet ripple under the weight. Our living room has jungled overnight. It looks like Where the Wild Things Are: here's the couch and bookshelves, there's the carpet and the Amazon. It sure didn't take much to provide dense foliage in this apartment. My job is to keep the rainforest alive and well until maybe September 2009, when our own movers will drop them off on another floor. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-08-15T23:16:00.000+07:00

Two weeks ago we finally got some plants. Buying plants is just one in a long list of paradoxes we strive to accomplish to keep us sane. Not that buying a plant is a paradox in itself, of course. Buying a plant is a nice way to beautify the home, regulate its atmosphere, and add a muddy, character-building daily routine to whatever else is going on. What is important here, to us, is the touch of life plants can add to the soulless and sharper image of our frequent corporate housing. We were once told the best thing to do when moving around every other year was to make each new house look as much like the last ones as possible--fooling the subconscious into believing the contents of these places constitute some kind of roots. Accordingly, we try to display our decorations in every house (three so far) by putting the same things in similar locations. This makes those locations seem more alike. Therefore, the newness of a place stops at the front door--or at least that's the theory. Plants are a part of this: we like to look around and see plants. We did it before. The paradox comes here: given the relatively universal restrictions on importing agricultural specimens, we have to lose these plants every single time we move away again. So we get them to make our house feel like our home, we nurture them for twenty months or so, and then we have to find a home for them. All so we can start the cycle again somewhere else (where? In Belgrade? Maybe Sarajevo?). It can be an emotionally abusive system for me, nursing little plants into big ones only to start again in the next place. Apparently it keeps me sane. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-08-14T17:37:00.003+07:00

I looked outside Tuesday afternoon to see something burning on the horizon. Smoke billowed from the District Four docks, snaking into the wind above the skyline and mingling with the ever-present monsoon. It was the thick blue-gray of a thunderhead in the humid distance. I watched the plume for a long time. It reminded me of war coverage: distant photos of conflict followed by close-up ramifications. It made me think of Georgia. Under a EU-brokered ceasefire, Russian troops pulled out of Gori today,* handing the battlefield back over to returning law enforcement officers and those who wish to photograph ramifications. The Russian army is still encamped around the countryside. It occupied the city as part of a push to liberate the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, a disputed region nonetheless located within the political frontiers of an ex-Soviet sovereignty. Gori is well outside this disputed zone. As is Georgia's capital Tbilisi, the target of several Russian bombs. It’s all pretty ironic: Russia feels it has the ethical advantage, but in light of Chechnya that's another way of saying Russia feels the ethical right to act contradictorily in regarding territorial interests. Ah, the nineteenth century--how we'd nearly forgotten ye. Riding Tuesday's train of thought: did you know that Sunshine and I were entertaining the idea of applying for a job in Tbilisi? Initially this seemed to have been quashed by the Russians. But this problem will stabilize into a contained simmer, a cold war if you will, before we’d get there. Aren't we entertaining the thought of working in Kosovo? It's either the world's newest country or a separatist Albanian enclave of Serbia, depending on who you talk to. Someday maybe even South Ossetia will have its very own positions to apply for, smoke on the horizon notwithstanding. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-08-12T17:11:00.002+07:00

I haven't been watching the Olympics. We tuned-in last Saturday to no avail. I was hoping that, being so nearby, continuous Asian coverage might allow me access to those events most frequently ignored by big network TV back home--like shooting, judo, and fencing. Really, US network television, do you actually think viewers prefer watching people running around an oval? I would rather watch a swordfight. So I tried; Women's Sabre was scheduled all day Saturday. But Vietnamese television is often wonky, and we were unable to find any Olympics coverage that day. It's normal: sometimes scheduled entertainment events, even nationally televised ones, don't actually end up on TV. We've anticipated live programming before, only to watch it go dark after fifteen minutes and be replaced by some dubbed soap opera in progress. The Olympics aren't much of a loss, really. I remember being excited about them when I was a kid, when they only happened every four years. Back then, the rampant and jingoistic politicizing didn't seem so insufferable; but that's only because I was still a kid. The jingoism has always been, at best, insufferable. This year, China is using this event to affect a posture of benevolence while sweeping many realities under its exportable carpets. The world has taken a lazy stab at protesting Chinese social transgressions and geopolitical avarice by protesting the Olympics themselves. While I write this, the guys who work in our apartment building's lounge are cheering for some very small women lifting very large barbells--and it's pretty infectious, I'll admit. But on another channel, CNN is reporting the advancing Russian invasion of Georgia, a reciprocal aggression in the South Ossetian tug-of-war, a long-awaited outburst which no doubt waited for the world's attention to focus on people running around an oval. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-08-11T22:17:00.002+07:00

I started trying to tell a story yesterday but then wildly digressed. I'll try again: Friday evening Sunshine was doing important job-related stuff so I was on my own for dinner. Often, I take these opportunities to further explore the row of Japanese restaurants along Lê Thánh Tôn Street near the Sài Gòn River. But I'd already done that--she'd also worked late on Thursday. Many of the places I used to go without her have closed down. That's the subject of yesterday's digression. But Friday I decided to eat at Au Parc again. Au Parc is a wonderful place about three blocks from our house. I mention it a lot. If I seem a little ho-hum about being there again Friday night, well it's just because I eat there about three times a week. I start to feel guilty I'm not trying new things more often. But dinner there is always so super. Lately, one of the waiters has adopted me as an unofficial English language tutor. Maybe that’s going too far. This only started because he'd made errors in his workbook. He'd discovered the right answers already, he just needed to know why there were right. He questioned me for about twenty minutes before taking my order. His English Language exam is coming up soon. Since then, he's always got a couple questions handy whenever I arrive. But I'm not a very good unofficial English Language tutor. Friday, when talking about the book I was reading--Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories--I tried to explain what fables were. He asked if they were like metallurgy stories. How dumb am I? He actually had to type something into his mobile phone translator before I understood. Yes, I told him, like mythology--only about animals instead of gods. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-08-10T23:27:00.000+07:00

Friday evening Sunshine was doing important job-related stuff so I was on my own for dinner. I used to go to the restaurant down the road called Bún Việt (and later Deli Saigon) on those nights. It was one of my favorites. I'd go there when Sunshine worked because she didn't love it as much. Then for some reason, without notice, Bún Việt closed. This happened just before I flew to the states in April. A new place cropped up in the same spot by the time I'd flown back again. I'm not so interested in the new place. These mysterious closings happen all the time. Favorite places like the Vietnamese restaurant Miss Kim, or pan-Asian Green Chili, or the MGM coffee shop, have all disappeared. Some of these have been replaced with new restaurants, others are just cavernous and cluttered gaps where buildings used to be. Luna D'Autunno, our first local Italian restaurant, and my favorite, closed to remodel months ago. By now I'm no longer really banking on their eventual return. At the Indian restaurant Alibaba, also my favorite, the manager informed us personally one night that the restaurant was relocating. We were given their new address on new business cards, a map on the back and everything. But no restaurant has ever opened on the indicated corner. It's all very strange. I need to remember that this happens all the time. The first two restaurants we ever tried to find in our neighborhood, based on high recommendations from our guidebook, had mysteriously disappeared by the time we'd moved in (one, the Indian restaurant Tandoor, merely moved--we did finally find that one). Yeah, so places change. It's just a side-effect of actually living here that we can register, and become disappointed by, these normal cycles. [Cavin]