Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]