vietnam

Feet scrubbing at sunrise Friendly lady with common tooth condition

Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) was loud and busy with motor bikes and street bargaining. My travel mate, Mark was the only Waki (non-Vietnamese) I had seen for awhile. Whether we were strolling down the street, having pho for breakfast at a street stand, or having a Tiger beer in a bar, we became a central attraction expressed by smiles, giggles, and stares.  If we asked one person a question, we were then surrounded by six people all wanting to help.

There was a miracle happening every moment there.  When our diver took us on his motorbike (slightly bigger than a moped) through the crazy crowded streets, it was a ride of faith as two-way traffic merged with us head-on.  Women in long colorful Asian dresses with dainty shoes powered through the traffic on motorbikes. Families with the father driving, four year old on the handles bars and on the backseat, mother breastfeeding the baby.  The turtles of traffic were the many skinny men who directed their bicycles, front loaded beyond capacity with plumbing supplies, a pallet of slate or brick, vegetables, or six people.  Nuns and monks rode tandem in their attire.  90 year old women with cone looking straw hats looked comfortable on the back of motorbikes.  Many riders looked like bandits with their faces covered by masks for better air.  All this was set to the chaotic buzz of small motors and high-pitched horns.

Our last couple of Tiger beers in Saigon were consumed at a bar where we were once again met with many curious smiles and stares.  One man kept holding up his mug of beer in my direction saying, “Tam-tam!”…A Vietnamese chugging game that I declined...American woosy.  From the other end of the bar we heard breaking glass from a full-force bar fight that broke out. Pinwheel punches were thrown between two men and everyone left their chairs to participate.  We watched drinkers grab beer bottles for potential weapons.  Another grabbed a 2x4 with dangerously sharp looking nails.  Our worried waiter rushed to our table to tell us it was time to go. Four beers = $1.20.

Rickshaws still in use

Smoking a cigar on a hot afternoon

Ladies from the market

While we awaited our 24 hour train ride to Hoi An to begin, we were informed that we were not bring firecrackers or corpses and we were not to stick our head out the window since kids throw stones at passing trains.  Once underway, we were inside a deafening drum and had to yell to be heard.  The lush jungle and conical hat-wearing farmers irrigating their crops blurred by.  There were 6 classes of seats, ranging from hard upright seats to AC sleeping cars.  In the morning, Vietnamese music was piped over the loud speaker let us know that Pho (soup) would be served soon.

In Hoi An, our $15 hotel was amazingly clean and beautiful.  Our first morning there, I woke at 5am to explore the new town, tiptoed past the hotel staff sleeping in the lobby, and stepped into the cool morning air.  In a shanty neighborhood, many of the houses had straw walls and I spied many glowing round charcoal blocks burning inside quart-sized stoves.  Motorbikes still slept at that hour, and all was quiet except the universal soft sound of morning mumbles and groans.  An old man in pajamas slid open his flimsy bedroom door to my alleyway, dipped a cup into the bucket and poured water on his baldhead. He gave me a warm smile.  A bicycle passed by with more glowing embers in his portable stove.  Frogs and lizards scurried from my path.

I squatted by the water to watch old men do yoga to a Viet-aerobics music tape.  Children surrounded me, fired Vietnamese questions at me and laughed when I said “Sin Chow” (hello).  Funny American. The old men invited me to coffee and tea.  In my limited Pictionary Vietnamese, I asked La, the oldest man, about his long pinky fingernail. He demonstrated as he dug his nail into his ear, pulled out a piece of wax, and flung it.  While I waited for my strong shot of coffee to cool, another man took his dirty finger with gunk under the nail, dipped it into my drink, swirled it around, and let me know it was the perfect temperature to drink up.  He also offered his daughter for marriage.  I gathered that “Boom-boom” meant we will make babies. Another man with a mole growing exceptionally long white hairs studied me silently.  Before smoking, La dipped his cigarette foam filter into his tea and blew the tobacco end to make bubbly goo come out of the filter.  For the next two mornings I exercised with them at dawn, followed by cigarettes, coffee, and more marriage proposals from the growing crowd.  I guess that many gathered at this out of the way cafe due to the American spectacle.  Of conversational interest were age, work, and family and my two family photos made for fun show-and-tell.  Those moments were excellent opportunities for me to learn more Vietnamese, but when I attempted a phrase, the 20 early risers all fell silent, then mumbled among themselves, then went into hysterics. I had no idea what was so funny, but I couldn’t help but laugh too.  Later I learn that I addressed La as a woman.  To make things worse, my “yum” comment on the coffee meant “horny” in Vietnamese.

Women from the restaurant where they taught me some of their secret recipes

Later in the day Mark and I went to the beach to have women market us seedy treats, drinks, fruit, books, manicures, pedicures, and foot massages.  We were addressed from the same script each time, “Hello!  Where are you from?  What is your name?  How long do you stay here?  You buy from me?  How about this one?  Same-same but different.  Cheap cheap.  No?  Why not?  My luck is bad today, you help me.  You pay in dong or dollars?”

Random events from a street stroll...The garbage truck tinkled down the street sounding like the ice cream man.  A motorbike pulled a trailer with what looked like 1500# of ice blocks.  A bicyclist hauled seven 200# live pigs (each oinker in a basket...how they got them in the baskets is still a mystery).  At 8:45am, music blared over the loudspeakers followed by the Vietnamese news at 9am.  Police boxes on street corners are for anonymous reports from citizens.  I imagined someone writing, “Mr. Cong ate my dog without asking and didn’t share it with me.”  I am told that the Vietnamese can have a toe cut off for trouble with the law. While Mark bought a new guitar for $20 (which we later learned was twice as much as was necessary), I spied a small flip-flop shop next door where six men made them by hand from used rubber, fabric, glue, and straw.  Every other storefront made clothes there. When we went to have some clothing made we were overwhelmed by the fabric choices, but were comforted by a bonus massage as we carried the burden of making up our mind.  I saw many old women with black teeth smoking cigars and picking their noses with no concern of being watched.  We stopped for a sip of fresh sugar cane juice and lime. Many focused women scurried by with a pole over shoulders and two balanced hanging baskets on either end filled with water, fruit, grass, vegetables, or garbage.  So many smiles.  Many toothless.  Craftswomen outside their shops made lanterns, bowls, paintings, or baskets. Bottles of wine with whole cobra (for good health).  New Northface backpacks (normally $200 to $400) sold for $12 to $20.  I bought one to accommodate our growing acquisitions.  Angelic looking schoolgirls bicycled by in their traditional academic flowing white dresses.  A woman squatted on the sidewalk to scour her feet with a scrub brush. Another old woman hiked up her skirt, squatted by the dock, and urinated in public. Men held hands in public.  Roosters crowed frequently.  Under some trees cicadas were so loud, we had to yell to be heard.  More motorbikes passed by carrying 20 live chickens, another with 30 live ducks (they sometimes cut the legs off so they don’t run away), another bicyclist peeked over the top of an enormous piece of furniture.  A young man gracefully jumped of the back of a motor bike traveling at 15 or 20 mph...in flip-flops.  Gas sold in used 16oz 7-up bottles on the side of the road.  We have stepped back in time.

Mark entertaining our Cyclo Drivers Old Woman living on her boat

When we first got to Hoi An, a 20-year-old named Moon wanted to be our guide.  “Maybe later” we told him.  That night, the next morning, the next afternoon, and the next day he patiently waited outside our hotel for later to come.  Once we adopted our guide and saw some incredible pagodas and temples, we were invited into Moon’s family’s home for his father’s homemade rice whisky (mixed with mushrooms, mysterious roots, rosehip, and star anise).  I see why they love their whisky and I am careful to not say "yum".  Coagulated blood cake, cow intestine, spicy fish, unknown greens, pig heart & stomach came to the table with more on the way until we begged Moon’s mother to stop making food.  After dinner, Moon’s father got out his Vietnamese 2-string instrument and a bow to play us a beautiful ancient Asian tinny tune.  Next, Mark strummed out some Beatles for us and the place went crazy with tapping chopsticks on bowls and cups. We were welcomed unconditionally as family.

Things I learned from our time with his family...People generally marry at 25, but if they wait until 35, they probably won’t get married.  I am told that the number one sport in Vietnam is rifle shooting, followed by running and soccer. The worst thing you can say to someone has something to do with smelly ass, but the words are so bad that not even Moon would explain it any further.  Generally people don’t take vacations.  No one has heard of cheese or president Bush.  Few ever leave their hometown.  If the next big town is 20 miles away, many may never see it. Although it was near 100 degrees, Vietnamese do not wear shorts. At the pagodas I was turned away due to my shorts and have learned to plan ahead by packing long pants for these times

Charcoal brick production

I had removed my shoes before entering their house, so when I walked barefoot into the clean bathroom with the freshly sprayed wet floor, I stepped over the water sandals and squatted over the hole. Later puzzled, I called to Moon to ask where the toilet paper was, but I found they use the hose hanging on the wall. Before I could attempt to use the hose, he had already run off to the store to buy TP for my American ass.  While I waited, I looked to my bare feet on the wet floor (and not in the sandals) and the system became clear.

Organic shallot processing

One of the best meals of my life was presented to me in Vietnam.  I don’t say that lightly.  Outside the restaurant, the Grandmother, Aunt, cousins, and daughter of the restaurant owner laughed at my interest in their chopping and slicing of vegetables.  The owner saw my excitement, sat to feed me, then motioned to her family to bring three more delicacies to our table (we already had six different dishes).  My serious food vibe connection with the owner concluded with a personal hand washing from her.  Moon translated that if I wanted to learn how to cook from her she would show me.

The next morning at 6am the owner and I left for the market to buy fresh meats (always slaughtered at 5am) and vegetables.  She strutted around the market in her red & white striped dress with fancy shoes, while her short male helper carried whatever she pointed to.  A third party told me that the hundreds of people in the market regard her as having the best restaurant in the city.  I began my day with a culinary rock star.  The details of those next five hours of learning from her family could fill a book, but are Top Secret.  Suffice to say, my food world has exploded in a beautiful way.

Later, during a five-hour bus ride along the winding coastal highway, our bus stopped for us to stretch and nibble. It was there I met an old, seemly stand-off-ish woman. Her son interpreted my words to her.

“You have the same eyes as my daughter” I said.

She stared at me with her crossed, milky eyes, softened, held my hand, and smiled.

“How old are you?” she asked through her son.

When I told her, she energetically pointed to me and her son told me that since I was 36 and he was 35, he was my Vietnamese brother and I was immediately welcomed as family.  When I boarded the bus, I looked to her to find she already had her eyes fixed on me.  Our five-minute meeting concluded with a wave goodbye and an open heart.  

School kids marching

After that long bus ride I felt grubby and needed a shave.  In a hole in the wall I eased back with my barber’s straight razor and girlie pictures on the ceiling. When I open my eyes halfway through I found the shave shop was filled with eight people watching this event.  A shave like that was an exercise in trust and it was important for me to be still, but was difficult since meanwhile some in the crowd were fascinated and played and pulled on my leg hair.  When the shave was over, he rubbed a refreshing oil into my face, massaged my scalp, knocked the top of my head with some kind of mallet, then put on a headlamp and set out a towel on my chest with metal & bamboo tools. He scraped deep inside my ears, wiped wax on my hands, and used a feather bamboo thing to fluff my ear canal until I was moaning like my dog Ebon.  The curious group imitated my sounds and laughed. When I sat up dazed, he grabbed my head to crack my neck, but that was where I had to draw the line. Seventy cents.

Expansive brilliant, green & wet farmlands stretched out on either side of our road for miles. In the muggy fields, peasant women in conical hats and colorful long sleeves tended to basil, onion, rice, corn, or mint and collected snails to sell at market. In the fields, many makeshift cloth flags represented burial sites for field workers who had died while farming there.  We learned that after the body decomposed, the respective family honors the relative with a “Bone-Washing Ceremony” where bones are dug up from the field, washed, and a reburied elsewhere.

We sat with one family and nibbled fresh cucumber and sipped Wiki (rice whisky) with long moments of comfortable silence. I wanted to ask many things, but to get my question and their answer understood could take an hour, so I found myself considering which topic I really wanted to take on before breaking the silence.

“Do Vietnamese dogs howl when they hear a siren?” I asked.

They didn’t know what I was talking about. I acted out the sound of the siren followed by the sound of my howling dog. They laughed at the performance, but explained that there weren’t any sirens, and dogs that howl get eaten.

“How do you deal with your kids when they say they are bored?” I asked.

The husband and wife conferenced, then explained that the kids were never bored because they always have something to do. I looked around to see a daughter who swept the floor, another brought us water, kids outside played soccer with a coconut and winged flip-flops aggressively to knock over a Coke can 20 feet away. Minimal material possessions.

“How old are your children?” I asked.

12, 11, 10, 5, and 4 they told me. I nodded that I understood. I made sounds like the beat of a song: Three quick beats with clapping, then I panted like I needed a breather, then two more rapid clapping beats. They laughed tears and pointed to me like I nailed it.

A family who invited us in for homemade whisky

We explored their small house and saw their hardwood beds with thin straw mats, unpainted concrete walls, no doors, a glowing shrine with flowers, incense, & pictures of dead relatives, wiring draped from room to room, and the neighbor’s sleeping lofts for when the river floods.

On another 15-hour leg of our train journey, we paid for hard bunks, which were covered with straw mats.  My top bunk with 2' clearance was in the company of five other equally cramped bunks in a room smaller than my bathroom.  The fast oscillating ceiling fan was a dangerous weapon so I carefully timed my climb in and out of my perch. To avoid bruising my delicate Western body, I was an uncomfortable rotating kabob through the night. Passing over metal bridges in the night, made the already loud train double in thunderous volume. Waking multiple times a night confused and panicked, I scrambled to say good-bye to the world. In the day, we watched out our window at the countryside and into people’s backyards for hours like it was a great movie.

Cyclo carrying seven 200# pigs

After a long day of hot touring in Hue with our cyclo drivers, we were taken to their favorite restaurant off the beaten path. A hot bubbling pot of meat and spices immediately came to our table, fresh French bread, large unidentified green leaves, sliced green banana, four other smaller mystery greens, another plate of fresh sliced meat, pungent fermented shrimp sauce, yellow rice, a pot of rice whisky, and a plate of fresh lemongrass to chew on, unpeeled garlic, and a medicinal sliced spicy root.  We were shown to roll up the meat in leaves and dip into the sauce and bubbling brew.  There was not much wheat in the Asian diet, but because of the French colonization years ago, these baguettes have become popular up north. There was not much meat on the bones and I studied our new friends to see the custom for getting it off the bone. I never mastered the chopstick pinch, bite, rip, and suck method.

"Cow?" I asked.  I made cow sounds.

"Hoong" our drunken driver said.

"Pig?" I asked.  “Oink, oink!”

People in the restaurant gave me a shocked look.

"Woof!" he says.

Gulp.

He showed me the hand-written menu for the catch of the day. There were six different types of dog being served that night. I asked where the dogs from a dog farm.
 
"Restaurant buys from people who don't want dog anymore." Bad dog.

When I first arrived in Vietnam, I was fearful from guidebook and expert warnings to avoid consuming the ice, fresh greens, meat, or anything that wasn’t boiled or peeled by me personally. And with that food caution, I also had my Costa Rican robbery lens on. After that meal, I laughed with Mark at how far we had come since our arrival with trusting our surroundings: Our backpacks in the cyclo outside the restaurant, ice in our glasses, and fresh leafy greens & Benji in our belly.

School girls ride by like angel bandits

More observations…the many piercing motorbike horns seemed to be part communication and part rooster. Museums and ruins had the same system: Buy the ticket, walk twenty feet and have it ripped. I was told on more than one occasion that I looked like a movie star…one said Elvis and was giddy to be around me. Beer can be as cheep as 21¢, but one steamy night on the 5th floor of a building in Hanoi we laid down top dong ($1) for the view and cool breeze. Napkins at our table were 3” x 3” pieces of recycled paper. In our travels we have made friends with Australians, Dutch, Canadians, French, and English.  A Dutch saying we learned is, "Just act normal, that's crazy enough." On voting day, 80% turn out to elect 50% women into office. The streets were filled with cheerful voting music from the loudspeaker for people dressed up to vote. Vietnamese were curious if I owned a car and gasped with envy when I admitted that I had two cars. I realized my seven-passenger van was really a 14-passenger vehicle in Vietnam. Graveyards looked like colorful miniature golf cities with swastika logos. Men smoke bamboo hookah water pipes on the street corners. I bought a 3.5¢ packet of their strong farmer’s tobacco, took an ambitious, brave hit from one man’s pipe, coughed violently and nearly passed out. He laughed and charged me nothing…I was shaken for the rest of that day.

Storm front hits the farm.

We learned that the Vietnamese are notorious copycats. Where other cultures might wish to distance themselves from their competition, the Vietnamese seem to like the company of a competitor. One street might have one storefront after another that sells the same things like underwear / socks, silk, Pho, karaoke, CD’s, or shoes. Among the funny misspelling in Vietnam, one place called “Fancy Pan Travel”, which we guessed was supposed to be Fancy Pants. Perhaps due to Fancy Pan’s success, many stores along that street had names like Fancy Pan II, Fancy Pin, Fancy Pann, etc. Another example was a deaf / mute who opened a restaurant and hired only deaf & mute employees. That place became so popular that two different competitors opened on either side of the original and also hired only deaf & mute workers.
 
On a dirt schoolyard in the country we saw 200 kids in white shirts with red neck bows marching in many organized circles to one child’s steady beat on a large drum. I cautiously tiptoed in, but all hell broke loose when 50% of the kids ran toward me yelling and smiling. I was taken to their concrete classroom where the noise echoed and amplified. Strange, but there was no adult anywhere, so Mark introduced me as the new English teacher. Later I learned that several times a day, the teachers took breaks together at the local restaurant and left the well-behaved kids to march.

Kids wave flags on Voting Day

On our flight home, we had a 12-hour layover in Korea and Asiana Airlines gave us a hotel room. We could have eaten off the parking lot leading to the hotel. Inside, the manager and front desk lady bowed to us and sent us to our room to rest. When we opened the room, the entry lights automatically turned on and a pre-programmed Korean voice welcomed us. The Jetson’s-style hotel room provided us room service, free lunch, slippers, a heated floor, huge TV, DVD/VCR, porno, cup sterilizer, hot/cold filtered water, refer, humidifier, a welcome basket (wooden brush, comb, cologne/perfume, gel and mousse), remote control for pleasant halogen lighting in different five sections of the room, a shoehorn, a shoe brush, a fancy couch, heat/AC, heavy frosted glass doors, heated marble floor in the bathroom, Jacuzzi, an eight headed shower (for a full body clean), beautiful fixtures, heated toilet seat (with control panel for bidet’s water temperature control, water pressure, male/female spray, and ass dryer). Never seen anything like it.

I recommend Vietnam as a safe, eye-opening peek outside of our Western world.

Water buffalo, common in the countryside