I'm This Far Out of the Boat

My Sunday drive is a motorbike journey through the mountains and hills of the Vietnam countryside.  It's not what you may be thinking.  I don't live in the jungle.  It's the dry season in Da Lat, and often I get the feeling I'm in old Mexico or somewhere else, because I can't believe that I'm here.  I cruise through the little towns and back roads, past the everyday Vietnamese fellaheen, past the ethnic minorities and their children, past the man sipping coffee in a shady cafe along the side of the road.  I relax, lean back and cruise along dusty roads out of the city and away from the busyness of modern urban life.  The wind smells of flowers from the numerous farms and greenhouses that blot the hills like so many dots from a Seurat painting.  There are children walking home for lunch carrying their schoolbooks in little knapsacks.  All the while the sun beats down on this December morn reminding me of Spring somewhere else.  I picture it all from the back of a horse in some spaghetti western, except no gun fights, no nothing.

sipping coffee at a roadside cafe

old church across the road from a much newer and more impressive church

minority town and horses

local soccer pitch

family walking away

Christmas In The Tropics

It's a little tough to convince myself it's Christmas when it's 70 and sunny.  They don't really celebrate it here, but they do like to decorate.  It doesn't feel much like Christmas this year.

Banh Mi Thit Nuong

Banh mi means sandwich.  Thit means pork.  Nuong means grilled.  I would have to describe my favorite food in Vietnam as a crazy good barbecue pork sandwich.  They do a surprisingly large amount of cooking over wood coals and that's how this sandwich starts.  You then take some hero sized french bread and smother it in chilies, chili sauce, soy sauce, and meat sauce that's been simmering all day.  Follow this by throwing on some mint leaves, cilantro, shredded papaya, sliced cucumbers, and some fried onion bits.  Finally add the pork and place the whole thing over the coals.  Eat while warm.  I eat one of these just about every day from this particular stand.

Teachers For Vietnam

The organization I work for is Teachers for Vietnam.  Our mission statement is "Teachers for Vietnam is dedicated to building bridges between the peoples of Vietnam and the United States through higher education."  This organization has paid for all my travel expenses and made my arrangements here in Vietnam.  They have been able to set me up with a terrific post in Da Lat.  Yet I'm still a little surprised they sent me here.  I have been working on building bridges by showing my students Hollywood movies, teaching them to trash talk in sports, and playing American football with them.  Still Da Lat University, the school I work for, seems to be pleased with my performance.  


My average day here in Vietnam usually starts off with some early morning teaching, class starts here at seven.  I then grab some lunch, usually a barbeque pork sandwich (banh mi thit nuong in Vietnamese).  I might then watch some cable television or hang out and drink coffee with the other teachers.  Maybe I'll then hang out downtown at the market, and eat again.  At night I usually either watch a movie, go to a bar, or just watch some soccer.  Most of my day involves eating and enjoying the perfect weather here in Da Lat.  I live in constant Spring time.  The relaxed life here is quite the contradiction from New York.

This street is the backpacker section of Da Lat, and this is about as busy as it ever gets.  Recently the head of the board of directors for Teachers for Vietnam, John Dippel, came to visit me and meet with the university.  I had the task of showing him around Da Lat.  Within the city itself I have to admit there isn't as much to do as advertised.  Most people spend their days relaxing and drinking coffee.  The real action occurs outside of the city, since it's surrounded by many waterfalls, mountains, bike trails, lakes, and valleys.  I've known John Dippel for quite a few years now and we spent most of our time walking around the city, enjoying the weather, and talking about the economic/political future of Vietnam.  Vietnam is rapidly changing and growing in its infrastructure.  Vietnam was one of the few economies that showed growth in the last year.  They are steadily modernizing and becoming an economic power in Southeast Asia, all the while reestablishing its cultural identity beyond the Vietnam War. It puts your work in a different perspective when you realize you are contributing to the economic and cultural revival of a nation.   I might be overstating my importance.

School Scenes

I'm squinting because it's incredibly bright during the day.

the library

I always want to set up my speakers in here and blast CCR's "Fortune Son."

the multimedia room where I show movies

The view from school...

Buddha in the distance

The greenhouses here are filled with roses.

The close of the day.

In Vietnam, They're Thankful For Teachers

The pay in America may be significantly better, but here in Vietnam we have Teacher's Day.  It's a big holiday here.  My students sent me emails, text messages, and one even gave me a present in celebration of Teacher's Day.  On the eve of Teacher's day the department of Foreign Languages had a ceremony for us where the students presented us with gifts and preformed for us.  They mostly did song and dance routine to Vietnamese style hip hop.  One group of students preformed a new twist on a traditional play in Vietnam.  It was all in Vietnamese so I understood none of it.  I think the highlight of the evening for me was some of the more traditional dancing they did.  There was one called the Peacock Dance.  There is a picture below.  Whenever they have these events they always ask the teachers to offer some performance, usually they want us to sing.  Some of my colleagues sung a religious song.  I volunteered to read a poem, I chose "The road not taken" by Robert Frost.  The following day the department took us all out for lunch.  The way these lunches usually run is that since I'm one of two Americans who drink, I have to sit with the male Vietnamese faculty and drink many, many toasts with them.

Remnants of a War- Saigon Part 5

In Ho Chi Minh City there is the War Remnants Museum, formerly the museum of American War Crimes.  It's basically a whole museum devoted to horrors of war.  They of course only offer one side of things, because this is a museum of propaganda.  This does not mean the realities of war presented here are not true, they are just not presented in the full context of what the Vietnam War means to America or Vietnam itself.  I have the luxury of living in the southern part of the country, that still remembers a better day.  I'm not going to offer some commentary on the correctness of war, I've never been in the military and it would just be arrogant of me to do so.  I will say that war takes a toll on all those involved, and that for all our turmoil the world is a better place because of the United States.  Thank God for these United States of America.

"The Price is Wrong, Bob"

I showed my students the movie Happy Gilmore, a cinematic gem.  They seem to really respond to people being physically injured or people behaving in a silly manner.  I had been showing them action movies, because those are the movies where dialogue matters the least.  I think their favorite scene may have been watching Adam Sandler get beaten up by Bob Barker.  Even without knowing who he is, they loved it.  They like the action scenes, but tend to turn off when it comes to plot points.  In this way I think we're all the same.  They also love children's movies, and I think this is kind of a kid's movie.  Maybe adult size children, such as myself and most of my friends.

P.S. I don't care how old he is, I bet Bob Barker is tough.

Just a Good Stretch of the Legs- Saigon Part 4

The Vanilla Gorilla and I took a page out of the Lonely Planet guidebook and took a walking tour of Saigon.  It starts off at Pham Ngu Lao park which is right on the border of the backpacker area and ends at the Jade  Emperor Pagoda, which is situated in the heart of urban, non-touristy Saigon.  The tour altogether is about 5km, but with the heat and all the sights it'll feel about double that.  The first real stop on the tour is Ben Thanh Market, which includes everything from live fish to every type of clothing one might want to buy.  From there you pass a statue of Tran Nguyen Hai, who from what I can look up is famous for being the first person in Vietnam to use carrier pigeons.  I could be wrong.  Then its off to the Fine Arts Museum which besides having a lot of contemporary art inspired by the war, has a nice collection of medieval art from Vietnam.  Afterwards we walked through the open air street market, which is filled with little shops serving food, fresh vegetables, and beer.  We walked by the Municipal Theatre and on to the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City.  After lunch we saw the War Remnants Museum, which was formerly the Museum of American War Atrocities.  I will comment on this in my final entry on Saigon.  We went to the Reunification Palace, and the brick Cathedral of Notre Dame;we didn't go inside either of them.  We quickly saw the old central post office, which is in the French colonial style.  We took a chance to explore the Botanical Gardens/Zoo in Saigon.  After some walking we finished at the Jade Emperor Pagoda which is tucked away in some unassuming back alley.  That was pretty much our walking tour of Saigon.

We Have Monkey- Saigon Part 3

There is a zoo in Saigon, and no it doesn't have pandas.  It does have monkey.  It seems strange to me that someone would keep an animal at the zoo and also eat it at the dinner table, but then again I bet monkey is delicious.  The Saigon Zoo doesn't start off too impressively.  It's in the middle of a park and it's not as organized as I am used to in the states.  The first thing you see is a couple of ostriches and giraffes tucked away in a pen.  From there you can't really see any of the other pens or animals and your not even  sure they have anything else at first.  It's a bit of a walk to find the other pens, and unlike I expected, they seem to have no one monitoring any of the pens.  Once you start walking though you can see a plethora of wild jungle cats from all around Southeast Asia.  This includes the wild jungle cat, which looks exactly like a normal house cat, except with leopard spots and claws to tear your face off.  The zoo has a raised walkway above some African grazing animals, wildebeests, gazelles, and others.  The zoo is populated with many, many bird cages filled with lots of large exotic looking birds.  They have African elephants, a couple of hippos and even a white rhino.  Which makes me wonder how the zoo here was able to attain a white rhino.  The stars of the show have to be the lions and tigers.  They are kept in a different area from the other wild cats and even have bigger cages.  What was interesting to see was the drunk trying to get the male lion to strike at his hand.  Unlike zoos in America where the big cats would be in a pit and you might be ten to twenty feet back from them, at the zoo in Saigon you're within arm's reach of the cage and there is no one around to tell you that lions are large dangerous animals.  So after throwing a rock to wake the lion up, the drunk proceeded to bang on the metal bars of the cage in an attempt to get the lion to strike at him.  In my mind I am still picturing the lion eating his hand.  The zoo was fun.

Pretty much the only thing separating these animals and us were these electric fences.  Check out Tommy's blog- http://novahongkong.blogspot.com. 

Vietnamese 70's Rock Cover Band? Check. Magician? Check. Crazy Drunk Australians? Check. Halloween on the Beach? Priceless.

It's a little unusual celebrating a holiday like Halloween in a foreign country.  Apparently not everyone dresses up like a luchador and begs for candy.  I wish I could have found a luchador costume.  Instead I dressed up as a guy who had just been beaten up, torn shirt, and fake blood galore.  I spent Halloween in Nha Trang, a beach resort city.  It's really touristy and normally wouldn't have been my bag, but I was there visiting friends.  I went to a party at the Sailing Club, a luxurious bar that sits right on the beach, and caters mostly to foreigners.  On the beach they had tables set up, with a dance floor, and a stage for the house band.  They played mostly covers of seventies rock tunes, and I was kind of having my Martin Sheen at the USO moment from Apocalypse Now, but it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun.  The place was packed and I was hanging with a group of people that included both locals and expats.  They had a costume contest.  I voted for the chubby guy in the bikini, because lets face it he deserved it for having to look ridiculous all night.  He didn't win though.  The Vietnamese seem to value scary over funny and creative.  We also had a group of dancers preform "Thriller," which while I hate Michael Jackson as a person, this is a great song.  Following this was Dragon Dancing and a magician who had come in from Ho Chi Minh City especially for this night.  I stayed out till like three in the morning so this was the latest night I've had since being in Vietnam, so it was a lot of fun. There is of course the unusual contrast between natural beach paradise and constructed tourist trap in Nha Trang to contend with.  I dressed up as a guy who had just been beat up, Aileen in the picture is the Black Dahlia, and Mai was Waldo from the books.

New York Yankees World Champions!

"It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers' fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home." Ken Burns' documentary, Baseball. 


As they say, hope springs eternal and in four months, thirty teams will lace em up again. They'll play through slumps, injuries, and those moments when the season seems to drag on, but they'll play, because this our game, and the feeling the Yankees' have right now is what we all hoped for, when we first put bat to ball.  The Yankees are world champions.

Bats in the Belfry- Saigon Part 2

About an hour and a half outside of Saigon you will find a unique and disturbing piece of war history, the Cu Chi Tunnels.  There's some irony in what these things become when tourism and spectacle overrun our sense of good taste.  That said, here is my description of things.

In traveling to the Cu Chi tunnels you leave the bustle of the city for the peace and calm of the flat countryside.  The time of day, the heat, and the lack of industry conspire to keep the sleepy country villages sleepy.  Hammocks and hazy cafes line the street, and I find myself tired from a long bus ride not really watching anything at all.  About an hour into the trip we stopped at a handicapped-crafts store.  This is a workshop for the handicapped to work with lacquer, paint, and wood carving.  They create beautiful and cheap works of art for tourists.  We arrive and observe the war zone turned tourist complex.  The first thing they ask you to do is watch their educational video on the tunnels and the war.  Afterwards you assemble into groups according to language and your tour-guide explains the intricacies of ambush jungle warfare.  They show you multiple types of traps and pitfalls, clever inventions of injury and death.  You can see 20ft craters, the leftovers of B-52 bombing missions.  The highlight of the park are the tunnels.  If you are brave enough and small enough you can crawl through the darkness.

Originally an Australian tourist had volunteered to go down in the tunnels, but after entering he quickly thought better of himself.  Myself and two of Tommy's friends then decided to crawl the thirty feet through this section of tunnel.  Before entering the tour guide mentioned casually that there might be bats in the tunnel.  For whatever reason, maybe it was the tone of his voice, maybe it was the casual manner in which said it, but none of us believed there would actually be bats down there.  I was in the rear, and in the dark.  Hayes had only a little flashlight at the front and I couldn't see a thing.  I could hear him shouting about the numerous bats that lined the ceiling walls and were apparently flying all around us now.  The tunnel itself was dark and damp, and barely tall enough for me to crawl through.  On the floor of the tunnel I could feel rotting leaves and bat droppings.  When we entered the tunnel we were told that there was only one way to go and as it turns out this was not true.  At the end of the tunnel there's a fork and in the pitch black of the tunnel it's creates inside of you a feeling of panic.  There are hundreds of feet of tunnels surrounding you, and only a few small exits hidden amongst the darkness, and you hope for daylight.  After exiting the tunnel I asked the tour guide how they keep the snakes out of the tunnels and he promptly told me that there are snakes in the tunnels all the time.  Awesome.

Oh yeah, and afterwards we took the opportunity to shoot off some Ak's.

I'm Starting a Motorbiker Gang

"Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels/ looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields/ in sixty-five I was seventeen and running up one-o-one/ I don't know where I'm running now, I'm just running on/ running on- running on empty."  - Jackson Browne, Running on Empty.

I bought a motorbike.  It's a Honda Wave Alpha and it's a fun little thing to go cruising around Vietnam on.  Da Lat is probably one of the best cities to go riding in.  While it is a city it is surrounded by farmland and mountain roads that lend you to believe this anywhere and everywhere.  At night the lights in the city dim, and you suddenly become aware of the dim glow of greenhouse lights as they awaken the dark countryside.  Dozens of greenhouses filled with hundreds of flowers line the gentle rolling hills, and you ride further on up the road into the darkness.  The roads are empty and only the lonely drone of the engine competes with the sound of wind passing you by.  The wind is cool, and you're alone.  At some point you have to stop...You can't go around that next bend...You should head home.  You throw one foot to the ground, hit the gas, and swing the bike around.  Maybe you just keep riding.  I like the bike and I do have to admit it is real hard trying to look tough on a 100cc engine while wearing a glorified bicycle helmet.

Tonto and The Vanilla Gorilla Ride Again- Saigon Part 1

The Vanilla Gorilla, for those who don't know is my cousin Tommy.  This is a self imposed moniker.  Tommy is studying, business I believe, in Hong Kong for the semester, and in his travels around Asia was able to make it to Vietnam.  Tommy and his friends Rod, Josh, and Hayes have actually seen a good deal of Asia already.  You can find details on their travels at Tommy's blog- http://novahongkong.blogspot.com.

So I took the midnight bus down from Da Lat to meet up with them in Ho Chi Minh.  The buses here are not what you may think, they are quite nice.  The bus company picks you up, and drops you off back home.  The give you a blanket, a bottle of water, and sanitary wipe for your face.  The seats lean really far back and no one complains about leg room, because Asian folks are short.  I was able to sleep through most of dark dreary nighttime drive.  I awoke some time outside of Ho Chi Minh, and could see in the hazy morning light the beginnings of the day.  It doesn't matter where you are, when you see people commuting to work and opening their businesses, you realize that people are just people, wherever they may be.

Hot Pot Lau

Lau is a Vietnamese staple, and a few weeks ago a group of students came over to make it for me.  They were very cool about it.  One student offered to make me lunch, and I think about eight or nine of them showed up at my door.  It was alright though.  They brought everything to make Lau with them.  I explained to them that I literally had nothing to cook with in my apartment.  I've been lazy about buying cooking supplies, utensils, plates, bowls, or even cups.  I mostly drink Tang (Tang is the closest thing to orange juice I can find) out of the side of a pitcher.  I think I've been lazy, because to eat out in Dalat costs less than a dollar for a full meal, to cook for one person costs about the same.  So they got right to it.  They started to break down all the vegetables, cut up the chicken, and boil the broth all while squatting on the floor.  The Vietnamese seem to have no problem squatting here.  While some prepared the Lau, I entertained the others, I guess.  I had them go through my music collection and see if their was anything they might like to hear.  My one student Muan asked me if I had "I will survive."  I did, so I played the only version I had, Cake's cover of the song.  They seemed to dig it, and my one student sang along.  Some of the other students were curious as to what my "Perfect Push-ups" were.  Yes, I brought them.  I figure they were the one ridiculous item I carried twelve thousand miles around the world, so I don't feel too weird about it.  All my students gave them a try.  None of them could use them.  I played them some more music, and they kept asking if I had Taylor Swift, apparently she's popular in Vietnam.  They weren't into The Pogues.  They definitely weren't digging Sabbath.  But they didn't mind the Zappa.  I'm considering that an initial success.

The way Lau is eaten is you keep a pot boiling on a burner in the middle of a circle.  You put some of the ingredients in the pot and some noodles in your bowl.  You pour the broth and some of the veggies and meat over the noodles and it cooks them.  Rinse and repeat as necessary.  As the Lau in the pot starts to run out you just add more ingredients and the broth builds itself back up.  Their seemed to be an order to things.  It seemed like we started with the rice noodles and the greens, then more noodles with some meat, then more noodles with less greens and more meat, then wheat noodles, and the process started over.  It was cool, it's a very communal way to eat.  At the end we polished everything off with some tart-mango, which is just unripened mango, and some "dragon's eye."  Dragon's eye are little fruits that grow on trees in Southeast Asia and they are so named because they resemble eyeballs.  You have to peel them and then suck off the gooey whitish substance that surrounds the pit.  It sounds really appetizing, I know, but they taste good too.  I actually like them a lot so I have been buying them at the market.  All in all, it was a pretty good Saturday.  The students seem happy just to be spending time with you, and hell I got free lunch, so you can't beat that.

Bag O' Food

"The belly rules the mind." -Spanish Proverb

So the matriarch of the family I have been spending time with here in Da Lat keeps handing me food when I stop by to say hello. So far, she has handed me a cob of corn, a small plastic bag with a couple of potatoes in it, and many random fruits. The latest fruit was something that looked like a red pepper but tasted like an apple. I was actually on my way to dinner with some of the other teachers when she handed me the fruit. I can't help but laugh because I am constantly reminded of that scene in The Wedding Singer when Adam Sandler gets handed a meatball by Drew Barrymore's grandmother. That's kind of what I've got going on, but then again, I had never eaten a potato like it was an apple before, so that was a new experience.

Lonesome Traveler

"Its scope and purpose is simply poetry, or, natural description."
- Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler.

I was hanging with some teachers from Volunteers in Asia, another program with teachers here in Dalat.  I walked home late last night.  In the cool calm of the late evening air I strolled among the empty streets and the blank houses.  The bustle of the day's activity long over, the streets where now barren, empty of the vendors and their exotic fruits and leafy greens, empty of the half wild pet dogs, empty of the busy people, empty of drone of motorbikes, empty of everything and everyone.  I walked in the middle of the road where the street-lamp light shone, away from the dark along the shuttered up storefronts.  The occasional light lit a window or two along the street, a television flickered in the distance, and I walked.  It’s three O'clock and all's quiet, no late night revelry, no shouting, no noise, no nothing to worry about.  I walked, and climbed the high fence as the night guard slept at the gate to our campus, and as I walked I wondered if they had locked the door to my building, and felt relief when I found that they hadn't.  I slept well that evening.

Bark at the Moon!

The Mid-Autumn festival takes place in Vietnam every year in early October.  It's a lot like Halloween with dragons and cakes in the shape of pigs.  What's supposed to happen is that the moon is at its fullest on the 15th day of the 8th month according to lunar calendar.  This is when the moon is at its brightest, and crazy people are at their most worried about the Werewolves of London.  What happens is that for about three days dragons wander the streets entering every place of business (all the business in Dalat are open walled) trading good luck for tribute money.  They dance, a drummer drums, and some guy dressed in red waves a fan at the dragon.  Large groups of people begin to amass behind the dragons and suddenly the mythical creatures has an entourage.  The crowds get so large that they stop traffic and the occasional wealthy man in a car gets upset.  In this case the dragon will dance on top of the car until the driver concedes and pays his tribute.  This happens until the dragon is satisfied.

What it is, is groups of male children get together and practice their dragon dances so that they can go around from store to store getting money from the shop owners.  This is supposed to bring them good luck for the upcoming year.  Following the three and four person dragons will be a drummer, a man in red who tames the dragon, and an entourage of children and adults excited to see the dancing.  Also during the Moon Festival groups of young adults get together to make floats out of bamboo and colored saran-wrap.  They make mostly stars, ships, and fish.  I saw one fish that was over twenty feet in length and required a week and ten people to complete.  They spend a lot of time on these floats and the students follow them, which make me think of the Rose Bowl or some other type of college homecoming parade.  A lot of people, particularly children carry candle lit lanterns with them, (see the picture in the photostream).  Most everyone eats moon-cakes during the festival.  Moon-cakes are bread like cakes filled with some sort of sweet filling either made from rice, coconut, or flowers and spices; these are the ones I have tried.  It's actually a lot of chaotic fun.  I got sing some type of Swiss Family Robinson "hello" song with a group of students and I was invited to eat lunch with a local family, who served something exactly like lumpia.  So I had a good time, plus a got see someone's lantern burst into flames.

Larry's Bar at the Sofitel

I feel alienated and separated.  Once a week, on Friday, we've been going out to get American style food and this past week we went to Larry's Bar at the Sofitel Hotel.  Larry's is described as the place where all the expats hang out.  The food was excellent (I had the buffet), the service was top notch, the atmosphere was fun, they had Jenga and a pool table, and I felt like I was back home somewhere.  Yet I felt a distance from the actual wait staff and cooks, who were Vietnamese.  I felt like I was a member of the colonial aristocracy that once ruled this country.  I enjoyed myself, but spending the extra cash to go there and the seeming distance Larry's attempts to create, made me feel a little guilty.  I also lost at Jenga which didn't help.

Lighten up Francis

All my students speak really softly.  I tried to explain to them that they have to learn to talk like Americans, boisterous and with complete confidence in the validity and importance of all their words.  To get them to this point I borrowed an exercise from a fellow teacher and brought all my students outside so as they could yell at each other.  Just for shits and giggles I decided to make the one group of students sing "Do wa diddy."  I got the idea from watching Stripes, it has been on every other day or so.  I only know the first few sets of lines, which is about all my students were able to do.  Don't get me wrong the Vietnamese like all Asian people love singing.  Every other place around here has karaoke, whenever they have assemblies they ask for impromptu exhibitions of song, and when we have "Teacher Day" I will be asked to sing something to the entire school.  For now, my students are pretty serious about me going out for a night of karaoke with them.  I said I would bring the teachers I live with, the other teachers seem hesitant, but willing, so expect another post after karaoke night.

The Last Guy I Knew With A Greenhouse Wasn't Growing Flowers

"Dear common flower, that grow'st  beside the way,/ Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold." -James Russell Lowell, American poet and cage fighter, from To The Dandelion.

One of the attractions here in Dalat is the flowers.  The city itself has a flower garden for tourists, but it is mostly famous for exporting its flowers all over Vietnam and Asia.  The landscape in Dalat is marked by lines upon lines of greenhouses that mark each little plateau carved into the hillsides.  At every few shops that line the street you can buy small bundles of chrysanthemums and the occasional rose of every variety and color.   I think that at some point in January they will have a flower festival here in Dalat, which will actually be more fun than it sounds, because any festival here involves drums, floats, food, and dancing.

Cha Ram Bap

I constantly say this wrong.  "Bap" is corn in Vietnamese.  "Cha Ram" refers to the fact that it's wrapped up like a spring roll or lumpia, if you're Filipino, and fried crispy.  So it's like having an egg-roll that's been filled with just corn.  I know this doesn't sound appetizing, but it is.  What happens is they give you a huge plate of various greens (one of which looks suspiciously like poison ivy), some rice paper (that feels like plastic), some veggies (that look like apple, but are not), and peanut sauce.  Mix some chili paste into the peanut sauce, wrap it all up in the plastic like rice paper, and you have Cha Ram Bap.  Some students of Bria's showed us a little restaurant down a dirt side road, which we would have never found ourselves, that has become our "go to" dinner hang out.  

Is Typhooning a Word?

Every so often a typhoon hits off the coast of Southeast Asia.  In this case it's Typhoon Ketsana, which hit the Philippines first and was described there as a "once in a lifetime" storm.  So far we are experiencing rain and extreme winds.  The typhoon managed to knock out the power in the middle of class today and uproot a 70ft tree on campus.  It has been blowing down tree limbs all day, I personally saw one nearly hit a student today.  I don't feel as if I am in any real danger though, and all the Vietnamese seem to accept this as a fact of life.  There is something that is of constant annoyance.  They don't seem to believe in door knobs and latches here, and the front door to the building flies open and slams shut constantly.  Their door locks consist of two metal loops and a pad lock.  I live in a four-story building with a front door that doesn't shut.  Something we have to look forward to is that we have only a month left before the dry season, nothing is flooding in Dalat, and I don't live on the coast, so I guess I shouldn't complain about the rain, for now.