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.