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.