Geckos and Goats

Life in Can Tho (pronounced Can Tuh) has been going pretty well. It’s a city of about one million people in the Mekong Delta. I understand that there are up to 100 foreigners who live here, but I have yet to see any others besides Alice (another volunteer with Heifer) and myself. People are very friendly, though. Perhaps it is because, as I have now been informed on several different occasions, I look somewhat Vietnamese. I do have to say my 5’1.5” self(Yes, it’s true! As of my last doctor’s appointment, I have apparently shrunk ¼ of an inch…so sad!) is quite enjoying being of average height for once. I sometimes even find that I am the tallest one in a group! Nonetheless, I do get stared at, and people randomly shouting “HUHL-loooo!” as I walk down the street. The other day, I had this guy come right up to me and just stare. Vietnamese and Americans have different definitions of the term “personal space.”

I have been staying with Alice. She is lots of fun. She also happens to be from Bordeaux, so I am brushing up on my French. Alice and I also live with assorted bugs and some friendly geckos who eat the mosquitoes for us. The mosquitoes really aren’t as bad as I expected. I do, however, spend an awful lot of time at home and at the office killing ants. You can’t leave anything sitting out for even 2 minutes! There are several neighborhood kids who are really cute. The street is lively at night because many of them play out in the street until pretty late, which I suppose is because it’s relatively cool at that time.

For the most part, however, it’s so warm and air conditioning is so scarce that most doors remain open during the day (the doors generally slide open so that there is essentially no front wall to speak of during the day). Consequently, you can see straight into most of the homes. Many restaurants are located in front of people’s homes, so when you are sitting on your little plastic stool enjoying your meal, you are entertained by kids playing and assorted relatives are watching TV.

Alice’s flat is downtown near internet cafes and a shop where I buy my bottled water. I am becoming great friends with the family who runs the store. They tolerate me trying to practice a few of my Vietnamese phrases on them that I learned from my fabulous (insert sarcasm here) audio tapes (example to a lesson introduction from the language tapes: “You are an older American gentleman meeting a younger Vietnamese woman at a hotel bar in Hanoi…”). I do not ask them for “Two glasses of beer, please” as my language tapes suggest, but I can verify the price of items and say some basic greetings. They laugh, but I’m sure they’re laughing with me and not at me…really. :-)

Even if they are laughing at me it, doesn’t bother me because they have discovered that I have a sweet tooth. They now give me free samples from the glass jars containing cookies and candy. When I actually try to buy some of the sweets they won’t let me pay.

On Friday one of the daughters mustered the courage to practice her English with me. Her English skills are about on par with my Vietnamese capabilities, but after about 5 minutes we had established what our respective names are and that I am from the United States. When she didn’t have the vocabulary for her next question, she put me on her cell phone with a friend who speaks English more fluently. They wanted to know my address. I could not convey that I was only staying with a friend for the time being and would soon be moving, so I finally just took her next door and pointed to Alice’s flat. She then asked if she could come over to practice English sometime. Even though it’s not even my apartment, I really couldn’t turn her down. Her family gives me free cookies and candy after all. We decided she would come over on Sunday at 7.

She showed up promptly at 7 with 2 of her friends in tow. Here’s how it went:

1) One of the girls would pose a question.
2) I would respond at rate of speed so slow of which no one at home would have ever believed me capable.
3) The girls would whisper and giggle back and forth amongst themselves for approximately 1-2 minutes trying to choose and develop their next question.
4) The sequence would repeat.

This lasted for approximately one hour. It was amusing, though, and I appreciated their interest in practicing their English. We are getting coffee sometime next week.

I am also making some friends at work and learning to love the motorbike as they have given me many frees rides. It is great fun riding on the back. Even though you can still feel the sun baking your skin, the breeze provides a temporary respite from the heat. Although it does drive me insane when they try to talk to me while riding, because it's a little difficult to understand given the noise from the traffic and that the broken English with the Vietnamese accent that is muffled through the mask. What can you do, though?

The traffic here isn’t as bad as Saigon, but there are still plenty of interesting sights to be seen on the road. One of my favorite combos is the women riding their motorbikes in full sun protection gear with high heels, talking on the cell phone with their little dog sitting up front in their purse. There are also whole families who ride on a single moped together. I even saw one family of 4 who also had their goat riding on the back in a basket. I love it! I love it! I love it!

As much as I do enjoy the motorbike rides, I decided to buy a bicycle of my own so that I would not have to continually bum rides off of others. My bike comes complete with a bell and a great big basket on the front perfect for market purchases.

On Monday Alice and I began biking to work, and I felt oh-so-Vietnamese. Unfortunately, I discovered that my habit of acquiring flat tires is not unique to the Volvo in the States. Thanks to a friendly pho vendor, after much pointing and gesturing, we were able to locate an old gentleman on the side of the street who pulled some rubber out of his bag of tools and promptly changed my tire. He charged me 4000 VND which is the equivalent of about 25 cents. I’m still amazed by how comparatively cheap everything here is! It was a low price, high quality job, though, as I made it to the office shortly thereafter.

I am still getting oriented and establishing my exact role at work, so I’ll hopefully write more about that later. I am tired of typing and, if anyone has actually read this far, I’m sure you are tired of reading.

Much love, happiness and sunshine to whoever is reading!

Photos at the top:

1) Roommate [not Alice :-)]

2) and 3) Neighborhood kids

Good morning, Vietnam!

On my first morning in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City my supervisor, Dr. Loc, had meetings in the morning. In the meantime, Khue took me around to do some sightseeing, and I was able to take in my first real impressions of the city. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the madness that is the traffic of Saigon. There is no rhyme or reason to the swarm of bikes, motorbikes, a few trucks made circa 1976, and carts of fruit being pushed by their vendors that all weave in and out amongst each other. Since there are no real traffic lanes and red lights are effectively ignored, one has to constantly dodge oncoming entities that may come shooting at you from any number of directions. The scene reminded me of the higher levels of Galaga (I, of course, being a Ms. Pacman enthusiast have never reached the Galaga’s upper tiers, but Becky is a pro, so I know what I'm talking about) when the bullets and comets come shooting at you with incredible frequency and speed.

Adding to the Galaga-esque outerspace atmosphere are the women riding motorbikes who look as if they have just stepped off a spacecraft. Apparently the Vietnamese prefer fair skin, and the women in particular are very aware of the damage the sun can do to one’s skin. Consequently, they arm themselves against the sun’s force with large, wide-brimmed hats that remind me of a cloth and somewhat smaller version of Spaceballs’ Dark Helmet’s head gear (therefore, really just an average size :-)), sunglasses, what can only be described as stylish surgical masks and gloves that reach all the way up to their shoulders. I simply do not know how the can stand it in this heat.

The street sights are compounded by the cacophony of continually beeping car horns, ringing bike bells, the swish of brooms pushing trash off of street corners, water splashing against the pavement as large tubs of dishwater are dumped into the street, and the cries of vendors hawking their goods. Many of their items for sell include an array fruits which I have never seen before. Some of the vendors actually haul them in two buckets that are connected by a pole, which rides on the backs of their shoulders. Many of them wear the Vietnamese cone-shaped hats. I knew that they were traditional, but I assumed that Vietnamese people today wore them about as often as French people wear berets, black and white striped shirts and twirl their mustaches while carrying around baguettes.

I believe some of the scents of which I caught a whiff included the dreaded durian fruit of which I had been warned (apparently some hotels do not even allow people to bring this fruit into their establishments because the smell is so strong), roasting chickens being turned over coals on street corners, and sweat, to which, I am sad to say, I was contributing given the intense heat.

After viewing the Reunification Palace, Notre Dame, the Continental Hotel and other sights, Khue and I met up with Dr. Loc (my supervisor), had lunch, attended a meeting with Operation Smile International representatives, and started off on the four hour car drive to Can Tho.

Most of the national road to Can Tho is built up with small shops and homes, but occasionally I did catch glimpses of rickety boats gliding down rivers and the intense green foliage of which I have seen photos. By the time we got on the ferry to cross over into Can Tho, night had fallen as had my heavy eye lids, so I was quite content to wait until the next day to really take in my new home.

Ok, so apparently I am not computer savvy enough to figure out how to do captions on individual posts. If anyone knows how, please let me know.

So the pictures at the top are as follows, 1) Khue in front of the People's Party building in Ho Chi Minh City; 2) Me in front of the Reunification Palace; 3)Communist Party banner (elections for the National Assembly had been held the day before).

No call Vietnam, but happiness to everybody

I arrived on Ho Chi Minh City on May 20th. As promised, Khue from the Heifer Viet Nam office met me at the airport and took me to our hotel - the Freedom Hotel - in the city. We didn't arrive until midnight which meant I couldn't locate an internet cafe to send an email to my dad. I tried to place an international call from my room, but was told by the night desk attendant, "No call. No call." This posed a problem as I knew that my dad was a complete stress case back at home. Anyone who is familiar with my dad will understand. He is what you would call overprotective. This past October I went to Nashville and forgot to phone home when I arrived. When he finally did get a hold of me a couple of hours later, he was only barely able spit out that he had already contacted at least 3 different police stations in Arkansas and Tennessee (5-27-07 update: my dad has informed via email that he actually spoke to 8 different police stations...i'm not kidding), called my “trucker” Uncle Craig so that he could send out an alert to all JB Hunt truckers and, as I later discovered, he had also managed to track down my roommate in Little Rock to ask her if she randomly had the phone numbers for any of my former sorority sisters (none of whom I was actually going to see in Nashville, by the way). He also informed that I had nearly been solely responsible for his early death.The point is, I knew I had to find someway to get in touch with my dad so that he didn't think I'd been kidnapped by Vietnamese communists and/or bitten by one of those poisonous Vietnamese snakes that he has been warning me about for the past 3 months. I pulled my laptop out and tried to get a wireless connection. I had trouble connecting to all of the available networks. Sometimes it would connect and then after a couple of minutes, the server could not be found. I was running around my rather toasty hotel room trying to find a good spot where the signal would hold. Unfortunately, I had been using my computer throughout my travels, so my computer died after about 15 minutes of me holding my computer up to different points of the ceiling.

The day before I had made a trip to Wal-mart to buy an international adapter. It was technically only configured for the UK, Europe and Australia, but I bought it on the off chance that it would work anyway. After digging it out of the bottom of my massive suitcase, I then used my tiny fingernail scissors to hack through that industrial strength plastic that manufacturers love to use. Amazingly, my cheap adapter worked, and my computer was back in action. I was eventually able to get a signal long enough to send an email home and breathed a sigh of relief. I figured that if I could get a wireless signal in our little hotel in the middle of the night, Vietnam had to be a little more developed than I thought. The trash can in my hotel bathroom read "Happiness to Everybody" and I thought to myself that, with this fairly promising start, perhaps I could find some summer happiness in Vietnam myself. After traveling for more than 24 hours, I finally curled up in my Vietnamese bed and fell asleep.

Break on through to the other side

Alright, so I've broken through to the other side. I've always been somewhat suspcious of people who blog, but I figured since I've also crossed over to the other side of the world, this may be a good way to update people on my time here in Vietnam . I can't promise to be a faithful blogger. This may very well be my first and last post, but at least I tried, right? Even if I don't keep up with the writing, I will try to occasionally post some pictures for anyone who is interested.



If anyone does ever read this thing, be sure to leave me some posts!