Ho Phuc

Interesting food I’ve eaten this week include: beef tendon (gross), pork liver (don’t categorize it with Pate…and also, gross), pork heart (better than pork liver…but still, gross) and last but not least-baby duck (pretty good!). We were eating with Chi Hien at a street-side restaurant when the bicycle powered food cart came rolling by selling the baby ducks! For accuracy’s sake, they’re actually duck-eggs, with partially formed duck’s on the inside. My duck-egg was considered a young one, which meant that it was about half boiled egg and half baby duck (you could still see its head). The worst part of the egg was that there were partially formed bones in the egg, though you could just crunch through them. The second worst part, which actually probably is the worst part, was the actual sight of the baby duck. I got around that one by keeping my eyes closed the whole time, though once I laid my eyes on that little baby duck I instantly stopped eating it. It’s not like I had some moral confliction with eating a baby duck, it’s pretty damn popular here in Vietnam; it just felt sort of weird. In combination with its lack of particularly memorable flavor means it’ll join the ranks of the spider & the beef tendon in the one and done club.

On Friday we finished our TESOL certification and are officially certified to become teachers! Ha. Anyways, it was sort of a busy week finishing up all the loose end requirements for our certification, so we had a tame weekend. In lieu of our weekly rooftop excursion, we elected for a massage instead.  This was maybe my fourth or fifth since coming to SE Asia and boy did it blow the competition away! Yes, we splurged for the 5-star treatment coming in at 16 dollars for an hour-long massage, but. Cucumber mask freshly peeled, check. Hot stone massage, check. Some amazingly acrobatic knee massage on back, check. A little chiropractic work throw in, check. And finally endless hot tea and candied ginger before and after. I want to go back already.  This evening, we’re going to a “club” with some of our Vietnamese students, so we’ll inform you of how that goes.

                And now for the big news of the week. After countless hours of searching and innumerable amounts of headaches, Ho Phuc is in my possession.  In reality, it took between 7-10 hours and was in comparison a breeze thanks to my two assistants I had working the case for me (my two oldest male students). I mean, I don’t really know what it is, whether they just really want to be friends with an English speaker or what; but damn, these Vietnamese people are NICE. Everyone in Cambodia and the blogosphere just loved talking about how ready the Viet people were to take advantage of you and rip you off, but I have experienced only the polar opposite (knock on wood). As of Friday, save for the tuk tuk’s, I had yet to even ride on a moto. I had been searching aimlessly on craigslist and the expat fb groups for the past two weeks looking for moto’s but let’s be honest, I didn’t know jack **** about moto’s. Chi Hien and Chi Linh were warning me about going to the used moto lots as they have a tendency to give you (foreigners) the worst bikes for the most money. I knew at the end of the day, buying a used moto was going to be a slight roll of the dice, but then again enrolling in this course was a sight roll of the dice.  Well, I figured if I was going to roll the dice I should probably just give my dice to someone who at least knows the ropes. With 15 minutes left in class, Libby came into my class to ask the guys whether they knew where to buy a moto. After a minute or two of processing and rephrasing- “O teacher, you want buy secondhand moto.” And bam, just like that the race was on, instantly they deferred to the oldest guy in the room, who had to be like 28 or 30? This is by no means offensive, as they all talk about it, but until the Viet people turn like around 35ish, they look 10 years younger than their actual age, then for some unexplainable reason the reverse happens around that time. Anyways, his English was quite moderate, so we had the slightly-better English speaking translating for us, as you can imagine the whole thing was a bit of a cluster****. While we made an initial call to one of the moto places, no luck. Then Nam (the guy’s name), went downstairs to employ/defer to the only older guy in the classes- Andy. Downstairs we went to the computers, to start trolling the Vietnamese version of a moto-only craigslist. I liked the sound of this as it bypassed the shady used moto lots. At first I specified I wanted a Honda (what I had at least inferred was the best moto). We found a 2006 Honda Wave at around 6 pm on a Friday night. By that point, Nam had to go to class, and so Andy offered to take me on his moto to the other side of town to check it out. So off we went, my first time on the back of a moto going to look at buying a moto, ha. Hah. Don’t worry, my Grandpa had a manual Honda scooter I used to drive as a kid so at least I wasn’t a moto rookie.  I was somehow able to convey to Andy that the ball was truly in the court, he needed to inspect it, he needed to test drive it, and he needed to ultimately give me the thumbs up or thumbs down. While we made it to the other side of town, looked it up and down, gave it a test ride, called his car dealer friend, and ultimately said no, we would need to wait for his car dealer friend to come take a look at it before buying it-too risky. So back we went after like two hours, I was a little dejected but knew being impulsive wasn’t going to be a good decision. In semi-broken English he said we would go look at moto’s either tomorrow morning or tomorrow evening, the communication was really that unclear. Anyways, I wake up at 8:50 to look at my phone saying we will meet up at 9 and that Nam is coming with too. Nam buys and sells cell-phone’s so Andy said he was the better bargainer, still don’t know how I deserved all this help. Anyways, he had 8 moto’s all picked out from the website he must’ve gotten the night before, after going through 2 of them (which took about 2 hours, crisscrossing Saigon), he said we needed to do more research. Well off we went to the internet café which was funny in itself. Here we were trolling the forums with 25 other little Vietnamese kids gaming so hard in their boxers. Well, we found a Honda Dream II (the moto that keeps on running) but it turned out to be too old. Next, we looked at a Honda Wave that seemed to be too good to be true. It was.  Some Honda’s these days are manufactured in China-this one was. Looked great and was incredibly cheap. I was willing to get something that looked like junk as long as it was going to be reliable (The Dream II), but at 200 dollars and looking spanking new, I didn’t know. Anyways, after like 40 minutes, Andy and Nam confirmed my suspicions and advised no. As it happened, they had a Yamaha they were selling for $275. Going in to my moto shopping, I sort of had pegged that as my sweet spot but were shopping at around the 175-200 level all day, which obviously was fine by me but really couldn’t get you far unless you got lucky. Anyways, after lowering my Honda criteria to simply being made in Japan; honestly lots of Honda’s are being outsourced and Japanese engineering is really the jewel of Asia. I was happy, I let Nam and Andy go through the whole checklist, had Nam try and bargain them down some, but they wouldn’t budge. Nam said it might be a little high, but at these prices a little high is like 20 or 25 dollars, too high. He was saying they only sold moto’s when they needed the money which was also reassuring. I was starting to get a little nervous that I wouldn’t be able to have my assistants pro bono forever so I sprung for it just as the clouds started forming. Well you guessed it, my first moto driving experience in Saigon was in the rain. What seriously saved me was Andy let me drive his automatic back to the hostel saying he would drive the manual.  I don’t want to scare, y’all but I’ll just say learning to drive manual in the streets of Saigon was a bit…challenging. It’s all good now, trial by fire is the best way to learn assuming you don’t go up in a blaze-which I didn’t. So now we got some wheeeeeels- Ho Phuc. Named after our two favorite names in Vietnam (like they are actually really popular names, there’s like 8 or 10 names in Vietnam that the whole country has, it’s pretty funny).  Of the trifecta, part 1 (moto): check.  We have job interviews on Monday so hopefully by the end of the week we can check that off too.

A tidbit from Libby: I was incredibly nervous when Andrew sped away to go inspect motos, knowing he would probably be driving it home.  I encouraged him repeatedly to please practice and learned how to drive it before he hit the streets.  While he was out, I bought a watch, went to the southern women’s museum and got a pedicure (J).  I returned drenched to the guest house to find a beautiful newly purchased motorbike!  It was very exciting but also pretty terrifying when I first got on it.  I made Andrew drive multiple times around the block to practice before I felt confident in his capabilities; and even then, I was praying almost the entire time.  I have driven mopeds before, one time being in the traffic of Rome, but this was a whole new experience.  Although there are traffic lights, that is about the only form of traffic control.  Motos swerve, cut each other off to avoid an oncoming car, drive on the sidewalk to skip a stop light and pop out into the lane.  It’s startlingly chaotic, yet somehow it works quite well.  Everyone is very aware of everyone else and thus very close calls end at that.  We had many close calls but here we are safe and sound.  On a girly note: I got the cutest helmet!  It is white with pink Japanese cherry blossoms, and it was on sale!  Well, now the city seems infinitely open to us as we can vastly increase our exploration territory.  As Anh Andrew says, until next time! 

(pictures to come)