Dispatches

Last Sunday we went to the “club” with six of our former students. Every club we went to before had American style prices, so we drank quite a bit of whiskey beforehand thinking we would only get a drink or two at the “club.” Turns out the club was actually just another rooftop bar with the “clubby” addition of really loud American top 40 hits. That being said, turned out the prices were Vietnam cheap! To the point, it is possible to have surface level conversations about what kind of movies you like and how many siblings you have for a few hours!  We drank towers of beer and had a wonderful time. The jury is still out whether those few hours of drinking are worth more than a day of hungover misery… On a side-note, I’m noticing a sort of competition clubs must be having with each other that takes place in the bathroom. One club had ice-cubes in their urinals. Another club put gobstopper-esque candies in their urinals. This club, which happened to be way cheaper than the rest, outdid them all. Floor to ceiling glass with a great view and then the urinal was just a giant wall of sloped glass with water falling down it. Minus the fact the glass was sloped the wrong way from a practicality standpoint, it was pretty novel and thus awesome. Looking back, the bathroom might have been the highlight of my night… I’ll have to go back so I can get a picture…

On Tuesday night we went to Broma (French colonial style building) to see a former LC program participant perform. He has totally quit teaching and is making it as a “professional” musician. I use asterisks because I seriously doubt he could be a professional back in the States, but if people are willing to pay him, why not? My prejudice could just be that he’s a solo acoustic guitar player and singer, and when you think about it, I’m willing to bet there’s not a more generic style of music that exists in the world, but that may just be me. Anyways, we went to Broma, which doesn’t have a covering on the rooftop and the musician was late in showing up, so we elected to get out of the rain by going to a different rooftop bar that did have a covering. As we were standing in the rain on the roof, The Rex Hotel was just staring at us in all its glory just across the intersection. The Rex is one of the 5 star hotels in Saigon and apparently has an amazing rooftop bar.  One of our new friends, a current LC student, convinced us we should splurge and try it out.  After getting lost in the lobby with the Versace’s and Armani’s stores, we made it up, and to our surprise, the best thing about that bar was the music that night. Sorry Jeremy, but these guitar players were definitely next level. It was a Spanish guitar band of all Vietnamese guys, but I’m still amazed at how good their picking was; I’ll be hard pressed to find better guitar playing here in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, are very capable people, and like most Asian cultures, are perfectionists. We couldn’t stay for a second drink (due to the outrageous price), so we decided to explore the hotel a little bit more. The building was shaped in a rectangle with a giant courtyard in the middle and on the whole left side was two rooftop pools on two levels. Well it had just stopped raining and since no one was around, we decided to go for a swim with an awesome view of the Biztech tower and the Saigon skyline in general. Acting like a confused white person goes a long way here, but still, I felt really really stupid walking out the lobby with wet hair and shorts that looked like I peed on myself, really badly. We’ll see if we try our luck a second time.

A different group of our students invited us to a small get together on Friday afternoon. For lunch, we went to a Hanoi style restaurant, which was pretty unremarkable. The interesting foods section is conspicuously blank this week, I’m sorry. I had a close call with Dog at this restaurant, but they had run out of Dog by the time we ate; I haven’t given up. After lunch, we roamed around town for a little while looking for a market to get ingredients for dinner. This group was a little better than our last group in that one of the students was near fluent, so we essentially had a translator which we needed as the rest of the group knew very little English.  That being said, lots of times the group would revert back to Vietnamese, and we would just sit there until they stopped talking, at which point we’d ask Sang what they were just talking about.  Before coming, Libby and I had somewhat naïve notions of going to the market and picking out fresh ingredients with which to cook our meals. First off, these markets aren’t exactly your Sunday stroll through the Farmer’s market. As I said before, meat isn’t refrigerated and general sanitation just isn’t quite up to American standards. But that is only the minor problem. The big problem is that the market is really where you get hit with the foreigner “upcharge.” Our mangosteens were marked up about 400 percent so we resorted to walking around the corner and having Sang go make the transactions alone, kind of funny. We’ll just have to be on our bargaining game if we want to attempt the food market experience alone.

                 We told Sang that we would contribute Sangria to the dinner to which he was rather excited since he also learns Spanish on the side. After implementing the going around the corner and hiding strategy, Sang said he’d go get the wine at one of the stands. I was thinking how strange it would be for someone to be selling wine at this market when he comes back with two 12 ounce water bottle containers of Rice wine. 30 percent alcohol content was pretty cool, but I didn’t even bother trying it on its own; the smell was enough to dissuade me. We did happen to run across a proper liquor store on the walk back so the final product was what I dubbed Asian sangria. Red wine, rice wine, 7up, mangosteens, and pineapple. It wasn’t so bad, and with a little tinkering I think it’ll definitely have its place in the repertoire. Thankfully I was only on cocktail duty because the cooking half of the meal looked like quite the… uh, experience. The typical Vietnamese kitchen usually contains 1 or 2 gas stoves and a rice cooker. Definitely no oven, and in our case a very unusual sink. All of this is of course fit into a space the size of a decent sized closet.  The sink was very curious. It actually sprayed out into a sectioned off corner of the floor and had a drying rack for all the dishes and cookware and silverware. It kind of would have might have been an awesomely efficient setup if it wasn’t placed at floor height (think foot rinser at the pool or the beach) which necessitated the Asian squat or else hands and knees and regardless made your feet really close to the food.  In addition, in lieu of no more than maybe two square feet of counter space (and that’s generous) most of the food prep was forced to take place on the floor, which was again, interesting. Thankfully, I stayed out of it for the most part. The final product was actually quite delicious.  The apartment was two stories, and the top floor was mostly empty save for storage, a hammock and a couple of mattresses against the wall, so we ate on the floor in the empty space of the room. There was some sort of broth with eggs poured straight into boiling water which created this weird but awesome shredded-tofu(???) like consistency in the broth. We had that with pork cooked in fish sauce and some other things which was also delicious. Finally, or rather to start we had a good salad with hard-boiled eggs and dressing made from lime juice.  I only came to realize afterwards that the only reason why this food was probably so good was that the cook was leaving in a month to go study baking for three years in Arizona… Looking back we probably should have skipped dinner and had a baking session instead, though as I speak, I’m wondering where she gets access to an oven (she has posted some pictures of professional quality cakes but I think that’s just at her job).  After that cooking experience and just staying in a very traditional Vietnamese apartment, I can say with only a sliver of facetiousness, that I understand how the VC were able to live in dirt tunnels for ridiculous amounts of time. I mean, even Hamas has to put concrete in their tunnels! Truly exceptional people!

(Libby does not support these final statements).

On Saturday, we went out with a friend of a friend from Phnom Penh. Though to call the friend of a friend, a friend, is stretching it. We actually hung out with him for a single night at a bar in Phnom Penh, but he was just exceptionally nice. He put me in contact with his other friend who was teaching in Saigon. Turned out the friend teaches an hour outside of Saigon, but he was really nice and I told him to let me know when he comes into town and we can grab drinks. Long story short, somehow Libby and I found ourselves on a “micro-brew” pub crawl with like 8-10 British dudes aged like 30-35. Even more funny is that our “friend”-William, had just bought his girlfriend’s engagement ring that afternoon so we somehow are at like his pre-bachelor party bachelor party. I can truly say it was quite the cultural experience. First off, they are so proud of their intra-Britain ethnicity, we had Wales, Ireland, Scotland, not sure the rest, and honestly don’t care… You’d think they would want to just group themselves under the English nationality, but who knows. It seems similar to a person with dual Canadian and American citizenship telling people they were Canadian… They were all very nice, about 4 of them had Vietnamese wives which was pretty hilarious. Libby kept asking them all where their wives were from and all of them kept saying Vietnam. I didn’t know if that was rude on her part but maybe I was the only one that thought that was funny.  What impressed me the most was their beer drinking abilities. I mean, some of these little guys were just pounding liters, and yes it started showing at the end, but they really kept at it until they were down for the count. One of them fell on his face on the sidewalk-really hard- and must’ve managed two more large pints before essentially falling asleep at the table. The other thing that impressed me was their musicality. One of them was a for real DJ in Brighton and a few others played electric guitar. That didn’t surprise me for all the things America has surpassed England in, I think the little Island still has a superior music scene-definitely superior music per capita.  They were naming a number of American hip hop artists and white rappers I have never even heard of.  Anyways, they did sort of have that obnoxious and very vocal Western European defeatist, self-subjugating, amoral political viewpoints. I think it must stem from those times spent in the air-raid shelters while Germany was annihilating their cities and all they could about it was, well nothing, and today manifests itself in those anti-Semitic rallies…At least they aren’t as bad as the other European countries but then again they at least can say they managed to be the last important European nation to get bombed by the Germans. To connect the dots, I said something along the lines of Englishmen and Americans be pseudo soul-brothers alluding to all our shared cultural values and such and he was like, “YA, like… cough IRAQ!” I was like, SHOCKER!!!!! (except in my head), and then moved on… Soon after he was telling me about how with some American’s he can tell that they don’t know how to act around him (meaning Brits) and obviously try and put on a persona. He said something along the lines of he liked us because we seemed to be acting like ourselves. My thoughts: meta-Stupid. Sometimes the stimulating characters are few and far between halfway across the world but thankfully we have Vietnam to keep us preoccupied! We did find a very good German “micro-brew” so I’d consider the pub crawl a success all in all.  That being said we spotted at least 4 rats at another location on the list.  But, we at least have that micro-brew to hold us over until the American style microbrew opens up in the next month or two. We met the co-owner a week or two ago who had his Colorado brewmaster on the way over. We got to be on his “membership” list which means we get to go to some tastings and provide feedback. Pretty excited! Anyways, it’s been a week plus with the moto and I just finally learned how to properly shift the gears (it’s really hard getting taught by people who don’t have accelerate and such in their vocabulary) but for the sake of brevity (ha) it’ll have to wait.. till next time!