In our end-of-term report to MCC, we are asked what advice we would give to a new volunteer coming to our assignment location. I had plenty. If you feel so inclined, put on your Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and read the list below aloud.

Don’t be afraid to say no to people who want free English lessons (there will be plenty), but don’t assume that everyone who wants to speak English with you is looking for free tutoring. Make friends. Buy a cheap cloth mask to protect your lungs in traffic.

Wear a helmet.

Respect their ancestors. Play sports. Learn enough Vietnamese to understand the logic behind illogical English. Don’t leave home without a raincoat.

In traffic, don’t look back, and stay away from buses. Forget what you were taught about how to cross the street: that doesn’t apply here.

Drink the coffee, it’s wonderful.

Don’t worry too much about food safety or hygiene. Don’t worry too much about anything. Use Skype to call family and friends. Try ruou can at least once. Sing. Learn one or two slang phrases in Vietnamese and use them judiciously.

Always give the benefit of the doubt to someone who is rude to you; what they are doing might not be rude to them. Don’t queue politely unless you have all day. Be generous with your personal space. Read good books. Drink lots of water. (Boil it first.)

Host visitors halfway through the year to rediscover the strangeness and excitement of your new home. Take pictures of motorbikes laden with live animals. Take videos of the traffic. Don’t show them to your parents until you’re back home.

Share your anger and frustration with other foreigners; help each other realize you’re being too harsh. Buy pirated DVDs. Scan your USB drive for viruses. If none are found, use better antivirus software.

Collect stories.

Consider your worst experiences to be your best stories and start laughing about them. Don’t assume your stories are interesting to others; tell them to your most critically honest friends first. Keep a blog. Write more often than I did, but don’t put off having fun out of an obligation to write. Bring a good pair of headphones.

Some of this advice might be useful, some might not. Some is obvious, some might not make sense until you’ve been here a while, and some you may decide is dead wrong. Take what you can use, ignore the rest, and enjoy the year.

Chuc may man!

MCC has provided reading material to help us prepare for the process of reentry. We’ve been warned that returning home can be as difficult as moving away. We are encouraged to prepare for a different sort of culture shock.

So I’ve been taking stock of old memories, recounting the surprises I faced in my early days here. It seems probable that those same things, no longer surprising, will be shocking in their reverse forms. So what do I expect to surprise me?

I expect my most difficult task will be readjusting to relative solitude. Quiet streets — low in both senses of the word volume — with drivers insulated from each other by metal and glass, and startlingly devoid of families and young couples on motorbikes, will disorient me. Malls and box stores playing light rock radio will strike me as unpleasantly sterile replacements for markets and sidewalk stalls blaring Asian pop music. Assuming I’ll spend at least a short while living with my parents, the number of people with whom I share a house will drop from eight to two. Life will grow quiet. Perhaps too quiet.

That that house will be insulated both from the weather and from external noise will probably come as another subtle and depressing shock. It’s not that the noise of Hanoi is particularly enjoyable, or that I haven’t often felt like escaping it. But my tolerance for background noise and activity has been raised to such a point that a quiet Canadian town like St. Catharines may seem altogether eerily silent.

One other observation that constantly registered during my first month in Vietnam was how slender the Vietnamese are, both women and men. It no longer surprises me. A related surprise was how casually Vietnamese apply the term ‘fat’ to people who experience difficulty managing their weight (is the latter phrase oblique enough to be fashionable?). I will have to exercise discretion in comparing the height and weight of North Americans to southeast Asians.

And, of course, I’ll have to come to terms with being short again myself. On top of everything else, that may just send me fleeing back to Vietnam.

The time-lapse video of an intersection near Hoan Kiem Lake adds considerable excitement to an already dramatic experience by speeding everything up.

The video really gets good around the one-minute mark when you get an overhead view. Enjoy!

Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo.

The first is of Luang Prabang, which I wrote about previously.

Luang Prabang:

The second is of our MCC regional retreat in Vientiane. Expatriate service workers living in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos came together for a few days in April to share about our respective work and experiences, to visit MCC projects in Laos, and to enjoy the hotel swimming pool.

MCC Retreat, Vientiane:

Shoes stored for a month on an otherwise dry tile floor end up looking like this (I cleaned the shoe on the right for comparison):

Mold grows on clothes, books, shoes. Anything, really.

That’s how humid it is in Vietnam these days.

At a red light, motorbike drivers now jostle for a spot next to a truck or bus to enjoy its shade.

That’s how hot it is in Vietnam these days.

Alternatively, click here to go to the album on Flickr.

• Rachel and Anna blog regularly about our shared experience in Hanoi with MCC’s SALT program.
• Erin, a SALTer in Cambodia, posted pictures of our exploits in Laos.
• Tim Nafziger, a young Anabaptist activist and writer, and Dale Suderman, a Vietnam war veteran, stopped by Hanoi on a recent tour through Vietnam.  Tim posted a blog entry about us. You can read about Dale’s reasons for visiting Vietnam here, and Tim’s here.
• Michal Garcia is a freelance photographer and friend of mine here in Hanoi.  He has let me use his big, expensive camera gear on a few occasions.  By a bizarre coincidence, we happened to meet each other in Luang Prabang, Laos on our respective vacations. Michal has posted pictures I took of him in Laos and at Minh’s Jazz Club on his blog.
• Just Massage, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, has a website featuring a picture of me receiving a Shiatsu massage.  You’ll just have to take my word that the back being massaged in the second picture on this page is mine.
• My friend, Lutheran vicar J.P. Cima has created a website for Hanoi International Church. I show up in a few of the photo albums, and many of the photographs in which I do not appear (only the good ones, mind you!) come from my camera.
• Anna, mentioned in point #1 above, is a communications officer with a small NGO in Hanoi.  As such, she occasionally uses her friends to promote various causes — like Just Massage in point #5.  Most recently she used the three Vietnam SALT volunteers as exemplary bicycle riders in a green transport campaign.
• After Tet I wrote a short letter to Charleswood Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, which was printed in The Grapevine, the church newsletter.  You can see a PDF of that letter here.
  

I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect based this passing comment, as I do not consider myself particularly attuned to the spiritual world. I think the mental image I formed was of a town blanketed with an atmosphere of reverential silence. I was expecting to join quiet queues of tourists filing through ancient temples and pagodas. I was expecting a soothing and salutary two days spent amidst relics of Buddist history.

Instead I was reminded again of why it’s best to travel without expectations.

That’s not to say that Luang Prabang is not a peaceful place: compared to Hanoi it’s a veritable woodland clearing.  But the streets are full of tourists, the markets bustle with activity (though, mercifully, not with high-pressure sales pitches), and there are plenty of ways to exhaust yourself.

We started by kayaking out to the elephants.  I had pushed our group to take an elephant ride, not so much for the ride itself as to enable us to later make the claim that we had ridden elephants in Laos.  Our walk through the woods was slow, with the animals seeming to begrudge us their every step.  Our young elephant drivers kicked behind the ears of their charges to spur them on, occasionally resorting to beatings with a small stick, or plunging a sharpened hook into the skin of the elephants’ foreheads.  I can now say that I’ve ridden an elephant in Laos, and have the pictures to prove it, but I would neither repeat nor recommend the experience.

Our four-hour kayak trip down a river through the countryside, however, was majestic.  As we propelled ourselves forward beneath torrential rains, we passed scenes of such staggering natural beauty that I felt compelled to refuse their subjugation by camera.  (It was also pouring rain, and the dry bag seemed to be the best place for my camera.)  People from local ethnic groups cast nets in the river for fish as we passed, and we went miles without seeing any signs of the modernity that is slowly making inroads into the underdeveloped country.  That experience I would both repeat and recommend unreservedly.

The following day we hiked to the top of a waterfall, swam in the turquoise water at its base, and pulled leeches from our feet and legs, leaving trails of blood trickling down between our toes.

My German friend Martin’s comment about spirituality must have been made in reference to the very active Buddhism of Luang Prabang.

The temples in the city are not historical relics — they are home to dozens of young monks in saffron-coloured robes.  Rather than maintaining a distance, as I might have expected, the monks could be seen mingling with tourists in the evening market.

This posed an ethical dilemma for me: I wanted photographs of the monks, but I did not want to play the role of the culturally insensitive, obnoxious tourist with a camera.  A telephoto lens might have helped.  In the end, I cowardly shot them from behind.

We spent almost a full day in each direction travelling by bus between Vientiane and Luang Prabang, and only spent two full days there.

Still, while I didn’t rediscover my latent spirituality as Martin’s comment led me to believe I might, and while I suffered from a head cold for most of the time we were in Luang Prabang, the trip was worth it.

Next time, though, I’d take the plane.

Before we begin today’s brief geography lesson about one of Asia’s more obscure countries, a word on the country name. Laos is pronounced as one syllable, not two, with a diphthong resembling the pained expression ‘ow’. Enunciation of the ‘s’ is optional, as it is silent both in Lao (the official language of Laos) and French (the language of their former colonizers).

Laos is a land-locked (or, in the positive parlance of politicians, land-linked) country bounded by Thailand to the west, China to the north, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south. Like Vietnam, it has been a one-party communist state since the end of the “American War” in 1975. Also like Vietnam, the Communist Party of Laos has opened up considerably through a series of market-oriented reforms in recent years.

Per capita, Laos is the world’s most heavily bombed nation. As part of their efforts to disrupt the flow of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the United States dropped more than two million tonnes of ammunition on Laos during their escapades in the region. Unexploded ordinance – bombs that didn’t go off upon impact and remain volatile – poses a major danger to the country’s six million inhabitants.

None of that background information, however, is immediately relevant to the long bus ride between the current capital, Vientiane, and the ancient seat of the monarchy, Luang Prabang. I just threw it in for free.

Crossing the mountain range that separates the two cities, the bus ride from Vientiane to Luang Prabang is at once spectacular and nauseating.

If you buy your tickets too late, as we did, you’ll end up seated at the back of the bus, unable to see the mist-covered mountains as the tail of the bus wags in exaggerated arcs around vicious curves. If you happen to be on the KING OF BUS, you will also discover that the bolts securing the rearmost seats to their frames are missing, and that reclining causes the cushion beneath you to slide forward and fall to the floor.

For ten long, headaching hours, I was unable to sleep, unable to enjoy the scenery streaking past, and unable to converse with civility, thanks to the nausea.

The most enjoyable moments of the journey occurred when the bus driver pulled to the side of the road to relieve himself, allowing passengers to briefly enjoy a view of what, at that precise moment, might well have been the world’s most beautiful mass urinal.

Those of us with antsy shutter fingers snapped off frame after frame, reminding ourselves that digital photography is cheap, and forgetting that our hard drives are already full of pictures we’re too lazy to delete.

We finally arrived in Luang Prabang around dinner time, having lost the best hours of the day to the road, and caught a tuk tuk – a modified pickup truck with benches and a roof serving as a taxi – into town to find a guesthouse.

I plan to write my experiences with the School of Peace (SOP) into a report in the near future, so I won’t go into too much detail here. In short,

The purpose of the SOP is to encourage engagement between peoples of different faiths in Asia. This is done through bringing together approximately 20 young adults from conflict areas of Asia who share different faith perspectives. Through lectures, exposure visits, and interaction with one another, the participants are able to learn about other faiths, and the importance of living with one another in peace. (Source: APEN)

I know there are those for whom the word peace brings to mind images of bell-bottoms, flowers and LSD, so I feel obligated to point out that the school is not teaching passivity or disengagement from a dangerous world (though I think this might be a misrepresentation of what the bell-bottomed LSD-trippers were about). But the “School of Structural Analysis and Social Transformation” would be a rather unwieldy name, especially as the students are not native English speakers.

I joined half of the students on a field trip in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where we spent the week engaging with and learning from a non-governmental organization called AREDS. AREDS works primarily with the most historically disenfranchised segment of the Indian population, the Dalits (or Untouchables).

At the end of a week spent learning together with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians from seven Asian countries, I was entirely unready to leave them and return to Vietnam.

For those who are interested in reading more about my experiences with the School of Peace and AREDS, I hereby promise that my report is forthcoming.

I suspect more people are interested in seeing pictures. Unfortunately I don’t have enough time before Laos to edit and process the more than 1,000 pictures that made it past the first cut (a quick review on my camera’s LCD screen). I promise to edit significantly before I post them here.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

A market in Karur, Tamil Nadu.

Young villagers in Tamil Nadu watch a rural education drama

• $1 DVDs. For less than the price of a movie rental back home, you can pick up the latest George Clooney film from any one of a large number of DVD shops stocking thousands upon thousands of pirated movies. While the price can’t be beat, not all copies are created equal. Some of the discs don’t play at all. Others aren’t what they claim to be. My friends Leon and Carmen were told they were buying three complete seasons of Arrested Development, and ended up with only a handful of episodes. One movie I bought turned out to have been shot with a camcorder in a movie theater, dubbed into a language I couldn’t understand. Still, it’s hard to argue with one dollar movies. The same deals can be found on music CDs and computer software.
• Dolce & Gabbana. Fashion is paramount in Hanoi, to young women especially, but also to the young men who style their hair and weave through traffic on flashy red motorbikes. The brand name of choice is Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian fashion house known for its exorbitant prices. In Vietnam, a pair of “D&G” jeans will set you back only around ten dollars. Authenticity undetermined, of course.
• Prescription drugs, without a prescription. Feel like diagnosing your own illness? Go ahead, pick up some antibiotics or narcotic painkillers from one of the hundreds of pharmacies in Hanoi that will sell anything, to anybody, cheap.
• Dog meat. It’s a delicacy. A special treat to be eaten at the appointed time of the lunar month. To answer the question on everyone’s mind, yes. I have.
• Peanut Butter. Needless to say, I was nervous about this before moving to Vietnam. Thankfully, my staple food made it here before me. A handful of small grocery stores catering to the expatriate community carry peanut butter (not Skippy, unfortunately), as do Big C and Metro, two Walmart-wannabes I try to avoid. The price of a jar here is about the same as it is in North America.
• Kentucky Fried Chicken. Before McDonalds, before Burger King, before the arrival of any other fast food chain, KFC has set up shop in Vietnam. To the best of my knowledge, the half dozen or so KFC locations were the only North American restaurants in Hanoi, until the first Pizza Hut opened its doors last month. KFC and Pizza Hut are, it turns out, owned by the same parent corporation. I expect we’ll be seeing Taco Bell and A&W joints opening shortly.

On Thursday I fly to Bangalore, India to spend twelve days with the School of Peace, and I fly to Laos for an MCC regional retreat shortly after I get back to Vietnam. Details and pictures to follow.

But there is a very popular model in the charity world that involves sponsoring individual children.  Doing it this way provides something tangible to donors: letters, pictures, report cards.  Things you can put on your fridge.

MCC generally believes group assistance to be better than individual assistance for a number of reasons outlined here.  The challenge, then, is to convince donors to support these projects, and provide them with something tangible in return.

Which is why I had to wake up at 5:00 a.m. last Monday morning.

Together with Vinh, a Rural Community Development program staff worker with MCC Vietnam, and Rachel, I travelled to the province of Phu Tho with my camera in tow.  Rachel is doing a writeup for donors to MCC’s Global Family program to stick on their refrigerators.  I was the designated photographer.

On the way, we stopped to watch a drama team educate high school students about HIV/AIDS, part of another program supported by MCC.

Students watch a presentation about HIV/AIDS.
View full album: MCC Projects

After the presentation, we visited three preschools in the Hien Quan district of Phu Tho, where MCC subsidizes nutritious lunches for 3 — 5 year old students.

Two preschool students eat a lunch subsidized by MCC’s Global Family program
View full album: MCC Projects

If this picture doesn’t inspire you to click here and donate, I fear for your soul.

[Note: MCC does not believe in using guilt to extract money from donors.]

Last Friday, my camera was called into service once again, this time by Anna. Anna spends a good deal of her time working with Just Massage, a massage centre in Hanoi with a mission to train and employ visually impaired youth. It was jointly founded by Action for the City, a partner organization of MCC in Hanoi.

Our Italian model receives a therapeutic Shiatsu massage
View full album: MCC Projects

Take some time to browse through the full album.

Having taken nearly 2,500 pictures since the start of February, I am wondering how soon I can justify buying really, really expensive lenses for my new camera.

For the most part, I spend my days trying to decipher sentences like this one:

It was also recommended that 10 kinds of trees used for land evaluation should be used and land map adaptation 1:10,000 should be constructed with 18 kinds of adaptations, thus, proposing 8 types of lands to be used and appropriate fertilizer putting down, coherent with the district land condition and development orientation.

Or,

However, the amplitude enlarging of this modulation, with its advantages and disadvantages, is an undeniable truth.

I am a manuscript editor in the English department of The Gioi Publishers. I am not a translator: my Vietnamese is not that good. Rather, I am given broken English and asked to fix it.

However, there is another aspect to my job that is often equally as challenging. A few of my coworkers translate English books into Vietnamese. They occasionally come to me with words, sentences and ideas that their dictionaries cannot sufficiently explain.

Some of these questions are easy to field. What does it mean to dunk in basketball? Here, watch this YouTube video:

Others are not so easy. One of my colleagues is translating a book about Feng Shui. When she comes to me with questions like, “What does it mean to centre your inner energy flow?”, I have to refrain from answering, “Nothing. They’re just meaningless words.”

The author of that book has given subsections “witty” headings like Here a Fence, There a Fence. I am forced to explain and sing Old MacDonald (though the singing might not have been strictly necessary), to prove that the author isn’t, in fact, referring to two fences.

A second colleague is translating a book titled How to Think Like Einstein, subtitled “Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius”. It is a book that counsels counterintuitive thinking in order to break out of self-imposed ‘rule ruts’. Unfortunately, in my observation, the Vietnamese tend to be rather literal. (The Vietnamese word for diabetes, for example, is “to pee sugar” – đái đường.) Explaining why you would preemptively discard obvious and sensible ideas in order to approach a problem in a radically new way is like explaining vegetarianism to a pig farmer.

The same book also described the (re)productive exchange of ideas between people as sexual intercourse between two minds. This was not only difficult to clarify, but rather awkward as well.

Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, I always enjoy it when my colleagues bring me questions like these. I love words and language in general, and sometimes their questions prompt me to research etymologies I had never thought to investigate (why, for example, do we ‘dress to the nines’?). The English language is a flexible and culture-saturated organism. It’s a messy, wonderful thing.

Rather than offer a formal apology for amount of time that has passed since I last posted here, I would point you toward my Flickr photostream, which is where most of my energy has been directed lately.

Translated roughly, the titular question of this post means, “Did you enjoy Tet in Vietnam?” (Literally, it would be, “Tet in Vietnam has happy no?”) It was a question I grew sick of answering.

Marking the lunar new year, also known as the Chinese New Year, Tet is the most important holiday and festival of the Vietnamese people. The name is probably best known in the West because of the 1968 Tet Offensive, but Tet really has nothing to do with what is known here as the American War.

We were given a week of holidays for this Christmas on steroids. A lack of initiative on my part left me without travel plans, so I remained in Hanoi to celebrate Tet with my host family.

I won’t write up my experiences at length here, though I was originally planning to provide some background information on lunar new year traditions such as paying respect to ancestors, giving ‘lucky money’ to young children, returning to countryside homes, and wrapping banh chung. This post has been germinating for too long already.

Instead I will let the pictures speak for themselves. If you haven’t already, take a moment to peruse the photo album linked to the picture below (or here on Flickr).

I have a new camera, a Canon Rebel XTi, and two prime lenses. People who know me can attest to my excitement about this.

New photographs will appear in the Photos section of this website. Click the link in the right sidebar to see my new albums.

Photos taken with my old Sony point-and-shoot can still be found at Picasa Web Albums.

I am not that person. As a constant embrace of change is perhaps my most consistent quality, I see relocation as an occasion to form new habits, adopt new ideas, try new personalities. Here I will try to pin down some of what might constitute the “new me” (though I would take exception to that term) since arriving in Vietnam.

In Vietnam…

• I am not a picky eater. This flies in the face of 20 years of received wisdom about Brent Durksen. In fact, here I have earned a reputation as being easy to feed, in addition to being the guy who’ll eat any and all food left on the table.
• I consider 8:45 p.m. a reasonable time to go to bed. An earlier me would have scoffed at this juvenile/geriatric regime.
• I am a keyboard player. In most places I am known as the guitar player. In a few, I’m known as a drummer. Without my guitar or djembe on hand, and with a superfluity of electronic keyboards in Vietnam, I am best known here for tickling the plastic ivories.
• I love playing volleyball. In all of my past incarnations, volleyball was my weakest and least favourite team sport. Here I get out two or three times a week to play with a group of salty (rather than SALTy) foreigners. Notice, though, that I’m not saying I play it well.
• I’m an idiot. This, of course, implies that idiocy has not always been a characteristic of mine, and sets myself up for any number of witty retorts. Perhaps I should disable comments on this post. But I am not convinced that my reputation for sheer imbecility extends widely beyond my Hanoian home, where my 9-year-old host sister frequently looks upon me with scorn as I desecrate the Vietnamese language.
• I’m tall. (Again, I really should disable comments.)

I’m sure there are other changes I could mention. And, of course, there is much about me that has remained the same. Perhaps those things will provide fodder for a later post, though probably not. I’ve always been lazy.

Having lived in Vietnam for five months now, I am in the sweet spot. During that time, I have lived with a Vietnamese family without committing any grave cultural faux pas. I speak enough Vietnamese to prompt a double-take by passing tourists. I have read books written by foreigners that by and large agree with my own conclusions. I am hereby ready to make some pronouncements on this strange and wonderful culture.

A few weeks ago, thumbing past the Vietnamese channels on our cable television towards the English ones higher up the dial, an instantly recognizable theme song caught my ear. Half expecting to hear Bob Barker – arguably the greatest game show host of our time – reminding us to stymie rampant pet sex, my fingers hesitated on the remote control. But, of course, it wasn’t The Price is Right. It was the Vietnamese copycat version Hãy Chọn Giá Đúng, or, Choose The Right Price. It had the same set, the same games (remember Plinko, anyone?), the same yellow name tags, but no Bob Barker, no “NEW CAR!!”s, and stiffer, more typically Asian applause.

My implicit comprehension of Vietnamese culture led me to watch with amused interest, but without surprise. After all, there is probably no game show on American television better suited to the Vietnamese culture I know than that brilliant commercial-within-a-commercial.

The Communist Party of Vietnam (the only show in town, politically speaking) has been gradually opening up the Vietnamese economy by way of free market policies since the 1980’s. The strategy known as Đổi mới, or renovation, has led to an astounding upsurge in international trade. The newly-capitalist Vietnamese have embraced consumer goods with as much passion as their incomes allow, and price comparison rivals the weather as a favourite topic of conversation.

This is a country in which “How much money do you make?” is reportedly an acceptable question to ask an acquaintance (though I have never asked nor been asked this question). Certainly “How much did that cost?” is fair game. One of the first things we studied in our Vietnamese language classes was numbers, and I was quickly struck by how much the average conversation here revolves around numbers. Usually huge numbers. It takes around 16,000 Vietnamese đồng – yes, the currency is called the dong. I’ll take a minute for those with the maturity of a seventh-grader to stop guffawing – it takes around 16,000 VND to buy one American dollar, so prices above 60 USD quickly soar into the millions. Here you have to be a millionaire to buy a rice cooker.

My Vietnamese host family were early winners in this capitalist game. Luxury items scattered about the house include laptops, digital cameras and an Apple iPhone, not to mention the new car parked beneath the kitchen. They all attest to my host parents’ skill at playing the domestic stock market, which has been shooting up like a junkie [Ed: too far?] in recent years. Their combined salaries alone would never have bought these status symbols.

And so the spirit of Bob Barker has come to southeast Asia. According to my intimate knowledge of the Vietnamese national psyche, it comes as no surprise. If I may say so, though, I’ve never been a big fan of game shows.

While this may seem a desperate plea for pity, it’s not. Rather, this post is meant to serve as a complement to earlier posts about what I love here.

And so, in no particular order, I miss

• Libraries. I am a member of the public libraries of St. Catharines, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Edinburgh, Scotland. The idea of having most of the great works of English literature available to me free of charge at any time is both reassuring and exciting. Getting a library card is one of the first things I do whenever I arrive in a new city. Not having access to a large English-language public library is starting to bother me.
• Parks. Hanoi has a few parks scattered about, but I have yet to find a place within a quick bike ride from my house where I can escape the noise and endless concrete of this metropolis.
• Cold milk and cereal. Fresh milk is just too expensive here.  I have, however, found a steady supply of peanut butter.
• Indoor heat. January has suddenly turned grey and nasty, and I’m working in an unheated office, wishing my feet and hands weren’t so bloody cold all the time. Imagine it, wearing long johns, mittens and a toque in 14-degree weather. (That’s in Celsius. For my American friends, I’m talking about 57 degrees Fahrenheit.)
• Truly high-speed Internet. The ADSL in this country functions at a fraction of the speed I had grown accustomed to in North America. This will probably be seen as a rather bourgeois complaint by some of my fellow SALTers, whose access to the Internet is sporadic at best.  My apologies.

I think it’s a testament to how much I enjoy my life here in Hanoi that most items on this list are so trivial.

Traveling with two Canadian friends in Thailand, we decided December 30th would be a perfect day to hit the beach. Our trusted Lonely Planet guidebook suggested that we would find two neighbouring beach towns three hours south of Bangkok by bus. The town of Cha-am was first along the Gulf of Thailand coast, and finding a budget guest house there was decided upon as Plan A.

But Plan A unraveled quickly as we wandered up and down the streets of Cha-am, being told at every turn that the town was full. We did find one room available, but we weren’t quite ready to settle for the stable, at least not at hotel prices. The room was a dingy, dark sauna on the fourth floor, with one bed and a shared bathroom. The rate we were quoted almost made us spit.

And so Plan B took us half an hour further down the road by bus to Hua Hin. Too tired and hungry by this point to walk around looking for accommodation, we entrusted our search to the blue-vested men at the bus stop whose job description we couldn’t quite determine. Still, they seemed genuinely motivated to find us a place to stay, so we sat on a bench in the middle of the bustling oceanside town, contentedly drinking coffee in the early evening while mobile phone calls were placed on our behalf. It was perhaps an hour later when they told us of a place around 5 km out of town that would rent us two rooms for the night. By this time I was already formulating Plan C, which involved taking an overnight train south, hopefully in a sleeper car with mattresses.

But sticking with Plan B, we took a taxi to see what kind of place still had room for us. The price for a room was slightly above our budget, but as long as we could put three people into one room, we weren’t going to sweat it. We eventually arrived at a hotel tucked away from the main road, where each room had its own carport with curtains that could be drawn behind your car for privacy. Young children reading this blog should just accept that we had reasons for not wanting to stay there, older readers can use their imaginations (as we did) to understand why such privacy might be desired by the target clientèle of this establishment.

And so we went back to scheming up new plans. We were discouraged from pursuing Plan C - the overnight train - by those who assured us that all southbound trains were as solidly booked as the hotels.

Plan D was to sleep on a bus headed to either Surat Thani or Krabi, destinations in the south of Thailand that we believed would be less busy on the holiday weekend. But we met a young couple at the bus station who told us of a wonderful island far away with long, sandy beaches and endless beach resorts with plentiful rooms for all. Overnight buses departed for this dream destination hourly. Thus was Plan E born, the plan that would take us to the island of Koh Samui over New Year’s Eve. The 9 and 10 o’clock buses were full, but after a long period of sitting anxiously at the bus station, we boarded the 11 p.m. bus and tried to catch some sleep.

From Thailand Trip

And we did indeed find a beautiful island with available accommodation and long, sandy beaches. We also found a lot of rain, and the most dangerous fireworks display I have ever witnessed. May this blog post inspire someone on Koh Samui to regulate the sale of fireworks to drunken foreigners on New Year’s Eve. We were fortunate not to witness any casualties, despite seeing a few wayward explosions.

It was an exhausting experience, but we ended up with a place to sleep, and found ourselves reasonably close to Krabi, the rock climbing Mecca of Thailand, where we would later spend two days abusing our bodies on some beautiful climbs.

From Thailand Trip

I would like to wish a belated Happy New Year to everyone who took the time to read to the end of this long, unwieldy story.

A word of wisdom from the wise: if you’re planning to head downtown on Christmas Eve in Hanoi, leave yourself lots of time.

Despite the fact that Vietnam is predominantly Buddhist (if only nominally), with Catholics comprising around 10% of the population, I have never before seen Christmas revelry on the scale I witnessed in Hanoi. I suspect much of this can be chalked up to the climate. After all, a street party is much more appealing at 20 degrees above zero than at 20 degrees below. Culturally, it also makes sense that if you’re not at home reading from the Gospels and exchanging gifts, you might be looking for something to do when a third of the world’s population is celebrating a holiday.

And so the young people of Hanoi head downtown. I was there myself because the two Protestant English-language churches in town were holding a joint Christmas Eve service in the ballroom of the Hilton. (Somebody was heard to observe that if Jesus was born in a filthy stable, wasn’t celebrating Christmas at the Hilton somewhat incongruous?)

To get out of the downtown area following the big production, we made the mistake of passing the most famous ice cream joint in town, which was filled to overflowing, bringing traffic on the road outside to a halt. Taxis couldn’t be had, with taxi companies hanging up on callers trying to arrange a ride. Our evening was a mess of cell phone calls, constantly evolving plans, flat tires and traffic, but it was a good evening all in all.

I leave for Thailand on Saturday, where it is currently 34 degrees Celsius. Compared to the damp 15 degree weather we are having here in Hanoi, the warmth should be a welcome change. There is no indoor heat in Hanoi, so to understand why I am complaining about such moderate temperatures, try setting your thermostat at 15 degrees for a week, spending hours at a time typing at a keyboard. I suspect you’ll empathize shortly.

I am sure it has already been said many times, many ways, but it is always interesting to see the familiar through the eyes of an outsider. I had intended to follow up an earlier post on some surprises I encountered in Vietnam with another like it (for example, Vietnam has paper money worth 3 cents), but things here became normal all too quickly.

Thus, it was good to have two friends visiting from Canada this past week. Leon and Carmen are spending three weeks traveling in Southeast Asia, and made Hanoi their first stop.

Rediscovering the terror of traffic, the shock of motorbikes laden with dozens of live animals, and the surprising sounds and smells of Hanoi was a good reminder that my life, while increasingly mundane to me, is still exotic and unique.

I was able to take three days off work, and we went to Halong Bay, a member of the Most Beautiful Bays in the World Club (you think I’m making this up, don’t you?). I had been to Halong before, but this time we had the chance to go rock climbing with a group of wonderful South Africans who were in Southeast Asia on a climbing trip. Click the picture below to see the full album from Carmen and Leon’s visit to Hanoi.

From Carmen and Leon Visit

The village is populated mostly by the elder generation and young children. Those of working age, like my host father, have migrated to the city for work. This is a familiar story around Vietnam, and around the world.

Click the picture below to see the gallery. I have also added pictures to a few new web albums, feel free to check those out as well.

From Trip to the Village

For those who appreciate context, I have provided a satellite map of Hanoi, highlighting a few places relevant to my daily life. Click the placemarks to see what they represent. The long blue line is the route of my daily commute to and from work.

View Larger Map

I must say, Google makes turning over your every personal detail so seductively simple that it’s hard to resist. By now they know more about me than I do.

If anyone who reads this blog is a SALT stalker (that is, a parent or friend of an MCC SALTer who regularly reads other SALTers’ blogs), the ‘day in the life’ post is one that will be familiar to you. Examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Being someone who enjoys being different merely for the sake of it, I have decided to take the ‘day in the life’ post inside my head. Here is a brief sample of my thoughts on any given Tuesday or Thursday (my ‘normal’ days).

6:12 a.m. Unprintable.
6:43 a.m. “Do I really have to take down this mosquito net every morning?”
6:55 a.m. “Please be bread, or phở, or bún for breakfast today. Anything but instant noodles and half-fertilized duck eggs.”
7:26 a.m. “Man, I sure love the smell of exhaust fumes in the morning.”
7:34 a.m. “I remember when a gap of 7 inches between two vehicles felt close.”
8:02 a.m. “Hey, I’m almost on time today.”
8:13 a.m. “I can’t wait until we’re finished editing this book. I really don’t care about Vietnamese cinema this much. I’ve already seen eight articles about this movie.”
9:38 a.m. “I’ve read this sentence three times, and I still don’t understand what it’s driving at. Let’s just highlight it and move on.”
10:09 a.m. “How much longer until nap time?”
11:24 a.m. “Okay, that sentence is hilarious. I have to save that one for later.”
12:02 p.m. “How do I say ‘give me everything but the fish’ in Vietnamese again?”
12:40 p.m. “Oh glory, hallelujah. Praises be. The noon-hour nap is the best idea never to take hold in Western culture.”
1:40 p.m. “Where am I? Oh, I’m still at work.”
3:08 p.m. “How much longer until volleyball?”
3:11 p.m. “That’s interesting. I’ve seen that exact grammatical structure in Vietnamese. It must have been translated literally.”
4:17 p.m. “How much longer until volleyball?”
4:59 p.m. “Volleyball, here I come.”
6:14 p.m. “If only I could spike this stupid ball. Well, at least I hit it into the net harder that time.”
7:02 p.m. “Alright traffic, it’s just you and me. If you promise not to kill me today, I promise never to tell my parents just how bad you really are.”
7:40 p.m. “I am the King of Chopsticks.”
8:05 p.m. “Kid, you’re 12 years old and can conjugate English verbs as well as I can. That’s remarkable. Now let’s get your homework finished.”
9:11 p.m. “Okay, I understood that question. I could be on a Vietnamese game show, too! Wait, I don’t know the answer.”
9:49 p.m. “Alright bed, it’s just you and me…and maybe Ira Glass.”