Back in the U.S.A.

The strangest thing about traveling is that as soon as you’re home, it seems as if you’ve never left. Of course, there’s a lot to process, to digest — much will be integrated into my world view over time. But day-to-day life can return almost immediately to normal routines.

I was in the Saigon airport at 3 p.m. Thursday to catch the first of four flights that brought me to Florida. A late afternoon flight on a weekday, Saigon to Hanoi, a lot of business travelers, traveling light. What caught my notice as I stood in line to board the bus that would take us to the plane: Almost everyone was carrying a big vinyl-sided briefcase with a metal rim. I haven’t seen that style of briefcase here in about 10 years. (I used to have one.)

I looked around, searching for other styles. I saw two people carrying something more updated. Thinking back, I realized that U.S. business people carried those briefcases before we all had laptop computers.

I had a lot of thoughts about development (as in “developing nations”). Many times I thought, while in Cambodia or Vietnam, this must be what Malaysia looked like 25 years ago. The traffic in Phnom Penh and Saigon and Hanoi did much to explain to me why roads are designed as they are in Kuala Lumpur — motorbikes lead to cars, and cars are bigger, and then new roads are needed. But pedestrians were not considered in the plans when Malaysia modernized the arteries in its largest city, and as I walked in the gutters of streets in Hanoi and Saigon, I understood why it’s so hard to walk around in KL’s famous shopping area, the Golden Triangle.

In Hoi An, to preserve the old part of the city, the government is forbidding all but foot traffic, one day at a time. Eventually it will be a wheels-free zone all week long, to the benefit of tourism — brilliant.

Another thing I considered after spending time in Cambodia and Vietnam was the retarding effect of war. Cambodia held its first free elections in May 1993 — before that, real economic development was not possible. Vietnam “opened the door” in 1986-89, but I would estimate Vietnam is at least 10 years ahead of Cambodia on the development scale. Other Southeast Asian nations such as Malaysia and Thailand have been able to focus on economic reforms, infrastructure, and education instead of cleaning up after a country-wide destructive conflict. When I thought about the chaos in Vietnam and Cambodia only 30 years ago, I had to judge their progress as pretty remarkable.

Vietnam has a mission right now to improve the education system at all levels, so it can properly train the next generation of skilled workers and information professionals. Night schools for learning English are everywhere, and many of the 60 journalists I met were enrolled in one. Our Intrepid Travel trip leader, Cong, had studied Russian in school for many years, but started learning English when he was 24 — about eight years ago. The level of English right now in a lot of the hotels where I stayed was poor, but with the government’s emphasis on tourism as one of its income centers, I would bet that will change soon.

I posted some new photos today on Flickr.

Another departure, with regret

Sitting in the business-class lounge in the Hanoi airport, using free wi-fi and drinking a can of passionfruit juice imported from Malaysia (huh?!), waiting for the second leg of the seemingly endless journey from east to west (although my route is eastbound, from Seoul to Atlanta). I’m sorry to be leaving Vietnam — would have liked more time in Hue, in Hoi An, in Saigon.

Tuesday night in Saigon, I walked around and watched people eating, drinking, and just generally hanging out on the sidewalk, as they always do. While I felt pretty fed up with the helter-skelter motorbike traffic and the almost impossible task of walking on the sidewalks (too crowded with seated people and motorbikes to permit much walking), I also thought I could really get to feeling comfortable in Saigon. Much more so than Hanoi. Saigon seems warmer, less harsh. Maybe I just didn’t spend enough time in Hanoi.

Our Intrepid trip leader in Vietnam, Cong, lives near Hanoi. He said if I had one month in Hanoi, I would grow to like it. But he also said, as we sat in the giant colonial-era post office building in Saigon’s District 1: “If I could live anywhere, I would live here.”

Ha Long Bay, Hue, and Hoi An

Since we left Hanoi, we have been seeing some of the most famous tourist attractions of Vietnam. All three of these locations are UNESCO World Heritage sites, meaning they are “considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.” (Photos to come later.)

Right now I’m in an Internet cafe in Hoi An, at 10:45 a.m. local time. Hoi An is a beautiful old city, filled with small old Chinese-style shop buildings along narrow streets (there is one street like this in Singapore, as I recall), formerly a major trading port for seafaring people from all over SE Asia, as well as the foreigners who traveled here for the spice trade, silk, and other goods. I am the only female and the only Westerner in a room with about 25 computers and about 22 young men and boys, most of them playing online games with intensive graphics, wearing headphones, and simultaneously checking several highly animated chatrooms. They are typing very, very fast. A country on the verge of a high-tech boom, for sure!

We came here on a very nice air-con minibus from Hue, where we had two days of fantastic tour-guiding by a local man named Thanh — including a day on motorbikes, zooming around backstreets no wider than about eight feet, smoothly paved with concrete. (Note: Dirt roads still prevail in Cambodia. Better roads, more paving, and fewer potholes in Vietnam.) The citadel of the Nguyen emperors impressed us, even though we were melting from the heat.

From Hanoi to Hue, we traveled on an overnight train, four beds per compartment, very comfortable and nice. The train left the station about 11 p.m. and arrived in Hue about 11 a.m. the next day.

To see the cliff-islands of Ha Long Bay, we went out on a wooden junk (with a motor) that was well-appointed for about 20 people to dine and sleep overnight. Each cabin had two beds and a private bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. The food really surprised us — the crew prepared and served delicious Vietnamese meals to us. The sky was cloudy but we had a clear view of the many tree-covered islands, other boats, and fish farms tucked away in coves. The boat dropped anchor in the late afternoon and we stayed put until morning, when we ate an early breakfast and sailed back to port.

Today we are flying from Hoi An to Saigon — then tomorrow, a tour of the Mekong Delta.

Two nights ago, Oliver Stones’”Platoon” was on HBO here. Very weird to be watching that in a room only a few hours south of the DMZ.

Ready to hit the road, in Vietnam

My best friend and her family arrived on Sunday, after a bad flight delay from Delta. The customer service from Delta has got to be the worst in the world. Their airport staff are rude and unsympathetic. I have experienced it myself — many times, in many different airports. The story of Delta making a family of four miss their flight from New York to Seoul, Korea, is basically one of gross incompetence.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell that story here. I’m glad they finally arrived safely — even though it was one day late! And all due to the stupidity of Delta and their extremely rude counter staff in Washington and New York. Naturally, when the family switched over to Korean Air, all the staff were very friendly, polite, professional, and sympathetic. What a pleasure to fly with a good airline!

So, the fast notes: Saturday, one of the Vietnamese journalists, Thuy, offered to show me around Hanoi a bit. We visited Phu Tay Ho temple — a beautiful setting, and very nicely kept up. Then we strolled around the botanical gardens. I had to meet Larry at 1 p.m., so Thuy and I parted then. Later I did a lot of walking around the Hoan Kiem Lake area.

Phu Tay Ho temple, in Hanoi.

Sunday morning I went to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. This is certainly among the best museums in all Southeast Asia! The highlight is the full-size traditional houses, tombs, and other buildings standing in a tree-shaded park behind the big white museum building. I loved looking at the construction of the walls, roofs, and floors. The techniques are similar to those I saw in the jungle in East Malaysia (Borneo) and also at the museum in Terengganu. The baskets and the big Chinese jars (fired pottery) were much like the ones in Iban longhouses.

Bun nem: Sidewalk fare, about $1.25 for lunch.

Sunday afternoon I went to Jodi’s hotel to meet them when they arrived. Sunday night I met Thuy and her friend Chung, and after a wonderful dinner of steamed duck soup with glass noodles, we went to someone’s home to hear a concert of traditional Tru singing. Wow, that was so cool! The women were all so beautiful in their ao dai dresses, and even a very young girl (about 11 years old) gave us a sample of her wonderful singing voice.

Monday Jodi’s family and I all went out for pho bo for breakfast, at Pho 24 on Thi Sach Street, followed by a walk around the lake and a visit to Ngoc Son temple (in the middle of the lake). Lunch was at Quan An Ngan, on Phan Boi Chau Street — really fantastic, and quite a bargain too.

Johnny and Lydia, jet-lagged at Ngoc Son temple.

After lunch, the Hoa Lo prison and then the water puppet show at the theater just north of the lake. We all really enjoyed the water puppets a lot (except maybe Johnny … we’ll ask him later). The accompanying music was excellent, and some of the skits had us laughing out loud. Even though the audience is mostly Western tourists, the show did not seem tacky or stupid (not dumbed down for stupid tourists). Production values seemed quite high, and the dozen puppeteers really showed a lot of skill in their manipulation of the wooden puppets. When they came out for a bow at the end, we all applauded them enthusiastically.

The Schmitt-Young-Nguyen family, at Hoa Lo prison, Hanoi.

Tomorrow we are leaving for Ha Long Bay — blog posting may become very sparse!

At liberty in Hanoi

Friday was my last day teaching the Hanoi journalists. They organized a farewell lunch, and the U.S. embassy invited Larry Berman, author of the nonfiction book Perfect Spy. The embassy provided copies of the Vietnamese translation for all the journalists, and Larry signed copies (view slideshow).

Today my best friend and her family are due to arrive from the U.S. Their airline — Delta — totally screwed up their flight. They are arriving more than 12 hours later than originally scheduled. How messed up is that?

Yesterday I had a great morning sightseeing with Thuy, one of the young journalists from the course. I will post photos later. Today: The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology! I hear it’s very good!

Journalist training, week 2, day 1

Same basic schedule, new city. About 30 journalists here as well. We had some Internet connectivity problems, but people seemed to be very patient about that.

Two of the U.S. embassy employees told me their home costs for DSL Internet are very reasonable — between $3 and $7 per month. The price varies depending on the amount you download. Their daughters, age 9 and 10, like to surf the Web a lot. The next generation of Vietnam kids is wired and ready for action!

Journalism training, 1:31 slideshow

This is a link to the Soundslides that the HCM City participants made to give to me on the last day:

Online Journalism for Vietnamese Writers

It makes me appear very interactive (ha ha). I was very touched by this — no other journalists whom I have trained ever gave me a slideshow!

Sunday in Hanoi

My day: Wandering aimlessly, drinking lots of water, enjoying Hoan Kiem Lake, stopping for cold drinks, and realizing how little interest I have in shopping.

Hanoi has this big section called the Old Quarter, sprawled around a big lake that today, Sunday, seemed to be the lounging-around destination of a fair number of local residents. My guidebook recommends the French colonial architecture, but in fact, this area is wall-to-wall shops, and just about every shop is selling stuff for foreign tourists. A fair percentage of nice things — silk and other soft goods. A lot of cheap knick-knacks too, but nothing (I am very happy to report) that looks like it came from Bali or Thailand.

Nice experience: Getting my camera repaired (see below).

Disappointing experience: Having the taxi on the ride home charge me double the real rate, which I knew because I had paid it in the morning. The rotten thing is, tourists are warned that there are these crooked taxi meters, but what the heck can I do about it? The meter runs, it goes too high — but am I going to fight the driver over $6 instead of $3? I ought to, but I don’t. I just don’t feel like arguing over $3. And yet, it makes me not want to be here. It makes me feel like the city is full of crooks (everyone tries to overcharge foreigners for just about everything here). In Cambodia, tuk-tuk drivers back down if you make it clear you know the real price. Here, taxi drivers and xe om (motorbike drivers) argue back and hold their ground. Even a fruit seller tried to extort a dollar from me for 10 cents worth of rambutans (on that, I held MY ground). I think the government needs to conduct some tourism training, especially for taxi drivers. Sure, Western people have money. But no one likes to be cheated all day long.

Now, about my camera: Back in Cambodia, the control that allows me to switch modes became a bit wanky, but it still worked. Today, I managed to drop my camera into a puddle. Luckily it was still in its case, and I grabbed it really fast, and a very nice shopkeeper ran out with a roll of toilet tissue to help me dry it off (see, not everyone here is trying to rip me off).

You might wonder how I became so clumsy. I was in fact very excited about seeing an old Honda motorbike — I need to admit that so you’ll appreciate how miserable I was when I discovered that the mode control was now completely unusable. I could manage to take pictures in automatic mode, but it was not stable — the mode would change itself without any activity by me. I broke my camera because I was eager to take pictures of a motorbike.

It would not have occurred to me to try to get the camera repaired, except for this: Last night I was reading a book I brought with me, Catfish and Mandala, by a Vietnamese-American guy who bicycled through Vietnam a few years ago. His bike got really messed up on arrival at the Saigon airport, and he took it to a local shop to see if it could be fixed. He was pretty sure it was un-fixable, but he was wrong. The quality of the repairs surprised him. So I walked into the next camera shop I saw and asked if anyone there could fix my camera.

I don’t think the three guys in the shop — one playing solitaire on the computer, one napping in a lawn chair, and one watching TV in the back — spoke much English, but somehow we managed to communicate about my camera’s problem. I left it there and went off to find an ATM, because I had spent almost all my cash. Note: A lot of ATMs seem to be out of cash these past few days.

Three ATMs later, I somehow managed to find the camera shop again (some minutes of panic while that seemed unlikely to happen), and my camera was — yes! — fixed. The little control is working the way it did when it was new, almost three years ago. Price: $12. Probably triple the local rate, but I didn’t care.

A walk, a temple, and a park

Local people played badminton, practiced kick-boxing, pushed babies in strollers, power-walked, stretched and performed calisthenics — about 6 p.m. in a pretty green park beside the Văn Miếu temple in Hanoi. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Children ran around, laughing, watching the kick-boxers, playing catch with a denim hat. Three grandmothers chatted beside a big fountain. Flowering trees with lavender, yellow, or red-orange blooms brightened as the sun sank lower.

So strange to remember this is a place I was supposed to believe was my enemy when I was a kid — Hanoi. I saw postcards of smiling Ho Chi Minh in the gift shop at the temple. A young soldier in uniform leaned against a wall surrounding a reflecting pool, chatting with some girls, with that red star on his army-green hat.

Yesterday (Friday) I completed the workshop for journalists in Saigon, and the participants really honored me with their thanks and their compliments. They made a Soundslides as a gift for me (link to come) and gave me a pair of lanterns decorated with folk paintings — what a surprise! Kit from the U.S. Consulate said she heard that they thought I spoke clearly and was easy to understand. Good to hear that!

Anyway, I’m a bit tired now. New photos on Flickr. I arrived in Hanoi about noon and went for a walk, ate some phở, drank cà phê sữa đá (Vietnamese iced coffee), marveled at the crazy traffic, and eventually found Văn Miếu, the Temple of Literature. Very beautiful and calm. The park next door, however, was almost as interesting! At least three badminton matches went on simultaneously. (I saw a lot of people playing badminton in Cambodia too.) People bring their racquets in canvas cases and play without a net. Tonight a woman played for almost an hour with a boy who was probably her grandson, and both of them laughed continually, obviously having a fine time together, smacking that little shuttlecock around.

Another popular game is similar to Hacky Sack, but instead of a footbag, a variation on a shuttlecock is used. I saw this game played on Sisowath Quay in Phnom Penh, and also in Saigon, but apparently it is super-popular here in Hanoi. In the park, a middle-aged man wearing a sleeveless undershirt managed to keep up with a much younger, bare-chested guy who seemed tireless.

Rain clouds rolled in, and I took a motorbike ride back to the hotel — it’s really an act of faith to enter the street traffic here. Arriving safely in one piece makes me feel lucky.

Heart of Saigon

I fell in love with Saigon tonight, walking the crowded streets on a quest for bánh xèo.

Tuesday evening, and the streets teem with people. The roads are filled with motorbikes (moving), and the sidewalks are filled with them too (parked, mostly). People fill almost all the spaces where no motorbikes have parked, and almost all of them were eating. They were eating on the sidewalks, perched on tiny plastic stools. They were eating inside their shops. They were eating while balanced cross-legged on the seat of a parked motorbike.

As I was walking, starting out about 6 p.m., the streets seemed to become more crowded. Everyone is outdoors. As I reached a big roundabout northwest of the cathedral (with a weird tower structure), it became challenging to weave my way through all the people standing around on the the sidewalks. I found Hai Ba Trung Street, which was wall-to-wall shops, and the energy of the city went over the top. I felt excited just to be here. (Maybe it was the adrenaline from the adventure of crossing the streets, motorbikes whizzing past front and back all the while.)

Every few blocks, I stopped to consult my map. Closer. I crossed Dien Bien Phu Street. Closer still. I crossed Vo Thi Sau Street. There was the church, on my left. On my right, a narrow alley, well lighted and lined with shops. Not too many motorbikes.

Ohmigod, I thought I had eaten bánh xèo before. I thought I knew what bánh xèo is. Stupid barbarian that I am! This was so fresh, so crispy on the outside, so succulent on the inside, with salty, chewy shrimps, with a giant heap of fresh herbs and tender mustard leaves, and of course some nice fish sauce and mashed chili peppers. Heaven on a plate.

At first, I was just eating a few bites of the pancake to enjoy it by itself. One of the waiters stopped and patiently showed me how to construct a mustard leaf wrapper lined with mint and basil and whatever all those other leaves were — assuming I had no clue how to eat bánh xèo. I thanked him profusely.

A young woman sat down on the plastic stool beside mine, with her grandfather on the other side. She wrapped his bánh xèo for him, then wrapped her own while he was eating. She practiced her English on me: “Do you eat bánh xèo often?” I told her it is very hard to get it in my country. Later she said, “You seem to enjoy it very much.” (Was I slurping or something?) I agreed. Then, a bit later, she asked, “Do you want to eat another one?” She was very sweet. She also made sure the waiter brought some more mustard leaves for me when I had eaten all the big ones.

Check out the wood fire in a pot! Each bánh xèo pan sits on its own fire. Each one of four cooks has about five pans going at once. This place is serving up bánh xèo at an incredible rate. I couldn’t even count the number of waiters running back and forth.

“How long you stay in Saigon?” the young woman asked me. “You could come here every night, have something different each time. Or just have bánh xèo, you like it so much.”