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.”

Journalist training, Day 1

Today I had about 30 Vietnamese journalists in a training session at the Saigon Times building in Saigon. I had been told we would have an interpreter, but it turns out that everyone in the workshop has enough English language fluency — so no interpreter. It’s a good thing I always prepare too much material, as speaking through an interpreter takes twice as long.

Session 1 was an overview of trends in online journalism in the West — cleaner and less cluttered site design, multimedia, journalist blogs, and “beyond HTML” (that means RSS, Twitter, Facebook, mobile, etc.).

Session 2 was all about journalist blogs — subject matter, writing style, linking, and so on.

Then, after lunch, everyone made a WordPress.com blog (like this one!). A lot of people here have blogs, and the newspapers are starting to offer them too, but WordPress is unfamiliar. People’s personal blogs are often on Yahoo 360 (too much like MySpace for my taste, but perfectly okay for personal stuff).

Khmer food (a summary)

The foods of Thailand and Vietnam are famous; the foods of Cambodia and Malaysia much less so. I’m a huge fan of Malaysian food, and of course I love most Thai and Vietnamese dishes — but what about the cuisine of the Khmers of Cambodia?

Chicken sour soup: Served with rice on the side. Tart and refreshing, full of fresh herbs, fresh pineapple chunks, and, in this case, green tomatoes. This was my last meal in Phnom Penh before I left.

I ate some very delicious dishes in Cambodia, including the unique sour soup. Very rarely was any meal as chili-hot as most Thai dishes, and most dishes did not include coconut milk. An exception was the amok (a word that’s not used to mean what it means in Bahasa, from which we derived the English word, which means to go crazy, most often in a murderous rage) — amok is both spicy and made with coconut milk.

Amok fish: Sweet and hot, a fantastic medley of flavors, with mild white fish, served with rice on the side. This dish seems to be prepared differently in each place that serves it.

Of course, it does not help public relations for Cambodian food when people discover that crispy fried bugs and spiders are favorite local snacks. (No, I did not even think about sampling these.)

Fried insects: The evening street market beside the waterfront in Phnom Penh (see large).

One very common dish I did not photograph (I become forgetful when a beautiful plate of food is set in front of me — I just start eating and only later realize I should have taken a picture) is beef lok lak, which was really tasty every time I ate it. It’s a marinated, thin-sliced, lean beef, stir fried and served with a black pepper dipping sauce on the side. “English style” comes with a fried egg and French fries. The Khmer version comes with steamed white rice and maybe some salad.

Another ubiquitous dish is morning glory, a very nice sauteed green vegetable (no flowers on the plate), served with or without meat. It reminded me a bit of mustard greens.

The curries I ate were tasty but not at all hot-spicy. (Maybe the cooks toned them down for the Western people?) Our trip leader took us to places that had menus in English and options for Western food, so I’m not entirely sure that I had a lot of authentic Khmer food. I was served two completely bland renditions of fried rice — always a reliable taste treat in Malaysia — so I quit ordering it. Fried noodles were usually instant noodles — ugh! — so I avoided those as well. I did have one awesome bowl of pork noodle soup for breakfast one morning, when Kalina and I struck out on our own — and somewhere or another I ate some very good spicy soup with glass noodles.

For more information about Cambodian (Khmer) food, see the Phnomenon blog.

Adieu, Cambodia

This morning I rode a tuk-tuk with all my luggage on the dusty, crowded road to the Phnom Penh International Airport (it’s small but quite modern). Now I’m in a nice hotel on Dong Khoi Street, in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). It’s Saturday night, and I’m looking forward to not needing to pack and haul my backpack anywhere for a whole week!

During the airplane’s descent, the city looked gigantic, endless, infinite — but here and there, padi fields and other farmlands broke up the patchwork of roofs, which appeared to be mostly corrugated steel.

Photos uploaded tonight are from Day 4 of my trip with Intrepid Travel, which was May 20. (The trip lasted 15 days, including the arrival and departure days.) That was the day we rode on motorbikes to some kampungs around Battambang, which is northwest of Phnom Penh.

Making rice paper crepes: If you like Vietnamese summer rolls, you know exactly what these are. The heat from these two griddles is hellish. The fire is fueled by rice husks. The black, burned husks are later spread in the fields as fertilizer.

Making fish paste: Oh, this was nasty. We heard that fish paste lends a special flavor that Cambodians yearn for when they live abroad, but like seeing sausage being made, this process is not for the faint-hearted (or those with a delicate nose).

Homemade skateboard: What made this remarkable was that I saw almost no toys among Cambodian children. This boy’s wheel assemblies sometimes detached themselves from the board. He would patiently re-attach them and then continue riding, steering with the string.

Roads with holes: This was far from the worst section of the road leading to the mountain, which I described in an earlier blog post.

More photos from Battambang here.

If it’s Tuesday, this must be Sihanoukville

Cattle wander freely everywhere we’ve been in Cambodia. Mostly they are big white oxen with a small hump behind their shoulder blades, although we have seen red and brown cattle as well. Today as we drove to the coast, I saw a number of water buffalo, with their enormous crescent horns. Two of them were yoked to a plow steered by a man wearing a straw hat.

Oxen boarding a raft: We rode on a motorized raft (with our bicycles) to an island along with this man and his two oxen.

We’ve seen a lot of the white oxen pulling plows and also sometimes pulling carts on the roads, but more often, two-wheeled carts are ingeniously fastened to the back of a motorbike seat. Most of these robust little motorbikes are 125cc Honda Dreams with an electric starter.

On Saturday we rode a motor-powered raft from Kampong Cham to a small island, where we saw a lot of wooden carts pulled by tiny brown ponies, each with a jaunty little plume above its ears. They were not quite miniature ponies, but they were definitely smaller than the ponies that you see at an American kid’s birthday party. Their strength is sufficent to carry some impressively heavy loads. They trot along briskly without any more encouragement than the reins slapping lightly on their backs.

Pony carts: We were in motion on our bikes for all the good photo ops with loaded pony carts. The pony looks a lot smaller when the cart is fully loaded!

Our many hours traveling on buses have shown us an almost wholly agrarian country, lacking the hideous commercial oil palm plantations of East and West Malaysia, farmed mostly by human and animal labor. The so-called tractors we have seen are small and hand-driven, like an ox-drawn plow with a small motor replacing the oxen.

The picture of rural life that’s sure to stick with me is one I didn’t manage to capture with my camera. We were riding the bamboo train through the padi fields near Battambang — acres and acres of wet fields, with houses far off in the distance — and there was a boy, maybe 16 years old, wearing nothing but the krama (a ubiquitious checkered cotton cloth we see everywhere) wrapped around his hips, sarong-style. He held a thin stick and was surrounded by four of his cattle. His bare feet comfortably gripped the muddy grass slope leading down to the train tracks. As we came into view he watched us, maybe trying to figure out why a bunch of barang (foreigners) would want to ride the bamboo train. The big white oxen clustered around behind him, but he showed no concern about them, or about us.

On the bamboo train: This single-car platform is powered by a small motor and can be disassembled in about 90 seconds. It’s really jarring, because there’s a gap at most of the rail joins.

More photos here.

Siem Reap and Angkor Wat

Yesterday and today we toured 1,000-year-old temples at Angkor — amazing stone carving and massive architecture. Our trip leader, Phalkun, pointed out that nowhere else in Southeast Asia can you find such monuments, such lasting evidence of an ancient civilization. The gigantic stones were carried by river raft from quarries 50 km away, and I imagine that hundreds of stone carvers were trained and supervised to produce such beautiful work 500 years before the Italian Renaissance.

The heat exhausted us. We drank endless liters of water, sought the shade whenever possible, wore white hats. Sweat soaked our clothes from top to bottom. By early afternoon, we were incapable of absorbing more information.

I was thinking about cities and civilization. The Malays had a complex social order that had been evolving long before they adopted Islam, but they built no cities of stone. Their beautiful wooden architecture could not survive for hundreds of years. In the jungles of northwest Cambodia, a Frenchman found the ruins of a long-abandoned city, the former capital of the Khmer people. In other parts of Southeast Asia, no ruins remain.

The Khmers developed a writing system of their own, something the Malays never did. Their script looks similar to the Thai script (and also the Tamil script one sees in Malaysia), but it’s not the same. Phalkun says some letters are the same between Thai and Khmer, but most are not.

Phnom Penh photos

The Internet here is excruciatingly slow. Uploading pictures demands a lot of patience.

The Royal Palace: Architecture similar to that of Thailand; beautiful gardens.

Lunch in Phnom Penh: Green mango salad with chilis.

Waterfront, Phnom Penh.

S-21: This former school was used as a torture center by the Khmer Rouge.

More photos here. Many more to come when I return to the fast Internet.