Chucky
We are finally in Cambodia.
The last update was written from Mui Ne, the idyllic tropical paradise heaven of Vietnam. It's probably not worthy of all those adjectives, but pretty close. We stayed a day longer in Mui Ne than we had anticipated, but Mui Ne was nice. The last full day I again rented a wind-surf board, and after getting blown well down the beach my first run and having to haul my equipment back -- carrying the board and sail single-handedly makes me angry -- I managed to windsurf back and forth with varying degrees of success the rest of the hour. I even tacked upwind a few times. I celebrated this accomplishment by laying on the beach-chairs with Vanya for the rest of the day.
Next was Saigon. I really liked Saigon, but I will preface this by saying that I also think I was predisposed to like the city -- Saigon, like Havana, Cuba, is a city that I romanticize: it is a city with (historically) heavy US influence, where sweaty U.S. dollars found their way into the hands of legitimate and illegitimate business owners alike. Something about this intrinsically appeals to me. Actually, something about this appeals to quite a few Americans, I think, as we saw many in Saigon. There were also many French tourists.
My first stop in Saigon was a massage parlor... one of the few, the guidebook claimed, was entirely legitimate. And it was. For $2.50 I received an hour-long massage, a massage I considered necessary preparation for yet another southeast asian mega-city. The massage parlor employs and trains blind Vietnamese as masseuses; it is bad to be blind in the United States, it is worse to be blind in a developing country like Vietnam. The massage was very relaxing, the first of many, I hope. The facility itself, however, was straight out of a bad, 'B' horror movie. It was set in what looked to be an old hospital, steril and linoleum-coated, with too much flourescent lighting. Upon arrival, for the first five, somewhat frantic minutes I could not find the ticket desk (the signs were conflicting), and ended up physically running into blind masseuses who had memorized the narrow corridors and could walk them freely. They were looking at me, but they were not actually looking at me, and this sent conflicting signals to my brain. I ended up backing up against the walls and sucking in my chest so that I would not run into them, or alternatively, they would not run into me. I'm sure they knew I was there -- I know they could hear me -- which made the situation even more uncomfortable.
In Saigon we of course did the "must-sees:" the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. But also enjoyed the night-life and walked a decent portion of the city. Our first night we shared liters of "Bia Toui,"the Saigon version of "draught beer," with a Vietnamese graphic-designer who seemed to consider beer a fair trade for his ability to practice english. I think he would have had them coming all night had we wanted them to, but we politely ducked out as the evening grew late. As a side note, Vietnam is a country where, especially by comparison to the US, it is considered acceptable to get smashingly drunk and teeter back home. Vietnamese men, particularly those with a slight belly, have an unfortunate tendency to do exactly that, whereupon they will lift their shirts above their gaping bellies and expose them to the fresh, southeast asian air. I am not sure how/where this started, but it is ubiquitous in Vietnam; it is also a trait I would like to bring back to the US. The next evening we had cocktails atop the Rex Hotel, a hotel that the US "Information Service" (a pseudonym?) rented permanently during the Vietnam War. It was followed by a delicious, French dinner, notable only in that it began what I hope to be a long relationship between me and the French soufflet.
We left Saigon after two days. Again, we both really liked the city, but there was more to see and there is never, ever enough time to see it all. Confound it! After our horrendous experience with the Halong Bay "package tour" in north Vietnam (I only briefly insinuated about nature of this trip, but it was a really poor tour), we opted not to do a similar "Mekong Delta" tour which everyone in Saigon seemed to be touting. "You going to Mekong Delta?" we were asked, over and over and over again. It was maddening. We made the right choice in not doing the tour, but were nearly dissuaded. There are a lot of things I like about Vietnam, but Vietnamese business practice -- and more specifically, lack of business ethics -- is not one of them. We were told over and over again that seeing the Mekong Delta without a tour was a bad idea, that we would get lost, spend a lot more money, not see the "sights." This was not the case, but this is what we were presented with over and over again. In fact, no one seemed to want to give us the information we needed so that we could do it on our own. At one point, the Lonely Planet guidebook for Vietnam says the following (or close to it): "You will leave Vietnam loving the Vietnamese, but convinced that they all want to rip you off." This is an accurate assessment. I have never felt more acutely the weight of my "foreigner"status -- my economic status, really -- than in Vietnam.
Our first stop in the Mekong Delta, Vinh Long, allowed us to take a 24 hour boat trip into the canals of a Mekong tributary. Our boat did not leave until 3:30 PM, so after checking out at noon, Vanya and I had some time to kill at a cafe... or so we thought. Caterine, a 75 year-old french-speaking Vietnamese woman, quickly befriended us and shared the next three or so hours with us. Her french, according to Vanya, was very good; she finished learning french in 1954 and taught it for quite a while. She recommended a restaurant for lunch, and then proceeded to lead us halfway across town to it, much further than we had anticipated. The restaurant was nice, although Caterine insisted that she would only eat the fruit she brought with her: a pomegranet and a dragon-fruit, liberal portions of which she gave to Vanya and I. She enjoyed four or five cups of iced tea, but all she seemed to want was some pleasant conversation (in french) and that we take a few photographs with her. I did, and I will send them to her as soon as I develop them. As is typical for her generation, she is a very, very short woman: her head, with large hat on, came to my shoulder. Slowly -- very slowly -- she walked us back to the boat-launch.
Vanya and I were alone with our tour guide, Nam, a 26 year-old who dreams of visiting the United States. Curiously, he really wants to visit Texas. Vinh Long is home to a number of small islands that serve as the tropical fruit-basket for Saigon, so throughout the length of our stay here these fruits were in abundance. Our first stop was a brick and pottery factory, a lesson in my misplaced faith in the mechanization of the world: bricks here are hand-cut, hand-stacked, hand-carted; pottery for potted plants is hand-molded. Little, if anything, is done by machine. Nor did I see a forklift throughout the whole compound. I do not have much work experience, but I have enough to know that forklifts make the world go round, and that to work without them -- particularly in the brick business -- would be miserable. It looked miserable. We saw a few boys working in the factory who could not have been older than 16 or 17, illegal in Vietnam, where the working age is 18. Why the owner would allow us to witness illegal business practices during a public tour is a question that will remain unanswered for me. He was just chilling, reading the paper.
Next we saw a small fruit orchard owned by a man who looks strikingly like Ho Chi Minh, where we ate our fill of starfruit, longan (sp?), rambutan, and jackfruit. He also poured us small saucers of his bootlegged Mekong whiskey, really spicy stuff. I call it "bootlegged" because he makes it himself, but I do not think he would call it "bootlegged"... everyone in the Mekong Delta makes their own whiskey. Anyway, his fruits are loaded by boat and sold at the floating markets that Vanya and I would later visit.
We stayed on one of the islands that evening in a guest-house, where we met Bella and Phillipe a British girl and a Frenchman, respectively. I bring this up only because it was there that a particularly funny (in my opinion) event ocurred. I am sure that this will not come through in writing -- it can't possibly come through in writing -- but I don't care The four of us were talking with our Vietnamese guide, Nam, after dinner, about birth fables in western culture (storks, for example). This segued into Cabbage Patch Dolls, and then, somehow, to the film "Chucky." Nam needed clarification regarding "Chucky," but quickly realized that he had seen the film. Phillipe somehow did not manage to hear that Nam had seen the film. Phillipe then spent the next few minutes explaining to Nam the plot structure of this atrocious movie. Somehow, with a straight face, Phillipe made clear that "Chucky"was a film about a red-haired children's doll that kills without remorse. Phillipe, I must add, is excitable, earnest, and speaks in a stereotypically heavy French accent. Part of the hang-up was on the word "doll." "You do not know what is a doll? You know, what little girls play with!" Phillipe kept asking, perplexed. Nam did not know the word "doll" in english, but this was not really relevant. Nam spent the next two minutes trying to convey that he, did not know what a doll was, but, in fact, had seen "Chucky." But Phillipe, by this point, was misunderstanding him entirely and was not to be stopped -- he knew the "Chucky" series pretty well and wanted it explained to Nam. "Chucky"was not even the point -- he was used as an example to try to explain what a Cabbage Patch Doll was. This would be difficult for two native english speakers. Most appalling about the whole situation, perhaps, was that all five of us had seen the movie. How did this happen? Why was it sent abroad? The "Chucky" series was, and is, a disgrace to film-making in the eighties. Yet somehow "Chucky"was seen in the U.S., Britain, France, and Vietnam.
From Vinh Lan we made a 24 hour stop in Can Tho, enough time to see the floating markets, one of the main attractions of the Mekong Delta. These were a lot of fun to see, our guide was as knowledgable as a guide could possibly be, and the markets were bustling. Our guide commented that she was not sure how long these markets would last -- first they were simple row-boats, now they are motorboats, and in the future more will be drawn to the more efficient street-markets. Later, our small boat was taken through a narrow canal to the house of a very, very impoverished man, whose name we never found out. The man made his money by hand-crafting plain chopsticks and bootlegging rice-wine, the latter being a remarkably simple process. He looked, physically, like he drank a lot of his own rice-wine. His house was constructed of coconut tree leaves, eucalypt trees, and bamboo.
I could write more right now but it will have to wait. We leave for Siem Riep in four minutes.
The last update was written from Mui Ne, the idyllic tropical paradise heaven of Vietnam. It's probably not worthy of all those adjectives, but pretty close. We stayed a day longer in Mui Ne than we had anticipated, but Mui Ne was nice. The last full day I again rented a wind-surf board, and after getting blown well down the beach my first run and having to haul my equipment back -- carrying the board and sail single-handedly makes me angry -- I managed to windsurf back and forth with varying degrees of success the rest of the hour. I even tacked upwind a few times. I celebrated this accomplishment by laying on the beach-chairs with Vanya for the rest of the day.
Next was Saigon. I really liked Saigon, but I will preface this by saying that I also think I was predisposed to like the city -- Saigon, like Havana, Cuba, is a city that I romanticize: it is a city with (historically) heavy US influence, where sweaty U.S. dollars found their way into the hands of legitimate and illegitimate business owners alike. Something about this intrinsically appeals to me. Actually, something about this appeals to quite a few Americans, I think, as we saw many in Saigon. There were also many French tourists.
My first stop in Saigon was a massage parlor... one of the few, the guidebook claimed, was entirely legitimate. And it was. For $2.50 I received an hour-long massage, a massage I considered necessary preparation for yet another southeast asian mega-city. The massage parlor employs and trains blind Vietnamese as masseuses; it is bad to be blind in the United States, it is worse to be blind in a developing country like Vietnam. The massage was very relaxing, the first of many, I hope. The facility itself, however, was straight out of a bad, 'B' horror movie. It was set in what looked to be an old hospital, steril and linoleum-coated, with too much flourescent lighting. Upon arrival, for the first five, somewhat frantic minutes I could not find the ticket desk (the signs were conflicting), and ended up physically running into blind masseuses who had memorized the narrow corridors and could walk them freely. They were looking at me, but they were not actually looking at me, and this sent conflicting signals to my brain. I ended up backing up against the walls and sucking in my chest so that I would not run into them, or alternatively, they would not run into me. I'm sure they knew I was there -- I know they could hear me -- which made the situation even more uncomfortable.
In Saigon we of course did the "must-sees:" the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. But also enjoyed the night-life and walked a decent portion of the city. Our first night we shared liters of "Bia Toui,"the Saigon version of "draught beer," with a Vietnamese graphic-designer who seemed to consider beer a fair trade for his ability to practice english. I think he would have had them coming all night had we wanted them to, but we politely ducked out as the evening grew late. As a side note, Vietnam is a country where, especially by comparison to the US, it is considered acceptable to get smashingly drunk and teeter back home. Vietnamese men, particularly those with a slight belly, have an unfortunate tendency to do exactly that, whereupon they will lift their shirts above their gaping bellies and expose them to the fresh, southeast asian air. I am not sure how/where this started, but it is ubiquitous in Vietnam; it is also a trait I would like to bring back to the US. The next evening we had cocktails atop the Rex Hotel, a hotel that the US "Information Service" (a pseudonym?) rented permanently during the Vietnam War. It was followed by a delicious, French dinner, notable only in that it began what I hope to be a long relationship between me and the French soufflet.
We left Saigon after two days. Again, we both really liked the city, but there was more to see and there is never, ever enough time to see it all. Confound it! After our horrendous experience with the Halong Bay "package tour" in north Vietnam (I only briefly insinuated about nature of this trip, but it was a really poor tour), we opted not to do a similar "Mekong Delta" tour which everyone in Saigon seemed to be touting. "You going to Mekong Delta?" we were asked, over and over and over again. It was maddening. We made the right choice in not doing the tour, but were nearly dissuaded. There are a lot of things I like about Vietnam, but Vietnamese business practice -- and more specifically, lack of business ethics -- is not one of them. We were told over and over again that seeing the Mekong Delta without a tour was a bad idea, that we would get lost, spend a lot more money, not see the "sights." This was not the case, but this is what we were presented with over and over again. In fact, no one seemed to want to give us the information we needed so that we could do it on our own. At one point, the Lonely Planet guidebook for Vietnam says the following (or close to it): "You will leave Vietnam loving the Vietnamese, but convinced that they all want to rip you off." This is an accurate assessment. I have never felt more acutely the weight of my "foreigner"status -- my economic status, really -- than in Vietnam.
Our first stop in the Mekong Delta, Vinh Long, allowed us to take a 24 hour boat trip into the canals of a Mekong tributary. Our boat did not leave until 3:30 PM, so after checking out at noon, Vanya and I had some time to kill at a cafe... or so we thought. Caterine, a 75 year-old french-speaking Vietnamese woman, quickly befriended us and shared the next three or so hours with us. Her french, according to Vanya, was very good; she finished learning french in 1954 and taught it for quite a while. She recommended a restaurant for lunch, and then proceeded to lead us halfway across town to it, much further than we had anticipated. The restaurant was nice, although Caterine insisted that she would only eat the fruit she brought with her: a pomegranet and a dragon-fruit, liberal portions of which she gave to Vanya and I. She enjoyed four or five cups of iced tea, but all she seemed to want was some pleasant conversation (in french) and that we take a few photographs with her. I did, and I will send them to her as soon as I develop them. As is typical for her generation, she is a very, very short woman: her head, with large hat on, came to my shoulder. Slowly -- very slowly -- she walked us back to the boat-launch.
Vanya and I were alone with our tour guide, Nam, a 26 year-old who dreams of visiting the United States. Curiously, he really wants to visit Texas. Vinh Long is home to a number of small islands that serve as the tropical fruit-basket for Saigon, so throughout the length of our stay here these fruits were in abundance. Our first stop was a brick and pottery factory, a lesson in my misplaced faith in the mechanization of the world: bricks here are hand-cut, hand-stacked, hand-carted; pottery for potted plants is hand-molded. Little, if anything, is done by machine. Nor did I see a forklift throughout the whole compound. I do not have much work experience, but I have enough to know that forklifts make the world go round, and that to work without them -- particularly in the brick business -- would be miserable. It looked miserable. We saw a few boys working in the factory who could not have been older than 16 or 17, illegal in Vietnam, where the working age is 18. Why the owner would allow us to witness illegal business practices during a public tour is a question that will remain unanswered for me. He was just chilling, reading the paper.
Next we saw a small fruit orchard owned by a man who looks strikingly like Ho Chi Minh, where we ate our fill of starfruit, longan (sp?), rambutan, and jackfruit. He also poured us small saucers of his bootlegged Mekong whiskey, really spicy stuff. I call it "bootlegged" because he makes it himself, but I do not think he would call it "bootlegged"... everyone in the Mekong Delta makes their own whiskey. Anyway, his fruits are loaded by boat and sold at the floating markets that Vanya and I would later visit.
We stayed on one of the islands that evening in a guest-house, where we met Bella and Phillipe a British girl and a Frenchman, respectively. I bring this up only because it was there that a particularly funny (in my opinion) event ocurred. I am sure that this will not come through in writing -- it can't possibly come through in writing -- but I don't care The four of us were talking with our Vietnamese guide, Nam, after dinner, about birth fables in western culture (storks, for example). This segued into Cabbage Patch Dolls, and then, somehow, to the film "Chucky." Nam needed clarification regarding "Chucky," but quickly realized that he had seen the film. Phillipe somehow did not manage to hear that Nam had seen the film. Phillipe then spent the next few minutes explaining to Nam the plot structure of this atrocious movie. Somehow, with a straight face, Phillipe made clear that "Chucky"was a film about a red-haired children's doll that kills without remorse. Phillipe, I must add, is excitable, earnest, and speaks in a stereotypically heavy French accent. Part of the hang-up was on the word "doll." "You do not know what is a doll? You know, what little girls play with!" Phillipe kept asking, perplexed. Nam did not know the word "doll" in english, but this was not really relevant. Nam spent the next two minutes trying to convey that he, did not know what a doll was, but, in fact, had seen "Chucky." But Phillipe, by this point, was misunderstanding him entirely and was not to be stopped -- he knew the "Chucky" series pretty well and wanted it explained to Nam. "Chucky"was not even the point -- he was used as an example to try to explain what a Cabbage Patch Doll was. This would be difficult for two native english speakers. Most appalling about the whole situation, perhaps, was that all five of us had seen the movie. How did this happen? Why was it sent abroad? The "Chucky" series was, and is, a disgrace to film-making in the eighties. Yet somehow "Chucky"was seen in the U.S., Britain, France, and Vietnam.
From Vinh Lan we made a 24 hour stop in Can Tho, enough time to see the floating markets, one of the main attractions of the Mekong Delta. These were a lot of fun to see, our guide was as knowledgable as a guide could possibly be, and the markets were bustling. Our guide commented that she was not sure how long these markets would last -- first they were simple row-boats, now they are motorboats, and in the future more will be drawn to the more efficient street-markets. Later, our small boat was taken through a narrow canal to the house of a very, very impoverished man, whose name we never found out. The man made his money by hand-crafting plain chopsticks and bootlegging rice-wine, the latter being a remarkably simple process. He looked, physically, like he drank a lot of his own rice-wine. His house was constructed of coconut tree leaves, eucalypt trees, and bamboo.
I could write more right now but it will have to wait. We leave for Siem Riep in four minutes.
posted by conor | 3:42 AM
1 Comments:
Conor--will you get back to me about where you might be mid-march? I'm going to a travel agency to get price estimates and need to know where you might be/if I could meet up with you, etc. LOVE YA!
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