Cambodian Keggers

So, I found out yesterday that Cambodian keg parties are remarkably similar to American ones: you spend a long time trying to get everyone together; even longer trying to find the place; then you get there and find that the beer's gone, and everyone is drunk and asleep; then you go find a bar.

I ran into my friend Ming on the street by chance last night. He is a Cambodian student that lived in the dorm next to mine. I had thought he graduated last year, but it turns out he just did this year. It was great to see him. He speaks English extremely well, and even faster than I do, which is saying a lot coming from a northeasterner. He invited me to a graduation party some of his other Cambodian friends were holding at the Agricultural University. I soon found out that the Agricultural University was at least 10km outside of Hanoi, which is pretty far on a 100cc motorbike carrying a fat American on the back. It was my first experience on the highway on a motorbike, but it wasn't nearly as harrowing as I expected. You have to share the road with all the huge trucks bound for Hai Phong, picking up shipments from Hong Kong, but the far right lane is pretty safe for slow motorbikes.

The ride was beautiful, and well worth the time spent and the aching ass, even if the party was a bust. We crossed over the Red River on Chuong Duong bridge, a notorious make-out point for Vietnamese couples, and the whole right side of the bridge was full of stopped bikes with couples holding hands. Alas, Ming didn't seem to want to stop. Once we got past the chain of "Karaoke Bars" and "Rest Houses" (read: brothels) immediately outside the city, it was just open land and rice paddies. The university was a maze of fields, rice paddies, irrigation streams, and slightly colonial-looking yellow buildings. It's amazing how much you can appreciate the fresh, country air outside the city.

After we realized the party was over, we headed back to Hanoi and had some bia hois with a group of Ming's friends. I met a guy who studied on my program the semester before I did, and it was amazing that we had both concocted the same twisted conspiracy theories about the guy running the program. (Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy, and extremely capable, but he is weird.)

Off to Saigon in a couple hours to meet Nathalie, and we will come back north by train and plane, stopping in Hoi An along the way.

It's only a flesh wound

The heat finally broke today, which was quite a relief. It is still a lot hotter than I would like it to be, but you can make it more than three steps without feeling dizzy. For the last few days, I have been going outside in sprints: an hour or two around town, and then a swift retreat to someplace with air conditioning. It has actually become a sort of fun game. At first, I was going to cafe's, but then you have to buy something, and the A/C is normally pretty feeble if there is any at all. Then I realized that I can wander into any five-star hotel and plunk myself down in the lounge without any trouble--I guess there are some places in Vietnam where being obviously foreign works to your advantage.

Based on a tip from an ex-patriot I met in a bar, I have also begun exploring the culinary options at fancy hotels. According to him, you can normally find an amazing dinner buffet with drinks for about $7. I don't think I found the real hot spots yet, but I did have an excellent lunch buffet today for $12, complete with gourmet foods from around the world (there's nothing quite like mashed potatoes and kim-chee) and an amazing dessert bar. I justified spending as much as my room will cost for the next two days on lunch by trying to eat enough to hold me through dinner.

I attended a graduation party for some of my Lao friends on Sunday, where the theme was "chua say, chua ve" (you can't get home until you're drunk). It turns out that "drunk" really meant "essentially unable to stand, or, failing that, we have run out of booze." I thought I was in the clear when the last keg got kicked, but then the rice vodka appeared. We capped the evening off with a late-night banquet of duck's neck and pig's feet. Pig's feet (actually, I think we might have just had the toes) are surprisingly delicious if you can get over just how much they look like, well, pig's feet. Needless to say, I spent most of yesterday curled up in my bed reading a book, venturing out for a single meal, where I became quite nauseated when a table nearby ordered beer.

I watched a police bust of the foodstalls on my street today while I was sitting in a cafe. Most eateries have small tables and chairs out on the sidewalk for patrons, and the police occasionally sweep through, confiscating any tables the restaurant owners are unable to rush inside quickly enough. Policing in Vietnam is very strange. Most of the time, while you will see uniformed police at every other intersection of the central city (wearing hideously green, military-esque uniforms with red trimmings), they turn a blind eye to almost everything. When they do come down though, they come down hard, and for extremely minor violations. You can see the schizophrenic nature of policing reflected in the way people obey traffic laws. The streets are generally a melee of weaving bikes, frequently entering the lane of oncoming traffic. Traffic lights are advisory at best: typically, traffic will continue through a newly turned red for a good 15 seconds, and then a number of people will just stop for a second before going through anyway. However, when people do stop, they make sure to stay well behind the stop line, generally by about 2 feet. According to one of my Vietnamese friends, crossing of the stop line is a favorite justification for a shake-down.

In motorbike news, I got my first nasty muffler burn today, a veritable right-of-passage, based on the number of bandaged and blistered calves I see around. It must have been a pretty funny scene to all the people watching me. I was parking my motorbike across the street from a pho restaurant, and the space was a little tight. Getting off my bike, my calves touched the hot muffler of the bike next to me. Unfortunately, my position was such that I was basically wedged between my bike and the one next to me, and I had to delicately avoid putting any weight into either bike, lest I cause one of those comedic-for-everyone-who-isn't-me-or-an-owner-of-one-of-the-bikes domino tipover, while slowly lifting and pushing my bike over enough to get out. Thank God for the well-stocked medicine bag Jessica and Henry gave me before my last trip.

I am flying to Saigon on Thursday to meet Nathalie, where we will begin what promises to be an excellent adventure north.

Vietnamese Heartthrobs

And so it begins...

This is my third day in Vietnam, but it feels almost like the first. Exhaustion, jet-lag, and the residual effects of my cold had me a bit under the weather the day I arrived; and jet-lag, the residual effects of my cold, and a hangover from my reunion with my Vietnamese friends had me pretty low-key yesterday.

I am safely ensconced in good old A2 Bach Khoa. My room is actually what was the classroom for my Vietnamese History and Contemporary Vietnam classes last year, which is kind of funny, but it's great to be back. My air conditioner works blissfully well, which is a welcome relief from the muggy, hot, jungle air outside, but I have already begun to get used to sweating 24/7. Hostel rooms are always funny because of the random relics left behind by prior guests. There is a framed map of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia on one of my walls, leftover from the room's prior life as a classroom. On the facing wall, I am treated to a generic Vietnamese heartthrob poster. He's a respectable man, the kind you could bring home to your mother: in the main picture, he is posed fully-clothed, innocently leaning on the shoulders of the beautiful (but not too beautiful) woman who is clearly is long-term girlfriend/wife; it's so comforting to find a man ready to settle down.

The headboard of my bed is graffiti'd with love notes to, ironically enough, me. In one heart is says "Hi John! I love you!" and in the other: "I love you so so so so much!" I actually know the origin of this graffiti. There was another program visiting from Connecticut College while I was here, and one of the students was named John. He started a rather controversial relationship with one of the Lao students in the next hostel, controversial because no one really believed he fully understood just how much his perception of serious relationship might differ from hers. I don't know what ever became of them, and, knowing the back-story, there is something slightly disturbing in the notes, but I try to put the reality of them out of my mind and tell myself that A2 is just welcoming me back warmly.

Hanoi is largely as I remembered it, but there is a tangible air of development and added prosperity. What were construction sites or empty lots are now shiny new high-rises. There are more cars on the streets, and even more motorbikes. Locals have begun to look down on the cheap Bia Hoi Ha Noi (Ha Noi brand draft beer), and Anchor Bia Tuoi (Anchor brand fresh beer) is all the rage, with a number of clean new locations--featuring full-sized tables and chairs! A number of shopping districts are slightly rehabbed, and I even saw a boutique wine shop(pe) called "Bordeaux." It is amazing that only a year can bring a sense of overarching development to an entire city.

I just spent two hours driving around Hanoi on my rented motor bike. Being on a motorbike in Vietnam is when I feel the least foreign. One of the things that I realized most reuniting with Hanoi was that, while everything looked exactly as I remembered it (with the exception of the economic development discussed above), the overall feeling of being here was something I had largely forgotten. Being in Hanoi is a lot of things. On a number of levels, the city nearly assaults the stranger--the dust; the heat; the smells, good and bad; the persistent hum of traffic and beeping of horns, foreign-sounding interpellations and conversations and songs. But more than anything, for me, is the persistent feeling of being watched. Everywhere I go, I can feel the eyes, the silent questions, the judgments, to the point that the congested, headache-inducing tourist area around Huan Kiem Lake becomes almost welcome because, while everyone is trying to sell me something, they're not just staring a me in pregnant silence.

The nature of space in Vietnam compounds the issue. In Vietnam, you are always in someone else's space. Life is lived on the sidewalk, so there is no wide boulevard for the pedestrian to walk in a private bubble. You are constantly stepping around a family eating dinner, two old men playing chess, a tea stand, or a motor bike parking area. Avoiding these obstacles, you step into traffic, along with the basket ladies, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, and fellow pedestrians. Overall, the effect is one of cooperation and community, and I find it refreshing from the sterility of American streets. If you are honked at when you are in the street, is meant as a "Hey, I'm coming up behind you, so don't do anything stupid," not "Get the fuck out of my way; the cruise control is on!" People expect you to walk in front of their bicycles and motorbikes (and cars too, but they can be a little less forgiving, contending with a sea of smaller vehicles as it is), and they compensate for you patiently. But when you are a sore thumb that feels like a sore thumb, this constant, forced interaction is hardly ameliorative.

Riding a motorbike in Hanoi, I feel like I achieve some kind of "one-ness" with the city. My horn doesn't have an accent, and I rarely stutter over lost vocabulary when weaving and merging along with traffic. While I would think the site of a big, white guy on an 80cc "Angell II" would be at least as funny and weird as one walking down the street--if not downright scary ("does he know what the hell he's doing?!)--I never seem to get a second look, or at least not that I notice. My ride today was meditative, and I feel like I became re-acquainted with Hanoi to the point that I can feel my agoraphobia already fading.

I wish my Vietnamese were better, but a lot is already coming back to me, and people tend to be sympathetic when I make the effort. Luckily, my end of most casual conversations is pretty simple; it goes something like this:

-"I am an American."
-"I am 22 years old this year."
-"Yes, I already have a girlfriend."
-"I arrived on Wednesday, I am here for a few weeks to visit."
-"I studied Vietnamese in Hanoi for four months last year."
-"No, I am not looking for a wife. I have a girlfriend already."

Pretty simple.