On Wednesday our part of Da Nang had a rolling power shutdown. This doesn’t affect life much, since people, even in the cities, aren’t particularly dependent on modern amenities. Plus, a lot of places have their own generators - including the new cinema. So, desperate for a few hours of air conditioning, I went to see a movie.

Sometimes when you’re traveling in an area where people don’t often deal with foreigners, you must resign yourself to the fact that anything you do is going to seem somewhat absurd, and that attempts at communication will make you look even more ridiculous.

Judging from the selection of films offered, what people like here are martial arts and giant monsters. So I elected to see The Incredible Hulk. With my limited Vietnamese vocabulary, I told the girl at the register that I wanted “one ticket - big green movie,” but it was clear from her politely blank stare that she wasn’t accustomed to the lateral thinking required to communicate with non-native speakers. So, sighing, I realized that I was going to have to do a big green Hulk impersonation.

Due to the power outage, classes were canceled. So we foreign teachers loaded up in a hired car and drove out for Hoi An, which, Tuesday being the 14th day of the lunar month, was having a festival.

Here, people set out flowers and food offerings for their ancestors and burn joss sticks and paper money on the 14th night of the lunar month. In Hoi An, they also have a great big street party with all the town’s beautiful lanterns lit. The town, always picturesque, was alive with music and chattering voices and the smells of cookery and incense.

Everywhere we walked, there was something to see. People having a poetry slam, accompanied by a flute player. Children selling candles in little boats to cast on the water:

Traditional music:

a calligrapher demonstrating his skill:

And martial artists performing forms:

Sorry about the crummy picture quality - it was really dark and my camera is really cheap.

I have this fantasy where I move to Hoi An and live out my days making and selling silk lanterns.

On Tuesday, Debbie, Phil, Ruth, David and I hired a driver and went to Son My, better known to Americans as My Lai - the village where a platoon lead by a Lt. William Calley slaughtered more than 500 civilians. The site is now a memorial.

There’s the usual assortment of blocky Socialist Realist art, of course, but besides that, the site is extremely affecting. The paths are designed to look like sand imprinted with bare feet being chased by boot prints, something you only notice eventually.

It leads among various bluntly labeled locations, like this drainage ditch:

“This ditch reminds us that US soldiers captured 170 villagers and shot them dead [in this spot] on March 16th, 1968″

and this house foundation:

“Foundation of Mr Le Ly’s family [home] survives the massacre. Seven members of his family were killed.”

I toured the small on-site museum with a guide, a small, plainspoken young Vietnamese woman dressed in an ao dai. Some of the other Americans there thought it was somewhat propagandized, since of course there are no memorials for the thousands of civilians killed by the North Vietnamese forces, but even though that’s a valid point, it certainly doesn’t detract in any way whatsoever from the horror and shame of this event and others like it.

The way the museum was organized actually gave me insight into why all the Vietnamese I’ve met here have been so friendly and open toward me and other Americans, despite the relative recentness of the war here. The tour guide and exhibits made a point of praising the few officers who didn’t participate, and held up the helicopter pilots who saved a handful of civilians and later helped bring the event into the open as heroes. They showed pictures of Americans protesting at home when the slaughter was publicized. The tour guide also extemporized that maybe some of the soldiers were afraid that they would be shot if they didn’t participate, which I rather doubt, but she was giving them the benefit of the doubt, I guess. The blame was placed firmly on the commanders, the people who sent the soldiers there, and on the people who actually pulled the triggers. And she gave a lot of credit to members of the US military who have since come to learn and remember and pay respects.

I doubt American society in a similar position would be as understanding, or as forgiving.

Noooo, I haven’t given birth. My Son is a collection of 9th-13th Century ruins near Hoi An. They’re where a lot of the sculpures at the aforementioned Cham Museum came from. The pronunciation, like most things in Vietnamese, is really tricky. I tried to hire a car, and our conversation went something like this:

“Where to?”
“My Son.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Uh, Mai Sun?”
“Ah, Maison? Parlez-vous francais? Which hotel?”
“Um. Nein. Me-e Soon.”
“Oh! My Son!”
“Yes!”

Seriously. Did you know that the word “ma” can mean six different things in Vietnamese, depending on the pitch and inflection? And I thought Russian pronunciation was hard.

Anyway, Phil (another American teacher) and I eventually did get there, and it was lovely and atmospheric and made me wonder what it must have looked like in its heyday.

The Champa had a real sense of style. Plus, the ruins are out in the middle of the jungle, so you really do feel transported in time and place. It’s the first time in Vietnam that it’s been actually quiet. No horns honking, no busses going by, no chatter. The loudest things were the insects and birds. It was absolutely lovely.

I was finding this headless buddha kind of melancholy, until Phil came along and suggested we take pictures standing behind it making buddha faces. Heh.

The ruins aren’t preserved like those at Angkor, because they haven’t been continuously inhabited, and they aren’t as grand, but there’s a fantastic atmosphere, a sense that you just stumbled upon them, overgrown in the jungle.

Nice well-groomed paths, though!

On the way home, we were delayed by cows.

Later Sunday evening, Phil, David and Ruth (an awesome retired Australian couple who are volunteering here) and I went in search of dinner. We happened upon a restaurant with girls in Tiger Beer cheerleader outfits and no English whatsoever, so after a complete linguistic breakdown on our part, we had to resort to miming. Phil’s impression of a chicken netted us a whole chicken, head, feet and all. Bawk bawk.

Last weekend was pretty relaxed compared to the previous weekend’s whirlwind tour of UNESCO goodness. Friday was the fourth of July, so me and the, like, two other Americans I know (Debbie and Phil, who both teach at my school) went to the beach and drank beer and ate fish and pretended there were fireworks. Because we are the kind of travelers who are not only too cool for the usual tourist traps, but also too cool for the Lonely Planet crowd (heh, not really, I love me some Lonely Planet), we hit up this hole-in-the wall place called Cat Bien, which is almost certainly not some kind of complicated multi-lingual pun.

Saturday I braved the cinema. They just opened a movie theater here in Da Nang. Judging from the current and upcoming selection of movies, people here are into martial arts and big CGI monsters. Like the dim bulb I am, I went to Three Kingdoms, and since I don’t know Chinese and the subtitles were in Vietnamese, I got to make up my own plot. I still have no idea what the movie was about, other than weepy old men who like jumping wide chasms on horseback while waving impractically large bladed weapons.

Sunday I went to church with my new friend Ly, the only Catholic I know here. There is a pretty pink cathedral here, a relic of the French colonial empire, and it was a really lovely service. The nice thing about being a itinerant Catholic is that wherever you go, it’s pretty much the same. Combats the homesickness.

I’d been warned that Sister Catherine, the mother superior of the attached convent, would press me into service, and sure enough, she had me up doing a reading in English (luckily, I am totally a pro at reading in English!) and then stared me into volunteering to help at her cathedral school. I’ll post more about that later. Both Sister Catherine and the cathedral school turned out to be absolutely lovely.

Later, I went back to Hoi An, because Hoi An is awesome. I think I’ll go there once a week. Until I catch malaria off their ten billion mosquitoes. On the way home from church on the back of Ly’s motorbike, I mentioned to her that I was going to Hoi An for the afternoon. She inquired as to how I was getting there. I told her taxi, and she told me taxis were too expensive, and anyway it was more convenient to take the bus, so she’d drop me off where I could catch one.

I said, “Great!”

So she drove around until she spotted a bus a few blocks ahead that said “Hoi An” on the back, and then CHASED IT DOWN on the motorbike, dodging in and out of traffic. She pulled up along side the bus and shouted in the window, gesticulating in a way that made me nervous about steering, and sure enough, the bus pulled over and I got on and it went to Hoi An. And no one on board seemed to think this was weird.

And that is one of the many ways transportation in Vietnam is more exciting than it is in America.

Anyway, last weekend I posted the picturesque sights, so this week I’ll go observational:

Buddhists here leave gifts at family altars for their ancestors. The usual offerings are gold decorations, fruits, incense, that sort of thing. But I guess this bunch really liked prepackaged cookies.

There are a lot of ethnic Chinese in Hoi An, since the Chinese dominated Vietnam for about a thousand years, and Hoi An was one of the big trading towns. The Chinese here have their own fraternal order kind of things. This statue was in the Cantonese meeting hall. It’s the kind of superb civic architecture you wouldn’t find in the US.

In a back corner of one of the tidy little archaeological museums, I found this, almost hidden.

So up the stairs I went, and found a bunch of exhibits that were probably not aimed at the tourist crowd.

“The chair of the US HELICOPTER that was shot down Cham Archipelago by the Cam An Guerrillas force”

There was also stuff like “the sword used to kill eleven Korean mercenaries” and “scale model of a Quisling ’strategic hamlet’.” It was definitely more interesting than the forty billion roughly mended urns on the first floor, I’ll say that.

Back outside, I found that the streets were full of inquisitive buddhist monks toting disposable cameras. Inquiry revealed them to be on vacation from Thailand. I think I’m starting to become acclimatized; it took seeing about twenty monks various places before I realized there were an unusual number of them around.

At dusk, I went out on a boat for an hour. The sky here turns a beautiful silvery color just before sunset. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. This picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it was the best I could manage with my $68 indestructible Best Buy digital camera.

Yesterday Debbie (a fellow English teacher) and I went to the Cham museum here in Da Nang. The Champa Kingdom was a group of Indian-influenced Malaysian people that peaked in the 10th century. There are still Cham around in Southeast Asia. I’m planning to go to the ruins of one of their cities, Mỹ Sơn, next weekend.

The first thing you notice about their architecture is that it’s covered in boobs. There were a bunch of signs saying “no photography,” but I’m a rebel, and how do you resist taking pictures of walls covered in boobs?

Seriously - covered in boobs. I thought maybe I was having some kind of freudian reaction, but then I read the sign, and yeah, they’re boobs. There were also “lingam” all over the place, which represent penises. But the boobs, they’re totally outright.

The Cham were hindu, so there were tons of carvings of various gods. The carvings are really graceful - a lot more artistic than I normally figure for the 10th century. The above is Uma, Shiva’s wife. Apparently she liked to boogie. I’d have liked to party with the Cham.

This guy was labelled “Lokesvara.” I don’t know who that was, but I love the facial expression.

And check out this lion! Seriously, how much fun must the Cham have been?

And as long as I’m flooding the blog with pictures, I suppose I ought to post one of the zillion Uncle Mao posters you see everywhere here. I mean, I thought there were a lot of Lenins in the former USSR, but Mao is downright omnipresent, and seems to have kinda become part of the Confucian pantheon or something. Check out the worshipful look on the people’s faces.

The other awesome thing I should really post is some mangled English. The superbly silly English slogans you see here make me feel much better about my pidgin attempts at speaking Vietnamese.

I just bought a notebook with this printed on the cover:

WHAT is
the TRUE
INTELLECTUAL?
I think my knowledge is
for myself and the society,
I’ll use it valueablely
for the people.

Love.

Okay, I’ll stop with the “good morning” titles now.

Saturday I went to Hue. Hue was the sight of the Vietnamese equivalent of the Forbidden City up until the 1940s, and a lot of the buildings - the kings’ tombs and the citadel - are still there, although some got wiped out by American bombs.

The morning was miserably hot and humid. Apparently it was icky even by Vietnamese standards, as people were just hanging around looking consumed by ennui.

We checked into the hotel, which looked exactly like every Krushchev-era public hotel I saw in the former USSR - a big box with an opulent lobby and homely seedy rooms. Even had the same floor plan. It was super clean and had A/C, though, so that was ace.

It was pretty evident who the usual residents of the hotel are. The soap offered a clue:

The sky opened up and the rain came, which beautifully relieved the heat, and also added a lovely atmospheric touch to our first destination, the tomb of King Tu Duc. He was known for being tiny and sicky and impotent, and having a beautifully poetic soul. The Vietnamese girls described the tomb complex as “romantic,” which I was skeptical about (a romantic tomb? Really?) until I saw it.

Several areas were marked “Dangerous Area” to discourage people from wandering into places where they could get beaned by falling masonry. Of course, that just made me go poke around in those areas more, because I’m the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way, I guess.

These little stone dragons are all over the place in Hue. The colored tiles on many of them are made out of broken china, which is clever. Apparently even rulers had the Vietnamese recycling ethos. (Wander down any alley here, and you can see old equipment of every type being dismantled for parts. People take down buildings with picks and sledgehammers to salvage all possible building materials. It’s very efficient.)

All the elephant statues made me wish there were real elephants around.

It was getting late, so we went for banh khoai, which are these seafood omlette tortilla things. They had a bunch of grills going at once and the chef was slinging eggs in style. Every once in a while one of the burners would send up a huge flame, which was startling to me, but no one else reacted.

The next morning, we paid this lady to take us out on the Perfume River on her dragon boat.

She and her family live in the boat, which sounded pretty fun to me until I noticed there were plenty of mosquitoes and no bathrooms. Her kids were adept at making their own fun.

The river was lively. There were tons of people out on boats despite the early hour, fishing and doing laundry and hauling goods from place to place.

The boat dropped us off at the market, which was a sensory kaleidoscope. Some areas were full of color and wonderful smells, like this one -

Other areas were full of color and less-than-wonderful smells, like this one -

There were plenty of surprises, like this lady showing off her koi. The koi was seriously pissed at being in the little bowl. It splashed me.

This pig appeared very pleased to be going to his next life.

The citadel at Hue was super-touristy, but very impressive. Except the part that had been bombed to smithereens in the “American War,” of course. The site was recently named a UNESCO world heritage location, though, so it’s under reconstruction.

I don’t know what these monsters are supposed to be, but they were all over the place.

And my wish from the previous day was granted! I also got to see a real elephant. I would have yelled “look, Mr. Frodo, an oliphaunt!” except I was the only nerd present. Alas.

This just-married couple was all over the place, getting their photo taken in front of every cool-looking spot. Every time I saw them, they had on different elaborate outfits. It was like 100 degrees in the sun, so I don’t know how they were even still upright, but they didn’t even look sweaty. I guess true love conquers all, even the weather.

One of the ways people combat the heat here is to lay down and take a nap from about 11 to about 1. They just do it wherever, too. First time I saw someone flopped out in public I thought they were dying or something, and spent a while trying to figure out how to say “Call the doctor!” before I figured it out. I doubt I’ll ever be acclimatized enough to just lay down on the stone floor of a pavilion in a major tourist attraction and fall right asleep.

Weird through-the-looking-glass fact of the day: in Vietnam, oranges are green. Really.

I start teaching on Monday, so last night I met most of my students and observed their classes that are currently in session. They’re adorable. It’s going to be really difficult to do the whole hardass teacher thing you have to do at the beginning of classes to establish authority, because…adorable. See?

This morning a group of teachers and I drove to Hoi An, a town near Da Nang. Driving in Vietnam is harrowing, because the roads are full of motorbikes and mopeds. I think the only thing scarier than driving in Vietnam is riding on a moped in Vietnam, which I did yesterday with one of the TAs (never again). Aieee.

And this is a fairly empty street - it’s early in the morning.

Hoi An is a lovely town. It’s built on a very human scale, and you can’t take cars down most of the narrow steets. Bikes are the primary mode of transportation.

People there seem very laid-back. Case in point - these police officers.

The town is gorgeous. The architecture (and also the culture, I’m told) is influenced by Chinese, Japanese and French, due to the various waves of trade and colonization. Chinese looks dominant to me, but of course, I don’t know anything other than what I’ve looked up in the encyclopedia and Lonely Planet, and what random people in the street tell me, so who knows?

They just held the Miss Universe pageant here, so there are all these little national flag lanterns all over the place. Hoi An is draped in lanterns in general. I really need to go back at night and see them all lit up.

Okay, so this last one is actually a lantern store. But still.

There are pagodas and historic public buildings and homes all over the place, like this one that’s dedicated to a hundred and some people who were killed by pirates, and this other one that I have no idea about but looked really cool.

I really liked this old wooden house that had been converted into a museum, especially the grotto in the middle of it. And especially the warning sign near the door.

English is kind of a local lingua franca (see what I did there, hey?). I didn’t actually see many native English-speakers, but I often heard two people from different countries using it to communicate.

The local crafting is awesome. I got two silk skirts tailor-made from scratch in one of the zillion clothes shops for less than 30 USD total. If I were any good at bargaining, I could probably have gone cheaper. I went in, picked out fabrics and a design and got measured, and voila, came back a few hours later to pick them up. Magic!

This guy was cool. He’s making a wooden Buddha out of mahogany. He said that it took him three years of study to learn to carve, and that it takes three days to finish a medium-sized piece.

In the center of town is the Japanese Bridge, which has been there since either the 1600s or the 16th Century - like I said, I just know what random people tell me, heh. This is a crappy picture because I couldn’t a side view of it, since the Miss Universe people had set up a photo shoot on a platform over the water under the bridge. Inside there are statues of dogs and monkeys.

The neatest part, though, was just walking around, people-watching, taking things in.

We had lunch at this restaurant and sampled two special local dishes - cao lau, a soup made with noodles, crispy thingies, greens and a sweet broth; and white rose, seasoned meat folded in thick rice paper.

Then we went home to Da Nang. The end!

Okay! This entry’s gonna be a little curt, because I am ridiculously jet-lagged, and I’m starving.

My flight was blessedly uneventful. The plane stopped for refueling in Narita, Japan, and then I had a layover in Singapore. Narita was a little weird. The airport looked like the setting of, like, every video game from the late nineties. I kept expecting a zombie or a whacked-out scientist to pop up. During the trans-Pacific flight I was seated next to a Korean-American women’s rights activist and a Canadian professional figure skater, so that was interesting conversation.

In Narita, you can buy colored oxygen. Huh.

The Vietnam Airlines people are lovely and bumped me to an earlier flight, so I didn’t have to camp out in Singapore for twelve hours. Which is good, because Singapore is a little creepy. It says “Death penalty for drugs!” on the entry visa, and there are people everywhere sweeping the already immaculate streets with little brooms.

My Vietnam Airlines flight was actually really pleasant. I have this mental list of Things Communists Do Right. (National anthems, for example. Communists are really good at national anthems.) Apparently airline food should be on that list, because, tasty.

In Hanoi I got a taxi to the train station. On the way we drove past the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. It looks like a cross between the Parthenon and Lenin’s tomb. Because I have very bad luck with ticket counters, of course all the trains were sold out. I got another taxi to the bus station, where a combination of sign language and pictionary got me an overnight bus to Da Nang.

Now, realize that when I got on the bus, I had been awake for almost two days straight. When I saw that it was full of little beds, I assumed I was having a wishful-thinking hallucination, but I totally went with it, because it was so nice.

Tiny little beds!

Eventually I realized that I couldn’t possibly be hallucination, because if I were, I’d have hallucinated beds that I wasn’t a foot too tall for, you know? But the ride was as pleasant as any fifteen-hour bus ride can be.

Most houses and businesses we passed had a little shrine like this, with joss sticks inside. This is near the Laotian border.

The people on the bus were awesome. You know how ugly a bus packed with Americans would be for a long ride on rough roads, but everyone here was pleasant and cordial the whole time. There were a few people who spoke English, including the guy in the berth next to me, who was a Cambodian wrestling referee on his way to officiate a tournament in Hue. A lovely Vietnamese family adopted me for the trip. The oldest daughter practiced her high-school English on me, and the mom tried to teach me to use chopsticks when we stopped for breakfast and lunch. Eventually she just got me a spoon, heh. I can barely hold a pencil, let alone manage chopsticks.

Breakfast was pho bo (beef soup with noodles and greens), thank God, something familiar

Okay, the mention of food has reminded me of my intention to go find street food ASAP, so: my boss - very affable. My school - very professional. My apartment - very pleasant.

Yay kitchen!

Yay bedroom!

Yay view from the balcony!

I ate one of these this morning. I don’t know what it is. It was really tasty. Apparently I’m not allergic to it, because I haven’t swollen up or gone into anaphalactic shock. If you know what it is, please tell me.

Uh…fruit?

So, I was really bored and cold back in March, and therefore agreed to go teach summer school in Vietnam for two months.

I think it’s possible there is something terribly wrong with my brain.

I fly out for Hanoi on Sunday, and from there I’m taking an overnight train to the seaside city of Da Nang. This should be interesting, as the only things I can say in Vietnamese are “excuse me,” “thank you” and “I’m sorry I’m an American.”

Hey, it’s an excuse to both renew my passport and revive this journal!

It’s been forever since I posted. So clearly the thing to do is to tell you all about this amazing, ridiculous holiday I just heard about.

At around 10 a.m., the first event of the Tomatina begins. Many trucks haul the bounty of tomatoes into the center of the town, Plaza del Pueblo. The tomatoes come from Extremadura, where they are less expensive. Technically the festival does not begin until one brave soul has climbed to the top of a two-storey high, greased-up wooden pole and reached the coveted ham at the top. In practice this process takes a long time and the festival starts despite no one reaching the meaty prize. The signal for the beginning of the fight is firing of water cannons, and the chaos begins. Once it begins, the battle is generally every man for himself. Those who partake in this event are strongly encouraged to wear protective safety goggles and gloves. In addition, they must squish the tomatoes before throwing for safety precautions.

Well, I know where I’m going for vacation this fall!