Preconceived Notions About Vietnam

About a year ago, we were interviewing for international teaching jobs.  Once we accepted our current post, I began reading.  I mean READING about Vietnam.  From internet blogs to every.single.book. in our city library and some I purchased from the internet.

Here is a list of things I found to be commonly held beliefs about Vietnam:

1. You (big fat Americans, or anyone over 5'8") will not be able to find clothes or shoes to fit you.

False!  I bought an absolutely cute skirt and a pair of boots last weekend.  It was in our 'western' part of town, but it is a part of Hanoi: 2012.  Plus, you can get anything you want tailored.  If I wanted to, I could get shoes cobbled.  Seriously, cobbled.  I just have to go to Shoe Street or Hoi An (a city famous for their tailors and cobblers).

2. There are no imported foods like cheese, cereal, tortillas, or salsa.

False!  Our local shop has most of these things and I know where to find the other items....just down our road.  Prices are high and selection is low, but these things are available.

3. Everyone is going to scam you.

False!  Admittedly, some Vietnamese people are trying to scam you .  By saying that everyone is, you are painting an entire country with the same brush.  Who hasn't been scammed in some other city, (by gasp), a non-Vietnamese person. Just be careful and pay attention to where that taxi is taking you.  If you see the same side of the lake twice or they don't run the meter, get out!  Otherwise, there are a couple of other scams running in the Old Quarter run by girls who speak English really well-they ask you to buy toothpicks and then try to snatch your wallet.  Just walk away from these girls.  If you don't stop, you won't get robbed, by them at least.

I've heard some people say that the higher prices for foreigners is a 'scam'.  I disagree.  Yes, the prices are a bit higher for us here than they are for local people.  However, prices are super low here on everything except for gas.  I don't really mind paying a couple of extra cents more.  That is all it really amounts to.  Quibbling over a nickle is not worth it to me.

4. Street food will make you sick.

Jury is still out on this one.  Jeff and I haven't been very sick while living here but we mostly go to places were we can see them cooking the food.  Plus, we cook (ahem) Jeff cooks a lot at home.  I don't really understand people's fear of street food.  I love Bun Cha and they cook it all on the side of the road with couple of hot coals.  Love it!  We get chicken on a stick from our "chicken on a stick lady" and she laughs at us and our attempts at speaking Vietnamese.  I think we are a novelty and she expects us to speak Vietnamese because we eat like Vietnamese people.  Pull over our motorbikes and get a couple of sticks of meat.  Get back on the motorbikes.

5. You will get robbed.
True- Most people I know have been robbed here.  Including me!  I know part of the blame was me and the way I was holding my purse on my motorbike.  The other part of the blame was the robbers (of course).  Now, I do things differently when I get on my bike.  I have down sized my purse so it fits either in the seat of my motorbike or inside my jacket. I think for hot weather, I will put it in my bike seat.  Of course, I have to remember to take it out of the seat when I get off the bike.  Breaking into my bike seat is easy.

Here are some other precautions we take when going out and about.  We don't pack more than one ATM card.  Either I take one or Jeff takes one but not both of us.  That way, if we do get robbed there is still an ATM card at home.  This isn't only because we might be robbed, but getting a new ATM card is a huge pain due to banking hours and locations.  We could leave both at home but sometimes we need extra cash.  Depends on what we are doing that day.  Jeff puts his wallet in a buttoned pocket or his front pocket.  We try not to have a lot extra cash with us.  Just enough for the day's activities.  A lot of the time, I won't even take a purse if we are going to the Old Quarter.  Although, thieves wouldn't notice me in the sea of backpackers walking around the Old Quarter with their backpacks and giant cameras screaming rob me instead of Janet.

Those are just five things I read again and again about Hanoi and Vietnam.  I'm not sure if they were written by people who were just here for a few weeks or by people who generally didn't like Vietnam. Regardless, it is nice to see how things really are for yourself.

Rules?

I think I've posted this quote before.  I know I mention this quote 8-11 times a week.  In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman utters the phrase: "This isn't Vietnam...There are rules."
Although he was talking about the Vietnam War (American war as it is known here) the comment still holds true, there are no rules.

Coming home from school on Wednesday I saw two things.  One, in Ciputra where the school is (a very nice, gated community) a 4 year old girl was squatting and peeing into the fountain.  Nope, it was around the back of the fountain.  Nope, her dad wasn't shielding her from everyone watching.  He was simply sitting on his motorbike, not even pulled over all the way.  The fountain, by the way, is the center point of a round-a-bout so she was dead center in the middle of traffic.  Two, we see this everyday, but it really struck me this time.  We come home on the lake road.  All along the road lovers stop on their motorbikes and cuddle.  Enterprising women sell drinks and snacks to people who are lounging on floor mats.  And...cars think that they are tiny.   No cars should be allowed on the road.  It is often barely wide enough for 1 car.   Two cars passing each other is common though.  Both hike a wheel up on the sidewalk and at about 2km an hour they ease past each other.  The motorbike community can't seem to understand why they must go slowly so from both ends, people honk through the whole ordeal.  This happened about 7 times on Wednesday.  It is terrifying when an SUV (overkill of a car in a city where the top speed is 45km and roads are repaired quickly) and a bus passed each other.  Restrictions on where to drive: none-there are no rules.

Today Burger King opened!  After our softball games (one planned, two against a Taiwanese A/B team who happened to be on the adjacent field) I went to the new Burger King with our school's PE teacher and his kids.  Oddly enough he lived 3 doors down from me in Indonesia in the mid-90's.  I was so excited for BK that I didn't think about the price.  Whopper JR in the USA: $1 Vietnam: $4.  Large coke in the USA: actually large Vietnam: size of a US small.  Anyway, I was just so pleased that it tasted exactly the same.  So price gouging: no rules.

Janet's motorbike ran out of gas on Friday (gas gauge doesn't work).  It was a surprisingly easy problem to fix.  I took a large water bottle, went to the gas station, and they filled it.  The attendant's only question was: "full?"  and "How long you live here?"  It was not the least bit odd to him that I was getting gas put into an unapproved container that would actually melt if I left the gas in it overnight.  He also asked if I spoke any Vietnamese, his English was good, good enough that he should have asked: "Why the hell are you bringing a water bottle to get filled with petrol?!?!" and "You crazy American, you are going to start a fire!"  Nope, I just strapped the green liquid (petrol is yellow in the USA, green here) to the rack on my bike said "Com-un" (Thank you) and zipped off.  There is a rule against this everywhere else in the world!!!!  In Vietnam, there are no rules.

Currency is all relative

Lincoln gets the Penny and the Fiver

Jefferson gets the Nickel and the elusive Two buck bill

FDR gets the Dime

Washington gets the Quarter and the Dollar bill

JFK gets the Half Dollar

Sacagawea and apparently Grover Cleveland get the Dollar Coin (Thanks Wiki)

Mr. Hamilton shows off his stuff on the 10 dollar Federal Reserve note

Jackson graces the Twenty

Grant looms over us on the Fifty

And

Franklin reminds us all that he was nice enough to start the first libraries every time we spend a hundred bones.  Lucky for us, we never spend more than a Hamilton on our library fines.

Here in Vietnam only one man stares back at you as you pay your electric bill.

To think, his brother who sold chicken was the disappointment in the family, he never had his own currency.

Also, since the 500,000 is worth about 24 bucks, I happened to have all this currency on me today.  The 500 because I can't spend it anywhere, everyone rounds up or down to 1000 except someone 3 weeks ago who gave me the 500.  I keep a hold of the 1000 and the 2000 to park our motorbikes.  We have to keep 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, to do business with street vendors.  We have to make a point to split our 500k and 200k bills at the grocery stores so that aren't handing unbreakable currency for 20,000 worth of chicken on a stick.  It sounds very bourgeois.  We are not drowning in money (in paper currency- we sometimes are) but its hard to transition form a card economy to a minor-bill economy for most of our transactions.

We can only get 100,000 or 500,000 notes out of the ATM, but if we give a 10,000 note to park our bike the security/parking men look at us hatefully, so we carry nickles and dimes in cash, piles of it, daily.

Good Beer and a Bike

So we were dropping of my dry cleaning (yup, in Hanoi I'm fancy enough to have dry cleaning).  We spotted a bar next door that we've driven by many times and never seen.  It would be a 'hole-in-the-wall' bar in the US.  Here it is a nice little joint and far bigger than the hole-in-the-wall places which actually are a hole with road-side/in-road seating.
Why are you mentioning this Jeff?
Thanks for asking.
There was a huge keg in the bar.  It looked more like where they ferment the beer.  The tap was labeled as Fresh Beer but it wasn't the same stuff that they sell at Bia Hoi.  It was malty and tasted like ... real beer!

Look at that nice brown beer in my Kansas glass.  The bottle is how you get a liter to-go.  At first we thought it was just a re-used bottle.  Here is the lid: 

Custom made!

This is starting to sound sarcastic, but this truly is good beer.

It is even better tasting because even the imported beer here is terrible.  You can either pay 8,000VND for local beer (330ml) or 68,000VND (500ml) for imported beer that tastes the same or 30,000VND (330ml) for Heineken which we all know tastes like minty garbage.

1 liter of Fifth Ocean, fresh from the tap to your own plastic bottle: 100,000VND.

Now that we can just pop a bottle of beer onto our bikes and head home, it is a good time to mention bikes...

I'm done renting a little semi-auto Honda Wave.  I bought myself a manual Honda Win.  It needs some work, but it runs fine.  For what I paid, I don't mind putting a few bucks into it.  More importantly, I now own a motorbike (sorry mom).

-Jeff

Catching Up

We have been negligent of our photo taking and a picture is worth a few words.
I spent last weekend with the Fattboyz and my pop down in Ho Chi Minh City, or as the locals still call it, Saigon.  It was fun, Fattboyz ended up with 19 rather than 12 guys so I didn't play with them.  Singapore's River Rats, who I remember playing against in high school showed up with only 10 guys, so I was picked up as a free agent.  Our Hanoi league starts soon and I was happy to play ball for one weekend to warm up.

Here in Hanoi:

We discovered the reason why everyone is skinny.  The white spoon is the one that comes with the bucket of ice cream.  The silver spoon is ours. Portion control seems to be the answer.

I'll continue to brag about our view.  I really really really miss the Oregon lakes with crystal clear, ice cold water.  You could see the bottom even if it was 40 feet down.  This is our lake on a rainy day.  It's great to look at but we don't know why people swim in it.

Also, rain like this... rain that comes down so hard you think that it must be a typhoon... is normal.

People walk down those steps and swim every morning.

That is a fishing reel.... stick and can=fish.

Those towers are the community that our school is in.  It is a beautiful sight across the lake.

I don't know if the pictures fully express how nice it is to have a bit of rain.  Imagine all of these lake views obscured by men with fishing poles/cans.  Even with the fishermen, we have a great place.

We still need to get to work, rain or shine... Friday it rained so hard that we had no power for most of the day (hotter than Hades) and we spent most breaks inside entertaining kids who want AC and soccer.

... But we had to get to school.

So we dressed like this:

Janet's bag/jacket barely covered her.  It covered a full grown Viet man... it went to my quads.

I went to the store and bought this.

The hatchet is a great tool but I wonder about the local knife laws... the other two instruments are a hazard.

The mouth from alien:

It's job is to peel vegetables. This is an aggressive peeler. That is the past couple weeks in pictures!

-Jeff

Absolutes-a new personal philosophy

Before we moved to Hanoi.  I used the phrase, "I never...." to describe all of the things I wouldn't do here.  I said things like "I'll never ride a motor bike."  I broke that absolute statement on the third day of being here.  I said that I would only take taxis.  That is simply not possible or sustainable. A major life lesson I have learned is to avoid absolute statements.  Let the circumstances dictate the outcome.  You can't always control or predict what life hurls at you.

P.S.  I ran over two rats on my motor bike commute to work this morning.  DISGUSTING!