Southeast Asia Champs, Tin, Toan, and Real Estate

(I swear there’s a coherent theme to this post, just give me a minute)

Well they did it. Vietnam beat Thailand and is now the southeast Asia big dog. Here are some photos from my friend Toan. It’ll show you two things at once: a clearer picture of the insanity that has been Saigon’s streets this week, and a first hand look at some of my main people here in Vietnam. Tin and Toan started out as my real estate guys, and have since become two of my best buds here. They usually kick my butt at pool, and they always kick my butt at darts, but I stick it out because their humor is priceless.

Here's Tin. This man squeals, and I mean on almost any occasion. In fairness, it's probably my favorite thing about him.

And this man, Toan, is here on this Earth to make fun of him. PS the peace signs are not optional in Vietnamese photos. It's just how it is, ok?

One last look

And speaking of Tin and Toan, I’m moving next week! (I told you it’s coherent . . . real estate guys . . . moving . . . see how this works?)

We had one too many run-ins with my land lady and security guard in this building, so we’re moving to a bigger building where we aren’t THE ONLY non-Vietnamese people living, and will no longer have to bribe to evade a midnight curfew. NO MORE LITTLE MAFIA MAN FOR ME. I’m currently scheming the revenge I will have on my way out. First choice would be to lock HIM out of the building at midnight, and see if it makes him mad. A close second is raw fish under his mattress.

Forget Christmas: Vietnam Vo Dich!

First of all, Merry Christmas and all . . . yadda yadda . . . let’s talk about what’s really important here:

Vietnam just whooped up on Thailand in the first round of the Suzuki Cup final here in Southeast Asia, people. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MUCH ELATION IN THIS COUNTRY EVER. (Well, in the short 3 months I’ve been here, let’s be honest . . . let me not make sweeping claims about long-time levels of happiness here. Still. it was HUGE)

I was out to dinner last night with some friends who do their big celebrating on Christmas eve. We left the restaurant around 10, and I went to catch a motorbike taxi home, only to find out that Vietnam had won . . . I was never actually going to get home.

I didn’t take the following photo – didn’t have a camera – but boldly pirated it from here. I just want to give you an idea of what the streets were like.

So, I hopped on the back of a bike with a 20-something kid who could not have been more excited about the present situation, and off we went.

Would have been faster to walk, but I would have missed out on riding along this sea of celebration that tops almost anything else I’ve seen yet in Vietnam.

It took about an hour to travel two miles. The great thing about everyone being on motorbikes as opposed to cars is that you all get to make friends and celebrate together. And they get a huge kick out of seeing a western woman with a VN Football bandana on the back of a motorbike celebrating their big win over Thailand. It’s a great way to make people laugh and smile, if you ever want to try it.

One person would start the chant: Vietnam Vo Dich! Vietnam Vo Dich! (This person was usually the kid driving me) . . . and everyone else would join in. Bike horns were the percussion section. Flags were flying in the air as far as I could see, and people were just laughing.

It felt like the whole thing was every bit as unexpected and exciting for them as March Madness was for Davidsonians this year (we’re not supposed to win things like this! i’ve always loved this place but now everybody knows how fabulous it is! i love it i love it i love it!!!), but it was for a whole country for whom these (dare I say it) relatively small athletic accomplishments are still historic.

And this was in addition to the babies dressed up as Santa.

I was thrilled to be swimming in it.

PS – by “Forget Christmas” I mean I love you dearly and miss you desperately and have been thinking of you often this Christmas and would give anything other than 2-weeks + 2-grand to be with you and I hope you’ve had a lovely one. The cold-heartedness was purely rhetorical.

Some things that have had me laughing . . .

Maybe I’m just in one of those moods, or maybe the world (or at least this country) has gotten funnier in the last couple days. Following are a couple things that get me cracking up just thinking about them in my head:

1. Last night I went to a Sushi restaurant in which the phrase on the menu’s cover was: Sushi is not only tasty, but also funny!
2. I went onto a gym’s web site for an address yesterday, and a part of the page read as follows: If you would like to have a quiet moment for your emotion resubliming, we are honored to welcome to you coming to VIP areas (only Lady Saigon 2) – where having nothing with you. Let nature was overwhelming my mind and lead the way!
3. And tell me, pray, what does one do when you have been teaching a whole lesson on “This is my . . . ” This is my head. This is my nose . . . and so forth. A lesson in which you haven’t mentioned apples even once. At the end of the lesson, you point to this kid’s head and go “what is this?” expecting, obviously, to hear “It’s my head.”

His response: AN APPLE!!!!

You laugh in his face, that’s what you do. He may as well have said “you haven’t taught me jack @#$% all lesson long, teacha!” Luckily he got it right the second time around, and doesn’t mind being the funny kid in class.

Almost as funny as the sushi.

Some people I love, and 7 things:

So there’s this fabulous couple in my life – the Lingenfelters. If you know me, you probably already know about them. Alvin was my youth minister in high school, and simply put, likely changed everything about where I would go from there on out. He married Lindsey in 2002 and they have since had two of the cutest kids on the planet, which is what their blog is mostly about. You know how it’s great to see people you love just being all happy? That’s mostly why I love reading their blog.

And Lindsey has become an absolutely stellar photographer, which makes it even more fun to follow their blog. If you live in Georgia – nay, if you live in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and maybe Tennessee – you should have your photos taken by her.

Anyway, I’ll resist going on and on and on . . . and on and on . . .

The point is, I could not love this family more, and you should know them, and I’m only doing this next bit b/c Lindsey said so. If this woman tags you and says share 7 things about yourself. . . share 7 things about yourself, you know? Here goes:

1. I almost lost a finger shooting a BB gun (without permission, obviously) when I was . . . 4? It was inside, too, if I remember correctly.
2. I used to have a cat with three legs
3. I just learned that I love pineapples in my fried rice.
4. I have a dream to one day have a coffee shop/book store where people can sit and play board games and listen to bluegrass all day.
5. If I could teleport myself anywhere else for an hour right now (besides any of your houses because that’s just not fair), it would be to a big climbable tree in the NC mountains
6. If I could change one thing about most human culture that I’ve seen, it would be the unspoken expectation that one should be self-critical.
7. I have hyper-extending elbows.

So now I tag 7 other bloggin’ peeps: John, Ansley, Meghan, Rachel and . . . Sleepy, Sneezy and Doc? (there aren’t 7, silly) Your turn!

PS – let it never be said I didn’t give you a hyperlink to the Lingenfelters.

PPS – on a Vietnam-ey note, things are going fabulously. We had a schwanky James Bond Christmas Party this weekend and I’ll post a photo or two soon. Waiting to find one that doesn’t make me and my people here look like total goons.

Jumpies and Footprints on Toilet Seats

So there are lots of squat toilets in Vietnam. You know the kind that are basically a hole in the floor but if you start there they look something like a real toilet? And they have these little spots where you’re supposed to put your feet. It’s pretty easy to avoid these if you have a mind to, which I have done with great success so far, but it doesn’t change the fact that that’s what most people here seem to be used to.

Which brings me to the cute part.

I was down on the Jumpstart floor of the school today, the place where all the 4-6 year-olds come, and went into the bathroom (which has regular old western toilets) to find little footprints on the toilet seats. At least one of them, and how many more I can only guess, decided that it would make most sense to climb up and stand on the toilet seat. Call me crazy but I don’t quite follow . . . I realize that everything you need to know you learned in Kindergarten, but to be fair they haven’t made it through kindergarten yet.

Which brings me to my next topic, which is MY Jumpstart class. I FINALLY brought my camera to take pictures of them during the break, and I started a small Vietnamese riot. These kids went nuts, as you will soon see. If the pictures seem poorly aimed and out of focus it’s b/c they are. You do what you can when your right hand is snapping away and your left hand is warding off 6 kids at a time. You’ll notice there are lots of aerial shots. That’s b/c they couldn’t reach me way up there. I had considered trying to do this during class time while they were being the little studious echo angels that they normally are, but instead you get the riot.

I just want to note that I’m pretty hoarse right now . . . my voice is on the verge of leaving me altogether here at the end of this teaching weekend. Remember how I said these kids copy everything you do and exactly the way you do it? They actually changed their voices today to match my hoarse voice.

Now  a couple of notes on individual students . . .

This kid, Binh, was already winning for cutest kid in the class, but he clinched it yesterday. I was teaching them 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. You know it: Five little monkeys jumping on the bed, one fell off and bumped his head, mama called the doctor and the doctor said, “no more monkeys jumping on the bed!” So at one point we role played and he was the doctor. He got dressed up with his glasses and stethoscope and was more enthusiastic than you can imagine every time he got to say “lo maw monteys jumpin on da bed!” And he’s always giving you this look, too, it’s great.

This girl – the one in the white – is actually crazy. She just started coming to class this week, and probably knows more vocabulary than anybody else in the class. BUT. Everyone else will be on colors or animals from Brown Bear Brown Bear, and she will be completely oblivious to it all, thinking very deeply and wondering with her whole brain just where the snakes are. Like, literally as if she knew they were somewhere in the room with us and she just had to find them. This was her only question/comment all day yesterday. But she’s very cute.

This kid was Binh’s competition for cutest in the class. Every time we’re passing something around the class (a ball, flashcard, whatever) he cannot stop squealing and laughing with glee when it hits his hands. It is priceless.

So that’s my Jumpies.

All I Want is You

Once again, I can’t resist posting some family photos, but I think they’re cute enough for all to enjoy. This is from the Cox family Thanksgiving gathering in GA. All the photo credits go to Ansley, Uncle David, and cousin Mike. Obviously, since I wasn’t even there. I hope you enjoy. A’ight? Peace train.

PS – I just got a custom-made semi-formal dress for $24. WHAT?! Only custom-made b/c Vietnamese clothes simply don’t fit western women. But WHAT?! I could get used to this.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, and beach-time ramblings . . . on nearly everything

Although I was a bit of a smart-ass yesterday in the rubbing of my beach trip in the faces of cold Chicagoans, it should be noted that the beach trip came just in time to stop the first round of real homesicknesses I’ve had since I’ve been here. I spent most of Sunday and Monday realizing that it’s December now, and I see almost nothing of Christmas around. Families back in the States are cooking and gathering . . . this is the best time of year to be in the States. And what about Santa Clause and the North Pole and Santa hats makes any sense at all when it is 90 degrees outside?

I was working on Thanksgiving Day, and will probably be working on Christmas Day. This is not meant to be a sob story, it’ s just meant to say that I miss you, and would sometimes like to be cold with you there in Chicago, and eat pumpkin pie and gingerbread cookies with you. And, thanks to this beach trip and an unexpected videoconference with Sarah Lynch, I’m feeling much better now.

The beach was great fun. I went with about 20 other teachers from my school, and we were like kids at Christmas just to get out of the city. We spent the whole day idly swimming, chatting, riddling, and guitarring away the hours, just happy to be in that place at that time. We also played a game of beach soccer, which my right foot is paying the price for today. I was forced to teach the word “limp” to my class tonight, as I can’t currently walk without a very silly-looking one. Beach soccer is probably not the safest of ideas.

[of course this injury came THE DAY i learned from a friend a new way of teaching iambic pentameter, which is basically to get the kids to limp around the room and go "i AM a PIRate WITH a WOODen LEG" along with the cadence of their limp. So what do you think this girl has been singing as she hobbles around this city? You got it!]

Also, I have some new trivia for you, stemming from this lovely beach outing: (forgive me, I’m apparently taking the “stream-of-consciousness” route today . . . )

1) What famous actor can take the first five letter of his first name, and combine them with the last five letters of his last name to make the name of an American city?

2) There are two animals that, if you remove the third letter of each name and put the names together, you have the name of a capital city. Which two animals and which city? (national capitals, not state capitals)

3) Name a law breaker that starts with an S. Remove the S and one other letter to get the name of another law breaker.

First person who can answer all of those gets a cookie.

I also went for a little walk along the beach – something that must always be done at least once a day if you’re at the beach, and I came across this hat:

I didn’t take the hat – there were things growing in it – but I did wonder for a long while at just where it might have come from. Maybe Thailand? Maybe China? Maybe Australia? Maybe a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific? Maybe California????

This is entirely thanks to Bill Bryson, whose (photocopied) book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” I just read. Bill Bryson has mostly just angered me in the past, but I would highly recommend this book if you have 500 pages or so in you. Much of the book talks about how coincidentally we’ve come across many of the things we know about the world. For example, oceanographers traced currents more accurately than they ever had before in 1994, when 34,000 ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship and washed up everywhere from Vancouver to . . . ahem . . . Vietnam. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

So while I’m on the topic of a  Short History of Nearly Everything, and embracing the stream-of-counsciousness mood, here are a few other things I learned (all shamelessly plagiarized word-for-word, almost). If you’re not interested in this kind of thing you can get off here, but for those who are, here are some new fun facts in my world:

• Protons are so small that the dot on this ‘i’ can hold about 500,000,000,000 of them, or more than the number of seconds it takes to make half a million years
• The edge of the universe, at least the visible part of it, is 90 billion trillion miles away
• Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1% of the dancing static you see is a remnant of the Big Bang – the very first photons converted into microwaves over all that time and distance
• Let’s journey to the edge of our solar system. Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But we can’t go at the speed of light, we’re limited to the speed of a spaceship – about 56,000 kilometers per hour. That’ll take 12 years. So that’s Pluto, but you keep going b/c the goal is the edge of the solar system. The edge of the solar system is when we pass through the Oort cloud, and we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another – I’m so sorry about this – 10,000 years.
• If you tried to draw the solar system to scale, you would have to make Jupiter the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Even then, Pluto would be over 10 meters away, and the size of a molecule.
• If you are an average-sized adult you will contain no less than 7 * 10^18 joules of potential energy – enough to explode with the force of 30 very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and wished to make a point.
• The Earth’s magnetic field reverses itself every 500,000 years or so
• It’s been known for a long time that Yellowstone is volcanic in nature, but for a long time we couldn’t find exactly where the volcano was, b/c we couldn’t find the caldera (the pit left behind from a rupture). Turns out, that’s because virtually the whole park itself is a caldera. At some time in the past, Yellowston must have blown up with a violence far beyond teh scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone is a supervolcano. It sits on an enormous hot spot 72 kilometers across and 13 kilometers thick. Its last eruption was 1,000 times as big as that of Mount St. Helens. The one before that was 280 times as big, and the one before that was at least 2,500 as big. It’s next eruption is also overdue by about 600 years.

So, I’ll stop boring you with fun facts from Bill Bryson now, but it’s cool stuff if you ever want a read. And don’t try to take me to Yellowstone anytime soon.

So in conclusion. I miss you. I’m sorry about the snow taunts. But the beach rocks. Bill Bryson rocks. And the world is big and cool.

The end.

I hear it was snowing in Chicago today . . .

. . . and I just want to offer my sincerest best wishes for the long season ahead. I think of you often. Just a couple tips a wise one once gave to me:

1) Don’t cheap out on your ice scraper – get a big one with a brush – even if it costs $10 more

2) Don’t cheap out on your gloves – get nice warm ones, and multiple pairs, for when you lose one glove the day before it goes all “stock market” on you and plunges to -20 degrees outside, simultaneously freezing your power steering and making your steering wheel feel like a hot stove that you have to handle with your bare hands

3) Keep salt in the car

4) Use your imagination, and look at these December pictures when needed . . . and know that I truly am with you in spirit . . .