The City That Never Sleeps In

The joy of shopping in Hanoi

2012-02-23T23:29:00.000+07:00

At any given moment on Tạ Hiện street, you'll find a tourist photographing this window for the Creative Oriental Crafts Kingdom:

Image from here.

[Since my innocent post on cockfighting ended up on a website for penis healthcare, I cannot wait to see what exciting opportunities arise from this one.]

This sign is clearly no accident, but an excellent business strategy, as confirmed by the store-owner in this blog.

It plays to an already well-established practice of tourists taking photos of Vietnamese signs, usually featuring the words "hung" and "bong" and "dong" and "dung" and "phuc". Once you become familiar with Vietnamese pronunciation, these signs sadly become less amusing. But rest assured, I'm not entirely above it all:

You'd think that after 2.5 years of enjoying Vietnam's premier ice-creamery, Nathan would have gotten sick of "Fanny" gags, but no, he hasn't. Every time we go there - yes, sometimes for all-you-can-eat Fanny - I have to hear about how he's going to put his dong into Fanny, etcetera. Never gets tired.

Maybe these stores all buy their signs from here:

Meta.

Shop names in Hanoi seem to run along a number of themes, much like the hotel names. There's the straight-talking ones, pretty unambiguous in promoting their products:

Or their sales channel:

Hmm, not actually, though.

Or the kind of customer they're after (presented in ascending order of nattiness):

If you're wondering what "men on TV" wear, it's this:

Damn straight, that's a leopard-print tuxedo jacket.

As with the hotels, there are also the stores which employ the "irresistible adjective" technique:

For when you need something, you know, classy and fabulous, to wear on a date with, just for example, a man on TV.

But the irresistible adjectives adopted by store owners sometimes take a strange turn, like this:

And this:

"Mysterious" isn't a quality I tend to look for in fashion. However, I can imagine some mysterious clothes being teamed quite nicely with something from here:

Then there are the shops which, through no real fault of their own, just can't help but play right into my puerile hands:

Coffee does that to you too, huh?

And also provide a lesson in why attempting wordplay in a second language is a very risky thing indeed:

Oh, Fartshion, you're my absolute favourite. No business strategy in the world could contrive to come up with that.

And now, a post about bears

2012-02-20T09:00:00.000+07:00

It's one of those universals about living overseas that you'll end up with more friends from other countries than from your host country. This is not something to complain about. In fact, it's probably one of the best things about living overseas.

In Vietnam, I've been thrown in with a whole heap of folk from walks of life that aren't my... usual... walk. Whatever, they're awesome.

For example, I got to meet Charmagne, who was resident jazz singer at the Metropole for three months. I don't know what excited me more: the fact that she got to live in the Metropole and have French onion soup delivered to her room for breakfast every day, or simply knowing someone with a sentence in their bio that reads "She performed at Sean "P Diddy" Combs' 3rd Annual All-Star Festival in Cancun".

I also got to meet Falk, who has the best job title in the world: Bear Manager. BEAR. MANAGER.

Falk manages bears at the Animals Asia Bear Rescue Centre in Tam Dao National Park, which we finally got to visit in December to celebrate Nathan's "bearthday" (see what I did there?). And it turns out that Falk may not have just the best job title in the world, but the best job too.

As you would imagine, bears at the Rescue Centre have been rescued, coming from the most horrific conditions on bear bile farms, where they are kept in tiny "crush" cages and the bile pumped out of their gall bladder for use in traditional medicine.

So when one of these bears is freed at the Rescue Centre, how do you reckon they feel?

Pretty damn happy.

It really does seem like they're the happiest bears alive. Oh, except for this bear:

Thanks to the Bear Manager and the other centre staff, this is bear paradise.

Their food is all prepared in the Bear Kitchen, which looks like this:

Bears like cabbage, sure, but can you see what's on that shelf there? Baked beans, sweet corn, jam, Nutella, coconut cream, peanut butter... Turns out that if a bear drops around to our house for dinner, we are already well prepared.

These treats are part of a frighteningly well-organised programme (did I mention Falk is German?) to keep the bears stimulated:

They even get special bear popsicles:

Their food is hidden about their enclosure for them to sniff out like a treasure hunt, which is just as much fun to watch as it sounds:

They then get to spend the rest of their time loping around with their friends and playing on their bear playground:

Long gone are their days of imprisonment and torture. Now their only worries are like when the tyre-swing breaks under their enormous, furry, Nutella-loving weight:

Bummer, dude.

The bears are so teddy bear-like and bumbling and adorable it's easy to forget that they're actually, you know, ferocious bears, which is why they have this:

Oh, to have a workplace with a Bear Escape Alarm!

I wanted a bear to escape so it could give me a big old cuddle, but Bear Emergencies are a serious business. Check this out:

Yes, that is a blow-gun. A BLOW-GUN. And that is Falk's wife, wildlife vet Leanne, demonstrating how to use it. Did I mention that I've met some awesome people here?

And what do you use to distract a bear while you're aiming your blow-dart? Well, what do you think:

How can you look at that shelf of distracting honey and think of them as anything other than big ol' fluffy teddy bears? It would be like shooting a tranquilizer dart into Winnie the Pooh himself.

At the end of our visit, two truckloads of new bears arrived, freshly rescued from a bear bile farm:

They looked worse for wear, stressed and terrified. It was a sobering reminder that being a Bear Manager isn't all bear popsicles and tyre swings. It's a job that comes out of a really awful, and completely unnecessary, industry of animal cruelty. And the rescued bears actually aren't the happiest bears in the world; those are the ones in the wild. Although this guy comes a close second:

If you'd like to visit the bears at the Rescue Centre, it's best to contact the Animals Asia Foundation in Hanoi to arrange a time for a free (!!) guided tour, by emailing Ms Thuy, their Communications Officer. Try to visit at feeding time for maximum bear awesomeness.

Unlike the wildlife rescue centres in Cuc Phuong National Park, it's easy to get to Tam Dao National Park and back in a day. You can organise a taxi, or catch the bus from My Dinh to Vinh Yen, then change for a bus to Tam Dao town or grab a xe om the rest of the way. The turn-off is at KM 13 near Ho Son, and then you follow that road all the way to the centre, which is in the foothills of the National Park.

Aside from the bears, the centre is also in a lovely little spot with a great view. Bring along some sandwiches and you can even have a picnic on their little patch of lawn.

You can donate to Animals Asia or sponsor a bear here, because bear paradise doesn't come cheap.

The last word on weddings

2012-02-10T15:12:00.000+07:00

I write this post under some duress. Personally I think this blog, which is supposed to be about my life in Hanoi, is at risk of turning into a wedding blog. And I hate wedding blogs.

But I admit that it would seem weird not to mention on here a certain event which took place a couple of weeks ago, which makes up for its lack of relevance to Hanoi with its exceptional significance to my life overall. Yes, Nathan and I got married.

Again. I know that's what you're thinking. But the first time wasn't for realsies.

This time was for realsies:

And there was a certain connection to Vietnam, actually, starting with the invitations.

Last year, Nathan and I had the honour of attending the snappily-named "International Musical Exchange Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Foundation Day of the International Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Public Security (ICD-MPS)". It was a pretty rad evening of song and dance, with my favourite performance being the ladies of the Hanoi traffic police singing a song about being ladies of the Hanoi traffic police. But I digress.

At that event, we were presented with this pennant:

One thing I love about Vietnam is that it's very liberal with its laurels. Almost all official events seem to offer take-home commemorative spoils. As someone whose life thus far has been entirely devoid of ribbons and trophies - but abundant in certificates of participation - Vietnam has been a real boon for me.

And God knows, I'm going to make the most of it:

Our wedding crest was designed by our friends at Crunchy Frog Design here in Hanoi, whose brief was to make us look like those great role models for happy marriage, Charles and Diana, on their special 50-cent coin:

Did their wedding invitation have motherfucking tassels? No, it did not. And that's why their marriage failed.

Once you have your own logo, it's kind of hard not to go crazy with it. So everyone at the wedding got to go home a winner:

Many other components of the wedding came from Vietnam too. Nathan's suit, my dress, and, of course, the heart-shaped moneybox:

Because some Vietnamese traditions are worth importing (Nathan also wanted to import the traditional champagne pyramid. Surprisingly, the venue wasn't that keen).

Our first dance came from Vietnam too. We learned it at our local dance studio, and we practised it in our little flat, before taking it on tour:

Vietnam's Got Talent. But we're not it.

Who knows, maybe we'll be making a star turn on the stage of the "International Musical Exchange Celebrating the 31st Anniversary of the Foundation Day of the International Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Public Security (ICD-MPS)".

The night was all the things that weddings are supposed to be, but it was still surprising just how much fun we had. The most fun ever, actually.

We spent five days in Hong Kong on the way back to Hanoi. Arriving home, we discovered that the cockfighting festival was being held on our street again, pretty much cementing the already pretty solid association between pecking, half-bald roosters and our nuptials.

As I picked my way through the mud and chicken poo, I couldn't get that Cruel Sea song out of my head. The honeymoon is over, baby.

That night Nathan and I were woken at 3am by sounds that were even more unidentifiable than usual coming from outside our window. I lifted the blinds to see the glow of charcoal on the street below, and, well, I'll just show you what it looked like in the morning:

"What's happening out there?" my new husband asked.
"Oh, they're just spit-roasting a whole cow, on the road", I said.
And the wafting aroma of roast beef sent us back to sleep.

Aah, home sweet home.

Hanoi vs HCMC

2012-02-02T12:51:00.000+07:00

Apologies for the lack of updates, but I've been kind of busy...

There will be a post all about that in good time, I promise. Please enjoy this column previously published in AsiaLIFE HCMC until normal transmission resumes:

I’ll let you in on a secret: I do not live in Saigon. I live in Hanoi. I’m here right now. If you hold this column to your ear, you’ll hear the gentle sound of pure Hanoi water lapping against the shores of one of our many (countless!) tranquil lakes in the crisp autumn breeze; if you take a great big sniff of the page, you’ll inhale the unmistakable scent of pure old world charm. You’re smelling it now, aren’t you? I know you are, because I can feel your jealousy from 1760 kilometres away.

I have experienced inter-city rivalries before. I used to live in Sydney, which invests a great deal of effort into being better than Melbourne (not that it has to, because it’s better without even trying) but the competition between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City is off the scale. This is completely understandable from the Vietnamese point of view, given the historical enmity between north and south, but what’s remarkable is how the expat community seems to feel just as strongly about it.

I know that I do. In fact, I would probably argue more strongly on behalf of Hanoi in the face of a Saigonese claim of being-more-awesome than I would for Sydney against Melbourne. And there is absolutely no logical explanation for this. The reason I live in Hanoi and not Ho Chi Minh City is random chance, and the reason I prefer Hanoi is because I happen to live here, and the reason I live here is random chance. It’s an argument as circular as the glistening shell of Hanoi’s legendary turtle. Incidentally, Saigon has no legendary turtles. Just saying.

Any time a Hanoi expat returns from a trip to Saigon, they must report back to their fellow Hanoians on what they did there. They must say that it was “fun for a weekend”, optionally noting that the nightlife and food is better, but immediately adding the essential and emphatic qualification: “I wouldn’t want to live there though”. The Hanoians must then all shake their heads, brows furrowed, as they imagine the plight of the poor souls down south who do have to live there. Terrible business!

The Hanoians must then rally the troops and deploy a tactical defensive move whereby they recap all of Saigon’s deficiencies compared to Hanoi, usually gleaned from a couple of brief jaunts down south. These must include, but are not limited to:

Too many traffic jams
Lack of seasons
Too many tall buildings
Too many beggars
Lack of charm/character/quaintness
Roads too wide
No lakes
Iced coffee is too sweet
Can’t understand (superior) Hanoi accent
Trees too tall
Too much luxury brand-name shopping
City is too big
Expats all work in the private sector
Weird herbs in the pho
Too much construction
Has two names
Not Hanoi

The Hanoians will then sit back, pleased with themselves for having irrefutably proven that the city they arbitrarily chose to make their home is Better Than The Other One They Could Have Arbitrarily Chosen.

But I’m sure that Saigon expats would never engage in this kind of nonsense about Hanoi. I mean, there’s not really much point when it’s a foregone conclusion who’ll come out on top, right?

You can't always get what you want

2012-01-18T11:48:00.001+07:00

Hanoi is currently in the grips of a pre-Tet consumer frenzy. You’d think that since there’s no Christmas-like gift-giving at Tet there wouldn’t be so much stuff to buy, but actually there’s even more.

Not only do you need to buy special Tet decorations and special Tet food, you need to buy new things like clothes, homewares and appliances to ring in the new year, because nothing says auspiciousness like newness. And you need to buy some gifts too, mostly in the form of potted plants, fruit and hampers.

Because every nook, cranny and underpass of the city is already being used to its maximum capacity for selling stuff, all this extra stuff that needs to be sold is just absorbed into the pre-existing spaces.

This is our local coffee shop, which is inexplicably called Jackson, and inexplicably features a toucan mascot:

While usually only selling coffee (or should I say "coffe"), it has temporarily diversified and is now offering pot plants:

Funnily enough, that “Happy New Year” sign is up all year round. This just happens to be the one of time of year when it actually comes good. Happy New Year to you too, Jackson!

This is the printing shop where we got the invitations and decorations for our Australian wedding made:

As you can see, it is now mostly selling preserved fruits. That guy packaging the preserved fruits is not just an ace preserved-fruit-packager, he also has pimping CorelDRAW skills. That’s Gen Y for you.

And this is our dear old Trúc Bạch lake:

For the rest of the year it’s just a sewer, but for now it’s a sewer with flowers growing in it. I asked Nathan if he wanted me to buy him a plant grown in his own poo, but he declined.

You’ll be pleased to know Trúc Bạch is getting into the Tet spirit in other ways:

That’s some altar offerings and a dead rat. Happy New Year to you too, little bloated chuột!

At any time of year, buying things in Hanoi can be a challenge. Every single thing that exists in the world exists in Hanoi – somewhere. In fact, they’re probably made here.

The challenge is in knowing where to find what you’re looking for. This is complicated by the travelling vendors, who might be tauntingly moving your sought-after item around town, always just out of your reach, as you’re hunting around looking for it.

And an infuriating thing happens often with supply and demand here, where as soon as you want something, it will completely disappear, even if it was previously ubiquitous.

For example, once we were cooking canh chua for dinner and needed pineapple. Now, anyone who’s been to Hanoi would know that Hanoi is usually awash with pineapple. In fact, “Hà Nội” in Vietnamese actually means “City of Plentiful Pineapple” (not really). But as soon as we actually needed the damn fruit, it was as if the street vendors had all been called out of town on a pineapple-selling convention.

Where's this guy when you need him, eh?

After giving up myself, I made Nathan cycle aimlessly around the city looking for the spiky suckers. It took him over an hour and he practically had to cross into China to find one. But find one he did, because he knows if he’d come back empty-handed, I would have beat him.

Now I know to aim low, and try not to yearn for anything too specific. I head out looking for “fruit” and if I come back with morning glory and some fried peanuts, I chalk it up as a success. Because it’s at least “food”.

So when Nathan dreamed up a Halloween costume that looked like this:

And which relied upon - entirely - for its execution not just two motorbike ponchos (which, incidentally, usually only appear for sale when it rains), and not just two two-headed motorbike ponchos, but two two-headed, green motorbike ponchos, I told him he was dreaming. “DO YOU NOT REMEMBER THE PINEAPPLE?” I said, calmly and reasonably.

But one thing I do love about Nathan is that he dares to dream. So I said I would try. But that I would spend no more than one day looking for the ingredients for his vision and if they didn’t turn up – which they inevitably wouldn’t – he would have to design a new costume. Preferably one featuring morning glory and fried peanuts.

I randomly chose a shop to begin my search the next day. The conversation there went like this:

Me: Motorbike raincoat?
Store lady: Yes.
Me: Two heads?
Store lady: Yes.
Me: Green?
Store lady: Yes.
Me: Two of them?
Store lady: Yes.
Me: Holy Mother of God. WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED.

And with that, she reached under the counter and produced them, as if she’d been expecting me.

“Well, Hanoi” I said. “You win again.”

And so Nathan’s vision became reality:

And I became sweaty and delirious from the combination of glue gun and plastic, but still none-the-wiser on how this place works. Which is just the way I like it.

Happy Year of the Dragon! Now go out and buy some stuff.

Foreigners on the flip side

2012-01-06T13:24:00.000+07:00

One of my favourite blogs from 2011 is Photastic USA, written by Huyen, a Hanoian who has moved to America with her husband Ben. While living in Hanoi for three years Ben kept a near-daily blog about his experiences living in Huyen’s country, and in a neat role-reversal, Huyen has now taken up where he left off, only writing about living in Ben’s country.

Huyen’s blog reveals that the expat experience, no matter where you’re coming from or going to, is, in many ways, a universal one. She writes about her first Thanksgiving with the same wide-eyed excitement as me when I wrote about my first Tet; she writes about snow with the same awe that I feel for the Hanoi summer; and she writes about commuting in NYC with the same terror experienced by any expat in Hanoi traffic:

“To be honest, if Ben did not go with me, I would cry in the station because of being scared. The crowd in the bus station is not the worst thing. As soon as we step out of the station, I saw a huge crowd of people on the sidewalk. I was surprised and asked Ben: Are all of them going to work? Ben said he thought so. It was really overwhelming how many people walking on the sides of streets in New York. Everyone was also in hurry to work. They walked so fast. I felt like I would be pushed if I just stopped for a second. One thing came out of my head that understand now how foreigners in Vietnam are so scared and nervous about the rush hour in Hanoi.”

Like me, she marvels at the differences between Western and Vietnamese weddings, and then, like me, decides that she prefers the traditions of her new country rather than her own. Also like me, she writes a post on the novel attitude to pets in her new culture:

“If you go to Vietnam and you see many signs of places with dogs or cats pictures, those are called Dog or Cat Restaurants. And you might see a lot of people inside. When we were riding bicycles in California, I saw a sign with a Dog and Cat picture, but I was surprised when the sign actually said: Dog and Cat Hospital! I stopped right away and told Ben: "Oh my god, I think my parents will be very very surprised when I show them this sign." So I asked Ben to take picture of me in front of the hospital. When I first moved here, I felt a little bit strange seeing how pets, especially dogs, are treated here. They have their own beds which I did not even have when I was a kid.”

She struggles with the local food, with its lack of rice and vegetables (although in one awesome scene she wows a crowd of guys at a barbecue by hoeing into some pig’s trotters), and has difficulties remembering and pronouncing American names:

“At first, I thought every one would easy to remember my name because my name is just one syllable, not complicated at all comparing to some American names like: Elizabeth, Sebastian. Also, there are a lot of last names in America comparing to few Vietnamese last names. Also, it was very hard for me at first to remember and say right every one’s name here, as I told Ben in Vietnam that all white people look the same for me.”

I felt that if anyone could share some insight into the experience of foreigners abroad, it would be Huyen, so I emailed her to ask if living in America has changed her perspective on what it’s like for foreigners living in Vietnam. In all honesty, I thought I knew what her answer was going to be; based on her almost universally positive writing about her new home, I assumed she would say that it’s much easier to be a foreigner in America. But I was wrong:

“When I first moved to the US, I was nervous that everyone will treat me different from American. But from meeting new people, I realized that no one really cares I am American or not. Actually I wish everyone think I am foreigner because I will be treated as a foreigner: people should talk slowly to me, and should understand that I am not used to everything in America (I did not know how to get around at the beginning). Then I think being a foreigner in Vietnam is much better. Everyone thinks that foreigners do not know many things in Vietnam, so local people will be very friendly and try to introduce new things to foreigner. I also feel like Vietnamese think foreigners are special people.”

This was pretty mind-blowing for me. It’s one of my pet peeves living here how often I’m told I “don’t understand” how to do things, and am mothered by well-meaning Vietnamese people who believe I don’t know how to carry out various basic tasks “correctly”. These tasks include, but are not limited to, using chopsticks, parking my bicycle, carrying my shopping, opening doors, wearing clothes, and generally just existing. But Huyen is right: for all the times I’ve complained about being treated like a child, or having my autonomy compromised, there’s been ten times as many occasions when I’ve benefited from the instruction and assistance of locals just because I am, as she says, “a special person”.

It’s so easy to focus on how foreigners in Vietnam are treated unfairly - especially when you’re getting ripped off every day - but I’d have to think very carefully before saying I want to be treated the same as everybody else. Would I want to be surrounded by people who assume that I speak fluent Vietnamese? And in many ways don’t I actually count on being mothered to get by here?

Huyen continues:

“I do not really see foreigners treated different in America because it is very hard to tell if somebody is foreigner. This is so different from Vietnam, because being foreigners in Vietnam really makes you have a lot of attentions everywhere you go. I think it is so exciting and interesting being a foreigner in Vietnam, except you probably have different price range for mostly everything.”

Next time I complain about the “foreigner price”, I’ll remember what it’s actually buying me: the luxury of being treated like a foreigner. Sometimes special treatment isn’t such a bad thing.

Thanks to Huyen for her brilliant blog and for answering my questions. I really hope you continue writing! And happy New Year to all the foreigners around the world, all of us eating unfamiliar food and struggling with unpronounceable names, wherever we may be.

Vietnam's Embarrassment Exclusion Zone

2011-12-27T11:30:00.000+07:00

This post was originally published in AsiaLIFE HCMC

I have written before in these pages about the comedic stylings of the Vietnamese, and their favourite subject (me). Vietnamese people seem to find me quite hilarious when I do pretty much anything (say, for example, some crazy activity like buying bananas from the market! ROFL!), but sometimes I find myself in a position where even I am prepared to admit that I must look totally ludicrous.

For example, while cycling through the city the other afternoon I decided that I absolutely had to have a helium-filled balloon shaped like a zebra with multi-coloured stripes. As I tethered that disco zebra to my handlebars, I looked right into his eyes and said, “Wait till they get a load of you.”

A foreigner, on a bicycle, with a balloon! Surely that’s worth pointing and laughing at, right? God knows, if I took that zebra on a spin through the streets of Sydney we’d get a few laughs.

But did I get so much as a double take? No. As far as everyone around me was concerned, this long-nosed, zebra-toting cyclist was the most normal thing in the world, warranting no special attention whatsoever. I felt strangely miffed. “Laugh at me!!” I wanted to scream. “Why won’t you laugh at me NOW?!!”

Then I realised that for the two years I’ve been living in Vietnam I’ve failed to fully exploit this country’s Embarrassment Exclusion Zone.

I’ve dwelled so much on why it’s apparently so ridiculously hilarious when I try to carry out an everyday task like buying bananas, that I’ve neglected to take advantage of the reverse phenomenon: the ridiculous will actually go unnoticed.

Why on earth aren’t I wearing my pyjamas in the street? Why aren’t I hanging out with the old ladies in the park performing provocative pelvic exercises and slapping myself in the face right now? This is the one time in my life when I can grind my groin into the side of a park bench and not be arrested for indecent behaviour, so why am I still here writing this column?

If you’re a man, you should go, right now, and buy yourself a bright pink motorbike helmet decorated with cartoon unicorns and the words “sweet dreamtime for my special pony”, because this is perfectly acceptable headwear for a man in Vietnam. You can finally express your inner special pony without fear of mockery. This is your time.

If you’re a lady, you should also head to the shops. When you’re there, buy yourself a completely sheer, 100 percent see-through blouse. You won’t have any trouble finding one. And then wear a black bra underneath it, and nothing else. Oh, except for tiny little denim shorts. No-one will bat an eyelid. You could re-enact scenes from “Pretty Woman” with wild abandon and even then no-one would ask you for your hourly rate.

Don’t lift up your transparent blouse to expose your belly though. That’s just for men, silly.

And we should all be singing in public. Loudly. All the time. In taxis, while queuing at the supermarket, in the office, and especially in a café where the waitresses are all singing too. Go on, harmonise with them!

I tested out the Vietnamese indifference to public singing after the zebra incident. I cycled down the street while singing “Rock Lobster” by The B-52’s at the top of my lungs. Nothing. Not a single reaction. Not even when I did the bit about the catfish.

After this you should be fitting right into Vietnam. Locals will praise you for your assimilation and you’ll never be laughed at again. Until you try to buy bananas.

Merry Christmas from Hanoi

2011-12-23T11:17:00.000+07:00

Once again it's the time of year when our landlord hangs a Christmas wreath from our front door. This year we'd beat him to it with some decorations of our own, but he was undeterred:

Such is the Vietnamese dedication to Christmas decorations. And they certainly wouldn't let a little thing like not even celebrating Christmas stand in the way of their polystyrene snowmen and saxophonist Santas.

I've written about the Vietnamese take on Christmas for Crikey, and since 'tis the season for slacking off, I'm going to grant myself a blogging holiday and just point you in the direction of that post: Christmas without the tradition and religion? Welcome to Vietnam.

Thanks to everyone who read the blog this year, and especially to those who left comments, which are like little blogging presents under the Christmas tree. Merry Christmas to you all!

How to get married in Vietnam

2011-12-10T05:39:00.000+07:00

Now that we've gotten the boring old photos out of the way, we can move on to the real business: the party.

Nathan and I have been mildly obsessed with Vietnamese weddings ever since we went to this one a couple of years ago. As we sat there, agog, in our Monday lunch hour, with the miniature bride and groom dancing before us, and the fireworks, and the champagne pyramid, and the exploding balloons, and the golden glitter shower, we knew, as certainly as we've known anything, that when it comes to wedding receptions, the Vietnamese have run away with the game.

There are many beautiful, traditional elements of a Vietnamese wedding which you can read about here. They involve rituals of receiving the bride and groom at their respective family homes over several days, and exchanging elaborate gifts. Now, not being Vietnamese, and not having a Vietnamese family, we're unable to partake in, or truly understand, these traditions. So we cut to the glittery, sparkly chase with our Vietnamese wedding plans and just had the reception. Champagne pyramid, here we come.

The first step was choosing a date. In Vietnamese culture the bride and groom attend a fortune teller to learn the most fortuitous date to hold their wedding, which is how you can end up with your wedding on a Monday lunch-time. Being Tays, who love advance planning, and scheduling, and weekends, we decided to set our own lucky date on the most fortuitous Saturday that happened to most fortuitously fit in best with our schedules. November 26: sounds lucky to you, right?

Next step, the invitations. As with everything else in Hanoi, wedding invitations are all sold on the one street - Hàng Gà - in the Old Quarter. In a similar vein to choosing a wedding dress most like a Long Island iced tea, we wanted to find the invitation that had the most stuff on it, therefore offering the best value for money.

Behold, the winner:

Check out the ROI on that sucker. These invites, with printing inside included, cost 15,000 VND (72c) each. That's 36 cents per duck. Put that in your business case and smoke it.

Then we bought the other most important things: the heart-shaped moneybox, and the glitter cannons:

Did I kind of want to get into a traffic accident just for the resultant glitter explosion? I would be lying if I said no.

At this point in our Vietnamese wedding planning we realised that planning a Vietnamese wedding was almost as hard as planning an Australian wedding. Only all in Vietnamese. So we turned to professional help. Funnily enough, the Vietnamese wedding planners, WedinStyle, told us they'd never organised the kind of reception we were after - a typical Vietnamese one. They noted that their middle-class Vietnamese clientele usually want a Western-style wedding reception, and yet here we were, Westerners, wanting a Vietnamese one. It's a funny old world, isn't it?

We were then presented with a list of wedding elements from which we could pick and choose. It became apparent to me that the organisers of that first wedding we'd been to had waved their hands at that list and said "We'll take the lot".

The first element we chose was an enormous blue tent, to block the entire street. Having been the victim of large street-blocking blue tents many times over the past couple of years, it filled me with pride that I could now look out the window and sigh, "Right there, that's our enormous blue tent blocking the entire street":

If you remember the post on What I See From Our Window, you'll recognise its placement:

Damn straight. That bin has a special place in our hearts, and we wouldn't want our wedding anywhere else than right there.

And if you remember the post on the cockfighting festival that happens on our street, you'll recognise this view from our other window:

It just so happened that the local pagoda's bi-annual cockfighting tournament was also on November 26. And that, my friends, is why you should go to a fortune teller to choose your wedding date. Because if you don't, they'll use their magic powers on you in the way you least expect.

Cockfighting wasn't one of the things we picked from the list of wedding options, but it added a certain je ne sais quoi to the day. And it made those hipsters who have weddings in rustic barns, sitting on bales of straw, look like total pussies. Bet those bales of straw aren't covered in chicken blood. Nope, didn't think so.

For some reason, the tent was constructed the night before the wedding and we had to pay Dung, the security guy from Simon and Sarah's old building, to guard it, and the balloon arch, all night. The sound of balloons spontaneously popping intermittently throughout the entire night will forever remind me - and no doubt Dung - of the precious joy of marriage. We also had to pay the security guard from the cockfighting festival to stop punters weeing on our tent. You really have to watch out for those hidden costs when it comes to weddings. I immediately added "wee-prevention guy" to the budget for our Australian wedding.

Back to the balloon arch, which was the next thing we chose from the wedding inventory. No matter where your wedding reception is being held in Vietnam, the balloon arch is compulsory.

Also compulsory, your name in polystyrene letters:

We actually got to choose that backdrop design from a number of options. It was the melon that won us over.

You'll see there the stereo system, which we needed to have because extremely loud nineties techno is, in all seriousness, the traditional soundtrack to wedding receptions in Vietnam. I don't know why this is, but it is. Who doesn't love a bit of 2 Unlimited at 10:30am?

Obviously the champagne pyramid was also a must-have for us:

There is actually a whole separate guy just in charge of the champagne pyramid. He arrived direct from another wedding where he'd been working his champagne pyramid magic. We got to keep his dry ice in our freezer, which was actually pretty exciting.

The caterers then arrived:

And somehow prepared food for 150 people in our laundry, which was amazing.

Then they crammed the tent with plastic stools and tables. No, incorrect. First, they crammed our laundry with plastic stools and tables:

Then they crammed the tent:

Does that not look awesome?

You'll see here the sign which was specially stuck up for the cockfighting festival:

NO WEEING IN OUR TENT.

Then the beer arrived:

Yay for our chairs!

Then everyone arrived, including us:

That is Ashton and Huong, who were our awesome MCs for the day. Huong also gave us critical input into how the event should be run. She said we needed a representative from our families to give a toast, but we explained this wouldn't be possible:

Us: We don't have family here.
Huong: I see. What is the job of the Australian Ambassador?
Us: Umm, he represents Australia?
Huong: Does he represent everyone in Australia?
Us: Umm, yes?
Huong: Are your parents in Australia?
Us: Umm.... yes?
Huong: Well, there you go. He can give the toast for your parents.

And so he did. In Vietnamese, pretty much outclassing our parents. Nathan's boss Richard and colleague Ms Ha also gave speeches, which were suitably embarrassing to Nathan, and therefore extremely enjoyable for me.

Then we cut the cake!

Which is easier said than done, because as you'll see from this "after" photo:

...the cake is actually mostly polystyrene.

And then, the champagne pyramid with simultaneous glitter bombs!

And then eating and drinking!

And then it was all over!

The next day, the only evidence that it even happened at all, was this:

An unfortunate balloon cock and balls.

One of the many reasons that a Vietnamese wedding reception is better than a typical Australian one in my book is this intensity. Every year when I'm watching the New Year's Eve fireworks, I can't help but think how much better it would be if they just let them all off at once. A Vietnamese wedding reception does just that. It's exciting, it's loud, it's colourful, it's frenetic. At no point do you think, "Geez, this is really dragging on a bit". It's also a neighbourhood event that centres around your home and involves the community, as any event with an enormous tent which blocks the entire street tends to. Our neighbours were stopping us to say, simply, "Happy!" for days afterwards.

Many of our Vietnamese guests commented that our wedding party was "old style", as receptions are increasingly held in large function centres or restaurants. I guess our preference for the older, street style is just another example of the Stuff White People Like phenomenon of Westerners looking backwards (barns, anyone?) while the Vietnamese look ever onwards and upwards. To me, there's real spirit in having everyone in such close confines, and all mustered right outside your very house. I would do the exact same thing for our Australian wedding if we could, but the council permits alone just don't bear thinking about.

The novelty of a couple of Tays hosting a traditional Vietnamese event did not pass unnoticed. I was interviewed about it for VTC on their English-language show "Sharing Vietnam", and the lovely Giap did a piece about it, also for VTC, which in three minutes conveys the ambiance of the day much better than all these words:

Thank you to everyone who came, and who helped with organising, and also James and Monica for most of the photos in this post. And special thanks to Tamara and Mags for hosting the after-party. We called in so many favours to make this happen that we'll have to stay in Vietnam another two years to pay them back.

Looking out our window today, you'd never think this was the site of one of the most fun days of our life:

Now all that's left is, as the Vietnamese say, one hundred years of happiness.

Our Vietnamese wedding photos

2011-11-29T14:30:00.001+07:00

Last weekend, Nathan and I held a Vietnamese pre-wedding celebration on our street. It was unspeakably awesome, and you'll hear all about it in good time, but to keep things chronological, you'll have to hear about our wedding photos first.

That's right, wedding photos first. Here in Vietnam, couples get the business of photos out of the way several weeks before the actual wedding takes place. It's a genius move which means you don't have that weird, disruptive gap in the wedding day where the bride and groom disappear with the photographer, and it also means you can display the wedding photos and wedding album to your guests on the day. What better place to show your wedding photos than at your wedding.

Vietnam is a nuptials-loving nation, with more wedding-dress shops per capita than any other country (probably). What I didn't know until I went into one of these shops myself is that they're not actually wedding-dress shops, they're Bride Factories. You don't go in there to buy a wedding dress, you go in there to come out a perfectly-packaged bride. The dresses are only the piped, meringue icing on the enormous multi-tiered cake.

For example, I was a Golden Package II bride. This was the second-to-cheapest bride I could be, which we figured was like the tried-and-tested method of ordering the second-to-cheapest wine on the menu. For Golden Package II we paid $193 and got:

- Two photo sessions in the studio

- One outdoor photo session at one of Hanoi's second-most-romantic locations

- Three dresses

- Two suits

- Two hair-dos

- Make-up

- One 25 x 25 photo album with 45 photos

- Two huge block-mounted prints

- 2 DVD slideshows of all our photos set to the accompaniment of Westlife's second-most-romantic songs

- The journey of a lifetime.

The journey of a lifetime started at 8:30am on a Saturday, with our long-suffering friend Huong (who took almost all of these photos), and about three bazillion other couples:

While waiting to begin our transformation from Normal People into Bride and Groom, we practiced some of the romantic poses we'd seen in the sample photo albums, like Fingers of Love:

And The Sniff, where you appear to lovingly smell your odorous partner:

Looking at that photo, you might think we needed more work than Golden Package II could provide. How could we ever compete with this, for example:

Aww! Maybe they were one of the couples who, judging by this schedule, had arrived at five o'clock in the morning:

The next stage of the journey for me - and three bazillion other brides - was make-up:

This guy was an absolute artiste. He didn't even charge extra for the foundation required to spack-fill my schnoz which is approximately twenty-eight times the size of a Vietnamese nose:

Next step, the dress:

Continuing the alcohol-shopping theme, I decided to run with the same method I employ when choosing cocktails: value for money. I was looking for the Long Island iced tea of wedding dresses, and I found it:

It had a three-metre train. Hells yeah:

Nathan then found the perfect suit to match:

Next step, hair (but sadly, not for Nathan):

These women were scarily good at their job. They were turning out approximately one perfectly-coiffed bride per seven minutes:

Hands came out of nowhere to sprinkle me with accessories and then, I was ready to cross the most important threshold of my life. I was ready to be spat out of the Bride Factory as...

A Bride:

For our "on location" shoot we chose the Metropole, which was excellent value as it included the little park next to the hotel and Hoan Kiem Lake nearby.

Something told me that we weren't the only couple to have made this decision:

There was actually a poor beleaguered security guard stationed near the hotel's entrance, trying to shoo the brides away like pigeons:

That couple sitting at the hotel's cafe there had obviously paid extra for the privilege. Maybe that came with Golden Package III.

It turns out that a white dress with a three-metre train isn't a very practical fashion choice for Hanoi. As we moved from photo-op to photo-op, my dress dragged along the ground, collecting more and more of Hanoi with it along the way. At one point it had accumulated - along with a not inconsiderable amount of dirt - an old lottery ticket, some chicken feathers and the plastic wrapper from a straw. I half expected to turn around and see I was dragging along a family having hotpot.

The state of the dress wasn't helped by the fact the photographer's assistant actually submerged it in the fountain to hold it in place for the first photo:

And then he and Nathan trampled all over it, like I was some kind of human picnic blanket:

Now, what's that you can see there? Is that maybe Nathan wearing the sexiest shoes you have ever seen? Only five sizes too small? Let's have a closer look:

Get me to the conjugal bed immediately!

With shoes like that, we were obviously going to attract a bit of attention:

This poor old guy was just sitting by the lake, eating his sandwich, when we turned up:

Nathan and I, and Sandwich Guy, are in there somewhere:

The strain of being beautiful and famous was taking its toll, so we paused for a break at this point. Just like they say on Next Top Model, modeling is really hard, you know?

Here are some of the fruits of our labours from this part of the day:

I'll have you know that some Vietnamese friends who saw these photos said I looked "very Korean", which, you'll recall, is the highest compliment a bride could receive.

After our break came our first costume change. Right there. Beside the lake. A special lady from the wedding shop turned up to Make This Happen, and even though I was one of those girls in high school who could get changed for PE without revealing any part of my body, she took this skill to a whole new level:

And then, job done, she vanished, presumably to assist another bride in a state of undress elsewhere. Let me tell you, if you need to put a bra on without removing your clothes, this woman is your man.

Our next look was traditional Vietnamese bride and groom, the outfits for which we had tailor-made for the wedding:

The onlookers went mental for it, with Vietnamese teenage girls literally queuing up to shove me aside and have their photo taken with Nathan. Who can blame them? It's quite rare to see a guy - even a Vietnamese guy - in the man version of the ao dai these days, whereas I just looked like the Vietnamese Airlines cardboard cut-out lady who lurks around travel agents and airports all over Vietnam:

At one point a young Vietnamese man came up to us and said "Wow! You look... you look... I don't know what to say!" which completely sums up the whole experience of being a Tay in an ao dai. People love it in the way that they love seeing a monkey wearing a waistcoat and little pants.

See that photo there where I'm holding my ear? This was a pose which was requested by the photographer repeatedly:

I reckon The Ear Tug is the new Heart of Fingers. You read it here first.

With our outdoor shoot finished, we headed back to the wedding shop for the studio photos. This meant another costume change, but disappointingly in a change-room this time. For my studio photo outfits I decided to focus on this part of the wedding shop:

Which led me, naturally, to this:

I swear I had a Barbie with an almost identical dress. And as Barbie has long hair, so must I:

The studio has a number of backdrops and romantically-themed props:

Our first set-up was a classic school formal backdrop with a touch of flora and fauna:

You know why I'm smiling like that? Because that's how someone wearing a tiny little crown smiles. Fact.

And then, having nailed the Ice Skating Beauty Queen Barbie look, we moved right on to the next transformation, which meant another visit to the change room:

One of my concerns before doing these photos was that the shop wouldn't have any dresses that fit a Tay-sized bride. Thankfully almost all of the dresses lace up at the back so you can simply force your back-fat inside. And surprisingly, these dresses are actually really large. Much too large for most of the Vietnamese brides, who are wearing them with folds of fabric pinned and sewn to hold them into place. They also accommodate an enormous bust - much larger than mine, and certainly much larger than the average Vietnamese boobies - which explains the piles of these seen throughout the shop:

There's also a lot of smoke-and-mirrors going on with the hair-dos. This is the front of my third hairstyle, which I like to call The Southern Belle:

And this is the back, which I like to call The Rat King:

But what does that matter when you've got a set like this:

For this shoot we had a different photographer to the one who did our outdoor photos, yet he asked us to do an almost identical pose to this one, where we pretend look at the amazing photos Nathan has pretended to take:

Except it makes less sense when the camera you're pretending to look at is a pretend old-fashioned movie camera:

We pretended we had been sent back in time to share knowledge of the digital age.

Probably because we were such good actors, we got an extra few shots with a new, uber-romantical backdrop:

For our final photo of the day, we gave it everything we've got, and sniffed like our lives depended on it:

My, how far we'd come:

In only... 8.5 hours.

And while we were now ready to leave the Bride Factory, the work was far from done. Scores of youths would spend hours Photoshopping us to perfection:

Bleaching our skin porcelain white, copying the gaps between our teeth to make them all perfectly symmetrical, and even going so far as to make our irises completely identical. The photos you've seen here are all the pre-Photoshop versions, as we only have the finished products in our album and on our DVD slideshow, so you'll just have trust me on this one.

Then the photos are all laid out in the album. It is a masterpiece in itself, featuring some pretty choice romantic quotes:

This page is my favourite:

Is it by accident or design that it says "Tay In Love" instead of "Stay in Love"? We'll never know, so let's just assume it was custom-made for us Tays.

And what led the designer to print on this page - very faintly in the middle there - the lyrics to the song "Baby I Love You" by J. Lo, featuring that King of Romance himself, R. Kelly:

The lyrics in question read as follows:

Blessed and cursed on the same day
The day that I first felt the power of you inside of me
Such a strong feeling
There comes a time in everyone's life
When you know that everyone around you knows
That everything has changed, you're not the same.

Hmmm.

Finally, you pick up your block-mounted prints and voila, you're all set for your wedding day:

But more on that later.

If you live in Vietnam, I strongly recommend taking this Journey of a Lifetime. It is guaranteed to be the most fun you can have for $193. I so much prefer these photos to the western style of wedding photos, which are super staged and super generic, but trying to pretend they're not. Vietnamese wedding photos are super staged and super generic and totally owning it. And sure, the style is sometimes camp, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to act out your fairytale fantasies. Are you going to go low-key with that? Hell, no!

The no-nonsense way in which everything was carried out made a mockery of the pseudo-specialness with which the western wedding industry imbues all wedding-related matters, just so they can charge you more. When I call it a Bride Factory, it's not meant to be denigrating, quite the opposite: the whole process hums along like a beautifully-oiled machine, and everyone involved is a total pro. You know when we were given the photos back? The next day. Amazing.

You don't have to be getting married, or even be in a relationship, to do a photo shoot as there are plenty of non-wedding dresses, and a bunch of girls would probably have more fun than with guys anyway. The guys get pretty gypped actually, with fewer costume changes and none of the hair and make-up fun. Instead, they spend a lot of time doing this:

But you'll definitely need to have a long-suffering Vietnamese-speaker with you for the whole day, to whom, after 8.5 hours of "Look at the camera. Look at the flowers. Look at each other. Hold your ear", you will be eternally indebted:

Along with three bazillion other brides, we used the services of Moza at 212 Ba Trieu.

Happy sniffing and snapping!

Ode to a Hanoi Autumn

2011-11-21T14:52:00.001+07:00

I recently did a morning’s work of interviewing a large number of locals to test their general English skills. One of the questions I asked was why they prefer Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (as Hanoians, it is out of the question that they would actually prefer the other place). Their initial response was immediate and universal: because Hanoi has four seasons, and Saigon only has two.

This might sound like the kind of arbitrary answer you give to the kind of meaningless question you get asked in language tests, but it’s actually a really pervasive, definitive aspect of living in Hanoi. In contrast to Saigon, where it’s always hot, but sometimes wet and hot, and sometimes dry and hot, Hanoi has four completely different dispositions that transform both the city and its inhabitants.

The Summer is unbearably hot and unproductive, the Winter is unbearably cold and grumpy, but they’re both worth it for the Spring, and even more so, the Autumn. Oh, the Autumn!

For this brief window, you can open your windows. The air temporarily stops dripping with humidity, the nights are cool, the mornings are mysteriously misty, and the afternoons are breezy and golden with blue, blue, blue skies. It’s enough to make the most jaded Hanoian use adjectives that are usually only the domain of travel-guide writers - otherworldly, romantic, charming – without any irony.

Unlike in Saigon, where they have so much fine weather they don’t know what to do with it, Hanoians ensure they make the figurative hay. This weekend our neighbourhood was swarming with families enjoying lakeside hot-pot and teenagers on swan boats enjoying an autumnal pedal-pash.

Everyone seems chipper. The weather is the first topic of conversation, as we try to consciously revel in every moment of it, and applaud our good judgment in making such a town our home. Tomorrow we might be in fur-trimmed puffy parkas, still mouldy from last year, but right now, the only thing dividing Hanoi from heaven is all that blue sky.

Post-script: Naturally, as soon as I posted this, the weather turned grey.

Vietnam hearts Korea

2011-11-11T15:37:00.003+07:00

A friend of ours met his girlfriend on a plane. To me this is, first and foremost, astonishing. Who is in any fit state to woo during air travel? Not me. I have to focus all my attention on an unwavering vigilance against any unusual sounds or other indications that we’re about to find ourselves in an episode of Air Crash Investigation.

So when I heard him tell the story of finding love in the window seat, all I could think of was “BRACE! BRACE! BRACE!” But a Vietnamese girl also listening intently to the tale replied breathlessly, “That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard! It’s just like a Korean movie!!!”

To the Vietnamese, Korea represents the highest possible pinnacle of romance. For this reason there is a secluded street near West Lake in Hanoi which is known as “Korea Street”. Of an evening young lovers go there on their motorbikes to pash under the stars, gaze out across the water, and paint romantic messages on the road:

Do they paint messages of love and devotion on roads in Korea? I don’t know. But it seems like the kind of romantic thing that Koreans would be all in favour of.

In Vietnam, as in many other Korea-loving countries throughout Asia, Korean stars dominate the cinema, the airwaves and the tabletops:

Which is much better than the possible alternatives:

Vietnamese television seems to consist almost entirely of Korean soap operas, dubbed using a single, emotionless female voice-over for all the characters. It doesn’t matter that she’s emotionless because there’s more than enough overwrought drama onscreen to make up for it.

According to The Economist, the rags-to-riches storylines of these dramas are “able to speak directly to audiences who have lived the Asian economic boom of the past two decades. Popular characters often abandon monotonous middle-class jobs to seek fame, or a “dream job”—perhaps suggesting that many Asians feel dissatisfied with their careers, despite the prosperity that has come with growth.”

Whatevs. It’s clearly all about the hair:

The Vietnamese news media is always concerned about what crazy hijinks the youth are up to lately, so naturally, they’re concerned about Korea. According to Dân Trí, a newspaper with really amazing columnists:

“Girls and boys try their best to reproduce love scenes they've seen in Korean movies. This influence has penetrated so deep into the national psyche that it has influenced the sacred Vietnamese wedding. Young couples now often opt to take their wedding photos dressed in Korean fashion. Korean restaurants in Hanoi, such as Sochu, Cook and Cook and Han Kanh offer young people a chance to pretend not to be Vietnamese for an hour or two. Although the "Korean Wave" may be immensely popular and satisfying for the youth, this cultural invasion, if it continues to grow, could pose a threat to Vietnamese identity.”

Vietnamese singers apparently pretending not to be Vietnamese by impersonating K-Pop stars. Because Vietnamese pop stars would never – I repeat, never – wear berets and shiny white leggings.

While Korea is busy exporting its hair-dos to Vietnam, Vietnam is busy exporting its brides to Korea. Before I moved here, it didn’t occur to me that the biggest market for Asian mail-order brides would actually be other Asians, but so it is, apparently “because fewer women in their homelands are willing to wed and take on a traditional role”.

Marriage brokers send more Vietnamese women to South Korea than to any other country. And what happens to these lucky brides who get to go to the most romantic country in the whole wide world? Well, apart from getting stabbed, beaten, imprisoned, enslaved, discriminated against, sexually assaulted, or matched with mentally ill, poor, violent, or alcoholic husbands, they’re no doubt living the rags-to-riches tales as played out on the Korean soapies.

Not to be outdone by its mortal southern enemy, North Korea has wowed Vietnam with an export of its own, in the form of Hanoi’s Pyongyang Restaurant:

The restaurant is part of a North Korean chain found in China and a few southeast Asian countries, and reportedly controlled by Bureau 39, the "money making" (and money-laundering) arm of the Korean Workers' Party. These restaurants are apparently forced to make annual payments of between $10,000 and $30,000 back to the DPRK government, “but if there's even a small default or lack of results, then the threat of evacuation is given.”

This would explain why the waitresses at Pyongyang Hanoi are extremely keen to upsell you to larger and more expensive dishes. Actually, “upsell” doesn’t really cover it. It’s more like an offer you can't refuse:

Customer: I would like this dish here please.
Waitress: No, you will have this other larger and more expensive dish.

Umm, but I don’t want that much kim chi.

The waitresses are apparently specially chosen by the North Korean regime for this privilege of working overseas, and are strictly screened beforehand for their patriotism and loyalty, to prevent defection. It’s hard to dine at Pyongyang without feeling anxious about the lives of the staff, and what happens to your money after you’ve paid for your super-sized plate of kim chi. You yearn for the soothing tones of some guilt-free South Korean K-Pop to assuage your conscience.

And because the North Korean government can read your mind (and probably this blog: Hello! Or should I say: 안녕! ), at that very moment the waitresses put away their pads and pens and this happens:

Then the song finishes, and they go back to upselling to save their lives.

How to appreciate Vietnam... while you're still here

2011-11-02T10:11:00.000+07:00

This post first appeared as a column in AsiaLIFE Ho Chi Minh City magazine.

When I arrived in Vietnam, filled with notions of my imminent cultural assimilation and fluency in the native tongue, I looked at most expats who had been here for a while with outright disdain. Why had they moved to Vietnam, I wondered, to socialize only with other foreigners and eat pizza?

I am now that expat. I’m probably eating pizza right now. And it tastes like mozzarella and self-loathing.

While I have all kinds of excellent, convincing excuses for why I’ve become the exact stereotype that I so scorned, if I could have my time again, I’d do it differently. For example, rather than just learning the Vietnamese expression for “I am studying Vietnamese”, I would actually, you know, study Vietnamese.

It’s not that I think my life here is in any way deficient. It’s more that when I meet newly-arrived expats now, I can’t stand being on the other end of those disdainful looks. “You’re looking at your future, Sonny Jim”, I say. And then I take a swig of whiskey to hide the pain.

I have noticed another kind of expat regret too. It’s the one where the expat leaves Vietnam and then posts Facebook status updates from their home country like “Wish I was drinking a cà phê sữa đá right now!!!” or “Missing my motorbike ride to work!!! :(” Exclamation marks are compulsory; sad face emoticons are optional.

That’s odd, I think to myself. I seem to recall that very same expat, when they were still in Vietnam, whinging about how they couldn’t get a decent coffee in this country, and how their motorbike commute was a daily near-death experience.

And so like the circle of life, and the turning seasons, and karma, and the cosmos, and that Justin Timberlake song “What Goes Around Comes Around”, I, the disdained, get to disdain again. Read my contemptuous lips: I will not become one of those rose-coloured regretters who use too many exclamation marks!!!

I’m not going to achieve this by being down on Vietnam. This column might make me sound mean spirited, but I’m not that mean spirited.

Instead, I decided to email everyone I know who had left the country and ask them, from the perspective afforded by being back in their homeland, what they now missed about Vietnam. I figured this was a way of averting the you-don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-til-it’s-gone syndrome and ensuring I appreciate the best things about Vietnam, while I’m actually still here.

The results are now in from my extremely scientific poll. And the number one most missed thing about Vietnam is the energy: the non-stop action, the excitement, the busy streets.

My first response to this was “Pffffft! Won’t catch me missing what you’ve charmingly described as energy but which we all know means a chaotic, frazzling free-for-all.” Because I guess I am quite mean spirited.

But this is the exactly the point. In a case of the grass always being greener, when you’re in Vietnam you pine for footpaths you can actually walk on, an empty park to run through, and just some peace and quiet godammit. When you return home and get free access to all those things, it’s actually quite boring. The bustle of Vietnam, the unpredictability, the chaos, it all provides constant stimulation and invigoration. And you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

So now when I’m stuck in traffic, wedged between a bicycle vendor selling bánh rán and a motorbike laden with road-tripping chickens, the sun’s blazing down, and I just want to get home, I try to think to myself, at least it’s not boring. It might be frazzling, but at least it’s dazzling. That’s my new motto.

And the other responses to my survey? What else should I be better appreciating? Well, the spontaneity of social life, the lack of responsibilities and societal expectations, and the bountiful free time; the affordability of going out, the luxury of a housekeeper and the cheap travel opportunities; the storms, the fruit, the geckos, the colour, the flowers, the street food, the markets, and the trà đá.

When you look at it, you actually experience most items on this list in just your average, run-of-the-mill day here. This can mean only one thing: you should appreciate every single day in this country while you still can.

Topsy-Turvy World

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000+07:00

In the middle of Summer, when I’m cycling down the road wearing a singlet top, skirt and thongs, and am surrounded by motorcyclists wearing hooded jackets that make them look like Kenny from South Park, long pants, and skin-coloured toe-socks, I do wonder who looks the more foolish (answer: them for now, but me, later, when I’m wrinkled and cancerous).

I wondered a similar thing when we were in Cat Tien National Park and found ourselves caught in a spectacular tropical thunderstorm. We Tays ran from the cracking lightning and crashing branches in fear for our lives. We huddled together under a shelter, from where we could enjoy the sight of local people wandering around, or cycling past, as if nothing much was happening.

Welcome to Topsy-Turvy World, where the sun is scarier than lightning (actually, I suppose the sun does kill more people than lightning after all).

Living in Vietnam certainly challenges your idea of universal truths. In fact, it’s a postmodernist’s paradise. If it were still the 1990s, and I was still enrolled in CUL100: Introduction to Cultural Studies, I could write a paper on it, and get a guaranteed High Distinction.

For example, do you think you’ve got a pretty clear grasp of how to row a boat? Well, you don’t:

This photo was taken in Tam Coc. The serenity of the boat trip was somewhat marred by floating vendors constantly approaching our boat to spruik their wares, and this traditional boat captain of ours shouting to them in Vietnamese "Don't bother, they live in Hanoi", and the vendors then rowing away, dejected.

Not only is it common here to row with your feet (to free up your hands for texting, obviously), they actually move the oars backwards, pushing them through the water rather than pulling them. Why? Well, why not, I suppose. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, which, in Vietnam, is a saying which probably makes more sense.

More discombobulation comes in the form of fruits. In Vietnam it's common to eat many fruits in what we would call their unripe state. Sure, we all know about green mango and green papaya salad, but munching down on a crunchy green peach or a rock-hard guava?

Not ripe! Don't eat it!

Just watching someone do it makes my mouth scrunch up like a cat’s bottom. There are plenty of Vietnamese tastes that are “acquired” to say the least, so that’s not the befuddling thing. It’s this: I was always led to believe that eating unripe fruit would give you a tummy ache. I’d go as far as saying this is a piece of received wisdom where I come from. But guess what? It doesn’t. It doesn’t at all! We have been fed lies by our mothers! Vietnamese people aren’t keeling over in the streets from unripe fruit! And they eat green bananas! With the skin on.

Want your mind blown even further:

Their oranges are green. And yet, like our oranges, they’re still called “orange” (“cam” in Vietnamese), like the colour (“cam”). The inside colour. And so I ask: are our oranges called "oranges" because of how they look on the inside or outside? I know. Really makes you think, huh?

There’s also the topsy-turviness of flowers, which I’ve mentioned before. In Vietnam, gerberas and carnations are some of the most expensive, highly valued flowers you can buy, while roses are common as muck. To me, a gerbera is an irrefutably butt-ugly piece of flora. If Nathan gave me a bunch of gerberas, I would assume only one thing: that I was in fact looking at Nathan’s long-lost identical twin, who had been reared in Vietnam. There would be no other explanation, as the Real Nathan knows better than to give any girl gerberas. I’m trying to open my mind to carnations, as now I’ve seen them liberated from their usual petrol-station surroundings, they’re actually perfectly nice:

Carnations: Victims of the Western construct of beauty.

And then we have footwear. Everyone knows that in Asia you don’t wear shoes in the house; instead you go barefoot or wear house slippers.

These are Nathan's house slippers. He loves them. I think they make him look like a creepy sexpat.

When it comes to most workplaces, this rule doesn’t apply, and you can wear your outside shoes around the office. With an exception: you are a woman sporting uncomfortable high-heels, in which case you don the heels for your motorbike ride to work, leave them under your desk when you get there, and then scuff about the office in stockinged feet and plastic slippers all day. Anyone who has watched Melanie Griffith in Working Girl knows that this is the exact opposite of what happens in the West, where women wear ugly, comfortable shoes to commute to work, and change into their sexy, career-advancing heels once they arrive at the office. All this has done is confirm for me that wearing high-heels is a mug’s game, in anyone’s language.

Lastly I present Vinawind, which is not only what you get after eating too much bun cha, it’s the name of our ceiling fan:

Looks perfectly innocent, right? No! Vinawind will mess with your mind. See the numbers on that dial? They don’t mean what you think. If you’re looking for just a gentle, fluttering Vinawind, do not trust your instincts and select “1”, the lowest number. Number 1 on the dial in fact results in a tornado of Vinawind howling through your apartment and rattling your poorly-sealed windows. Number 5, the highest number, is actually the lowest setting. I can’t tell you the number of times I have stood before that Vinawind dial and coached myself: “Right, Tabitha, you should go with the opposite of what you think it is. So if you think it’s 1, then choose… Hang on, do I think it’s 1? Would it be 1 in Australia? Do I really exist? Is Vinawind even real? What is real?” etc.

In summary, if you’d like to feel like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, then you should move to Vietnam.

How I became Vietnam’s most hated columnist

2011-10-22T15:39:00.000+07:00

One of the best things about writing this blog is getting comments and emails from Vietnamese people saying that my foreigner’s perspective has helped them appreciate their own country in a new light, or pay more attention to everyday Hanoi things, previously passed unnoticed due to over-familiarity.

I know absolutely bugger all about Vietnam really, and exist here in an isolated expat bubble. I have zero expertise when it comes to this country’s history or culture, and no credentials to write about Vietnamese society. All I have to offer is my point of view: what Hanoi looks like and feels like to a complete outsider.

That this has any resonance with Vietnamese people is a great - and surprising - honour.

Also surprising and honouring is that this blog has spawned some amazing writing opportunities for me, including being invited to write regularly for Dân Trí’s online blog. Dân Trí is one of the country’s largest news sites (in fact, they say it’s the most popular of all), with 70 million hits a week. SEVENTY MILLION. That is 69,999,300 more readers than this blog gets, for example.

My posts are written and published in the English edition, but they’re targeted at the paper’s primary readership - Vietnamese people obviously - who read the translated versions. This has meant that for the first time, my writing is being read by Vietnamese people who might not be able to read English.

And do they find my light-hearted perspective on their homeland to be fresh and endearing? No. In fact, they cannot stand me.

My first column was about my personal experiences as a Western vegetarian in Vietnam. It was a toned-down version of the blog post which I later published here. To me, this was an inoffensive subject which, from my experience, many Vietnamese people seemed interested in.

It generated 166 comments. Thanks to Google Translate, I was able to spend an entire dismal day reading all 166 comments as they came in. The first was:

Do not make such an objective opinion. I was really upset when I read your post because you really do not know about Vietnam.

Ouch. The next was along the lines of:

You should try to wade into fields such as agriculture every morning. I think you will understand what is POVERTY.

And on it went:

You live in Hanoi two years but true that you understand nothing of VIETNAM!

Obviously you do not know anything about Vietnam at all.

We hope that the next time you want to write about a certain topic, please do your homework on the subject and then write!

After about 112 comments along those lines, and some complicated arguments about whether or not vegetarians eat eggs, the comments did start to become more positive and supportive of the ignorant foreigner behind the article. I also received many emails like the following:

I think you understand Vietnamese because you are foreigner, you see Vietnamese is different from you and the rest of the world, but most of Vietnamese who don't agree with you, they only compare themself with other Vietnamese. Then they cannot stand when somebody told them that they are not good or something like that.

Nathan asked whether I was positioning myself as Vietnam’s Miranda Devine. It appeared that I was.

Worried that we might receive a Molotov cocktail through our bedroom window, I intentionally tried to win over the crowd with the next column. It was an ingratiating, innocuous ode to cycling in Hanoi. It was pretty boring, but it did seem to salvage my reputation. There were 50 comments, universally in agreement.

But I was still het up about the negative comments (maybe this is how Miranda Devine turned evil: it all started with one perfectly innocent, light-hearted column…). I didn’t care that people disagreed with my opinion (happens all the time), it was the constant references to my failure to “understand” Vietnam that really got to me.

You see, not understanding Vietnam is the whole point of me writing for the newspaper. It's supposed to be an opinion piece from a foreign perspective.

My goat well and truly having been got, my next column was, naturally, about exactly this. It featured narky nuggets like the following:

"I am a foreigner, so I won’t ever understand Vietnam like a Vietnamese person, but does that immediately invalidate any contribution I might make? If I do things differently or interpret situations differently to a Vietnamese person, does that make me ignorant, or foolish, or wrong, or simply different? And isn’t it at least interesting to hear a different perspective, even if you don’t agree with it?"

I emailed it off to the editor with the obviously humorous aside that it should probably be headlined “Ms Tabitha gets all passive-aggressive”.

Turns out you shouldn’t joke about things like that:

It garnered 62 comments, and in a clear piece of evidence that passive-aggressiveness actually works, they were almost entirely sympathetic:

Do not be sad, continue writing for people like us to have the opportunity to learn from you slightly. We become more wise than by learning from our differences rather than to eliminate it.

There are still people like me here to support you. Hope to read your next post. Always wish you well and find more fun in those days lived in VN.

You've opened a very exciting discussion but the topic is quite sensitive, it's a difference about the culture. Remember that some conservative people they believe that something is a truth, it cannot be changed and they won't accept the opposite ideas.

Not only loving your essay, I have to admit that after reading your essays I slapped my lag and said she was so true, I did not realize this before… Overall, I think you essay is too direct, that sounds like this essay want to teach people something. In my mind, most of Vietnamese people do not like this. So I anticipate this essay will receive a lot of negative feedback. Please go out more, discover my country more and then write more for us.

Unfortunately, Tabitha having too many ideas a bit "feisty."

A good portion of the comments were still directly referring to the fateful post on vegetarianism, a subject which seems doomed to haunt me for the rest of my time in the country.

And what since then? Well, the last column, about everyday practices in Vietnam that seem “mysterious” to me (in the same vein as this blog post) got 98 comments. They were mostly really interesting and insightful, even the devastatingly negative ones. And while I still get dispiriting comments about the invalidity of my opinions or my lack of understanding about Vietnam, there’s always a silver lining, or should I say, lightning:

Dear Tabitha. I've read some of your posts. And I feel as though you do not know much about Viet Nam, as well as the Vietnamese people. But I also thank you for the receipt of your personal lightning.

The whole experience of writing for a readership of tens of millions is one of the greatest capital-o Opportunities that’s ever come my way. Not just because I get to be Ms Tabitha, newspaper columnist, but because it allows me to interact with a whole swathe of the population who are usually shut off from me, due to my inadequacies in the Vietnamese language. If anyone can help me try to understand Vietnam, it's them.

And you know how I can always tell when one of my columns has been published? Because I immediately get inundated with Facebook friend requests from total strangers, and my inbox starts filling with emails like this:

Thanks to you because of things you have shared with Vietnamese people, I think you have a heart of gold, if not, you just smile at us and say nothing. For everyone over the world, think about opinions of foreigners, and views our own culture in many different ways always be nice to live, to come closer to each other. I love this way.

Hope to see you soon in Hanoi!

Suck on that, Miranda Devine.

Why you should move to Vietnam

2011-10-16T11:06:00.000+07:00

Two years ago today I stepped off a plane at Hanoi’s luxurious Noi Bai International Airport. It will be two years tomorrow for Nathan, because AusAID payed for my Cathay Pacific flight and Nathan paid for his own China Certain Death Airlines flight that featured a 12-hour layover in Taipei. He was quite literally a trailing spouse.

I remember leaving a note in our hotel room for him for when he arrived. It said, “I think we’re going to be happy here!”

Vietnam has a coastline of 3,444 kilometres. And it's all hedge.

Nathan and I had never been to Vietnam when we made the decision to move here. We have talked often about what a strange mindset we must have been in at the time to make such an ill-informed and reckless decision.

I honestly don’t know what we were thinking. We had jobs, and prospects, a great apartment, amazing friends living in the neighbourhood… We certainly weren’t running from anything, which seems to be an impetus for many expats, who might be avoiding anything from the aftermath of a bad relationship to high unemployment rates. All I remember is that our friend Sophie told us about the AYAD programme, where you could volunteer overseas for a year, but you had to be under 30 to apply. At the time, I was 29 years and ten months old.

This is the first photograph I ever took in Vietnam. Wow! Look how many motorbikes are parked here! Stone the crows! Etc! It’s been a while since I thought the sight of ten motorbikes in a row was photo-worthy.

We have also often talked about how if we had visited Hanoi as tourists there is no way in hell we would have moved here. The city doesn’t show its best side to visitors, and I’m almost positive we would have formed the same opinion as all of our overseas guests: it’s a fun place to visit, but a bit too full-on for us. After our guests say this, they usually get their foot run over by a motorbike and that pretty much seals the deal for them.

But if you are considering moving to Hanoi and you are, unlike me, the kind of person who actually does background research before making a life-changing decision, then I offer you this advice: come.

I took this photo on the same day. This is, in fact, how our water gets delivered to us every week.

If we had spent the past two years in Sydney, our lives would have been splendid. I know this because our friends continue to have extremely good fun without us and then tell us all about it, which is insensitive of them, isn’t it? I can imagine the alternative past two years we could have had in Sydney all too easily: the grass underneath our toes, and the ink of Saturday papers on our elbows.

There was a low point some time in the last two years where Nathan and I wondered why we had willingly swapped financial security, good health, green spaces, and our loved ones, for an income below the Australian poverty level, intestinal worms, exhaust fumes, and only a bunch of relative strangers for company. When we laid it out like that, of course Sydney was always going to come up trumps. And so it should! It’s our home after all.

But the good thing about having a home is that it will always be there, almost always as you left it. While I really do look forward to the day we go back, and think about it often, there is something really invigorating about being away from it.

Our life in Hanoi’s got something that Sydney just can’t touch: every day is an adventure. Every day is unpredictable. Every day is bewildering, frustrating, exciting, horrifying, confusing and dazzling. Everything you think you know is challenged. Opportunities – and setbacks - appear out of nowhere. You find yourself behaving in a way you don’t understand. What’s important to you suddenly becomes extremely clear, even if by its absence.

Some everyday sights are still worth photographing: I'll never get used to the flowers. I took this picture on our street last week.

On my first night in Hanoi, I walked around Hoan Kiem Lake with the other volunteers. I remember thinking, “Hmm, so this is supposed to be the ‘peaceful, tranquil, jewel of Hanoi’ is it?” and yet seeing only touts with photocopied Lonely Planets and hearing only honking.

My first impression of the lake was correct. It isn’t ipso facto tranquil; it is fluorescent with pollution; and it is, let’s face it, a traffic roundabout. But I’ve luxuriated in the shade of those lakeside trees in summer, I’ve jogged along its paths in winter, I’ve cheered with the Hanoians as the giant turtle surfaced, and during the Tet fireworks display there, I’ve witnessed the memorable sight of backlit rat silhouettes running startled from the trees into the crowd. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for the world.

So happy Hanoiversary to us! It’s been an adventure. And we’ve learnt that actually it doesn’t hurt that much to get your foot run over.

My slapdash people

2011-10-07T08:02:00.000+07:00

This post first appeared as a column in AsiaLIFE Ho Chi Minh City magazine.

I am a naturally slapdash person. I believe if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing quickly and with as little effort as possible.

I apply my “that’ll do” philosophy to all areas of life, including cooking (“Sift the flour? Sounds like a waste of time to me!”), home cleanliness (“The vacuum cleaner sucks up dust and pushes things under the bed!”), and personal grooming (“So long as I don’t raise my arms, there’s no need to shave my armpits!”).

When I arrived in Vietnam I immediately recognised it as my spiritual home, populated with like-minded souls who truly were my people: my slapdash people. Because if there’s one thing the Vietnamese love to cut, it’s corners.

My delight soon turned to concern, however, when I realised that some problems do seem to arise if you have an entire nation of people who are just like me. It’s all very well for me to take a laissez-faire approach to life, because I don’t actually do anything important, but I can assure you that you don’t want me to build any load-bearing structures for you.

Vietnam is where the slapdash chickens have come home to roost. And that chicken house is a little bit shoddy. Like, maybe the door doesn’t quite close properly and the chickens get an electric shock whenever they turn on the light.

But this isn’t a column about Vietnam’s iffy wiring and laidback approach to pernickety details like construction standards. It’s not about living in a country where your landlord sends you a text message when you’re having a house party to warn you against your guests all dancing at the same time because it will cause your building to collapse. Would I besmirch the good name of my slapdash brethren at the first sign of my house collapsing? No!

This is a column about Vietnamese negligenius: that fine line between negligence and genius. And I think you know I’m going to err on the side of genius.

For example, our upstairs neighbour asked the aforementioned landlord to replace her mouldy, disintegrating shower curtain one day while she was out. When she came home, she found a brand spanking new shower curtain hanging up. Unfortunately this one was a good 20 centimetres too short to actually curtain the shower.

She mentioned this small, but fairly important, problem to the landlord and the next day she came home to find… what do you think? No, not a new, longer shower curtain, nor a strip of plastic stapled onto the bottom of the old one (this is what I, in all my slapdash glory would have done).

Instead, the shower rail had been wrenched out of its fittings, and, using a number of probably inappropriate tools, reaffixed into some holes that had been whacked into the tiles 20 centimetres lower down the wall.

Sure, her bathroom now looked like a construction site, but she had a functional shower. That, my friends, is negligenius.

The same landlord, who has now been mentioned so many times that he is basically the star of this column, also once tended to a problem we were having with the light in our bedroom.

He stood on a chair, which he put on top of a desk, played around with the light for a while (with the power on, obviously), declared it broken and then removed the entire fitting, holus bolus, from the ceiling.

I noted to him that when we lay in bed, we would now be gazing up at a gaping hole into our no doubt rat-infested roof. So he reached down to the desk - conveniently located under the chair he was standing on - picked up a document I had printed out for work and then slipped it inside the ceiling so that it lay flat against the hole.

Voila, negligenius: light problem fixed, hole problem totally fixed. Plus the rats now have some bedtime reading material if they want it.

And so Vietnam, I salute you. Your slogan should be “Vietnam: Experience the negligenius” and your logo should be that guy I once saw - negligenius incarnate - who had fashioned himself a motorbike helmet out of a polystyrene box. I realise now that you’re not my slapdash people at all: you are my masters, and I have much to learn.

Being a vegetarian in Vietnam

2011-09-30T17:50:00.000+07:00

A version of this post was first published in Dan Tri International.

The first time I ate meat after having been vegetarian for over ten years was at the Vietnamese Embassy in Canberra when we volunteers were taken there for a visit before being sent to Hanoi.

We had just eaten an enormous lunch, and the afternoon embassy visit was supposed to be a courtesy call, where we’d shake hands with the Ambassador and maybe drink some tea. Instead we were led to a large dining table in a room dominated by a display of the embassy’s ping pong trophies, where a many, many course meal was immediately laid on us by His Excellency’s private chef.

As I chowed down on those pork spring rolls and beef pho, I remember thinking to myself “Hmm, I wonder if this might be a taste of my Vietnam experience to come”.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA HA HA HA. HA.

It was.

Not suitable for vegetarians.

While it might be easy to be vegetarian at a Vietnamese restaurant in Australia, it is not easy being vegetarian in Vietnam. Most guidebooks to Vietnam make reference to the country’s “great tradition of vegetarianism”, and well may that be the case, but if you’re a vegetarian, and you’re coming to Vietnam, you will experience the great tradition of eating omelette and morning glory for dinner.

I have met one Vietnamese vegetarian. She was dining at the table next to us at a vegetarian restaurant. You might assume that most diners at a vegetarian restaurant would be vegetarians, but you know what they say about assumptions (that’s right, that assumptions actually contain pork). The “great tradition of vegetarianism” for most people in Vietnam is to abstain from real meat in favour of glutinous fake meat on only two days of each lunar month. They’re part-time vegetarians.

These are some of the appetizing take-home items you can pick up from a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant.

Vietnamese people are firm believers in the strength-giving qualities of meat. Having spent most of my life answering the question “Why are you vegetarian?” I was surprised to find that it’s not the first question on the meat-chomping lips of the Vietnamese. Instead, since arriving here, the question has been “Aren’t you hungry?” Then there is a one-beat pause as they size me up. And then the inevitable follow-up question: “But how can you be vegetarian and be so fat?”

Even the beer is fake at the Buddhist-run restaurants. A can of 0.0% Bavaria goes nicely with your vegan gizzards.

In Vietnam, meat is the source of most of the population’s nutritional needs. So, the thinking goes, if you take out the meat then… what? A friend told us the story of a six-foot-something, strapping, English, vegetarian man who was repeatedly told by his Vietnamese colleagues that it was dangerous for him to ride his motorbike. Not because he was liable to get run over by a bus, no. But because, being vegetarian, he would be so enfeebled and malnourished that he could topple right over at any time. They probably kept a wide berth from him in the office too, just in case he keeled over and trapped them against the photocopier.

Even though the sign says some of these steamed buns are "vegetarian", what they mean to say is they're filled with nothing. That's right. Vegetarian steamed buns are just buns. Don't fall for it.

When we went to visit a friend’s family over the Tet holiday, she pre-warned her relatives that this crazy Tay would prefer not to eat meat. Very kindly, they prepared an omelette for me. And then her Aunt added pork to it.

“But the crazy Tay is eating the omelette because she doesn’t want to eat the meat”, our friend explained.
“I know”, her Aunt said. “But without the pork she will be too hungry!”

Almost every Friday lunch time, I meet friends for this vegetarian bun cha. It's been a tradition for two years now. None of us has starved to death during that time, that I know of.

And so we’re back to where we began: the omelette. The omelette is to the vegetarian in Vietnam what the mushroom risotto is to the vegetarian in Australia. When Nathan and I did a four-day Mekong Delta cycling trip with all food included, Nathan ate all kinds of pork and fish-shaped things in the meal breaks between the long rides. I ate omelette. At every single meal. For four days.

On that trip, this is how they served the rice at one place, so they were forgiven.

The omelettes would have been made with fish sauce anyway. Everything is. A friend of ours who visited a coffee-roasting business reported that they even add fish sauce to the coffee beans. So if you don’t want to eat fish sauce, then you’ll have to eat only at the aforementioned Buddhist-run vegetarian restaurants (where they have fake, vegetarian fish sauce), or at Western restaurants.

For those vegetarians like me who have found their rock-solid ethics have crumbled in the face of fish sauceversity, and who’d like to know what Vietnamese street food in Hanoi is kind of the most vegetarian friendly, I've tried to come up with some suggestions based on my own experience. This is pretty much the most useful thing I think I've ever done - and probably ever will do - with this blog, so it merits being in its very own separate post:

Vegetarian-friendly street food in Hanoi

Good luck to you all.

Vegetarian-friendly street food in Hanoi

2011-09-30T16:17:00.000+07:00

The reason this post is not called "Vegetarian street food in Hanoi", is because such a thing pretty much doesn't exist. And I know it's not very "friendly" to eat the fishies fermenting in your fish sauce, but you're hard pressed to get any fish sauce-free Vietnamese food, and it's damn near impossible if you want to try street food in particular.

So these suggestions come from my "best efforts" approach to being vegetarian in Hanoi, and will hopefully prove useful to any fellow vegetarians who don't want to be permanently relegated to the city's (still excellent) vegetarian Buddhist restaurants.

Handy hint: Much more successful than trying to say you’re “ăn chay” (vegetarian) is the phrase “không thịt” which means “no meat”. If you can’t pronounce it, then write it on a piece of paper and flash it around with wild abandon.

Another important piece of veggie vocab is “xì dầu” which is “soy sauce”, which you can ask for as an alternative to the ubiquitous fish dipping sauce. Many places don’t have it though, so if you’re super dedicated you could always carry in your bag a few of those little plastic soy sauce fish you get with sushi. You can try asking for no fish sauce (“không nước mắm”) in the cooking, but good luck with the results!

Phở không thịt: Pho noodle soup with no meat

Without the meat, Hanoian pho is just a bowl of broth with noodles, and the broth is – of course – made almost entirely from chicken or beef stock. But if your ethics aren't as strong as your desire to eat phở in Hanoi, then ordering "phở không thịt" at any phở stand won’t raise any eyebrows. At some places you can get an egg (“trứng”) thrown in too.
Where: Practically everywhere at breakfast time. 49 Bat Dan has a well-earned reputation.

Phở xào không thịt: Fried pho noodles with no meat

Image from Góc bếp hoa Dím

At any place which has an enormous blackened wok out the front you can get phở noodles stir-fried with morning glory and sometimes a few tomatoes (and margarine and cheap oil and MSG and sugar). Just ask for "phở xào không thịt".
Where: Look for a flaming wok, or try Nui Truc street, near Giang Vo.

Phở cuốn trứng: Noodle rolls with egg

"Phở cuốn" are rolls made from sheets of phở noodles. They usually contain beef, but you can also get them with fried egg, and some lettuce and herbs inside. At the phở cuốn joints you can also get “phở chiên phồng không thịt”, which is deep fried pillows of phở noodle squares, served with fried greens. And also, as featured in this photo, fried corn ("ngô chiên"), which counts towards your daily vegetable quota, right?
Where: Anywhere on Ngu Xa street, or around the corner at 7 Mac Dinh Chi.

Bánh mỳ trứng: Fried egg sandwich

It’s kind of strange living in Vietnam and fantasising about the Vietnamese salad rolls I used to get from the bakery next to Newtown station, but I do. You can’t get those here, but you can get "bánh mỳ trứng", which is egg fried with MSG and served in a roll with cucumber and spring onion and drizzled with fish sauce or soy sauce. It’s amazingly delicious.
Where: Any stall with bread rolls on display and a little frying pan on a charcoal burner. There’s usually a lady at lunchtime standing on the corner of Ly Quoc Su and Ngo Huyen streets.

Bún bò Nam Bộ không thịt: Noodle salad in broth with no meat

A southern dish usually served with beef, without the meat it’s still a tasty and satisfying lunch of rice vermicelli noodles, herbs and broth topped with bean sprouts and peanuts. Pretty sure the broth is made with some kind of meat stock or fish sauce though.
Where: 67 Hang Dieu street or 49 Xuan Dieu street

Bún đậu: Tofu with herbs and noodles

Fried tofu cubes served with squares of cold rice vermicelli noodles and herbs. It’s usually sold with fermented shrimp paste as a dipping sauce, so if you don’t want this you can ask for “nước mắm” (fish sauce), or “xì dầu” (soy sauce) if they have it, or you can forego dipping sauces all together (which would be a bit crap, since it's a dish designed around dipping).

Where: Anywhere you see someone deep-frying tofu cubes. There’s a regular lunchtime stall near the Chau Long market, on Nguyen Truong To on the corner with Tran Vu.

Nộm đu đủ không thịt: Papaya salad with no meat

Image from Bếp Rùa

This is papaya salad, drenched in a sweet, spicy fish sauce and served with crushed peanuts. It usually comes with dried pork on top, so you need to specify “không thịt”.

Where: Hoan Kiem Street, often unmarked on maps, which runs between Cau Go and Dinh Tien Hoang, near the Water Puppets.

Quẩy: Fried bread sticks

Image from VCTV

These are nothing more than deep fried sticks of dough, served with a sweet fish dipping sauce. A delicious and unhealthy snack. You can also order quẩy when you get phở for dipping in the broth.
Where: In the evenings on Hang Bong street, near corner of Phu Doan

Bánh chuối, bánh khoai and bánh ngô: Fritters

Image from Saigon Toserco

Deep fried banana (chuối), sweet potato (khoai) or corn (ngô) fritters that are sold more commonly in winter, it seems. These sound more delicious than they are, in my opinion, tasting mostly like deep-friedness and not much else.
Where: Pho Yen Phu, near the turn off for the Intercontinental Hotel

Xôi: Sticky rice

Xôi is served with a few different meaty type things, but you can also get it just with peanuts, mung bean paste or egg. You can even get it with ice-cream ("kem xôi"). It seems too good to be true that this could be a truly vegetarian dish, so I suspect the rice is probably made with lard.
Where: Xôi Yến at 35B Nguyen Huu Huan, where you can conveniently point to the toppings you want

Cơm Bình Dân: Vietnam’s smorgasbord

Image from Cappu's

Cơm Bình Dân stalls are cheap workers’ lunchtime spots with a glass display cases of several types of food (usually gone cold after sitting there for a while) served with rice. You’ll always be guaranteed a vegetable side dish of some description at these places, and cabbage pickles, and sometimes a tofu or egg dish. Just check the tofu isn’t hiding little parcels of pork. Sneaky buggers.
Where: All over the joint at lunchtime. The food is always displayed out the front, like in a food court display.

Kem caramen: Crème caramel

Thankfully vegetarians can go gangbusters at dessert-time and eat all the same sweet street food as everyone else. To celebrate, you should eat as many street-side crème caramels as possible.

Where: 29 Hang Than street

Sưã chua nếp cẩm: Fermented sticky rice

Image from Việt Báo Việt Nam

Available from the same place as the crème caramel, "sưã chua nếp cẩm" is fermented black sticky rice served in a cup with yoghurt. Tastes kind of like someone spilled a glass of red wine in your rice pudding. Delicious.
Where: 29 Hang Than street

Hoa quả dầm: Fruit cup

Image from Người Hà Nội

A summer time favourite, this is simply diced fruit served with condensed milk and crushed ice in a glass.
Where: All along To Tich street

Chè: Sweet bean drink

Pick ‘n’ mix desserts of sweet beans and strange gelatinous things and coconut milk. I would eat this every day if it wasn’t guaranteed to cause diabetes. In winter, you should also try “bánh trôi tàu nong”, which is black sesame-filled dumplings in a hot ginger broth and “chè chuối nướng” which is grilled banana with tapioca in hot coconut milk.
Where: 72-76 Hang Dieu street

On being a dog-lover in Vietnam

2011-09-23T06:43:00.000+07:00

Before I came to Vietnam, I thought that when people said the Vietnamese eat dogs, it was an awful racial slur. It sounded to me like a schoolyard taunt - “They eat dogs, you know” – and a horrible thing to say about anyone. The very worst, actually.

It came as quite a shock then when I realised it was true. I went though a period of denial where I decided that surely – surely – even if you could eat dog here, most people wouldn’t want to, right?

But this delusion was hard to maintain when my colleagues went out for much-enjoyed dog-meat lunches every month.

I then decided that the dogs raised for dog meat must be some very different kind of dog to what I’m used to. Totally unlike any dog I’ve known or loved, right?

They’re not. They’re exactly like the dogs I’ve known and loved. And saying they’re wholesomely “raised” hides the absolute, unspeakable horror of the dog meat trade (that many pet dogs get dog-napped off the street was another thing which I lamely tried to believe was an urban myth for quite some time).

And dog meat doesn’t look like a steak, or a lamb chop. It looks likes a dog. I can quite honestly say it’s the most gruesome thing I have ever seen. When I am taking guests around Hanoi, I always warn them if there’s dog meat up ahead, and give them the option of covering their eyes. Because I sure wish I had never seen it, and didn’t have to see it, over and over again.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to eat dogs, or that it’s hypocritical to eat other animals and not dogs, or that the Vietnamese shouldn’t eat dogs etc. These are all conversations that any foreigner who has lived in Vietnam longer than three weeks gets pretty sick of having. What I’m saying is: I really, really love dogs. 

Nothing makes my heart sing like the sight of a big ol’ fluffy dog. Nothing! If you said to me “Puppies or babies?” I’d say “PUPPIEEEEEEES!!” without a moment’s hesitation.

PUPPIEEEEEEES!!

Other than family dogs, I’ve never actually owned a dog of my own. This is because I love dogs too much. I know that if I got one, it would ruin my life. I wouldn’t be able to leave the house. I would live out my days and nights staring adoringly into its eyes and letting it eat all my socks.

PUPPIEEEEEEES!!

So dog-watching has long been one of my favourite pastimes. This hobby hasn’t been hugely rewarding in Hanoi. There are a lot of dogs in cages, a lot of chained dogs, a lot of dirty dogs (well, it’s hard not to be in Hanoi) and most dogs either look like this:

Or like this:

These aren’t my favourite kinds of dogs, but there have been some winning moments:

Every time I look at these photos, I yawn.

There’s also an increasing trend for imported dog breeds as a kind of luxury status symbol:

Some of the dogs here are pets, some are guard dogs, some are to be eaten, and some are all three. For example, I watched the neighbours over the road lovingly rear a puppy and then one day when it was fully grown, sell it to a man on a motorbike with a cage crammed full of his furry friends (presumably all about to be killed for meat). That wasn’t a particularly happy day for me.

From my dog watching, it seemed to me that the general attitude towards dogs here was one of indifference. And the dogs seemed to know their place too. They never ask for pats or beg for food or scavenge off street-side tables. Good luck trying to have a picnic in the park in Newtown in the face of sandwich-stealing spaniels, but here in Hanoi, where meat is barbecued right at dog eye-level, no dog would even dare to sniff it.

The only sign I could see of affection towards dogs, and indeed the only sign I could see that Vietnamese people think of dogs as having feelings at all, was in the winter-time, when dogs start appearing in jumpers. Human jumpers:

And then came Tiger:

Tiger is our friend Alnea’s shih-tzu. In her seven years she’s lived in Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, and now Hanoi. She likes cats (from a distance) and eating carrots. Also, as I mentioned in last week’s post, mooncakes.

When I first met Alnea, the conversation went like this:  
Alnea: “Hi, nice to meet you.”
Me: “Whatever. I WILL LOOK AFTER YOUR DOG WHENEVER YOU WANT.”

See, I love dogs too much.

I terrified Alnea so much that she went on a holiday almost immediately, leaving Tiger in my clutches.

I did check with our landlord first, actually. His name is – I kid you not – Mr Chien. If you have forgotten your highschool French, I will remind you at this point that “Mr Chien” is French for “Mr Dog”.

Mr Chien is a cheery fellow with a big hairy, lucky mole so he said Tiger’s tenancy was fine so long as she was, in his words, “a little fluff dog”.

I can’t describe how it felt to have that little fluff dog running up and down our hall, cuddling up to us on the couch, and bounding up our stairs after her walk.

For ten days my heart was a little melted puddle.

No surprises there. But here’s the real surprise: the neighbourhood freaking adored her.

As we walked Tiger around our island, old men would rush from their houses, their faces expressing nothing short of rapture as they crouched down to see her in all her cross-eyed under-bitten glory; mothers would bring their children over and force them to stroke her coat; teenage boys would coo over her, and take her photo with their phones.

Everywhere we went we heard cries of beautiful! pretty! cute! clean! and, if we were carrying her, baby! The smiles were infectious: walking her was like one big love fest.

When I took her to the market (holding her in my arms so she didn’t dirty her little paws on the offal juice), the crowd went wild. The hardened, sour faces of the butcher ladies transformed into delight at the mere sight of her. Chi Xoan, our favourite market lady, went what can only be described as ape-shit, as she rubbed her face all over Tiger’s fur, and then suggested I sit Tiger down right on top of all her fruit and vegetables for a better view.

On the way out of the market, I decided to walk past the dog meat section, which I usually carefully avoid. And, yes, the dog meat sellers went gaga for Tiger too, just like everyone else.

What does this mean? I don’t know! Is Vietnam gearing up to be a dog-loving nation, but only towards little fluff dogs? Are Tiger’s charms just simply irresistible?

I recently read in AsiaLIFE magazine an interview with a Vietnamese vet, Dr Nguyen Van Nghia, who had this to say about the Vietnamese attitude to animals:

"When I went to France and England or read books from America, I saw how to love animals. I would see people feed the birds in nature. If an owlet fell from a tree, they – just normal people – would take it to a hospital. I don’t see that here. Even if people love animals they don’t know how to love animals."

First of all: owlet is my new favourite word. Second of all: I think you're right Dr Nghia. People can see that Tiger is obviously such an adored dog that they can't help but adore her too. If an animal (for example, an OWLET!) is shown love, it generates love. I think that most dogs in Vietnam just don't get that chance.

Tiger has been cruelly taken from us now, leaving an adorable little Tiger-shaped hole in our lives. We try to find ways to fill that hole:

But then one night we just really felt like pumpkin soup.

Mid Autumn Festival madness

2011-09-16T06:35:00.000+07:00

The Mid Autumn Festival in Vietnam is rad. It's like a combination of Christmas, Halloween and the Royal Easter Show. And the legend behind it involves a woman accidentally weeing on a sacred banyan tree. What more could you want?

The festival is entirely for children, with the story going that traditionally during the autumn harvest, children would get neglected. The Mid Autumn Festival is when the adults make it up to them. It's basically kids milking one massive guilt trip. And as any child of divorced parents can tell you, that's the best fun a kid can have.

There are various components to the festival, the first being that mooncake shops start popping up everywhere. This, for example, is a photo processing lab that has decided to temporarily branch into the mooncake game:

Outside the most popular moon cake shops there is absolute traffic pandemonium. Imagine the David Jones Food Hall on Christmas Eve - if it was filled with motorbikes. Nathan and I cycled past one place on Thuỵ Khuê where the police had actually been sent in with blaring sirens to try to clear the road of jonesing mooncake customers. It wasn't working.

The weird thing is that nobody seems to really like mooncakes all that much. As our Vietnamese friend explained, they're not for eating - just for giving.

As per this dictum, our landlord gave us some, and we didn't eat them:

We cut a small piece to try, and didn't need to cut any more. Nathan actually spat his piece out in the sink. I then went to great pains to conceal the rest of the uneaten mooncake in our bin, so the landlord couldn't happen upon it somehow.

At the time we were dog-sitting this dog, Tiger:

Who you'll hear more about next week, I promise. While we out that evening, Tiger went through the bin, found the mooncake and ate the entire thing. That's 1000 calories for one small dog.

On the subject of dogs, one of the most awesome aspects of the festival is the pomelo dog:

Turning fruit into animal shapes is part of doin' it for the kids: the food is all supposed to be what kids like the most. Bugger the kids, the pomelo dog is amazing in anyone's books. It's an inside-out grapefruit! And a dog!

The Mid Autumn Festival also involves a lot of dressing up. Princesses and fairies and monkeys start turning up all over the neighbourhood:

There are also traditional papier mache-masked characters, usually played by the adults at the festival parties:

Nathan played the character of Chí Phèo, who is a drunkard and "lovable buffoon", at the WWF office party last year:

It wasn't hard for him to get into character. In fact, he was such an energetic lovable buffoon that his voluminous quantities of sweat actually transformed the inside of that papier mache mask back into glue and wet newspaper.

We were invited back regardless, and at this year's WWF Mid Autumn Festival party, Nathan sweated even more voluminously, as a saola:

The saola is a critically endangered antelope that is so rare that it's known as the "Vietnamese unicorn". Our friend Nicholas, a specialist in endemic Annamite ungulates (aka unicorns), has been in Vietnam for five years studying the saola. He's never seen one. In fact, no scientist has ever seen one in the wild.

Luckily Nicholas was at the party:

I haven't seen Nathan since then. I think he's been flattened between the pages of Nicholas' PhD thesis.

As well as the costumes, there's a whole load of other paraphernalia. Hàng Mã, the street in the Old Quarter which specialises in festive decorations (you might remember it from the post about Tet) goes mental as adults fight over lions and drums and lanterns and pentagrams. Imagine the showbag hall at the Royal Easter Show - if it was filled with motorbikes:

And no kids' festival would be complete without a whole load of crap plastic toys. Battery-operated plastic lanterns are particularly favoured, but anything that lights up and beeps annoyingly will do:

The wiser parent will take the quieter option of a toy kitchen set:

I know it makes perfect sense, but I was super excited that these toys specifically reflect the Vietnamese kitchen, complete with miniature quay, banh bao, steamers, thermoses, tiffin tins, charcoal burners, and those plastic covers to keep flies off the food. I was disappointed, though, to see the plastic stools hadn't been further miniaturised. I guess that's not really possible.

On the actual night of the Mid Autumn Festival, boisterous brouhaha lions parade the street and all the children come out to watch. Sadly none of the lions vomited up a diamond ring this time.

The lion dancers on our street are actually the local xe om (motorbike taxi) drivers who usually stand on the corner and shout "Moto! Moto!" as I pass by, even if I'm on a bicycle at the time. I really like this amateur, community involvement. It's like when the school principal plays Santa, and it's simultaneously so much crapper, and so much better than a professional Santa.

You can see in this photo that the xe om driver/drummer has actually kept his helmet on, just in case a fare comes along mid-performance:

Last year one of the xe om drivers melted his nylon pants with a bit of poorly aimed fire twirling, but there were no such disasters this year:

Just a bunch of kids out late at night in their pjyamas, wielding plastic, flashing toys, and enjoying the one time of the year when everything really does revolve around them.

The best fat joke the world will ever hear

2011-09-08T10:37:00.000+07:00

This post first appeared as a column in AsiaLIFE Ho Chi Minh City magazine.

I don’t know very much about Vietnamese humour, but I know that my Vietnamese friends like jokes about boobs, and that the passengers on Vietnam Airlines can’t get enough of that second-rate Candid Camera they show on the little screens.

I am convinced, however, that the Vietnamese are actually comic geniuses.

I present Exhibit A.

One evening, Nathan and I were dining at an eerily silent and empty upscale restaurant. It was like it was too fancy to have sounds. Or customers. Indeed, we were the only ones there until an older Tay gentleman – I would say sixty, in the latter stages of a mid-life crisis – arrived and made a beeline for the bar to chat to the lovely young bar girl.

The gentleman ordered his drink and broke the eerie silence to make painfully sleazy small talk with the several-generations-younger girl, all the while nibbling from a bowl of peanuts that was sitting on the bar. And then it came out of nowhere:

Bar girl: I don’t think you should eat the peanuts.
Man Having A Mid-Life Crisis: Why?
Bar girl: Because peanuts are bad for old people.
Man Having A Mid-Life Crisis: [Eerie silence]

I used every last piece of self-control within me not to shout SMACK-DOWN from across the room.

It was a delicious moment; impeccable comic timing. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” I thought. But then I realised, no, he probably shouldn’t because smoking is bad for old people.

The Vietnamese penchant for bluntness is well-known. I’m sure you have many examples of your own. Like when a man at your workplace approaches you at the water cooler to tell you that he and the rest of the Finance team have all been discussing your outfit. “I have been chosen to come and ask you”, he says. “Why are you wearing pyjamas to work?” Okay, so maybe this didn’t happen to you. And, for the record, I was actually wearing a two hundred-dollar, Japanese designer dress. But never mind, you know what I’m talking about.

You wouldn’t necessarily call this bluntness “comedy”, but if you do, living in Vietnam instantly transforms from being mildly humiliating, to being completely hilarious.

In a case of “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry”, you just need to see Vietnam as the humour capital of the world. People pay good cash money to see stand-up comedians perform this kind of side-splitting off-colour material. Instead of skulking off to bed, Mr Too Old For Peanuts should have applauded the bar girl’s virtuoso deadpan routine.

To bring home my case, I present Exhibit B. This happened when a Vietnamese colleague of mine met Nathan for the first time. She said she was very pleased to meet him and exclaimed, “Oh, look at you two, you’re a perfect 10!”
“Oh, that’s so nice! Thank you!” I said.
To which she responded, “Yes, he’s the 1 and you’re the 0”.

It took me several beats to work out that this was, in fact, the best fat joke the world will ever hear.

My colleague was oblivious to Nathan’s horrified do-not-go-there face (which I’ve seen many times before, most notably when the lady at the airport check-in counter asked me if I was pregnant), so she continued.

“Yes”, she said. “And without him, you’re nothing!”

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

I gasped so forcefully that I was literally propelled backwards. Only my massive fatness stopped me from keeling right over. I clutched my hands to my chest in shock. It was perfection. It had everything. An insult masquerading as flattery, ingenious wordplay, and a diabolical one-two finish about how fat girls can’t get a guy.

Nathan’s do-not-go-there face became his oh-no-she-didn’t face, the grimace indicating that he feared the worst. I paused to fix forever in my mind this moment of comic genius, and then, I cried buckets of tears. Yes, that’s right: tears of laughter. With a few sobs of humiliation thrown in just for good measure.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the motorbikes

2011-09-01T14:43:00.000+07:00

I don’t know anything about motorbikes, and I don’t really like them. I don’t even like to touch them. When my bicycle gets parked in by one, I gingerly prod the offending vehicle, then look around, like a meerkat, for a parking attendant to rescue me.

But since living in Hanoi is like living inside an enormous motorbike swarm, I soon realised that I had to learn to enjoy at least one thing about them. And I did. Their names.

The motorbikes here all have English names, which makes it easier, but sadly, they’re all proper words. You don’t get to see the likes of the Hyundai Terracan, which is my favourite-ever car name, conjuring up, as it does for me, the image of a TERRIFYING TOUCAN.

In the absence of made-up words, the pronunciation can sometimes suffice. I remember the day I found out that the Honda Super Cub was pronounced “Honda Sooper Coob”. It was a great day. Ever since then I have made sure to say it outloud whenever I see one, which is often.

Sooper Coob!

The most common Vietnamese motorbike is the Honda Wave, which is a “splendid mover”:

And then there’s its cousin, the Future Neo, which is a “splendid cruiser”.

There’s an awful lot of splendour in Hanoi, just thanks to these two models. Jolly good show, you splendid cruisers and movers!

Taking things up a notch, you have the Yamaha Exciter, which is a great name for both a motorbike, and a marital aid. In fact “The Exciter: Splendid Mover” would be a best seller in this category.

My favourite thing about the Exciter is this advertising campaign:

It reads: “It’s exciting! Exciter 2011”. Don Draper himself could not have said it better.

Also sharing its name with an electrical appliance is the Honda Airblade:

I remember when I first used a Dyson Airblade electric hand-dryer, in the toilets of a hotel in London. It was 2008. July, I think. As I watched the loose skin of my hands tossed about in that hot jet of air like the flapping jowls of a high-speed basset hound, I felt like I was truly alive for the first time.

If riding a Honda Airblade is anything like that, then wow, maybe I don’t hate motorbikes after all.

From my personal scientific research, I would say the second most popular motorbike in Hanoi, after the Wave, is the Dream. Honda has obviously come up against some difficulties with naming subsequent Dream models. I think they should have gone with: Dream, Still Dreamy, Dreamier, Totally Dreamy, and Dreamiest. But they didn’t. They went with:

Dream:

Dream II:

Super Dream:

And Dream Exces (sic):

There is a range of motorbikes which, like the Totally Dreamy, is targeted at women and designed specifically to allow for an elegant mount while wearing skin-tight miniskirts and enormous stacked high heels. These bikes have names like this:

Or this:

Or, in the case of gender confusion, this:

(Doesn’t that just instantly fill you with love for that motorbike? The Berty! Berty and I are just popping into town!)

Strangely, the Elegant is not one of these lady motorbikes:

And yet one of the most ladylike of all the lady bikes is the Attila:

The Attila. I would love to have seen the focus group which hit upon that name. “Yeah, we’re thinking Huns, we’re thinking plundering, we’re thinking barbarians, slaughter, rivers of blood, we’re thinking lots of room for a large handbag…”

Absolutely the most awesome thing about Vietnamese motorbike names – and the thing which keeps me always scanning the traffic – is that, like everything else in Vietnam, you can get one custom-made.

[EDIT: Since first publishing this post, a few people have mentioned that I'm actually wrong about this. The following bike names are not customised one-offs, they're actually legit model names. Well, they're legit, Chinese rip-off model names. As Nga noted in the comments, this actually makes them EVEN MORE HILARIOUS.]

What would you call your motorbike if you could call it whatever you wanted? If Exciter just wasn’t EXCITING! enough? Maybe you’d start at the top at go with this:

Or maybe you’d start at the bottom, with this:

Or maybe, you’d look to the heavens:

Or maybe, just maybe, for no reason that I can possibly think of at all, you’d go with this:

When I saw the Weasel, I thought I had reached the absolute pinnacle of motorbike names. Surely there could be nothing better than having a Weasel (A WEASEL!) as your mode of transport.

But then my friend Ed alerted me to his very own bike, which came already re-named when he acquired it. Behold in all her glory…

… The Fairy Horse.

So now, when I’m stuck in a motorbike swarm, breathing in the exhaust and worrying about my toes getting run over, I just pause, and imagine myself in a field of fairy horses, and everything’s okay.

Can they fix it? Yes they can!

2011-08-26T14:43:00.001+07:00

It’s a pretty easy hit to say that Vietnam is a bit shonky. But it is. It’s the kind of country where a newly built five-storey Pizza Hut collapses on its opening day. And I mean really collapses:

And where, given the choice between this Lift Of Death, and the stairs, I’d take the stairs.

The shonkiness is like a spectator sport. You can sit in a café and watch construction workers, in plastic sandals, wielding an electric saw, and just hope that they don’t amputate their own foot. Or you can ponder why the entire construction site, held together by twigs and bricks, doesn’t simply collapse in a heap, like a game of Pick Up Sticks.

Construction sites in Vietnam always remind me of Eeyore’s house.

One night, walking down our street, we even got to watch a man balancing precariously on the top of a mound of garbage in the back of a moving truck as he lifted up the huge bundles of electrical wires that were hanging across the street, to allow the over-sized truck, with him on it, to pass underneath. Just grabbing onto those wires with his hands, he was. While standing on his big old moving pile of garbage.

When you are on holiday in Vietnam, it is compulsory to take a picture of the power lines.
They actually check your camera at the airport upon departure to make sure you did.

Foreigners make a sport of complaining about this shonkiness, especially when any ambitious venture like an underground rail network gets floated. I do it too: a friend planning a visit to Vietnam asked me if she should go sky diving here. I laughed hysterically for ten straight minutes and then said “HELL NO”. I personally wouldn’t go grass skiing in Vietnam, let alone sky diving.

But because I’m not simply contrary when other people complain about Vietnam, I’m goddamn holier-than-thou, I’ve taken to responding to all criticisms of this fine nation’s shonkiness in the same way.

Whenever someone says something like “God help us if Vietnam ever builds a nuclear power station”, I quietly think “Note to self: order iodide capsules” but say out loud “Well, you know, if I said to you that you had to transport 50 live goldfish on a motorbike, I bet you couldn’t do it”.

This is guaranteed to stop the naysayer in their tracks, because not only is it a complete non sequitur, it is irrefutably true.

I have stolen this picture from Linuts on Flickr as I have never managed to photograph this breathtaking feat myself. I am usually too busy wetting my pants with excitement when I see one of these motoquariums.

The resourcefulness on display in Vietnam is, I reckon, just as astounding as the shonkiness. (Right here is the point in this post where I feel almost obliged to say “And that is why they won the war”, but I’m not going to say that. You can’t make me.)

It’s like that scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers back in Houston have to work out how to fix the problem on the spaceship using only a wire coat-hanger and a sock (or something like that, right?). A Vietnamese person would have been AWESOME at bringing that shuttle back to earth, I guarantee you.

For example, you need to make a shelf but all you have is a tree, an octopus strap and a plastic basket:

You need to make a portable digital photo printing lab, but all you have is a jerry can, a car battery and a plastic stool:

You need a clothes dryer for winter, but all you have is a gross old air vent and a piece of string:

You need to create a small-scale Hanging Gardens of Babylon but all you have is some empty La Vie water bottles and some wire:

And, my all-time favourite: you need to get some berries off a very tall tree, but all you have is a pole and another empty La Vie water bottle:

If you can’t see it in the picture, what you do is cut the bottle into a little scoop shape, then you jam the neck of the bottle onto the pole and capture your berries by rattling them off inside your custom-made Tall Trees Berry Grabber Offerer (I am patenting it now as I write).

I remember I used to get really frustrated at the lack of egg cartons here. The eggs are sold loose and they just pile them all in a plastic bag, making for a fairly nerve-wracking cycle home from the market.

One day, the market ladies watched me balancing my bag o’ eggs on top of the groceries in my basket and shook their heads in dismay. They shooed me away from my bike, took back the eggs, and tied the handle of the plastic bag to the handle of another plastic bag, so that the eggs hung inside. They then tied the outside bag to my handle bars, so that while this bag swung around, the eggs stayed pendulously still.

I was awe-struck. I actually gasped and said: "Whoah. Physics." That’s how you transport a dozen eggs if all you have is two plastic bags and a bicycle.

So while I won’t be gunning for the construction of a Vietnamese nuclear power plant, at least you know that come the nuclear meltdown, they'll be able to fix the thing with a plastic water bottle and an octopus strap.

Hanoi mannequins for dummies

2011-08-19T11:19:00.002+07:00

The mannequins of Hanoi are a ragtag bunch with a considerably higher percentage of deformities than the rest of the population. They are also terrifying.

You have the bald ones:

(Nobody wants to think about cancer while clothes shopping, do they?)

You have the amputees:

Or, in this case a whole family of amputees!

Then there are the she-mannequins. My, what a lovely strong jawline this lady on the right has here:

This one's not just any old man in drag. It's clearly Dean Pelton from Community:

Incidentally, there are other celebrity mannequins too. Like Fergie:

And Kevin Bacon:

He hasn't aged a bit.

There are also zombie mannequins. They look like they were once normal mannequins, much like you and me, but now they WANT TO EAT YOUR BRAINS:

They do not make me WANT TO BUY YOUR CLOTHES.

Even more alarming than the zombies are the freaky child mannequins.

Their necks are disproportionately large, their arms disproportionately short, and their facial expressions disproportionately off-putting:

See, I told you!

This one is doing Beseeching:

"Help me, please, I can't reach my tiny arms to my mouth."

This one is doing Constipated:

This one is doing Yo Homey Whassup:

And this one is just doing My Head In:

The stuff of nightmares, that is.

Since a mannequin's sole function is to make clothes look good, and since Hanoian mannequins do exactly the opposite, it's kind of baffling why they exist.

It's also baffling why there are no Vietnamese-looking mannequins. Weirdly there are more mannequins "of colour" here than you'd likely see anywhere else, despite there being next to no black people:

I was also baffled why so many mannequins have embarrassingly left their flies open:

Until I realised the reason why: the Vietnamese-sized jeans are so small that they don't actually do up on a standard-sized dummy. The mannequins are actually TOO FAT for Vietnam. They're not alone.

For answers to all my mannequin-related questions, I went to - where else - mannequin street.

It's an alarming place, where men sit among mounds:

And boys will be boys:

It was a gruesome place:

Where I witnessed unspeakable horrors:

The freaky child mannequins, which I assumed were cast-offs from a bygone era of freakiness were actually for sale brand new here:

And, terrifyingly, it seems they'll soon be joined by a new breed of alien child mannequin:

It also turns out you definitely can get Asian mannequins:

But they're few and far between even on mannequin street (which is not entirely dissimilar to what I imagine the inside of the Playboy mansion looks like):

Surrounded by these pert-bosomed specimens, in possession of lustrous locks and all their limbs, it was obvious that there are plenty of attractive, able-bodied mannequins in Hanoi: the new ones. The ones who haven't weathered the physical strain, the grime and the hair-matting humidity that the city inflicts on them, and... on all of us.

My bosoms might not have been so pert as theirs when I arrived, but I was as fresh-faced and sparkling clean as these residents of mannequin street/Playboy mansion. After the make-up slid off my sweaty face, my nice clothes went mouldy and I realised that hair styling and bicycle helmets aren't compatible, I too started to look pretty rough around the edges. It's basically the reverse of that film from the 1980s where a mannequin came to life, as I come ever closer to resembling a Hanoi mannequin (but with bigger pants). I guess when my arms fall off I'll know it's time to leave.

Hanoi is turning me into my mother

2011-08-10T12:18:00.000+07:00

It’s hard to know how to follow last week’s blog post. If you ever want to see your inbox filled with hundreds of messages sending you warm, fuzzy feelings, then I recommend getting engaged. Nathan has been riding high on the glory of the proposal all week, and me on the unbridled smugness of being snaffled by someone who would propose so well.

My mind has been on weddings and shared futures and families. These thoughts lead to one blog topic, and one blog topic only: mothers.

There’s an anecdote about my mother that goes like this. Once, when she was being introduced to someone for the first time, she said hello, then paused, and then said, for absolutely no reason, “I had salad for lunch”.

This wasn’t particularly out of character for her. She raised me to believe that it’s better to say something strange, than say nothing at all.

Until now, I have always been lucky to work in jobs that don’t seem to mind me saying strange things at inopportune moments. In fact, I noticed that this was often characterised in the corporate workplace as “shooting from the hip”. Excellent, I thought. If inappropriateness is valued here then soon I will be CEO.

Here in my current role of Trailing Spouse, however, I think this particular skill might not be in the job description. At my first official function I stood dutifully alongside Nathan, as someone important from somewhere important made her way along the meet-and-greet line, shaking hands as she went, until she got to me.

“And where are you from?” she said, meaning “What fancy job has landed you at this event?”
So, naturally, I said, “Oh. I’m from… Nathan’s… wife… closet…”.

She looked alarmed and swiftly moved on to the next, probably much more appropriate, person. Nathan then said he’d like to put me back in the “wife closet” and swap me for a less weird model for the evening.

And thus continues the inexorable march towards becoming my mother.

My agedness is definitely playing a significant role in this, but I think living here is making it worse. This also complies with the first rule of being an expat: above all else, and against all evidence to the contrary, blame your personal problems on Vietnam.

Here are my symptoms.

I have started making loud observations about people within earshot, arguing that it’s okay because they can’t understand me, and they’re probably talking about me too. It’s not okay. I’m sure that one day I will happen upon a taxi driver who speaks fluent English and I will get my comeuppance.

But it’s not just with Vietnamese people. I’ve also started doing running commentaries about Tays. These are the kind of tedious, stream-of-conscious thoughts that don’t actually need to be spoken out loud (at least, that’s what I’m always telling my mother), but I need to take all the excitement I can get here.

One time Nathan and I saw some very familiar looking Tays buying some ice-cream at Fanny. “I think we know them”, I said, and smiled accordingly. They smiled back. Then they left, thankfully, because I immediately realised how I knew them, which is to say, not at all.

They looked so familiar because I had spent an entire evening at a pizza restaurant watching them at a nearby table having an argument, and relaying a running commentary to Nathan. “Now he’s got that what-do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it face and she is shaking her head. I’m seeing a lot of contempt here. And now he’s eating garlic bread. But she’s pushed her plate away. She’s playing with her phone. Ooh, the silent treatment…” You probably haven’t dined with my mother, but I can assure you from years of personal experience, that this is exactly what it’s like.

My mother doesn’t like to leave the house, and if she has to, she doesn’t like to go very far. Considering this genetic make-up, maybe I shouldn’t have moved onto an island. My realm in Hanoi shrinks by the day. I talk about going to the Old Quarter like it’s a day trip: it’s a ten-minute bicycle ride away. I hesitate over social engagements that involve crossing a bridge. I fantasize about being flooded in.

Central Hanoi is just so geographically small and so easy to traverse that is has skewed my sense of scale. If you’re not averse to leaving the house, you can call a friend on the other side of town and say “Meet you in 20 minutes”. In Sydney, you don’t have friends on the other side of town. I don’t like anyone enough to change trains twice. So, Hanoi, it’s your fault. You’re too small, and you’ve shrunk my dominion right down to your size.

One of my mother’s favourite pastimes is meteorological one-upmanship. She lives in the Blue Mountains so she gets great pleasure from scoffing at what lily-livered Sydney-siders call “the cold”. Hanoi winters have provided me the material to beat my mother at her own game. “At least you have heating!” I can say. Or, “You wouldn’t understand what it’s like here! It’s cold and HUMID! I am MADE OF MOULD”.

Disappointingly, this summer hasn’t been very hot, so I’ve missed the opportunity to poo-poo anyone in the northern hemisphere crying warm.

I have also become a Nervous Nelly. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call “risk averse” before coming to Vietnam, but now I’m like a skittish little poodle; like, for example, my mother’s skittish little poodle Susie (need I say it’s true that dogs come to resemble their owners?).

The longer I stay here, the more I think that Susie might have been right. The world is a terrifying place filled with mantelpieces that could launch objects onto you from great heights, and gaps in footpaths that you could fall through, and children with sticky fingers who could pull at your tail.

The longer I stay here, the more horror stories I accumulate about amputations and electrocutions and infections and knocked heads and poisonings and airlifts. The longer I stay here, the more anxious I am not to feature in one of these stories myself.

I now take wide berths around construction sites; I avoid cycling at night-time; I have developed phobias of unstable concrete sewer coverings and of the wobbly power-points in our house; I tut-tut at friends who ride motorbikes in thongs; I’ve become paranoid about bag snatchings; and every day, more and more, I flinch and startle at car horns. There are a lot of car horns in Hanoi. Not long now until I start using expressions like “My nerves are shot”. And then it’s just one short step to: “My sciatica is playing up”.

Well, at least Nathan can’t say he wasn’t warned.

PS. Hi mum!

This is what happened today

2011-07-31T17:54:00.000+07:00

Nathan is not a morning person, but this morning he woke up uncharacteristically chipper. We went out last night with his brother Heath, who is visiting, and some friends. We had drunk rice wine at Chim Sao, and then beers at GC and then more beers at whatever that place is called next door to GC, and then cocktails at Southgate. And yet this morning Nathan leapt up like a sprightly little liquor-loving deer. More precisely, he was like a sprightly little liquor-loving deer concerned with home cleanliness: he got up, got dressed and said he needed to put the rubbish out, at 9am. He disappeared out the door, assuring me the bin was "very smelly" and needed seeing to immediately.

He came back upstairs to tell me that it seemed today was "a special day", and that there were exciting things happening at the pagoda. I suggested that I would celebrate the "special day" by continuing to lie in bed.

And then we both heard the sound of a boisterous brouhaha lion on the street.

My favourite Vietnamese tradition is the lion dance. You can hear them coming thanks to the drums and cymbals that parade along with them, luring people out of their houses to watch the performance and feed the lion lucky money. The dancers endow the lion with so much playful personality that this furry, bedazzled and pom-pommed creature really does seem alive. Last year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, when the lions dance through the streets almost every night, there were information display screens along the road near our lake explaining their significance to Vietnamese culture. They referred to them as "boisterous brouhaha lions", which is just the most perfect description. They do create a brouhaha, and they are boisterous. Umm, and they are lions, yes. That too.

And so, knowing I could not resist the lure of a boisterous brouhaha lion on our street, Nathan bundled me out of bed. "Quick!" he said. "Get dressed! We'll miss it!" I threw on some clothes and with bed-head and hungover eyes, said I should have just done as the Vietnamese do, and wandered out in my pyjamas. As we made our way out, I told Heath he was pretty lucky to witness such a perfect little cultural vignette on only his second day in Hanoi.

Our neighbours were gathered in the street, coaxing the lion over to them by waving 10,000 dong notes, which he'd snap up in his flapping mouth like the Cookie Monster.

He was a delightfully playful kitty, this one, rushing towards you then lowering his big fluffy head for a scratch behind his ear.

As Nathan manages to do when presented with any child or animal, he made the lion particularly frisky. If there was an information display sign written about Nathan it would probably describe him as a "boisterous brouhaha Nathan". He teased and tousled it, and the lion responded by prancing around him, leaping in the air, creeping backwards, and then barreling towards him; I was reminded of how on windy days our family cat used to work itself up into a frisky frenzy by running up and down the hallway and then rolling itself up in the rug. Laughing too much to take any decent photos, I was also reminded of how much I love boisterous brouhaha things, be they lions or Nathans.

The lion then stepped away from us, and pulled his big head close into his body, arching up. "Uh-oh", I said to Heath. "It's like when cats do that backwards wretching thing before they vomit".

And then the lion vomited.

He vomited a diamond ring into Nathan's hand.

An enormous cheer went up, and applause; there was a crashing explosion of cymbals and drums; and the lion threw his head back and danced wildly. Nathan got down on one knee, and I was half-blind from the tears and half-deaf from the sobs. He picked me up and twirled me around and around and around, and all I could see was a blur of red fur and gold sequins and all I could hear was the brouhaha and all I could think was "yes".

Our neighbours came to congratulate us and shake our hands, always using both their hands to clasp ours so firmly. A teenager who could speak English translated their well wishes for us. They all said they had never seen anything like this happen before to anyone else. I agreed that it was a most singular thing to happen to a person before breakfast on a rainy Sunday.

The crowd dispersed, the lion undressed and while still reeling from it all, a family across the road invited us to their house for tea. We sat in their loungeroom, me with Nathan's grandmother's ring on my finger, drinking cups of green tea and glasses of this indescribable drink of sour fruit that the Vietnamese so love, and eating longans and yoghurt, listening to the story of the happy, twenty-year marriage of our hosts, both born in the year of goat, just like me and Nathan.

Wanna live like common people

2011-07-22T17:16:00.000+07:00

My greatest legacy to WWF Vietnam was the introduction of the concept of “Stuff White People Like” to the Communications Team.

For example, when redesigning a brochure promoting national park tourism, I pointed out that unlike the Vietnamese version, the English version must contain no photos of Tays partaking in fun adventure activities.

“Tays don’t want to think that other Tays are in this national park already. They want to be the only Tays”, I explained, in an excellent example of Australian Government-funded capacity building.

The photo was replaced by one of pristine, Tayless wilderness.

I also removed all photos in which you could see that the ethnic minorities were actually wearing jeans under their traditional garb.

“Tays want to believe they’re the first foreigners that this remote tribe has ever seen”, I explained. “They want the ethnic minorities to be completely isolated from the modern world”. I suggested a photo of a woman with a baby strapped to her back instead.

“But these people are dirty! They look poor!” my colleague accurately observed.
“Exactly”, I said. “Tays love seeing poor people on holidays. It makes them feel more authentic”.

My colleagues looked confused, and rightly so.

I was met with the same look after I organized to have some large street banners, which WWF had produced, turned into bags to give as gifts to office visitors. You know, like the type you can buy at any Oxfam shop:

My colleagues, upon seeing the bags, looked horrified.

“Do you know what this is? This is rubbish!”
“Yes, that’s the whole point of it”, I explained. “It’s recycling. Tays love recycling.”
“Why would you want a bag made of rubbish? It’s not nice!”
“People will want them”, I promised. “People buy them in Australia.”

The rubbish bags were set aside as gifts strictly for Tay visitors only. Naturally they were extremely well-received, completely confounding my colleagues. One of them wrote “Stuff White People Like” on a post-it note and stuck it to her monitor, like a riddle which she would need some time to mull over.

Vietnam is a country that’s on the up. It’s focused on fast development and a bigger, brighter, shinier future. The trend in the already developed West is to look back. The Vietnamese want cars, and the more expensive, the better; Westerners want bicycles. Vietnamese want supermarkets and clean, hygienic mass-produced food; Westerners want farmers’ markets, or even better, to pick their own fruit. Vietnamese want enormous plasma TVs and all the mod cons; Westerners love bragging that they “don’t even own a TV”. Vietnamese want brand new houses and brand new furniture; Westerners want vintage.

Retro tastes are a luxury: being retro in Vietnam is basically being poor. If your family acquired the convenience of a motorbike in only the last ten years, why would you go back to bicycles? Why, if you could afford not to, would you eschew new things in favour of the old?

Vietnamese people wisely don’t want to be poor, and they don’t want to look poor either. Yet White People (ironically) spend buttloads of money on doing just that. To us, “old” is valuable, timeless, unique, and here, it’s… just old.

I’ll take Nathan to illustrate my point, as usual. When Nathan bought new glasses here, he disappointed the optometrist greatly by choosing some of the cheapest frames in the store. Here they are:

She scrunched up her face at his choice. While glasses like these are sported by hipsters all over Australia, in Vietnam, they're popular mostly only with old men. It’s fine wire frames which are all the rage here. Our Vietnamese teacher, who wears fine wire frames, set him straight. “I don’t like them”, he said. “They are old style. And they make you look old”.

So Nathan showed him a thing or two about style:

Now when someone tells him he looks old, he punches them in the face. And then does the YMCA dance routine.

It’s the same thing with motorbikes. Vietnamese people want stylish, reliable new motorbikes, with as many bells-and-whistles as possible.

Tays want this:

Or even worse, this:

Image from Horizons Unlimited

And then they break down all the time, and being less common than your average Honda Wave, they’re harder to get repaired. That’s right. They go out of their way to not buy a new, reliable motorbike in favour of an old motorbike that breaks down and is hard to get repaired. You can see how this might be baffling.

While going about my daily life in Hanoi, I often note to myself, “Hipsters would love that” (and trust me, I know, because no-one – I repeat, no-one – could be a more clichéd manifestation of Stuff White People Like than me).

For example, hipsters would like this old, cheap aka "old-school, vintage" enamel cup:

Hipsters would like this old, cheap aka "funky, retro" ceiling fan:

Hipsters would like this old, cheap aka "rustic, industrial" light:

Hipsters would like this old, cheap aka "antique, shabby-chic" thermos:

That thermos was in the dirt-floor shack of an 80-year-old couple who lived in Ba Be, raising buffalo. If only they knew they could sell their thermos to hipsters on Etsy and make enough money to live off for six months.

Also, see these shoes that this Forest Protection Department Ranger is dousing with leech-repellent?

They’re cheap, regulation-issue army shoes. A friend of ours who works in a national park here was wearing them in Newtown while visiting recently and was stopped on the street by a hipster asking where he got them. Rangers are so hot right now. You read it here first.

Living in a country where they don't have boho, they just have rising damp, and they don't have rustic, they just have rust, it does draw attention to how ludicrous some of these trends are in the well-off West. I see images like these designer interiors on Apartment Therapy and think Vietnam is unwittingly ahead of its time:

I feel much better about our mouldy corner now I know that mould is in this season.

And then I think of these photos, which I took at a friend's family home over Tet:

And how beautiful their home was, in exactly that way that White People Like. But if they want to knock it down, and build something more modern, with proper wiring, and an indoor toilet, and glass in all the windows, then I would be the first person there with the sledge-hammer.

Happy Bastille Day

2011-07-14T15:21:00.002+07:00

Back when I was a whippersnapper, I lived in Paris for a year. I even kept a blog about it, which I repeatedly referred to as a “web-log”. How quaint the early 2000s were.

As it was the early 2000s, my "web-log" didn't have any photos. So I did a Google image search on "early 2000s Paris" and got this.

One thing I learned from living in Paris is that you can’t ever complain about living in Paris.

Say, for example, you express mild disappointment that, en route to the airport, you rolled your wheelie suitcase through a mountainous dog turd on the train platform. Your friends “back home” will respond “But you’re IN PARIS! At least you’re rolling your suitcase through a mountainous dog turd IN PARIS and not stuck in your boring office LIKE ME!!!!!”

They always used a lot of exclamation marks.

This doesn’t happen when you live in Hanoi. I don’t think many of our friends “back home” are queuing up to swap places with us. I don’t know why, since I always make it sound so awesome here, what with my constant references to rats and sewerage. But the funny thing is, I often find myself reflecting on how much happier I am here in stinky old Hanoi than I was IN PARIS!!!!!

Paris has rats too. They call them "les rats".

There’s a very pervasive misconception held by Francophiles that if they move to France, wear silk scarves and buy artichokes from the local market, they’ll be just like the French. But a foreigner living in Paris stands out just as much as a Tay in Hanoi. I had studied French for close to ten years when I moved there. I had read Proust in the original. I figured I was going to fit in just fine.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Instead, I discovered there were all these little social mores that were so ingrained in the French culture and so subtly executed that I couldn’t even work out what they were. All I knew was, I was doing them wrong. Wherever I went, whatever I did, you could hear a chorus of little tut-tuts in my wake.

Sure, this is nice, but it would be better if it spelled out "Chúc mừng năm mới" in potted colour.

My finest hour was when I was invited to have a coffee by a French girl in my class. Excited by the possibility of securing a real, live French friend, I was on my best behaviour. I probably wore a silk scarf. And maybe, thanks to my excellent conjugation and knowledge of the classics of French literature, she thought, for a moment, that I might be worthy of her company. Just for a moment. Right up until the point when I got my little finger stuck in the handle of my espresso cup.

That is correct. I got my little finger stuck in the handle of my espresso cup.

First, I had to ask her if she had any hand-cream in her bag. She didn’t, so I had to put my hand, with cup attached, into my coat pocket and take it to the bathroom, to work it off using soap.

I didn’t hear from that girl again.

This is Nathan in France a couple of years ago. He is gripping the pain au chocolat so tightly in case he slips and gets that cup stuck on his finger.

French people don’t get their fingers stuck in the handles of their espresso cups. And they don’t think it’s very funny when other people do, either.

And that, right there, is why I am happier in Hanoi. Here, every waking moment I am massively and spectacularly inappropriate. When I try my absolute hardest, I am at best ham-fistedly inept. It’s not so much like I have my pinkie stuck in the espresso cup; it’s more like I have shoved the whole thing up my nostril. And the Vietnamese don’t get embarrassed for me, or cringe, or tut-tut. No, they point and say, very loudly, to anyone that’s listening, “That fat Tay has such an enormous nose it can fit a cup inside”.

Because you can say whatever you like about being a foreigner in Vietnam, but at least you always know where you stand.

Coming from a different culture, without the weight of Vietnam’s traditions and long history behind me, I’m never going to fit in here, just like I was never going to understand How Things Are Done in France, even if I bought the whole market out of artichokes. So if I’m going to be floundering in a foreign culture, forever putting my foot wrong, I’d rather do it in a country that can laugh about it. A lot. If I’m going to look ridiculous, which I do, all the time, then I want to own it.

I probably should mention that France is actually my favourite country in the world, and the site of some of my happiest moments in life. I have been back many times since living there, and find myself physically yearning to return all the time. And yet the chances of me coming back to Hanoi after we leave: pretty much less than zero. Go figure!

I remember, in Paris, a fellow-Australian expressing exhaustion at trying to constantly maintain composure, second-guessing her every move lest she attract the dreaded tut-tuts. We compared notes on how many parties we had left in tears, and realised that “faux-pas” ain’t a French word for nothing. “They look at me” she said, “like I’ve just FARTED”.

I’m yet to fart in any Vietnamese social settings, but if I did, I know exactly what would happen: we would all laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

When two blogs collide

2011-07-07T07:26:00.000+07:00

I was going to write a blog post called “Nobody told me there’d be days like these”. It was going to be about how stepping outside your door in Hanoi is like going down the rabbit-hole.

You’ll be on your way to Sunday brunch and you’ll see this:

A husband-to-be and his homies (and their mums) bearing gifts for the in-laws.

One gift was a whole pig:

If that doesn’t win them over, nothing will.

Or you’ll be cycling to the pool and you’ll pass these:

They're sacrificial offerings to be burnt as part of a Mother Goddess ceremony.

(If I made something as awesome as this, I would not allow anyone to set it on fire. Given the choice between eternal wealth and prosperity, and keeping a large, paper elephant in my loungeroom, I would choose the elephant.)

Or you’ll meet your friend in the park for a sandwich and discover this:

That the park has been turned over to marquees, stages and loudspeakers to mark World Milk Day. I hope you didn’t forget to celebrate World Milk Day.

Look! Milky Sydney Opera House:

This blog post was going to be about the wonder, the excitement and the otherworldliness of living and travelling in exotic places. The strange days, indeed.

And then I said, “Tabitha! Get a hold of yourself! Doesn’t that contradict one of your most firmly-held life philosophies? The one that says it’s unimaginative bunkum to equate the exotic with the noteworthy? That if you’re curious enough, you’ll find the most wonderful things right under your nose?”

“Bugger me sideways, Tabitha! You’re right!” I said.

“In fact, didn’t you used to write a whole blog dedicated to opening your eyes, appreciating your own neighbourhood, and seeing the beautiful in the familiar?”

“Oh Tabitha, it must be hard being so right all the time”, I said. “By celebrating the spectacular and the extraordinary, I’m overlooking the splendour of the little, everyday things. And I love the little, everyday things! I mean, not every day can be World Milk Day, can it?”

And with that dressing down, I picked up my camera and went off to the market to buy a kilo of tomatoes, following the same route I do every day.

I noticed for the first time, that people use the hollows in the concrete telegraph poles to store things:

I saw still lifes:

This one is Morandi, when he graduated from bottles to saucepans:

I saw an office being renovated, and I felt a little pang for the old, unwanted things:

But then I wondered how many people in the world have a photo of computer towers with a tree stump (according to my Google image search: none), and I felt pleased with myself.

And then I thought of this shop I had just passed:

And remembered that nothing is unwanted in Vietnam.

And while gloomily reflecting on how criminal it is that these beautiful old tiles will be replaced with sparkly faux-granite atrocities, I noticed that paper aeroplane lying there, and I suddenly felt only positive things about all of humanity:

I pondered how concertina grills are somehow more 3D than everything else in the world:

I noticed that half of this window has been intertwined… with twine:

I was satisfied in a way I haven’t been since in France when I saw a hedgehog… in a hedge.

I looked up:

I saw buildings I never even knew were there:

I guess I've always been too focused on scanning the street for my favoured flower- and fruit-sellers to notice them.

But I saw the sellers too:

It seemed this could be an advertisement for washing powder. Tide: Making your chrysanthemums blindingly yellow.

I noticed for the first time that practically on my doorstep I could buy a fighting fish if I wanted to:

Or a Ming vase:

If anyone's stuck for gift ideas, I would like the first one on the second shelf. So iridescent!

I turned around from looking at a fish in a jar, and I saw a cat in a box:

The cat’s owner noticed that I was photographing it, so came rushing over, heaved it out of the box and preened at its face to make sure it looked its best for me:

She then stood behind me while I took this photograph, clicking her fingers to make the cat look at the camera:

I don’t know how to say “Work it, baby” in Vietnamese, but she was probably saying that too.

I ambled home with my tomatoes, Vietnam’s Proudest Cat Owner leaving me with a smile on my face. When I got to our door, I noticed that the three apartments in our building have three different species of doorbell:

For the sheer joy of it I rang ours, even though I knew no-one was home.