If you’ve ever have the desire to stand agog on a street corner, literally agog, come to Ho Chi Minh City and witness the motorbike traffic. For a sample, view: Bikes on Street Corner Then, venture across the street. The first time, you cross with the same faith and fear as with your first parachute jump. Newbies usually follow along behind a native, but after a while, you brave it on your own. The key is to walk slowly, making eye contact, so that the drivers know you see them and won’t make unexpected moves as they swerve around you…at speed. HCMC is a city of close to nine million (some say), and motorbike population is close to half that.
Three million motorbikes! Motorbikes everywhere! Endless swarms, hundreds upon hundreds of them, flow down the streets, like water currents in a mountain stream. Out of control? No. They actually work like a complex self-organizing system, obeying an inscrutable set of rules. U-turning, bumping up onto sidewalks, coming in eddies from all directions at once is part of it all. Trucks, buses, cars, push carts, bicycles, and various weird motorized delivery vehicles join in the flow. Oh, and the native pedestrians casually ford the busiest streams. At intersections without lights and round-abouts, great intermingling and transient flow disturbances occur, yet resolve.
There are the sidewalk riders, too, which is OK when you see them coming toward you. However, these days, motorbikes generally have four-cycle engines, not the popping two-cycle ones, and are well-muffled; so, they can purr up behind you on the sidewalk and pass without warning, scaring you out of your wits. Claude’s expression, “stealth mode,” comes to mind. You understand full well what would happen if you stepped in the way of a sidewalk stealth rider. Then, there are the counter-current gutter riders. They travel the gutters from the wrong direction. As you look toward the oncoming traffic, preparing to step out into the street, a gutter rider is suddenly upon you from the opposite direction. These kinds of unexpected riders scare me most.
You might assume there are thousands of collisions; yet the accidents are diminishing few percentage-wise. Fortunately, we have only been hit by a bicycle that was trying to run a light.
Judy and I compare the motorbike traffic to swarms of skiers on cat paths at Snowbird, gliding along across other paths and swooshing finally from every direction toward a lift. Like skiers, riders don’t want to hit you, and you don’t want to get hit, so it all works out. We have come to believe also that the motorbikes grow into personal extensions of Saigonese riders, comparable to how ice skates are to hockey players or skis to skiers. They ride, lurch, stop, and dodge in the traffic just as easily as we walk through crowds. Really, riding here is comparable to leaving a stadium on foot through a huge crowd after a big game. It’s that normal.
When it rains, as it did for the first six weeks, riders just slip on their ponchos, flip them back over the family or second rider and continue along the streets without much change in speed. In Hoi An, in the midst of biblical deluges, the riders glided along along flooded streets up to their flip-flops in water.. So, ponchos plastered against themselves, riders came at us through mist and rain, casting high sprays to either side of their bikes.
All of this melange is no big deal for those who were suckled on bikes as infants and grew up sandwiched between mom and pop. It’s natural to them; they have been on bikes their whole lives. Sometimes, four riders sit packed on a bike, if the children are small enough. We saw a great sight last week: a child, riding on on her mother’s lap, one elbow on the handle bar, looking as bored and world-weary as a model on a catwalk. Will we ever get home, Mom? Then, there was the tiny baby content with its bottle riding in mommie’s lap. Another sight? What about an infant seat that hangs between a parent’s legs? Or a child seat on bamboo legs that stand freely on the floor board? Or a rear-view mirror adjusted so that two girls can look at each other while talking as they ride along? Foreigner bikers, even experienced ones, don’t adapt rapidly or well. It’s not instinctual for them.
All said and done, though, the bike culture is very efficient space-wise. At five o’clock, most streets are packed with bikes, more than fifty per twenty yards at a red light, we estimate, and with the same numbers on the opposite side, while a dense cloud of other riders passes through the intersection. How far do you think that many of cars would string out! For many blocks, probably. And there is very little pollution: the air is pristine compared to BKK’s; yet most riders wear masks.
Head injuries are down 50% since the government mandated helmets last year. One neurosurgeon complained that his practice was falling off. Where helmets are obligatory but bland and featureless, some innate sense of fashion has given women’s helmets a flair. They use cloth (or maybe just large hats) to make helmets look like sun hats with imaginative color schemes, crinkly brims, and sometimes with matching jackets. They look pretty cool, these women with their long gloves and masks beneath these helmets. Men settle for baseball batter-cap-like ones, or ones painted in jungle green camouflage to match their cargo pants.
Remember, the old romance movies where couples spent evenings speeding around fountains in Rome on Italian scooters? Well, here in HCMC, you occasionally glimpse a babe, riding sidesaddle behind some dude, legs crossed, calf, short black skirt mid-thigh, high high-heels, black hair in the wind falling from beneath decorative helmet, cigarette at fingertips, insouciant to the max. You’ve got the picture.
Tags: Vietnam
We are lucky to be here in Vietnam as older travelers. By custom, the Vietnamese honor people older than themselves, even those, such as our presenile selves, who are proceeding blissfully into the future. They are known also for overwhelming hospitality. We have experienced these expressions in spades and so have felt honored and welcomed beyond any expectation. We are amazed by it all.
Take Dr. Nho, the professor, mind you, who is a decade younger than I am. He and his family—wife, daughter, and son— have taken us out almost weekly to restaurants where the food is authentically Vietnamese and unmistakably excellent. Two of the restaurants were located deep in Chinatown, another in the “New City” across the river, and the others scattered about in our district. He finally relented and let us take him out: we had great pleasure of taking him and his family to dinner on evening of his birthday.
And he presents us with unexpected gifts. First, it was a half dozen mangoes, next two bottles of French wine, and after I admired the strong Vietnamese drip coffee, he arrived with a coffee press and half kilo of fine-grind coffee from the central highlands. About two weeks later, he brought a second blend for consideration; so, I’m sitting here with almost 1 kilo of coffee and the jitters! Also, at first, he insisted on having one of the neurosurgeons pick us up and bring us home from the hospital, at a huge imposition on their time. Our appeals to allow us to travel by taxi went unheard until, we think, the doctors threatened mutiny. So, he purchased a pile of taxi vouchers for us to use back and forth to the hospital. We take motorbike taxis only rarely.
Tags: Vietnam
On Sunday, Dr. Nho and his family, picked us up for a “broken rice” breakfast. Breakfast was in a run-down-looking, open-air, pavilion-like, restaurant that you couldn’t find without knowing it was there. But, we swayed and bumped across construction ruts out near the harbor and entered a packed parking lot. The restaurant seems to be one of those those places known to the cognoscenti, like the old farmhouse restaurant, where everybody in Oxford goes. A high spirited former patient, from whom Dr. Nho had completely delivered a left frontal meningioma, met the Nhos there.
At first glance, the breakfast looked modest: a scoop of white “broken rice” on a simple white plate was capped to one side with thin slivers of sautéed onions and a slice of fried pork was on the top. Unfamiliar spicy flavors made the combination work. There was also a piece of bread that contained vegetables, maybe eggplant. Some Vietnamese tea and Vietnamese drip coffee filled the menu out. It was terrific, cost almost nothing, and worth writing home about, as you see.
Tags: Vietnam
While you were stirring around this morning to go vote, it was last night for us. We were reminiscing about our long string of new, exciting, and improbable experiences here in Vietnam. I almost feel guilty about having such fun and great good fortune in general. Last weekend’s events are an example, as will be next weekend’s. For, this coming weekend, we are going to Nha Trang to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. Wow, forty years!
On Saturday, around noon, we went out with Co Phuc, our Vietnamese language teacher, who had invited us to visit a famous traditional medicine museum. First we went to a Vietnamese restaurant and enjoyed a lunch of sautéed pumpkin blossoms, a very common tofu bowl slow cooked with green onions, garlic and herbs, a squid and mixed-vegetable dish, and a wonderful soup. How fine! 
After lunch, we taxied over to the museum, which is housed in an authentic old, five-story wooden house. The museum’s collection builds up across 2000-years, and has some truly ancient artifacts. It’s a collection put together as only true collectors can do. We saw the original writings of the father of Vietnamese medicine, a famous follower, and the father of Vietnamese acupuncture and his illustrations. We saw rows upon row of bottles containing concoctions from plants and animal parts. All the old tools, boilers, bottles and ceramic fermentation jugs (yuk!) were on display. The guide dressed me up in a period hat and gown, and Judy photographed me working with herbs and a grinder. 
The museum is now supported by a modern traditional-medicine company, whose products are sold in tea bags at the gift shop.
So as to make informed purchases, Judy and I underwent examinations by a traditional doctor. She just felt our pulses, said I had a bad knee and needed to do something about my shoulder. Right on target, so far. She worried, too, about my cholesterol, little personal, I thought, and she couldn’t be right about everything. I bought several boxes of teabags of medications for equanimity and blood pressure reduction. They contain a famed red fungus, anciently recognized as highly potent. The meds cost next to nothing. Oh, and I did buy some anti-cholesterol teabags, just in case. The doctor thought Judy might have some thyroid trouble. Could she noticed the scar on Judy’s neck?
The museum was very interesting, and the experience of exam by a traditional doctor was our first, excluding some acupuncture treatments in Malaysia six years ago. Great afternoon.
Tags: Vietnam
I know we are all celebrating this magnificent moment. I hope today’s spirit of unity will continue and that we will move forward now as Americans, unqualified by categories, not black Americans, Mexican Americans, etc. but American Americans, a people, unified. Mom and I are terrifically proud to have seen civil rights seeds sewn in the ’60s grow finally to fruition. This election is truly a cause for celebration. Olivia, thanks for sending our absentee ballots so we could take part in it all.
We are thrilled with warmth and pride about being Americans, today’s election, and what we hope it means.
We have now been in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon, for almost exactly one week. Our impressions are currently mixed as we compare Vietnam with Thailand. We have been trying to decide how to count — or discount — the familiarity quotient that we have developed with Thailand and the Thai language over the last 5 years. So far we think that Thailand is easier for foreigners than is Vietnam.
That being said however, we do know for a fact that the Vietnamese people are VERY friendly and try VERY hard to be VERY helpful. The problem for us currently is that there are not as many people here who speak a fair amount of English as there are in Thailand. AND, the Vietnamese language is VERY difficult and we know essentially ZERO Vietnamese. But, we enrolled and started today, the 24th, in a language school (a 10 minute walk from our apartment, yea!!) to study Vietnamese. So, that should help some. The two of us have a class together with a terrific teacher. We’ll let you know about any progress we might make.
On the definitely plus side, Ira and I are settled. We have found a reasonably priced apartment for the duration of our stay in a neat sort of alley in a great location. Included with the rent for our apartment is high speed internet (as good as at home) and 3xweekly cleaning and laundry (better than at home ;>) ). The building is charming and a bit funky with 5 tenants in all, one each per narrow floor. We are also within walking distance of a neighborhood with lots of restaurant and bar action. As we start to learn some Vietnamese, this will be a great place to practice as none of the people who manage and work in this building, except for one woman in the office, speak any English. Right now, we just make gestures and draw pictures (thank goodness Ira is good at sketching — you should have seen his toilet plunger).
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When I said that the building is narrow, I really meant it — like 13 feet. In Vietnam, taxes on a house are based on the number of linear feet the house runs along the street. So, the name of the game is “tall, skinny, and deep”.
Dr. Nho, Ira’s medical contact and our sponsor for this extended stay, is as warm and lovely as always. When we actually arrived, he was in the USA. Weird, huh?!! But he is back now and is very interested in showing us his city and the immediate surroundings. We are also in the process of getting things set up with him.
Travel plans are still shaping up. Our microbiologist friend Nigel who lives in Thailand is celebrating his 50th birthday in October, so Ira and I are planning to go to the Kingdom for 5 days to add our wishes to those of others and to see old friends.
We are also toying with the idea of going to Hue and Hoi An the weekend of Oct 3rd. That area is supposed to be very nice and we haven’t been there yet.
Tags: Vietnam
We’re just back from a fine week of vacation, first for a few days in Hua Hin, home of the famous Nigel and then to Saigon and Nha Trang.
In Hua Hin, Nigel survived a near catastrophe. A coconut fell from thirty feet above him, grazed his glasses and knocking them to the sidewalk, lacerating his chin and scraping his chest and abdomen. A brisk wind had just blown up, apparently causing the bombardment. If Nigel had been three inches further down the street, the coconut would have caved in his head, probably broken his neck, and he would now be either six feet under or a few bone chips, some ashes and CO2. We celebrated his good luck that night.
The next day, we went back to BKK to spend the night and headed off to Vietnam early the next morning. It is almost impossible to describe the courtesy and magnitude of our welcome by the neurosurgeons there, so we’ll have to tell you about it when we get back.
After three days in Saigon, we went up to Nha Trang for another three. The Nha Trang beach is the most beautiful and least crowded we have ever seen, and the beach-front restaurants were fabulous. We saw the ladies cooking lobster and fish on the beach and offering massage and manicures that Olivia and MC described. Those two must have made a huge impression during their visit, for we also discovered the Olivia restaurant seen in the attached photo. Cecile and Gabe would have loved the beach fun.
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Tags: Thailand
Things are beginning to wind things down here as the hot season approaches. School closes formally next Friday. Judy’s exams are over, and she’s been working hard to finagle her grade books, as every student—whatever their academic grade—must pass: It’s the Thai way. My final is tomorrow. So, this week and next we say good-bye to our group of friends here in KK and particularly those at our school. Between the close of school and our departure on April 8 we have some fabulous plans.
First, we are going to Hua Hin, a gulf coast town where the king keeps a formal residence, to visit our friend Nigel, the renowned fungus scientist and author of the dark novel that Judy, Olivia and I have read. He and Rung, his female partner of 15 years, own property there that they are beginning to develop, envisioning a group of Thai houses around a lake. We thought seriously of building a vacation place there on their property ourselves, but decided it would be a bit too far in the future for people our age. With the recent debauching of the dollar, a nice little cottage in Hua Hin would have been a good investment. Ah well …
On March 10, we go from Hua Hin to Vietnam. We’ll spend a few days checking out Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) as a place to live for a few months next fall. I have met with Dr. Nho, the head of Neurosurgery at the major hospital there, on several occasions and he is interested in having a volunteer to work with him. We also have an American ex-pat acquaintance in Saigon who is well-connected (she’s a lawyer, businesswoman, and part owner of a trendy restaurant) and are hoping to get advice from her also.
We will then go to Nha Trang for some sightseeing and more beach time. Nha Trang is supposed to be beautiful. We return to Thailand March 16.
Shortly after that, on March 21, our friend, Mary Jalonick, is coming to visit and tour. Mary will be in Thailand until March 31 and we are looking forward to traveling with her. We have really enjoyed visits from Olivia and Aaron, Gene, Susan, and Ginia, Peter and Robyn Heilbrun, Bill and Sherry May, and Karen Click. Mary will leave just over a week before we head back to Dallas ourselves on April 8. And our BKK friend, Ray Pearce. We will fill those days with a trip to Phuket and a visit to Bangkok to see all our friends there one more time.
After that, we’re off for home.
Judy and I have made many friends and some close acquaintances in Khon Kaen. So, we’ve been having farewell evening meals with different folks and this week is booked, too. We recently hosted a good-bye cocktail (actually beer) party for all the English Program teachers at a very sunny bar/restaurant that one of our teachers partly owns. Next week, the head of our English Program is hosting a dinner in our honor at a Thai restaurant.
Before we leave, we’ll be attending our fifth wedding, this of a young, convivial British man and his Thai fiancée. Three of the weddings we have attended were those of Thai couples and two of Thai-Western couples. One ceremony was Thai Catholic, one Thai Protestant, one Chinese, and the other two Buddhist: quite a mix!! All lovely. There is also always a gala evening party, some larger than others. The most spectacular of these for us was a seated dinner for 4,500 people – no joke!! That one was the party of the son of the owner of our hotel. And I thought some of the Dallas weddings were over the top!
We have been to only one funeral, however. It too was lovely and very different from what we are used to in the West.
Appropriately enough, our last event is Khon Kaen will be with Duncan, our first friend and acquaintance in KK. Duncan is the proprietor of Leo’s bar and he is going to throw a going away happy hour for us, with Thai food and snacks. So it seems this jam-packed year is coming to an end.
Tags: Thailand
Over the past weekend Judy and I attended a wedding and reception that bordered on the regal. We were flattered to be invited by the owner of this hotel. This family is apparently among the most influential and wealthy families around here. Their eldest son–an assistant to an important local official, maybe the Mayor. We never got it straight–married a local judge who whose social standing probably isn’t too shabby either. The wedding was a mixed Chinese and Thai ceremony, of which we saw the Chinese part which began at 6:30 AM Friday but had to go to school before the Thai part started. The ceremony was in a large hall in the hotel, which seated, we estimate, about 300 guests. An MC explained the what was happening. The ceremony seemed to boil down down to affirmations about food, family,
fortune (as in treasure; much gold on the stage) and future. It seemed to be mostly about the nuts and bolts of putting two individuals and their families together. There was nothing religious about the Chinese part.
That evening, the wedding reception took place the convention center on the university campus. Two thousand five hundred of the guests invited by the families filled the hall and enjoyed a multi-course dinner with drinks. Om the expanse of the lawn outside the hall, 1,500 others, factory workers, city employees, hotel employees and others who apparently came from the district the son or his party represents, also dined before a stage and huge TV screens and a band.
As the guests dined on this sumptuous occasion, the bride and groom strolled down a decoratively-lighted 30 yard red carpet and took to the stage, where they submitted to questions from an MC. This was a mixture of humor and sentiment. The bride and groom soon left the hall stage for an appearance on the outdoor stage where they were again introduced and MC’d. For all the world, that looked like a regal appearance. We could watch it on huge convention type monitors, but watch almost parenthetically, because a popular Thai crooner took our stage and emoted above his keyboard and sang familiar love songs
that the crowd loved. Then a couple of guitar payer-singers performed. At the end of the evening, the bride and groom returned to our stage with their families and expressed their heartfelt sentiment to their families and, get this, thanked the audience for coming!
Thanked us for coming! Thanked us for coming to witness the wedding that makes all Dallas weddings look modest!
Yesterday, we went to a small wedding of a Thai fiend/acquaintance that we like a lot. We arrived just after the monks had chanted about this propitious occasion. Anyhow our friend Veena was marrying an Englishman, Allen, from New Castle, whom we really liked. Theirs was a match made in cyberspace. Allen says he had just purchased his first computer and had just powered up and there, on IE, was Veena in a chat session. Allen was smitten. He figured out how to chat and began regular chats with Veena; he later visited Veena in Thailand a couple of times; and on this his third visit moved here and they married. It was a small Thai wedding in her home . After a meal, the ceremony began with a yodeler leading the guests into the house. It was a family-oriented affair, the monks having left, in which the
couple sat on the floor before a large decorative item. The slightly inebriated grandmother spoke ceremonial words, and guests tied good-luck strings about the couples’ wrists. They then went upstairs with the family and kissed on a bed covered with rose petals. It was
really a fun occasion.
At that wedding we also met another couple who had met on the Internet who are getting married soon in Australia.
We are going to another wedding in BKK soon, the Voravut’s daughter. The Voravuts are catholic.
Wow! Three weddings in a row. I’m about to get wedding fatigue, but am sure it’s better than funeral fatigue. Fifty members of my high school class have passed on. One of my favorite high school friends died of a stroke a week after the reunion, possibly form the shock of
seeing his old classmates these fifty years later, unpersuaded by our assertions that we, the class of ’57 to a person, still look pretty good.
Tags: Thailand
Every year in Thai schools they have what’s known as Wai Khruu Day. This is a day for students to pay respect to and thank their teachers for working to educate them. A lovely concept, isn’t it?
The “wai” is the traditional gesture of respect that the Thai people make to each other. Basically, to make a wai, you press your palms together with the thumbs pointing towards and at about the level of your heart. There are, of course, different levels of how high or low you put your palms and whether you sort of bow or not and who wais first. These are determined by the status of the two people. For example, children make very deep wais to adults, etc.
I copied the excerpt below from a website:
At the start of every academic year, students all over Thailand take part in an elaborate ceremony called Wai Kru. They do this partly to thank their teachers for teaching them well in the past, but also in order to gain merit and good fortune for the future. The ceremony often starts with the principal lighting candles and incense sticks and paying homage to the Buddha image. Prayers are then read by senior students. Then everyone takes a vow to be loyal to the nation, religion and king, to be good pupils, to behave themselves, and to obey the school rules. Students from every class then come forward with gifts of decorative flowers for their teachers.
At our school, it was very much like this except, since Khon Kaen Wittayayon is so big (the whole school is around 4500 students), there were only representatives from each class at the main ceremony. We then went to our particular homerooms and had another small ceremony with our own students.
I have attached a few pictures of Ira and me and/or our students. The M4 and M5 students are some of my students and the M2 students are some of Ira’s. Chai is the director of our program.
Tags: Thailand