HOINH TO WYOMINF

同益街市中醫

2011-08-23T17:37:00.010-05:00

I have been to many Asian markets in my time, but Tung Yick Market in the New Territories has got to be one of the most photogenic. You'd think the visual appeal of raw fish on ice would wear off after a while, and it does; but then there are brains and toads. And only one guy yelled and waved his cleaver at us.

T卹

2011-08-21T20:31:00.010-05:00

Back in the bad old 90s, when the Discount Den was still a trading concern, my friend Tim made the pithy observation that stupid t-shirts make the world go 'round. Nowhere is this truer than in Hong Kong, where it is impossible to go twenty yards without seeing an ageing Chinese man proudly displaying a garment emblazoned with slogans like "U GUT I GUT" or "FVCK SCHOOL". If in Vietnam I wished for a cameraman to document the crazy things one sees being transported by motorbike, here I wished I could plant myself at any random street corner with a zoom lens and a lack of concern for other people's privacy.

Grammatically the Hong Kong shirts run the gamut from Engrish to just plain infelicitous, with a healthy lack of disregard for niceties like spelling or semantic content. I managed to snap a few, but they just come and go so fast, by the time you process it, they're down the street already.

Only part of this is nominally in English...but which part???

Excuse me?

The Cheung Chau Motherlode of Stupid Hats. So...much...stupid!

This is really my favorite, truly the pinnacle of some kind of art form.

星光大道

2011-08-20T20:25:00.037-05:00

Saturday Morgan and I excused ourselves after lunch (I think?) and headed over to Tsim Sha Tsui to wander along the Avenue of Stars and marvel at the skyline.

The Avenue is sort of like the HK equivalent to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, except you've never heard of any of the names on the stars. Actually that's not true, I did find a few old friends here and there.

I'm Tsui Hark. I'm a film director.

We also discovered a chipper character by the name of Mcdull.

Everyone wants to touch your snout when you're Mcdull.

Apparently Mcdull is a personality of some reknown.

Also, on our way back to the train we happened upon an extremely insistent Coke machine.

昂坪

2011-08-19T23:14:00.029-05:00

Friday we had a half-day at ICPhS, so after lunch Alan took a group of us out to Lantau Island to Ngong Ping 360, where getting there is half the fun.

The main draw is the massive buddha, one of seven which points...somewhere important. (Beijing?)

The views from said buddha are impressive, there can be no doubt.

Turns out it gets bigger as you get closer:

蟾臉

2011-08-18T22:47:00.023-05:00

On Thursday Alan took us out to eat. It was supposed to be 'street food' but seemed awfully sanitary by Southeast Asian standards. Still, the food was pretty good.

Razor clams.

Some kind of mantis shrimp, or squilla as the menu would have it.

Tasty, but the carapace is razor-sharp.

Afterwards, we went out for dessert. I had some kind of doughy mango-flavored cake, while Morgan tried to decide between custard with bird's nest and custard with bird's nest and toad gland. He elected to just stick with the bird's nest, but in my photo-happy state I happened to capture his expression before, during, and after it was explained to him exactly what was in his custard.

Anticipation, enjoyment, shock, denial, resignation: the 5 stages of eating saliva.

香港

2011-08-16T17:10:00.022-05:00

Although I like to think of myself as something of an Asia vet, in point of fact my experience is rather limited. In any event, it proved insufficient to prepare me for the sheer scale of Hong Kong. While admittedly lacking the 15-minutes-into-the-future quality of Tokyo, it's safe to say that Ridley Scott's conception of LA circa 2019 is not too far off.

Really, the only difference is the flying car.

Hanoi has history; Phnom Penh enjoys a certain languor. Hong Kong is simply massive. It's like Manhattan if it were located in Vancouver Bay and filled with Chinese people. Oh, wait.

In fact, both San Francisco and Vancouver make much more sense in light of Hong Kong. It's not just those cities' large HK expat populations, it's why they fled to those locations in the run-up to the 1997 handover. Harbours and hills. And more hills.

It looks flat until you get to the Peak, but it's really a mass of terraces.

Like everything else here, the conference venue is massive, a fact we become well acquainted with on the first day when we are refused entry on account of a surprise visit from a mainland Vice-Premier or some such. After several laps around trying to find a security guard that will let us in, we are eventually granted access thanks to several of us having registered the day before.

Walking outside in HK is not recommended. It's not because it's hotter than anywhere else in subtropical Asia, but more because it's impossible to simultaneously dress for the outside temps (35℃) and the inside temps (18℃). If you bring a jacket, it's soaked after 30 seconds, but without one, sweat icicles form as soon as you step indoors. In Vietnam, the A/C is usually only turned on when white people show up; in HK every business has it going full blast, usually with the front doors wide open. Even the buses are like mobile meat lockers. Hong Kong: not into moderation.

Tạm biệt

2011-08-15T16:48:00.037-05:00

My final day in Hanoi was predictably hectic. In the morning I headed over to Long Biên to meet with thầy Lợi. I was early, so I spent some time roaming around the alleys and byways, which see rather less traffic compared to other parts of the city.

After some light linguistics banter, Lợi saddles me up with books and longans and I head off to MICA to bid the assembled farewell. Following a quick lunch with Phương it's off to the Institute of Lexicography to watch Mark Alves try and tell lexicographers about WALS. Lợi introduces me to the editor of the in-house journal Từ điển học và bách khoa thư who gives me a few sample issues and encourages me to submit translated articles for the Vietnamese market. You know you've got a publication with a high impact factor when the back cover is an ad for a cellphone company.

After returning my motorbike and picking up a few gifts, I grab a final bowl of bún bò nam bộ and repair to the nearest bia hơi with a volume of Vietnamese linguistic reprints. My studiousness attracts the attention of a Swedish-educated English teacher, who quotes long passages of incomprehensible poetry at me, or maybe he's just making it all up as he goes along, don't the Russians do this kind of thing with Pushkin? Sadly I must cut this encounter short, tomorrow Marc, Hiện and I are off to Hong Kong at a rather inhumanely early hour, mustn't be late.

Sản xuất ở Hà Nội

2011-08-14T23:05:00.028-05:00

I had really meant to try more new places this time, but old habits die hard. Despite staying just around the corner from Hàng Mạnh, I felt the inexorable pull of Mai Hắc Đế and its gauntlet of bún chả vendors.

Prices have gone up.

Bún chả as can only be had in Hanoi.

Nem cua bể.

Sadly, my favorite bún riêu joint on Thi Sách has been demolished, no doubt to make way for a new high-rise or karaoke bar. The place across the street is tasty, no doubt, but seems to be missing a certain something I can't quite put my finger on.

Bún riêu thập cẩm.

Nông thôn

2011-08-13T21:48:00.016-05:00

Mathias and Huyền took me down the world's crummiest roads to the house they are building out in Lam Cốt in Tân Yên district, Bắc Giang province. It is literally in the middle of nowhere. Very peaceful.

Mathias takes me out for a tour of the surrounding rice fields, which are interspersed with various tombs; apparently you can't move them, so you just sort of plant around them.

The fields are littered with what appear to be pieces of oversized bubble-wrap. Apparently this is the technology transforming modern rice planting: soon, hunched-over geriatric Vietnamese may be a thing of the past.

After spending the better part of an hour sloshing through the mud, we return in time for lunch with the neighbors, who rib Mathias for being in Vietnam 7 years yet still not able to understand them. Whilst they busy themselves with details of marble tiles and door frames, I pass out in a hammock and spend some time conversing with a 4-year-old who asks me if I live in "Hà Lội" and advises me to learn English.

After returning from the sticks I went for a tasty chả cá and called it a night.

Cảnh sát

2011-08-12T22:33:00.025-05:00

As it is the middle of the 7th month of the lunar calendar (or something) it is an auspicious time of year, and the streets of Hanoi are thick with smoke from the burning of vàng mã. After meeting Mathias for phở and nước ép, I head over to MICA to try my hand at static palatography. The linguograms work ok, but it's very hard to see what's going on with place of articulation; there just isn't enough charcoal coming off. Perhaps the cocoa I mixed it with is to blame?

I guess that's alveolar?
Defeated, I console myself with the realization that what I am about to publish on the topic is wrong, and alert the editors, after which we briefly repair to the bia hơi. After dinner with Hiện, Marc, Phương, and Phương's German friend Mathias, we head over to a café near the church to witness a hilarious game of cat-and-mouse played by the police and the café owners, who can be levied a stiff fine for having patrons spilling out all over the sidewalk, so our tea-drinking is periodically interrupted by cries of "cảnh sát!" at which point everyone must leap up and stand around lamely whilst the proprietress tries to gather up all her plastic stools before the cops nab them. Good fun.

On my way back down the ngõ, I happen upon Bracat and a fan.

You can't tell now, but....

BRACAT IS FIXING YOU WITH A BALEFUL GLARE

Quê hương Hà Nội

2011-08-11T21:33:00.001-05:00

I don't care what everyone else says, I like Hanoi, it is like coming home. However I could do without the 30% inflation. A perpetual construction project as long as I have been coming here, the pace seems to have doubled in my absence as the development of Greater Hanoi continues unabated.

Those weren't there, before.
Yesterday after checking into my hotel, I immediately rented a motorbike and headed back down to my old 'hood. Things done changed…chợ Mơ is gone, to be replaced by the multi-storey Chợ Mơ Shopping Center. My favourite bia hơi has been replaced by a seafood restaurant. I settle for a consolation prize of mì xào dòn at a place across from Reunification Park, then bike out to see Uncle Ho, whose mausoleum grounds are always a peaceful respite from the usual bustle of Hanoi.

This morning I stopped by MICA, who have moved into a gigantic new building across the street from the main campus. After catching up with Khoa, Sơn, Đặt and Diệp, I have lunch with Marc and we go to hear Mark Alves talk about Sino-Vietnamese historical linguistics at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Mark raises much nationalist ire by arguing that many common Vietnamese words are transparently Chinese (this is by no means a radical suggestion, and Mark is by no means the first person to point it out). Later, the ranter gives me a copy of his book, why am I not entirely sure, perhaps because I just happened to be in the room at the time.

As we shuffle out, I am told by the female staff and students that if my Vietnamese is ever to become as good as Marc's, I need to get myself a Vietnamese wife, as he did. Pointing out to them that I already have a wife does not seem to make much of a difference, after all, một lúc một vợ, đúng không?

Quay lại

2011-08-08T10:45:00.057-05:00

Sunday morning Giang headed off for further work in the delta, and I boarded the Mai Linh back to HCMC.

The trip was largely uneventful, though the volume of the Vietnamese musical stand-up comedy DVDs made it somewhat difficult to concentrate on work.

It just goes on like this.

Getting back from the bus station was a bit of a trial: I assumed I could just take a city bus as I had on our outbound trip, but apparently at 7pm on a Sunday evening all the city buses stop running, or at least stop accepting passengers, or is it only foreign passengers? All very difficult to say. I eventually capitulate and take a cab that costs more than my bus ticket from the delta.

For various reasons I decided it would be easiest to stay in Saigon's "backpacker district" Pham Ngữ Lão for the last few days I am in town. It is even more horrific than I dared imagine, although the hotel is perfectly cromulent.

I pass my final days in the Dirty South working on a grant proposal and trying as many varieties of chè as I can find.

Chè nhãn và sen (longan and lotus seeds). Beer not included.

Rạch Giá

2011-08-06T23:13:00.001-05:00

Now unable to sleep past 6am, I awaken at the first hint of light and content myself with organising data until Giang rouses himself. Rather than spend another day enjoying the dubious pleasures of Giồng Riềng, we have elected to head to the nearby coastal city of Rạch Giá for an evening of much-needed R&R. After finding a suitable hotel, we head out to find some lunch and stare at the sea.

Phú Quốc island off the coast of Rạch Giá.

Trapped for a few hours by a heavy downpour, we head back to the hotel to check in, where I promptly break the key off in the door handle. Giang attempts to rent a xe máy for the afternoon, but the chủ wants an exorbitant sum for a mere 4 hours, so after so angry fussing we head off on foot.

yyyyyup.

After a few hours of these shenanigans, we happen upon a seafood cafe that seems reasonably well-populated and set about sampling the wares.

These sò are either clams or oysters, I can't really tell, they're like clams with tentacles?

These guys are also sò but much more clearly clam-like, and served in tamarind sauce, mmm.

Goose, anyone?

Giang ends up having to translate for a French family and a massive posse of Spaniards who can't seem to work out what they have in their lẩu.

Giồng Riềng 4

2011-08-05T23:44:00.002-05:00

Things That Make You Hate Fieldwork: the conspicuous absence of recognisable toilets; waking up at 3am unable to sleep due to drinking things with ice made from Mekong Delta water.

A rather sanitary exemplar of its type.

Things That Make You Love Fieldwork: karaoke with the chủ tịch and his entourage at 4 in the afternoon; eels.

You think there aren't karaoke machines in there, but there are.

The previous night could best be described as "sleepless". At some point the management elected to cut power to the A/C, so it was never really clear if I was actually feverish or just stewing in my own juices. No matter, after several hours of entertaining fantasies of telling Giang to head to the chùa on his own I dutifully roused myself at the first sign of dawn. Giang asked if I was khoẻ, but I was feeling pretty far from khoẻ at this point; food was not in my immediate future. Nevertheless, I purchased some canned coffee and something breadlike at the local bookstore for possible future consumption.

On our daily trip to the UBND to get shuttled out to the chùa, Giang's shoes well and truly disintegrated, so we stopped at the chợ to find him a new pair of "GUCCI" sandals. After that it was back out to the sticks, where we made haste setting up, as (a) we had to re-run many of the folks from the previous day, Giang having misinterpreted my instructions w/r/t the wordlist and (b) our window of working time was limited, on account of the monk's early lunch hour. Things went reasonably smoothly, although the crowd of onlookers in the "perception booth" began to swell to what at times seemed like half of the village.

Don't you people have to be somewhere?

Around noon we managed to finish up and convince Trung et al. that we weren't up for another afternoon of drinking (and subsidising everyone else's drinking of) moonshine, on account of my poor health, natch. We (Giang, myself, Trung, and our police escort) managed to scuttle out with data from an additional 8 subjects, many of them under the age of 40 even, huzzah! And as a bonus, my laptops now carry with them the accumulated grime of three hundred summers spent tilling the rice fields of Kiên Giang.

After lunch we are taken back to the UBND of the xã to run our Vietnamese controls. Given that all of these subjects had seen a computer at least once in their lives, and were literate in Vietnamese to boot, things moved along at what seemed like lightening speed. One young man is extremely excited to discover that I live in Scotland and immediately begins quizzing me on the status of every UK footballer imaginable, none of whom I am familiar with, of course. The girls titter at my every utterance, because it is incomprehensible or because I have said something hilarious I am never sure. As the afternoon wears on Trung becomes more and more agitated, clearly aching to get out of here and drink some more sraa.

SERIOUS BUSINESS

At this point we are faced with a decision: we can either pay all of the Vietnamese participants, or we can invite some subset of our welcoming party out for a drink. Since in all likelihood we have to do the latter anyways, I am treated to the most authenticate Vietnamese experience imaginable, as it's off to a karaoke joint (run by the chủ tịch's wife, funny how that works) for a seemingly endless afternoon of beer, fruit, fish, beer, noodles, fruit, beer, pig intestines, and round after round of karaoke, the Vietnamese (nay, Asians in general) love this kind of thing, I have no idea why exactly, but eventually I reach the point of lucid inebriation whereby I am coaxed into taking the microphone and singing along to Vietnamese songs I have never heard, much to the delight of the assembled masses. Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, this type of thing comprises about 90% of what fieldwork actually is; the building of relationships, the shaking of hands, the endless toasts. The actual business of gathering data is almost an afterthought. It makes a certain sort of sense, but only just.

After several hours of these shenanigans we finally manage to tear ourselves away from the dubious pleasures of wine, women and song, at no small expense naturally, having provided an afternoon's entertainment for half the staff of the UBND. But our evening is just beginning, for we have a date with Cô Mai, the office manager at the UBND of the huyện, who it turns out has invited us to a restaurant literally next door to our hotel that we never knew was there, and is wonderful, I am forced to eat nearly an entire eel, which is delicious as it has been boiled in some kind of fantastic fermented rice broth. Naturally 700,000 additional beers are consumed, but are we allowed to simply stumble 30 feet to our humble beds, no! For her hospitality Cô Mai wants Giang to come to her abode and speak to her daughter on the subject of post-secondary education, the daughter having recently completed a BA in psychology and now considering post-graduate study. So it's back across the "city" to Cô's house, where we are force-fed 10,000 pounds of rambutan and Giang, in his now slightly more than inebriated state, lectures the poor girl for 90 minutes why she shouldn't pursue post-graduate study in psychology. As per usual, I am lucky to understand 30% of what is said, but feel badly for the girl, who is clearly uninterested in this lecture, as am I, but neither of us have much of a say in the matter. Eventually one of the co-workers from dinner decides he too is tired of this nonsense and I use the opportunity to escape into the night, Giang electing to stay and continue holding forth.

As we cruise through the cool night I reflect once again on what I am doing here. I speak reasonable German and passable Czech, certainly much better than my Vietnamese, so why am I not working on those languages? I ultimately come to Vietnam for the data, not because of any inherent fascination with the country itself, don't get me wrong, it's all very interesting, but for me the pleasures of this land are rather hard-won, especially when compared to many of my Western compatriots who clearly love this sort of thing. Meanwhile I think longingly of Scotland, maybe a sidewalk cafe in Berlin, or I could be doing fieldwork in Ostrava, where I am reasonably certain they don't serve ice in their beer. But no; I am here, in Vietnam, where ants have set up a colony in my laptop and I struggle to understand the simplest of queries. Yet I keep coming back. There must be something.

Giồng Riềng 3

2011-08-04T23:47:00.001-05:00

Up at the crack of dawn again, back to the chùa, today data collection begins in earnest. Our first group of informants appear to be the pagoda's cooking staff, a bunch of 50-year-old women who like to laugh at everything and who speak something neither comprehensible as Vietnamese nor Khmer. After some initial false starts we eventually coax them into producing the colloquial variants we're after, but not without hacking the wordlist to pieces and contenting ourselves with one containing less than half the forms elicited in Phnom Penh (which Giang then manages not to elicit completely anyways, more on this below). The list of nasal-reduction near-minimal pairs must be abandoned, many of the forms being too obscure for the farmers to have encountered.

Hello, I live in the stairwell.

I am tasked (or rather, task myself) with running the perceptual experiments, which start off quite horribly, and I am reminded of the New Yorker piece on Dan Everett wherein Tecumseh Fitch comes to the Amazon to try and run experiments with the Pirahã and his equipment stops working and Everett refers to him as a "goddamn Chomskyean...[who] can't even run an experiment". However all is not lost, one of the monks is quite sharp and figures out exactly what it is that I am after, not that he has much success explaining it to the Betel Nut Crew. Around 11am the monks need to eat (they don't get to eat again after this, and traditionally no one works whilst the monks are eating) so we retire to the main room for more drinking of tea, smoking of cigarettes, and incomprehensible Vietnamese.

Part of the unfinished pagoda, that will be an additional 300,000,000 đồng, thank you.

At noon, we get to eat, "we" being Giang, myself, our handler Trung, the policeman Nhỏ, and about 10 Khmer guys whose job seems to consist of hanging around the pagoda, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Oh, and getting wasted at lunchtime, that seems to be a popular pastime as well, one which we are obliged to partake in, naturellement. A bag of homemade rice liquor is produced -- maybe a 750 worth? -- and poured into two small shot glasses, shot after shot, given to various members of the contingent who then invite another member to imbibe with them, each downing half the shot. The kitchen crew appear and belly right up, taking obvious delight in forcing me to drink with them. What's 10 shots of lunchtime moonshine between researcher and consultant, anyways? Surely this is kosher in the eyes of the ethics committee?

Good and soused, we lead our liquored-up informants back to the saalaa riən for another go at the perceptual listening tasks. Things seem to go a bit better the second time around, though some of the participants are clearly just pressing buttons at random, likely having no idea what a computer is, or what it is they are hearing, or perhaps they just can't hear?

After pondering what the hell it is I'm doing out here for a while longer, we retire back to our 5-star resort to pick over the day's findings. This is when I discover that Giang has failed to elicit all the forms on the wordlist, making comparison between tone pairs impossible, so we now have to ask all these people back again tomorrow, oh happy day. Most of the women's responses appear to be little more than random button-pressing, but much of the other data looks at least viable, if not immediately interpretable. The day ends with another bowl of instant ramen at the chợ followed by a badly-needed beer, drunk while precariously perched on a rickety bridge over the river, trying not to get run over by passing motorbikes.

Giồng Riềng 2

2011-08-03T21:21:00.002-05:00

Life on the river.

Up at 6, breakfast of questionable but reasonably tasty phở, then it's off to an endless series of meetings and coffees with people at the district-level UBND (Ủy ban Nhân Dân, aka the People's Committee). As a friend of a friend put it, "you would not go to someone's house and play with their children if their father were not home, would you? You see, the People's Committee is like the father."

Gas station for boats.

Or rather, lots of fathers. We meet with police, party officials, administrative staff, the works. Lots of questions about the purpose of the research (to develop the economic and social strength of the people, party and country, of course!), where we were from, why Kiên Giang, etc. I don't know how I would manage this without a native speaker as guide, someone who has played this game before, it is a rather predictable dance but clearly treacherous if one is unfamiliar with the path...

After many, many hours of gettin'-to-know-you-chit-chat spent sitting on the horrifically uncomfortable wooden furniture Vietnamese seem to reserve precisely for such occasions, we are finally sent away for lunch and told to come back at 1pm. More sitting, more tea, then it's off to the UBND of Ngọc Chúc village with our handler Trung and police escort in tow to explain the whole project again to the village president (chủ tích xã). He provides us with a suitably revolutionary Khmer speaker in order that we might vet our wordlist, who insists up and down that no one in this village speaks in the way I have been led to believe they speak, only hicks from other, neighbouring villages. This story is naturally corroborated by the old dudes at the chùa when we taken to see if it will make a reasonable recording space. It won't, but it will, if you know what I mean.

Cái Đuốc Lớn pagoda, Ngọc Chúc village, Giồng Riềng district.

We're going to record in here?

We are served tea with bugs in it, whether they came with the tea leaves or snuck into the ice as it was drug down the driveway, I do not know. There are so many bugs in my room at le château Giồng Riềng (I could hardly call it a hotel...) that I wouldn't be surprised to find myself held up at customs in Hong Kong for trying to unknowingly smuggle in an ant farm.

So, all in all not exactly reassuring. But we are nothing if not flexible. In an effort to make the most of our time here, I am now trying to synthesise Vietnamese stimuli for a cross-linguistic perception experiment. Whether it will work is anyone's guess, but I didn't come this far to go home empty-handed. It certainly wasn't to eat the same bowl of hủ tiếu at the same roadside stall 3 times a day.

Warning: images may be dustier than they actually appear.

Giồng Riềng

2011-08-02T20:08:00.000-05:00

This morning Giang and I boarded a Mai Linh Express bus bound for the Mekong delta, with the goal of collecting perception and production data from ethnic Khmer speakers in Kiên Giang province. What little published data exist on this dialect suggest that the situation is somewhat different from that of other dialects, but how different is unclear, given the lack of any acoustic data. Thus we go. Giang has done a great deal of work with Khmer speakers in other provinces, but never Kiên Giang, so it's interesting for him too.

The trip to Giồng Riềng town (+9° 54' 32", +105° 18' 31") in Giồng Riềng province is not all that far from Hồ Chí Minh City as the crow flies, but takes a long time anyways. Just getting to the Bến Xe Miền Tay bus depot from Chợ Bến Thành takes at least 45 minutes, then it's 3 hours to the ferry, plus another half an hour to cross.

A few more hours to Rạch Sỏi, then it's time to catch a local bus packed with boxes and fish food and people trying to sell you baguettes whilst the conductor hangs out of the bus careening at top speed down a single-lane road…

Around 6pm we finally arrive in the thị trấn. Like most any other Vietnamese delta town, it is small, with little to do before 6pm and nothing to do thereafter. Judging from the open-mouthed stares that greet me as we stroll down to the chợ I surmise that visits by foreigners to this part of the province are rare.

After slurping down some cháo and boiled duck it is all I can do to stumble back to our, ah, palatial digs at the nhà nghỉ and call it a night. Tomorrow promises to be a long day...

Phòng thí nghiệm

2011-08-01T21:13:00.000-05:00

Monday morning I have agreed to help two of the local Vietnamese phoneticians, cô Thư (who did her PhD in St Petersburg w/ Mirra Gordina, wow) and thầy Huệ, with some equipment they have recently purchased. Upon arrival I am confronted with two challenges: (1), the machine is a Kay Elemetrics CSL, something I have never used before and (2) I have literally forgotten all of the Vietnamese linguistic terminology I have ever known, not a particularly difficult feat, as I knew so precious little to begin with. Nevertheless we carry on and muddle through. At the very least they should now be able to take simultaneous EGG and audio recordings and do qualitative comparisons of F0 and voice quality, though my money (or not, as it happens) is still on Praat for anything serious, if the CSL software has a scripting language, I couldn't find it.

Upon returning to the hotel I run into the cleaning staff and discover my laundry is ready. The girls hand me a receipt and ask me if I can't pay them now. Ok, that's fine, but I never paid them directly before. They attempt to explain something which I eventually think I understand: they want me to give the receipt to the front desk, presumably to prove that I've paid?

5 minutes later I run into them again, serendipitously I suppose, on my way downstairs. One of the girls spies the receipt in my hand and commences with much squealing and consternation, no no, I should throw the receipt away, you see, instead of going through the normal channels the girls have simply spirited my dirty underwear off to their house and washed it themselves, by paying them directly the whole business is kept on the sly and the hotel deprived of their cut, langsam fällt der Groschen….

In the evening I meet with Van and two of her co-workers who are in from California for their NGO retreat later this week. One is a young woman with a very interesting resume that includes a 3 year stint in Kosovo, and the other turns out to be the daughter of Charles Townsend, the eminent Slavicist at Princeton who wrote the book (literally) on Late Common Slavic. Perhaps I will be re-accepted into polite Slavicist society now that I can say I shared a cab with Sylvia Townsend.

Lời giảng

2011-07-31T12:47:00.000-05:00

Of course there lectures on Sunday mornings in Vietnam, why wouldn't there be? In this case, it was on account of thầy Lợi being in town for the aforementioned dissertation defense. He gave a lecture on the history of experimental phonetics in Vietnam that I understood only some of, partly on account of him speaking quietly, by mostly on account of having forgotten all the Vietnamese linguistic terminology I ever knew, which wasn't much I suppose, so there you are.

There was a great anecdote in there about Chomsky's visit to Vietnam in the 60s, or rather the aftermath. Somehow in the wake of his visit he arranged for a sonograph to be sent to the Institute of Linguistics in Hanoi, where it sat, untouched but dusted daily, for about 20 years before the janitor was given a medal and the sonograph was resigned to the trash heap.

Later I meet with Van, Nghia, Philip and Morgan, the last a Vietnamese-German fashion photographer raised in France and previously based in Hong Kong. He invites us to his fantastic digs on the river to play ping-pong in the merciful absence of motorbikes.

Thảo cầm viên bất ý

2011-07-29T20:42:00.008-05:00

Today I accidentally wandered into the zoo whilst having breakfast. It wasn't my fault; I was just strolling through the gardens.

It turns out they have some loud monkeys there:

Also, my phone gets spam now:

Bảo vệ

2011-07-28T23:05:00.002-05:00

Time to get to work. After touching base with Giang, my co-conspirator on the upcoming trip to the delta, I am informed that a PhD student will be defending her dissertation on Khmer in Vietnam and would I like to attend? Of course I would. What I fail to realise is that a PhD defense, nay, any academic function in Vietnam, is actually just an excuse for old men to stand up and pontificate for up to 45 minutes on topics of their choosing, which need be only tangentially related to whatever the doctoral candidate/invited speaker/guest of honour is actually talking about.

I understand they picked this habit up from the French.
This defense lasted no less than four and a half hours, including a rather long diatribe by a demonstrably crazy person who insisted that languages should never borrow words from other languages because it dilutes their purity, etc. etc. But eventually Miss Huệ was granted her PhD and we could retire for lunch.

After lunch Giang and I chat for a bit about our upcoming fieldtrip and I head back to the Gió Bắc to work on a new stimulus list.

Cơm trưa

2011-07-26T13:49:00.002-05:00

What a long, boring trip it's been. But first things first: a man's gotta eat.

Gỏi cuốn, bún thịt nướng chả giò.
Bún thịt nướng chả giò (detail).
Next: shave and a haircut?

ជំរាបលាភ្នំពេញ

2011-07-25T10:44:00.002-05:00

Sadly it is time to leave Phnom Penh and depart for more hectic climes. A pity; I have grown used to the pace of life here.

All in all, this was an extremely successful expedition, both in terms of the data gathered as well as contacts made. It will be much, much easier to conduct follow-up studies and future research here, which is always a Good Thing. But for now, it's back on the bus, see you on the other side.

ញ៉ាំបាយ

2011-07-24T21:34:00.001-05:00

I am not going to pretend to be an authority on Khmer cuisine. As alluded to earlier, basically everything I know I learned from phnomenon.com, coupled with a willingness to try things that may or may not have turned out to be barbecued heart. But rarely was I lead astray. In the event you find yourself in Phnom Penh, here are a few treats you might enjoy.

Breakfast. The quintessential Cambodian breakfast is apparently kuy teav, a brothy, noodley concoction similar to its Vietnamese cousin hủ tiếu. For my money, however, the perfect morning nosh is a steaming hot bowl of bobor, a thick, congee-like rice porridge served with bean sprouts, chicken or pork, and blood cake. Together with an iced coffee, a perfect way to start your day.

Lunch. You can get anything your heart desires at Psar Thmey, like tasty bok l'hong or a barbecued squid the size of your head. There are also a few vendors selling a delicious Cambodian take on bún thịt nướng: rice noodles, veggies, pork and an eggroll served with fish sauce.

Dinner. Street 148 between Streets 13 and 19 (I think, don't hold me to that) features a row of lo' chaa vendors serving up delicious fried rice noodles with pork, beef and leafy greens. The largest vendor also has a tasty selection of steamed dumplings stuffed with tasty pate-like substances. Dinner and dessert for $2.

However, probably the best meal I had in Phnom Penh was at a restaurant called "18", across the street from the Night Market. It is called nhoam svay trey chhaoe and it may in fact be the single greatest culinary offering going in Cambodia. On paper it is a shredded mango salad with smoked dried fish, but in practice it is a superfood which manages to hit sweet, sour, spicy, and umami all at the same time.

The site of my revelatory mango salad experience.

And if you're in the mood for some post-dinner entertainment, the Night Market is just across the street.

ធ្វើការ

2011-07-23T22:01:00.000-05:00

It's true, I didn't just come halfway around the world to drink rice beer and eat street food of questionable origin; I've also been working. Modern technology has made it easier than ever before to collect high-quality phonetic data almost anywhere, so long as you can recharge your batteries now and again.

A participant trying not to fall asleep during one of the perceptual listening tasks.

Most of the data collection has taken place at the Buddhist Institute, the one-time Royal Library near Independence Monument.

Cambodian isolation booth.

All of this was facilitated by one Mr. Sokny Sor, an extremely kind fellow who both arranged for me to use his office and found participants of the proper background.

Sokny Sor, Chief of Mores and Customs.

Sokny spends much of his time digitising Khmer texts, such as all of the back issues of Kambuja Surya Magazine and the Chuon Nath dictionary.

Chuon Nath, the man, the myth, the legend.

Today was the last day of recording. All in all things went quite well, aside from a few times we lost power, but if that's the worst thing that happens on this trip, I'll be ecstatic.

យីហោ

2011-07-23T03:57:00.000-05:00

A collection of various detritus spotted around town:

Apparently all of the cigarettes have been liberated.

This seems like exactly the wrong brand name for this product.

Does DisneyCorp know Pooh Bear is shilling nappies in Phnom Penh, I wonder?

ប៊ីយេរមួយទៀត

2011-07-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

There's not much point in blogging about beer (or food; certainly not food) in Phnom Penh, everything worth saying having already been said by Phil Lees at phnomenon.com some years ago. Nevertheless, I made it to at least two of Cambodia's three (!) microbreweries to sample the wares, and now you have to hear about it.

Man Han Lou. Housed in a Chinese/Thai/Viet/Khmer restaurant at 456 Monivong Boulevard, this establishment brews four beers: a lager, a red ale, a stout, and a "green" beer (colored with seaweed, apparently). Sadly, only the stout was pouring on the day of my visit, but that didn't stop me and a tableful of Russians from enjoying it.

At $3 a glass, it's pricey by Cambodian standards, but pleasant and well-balanced, with a thick, foamy light-brown head, smooth mouthfeel, and nicely balanced chocolate and coffee flavors. Maybe more of a porter than a stout. Central Waters Mudpuppy it isn't, but probably the single best beer I had while in Cambodia.

Munich Beer Restaurant. This "Germany Fresh Beer Restaurant" is located across Sothearos Boulevard from the "singing fountains", a kind of Vegas-like water feature replete with blinking lights and an unlicensed mash-up soundtrack. Bored Khmer beergirls in daisy dukes lackadaisically serve a mixed Khmer/Western crowd. Photos from Oktoberfest (?) adorn the walls, with the restaurant's "Munich Beer" logo photoshopped onto the glasses. You stay classy, Munich Beer Restaurant.

The stout here is acceptable but nowhere near as good as that at Man Han Lou. The gold is an unfiltered ale, but difficult to pin down at first because it's served up rather colder than you might be used to in the UK. One can almost taste the promise of hops. Not going to win any CAMRA awards but perfectly quaffable. Price are quite competitive by Cambodian standards.

I didn't try any food, although the menu makes some intriguing promises.

All in all not as bad as the snobs at Ratebeer would have it, but nothing transcendental either (hey, what did you expect). But it's neither Angkor nor Anchor, so drink it and be happy.

តែមប្រិ៍ខ្មែរ

2011-07-21T01:12:00.005-05:00

Spotted this afternoon at the Post Office:

"Condoms are a great weapon in the fight against AIDS"

"I never forget to use a condom! How about you?"

បៀរ

2011-07-14T07:30:00.006-05:00

ABC Extra Stout is brewed by a local affiliate of Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd, the same subsidiary of Heinekin responsible for churning out endless vats of Anchor Smooth (see below). Apparently, it took home the Gold in the stout category at the first Asia Beer Awards last year, but had to settle for Silver this year. If I understand their website, it looks like everyone gets a medal, and there are only three kinds of medal. So, yeah.

I've got nothing in principle against high ABV stouts (I'm looking at you, Founder's) but ABC Extra does not have what beer snobs refer to as "well-hidden alcohol". With a light brown head and thin mouthfeel, the aroma hints of chocolate and roasted malt, but a bitter molasses flavor dominates. The best of the bunch.

Angkor Beer, courtesy of Cambrew, is full of doughy, grainy, corny goodness. So pale I sometimes forget it's there. Legend has it that the "light hoppy aroma" promised by Cambrew's promotional literature can only be picked up by trained bloodhounds. It's here, it's there, it's everywhere, you're going to drink it whether you like it or not. The text at the top ប្រទេសខ្ញុំ ស្រាបៀរខ្ញុំ [prɑteih kʰɲom sraa bier kʰɲom] is the "my country my beer" slogan one sees plastered across the chests of ten thousand hapless Western tourists every day.

Anchor Smooth (pronounced "anne chore" for no readily apparent reason) is of no relation whatsoever to the storied steambrewers of San Francisco (unintended alliteration there, I promise). Differs from Angkor largely in terms of packaging. I occasionally forget it isn't water and use it to brush my teeth.

Grim pickings, no? Never fear, alternatives abound:

I wouldn't pay $1.70 for High Life in the States, why on earth would I pay that in Cambodia.

ស្មូរជន

2011-07-12T22:20:00.000-05:00

Phnom Penh is a bit of a different place than it was last time I was here. For one thing, it actually seems to have something resembling infrastructure: sealed roads, potable (if heavily chlorinated) tap water, even a stoplight or two. Still no public transport or independent judiciary, but you have to start somewhere.

Yesterday I met with a potential fixer at the Buddhist Institute, introduced myself to the skeleton crew at CKS (the people who are funding this little escapade), and stopped by the Vietnamese Embassy to get a visa. So happy was I to be able to speak to someone in their own language that I nearly gnawed the ear of the poor man giving me the visa right off.

Today, I finally managed to shake off my lethargy and the paralyzing fear I seem to be struck with whenever I don't speak the local language, and started eating street food. Internets be damned: just wander off down the road and stop wherever there seems to be a critical mass of locals. I didn't find anything particularly spectacular, but neither was I stricken with any shakes, chills, or gastrointestinal revolts. Plus I found the Drugs Department.

I think this is a variant spelling (in aksaa khaam) of ក្រសួងញៀន [krɑsuəŋ ɲiən] «Ministry of Addiction», though I have no idea what the first bit says, or even how to pronounce it.

The present state of the Drugs Department.

The other news of the day is that I am apparently miserly. At least, I think that's what I was told by a motodup driver when I declined his services, saying I preferred to walk.

"Ah", he said, "smoe cheng", pointing at my feet. He was even so kind to write it on my hand for me, without so much as my having to ask.

ជើង cheng [cəəŋ] is clearly cognate with Vietnamese chân meaning foot or leg, so I assumed smoe had something to do with walking -- on foot or something to that effect. So on my leisurely stroll back home, I tried it out on each motodup who asked me if I wanted a ride.

"No thanks, today I'm smoe cheng", I would answer.

When I got back I tried to reverse engineer my interlocutor's romanization. As far as I can make it he could only have meant ស្មូរជន [smoo cɔɔn], which Headley defines as "one who is stingy/shamelessly avaricious; skinflint; miser."

Perhaps there is some pun to be had based on the similarity of [cɔɔn] to [cəəŋ]; I was quite certain there was a velar nasal there. But the meaning of [smoo] is unambiguous. It's possible he intended ស្មុយ [smoy] "unhappy, miserable, sloppy", but that's not particularly complimentary either. Me and my miserly feet.

Penh redux

2011-07-10T22:17:00.000-05:00

Inadvertently picking up where I left off, eighteen months later, I seem to be back in Phnom Penh.

I am staying on the southwest side of the city, in a part of town called Khan Chamkamorn ខណ្ឌចំការមន, which is in close proximity to the institute I'm affiliated with but remote with respect to everything else. Plus this hotel is not exactly what you'd call 'luxurious'; even 'spartan' seems as though it might be stretching things. I mean, it's perfectly cromulent; it has a bed, air conditioning, and there is a restaurant next door that serves cow penis cooked in a myriad number of ways (I am not making this up). However, it is completely windowless, the karaoke music from aforementioned restaurant can at times make the walls shake, and its target market appears to be those in need of, shall we say, short-term accommodation (different rates depending on time of check-in, condoms instead of Gideon Bible in the bedside drawer, etc.)

Really, it's fine, but for three weeks? The lack of natural light might cause me to lose it. Still, for $13 a day, what do you want here.

But at least there's Vietnamese TV! Oh, wait, the TV just stopped working for no readily apparent reason. That's ok, I have stimuli to synthesize.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a Cambodian phone number, if only so that my cell phone would turn on and I could use it as an alarm clock. Cost of SIM card: $2. Cost of outgoing call: $0.08/min. Terms of contract: priceless?

OH FINE

2011-07-06T18:27:00.001-05:00

the blogging will continue until morale improves.

ភ្នំពេញ ២

2009-06-30T05:55:00.006-05:00

Our second and final day in Phnom Penh was pretty low-key.

After breakfast, we strolled down Norodom Blvd to Monument Books, where I was able to find a Khmer-language copy of the Khamboly Dy's History of Democratic Kampuchea along with a few other goodies. Our goal was the National Museum of Cambodia, which we overshot somewhat, ending up down at Independence Monument.

After backtracking, we eventually managed to find the entrance to the museum, which is quite fantastic. Many sculptures and carvings seen at Angkor Wat, Preah Vihear, and other important historical sites in Cambodia are actually replicas; the originals are on display at the National Museum. Going to the sites first comes highly recommended, as it is much easier to situate the objects in the context in which they were found.

The most interesting part of the museum was an exhibit detailing the excavation and subsequent investigation of the Koh Ta Meas archaeological site. Here, a French-Cambodian team uncovered a pre-Angkorian necropolis estimated to be nearly 3,000 years old. The exhibit includes extremely in-depth discussions (in several languages) of osteoarchaeology and paleo-trauma, radiocarbon dating techniques, zooarchaeology, the unusual local media attention and popularity of the discovery, and much more.

After lunch, we tried to go see the Royal Palace, but it was closed for some reason.

Chan Chhaya Pavilion from the Sisowath Quay.

Just dryin' my laundry.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the pool.

We leave you with the following clipping from the Phnom Penh Post:

Text: "A motorist negotiates with police after a gun was found in his vehicle during a search on Sisowath Quay."

ភ្នំពេញ ១

2009-06-29T05:29:00.007-05:00

Early Monday morning, we bade farewell to Marom and boarded the exceedingly short (35 minute?) flight to Phnom Penh. After getting checked in and oriented, we decided to get the depressing stuff out of the way in the afternoon, and arranged for transport out to Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng.

There is nothing I could say about these places that hasn't been said a thousand times before; they are grisly, sobering sights. I'm glad I went, but I can't say I had a good time.

Memorial stupa at Choeung Ek.

Mass gravesites at Choeung Ek.

Despite the seemingly idyllic setting, with beautiful trees and the sounds of children playing at a nearby school, the Killing Fields have a extremely immediate and visceral impact, accentuated perhaps by the minimal on-site documentation. The Genocide Museum, on the other hand, has an extensive, informative, and gut-wrenching exhibit courtesy of the Documentation Center of Cambodia featuring photos, interviews, and even a film. Fittingly, during our visit we were trapped in the prison thanks to an extended torrential downpour, which made getting back to the hotel something of an adventure.

For dinner, we ended up not trying the fried tarantula, although I probably should have. We did see some massive crickets at Psar Tmieh which looked awfully tasty...

កំពង់ឃ្លាំង

2009-06-28T09:47:00.012-05:00

[Publisher's Note: a few folks have written in to say that they are having difficulty viewing the Khmer-language text. You may need to install the necessary fonts.]

On our third and final full day in Siem Reap, Mr. Marom took us out for a day in the countryside, including a visit to Kampong Khleang.

Due to the villages' proximity to Tonlé Sap, houses are three to four meters above the ground, partly to deter snakes, but mostly to avoid the rising waters during the rainy season.

Fish traps.

We were heading out onto Tonlé Sap to rendez-vous with the fishermen, who spend the night on the lake and head back in the morning with the day's catch.

On our way out to the lake itself, we passed through an area populated largely -- in fact, exclusively -- by Vietnamese. Marom had some interesting things to say about the 4,000,000(?) Vietnamese living in Cambodia, asserting that the only reason the CPP win every election is because they are puppets of Hanoi and all the Vietnamese vote for them, that the higher echelons of the Cambodian police and military are populated by ethnic Vietnamese, and that the Vietnamese are more successful fishermen than the Cambodians. Cambodians don't like to live next to the Vietnamese, however: "always making so much the noise, playing loud cassette tapes..."

Life on the lake.

The day's catch comes in.

Marom peruses the snakes on offer.

We may have a winner.

Marom eventually settled on some fish and we headed back to the village. En route we noticed a large number of the following structures, green pools of water beneath transparent plastic suspended from sticks or bamboo with a fluorescent light at the top:

It turns out that these are cricket traps: at night, you turn on the light, and the algae in the water creates a green glow, attracting crickets, which are then eaten, or sold to the Thais, who apparently have such an appetite for crickets that they basically ate every cricket in Thailand and now have to import them from Cambodia. You can't make this kind of thing up.

On our way back from the village, we stopped by the so-called "Rulous Group", a trio of pre-Angkorian temples: Lolei, Preah Ko, and the Bakong.

Lolei.

Sanskrit carvings at Lolei.

A former library(?) at the Bakong.

One of the few remaining bas-reliefs at the Bakong.

A brick tower surrounding the Bakong.

A sacred bull at Preah Ko.

Sanskrit carvings at Preah Ko.

Unfortunately, our visit to Preah Ko was cut short by the onset of a sudden and severe downpour. Poor Marom had to battle through the driving rains for nearly 20km. Such is the life of the tuk-tuk driver.

After getting cleaned up, we headed out for our final 'event', a buffet dinner and apsara dance performance at nearby hotel. As a general rule, I tend to avoid buffets, but especially so in Southeat Asia; eating buffet food is a sure-fire way to increase your risk of food poisoning. As it happened, we were spared any intestinal discomfort, but the food was absolutely terrible; even the draft beer was undrinkably skunky. All might have been forgiven, but we were surrounded by Korean and Vietnamese tour groups the entire time. Truly hell on earth.

On our way back to the guesthouse, we were accosted by Mr. Marom and some of the other tuk-tuk drivers, who had set up a "tuk-tuk bar" out on the street. We stopped to have a beer and chat for a while. Eventually the mosquitos got the better of us and we decamped for parts indoors.

អង្គរទៀត

2009-06-28T09:36:00.010-05:00

When we arrived back at Suvarnbhumi, we were informed that our flight to Siem Reap had been delayed, but that they could put us on an earlier flight. "Smaller plane," the girl at the Bangkok Airways check-in counter informed us, "OK?"

OK.

Although I had already been to Angkor Wat last year, Rachel hadn't, and since I like Siem Reap town quite a bit I was happy to go back for Round 2. This time around we had a guide (courtesy of the good folks at Two Dragons) who was worth every riel. In addition to really knowing his stuff, Mr. Khim was exceedingly good at avoiding the Vietnamese tour groups mobbing the temples over the course of the weekend. He also knew all the good spots to eat (although our driver later revealed to us that drivers and guides usually eat for free at restaurants if they bring in tourists). I've had quite a bit of amok in my day, but I have to say this was probably the best.

Put the amok in the coconut...

...and eat it all up.

Aspiring kitchen help.

Out of almost 2,000 apsara carvings at Angkor Wat, this is the only one showing her teeth.

Day 1 was spent at Ta Prohm, Angkor Wat, and Angkor Thom; on Day 2, we went out to Banteay Srei and visited some of the temples on the "Grand Tour" included Pre Rup, Preah Khan, and Neak Pean, some of which I hadn't been to last time. With the historical and archaeological background provided by Khim, however, even the temples I had spent considerable time at last year really came alive in their historical context. When we hit the Rolous Group on our own the following day, we were well prepared to interpret the lintels and carvings all by ourselves.

Cambodian gas station.

Sanskrit carvings at Banteay Srei.

เชียงใหม่

2009-06-28T06:25:00.011-05:00

On Sunday we flew up to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand.

First things first: round to the hotel.

By the time we got settled in and cleaned up, it was getting late, so we had a walk around, caught a seafood dinner at the night market, and called it a day.

Despite Ronald's best efforts, we did not have dinner at Thai McDonald's.

On Monday, we wandered across the river to find a new hotel and someone who could take us out to Doi Inthanon. As it happened, we found both in the same place. After getting everything squared away, we found some bicycles and started exploring. We ended up at Wat Chedi Luang, which was mostly empty on account of it being the weekly Buddhist "holiday".

However, there were still some monks available for Monk Chat.

Most of the monks didn't speak much English; the one who did turned out to be from Laos, and a chatty little thing besides. I tried talking with the initiates in Thai, but Kham Mueang is considerably different from "Standard" Thai. I don't care what Wikipedia says, there's a velar fricative in there. One of the younger monks was quite the showoff, and helpfully demonstrated how to tie the traditional saffron rob in both styles (shoulder covered/outside, shoulder bared/inside).

By the time we bade the monks a fond farewell, it was mid-day and the sun was really beating down. Rachel had decided she'd had enough of the outdoors for a while, so she went off for a massage; I elected to bike out to the zoo.

I'm not a big fan of zoos in general, but the Chiang Mai zoo was really pretty cool. For starters, there was no one there: I saw just two other patrons the entire afternoon, and no employees of any kind, aside from the chap who checked my ticket on the way in. The other nifty thing is that the animals are more or less able to roam free. A few of the gibbons were in (roomy) cages, but everyone else was pretty much left to their own devices as far as I could tell. I guess there were moats, but they didn't look like it would take much to jump them.

What's goin' on on this side?

The most interesting bit was the bird sanctuary, which featured an incredible pair of Lady Amherst's Pheasants as well as a horde of these blue fellows. I don't know what they are; if you do, please let me know.

None of these birds were caged (although the enclosure was covered), so one could literally walk right up to them. Really quite fantastic.

I don't understand what this is about either.

After leaving the zoo, I met Rachel for dinner at what was supposed to be a halfway decent English pub. We both ordered the fish and chips, both of which turned out to be completely inedible, yet absurdly expensive. Lesson learned, we slunk off to the night market to find some fruit.

Early the next morning, after a tasteless bowl of โจ้ก, the folks from Earth Eco showed up with a songthaew to cart us first to our new digs and from there, up to Doi Inthanon. The all-day trip was sold to us as including "five to six" hours of proper trekking, but this seemed to have been greatly exaggerated. We trekked through light rainforest for about two hours, pausing for about 30 minutes by the Maewang Waterfall, wherein I chatted with our guide, Bhop, about recent happenings in Thai politics.

In spite of his well-rehearsed jokes, Bhop was a good guide and a fun fellow to hang out with for the day. After arriving at a Karen "village" -- mostly just an attempt to coerce tourists into buying scarves and dried fruit -- we clambered back in the songthaew for a two-hour ride up to the top of the mountain, which was followed by more light trekking and a stop at Napamaytanidol Chedi (temples built by the Thai Royal Air Force in honor of the King and Queen's 60th birthdays at a cost of around 50 million baht) as well as the Vachiratharn waterfall.

Everyone is exceedingly happy.

This psychedelic little fellow hung out with us for quite a while.

Please refrain from peeing at the top of the mountain.

View of the valley from the Napamaytanidol Chedi. We were at cloud-level, basically.

While not quite the rigorous jungle trek we had envisioned, it was still good fun and nice to get out of the city for a day. After returning to Chiang Mai, we had dinner on the river and got caught in a downpour, which had the pleasant effect of cooling things off, temperature-wise.

Our final day in Chiang Mai was pretty laid back. In fact, the most exciting thing we did was to find Studio Naenna, a textiles shop which produces hand-woven, naturally dyed fabrics. The studio was founded by a British woman who has been a lecturer at Chiang Mai University since the 1980s, after eight years in Laos; her daughters, born and raised in Chiang Mai, speak absolutely flawless Northern Thai, which is a really disconcerting thing to hear coming from white people. As they are traditionally produced, some of the garments can take up to a year to complete! A fantastic little operation and the sort of thing that makes you want to stay in Southeast Asia forever.

This is going straight to 2600.

อยุธยา

2009-06-28T05:28:00.006-05:00

The early part of two weeks ago consisted mostly of trying to make the same recording of Đạt over and over again and running into one problem after another: noise pollution due to the sound booth not actually being soundproofed, poor recording quality (thanks, Roland), trying to record on the MacBook and have it overheat and the fans turn on, etc., etc. Thanks to Đạt's boundless patience, we finally got it right.

On Thursday I left steamy Hanoi for just-slightly-less-steamy Bangkok, where I had brunch with Doug and Sai and got caught up on all the latest happenings in the world of SEALANG. In the early evening I wandered around the neighborhood, trying out my Thai on the street food vendors. Misunderstandings were frequent, but they always resulted in my getting to eat some kind of food on a stick, so all was well.

Rachel arrived late Thursday night, and Friday I took her round to see the main tourist sites (Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Wat Arun, etc.) Having already blogged extensively about these places last year, I'll just refer you to the earlier posts for pictures. Except for these.

Do not dangle any doll.

"Hurry up! Get in my mouth!"

Even Buddha needs a drink from time to time.

On Friday, we caught a minibus out to อยุธยา (Ayutthaya). Ayutthaya was the capitol of Old Siam from 1350 until the Burmese sacked it in 1767. The king was left to starve to death, marking the end of that particular royal lineage, but the half-Chinese general Thaksin managed to defeat the Burmese a few years later, whence he set up shop in Thonburi, now part of present-day Bangkok.

A UNESCO World Heritage site (at least, the park where most of the ruins are held), Ayutthaya is of considerable historical importance, but is also a fairly pleasant place to while away an afternoon. As much of the architecture shows considerable Khmer influence, it feels a bit like some of the smaller temples at Angkor, if a town had sprung up around them. After lunch, we managed to find some bicycles, which made tooling around the park much easier (and breezier).

Chedis at วัดพระศรีสรรเพชญ (Wat Phra Si Sanpet) housing the ashes of สมเด็จพระ บรมไตรโลกนาถ (King Boromatrailokanat) and his two sons, King Ramathibodhi and King Boromatrailokanat II.

Viharn Phra Mongkol Bopitah.

Pieces of Buddha statues at วัดราชบูรณะ พระนครศรีอยุธยา (Wat Ratchaburana).

Saturday morning we went round to the market before heading to airport to catch a flight up north to เชียงใหม่ (Chiang Mai).

เราเป็น

2009-06-22T09:52:00.002-05:00

Dearly Beloved,

yes, we are alive, we are just in Chiang Mai, where apparently free internet does not exist. So, we'll be with you in a few days. Today's highlight was Monk Chat (actually at วัดเจดีย์หลวง). Tomorrow: ดอยอินทนนท์.

Love,
Rachel & Ned

Thị thực

2009-06-17T07:39:00.000-05:00

This had better work.

Cúc Phương II

2009-06-16T07:20:00.002-05:00

Sunday morning I did my best to get up bright and early. This did not prove difficult; at around 5am or so, the electricity was turned off, which meant the air conditioning gave up the ghost and the resultant rise in temperature was enough to convince anyone to get up and face the day. That, and the fact I'd gone to bed around 9pm.

After a breakfast of tasteless instant phở, I went for a stroll in the botanical gardens, and then decided to try my luck at a run. It didn't seem all that humid, I reasoned, so I drove about 15km into the forest, parked, and figured I'd run 5k in to the center and back again.

The first 5k weren't too bad, but the second 5k were murder: on a motorbike, you don't notice 10% grades, but when it's 95 in the shade and you're surrounded by humid rainforest, they take it out of you. Eventually I made it back to the bike, returned to base camp, cleaned up, had a tasteless lunch to the sounds of a chicken being slaughtered and summarily served to the Vietnamese family sitting across from me, and checked out.

As I drove down the mountain, I reflected fondly on the trip, and contemplated the various routes I could take back to Hanoi. The skies were mostly clear, but I was wearing long sleeves this time, and jeans. As I drove through Nho Quan, I considered stopping in to see my not-German friend again, and pulled over to take a picture.

It was at this point that I noticed my camera was gone. Before checking out from the park, I had hung my camera, and a large bottle of water, on the ubiquotous hook present on every motorbike in Southeast Asia. The water bottle was still there, but the camera was nowhere to be seen. I checked the compartment under the seat, and my bag as well, but I had made no mistake; the camera was gone. There were two possible scenarios, I reasoned: either I had gone over a bump coming down the mountain and the camera (but not the water) had flown off, or someone had snatched it from the bike while I was checking out. While both scenarios were hard to envision, it seemed exceedingly likely that, whatever the case, the camera was history: either it was lying smashed on the side of the road, or it was in someone's pocket.

It's an old camera, I told myself. You've had it since before you moved to California. It has a tiny screen and is only capable of taking 16-second soundless videos. You'll be in Bangkok in 3 days; you can get a new one. Let it go.

Rather than heeding my inner dialouge, I turned the bike around and began speeding back towards the mountain path towards the park. I was annoyed. Just getting back up there was going to take the better part of half an hour, and for what? Well, maybe I had left the camera in the room, or something, but I really doubted it. I had dinner plans tonight, and a lot of work to finish besides, this was really --

And then I rounded the curve, too fast, the bike hit gravel, and I hit the ground.

Actually, I hit the ground twice. The first time was with my shoulder and knee, which usefully cushioned the bike from doing the same; the second time was with my face.

I was lying on the ground with the bike, still purring, on top of me. There was a lot of blood on my shirt, which seemed to be coming from my face somewhere. An older Vietnamese man was coming towards me, saying something incomprehensible. I tried to stand; it hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.

The Vietnamese man pulled some leaves off of a bush, chewed on them, and then took them out of his mouth and stuck them on my chin. "Come over here," he said. It seemed like the sensible thing to do.

The man, whose name was Linh, led me over to his house, where he ran some water and encouraged me to clean the gravel from my wounds. A small crowd soon gathered, consisting of Linh's wife, an unidentified child, and a woman with MS. The child turned out to be very useful; whenever I had difficulty understanding something, which was about every 6 seconds or so, he would slowly and exasperatedly repeat whatever was being asked of me, as if explaining it to someone exceedingly stupid and/or deaf.

"Do you have any soap?" I asked Linh's wife. She did. Miracle of miracles. She also had some sort of wax, or tar, which she encouraged me to rub in my open wounds.

Damage control. My shirt was torn and covered in blood; my knee, bleeding but probably not dislocated; and I had some leaves stuck in my chin. I decided to see about the bike.

At first, the bike appeared to have weathered the accident fairly well: the left footrest had been bent, but a quick twist with a crowbar put it right again. However, all was not well with the front fork (connecting the wheel to the steering column) -- it had been twisted pretty badly in the crash, such that when you pointed the bike forward, the wheel pulled about 10 degrees to the right. Not exactly optimal conditions for a 3 hour highway drive. Linh and his associate puttered around the bike, poking at things and making clucking noises.

"No good," he said. "Very dangerous. Very expensive".

Great, I thought, just what I need; a $1000 bike repair. Sure, why not, I didn't need to pay rent this summer...

As it happened, I was in luck. Not only did Linh happen to be a mechanic (where better to set up a repair shop than next to a dangerous curve in the middle of nowhere?), but his definition of "very expensive" differed drastically from mine. While I sat and bled, chatting with the locals, he went off down the road to buy a replacement fork, after which he proceeded to take the front of the bike apart, replace the fork, and patch everything back together, in 90 minutes or less.

"Fix it, no problem," Linh said. "In America you would just throw this away!"

By this time it was getting quite late, the previously cloudless sky was darkening, the bike was driveable, and I felt more or less capable of driving it. (Even if I had been seriously injured, the closest hospital is in Hanoi.) It was time to settle the bill.

Replacement fork: 200,000 VNĐ.
Labor (c. 60 minutes, not counting time spent procuring the part): 10,000 VNĐ.

I did not take this opportunity to practice my bargaining skills.

Linh gives me his phone number in case of any further problems, and I head off down the road. Within minutes, it begins to rain, and then it begins to really rain. I press on, but soon my jeans begin to resembled parachute pants filled with water, and I pull over to transfer the contents of my pockets to my bag, which has the advantage of being waterproof. I waited for a while beneath a thatched roof, making conversation with a few wide-eyed children and eventually a curious adult, who advised me to head back to the nearest town and purchase a raincoat.

The rain passed soon enough, and an hour later I was mostly dry. The rest of the trip home passed without incident, although I was reminded of how much I hate driving in Hanoi city. As I staggered into the lobby, I braced myself, expecting the hotel staff to recoil in horror at my disheveled appearance, but no one so much as batted an eye.

"Did you have a nice weekend???" they asked exuberantly.

"Kiệt sức," I replied, which they thought was hilarious for some reason. I was shown to my new room, which featured a single bed for a change, and no leaks in the roof.

I sent Linh a text message thanking him again for his help and letting him know I made it back to Hanoi in one piece. A few hours later, I received the following reply:

Ngay mai em den benh vien xem lai vet thuong o dau goi nhe.neu can thi chup x,quang cho chac chan.

Which I think says, "Tomorrow go to the hospital to have those scrapes cleaned out, yeah? If necessary, get an x-ray to be sure."

After dinner with Nathalie, I limped home to bleed on the linens.

Cúc Phương I

2009-06-15T07:38:00.013-05:00

This past weekend, I decided to get out of town. On Friday afternoon I went looking for a motorbike to rent for the weekend to carry me to Cúc Phương National Park.

I had meant to leave by about 9am Saturday, but the motorbike I had "reserved" the day before was apparently not actually reserved, so I was forced to improvise. Fortunately, I happened upon these people who, despite focusing more on offroad bikes and tours, were happy to provide me with a little Wave-type bike for the next few days. By 10am I was on the road, merrily getting lost on backroads and drawing curious stares from cat-eating villagers.

It was a beautiful day. Unfortunately, it was a little too beautiful, in that the sun was really beating down, and being that it was a weekend and I didn't have to be at the university, I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I didn't think anything of it until a few hours later when I looked down to find my arms were the color usually reserved for fire trucks. I stopped, changed shirts, and put on sunscreen, but it was too late. Even my hands are sunburned. My hands. How does that happen? But only half my hands, because my fingers were of course under the grips.

The "easy" way to get to Cúc Phương is via Ninh Bình, which lies about 100km south of Hanoi on National Highway 1A. Part of Highway 1, the part that runs along the coast, is quite pretty, but the part close to Hanoi is pretty awful, especially if you're on a motorbike, because you are constantly being overtaken/run off the road by trucks, buses, and tankers of all varieties. Since in Vietnam, the getting somewhere is always at least half the fun, I wasn't too keen on spending my only weekend out of the city surrounded by honking 18-wheelers; so I went slightly out of my way in order to take the Hồ Chí Minh Highway, aka Highway 21. It was basically empty, except for the occasional motorbike or herd of water buffalo.

The Hồ Chí Minh Highway runs along a series of tree-covered karst limestone rock formations. It's a bit like Hạ Long Bay, but without the water. Apparently, this two-lane country road is slated to become an 8-lane superhighway; I recommend you spend some time on it before this happens. Right now it's like the best of both worlds: light traffic, beautiful scenery, and brand spankin' new asphalt. No potholes, natch.

Getting there.

As I got closer to Cúc Phương, I had to stop quite a few times to ask the way. At one point, the little girl I was talking to decided that she didn't know what I was on about, but that she would run and fetch her father, who immediately started giving me directions in German.

"Do you know German?" he finally asked (in German).

(As it happens, I do, but that failed to explain why he just started talking to me in German. It's a strange old world out there.)

It turns out that the park itself is about 11km outside of a small village in Nho Quan district. One of the random people I asked eventually volunteered to just show me the way, and hopped on the back of my bike. Sure, I thought, why not.

The young man's name was Thiện, and he was back home visiting family, or something. Sort of a strange guy, he didn't seem to have any particular sort of plan, destination, or luggage, beyond a mostly empty duffel bag, and while he seemed happy wandering around the park, it later became apparent that his parents, with whom he was staying, lived about 15km away from where I'd found him. Why he wanted to come to the park is beyond me. Anyways, nice enough guy.

After I checked into my, er, rather rustic accommodations, one of the park rangers took me on a tour of the Endangered Primate Rescue Center along with a group of Singaporean tourists. The center is run by Germans, but is mostly staffed by locals, who care for the animals, clean the cages, prepare the food, and so forth. The EPRC has had a fairly successful breeding program, although I gathered that finding safe habitats to reintroduce these animals back into the wild is considerably more difficult than convincing Delacour langurs to produce offspring in captivity.

On the walk back to the park entrance, I had a chat with the Vietnamese tour guide who was accompanying the Singaporean posse. He opined that Sapa is, in point of fact, "paradise" (thiên đường tại Việt Nam). I've always avoided Sapa, assuming it to be overrun with tourists, but apparently there is a good reason for this. Next time.

After dinner at the canteen with Thiện, the fellow who showed us around the primate center took me out night-spotting. This involved driving about 18km on the paved path that cuts through the park and then, well, creeping around the jungle with high-beam flashlights, looking for indigenous critters. Since the center of the forest had seen a light rain earlier in the evening, pickings were fairly scarce; apparently, animals don't like to hunt for food with wet fur. Who knew?

Still, it was a pretty cool little jaunt. We did eventually spot a few civets, various mammals up in the canopy (possibly a slow loris), and all manner of increasingly alien insect life.

I was hoping to see some bears, but no dice. Oh well. It was really fantastic to be out in the depths of the forest; when you turned off your lights, it was really quite pitch black. Not at all quiet, however.

Tomorrow: Day 2, wherein I go running, lose my camera, and Wipe Out.

Trần bị rò

2009-06-09T10:22:00.012-05:00

Last week, I said it was hot. It wasn't hot. In Hanoi, it's hot. 45° C over the weekend; a comparatively brisk 38° today. So much juice is being sucked down that rolling blackouts are even more common than last year. When Vietnamese people are lounging around with no shirts on and complaining about the heat, you know it's hot.

It had been so long since I'd been on a domestic flight in Vietnam...what a hoot. Flight attendants talking on their cell phones, people getting up to use the restroom whilst the aircraft taxis down the runway, a woman depositing a 20kg sack of rice on my shoulder...everything but chickens in the aisle. Despite the best efforts of our Aussie captain, our departure was delayed because the entire airport was shut down due to the arrival (or possibly departure) of a "VIP". When I asked them, the flight crew opined that this meant the president of Vietnam Airlines. Nice work if you can get it.

Returning to Hanoi has been something of a quiet homecoming. On Tuesday afternoon I went by MICA and it feels as though I'd never left. Today I helped Sơn with an article he is trying to publish, and made plans with Đạt to do some recordings next week. I need to start needling people about the experiment, however.

I was a bit late getting into the office today because I spent the early morning hours attempting to deal with the visa situation, which was supposed to have been taken care of in HCMC. As I suspected, my shiny new visa extension is completely useless, in the sense that it does me absolutely no good once I leave the country next Thursday. It was suggested to me that the reason the folks in Saigon messed this up is because I conducted the transaction in Vietnamese (not an unreasonable assumption; it is rarely the case that showing off your Vietnamese skills actually results in a positive outcome), so I tried in English. In two different establishments, no less. Alas, my entreaties fell upon dead ears.

Finally, I spoke with the folks who sorted my visa here the last time, who seemed to grasp the concept of leaving the country, but also returning to it. They suggested that, if I didn't want to pay for a three month multiple entry visa for which I clearly have no use, I could simply arrange for a "visa on arrival" at my port of entry. This consists of a piece of paper which I present at the border to the "immigration authorities" (I use the term in the loosest sense possible here), who will apparently have prescient knowledge of my arrival and issue me a brand spanking new visa, for a price, of course. I expressed my serious doubts about this arrangement, but my interlocutor assured me she had made dozens of such successful arrangements. She also admonished me for calling her em after she looked at my passport and discovered I was actually younger than she was. So, you know, maybe they'll let me back into the country, maybe they won't. We'll just have to improvise.

Tonight, it finally started to rain, but the roof in my hotel room is leaking so badly that a 10 gallon bucket filled up within minutes. There are now towels all over the floor, but they are quickly rendered useless because much of the water is simply dripping down the wall and summarily fails to be captured by the bucket. After providing me with a slightly larger bucket, the hotel staff wished me "chúc ngủ ngon" and made vague assurances that they would take care of the leaks in the morning. There's also some sort of creature living on the roof that likes to scamper back and forth occasionally. Gotta love the penthouse suite.

In other news, there is this really weird show on H1 right now featuring a bunch of postgraduates from Finland, Russian, Korean, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, China, Mongolia, and Britain discussing whether or not they think the are grown-ups. No one is a native Vietnamese speaker, but they're all doing better than I would be. For the finale, one of the Vietnamese hosts treats the audience to a seemingly apropos-less dance routine, accompanied by the ubiquitous techno soundtrack and ably lip-synched. (It's always hard to tell if they're actually singing, because there are invariably so many backing vocals on the tape; what's one more?)

Lo lắng

2009-06-08T03:16:00.001-05:00

So the question is, are they really going to let me back in with this?

Bụi bặm

2009-06-06T06:25:00.014-05:00

It is hot in HCMC. The rains have avoided us for several days now, which may sound nice on paper, but in reality it means that things on the ground are hot and dusty.

I spent most of this week waiting around for permission to run experiments at the USSH. Finally, on Friday afternoon, I was informed that it had been arranged for me to meet with six students, one of whom had actually participated in a similar experiment which I had run here last year. Once again, everyone came at once and I felt obliged to try and entertain the students who sat patiently waiting for whoever was taking the experiment to finish.

The girls were mostly quite shy, but after they finished and left, one of the boys seemed keen to chat while waiting for his friend. After a few minutes of conversation it became apparent that this young man, let's call him Duy, came from a family with considerable connections. Never mind that his cell phone seemed capable of receiving international TV stations, he had been to Europe and Japan on numerous occasions (he was studying Japanese, he told me, because he liked to travel in Japan, but the Japanese apparently don't speak English), and had even been Stateside no fewer than four times, including a sixth month stint studying abroad at a university in California. Dorm food had made an (inexplicably positive) impression on him, as had the size of Americans' waistlines and our curious custom of expecting people to actually show up at 8:30 for events scheduled for 8:30. (The Vietnamese tend to operate with a rather elastic notion of punctuality, which is sometimes called thì giờ cao su, from the French caoutchouc 'rubber').

Friday night I met with several folks for dinner. The overall mood was rather somber as we'd found out that morning about the sudden death of a mutual friend who had been living in Vietnam for some years. The news came as a huge shock to everyone and the reality has been slow to settle in.

On Saturday, I had been invited to lunch by Nicolas, a French colleague who was working at MICA in Hanoi last year at the same time that I was. He and his wife just had their first child, and are currently living out in District 2 with her family in a really lovely house down at the end of a quite alley not far from the river. Nico's father-in-law has an avid interest in fish. This not-so-little fellow lived in his own pool in the living room.

Cá chép.

After lunch, Nicolas took me back Q1 by way of the maternity hospital, where he needed to get a copy of his son's birth certificate. I had vowed not to get on a motorbike for the duration of this trip, but alas, it was not to be. Still, it was a nice ride through a part of the city I had not previously had occasion to visit.

Impromptu roadblock, or just abandoned scrap metal? We may never know.

What I still can't figure out is how exactly he got up there.

Mmmm...various eggs.

The hospital itself was a real trip. While getting the birth certificate and proof of payment was surprisingly straightforward, if the place ever went up in flames, no official record of your birth would remain. Everything is done in triplicate on thin strips of recycled paper that are kept in giant cabinets in rooms whose doors are labeled only with signs saying things like "PLEASE COME IN CLOSE DOOR". Nicolas told me that the going rate for a natural (i.e., no anaesthetics), physician-assisted hospital birth is about 5,000,000 VNĐ, plus around 700,000 per day of inpatient stay. While he agreed that this was relatively affordable by international standards, he was still somewhat miffed. After all, in France, it would have been free.

Tomorrow: brunch with Don Gordon.

Thẻ tín dụng

2009-05-31T11:48:00.002-05:00

Today started out fairly uneventfully. Had breakfast and chatted with John Ingram. Worked the rest of the morning, which involved uncovering a really annoying bug in Praat. After lunch I went over to the Air Asia office in the Phạm Ngũ Lão to try and figure out why I wasn't able to purchase tickets online using my credit card. It turns out that they can't authorize Bank of America cards from Asia (or so they claim), but purchasing the tickets directly at the office was twice as expensive (the specials are, of course, only available online). So, I went in search of a wireless connection. I'd like to think it was this.

The motherlode.

Luckily, my Chase (debit) card worked. Not so for Bangkok Air -- their website was having none of anything. Not to be deterred, I hopped in a cab and went over to the Bangkok Air offices. Miraculously, they were actually closed. I mean, I know it's Sunday and all, but this is Vietnam, people.

Don't push this door open lah?

I decided to walk back home from the Bangkok Air office along the Tôn Đức Thắng, which runs alongside the river.

It smells just as good as it looks.

Since it was so nice out (a balmy 34° C) instead of heading straight home I decided to poke around the neighborhood and the various hẻms.

The local exterminator.

You want a wonderful future, don't you?

When I got back to my hotel room, I checked my email, which included, among other things, a notice from Bank of America that they had placed a hold on my credit card until such time as I could speak to a service representative.

I think we should call a moratorium on speech recognition research until everyone promises to stop using it for evil. By "evil", I mean those automated "help" systems such as those frequently used by credit card companies and airlines. I'm on a transcontinental call, here. Time is quite literally money, and I don't want to have to wade through 80,138 button presses to talk to someone.

I think I spent around 45 minutes in total on the phone. The short version went something like this: call the AT&T Vietnam operator, get connected to Bank of America, AT&T auto-operator doesn't understand Bank of America auto-operator, get disconnected, call back, talk to real operator, get connected, press buttons, get transferred, transfer fails, call dropped, call back, repeat operator hoohah, get connected, get transferred, spend 20 minutes on hold...only to get connected to the DEBIT card department, who can't help me....

...but they are happy to connect me to the credit card people. Ms. Chipper McGee answers.

HER: And how are YOU this morning?
ME: Well, it's night where I am.
HER: Oh. Well, what state are you calling from?

After giving her all of my information, she agrees that the situation is most inconvenient. By way of assistance, she transfers me to yet another department, where I'm put on hold yet again. (The hold music, meanwhile, has been getting more and more somber.)

Eventually I speak to someone who assures me that they Vietnamese don't know what they're talking about and that my card will most certainly work now, but I don't think I'm going to press my luck. On a positive note, once I was actually connected to human beings, they were clearly based Stateside.

Moral of the story: bring cash.

Chợ lớn

2009-05-31T07:16:00.009-05:00

On Saturday afternoon I met up with Marc, his girlfriend Hiện, Phương and a few other folks and went to Chợ Lớn to have lunch and visit a few pagodas.

The main attraction was Chùa Bà Thiên Hậu (or 天后宫 for you Chinese readers). This temple is dedicated to a sea goddess known alternately as Māzǔ 媽祖 'mother-ancestor' or Thiên Hậu 天后 'heavenly queen', who is a sort of patron saint of fishermen and sailors.

Bà was apparently born Mi Châu 林默娘 in 960, or so the story goes. How exactly she ascended to goddesshood is apparently a matter of some dispute.

Chùa Bà Thiên Hậu is one of the older pagodas in Hồ Chí Minh City, having been built around 1760. The French Protectorate bestowed heritage status upon the site around a hundred years later. It's quite the deal as temples go. Being as it is in Chinatown and all, the clientele are largely ethnic Chinese, although plenty of Vietnamese stop in as well. The Vietnamese, pragmatic lot that they are, worship everywhere, just to cover all their bases. Vietnamese temples, Chinese temples, Buddhist temples, Hindu temples, Catholic churches...anywhere. Marc told me that they even try to pray in mosques, but that the Muslims won't let them in. Mê tín quá...

Our visit concurred with that of a group of Cantonese tourists who were busy burning everything in sight.

Cúng bái.

After a while we nipped off down the street to find lunch,

It's beginning to look a lot like Bangkok.

stopping in at another temple along the way. I don't remember the name, but perhaps one of you Chinese-readin' types can tell me.

Mệt mỏi.

Lunch was served by a woman with the greatest set of teeth ever. I wish I could have gotten a picture. I think she had three bottom teeth and one top tooth, and all of them were sort of ragged.

Across the road there was a rooster in a cage. I commented to Marc that I thought this practiced had long since been outlawed. "Sure," he chuckled, "so is keeping bears."

Keeping bears?

(Apparently some people here still keep bears for terrible reasons. And in the city, no less.)

So, no pictures of teeth, but on our way back we did come across a vendor selling lots and lots of these:

Yeah, that's what you think it is.

Hội thảo

2009-05-30T06:47:00.000-05:00

The conference is over. I didn't take any pictures, but other people did, so maybe we'll see some of them someday.

Trở lại

2009-05-26T14:00:00.001-05:00

The Belgian was right: it's different the second time. But it's good to be back.

Lời bạt

2009-01-13T17:22:00.002-06:00

The LSA is over, and after interminable flight delays, I'm finally back in Chicago, where the temperature is now best measured on the Kelvin scale. Although I'm still getting used to the time shift and bland American food that costs twenty times what I've grown used to paying, I thought I should jot down some reflections on the last few months while they are still relatively fresh in my mind.

It turns out that you can get so used to the manic energy of Hanoi that you don't know what to do with yourself when a place like San Francisco seems placid in comparison. I'm just going to come right out and say it: I miss Asia. I miss the people; I miss the weather; I miss the food. I miss the chaos of the Chatuchak market and the stifling heat of Hanoi summer nights. I miss nighttime motorbike rides through deserted streets, sunsets at Thống Nhất Park, afternoons drinking tea with Bác Cảnh. But most of all, I miss the challenges: of getting from A to B, of speaking Vietnamese every day, of constantly learning new things and meeting new people and finding new ways to accomplish what you took for granted. And realizing that now you take new things for granted, like the availability of decent phở every six meters or so.

I miss it because it has reminded me of why I prefer to live in a place instead of simply travel: because it forces you to expand your horizons, re-evaluate your goals, and consider an alternative way of life. It makes you appreciate both the things you have and the things you don't.

In the end, I have decided, it is not unlike being on tour. There are things you like and things you loathe, and often it becomes all too easy to focus on the inconveniences; but at the end of the day, deep in your heart of hearts, you know that there is nothing else you would rather be doing. I can't wait to go back, and I heartily encourage anyone reading this to spend some time in Southeast Asia as soon as possible. You don't even have to eat congealed blood cubes to enjoy yourself, although I recommend that you do.

Bạo loạn

2009-01-08T11:45:00.003-06:00

Last night I went to meet my friend Jess in Oakland and accidentally got off the bus just as this was happening. People be angry, and whatnot.

Hết giờ

2009-01-05T01:40:00.001-06:00

Greetings from Hong Kong. Surrounded by Chinese fashionistas and listening to bizarre renditions of Christmas music, waiting for my interminably delayed flight, I give you what will likely be my final blog from Asia.

Saturday morning was busy: I rose early to finish packing and move most of my belongings to my temporary digs at the Spring Hotel, on a quiet street next to the Nhà thờ Lớn. After dropping off my things and haggling with the owner over the price of the room, I went and got some new glasses at the Công Ty Kính Mắt Việt Nam. Lenscrafters has nothing on these people: after I'd picked out some frames and had the world's quickest eye exam, they ground the lenses out on the spot and handed them to me less than 15 minutes later, all for a fraction of the price you'd pay in the States.

Sunday morning I did a bit of work, had my last bowl of bún riêu, and headed back to the house to help clean up before turning in the keys. The bus took an unexpected turn a few blocks earlier than it usually does, but one of my fellow passengers saw to it that I got pointed back in the right direction. I think he would have walked with me to my hotel if I'd asked him to. For every person who tries to overcharge you, you will have ten experiences like this in Vietnam. It truly is one of the safest places I've ever been. Modulo the traffic insanity, of course.

After insuring that the small library I'd accumulated was going to fit in my luggage, I splurged for a last dinner across the street at Lá and met Nathalie and Charles for drinks at Mao's. Nathalie maintained that it was important to leave Vietnam hungover; if that's the case, then mission accomplished. Nothing like being extra dehydrated when you make that sixteen-and-a-half hour trans-Pacific flight.

This morning I had a quick phở and coffee and then it was off to the airport for the final time. This first leg of the flight, from Hà Nội to Hong Kong, was operated by a Chinese airline (Dragonair). They were very nice, but no one was speaking Vietnamese, which caused me to panic just a little bit as I realized I was, in fact, officially leaving.

As we waited on the tarmac, I thought of all the things I was going to miss about Vietnam: bún riêu (let's just say food in general), the park, nighttime motorbike rides through empty streets, chatting with families at Hồ's mausoleum, withdrawing 5,000,000 đồng from the ATM, the almost total lack of Western corporations...even the Vietnamese, God love 'em, I'm going to miss them too. They really do make learning their infernal language easier, mostly because nearly anyone is a willing conversation partner once you show you can speak a little Vietnamese. Strike up an innocuous conversation with your xe ôm driver and before you know it, you'll be singing revolutionary songs at the bia hơi and have been introduced to everyone's extended family.

Of course, I won't miss the shoving, the honking, the pollution, my neighbors' penchant for karaoke at 7am, or having to routinely climb up on the roof to shake the giant water retention unit because the pipes are so old. And I will never understand why the Vietnamese love fluorescent lighting so much. But in spite of those things, I hope I have a better understanding of what draws so many to this part of the world. Sure, you get your share of losers looking for the easy life, but you also find people who thrive on the challenges of a constantly changing environment. In the case of Vietnam, you have an economy that is trying to go from the 19th century to the 21st while skipping over the 20th entirely. Whether or not it will work is anyone's guess, but it's going to be a heck of a ride.

I have also come (slowly) to a better understanding of what brings people to Hà Nội in particular. It isn't a city like any other, although it may soon become one. As Erich put it, Hà Nội is an attempt to create a different kind of post-colonial Asian metropolis -- entirely different from the model of Bangkok, Sài Gòn, or Manila. The younger generation is less interested in this project, and more interested in rampant modernization, so in 10 years' time Hà Nội may look much more like its neighbors to the south. But for the time being it still retains a unique character; a charm, even. You just have to know where to look.

As we take to the air, I try to temper my pending nostalgia with the knowledge that this is not the end, it's just the beginning. That I managed to get some useful research done on this trip was a happy side-effect: the point was really to poke around, get the lay of the land, and convince myself that I could still learn a foreign language at my advanced age. I'm sure I will be back: the question is not if, but simply when.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some HK$88 fried rice to eat.

Côn Đảo

2009-01-04T04:31:00.013-06:00

Last Tuesday morning, I got on a Russian prop plane with 7 French people (most of whom I didn't know) and a Belgian (whom I did) and flew to the Côn Đảo archipelago, a group of islands 180km off the coast of southern Vietnam.

I know this Belgian.

Transport courtesy of Vasco Airlines.

After a short and mercifully uneventful flight - there's only one per day - we picked up our things and were escorted to our hotel by some folks who, four days later, were to demand a king's ransom for their services. Bernard (the Belgian) discovered that the hotel's owner spoke Czech, so the two of them carried on in Czech for a while. I was surprised by how much I still could understand, and frustrated by how hopelessly little I could produce.

We had arrived on the island at what could only be described as the height of low season. I'm not sure where all the other people on the plane went; presumably off to hide in one of the high-priced resorts that dot the island's southern coast. But we didn't see any of them again.

Despite the high humidity, near-constant cloud cover, and occasional high winds, we never saw rain, and the temperature was consistently pleasant. There isn't much to do on Côn Đảo, but in a way that was just fine: it provided a badly-needed excuse to just sit and listen to the waves crash against the shore

The local bank.

Côn Đảo was originally home to a French prison, which was then put to use by Vietnamese in the 1960s and 70s. As a matter of fact, many members of the current Hanoi administration, as well as Party luminaries such as Lê Duẩn did time in one of the island's prisons, or its infamous "tiger pits".

On Day One, nothing much happened - we just poked our heads around the place a bit. On Day Two, things got a bit livelier. The girls were all interested in finding a bit of beach to lie on, but as I'm not much of a beach guy, I elected to head off and see what the Côn Đảo National Forest had to offer. Bernard decided to come along with me, so we struck off in the general direction of the tallest landmass in sight.

Along the way, we passed by a few more prison-related bits of di tích.

Vestige of colonial torture.

Vestige of Skull. (?)

We hadn't brought along any food, or even any water, as we had only meant to wander around for a little bit, but once we struck out into the jungle itself, it was impossible not to keep going. There were almost no signs that anyone else had been there in years, and we didn't encounter any other travelers for the entire day. At one point the path became almost impossible to follow, but Bernard, being the good Boy Scout that he is, got us headed in the right direction.

The fearless Belgian leads the way.

The forest was incredible: we caught glimpses of macaques and the indigenous black squirrel (a species endemic to the islands), marveled at the massive termite mounds, and clambered over fallen trees and mossy rocks with the crabs and the geckos.

It's a bit hard to tell, but that's a monkey monkey right there.

After a few hours of this, we eventually got spit out on the other side of the island. We were hoping the beach we were coming to was the same beach as the rest of our party had been planning on visiting, but alas, it was not so.

This may look like just a bunch of rocks, but it was actually quite cool: we were there are low tide, so all sorts of critters were visible in the tide pools.

After poking around for a while, we tried to determine our next move, basically: right or left?

Bernard contemplates the scalability of the cliffs.

A fellow traveler.

As it happened, we tried both, but the rock faces on either side eventually proved insurmountably sheer. After about three hours of clambering around the coastline, we were forced to admit defeat and retrace our path through the forest. Exhausting, but thoroughly rewarding.

New Years Eve itself was spent on the beach down by the Côn Đảo Resort. The Czech-speaking hotel owner had arranged for some folks to help us make a bonfire and grill food. The food-grilling part was a bit of a disaster (a little sand with your shrimp?) but overall it was a nice way to ring in the New Year. As time went by, all kinds of random folks joined in the fun: an Austrian couple, a fellow from Sweden, and most of the Vietnamese who worked at the nearby restaurant. I think we were really the only party in town (outside of places where lots of Westerners tend to congregate, the calendar New Year isn't much of a cause for celebration in Vietnam). It was a fun time.

New Years Day was appropriately mellow: sleeping late, foraging for food, followed by a swim in the ocean and a sunset on the west coast of the island.

Over coffee in the morning I had an interesting chat with Clement, who turned out to be a PhD student as well, studying urban planning. He had some very interesting things to say about Hanoi. When I mentioned that the city seemed to be growing more or less chaotically, he told us that in fact there is an official plan in place meant to govern urban expansion, the creation of necessary infrastructure, and the like, but that local corruption in particular makes it very difficult to execute. There are some major social roadblocks as well: developers (or the government) keep buying up farmland, but the displaced farmers now have nowhere to live and no skills which they can use in their new urban environment. A lot of food for thought.

On the whole, the trip was nice enough, but it reminded me why I don't travel in large groups. It was very nice to be invited along, but I was clearly the odd man out, in part because I don't speak French, but also because I had a difficult time sharing my companions' unbridled love for all aspects of life in Vietnam. When I revealed that my idea of a good time was an extended stay in a place like Bruges, where everything is old and pleasant and quiet and small, I was greeted with a table full of people staring at me as though I had asked for a weasel sandwich.

Friday we headed back to Hà Nội, or at least some of us did. Juliette was off to Hội An to meet up with her roommates, and Bernard was due to meet his parents in Huế, but ended up missing his flight. We were delayed in taking off by about 45 minutes due to some Vietnamese man entering into a screaming match with one of the flight attendants, which ended with him and his family being escorted off the plane by security. I still don't understand what all the fuss was about: I think it had something to do with his perception that one of the flight attendants had been rude to him, but I don't really know, and when I asked the guy sitting next to me for clarification, he told me something extremely complicated in Vietnamese that I didn't understand.

As tedious as it was, it was interesting to experience first-hand, because after a while, everyone on the plane started weighing in. For the first few minutes they just let him yell, but after a while people started calling for a vote as to whether or not he should be removed so the flight could take off. The same thing happens when there's a traffic accident: the crowd of onlookers will act as impromptu arbiters, intervening if they think one party is making aggregious demands of the other. And they say it's not a democracy here. Nonsense.

Bận quá

2009-01-02T12:59:00.007-06:00

My apologies for the interminable delay. I'm sure you've all been on the edge of your seats, especially the occasional readers from Sweden and Guam. I meant to do a "week in review" posting before the Côn Đảo trip, but one thing led to another, and it never happened. So, for my own interest in record-keeping more than anything else, I'll try and sum up what's happened since we last met:

• Last Wednesday (that would be Christmas Eve Day), I met with Nguyễn Văn Lợi, the Vietnamese authority on tone and tone-related topics. (I know this doesn't sound exciting to the non-linguists, but trust me, it is.) It was my last free day in Hanoi, so since time was short and several folks had urged me to be sure to meet with him, I got in touch, and he told me to come round to his place, which was off on the other side of the river. Despite having turned in my wheels the day before, the bus ride over was a snap.

Lợi is essentially interested in tone, phonation, and their interaction in the languages of South East Asia. His library is IMMENSE. While our discussion got off to a sort of shaky start, once he got into his element and started explaining his hypotheses about precisely when Central Vietnamese dialects fell off the Vietic tree, his eyes lit up and he hardly stopped talking until his wife interjected and forced us to eat some dragonfruit. As he was in the middle of something, he tried to continue.

Nghỉ, his wife scolded him. It didn't work. He kept talking, the dragonfruit left untouched.

After about four hours of this, I finally convinced him that I should go. (Professor is not in the best of health, unfortunately.) A very inspiring conversation, but intimidating as well. There is clearly a lot I need to read up on here.

• Thursday, Christmas Day, was my last day of Vietnamese class. I had decided to get Miss Fragrance some flowers as a parting gift (the Vietnamese love flowers). I had thought I could just stop and grab a bouquet on my way to the bus at the flower shop next to our ngõ, but when I got there, it became clear that things weren't quite so straightforwards. After explaining who the flowers were for, how old she was, and what colors I thought she liked, one of the young flower-arrangers asked me how much I would like to spend.

(This question is always the kiss of death for me, especially for things like flowers. How much do flowers cost? I have no idea. A lot?)

ME: How about 200,000?
HER: Oh, yes, you can do that, but for 400 or 500,000 we can make it much more beautiful.
ME: [looking frantically around to see if there are prices printed on anything, anything at all] Oh...well...maybe 400,000 then.
HER: [smiling her biggest, cutest smile] Oh, but 500,000 is more beautiful.

Eventually I capitulate. Is $30 too much to pay for a bouquet of flowers? I still don't know. In my defense, I will say that they did a bang-up job, because on my way to find a xe ôm to take me to class, I was asked by every woman in the street (and a few men) if the flowers were for her. When I finally arrived, nearly 30 minutes late, Cô Hương and the rest of the ESP staff seemed duly impressed. "You really understand the female psyche", I was told. (News to me.)

I understand this psyche.

After our last "class", which consisted mostly of extended farewells and promises to try and help Cô Hương do a stint teaching Vietnamese in the States, I hurried back home to finish packing. I had originally planned to just bring my suitcase with me and take the Vietnam Airlines shuttle to the airport, as it is much cheaper than a cab, but one of my roommates also had a flight at about the same time, so I decided to share the cab with her, as it meant I didn't have to lug my suitcase all over Creation (nor wait an indeterminate amount of time for the shuttle, which leaves the VNA office only when completely full). Poor Beatrice didn't seem to know about the airport cab companies, however, and had just rung up a regular city cab, who wanted to charge us the meter rate out to the airport, at something like 5 times the normal rate. In a way, I was somewhat pleased, as it finally allowed me to employ the Vietnamese equivalent of "are you out of your !@*#% mind!?" After some haggling with the dispatcher, I eventually dismissed the fellow and rung up Nội Bài Taxi, who arrived like clockwork minutes later.

Our cab driver was a real Chatty Cathy. Once he figured out I spoke Vietnamese, he kept interrupting us to ask about America. Is America dangerous? Does everyone own a gun in America? Do all Americans hate black people? etc. Apparently, these are still some widely-held beliefs about the place. I don't think of America as dangerous, but then again, the Vietnamese don't seem to regard their driving habits as dangerous, either, so there you are.

With a few good solid hours of Vietnamese conversation under my belt, I was having a pretty good Christmas day. Hà Nội was sunny and brisk, I was on my way to the warmth of the south, and Vietnam seemed to be revealing all of its hidden charms that the tourist literature likes to crow about. This happy reverie came to a screeching halt when I tried to board the plane to Saigon. There's nothing quite like standing in a line with Vietnamese people who are all shoving you out of their way, only to discover that they're in the wrong line because they didn't bother to look at their seat number, at which point they shove you out of their way again to shove their way into some other line. I could almost take it all, if it weren't for the incessant shoving.

In fact, I decided, I'm really just bothered by three things: the pollution, the honking, and the shoving. If people quit throwing garbage in the street, learned to drive in a more or less silent fashion, and figured out how to queue, I think that everything else would sort of fall into place. Those three things, for some reason, grate ceaselessly on the nerves. (NB: they do not grate on everyone's nerves. Many long-term expats have simply gotten used to the noise, don't seem bothered by the pollution, and are perfectly happy to queue-jump with the best of them. The aspects of life in Vietnam that drive me nuts are also the same things that make it an interesting place to live for a lot of people. There is never a dull moment, here. Everyone is young and full of energy, constantly building something or going somewhere. It's like living in the middle of a giant construction zone, or possibly an ant farm.)

Eventually, I make it to Van and Rick's for their Christmas party. Things wind down pretty early, in part because many of the attendees had to work the next day, and in part because poor Van and Rick's plane back from the States was delayed by a bazillion hours. Still, a fine time was had by all.

• Friday morning I was off to the University bright and early. The main point of this weekend in Saigon was to recruit and run subjects for the second half of my tone discrimination experiment. Fortunately for me, Dr. Nguyễn Văn Huệ of the Trường Đái Học Khoa học Xã Hội và Nhân văn TP.HCM's Faculty of Vietnam Studies had graciously agreed to help me out. Meeting with Vietnamese academics has been very rewarding. It's difficult conducting these conversations in Vietnamese, but it's also clear that a lot of doors are opening, which is very exciting. Don't get me wrong: my Vietnamese is still terrible. But it is less terrible than it used to be.

Between the folks at the University and Huyền's friend Thảo (who teaches at the law school across town), I managed to run 18 subjects in just two days, and Van volunteered a few of her cousins as well, so from a data collection standpoint, the trip was a complete success. Now it's just a matter of interpreting the results.

• Saturday and Sunday were pretty low-key. Sunday night I went out with Mitch to watch the Thailand-Vietnam final, which Vietnam won at the absolute last second in the most dramatic fashion possible. Needless to say, people went nuts.

• Monday was another all-day subjects extravaganza, after which I met Nicholas (from MICA) and his wife for dinner, and then Van and Rick for a nightcap.

Up next: four days with the French.

VÔ ĐỊCH

2008-12-28T09:43:00.002-06:00

INsanity. Vietnam just won their first international title at the last possible second and the streets are packed with people beating on drums, oil cans, toddlers are out banging pot lids together, the streets are choked with motorbikes, people waving flags, everyone is delirious. You'd think the Berlin Wall had fallen or something.

Chúc mừng No-ên

2008-12-24T21:07:00.003-06:00

"Đêm No-ên là đêm no em" indeed.

Việt Nam vô địch

2008-12-24T12:25:00.003-06:00

It's 1:20 AM, and the streets are uncharacteristically packed. Mostly with people driving around the lake, waving flags and banging drums. Việt Nam vô địch.

Again, old camera, no sound.

Băng Cốc II

2008-12-24T09:03:00.001-06:00

[I've figured out how to change the post date and time, so I can make it seem like this post came from the distant past, and you all missed it. Hah!]

On Sunday morning, I awoke feeling a bit sluggish. My first though upon waking up was oh no, you forgot to brush your teeth, didn't you. I staggered into the shower, got dressed, and headed out into the brightly-lit Thai world to try and make some sense of it all.

I knew I needed some food, but I wasn't going to repeat the Panang disaster of Saturday, so I opted instead for a supposedly Western-style breakfast at a local café. It turned out to be more or less inedible, so I made do with coffee and fruit before heading off to catch the Skytrain.

It's good to finally see monks getting a fair shake.

I was taking the Skytrain to the end of the line so that I could get on some kind of water taxi, which would ferry me up the Chao Phraya river over to the general area of the Grand Palace. Doug had told me something about tickets, but I couldn't remember exactly what he said, so of course I managed to buy some sort of all-day ticket I totally didn't need, which turned out to be completely useless, and was expensive to boot. People often complain about this aspect of Thailand, and I can see why: everyone is very nice, and polite, and smiling ear to ear, and they are all trying to sell you something you don't need. But no one is going to tell you that; you just have to figure it out on your own.

The boat ride was pleasant enough; we passed by a few of the city's more celebrated sights before arriving near the Palace, at which point I disembarked, fought my way through the ubiquitous hordes of women hawking water and fruit, and tried to find a way inside the fortified palace complex. As it happened, I took the long way around, but that was a happy accident, since I found a cart selling Thai bumper stickers, which are awesome. I really wanted something like the following, but no dice.

Bad things befall those who point their feet to the Buddha.

Entrance to the Palace was supposed to come at a rather princely cost, but no one ever accosted me asking for any kind of ticket or demanding any money, so I just waltzed on in, assuming this was karmic realignment for the superfluous boat ticket. The first bit you visit inside the Palace complex is the Wat Phra Kaew, home to the Emerald Buddha. The clever folks over at Wikipedia have already written up all the interesting things there are to say about the place, so I'll just get straight to the pictures.

Prasat Phra Debidorn.

พระศรีรัตนเจดีย์ (the Phra Sri Rattana Chedi.)

Entrance to the พระมณฑป (Phra Mondop) library.

Yaksha demons.

The interior of the temple wall is painted with scenes from the Ramakian, the Thai version of the Ramayana.

Rama eat you!!

After you've had your fill of staring at gleaming gold libraries and listening to sutras, you can head over to the actual palace grounds themselves. Rama IX himself doesn't currently reside in the palace -- too busy making sure there are pictures of him on every flat surface in the city, I imagine -- but it is still used for various state ceremonies, weddings, visits by foreign dignitaries, etc.

Two views of Chakri Mahaprasad Hall.

Seriously, though, the king worship thing is a little freaky. I'm sure he's a great guy and everything, but he wears these sort of creepy wire-frame glasses, his picture is everywhere, and he looks a bit too much like Yoda...it's all very odd.

After I left the palace grounds, I wandered into a park,

and then over to วัดโพธิ์, the Wat Pho. Wat Pho is perhaps best known for its 150' long พระพุทธไสยาสน์, or Reclining Buddha.

This picture is notably largely because immediately afer I took it, the mentally ill man in blue attempted to divest me of my camera.

By this time I had more or less managed to sweat out my hangover, but had also had my fill of Culture for the day, so I decided to head back up north. It was only after I made my way back to the pier that I discovered that (a) I had been ripped off with respect to my water taxi ticket and (b) it might be a while before anything turned up heading north. I sat around for about 20 minutes before reaching the conclusion that, at this point, my time was worth more to me than $3, and I made my way back out to the main street to hail a cab.

It's very important to get a pink cab.

Things were pretty uneventful after that. I went back to the VP Towers, chatted with Doug, saw him off to his evening appointments, had some dinner, and turned in early. I wrote quite a bit, trying to come to terms with Bangkok/Thailand vis a vis Hanoi/Vietnam. Despite the fact that they all share borders, there seems to be some sort of invisible wall separating Thailand-Cambodia from Vietnam-China. Is it the Buddhism thing? Is it that Thai and Khmer are demonstrably related, but Vietnamese is some sort of Austroasiatic redheaded stepchild? Is it the fact that Thailand don't seem to give a rat's ass what China has to say? I don't know. Bangkok is a modern city; I wouldn't say it's a city "like any other", but there are plenty of Starbucks in Bangkok. There are no Starbucks in Cambodia, nor is there health care, clean water, or a functional central government. And yet the two places feel far more similar to one another than either do to Vietnam. You don't have to go far in Southeast Asia, it seems, to travel great distances.

The next morning, after getting horribly ripped off by a cab driver, I bid a fond farewell of Bangkok and boarded a Vietnam Airlines flight back to Hanoi.

Băng Cốc I

2008-12-24T08:19:00.000-06:00

Last Friday I went to Bangkok for a weekend. Give the recent unrest that has plagued the city, it was unclear for a number of weeks if the trip was going to happen or not. Suvarnabhumi (pronounced something like "Suwannaboom") is an ultramodern international terminal; it's hard to imagine it filled with yellow-shirted protesters.

After some initial confusion, my taxi driver managed to figure out where it is I was going. I, unfortunately, was of no help to him. I knew the name of the street, but didn't know how to write it in Thai, or read anything on the Thai map he produced. I knew it was near the Victory Monument, but of course it's called something else in Thai, and I didn't know what that something was. But we got there.

I was mostly in Bangkok for fun, but also partly under the auspices of visiting with Doug Cooper, head of the Center for Research in Computational Linguistics (and, incidentally, the author of Oh! Pascal!, a textbook used by myself and practically everyone else who learned computer programming back in the early 90s). The resources Doug and his team have put together are second to none, in part because basically no other such resources exist. I've done a bit of work for CRCL on some of the Vietnamese language resources, so since I was in the area, it seemed like a good excuse to stop in and say hi.

The view from my balcony, looking northwest.

อนุสาวรีย์ชัยสมรภูมิ (Victory Monument), from the Skytrain station.

I met with Doug, we caught up, and he introduced me to a few of the current CRCL staff. After I checked into my room, we went to get a bite to eat, and Doug gave me a few pointers on fun things to do in Bangkok. I was pretty tired out from the trip -- I'd had to get up quite early to deal with the whole cab-to-the-airport situation in Hanoi -- so I decided to play it pretty low-key. I mostly just walked around the neighborhood, nibbling on incredibly spicy street food and marveling at the number of fat people. A sure sign that you have entered an affluent culture is the presence of fat people. There are a lot of fat people in Bangkok. Is it a more sedentary lifestyle? The judicious use of coconut milk? The fact that I've been in Vietnam so long I'm use to everyone being thin as a rail? Who knows.

The glowing monstrosity that is the King Power complex.

Eventually, I wandered over to the Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which is sort of like the Sears Tower of Bangkok. I thought it would be nifty to see the lights at night, so I went on up. You have to change elevators several times, all in an effort to get you to buy junk, but eventually they let you out onto the revolving open-air skydeck.

It's not just the lights; we're also moving. Slowly.

The view was quite nice, although it would probably have been cooler if I had known what I was looking it.

After the tower, I walked back in the general direction of my hotel. There seemed to be an inordinate number of elephants in the street (by "inordinate" I mean "any"). I later discovered that this practice is illegal, mostly because it is rather cruel to the elephant, but sometimes Thais bring them in and try to get tourists to buy fruit to feed them.

After I got my bearings I decided to end the evening with a Thai beer, and found one at a beer garden (remember those?) which also featured some sort of live music. There seemed to be a great deal of music in Thailand, most of it home-grown. The popular music scene in Vietnam is not exactly what one could call "diverse", so all of the sudden, listening to an acoustic three-piece do Janice Joplin covers seemed like a totally pleasant way to kill an hour or so. (Clearly, the beer must have kicked in by this point.)

The next day, my plan was to head to the Chatuchak Weekend Market (จตุจักร) to see what there was to see. Unfortunately for me, I decided that a nice Panang curry would be a good idea for breakfast, and shortly after I got on the Skytrain, my digestive system informed me that it had other ideas regarding my travel itinerary, so the first stop was somewhere called Ari. (It seemed nice enough, in the way that high-end shopping centers for the stupidly rich are nice.) After the Panang demons had their way with me, I made my way to the end of the BTS line and found the market.

It would be hard, actually, not to find the market: it's massive. Apparently there are something like 35,000 stalls in the place. I'm not much of a shopper, but just wandering around the place was fascinating, in part because it served to highlight how different Thailand is from Vietnam. Sex tourism aside, Bangkok is simply not a very conservative place. Women drink alcohol, people wear shorts; compared to Hanoi, it's like anything goes. Do you need a bootleg Iron Maiden t-shirt, or something with Sid Vicious's face on it, or a tie-dyed tank top bearing the slogan "Fear of a Black Planet"? You can get them at Chatuchak, along with jeans, trucker hats, 1960s Thai romance novels, live poultry, backscratchers, or anything else you could possibly imagine. And in all likelihood, it will be sold to you by a long-haired, dope-smoking Thai rocker blasting Jay-Z at top volume. A veritable assault on the sense.

There seemed to be a "NO PICTURES" sign everywhere I looked, and in the dim lighting the photos would have looked terrible anyways, so you'll just have to get your visual fix from Wikipedia, sorry.

I did buy a few things, like this Cool Relaxing Soap. It's refreshinf!

Extremely refreshinf.

After a few hours at Chatuchak, I got back on the train and headed back downtown. I didn't really have a plan for the rest of the day; I was reserving Sunday as Tourist Sightseeing Day, so I looked at Doug's notes and decided to head down to Siam, where he had said there was some kind of giant electronics/pirate software market. I never did find that, but I did find the Siam Paragon, a 300,000 square meter monument to the glory of unbridled capitalism. Need a new Bentley, Ferrari, or Hummer? All have showrooms at the Paragon. Hosting a convention? Consider the services of the Royal Paragon Hall. Or perhaps you would like to don a wetsuit and swim with live sharks? Join us at the Siam Ocean World, Southeast Asia's largest indoor aquarium, conveniently located in the basement. That will be 5,000 baht, please.

This photo isn't very good, but it is a neat example of the "when worlds collide" feeling I often experienced while in Bangkok. What we have here is ศาลพระพรหม, the Erawan Shrine, which houses a statue of Phra Phrom (the Thai version of Brahma). It's good to know that, after you drop a few million baht at Burberry, you can just step outside and pay your respects to the creation god. When I wandered by, there was so much incense smoke in the air you could hardly breathe.

The Thais take this kind of thing very seriously. Apparently, the shrine was built in this location because some military astrologer decided the foundation stone to the nearby Erawan Hotel had been laid on an inauspicious day, so to correct for this error, a shrine was called for. When a mentally ill man destroyed the statue in 2006, he was beaten to death by angry street sweepers. Go figure.

Flower garland sellers along the street near the Erawan Shrine.

Wandering back towards the train, I happened upon the Wat Pathun Wanaram, which was unfortunately closed for repairs of some kind, but the attendant temple grounds were still open, so I went in for a look-see.

When worlds collide.

Given the hustle and bustle of the busy shopping sector right outside, the grounds were surprisingly peaceful and quiet. The few laypeople who were about were mostly sitting on benches reading sutras, or praying to one of the various deities.

At five o'clock, recordings of the sutras began to emanate from speakers hidden in the bushes, so it felt a bit like the trees were talking. Extremely eerie, but a pleasant respite from the hectic pace of the city outside.

When I left the Wat, I initially planned to take the train back up towards home, but instead elected to walk, nibbling on street foods and fruits, snapping pictures, and taking it all in.

This little fellow was everywhere.

If aliens were going to get married, I can only imagine they'd want to do so in Bangkok.

By the time I got back to the hotel, it was dark, and I was getting peckish. I'd bought some postcards at the market earlier, so I intended to take a shower, have a bite to eat and a beer at one of the local food stalls, and pen curt missives to those back home. Fate, however, had different plans. I happened to be carrying a Vietnamese newspaper I had gotten on the plane, and in the elevator a young American fellow asked me, "what's that?"

"It's Vietnamese," I told him, hoping to avoid having a conversation.

"You can read that?" came the reply. "Good for you, man."

The conversation did not end there, however. The young fellow's name was Josh; he was a graduate student in international economics from Johns Hopkins; and he had been sent to Thailand to improve his Thai, which turned out to be already quite good, in my expert opinion as someone whose Thai consists solely of สวัสดีครับ. We got to chatting over drinks and laab while he was waiting for his friends to turn up from Shanghai. They took longer than expected, so since we had a lot of similar interests and had hit it off reasonably well, Josh invited me to come out on the town with them. I am assured that I had a pretty good time - something involving coconut shakes and a bottle of rum - but the last clear memory I have is standing in the middle of อนุสาวรีย์ประชาธิปไตย at 3am, trying in vain to hail a cab.

Hẹn gặp lại

2008-12-23T06:33:00.004-06:00

The landlord called, the radio is talking about Bác Hồ, and I said my tearful goodbyes to everyone at MICA this afternoon.

Why no, we're not outside; it's just freezing everywhere at the moment.

Tomorrow I am supposed to meet with the ex-director of the Linguistics Institute. Nothing like waiting until the last minute to do things I should have done the first week I was here. Time to put on a sweater and go to bed.

Chưa đủ dài

2008-12-23T01:33:00.004-06:00

Today it decided to get cold, again. I woke up in the middle of the night and had to put on jeans and polar-tec. I know 50˚doesn't sound cold to those of you in the Midwest right now, but here, with no heating or insulation or blankets, it can be a bit of a drag. At least down South it should be considerably warmer.

This morning I had one of my last Vietnamese classes. I was tired, and cranky, and not in a very Vietnamese mood. Cô Hương told me that I still don't understand Vietnamese culture because I haven't been here long enough. "You should stay at least a year," she admonished me.

A year? Can I imagine spending a year here? I'm not sure. I still haven't figured out why people love this place so much. For all its positive points, it is still incredibly loud, and dirty, and polluted, and lacking in infrastructure. A year? Really?

This afternoon is my last at MICA. I've invited people for juice and snacks, but it hardly anyone is around at the moment: most of the French folks are back in France, and the Vietnamese are...I don't know where they all are. It's awfully quiet round these parts, though.

Bangkok report is coming. Honest. Soon.

Bóng đá

2008-12-18T02:53:00.005-06:00

Last night I went with Haydon, Claudine, and Charles Keith to the AFF Suzuki Cup semi-final soccer match between Vietnam and their rivals Singapore. Apparently a number of years ago Singapore had won an important game on account of a contested goal, so this was something of a grudge match. Claudine, who is herself from Singapore (Haydon went to University there as well) obtained the tickets from some friends of hers who were in town as part of the football team's logistics team, or something. I'd never been to a national soccer match before, even in Germany, so it was pretty exciting. I wanted to take more pictures, but there were police everywhere, and it is generally not advisable to do anything that might make Vietnamese police think you're taking a picture of them, so I played it pretty safe. The result? Terrible pictures.

Check it out: some dude's head!

The recently completed Mỹ Đình stadium is fairly sizeable (55,000 capacity) and built way out in the middle of nowhere, but which based on the number of construction projects we passed, is well on its way to becoming Somewhere. The rate at which Hanoi is expanding is difficult to describe. It is a bit like watching grass grow, except imagine if you could actually watch grass growing, before your very eyes: it makes no sense. Things of this scale aren't supposed to mutate this quickly; changes of such magnitude aren't usually so palpable from day to day. It's amazing and frightening all at the same time.

The match itself was fun, but it quickly become clear why you don't see either of these teams in the World Cup: they're not very good. Vietnam dominated the game in terms of both time of possession and attempted goals, but despite a few good attempts in the first half, they were never able to make anything happen. This seemed partly due to the fact that their play turned extremely cautious whenever they approached the box, as though they wanted to wait for everyone on the team to turn up and execute a textbook set-piece goal. Not gonna happen, guys.

For their part, Singapore played terribly. Perhaps they'll do better on their home turf. (EDIT 21/12/08: they didn't.)

Isn't it comforting to know that Uncle Hồ is gazing benevolently over the proceedings?

Tomorrow I'm off to Bangkok for the weekend. In the event that I have time to do something other than work, I hope to have some grist for ye olde blog-mill when I get back. Stay tuned.

Con chuột

2008-12-12T12:09:00.002-06:00

The little bastards really can climb walls. It's amazing.

Not to scale. I think this thing would give our cat a run for its money, though.

Mê tín

2008-12-11T04:52:00.006-06:00

Yesterday in Vietnamese class, whilst discussing marriage customs and related vocabulary, I got a little primary on Vietnamese numerology.

Women aren't supposed to get married when they are of an odd age (21, 23, 25...) This doesn't hold for men, but a man's age is important when building a house, which is again not to transpire when he is of an odd-numbered age.

9999 (and various sequences of 9s) are apparently lucky because 9999 is the code for vàng chất lượng (high-quality gold). 8s are lucky because the Chinese-Vietnamese word for 8, bát, apparently reminds people of phát triển 'development'. Similarly, the Hán-Việt word for 6, lục, reminds Vietnamese speakers of lộc, meaning 'wealth, blessing from the gods'.

This obsession with 8s and 9s extends to addition as well. So for example, the motorbike license plate number 3271 is particularly đẹp (beautiful) because the numbers added up to 19, which contains a 9, natch. My motorbike license plate number, 5973, is rather xấu, however, because the numbers added up to a measly 24 (no 8s or 9s involved, and it's even to boot).

Taking a picture of just 3 people is considered unlucky, particularly for the person in the middle. (However, when lighting incense at the pagoda or at an altar, you always light 3 or 5 sticks, never an even number like 2 or 4. I'm not sure what the deal is here. Get back to you on this one.)

Another tidbit of Vietnamese superstition unrelated to numerology: when walking out of a door, it is considered lucky if the first person you meet is a man, but unlucky if the first person you meet is a woman.

I'm not sure how many people are actually keen on this kind of thing, but Erich has assured me that it is quite a lot. As if to prove the point, Marion came home last night bemoaning the fact that she didn't know when her office was going to be closed for the holidays, because the Vietnamese partners had yet to go to the fortune-teller and determine a sufficiently auspicious date. Is it really any stranger than Judeo-Christian customs? No meat on Fridays, Lent, confessing to a priest things you wouldn't tell your own mother, etc.?

EDIT: Van has provided us with some additional insight:

4 is unlucky because the Hán-Viêt word for 4 (tư) sounds a lot like the Hán-Việt word tử, which occurs in a lot of compounds related to death and dying like tử vong 'to die, pass away', tự tử 'to commit suicide', tử hình 'death penalty, to execute', etc.

"2 is unlucky because when a person dies you put two sticks of incense in the pot. that's why it is unlucky or highly offensive should you leave your chopsticks standing up in your bowl instead of laying it on top of your bowl/dish. you are either saying hey dude sitting across from me drop dead, or you are just a jackass who likes to jinx everyone around you..."

So there you go. Western people, don't be stickin' yr chopsticks in your food when you're not using 'em.

Bài thí nghiệm

2008-12-10T08:47:00.006-06:00

On Sunday I met with Huyền Vũ, who Marc Brunelle put me in touch with. Huyền is an instructor at the Trường Đại Học Sư Phạm Hà Nội, the Hanoi University of Education. (As it happens, she is also planning to start graduate school in Canada next year, and has been in touch with instructors at Memorial. I did my best to sell her on St. John's and its linguistics faculty, who are on the whole Pretty Good.)

I met with Huyền at a cafe not far from her University, which as it happens is about halfway to the airport (= Far Away). They have some great signage out there.

Huyền graciously offered to recruit her students to participate in my latest experiment, which is going to be a huge help.

After our meeting, I went to have dinner with Natalie, yet another Vietnam studies person I met at SEASSI. Natalie is an anthropology graduate student at UW-Madison who works in the area of public health, focusing on attitudes towards fowl and how they have changed following the bird flu epidemic. (Sound strange? Trust me, it's eminently fundable.) She is in month two of a fifteen (!) month stay in Vietnam. Anthropologists: they don't mess around.

We had some good discussions about the nature of fieldwork and how it changes your attitude toward a place. Essentially, doing fieldwork involves allowing people to smash your fragile ego into tiny little pieces, which you then painstakingly reassemble, like a fabrege egg. The payoff comes if, and when, you manage to rebuild. While this manifests itself as overconfidence in some, for others I think fieldwork can be a powerful experience of self-actualization. (Of course there are always some people, like Gerard Diffloth, who just actualize themselves right off into the mountains, never to return.)

But what do I know; I've never done any real fieldwork. This girl is going to go off and live in a one-room hut in some village somewhere with a bunch of chicken farmers for a year. Try explaining that one to your in-laws.

On Monday, I spent most of the day working out the kinks in my experimental template. I love PsyScope, I'm glad it's free and all, but certain things that should be dead simple, such as providing user feedback, are well-nigh impossible. Hopefully, with the new grant, Luca and co. can remedy some of these shortcomings and provide a real alternative to the hegemony of E-Prime.

Monday night has also become House Dinner Night; on this particular Monday Nicholas and Helénè were on deck, preparing tasty home-made nem and some absolutely fantastic crêpes. The French sure know how to eat.

Tuesday morning it was back to Vietnamese class. I decided to avail myself of my fleeting opportunities to ask pointed questions of a linguistically sophisticated informant and verify some of the syntax/semantics data I had collected over the last year in Chicago. Unfortunately, I was not very well prepared, which led to Miss Fragrance getting all agitated about parts of speech ("no, no; this is always an adjective!"), which led to me getting equally agitated ("no, look, it is clearly ambiguous!"), even though that is the first rule of fieldwork: never get agitated.

That night I watched "There Will Be Blood" with a few of the French, but the pirated Vietnamese DVD died right at the climatic final showdown, so I don't know how it ends. Please don't tell me. What I did see of it seemed pretty great, though.

On Tuesday afternoon I had gotten a message from Huyền telling me to be at the Trường Đại Học Sư Phạm at 8am sharp, so Wednesday morning was an early one. Predictably, I got a little lost, and ended up over by where we had met for coffee on Sunday. As it turns out, that sign does get turned on.

After I finally arrived, I spent the entire day running subjects (Huyền's students), all of whom were girls, none of them a day over 21. This in and of itself wouldn't have been a huge problem, except for the facts that (a) there is no such thing as a "quiet" room in Vietnam, (b) they were sent to me in two large groups and (c) trying to convince half a dozen teenage girls to sit quietly whilst one of them performs a listening experiment is probably not possible in any culture.

(The thing is, in the States, you can get in touch with subjects in advance; and the they arrange to come to the lab at such-and-so a time, after which the next subject comes, and so on and so forth. The way of Vietnam, this is not. Oh well. It was a good chance to practice my Vietnamese, and I only got asked if I was married a few times.)

Over lunch I did a preliminary analysis of the data and was appalled by some of the subjects' error rates. I still can't figure it out. Just when it looks like they were just pressing buttons randomly, there will be a string of responses that are actually correct, suggesting that they did, in fact, understand the task (which is pretty bloody simple: "are these two words the same, yes or no?"). Nevertheless, some of the data are just going to have to be thrown out. The trick is going to be coming up with a principled means of culling.

I somehow failed to take any pictures of the girls. I don't know why; as the only American many of them had ever met, I was forced to pose for a seemingly endless string of cell phone pictures, so I'm sure they would have been delighted. And yet, I took a picture of the stairwell. I'm sorry. It's all I have.

By the time I left, it was rush hour. Rush hour traffic seems better now than when I first arrived. I attribute this to a noticeable increase in the number of police directing traffic, but maybe I'm just more accustomed to the chaos.

I don't know what I like more about this, his sweater or his helmet.

I ended up going down to the Old Quarter to meet Claudine for a dinner and drinks. She made what I thought was a very trenchant insight about the process of learning a new language (and she should know, having learned English, Vietnamese, Khmer, French, chữ nôm...): it's not really that your language skill ever reaches some particular level of fluency which is in and of itself sufficient; it's more that, after a certain point, you simply learn to exert your will on the situation at hand. You are going to communicate, you are going to do it using this strange system of clicks and whistles, and it is going to happen Right Now, no matter what you, your interlocutor, or anyone else has to say about it. It reminds me of a quote often attributed to Johann van Neumann: “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”

1:58:53

2008-12-07T21:04:00.004-06:00

We ain't gonna beat Downtown Danny with times like these, Todd.

Nhà sách cũ

2008-12-06T05:02:00.004-06:00

When it rains it pours: everyone's in Hanoi all of the sudden. Mitch, Claudine, Natalie, Haydon is coming next week, Van & Rick are here for a wedding this weekend -- it's people overload. (In a good way, of course.)

This past week has been one of work, mostly; some days more gets accomplished than others, of course. Vietnam, I realized last night, presents one with a conundrum, a riddle if you will. On the one hand, it is a great place to get work done, for the simple fact that there isn't much else to do: there is very little in the way of entertainment to distract you from academic pursuits. On the other hand, the problem with trying to work here it that, every morning when you step outside, WHAM! there it is -- Vietnam, smackin' you upside your damn fool head. Try finding somewhere quiet to work in Vietnam. I dare you. If there are rules about not answering your cell phone in the library, those rules are not observed here.

And yet I have been making progress of sorts. I have begun to organize my thoughts around a dissertation topic; I got a paper accepted to the Conference on Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA in January; a colleague at the University of Ottawa has kindly put me in touch with some Vietnamese faculty here who have offered to help me recruit subjects for an experiment I hope to run this month.

Most importantly, perhaps, I seem to have crossed some sort of threshold with respect to my command of the language, or in any event with my perceived command thereof; it has done wonders for my self-confidence, which has in turn induced a positive change in my attitude towards Vietnam in general. No longer does the thought of a conversation with a real live Vietnamese person cause me to break out in a cold sweat. While I am nothing even approaching fluent, I at the very least feel as though I can get the gist of what is said to me even in situations for which I am wholly unprepared. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.

This very morning, in fact, provides a convenient exapmle. Erich had asked me to pick up some books he had ordered at a used bookstore and ship them to him back in England. The proprietor of the bookshop, one Phan Trác Cảnh, was expecting me when I arrived.

CẢNH: A, Zem! Trà?

(Zem is the closest the Vietnamese can get to James, generally.)

So we had some tea, as one does in Vietnam, and chatted: about Vietnam studies, about his previous career at the Unversity, about the difficulty of locating out-of-print Vietnamese language titles in the United States. Not once was I asked if I had a wife, or told that my Vietnamese was giỏi lắm. (When they tell you it's giỏi, then it's clearly not giỏi at all.) Eventually Mr. Cảnh produced a massive list of linguistics titles, some 200 in all, which I drooled over for a while; and after I selected a few, he went off to various nooks and crannies of the 4-story building to retrieve them. Cảnh claims to have his collection systematically organized, and although I couldn't for the life of me divine how, he did eventually return with my requests in hand, all sorts of wonderful things: grammars of indigenous languages, collections of linguistics essays, and the real prize, a copy of Hoàng Thị Chau's dialect survey Tiếng Việt trên các miền đất nước, which I had been searching for ever since arriving in Vietnam.

As it happens, Cảnh only sells originals he owns more than one copy of; so several of the books I wanted needed to be photocopied, after which I would be awarded the photocopies. This isn't a bad deal, really, as the originals are more often than not extremely fragile and falling apart. Cảnh isn't cheap, but he's got the goods, and he knows it. You need anything relating to Vietnam studies, you head over to #5 Bát Đàn and talk to Mr. Cảnh.

Flush with optimism, self-confidence, and dozens of dusty volumes, I went to meet Van, Rick, and Claudine for chả cá. After lunch I headed over to the post office to ship Erich his books, whereby I amazed myself once again by managing entirely in Vietnamese. Once again, Bob Bailey was right, I thought to myself. 3 months.

Tonight is dinner with Mitch and Claudine, and possibly some mild shenanigans with Van and Rick; but I really have to do my best to be in bed at a decent hour, as tomorrow morning I am running a half marathon I have only vaguely trained for.

In answer to your next question, no, it's not a closed course (can you imagine?), so it'll be Vietnam business as usual. Apparently there will be water stations, though, so that's something.

Tam Đảo

2008-12-02T02:07:00.008-06:00

This past weekend I had occasion to visit the Tam Đảo Hill Station, a small hamlet nestled into the mountains about 85km north of Hà Nội. There is very little to see, and even less to do, in Tam Đảo (unless one is Vietnamese, in which case karaoke is all one would ever want to do, apparently). In fact, these folks more or less hit the nail on the head. And yet, it was just nice to be out of the city for a night, in a place with no tourists, hardly any locals, and absolutely no sound.

We left quite early on Saturday morning, which was a good way to take advantage of the daylight hours, but made for nippy traveling. 60 degrees on a motorcycle traveling at 60kph requires clothing which I did not bring to Vietnam. I figured I could compensate by layering, but to no avail. After an hour or so we stopped for a coffee and to try and shake the chill from our bones.

Juliette had planned a route that more or less avoided the main roads, which was a great idea, not only because the main roads are filled with trucks, but also because the getting there is (at least) half the fun on these kinds of trips.

After a few hours the farmlands began to give way to mountains,

and presently we could see our destination, nestled into the hillside.

From the foot of the mountains up to Tam Đảo itself is about 20km of steep, winding 10% grade; Lance Armstrong would be at home here. It took a good 45 minutes to reach the village itself.

After a quick late breakfast of terrible instant phở, we set off to find accomodations. This was not in and of itself a difficult task; the town is basically nothing but hotels, and in winter, none of them have so much as a single occupant. However, one of our party (who will remain nameless) insisted on trying several places in an effort to bargain the proprietors down from, say, $5 per person to $4 per person. I can sort of see the point -- we were literally the only tourists in town -- but frankly, I just can't be bothered. Eventually a hotel was agreed upon, and we were able to stow our gear and head out to explore the environs.

Tam Đảo was built by the French, for the French, so during the French War the Vietnamese pretty much destroyed the place. A pity, since the Soviet-era structures that replaced the French villas are all rather uniformly ugly. But you don't go to Tam Đảo for the village itself; you go for the clean air, the deafening silence, the picturesque landscape, and the sunsets.

We spent the better part of the afternoon wandering through the su su fields and the surrounding countryside, searching for vestiges of the French occupation.

On account of having risen before dawn, we were all in the mood for a pretty early night. If it had been chilly on the way to Tam Đảo, it was positively cold in the village itself. This was due in part to the altitude, but mostly to the fact that heaters are simply not a standard feature of Vietnamese buildings, so the inside temperature is always the same as the outside temperature. In spite of the multiple duvets, I ended up sleeping fully clothed. I think it was even colder, practically speaking, then staying at my Dad's house in Duluth. The heat's not on there, either, but at least it's insulated.

Before heading to bed, however, we were treated to a bit of excitement. It seemed Marianne had neglected to bring her passport with her. Whenever foreigners stay in hotels in Vietnam, they are obliged to show their passports to the staff, because the hotel is in turn obliged to contact the local police and let them know that foreign devils have taken up temporary residence in that particular corner of Socialist paradise. Earlier that afternoon, Marianne had explained to the staff that she had forgotten her passport in Hanoi and had instead provided them with her U.S. driver's license. At around 9:30pm, however, the hotel staff came knocking, and after many oblique questions eventually disclosed that the driver's license had been deemed insufficient, so Marianne's physical presence was requested at the office of the local constabulary, where she apparently received a stern talking-to. Fortunately, that was the extent of it; much to everyone's surprise, no "fine" of any kind was levied. I assume the police chief just rather wanted something to do for a change.

The next morning we struck out early to try and do some hiking in the hills. We stopped off in a few spots, near various lakes and hamlets, and eventually spied a pagoda set far up on a hill, which offered a spectacular view of the valleys below.

After returning from the pagoda, we tried to figure out where we were, but the road we were on didn't appear to exist on our map, probably because it was still being constructed.

While we had assumed that any small road must, eventually, rejoin with some major artery, as the afternoon wore on, we began to worry we might be getting into a mess that would prove difficult to get out of, and eventually stopped to query the locals.

MARIANNE: Excuse me, do you know if this road goes to Hanoi?
WOMAN: Hanoi?
MARIANNE: Yes.
WOMAN: You mean, the city?

We were going the wrong way.

A few gravel roads later, we connected back up with the main highway and wound our way back towards the capital.

On the way into town I somehow got separated from the others and got a little lost, but eventually figured out where I was and got home. That night I ended up having dinner with Mitch Aso, who I met at SEASSI a number of years ago and who is working on his doctorate in Madison. He is aiming to write a medical history of northern Indochina and to this end has been doing lots of interviews with people who used to work on rubber plantations. We had a good time catching up and talking shop.

On Monday, I decided to try and buy a jacket, since the weekend had convinced me that true cold was, in fact, possible in Hanoi. Unfortunately, clothing sold in Vietnam (as opposed to clothing manufactured for export) is, unsurprisingly perhaps, made with the Vietnamese frame in mind, meaning that the arm-length-to-trunk ratio is all wrong; so anything with sufficiently long arms is, generally speaking, about eight times too big. I spent all afternoon having people try to sell me ill-fitting coats and succeeded only in getting my sunglasses stolen. In a fit of desperation I did eventually buy a light windbreaker, but it has become quite clear that it, too, is better suited to a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Monday night Marion made dinner and I got a chance to try and hang with the French speakers. Oddly enough, whenever I got stuck, Vietnamese would come out. Maybe I am retaining something after all.

Một tuần bình thường

2008-11-28T06:08:00.007-06:00

Happy Belated Thanksgiving, or something. It's been a fairly dull week, so I'll just throw out the highlight reel so's I don't forget it myself.

First off, I've been in an oddly positive and productive mood. I think this is largely a function of two factors: (1) I haven't had to stand in line with any Vietnamese people, and (2) the weather has been outstanding.
On Sunday, I arrived back in Hanoi to discover that I had two new roommates, Nicholas and Helene. They are a pair of French engineers who have arranged some sort of world walkabout whereby they work for a few months and then travel for a few months. They have arrived here fresh from Madagascar, and after Vietnam I think they're heading to Ecuador, or somewhere equally far-flung. Nice folks, and it's good to have some company on the top floor again.

On Tuesday, I had a terrible time in Vietnamese class. It was as though I had forgotten everything I'd learned in the previous six months. I wasn't tired, I'd had a good breakfast...I don't know what it was. Later that afternoon, I met with Cường 1 and had coffee, and then met with Bernard and Juliette to discuss the Can Dao trip. Juliette also invited me to Tam Đảo with her and some of her roommates this weekend, which would be a nice little excursion into the mountains.

Wednesday was a Good Vietnam Day. I think I was still riding high on my meeting with Cường 1. (Cường 2 never got in touch, incidentally.) That night there was a soiree for our roommate Anh, who is finally going to France. I got to see Dương and Huyền again, which was fun. It turns out Huyền somehow failed to get a high enough grade on her English exam and her study abroad in Australia has been delayed. I can't understand it myself; her English is fine (and much more understandable than that of many Australians).

My English is just fine!!!

I realized at some point during the evening that I was dangerously close to entering that period of living somewhere where you start to make a few friends, can actually have quasi-meaningful conversations with people in a foreign language, etc. A pity I have to leave in a month, isn't it. Such is the arc of living abroad.

Thursday's Vietnamese class was much better than Tuesday's. I booked my ticket to Bangkok, but given the current closure of the airports it's not clear if I'll actually get to go or not. I came home early from MICA to go running and found Anh on the couch -- her flight out was routed through Thailand and...Pech gehabt. I had an approximation of Thanksgiving with Nicole, her Vietnamese teacher, and a gaggle of young Vietnamese girls, who were alternately trying to teach me slang and sing the national anthem in unison. I believe the word is "surreal".

Today I think I finally got one of my experiments designed and set up, but I can already tell subjects are going to have a rough time of it. The idea is to have them judge similarity of syllables, but to expedite the processes I've been using prerecorded materials from the VNSpeechCorpus, which means I have some words, and some nonwords, and when you ask people to make explicit comparisons between words and nonwords they tend to get confused, and it's sort of a strange task in the first place; "don't worry about what these things mean, just tell me which ones sound more similar to one another". Oh well. It's a small set of stimuli, so if I don't get any useful results after three or four subjects, I can try something else, I suppose.

Well, Juliette & co. seem to want to leave for Tam Đảo at 6am, so it's off to bed. Enjoy Black Friday, capitalist infidels!

Siem Reap III

2008-11-25T09:21:00.017-06:00

At 4:50am, my alarm started making noise. It took a few seconds to register that (a) I was not in my own bed, (b) I was actually in Cambodia, and (c) I needed to get up. Thankfully, the guesthouse provided a 24 hour (instant) coffee service, so after a few cups of coffee, some German granola bars, and judicious application of mosquito repellent, I was on my way.

On route to the park, in between trying to dodge potholes I couldn't see, I contemplated where to go for sunrise. As time was of the essence, I eventually settled on returning to Angkor Wat, as it was the closest destination I was relatively sure I could make before daybreak.

As you can see, the heavens weren't exactly cooperative. Plus, there's that damn scaffolding.

Also, my camera; she is terrible.

Around quarter past six I once again grew annoyed by the crowds and headed off. While the cloudy skies made for poor picture-taking, they made for great biking. My destination was Banteay Srei, a temple around 30km north of Angkor Wat.

Just doing a little fishing on my way to school.

Presumably this name means something to you Japanophiles?

Of all the billboards I saw in Cambodia, I think this is my favorite.

The journey took, in sum total, about an hour and forty-five minutes; not bad, I thought, considering I was taking my time, stopping rather frequently for pictures and to gaze in awe at the landscape.

Getting there.

I arrived at Banteay Srei around 8am: early, but not early enough to escape the crowds. The lighting was less than conducive to picture-taking, and the morning haze gave everything a sort of washed-out looked, but I've posted a few examples anyways.

Looks like just another linga stand with a missing linga, right? See those strange curves in the rock? That's where the Khmer Rouge used to sharpen their knives.

In addition to being one of the oldest temples in the Angkor complex, Banteay Srei was also built of red sandstone, a considerably more robust medium than the limestone used to construct many of the other temples. As a result, many of the bas-reliefs and carvings have weathered the passage of time extraordinarily well.

The various guidebooks recommend that visits to Banteay Srei be combined with a visit to Banteay Samre, a small temple just a few kilometers off the main road leading back towards the main Angkor complex. Since I was heading that way anyways, I thought I'd stop on by, although by this time I was having much more fun simply getting from point A to point B.

Ain't nobody here but us cattle.

I found the turn-off, but after a while, I stopped seeing other Western travelers, and started to wonder if perhaps I'd gone astray.

Still, there was a road, so I kept on following it.

Probably left over from the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. I wanted to go in for a closer inspection, but, you know...landmines.

After a while, the road turned from asphalt to red clay, and eventually ceased to exist entirely, at which point I had to come to terms with the fact that I was effectively lost.

I backtracked for a while, took another wrong turn, had a non-conversation with a fellow who thought I could speak Khmer, waved hello to countless children, and eventually found the path leading to the temple. It was completely unmarked, although on the way back it was quite obvious where it was, on account of the 154 Korean tour buses parked out front. This explained why I had missed the turn-off the first time, however, as there had been no sign that anyone else was there.

Banteay Samre itself was a bit underwhelming, and plagued by pushy vendor-children on the temple grounds themselves, so I didn't stay long. After passing through several small villages, I came to the Pre Rup.

Pre Rup, one of the larger temple-mountains at Angkor, is apparently a rather pleasant place to take in the sunset. However, it was only noon, and cloudy; and as I was beginning to suffer from "temple burnout", and wasn't too keen on hanging around anywhere 6,000 tourists were likely to congregate again in any event, I bade my farewell to the park and headed back towards Siem Reap Town.

After a lunch of laab and amok, a Cambodian fish curry, I went to do a bit of shopping. I actually managed to find a bookstore that stocked a Khmer grammar, from the Routledge Colloquial series. It looked awfully slim, however, compared to the other volumes of that series which I already own, and it lacked a price tag.

ME: How much is this grammar, please?
SHOPKEEP: Three dollars.

Three dollars, you say? Clearly, you haven't just illegally reproduced this book. No; I'm sure the author is receiving his due royalty for each copy you sell.

The best part was the accompanying cassettes (yes, cassettes) which, despite having full-color sleeves, are copies onto 60-minute Type 1 Maxells, a kind of cassette which I am reasonably certain is no longer manufactured. I bet the sound quality is just fantastic. But for three dollars, who's complaining? [Answer: David Smyth and the good folks at Routledge UK. David, if I ever manage to actually learn Khmer, I promise to buy you dinner someday.]

What I really was really out looking for, however, were some traditional Khmer instruments; and after asking around the Psar Chas, I managed to locate a shop that sold some. I was particularly keen on bringing home a sralai, which is a sort of oboe-like thing, and the shop did have one; but neither myself nor the shopkeep were able to get it to make any sound whatsoever. (It's apparently quite difficult to play.)

I considered a few other items, including several two- and three-stringed tro and various thon drums, but I couldn't coax anything more than ineffectual creaks out of the tro, and the only drums that sounded any good were far too large to consider bringing back with me. In the end, I left with the consolation prize: several CD-Rs of dubious provenance.

Not a priority, apparently.

I'm not really certain what this runs on. Pith and vinegar?

As dusk fell, I headed back to the guesthouse to write postcards and chat with the staff, who were thoroughly amused by my nascent attempts at Khmer. I had vague plans to hit the town in the evening, but I was far too tired, and by 10pm I had conked out.

Sunday, I rose early and, after a hearty breakfast (no more German granola), Mr. Sith drove me back to the Siem Reap International Airport.

The airport is quite amazing. It is essentially brand new, staffed to the gills, and yet more or less utterly devoid of travelers.

Recent reviews notwithstanding, I found Siem Reap Airways to be quite good.

After arriving in Sài Gòn and retrieving my baggage, I headed over to the domestic terminal. While Tân Sơn Nhất isn't the greatest airport in the world, I knew that there at least existed a café where I could get some work done. Unfortunately, Jetstar doesn't allow check-in more than one and a half hours prior to take off. It was noon; my flight left at 4:30. There were no working power outlets, no tables, and no café. It was going to be a long afternoon.

I spent a good deal of this downtime mulling over my negative attitude towards Vietnam, which had been thrown into high relief by the trip I'd just been on. I was struck by how much I loved Cambodia and kept trying to figure out why I haven't felt the same way about VN. Part of it, I reasoned, was just new-place syndrome: after all, I'd had similar reactions to Germany, San Diego, and Chicago when I'd moved to those places, and after some time I grew to love all three of them. A certain amount of pure culture shock is probably also at play, albeit a peculiar kind of culture shock, wherein things are different but not that different, with the result that it becomes all too easy to focus on the negatives rather than the positives.

Mostly, however, I think it has to do with my internal uncertainty regarding why I have spent so much of the last several years of my life learning this language if I have no connection to the culture or people who speak it. As Erich pointed out to me, my interest in the language is ultimately empirical; it has little, if anything, to do with the context in which it is embedded. Unlike many people, I didn't choose to learn Vietnamese because of any abiding interest in the country, culture, or history. I guess I'm not entirely certain why I chose to learn it. Maybe that's the crux of the problem.

Twiddling my thumbs in the Sài Gòn airport, however, I came to realize that many of the behaviors that were driving me crazy are not at all unique to Vietnam. I don't like Sài Gòn for many of the same reasons I don't like L.A., but that doesn't have to do with any particular characteristics of the Vietnamese; it has to do with a general dislike of loud, obnoxious people who jabber on their cell phones in public at wholly unreasonable volumes. If that is the yardstick of progress, then send me back to the Stone Age.

Anyways, the upshot is: Siem Reap was amazing. Best trip I've taken since Romania. I really want to go back next weekend for this, but I'm not sure it's in the cards.

HOINH TO WYOMINF

同益街市 中醫

T卹

星光大道

昂坪

蟾臉

香港

Tạm biệt

Sản xuất ở Hà Nội

Nông thôn

Cảnh sát

Quê hương Hà Nội

Quay lại

Rạch Giá

Giồng Riềng 4

Giồng Riềng 3

Giồng Riềng 2

Giồng Riềng

Phòng thí nghiệm

Lời giảng

Thảo cầm viên bất ý

Bảo vệ

Cơm trưa

ជំរាបលាភ្នំពេញ

ញ៉ាំបាយ

ធ្វើការ

យីហោ

ប៊ីយេរមួយទៀត

តែមប្រិ៍​ខ្មែរ

បៀរ

ស្មូរជន

Penh redux

OH FINE

See also

ភ្នំពេញ ២

ភ្នំពេញ ១

កំពង់ឃ្លាំង

អង្គរទៀត

เชียงใหม่

อยุธยา

เราเป็น

Thị thực

Cúc Phương II

Cúc Phương I

Trần bị rò

Lo lắng

Bụi bặm

Thẻ tín dụng

Chợ lớn

Hội thảo

Trở lại

Lời bạt

Bạo loạn

Hết giờ

Côn Đảo

Bận quá

VÔ ĐỊCH

Chúc mừng No-ên

Việt Nam vô địch

Băng Cốc II

Băng Cốc I

Hẹn gặp lại

Chưa đủ dài

Bóng đá

Con chuột

Mê tín

Bài thí nghiệm

1:58:53

Nhà sách cũ

Tam Đảo

Một tuần bình thường

Siem Reap III

同益街市中醫

តែមប្រិ៍ខ្មែរ