Now in Ho Chi Minh City, which everyone still calls "Saigon." In fact, we noticed on the flight down here that the HCMC International Airport 3-letter designation is "SGN." But I'm getting ahead of things.
The day after my last post, we had a free day in Hoi An. I rented a moto and spent several hours just exploring the city and surrounds (long pants this time). I drove out to the beach, which was a bit overrun by luxury resorts for my taste. Then, after lunch, I drove around the two little islands in the river downtown. Hoi An oldtown is around the riverfront but generally doesn't go across it. Therefore, there aren't really any tourists who venture much into the islands, at least not past the thin veneer of restaurants and shops directly across the river. Almost all trip long, my best experiences have happened off the beaten tourist path, so I was happy to get lost in back-alley Hoi An. And lost I got. Those islands are just a maze of tiny streets twisting every which way. I didn't mind getting lost because I knew I was on a small island and would eventually figure it out. But then I decided it was time to go back across the river and started looking for landmarks. When I finally found one, I realized I was on the exact opposite side of the island from where I thought I was. It was really discombobulating, like I stepped through a wormhole or something. In the meantime I got lots of curious smiles and hello's from the people on the island. And when I stopped to take a picture at one point, and old woman with surprisingly good English struck up a conversation with me. I told her I was from the US and that my dad was vet. She told me she learned to speak English from some GI's and from tourists. We talked briefly about the war, which concluded when she said something like, "I think Americans try to help, but they make it worse." Then, after a long pause, "Same now, in Iraq." I raised an eyebrow and a grin and told her I thought she was very smart. I forgot to ask her name.
The flight to Saigon yesterday was uneventful and quick. But Steven's hotel plans for Saigon got messed up through some miscommunication somewhere, and we had a bit of a time finding a place to stay. In fact, we had to find two hotels because of limited availability. The six others are in three doubles at one hotel, and I'm in a single at another hotel a block and a half away. What's more, my room is tiny and has now windows, giving it the vague feel of a prison cell. It's only for three nights, but I'm not crazy about it, especially since the other hotel has a pool, and mine doesn't.
Maybe it's just because I'm ready to get home, but I can't say I like Saigon much. It's way too much like New York to be interesting. Whoever said we lost the war hasn't walked through downtown Saigon lately. You may be in a one-party state, but it's all about the capitalism here. There are also lots of western companies here, unlike anywhere else we've been. There's a KFC about 200 yards from my hotel. All around the city center, there are high end clothing stores catering to richer tourists than I and to VN's nueveaux riche. Also as with NYC, eating is much more expensive here. Last night I paid 120,000 VND for dinner. That's only about $8 US, but it's over twice what we've been paying for comparable meals everywhere else, including Hanoi.
This afternoon we're going to the War Museum, which should be interesting and possibly disturbing. Then tomorrow we're taking a Me Kong delta day tour. Then...we come home. I honestly can't wait to get on that flight home (well, really the first of three flights, but you know what I mean). A month is too long to be away from the family, so Saigon better what out over the next two days. I'm in a pissy, homesick mood.
Stu
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Smelly Europeans
In Hoi An now. Now THIS is a town worth visiting...unlike Da Nang, which is horrible. To be fair, my bad feelings (OUR bad feelings, since pretty much all of us feel this way) are mostly about the hotel. No internet in the hotel, even though they told us they had it. Some really dodgy payment procedures for laundry and drinks. Copious cigarette smoke and flies in the breakfast room. And all they had was pineapple jam! I mean, really. Who lives like that?!
We arrived in Hoi An (not to be confused with Hanoi) yesterday mid-day, and it's night and day to Da Nang. This is a beautiful little town with an old-town city center that wasn't damaged in the war--one of the few such places in the country. Also, this is the first time on the trip we've been in a hotel with a swimming pool. That's a pretty nice way to get away from the heat here. Would've been nice in Hue. Oh, well. Matt also appreciates all the 20-something tourists in their bikinis.
Speaking of European tourists, let me tell you about the tour Steven, Matt, and I took to My Son this morning. (Looks like "my son," pronounced "mee sone.") My Son is an ancient ruin site about 30km to the west of Hoi An. I couldn't tell you when it dates from because our tour guide's English was opaque. I could make out about every third word, barely, and the overall ideas of what he was trying to say eluded me. However, this much I think I got: My Son is a ruin from the Cham culture, which dominated large parts of southeast Asia hundreds of years ago (root of the word "Cambodia"). I think this is the same culture that created the temples at Angkor Wat. The architecture at My Son is very similar to Angkor Wat. There were aspects of Hinduism visible in the ruins, which surprised me because I didn't realize that Hinduism ever reached this far east. At any rate, they were beautiful and very old, everything a good ruin is supposed to be.
There was one area within the ruins, which are really several separate sites all within about 1 km of each other, that had collapsed from nearby U.S. bombing during the war. Then, walking through the ruins, we saw several signs saying that such-and-such excavation/restoration/presentation had been made possible by contributions from various countries: Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Japan, Australia. I know a few of you might get your hackles raised by what I'm about to say, but I have to say I'm a little ashamed of this. The basic model since the beginning of the Cold War seems to be that we destroy things, and other people sort it out. There have been several times in VN when I've seen some indication somewhere that something was funded by a certain country or group or individual within a country. All over the OGCDC offices, for instance, every piece of equipment that was donated has a little note on it saying who donated and showing that national flag. Rarely, very rarely, have I seen the US flag or the US mentioned as a donor for some worthwhile cause here. I know there are plenty of examples of US aid going to good work elsewhere in the world, but the amount of US foreign aid overall is so paltry it's barely worth mentioning. I mean, can we really not beat out Poland?! Honestly. But enough with that heavy stuff, back to the tour.
After walking through the sweaty jungle all morning, we got back in the van for home with the other people on the tour, a mix of Dutch, Danes, and Germans. When we got in the van, we were all hit like a wall with a deeply pungent armpit smell. Now, our whole group got plenty sweaty in vans around Hue, and we never smelled anything like this. Foreign aid be damned...Americans just smell better than Europeans. They stunk, bad. So the next time a European gives you a superior cultural air, just let them know that Americans just smell better, with or without Chanel 5.
Stu
There was one area within the ruins, which are really several separate sites all within about 1 km of each other, that had collapsed from nearby U.S. bombing during the war. Then, walking through the ruins, we saw several signs saying that such-and-such excavation/restoration/presentation had been made possible by contributions from various countries: Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Japan, Australia. I know a few of you might get your hackles raised by what I'm about to say, but I have to say I'm a little ashamed of this. The basic model since the beginning of the Cold War seems to be that we destroy things, and other people sort it out. There have been several times in VN when I've seen some indication somewhere that something was funded by a certain country or group or individual within a country. All over the OGCDC offices, for instance, every piece of equipment that was donated has a little note on it saying who donated and showing that national flag. Rarely, very rarely, have I seen the US flag or the US mentioned as a donor for some worthwhile cause here. I know there are plenty of examples of US aid going to good work elsewhere in the world, but the amount of US foreign aid overall is so paltry it's barely worth mentioning. I mean, can we really not beat out Poland?! Honestly. But enough with that heavy stuff, back to the tour.
After walking through the sweaty jungle all morning, we got back in the van for home with the other people on the tour, a mix of Dutch, Danes, and Germans. When we got in the van, we were all hit like a wall with a deeply pungent armpit smell. Now, our whole group got plenty sweaty in vans around Hue, and we never smelled anything like this. Foreign aid be damned...Americans just smell better than Europeans. They stunk, bad. So the next time a European gives you a superior cultural air, just let them know that Americans just smell better, with or without Chanel 5.
Stu
Monday, June 4, 2007
Hog burns
I'm sorry it's been so long since the last post. We were pretty busy during the last few days in Hue, and it took a while to track down an internet cafe here in Da Nang. I'm covering several days here, so I apologize for the very long stream-of-consciousness post below.
My title refers to an adventure Matt and I had on Sunday. We rented a couple of motorbikes and went looking for footage of city and country life. This is what's called B-roll, illustrative shots that may or may not be used in the film but which are nice to have if you find you need them. Since the OGCDC is in Hue, we needed some footage of life around the city. We also wanted some more farming footage, despite my little run-in with that cow.
So, we rented bikes from the hotel at $1 USD/hour, threw the camera in Matt's bag and the tripod in mine and set off. Now, the motorbikes in question are more like amped up mopeds. Matt kept jokingly referring to his as a hog, but these things don't exactly scream "Easy Rider." They're pretty much the same thing you see all over the place in Europe. Also, virtually no one here wears a helmet, so renting one of those was out of the question. In other words, I'm riding a motorbike with a heavy backpack on, with no helmet, on streets with almost no traffic control, in a country with a sub-par hospital system. Sorry, Amara.
It was worth it, though. We got some great stuff around the city, including at an open-air market that was definitely of the locals-only flavor. Then, we got on the highway leading south out of the city toward Da Nang. After a few km's we turned off the main road, drove through a thin facade of stores and houses, and were almost instantly out in the rice fields. We rode the bikes along this 4'-wide dike between the paddies. (If you've ever been out in midwest or southwest farm country, these dikes are a little like the dirt road grids out there, except they're much smaller and made for two-wheel/two-foot transport only.) We decided to ride all the way to the other side, where we saw a farm village in the distance, and then double back to pick up the scenes in the fields that looked the most promising. But when we got to the village, we realized it was like one of those I described in my last post, a farm village that has no full-size roads in, and is therefore entirely absent of westerners. The village had a river running down the center and a concrete bridge across the river. There were people fishing and bathing in the river, and we got some great shots of this little hideaway. The sight of two tall white men with cameras, as you can imagine, created a bit of a spectacle, but no one seemed to mind, and the kids were hilarious. Everyone seemed to find it amusing to have the camera pointed at them, although several of the shots are way too posey to actually use.
After leaving the village we went back across the dike (which was a little over a km long) and stopped twice to get some shots. Alas, no one was working with a water buffalo, so that shot still eludes us. However, we got lots of other good "rice work" footage and a few shots of something pretty odd. These paddies have lots of little canals between them to use to flood the paddies or pump water out of them. The farmers also use the canals to farm small fish as well (smart, right?). There were two people in a small boat who, at first, looked like they were netting fish in a small net on the end of a pole and then dumping them in the boat. But there were three or four car batteries in the boat hooked up in series. We couldn't figure out why until we saw a wire leading from the batteries down the pole to the "net," which was really a wire mesh basket. In case you haven't figured it out by now, the man was electrocuting the fish. And there was a creepy buzz every time he stuck it in the water. Sure makes it easier to catch the fish!
When we finally returned to the hotel, I realized that I had a problem. I had put on sunscreen, but when I did so I hadn't considered that my shorts would ride up when seated, and I hadn't put any on my lower thighs. So my lower thighs and knees had been in direct sunlight for several hours. Although the area of the burn is relatively small, this is definitely the worst I've been burned in a VERY long time. I'm writing this about 48 hours later, and they're still bright pink. I'm surprised they haven't blistered. Sort of puts a downer on going to the beach here in Da Nang.
Another interesting little tidbit of VN information comes from a trip Matt took a few days earlier. It's too complicated to try to explain why, but on Friday he took a car to Da Nang from Hue and back again. The driver spoke very good English, and Matt had an interesting converstation with him. At one point, Matt told him how some people back home were a little worried about us coming here because they assumed that the people here would hate Americans. The driver, in what has to be one of the best lines heard on this trip, replied, "We don't hate Americans. We look to the future, not the past. We hate the Chinese."
Yesterday (Monday, the 4th) we took the three hour bus ride from Hue to Da Nang. Most of the people on the bus were westerners, but, as on the DMZ Tour bus, there were few Americans. Most of them were Aussies, English, or Irish. There was one woman in her mid-twenties who just wouldn't shut up the whole trip. She was speaking very loudly and ceaselessly to everyone within 10 feet of her in a thick Manchester working-class accent. I don't care how much you like My Fair Lady, that much cockney, for that long and that loud, is just damn annoying!
Half way through the ride, we stopped for toilet (that is, "toilet") and drinks. The people getting off the bus were instantly acosted by people selling tchotchkes. And one local lady had a ripped $20 bill she was trying to exchange for VND. At first this seemed pretty reasonable. We've noted on a few occassions that if a US bill has even a relatively small tear in it, vendors and even banks won't take it. I don't know why, but a ripped US bill is basically useless here. So it's not, on the face of it, so suspicious that this woman would want to try to trade this bill to some westerners. Matt, always the capitalist, was going to offer her 200,000 VND for it, which is about $12.50, but when he took a look at it, he realized it was couterfeit. When he told her he thought it was counterfeit, she got very upset at him. It was pretty funny, because her reaction was of the methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much type; she was definitely running a scam.
As we were getting back on the bus, I asked for a cold Huda beer. Huda is one of two beers brewed in Hue, and it's pretty good, not to mention criminally cheap. I paid my money and waited, but they didn't have a cold one, so they offered me a 333, which is a Hanoi beer. They wanted 3000 more for it, but I didn't have any more small bills (it takes some getting used to to think of 2000 or 5000 notes as "small bills"), so I just asked for my money back. At that point they just let me take the 333 for no extra charge. But here's the thing, according to all the travel guides, 333 has formaldahyde it in. If you get drunk on it, you'll get very sick. Thanks goodness I only had one. (Sorry again, Amara.)
When we arrived in Da Nang, we found a hotel on the beach, which cost, per night, only a little more than the hotel in Hue..."really cheap" as opposed to "dirt cheap." It's right across from the beach, and all our rooms look out over the ocean. In fact, it's a lot like the beachfront strip in Virginia Beach, only a little shabbier. We're here until tomorrow, when we set off for Hoi An.
Da Nang is a tourist town, but most of the tourists are domestic. This is where the Vietnamese come for their beach holidays. So the tourism trade here caters much less to westerners than in Hanoi or Hue. For example, right next to our hotel is a big restaurant that clearly gets its business from the nearby hotels. But whereas most of the other restaurants we've been frequenting were catering almost entirely to western tourists, this one had only one other table with westerners at it and no English on the menu. This made ordering a little bit of a challenge, but, as always, Lan was happy to rescue us. I went back to the hotel and made a short night of it, but some of the ladies went later on to another restaurant just to hang out. This one made a stab at an English menu, but as we find so often here, the translations and misspellings can be unintentionally humorous. At this place, they tell me, an item that was clearly supposed to be steamed crab was listed on the menu as "steaming crap." A few others that stand out in my mind:
1. At the Ho Chi Minh museum in Hanoi, there's a locker area to stow your things with a sign that reads, "Take luggage of foreigners, no charge."
2. At one of the restaurants in Hue, a sign for a tourism company bragged about their roomy busses that would, "comfort many-legged foreigners."
3. A cute little boy seen on the street in Hue wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a puppy and the words, "I like dog." I wanted to ask him if he prefered grilled or fried, but I just don't have the Vietnamese for something that complicated.
That's about as good a place to end it as I can think of. I'll try to make another post soon, or, as a sign in Vietnam might say, "Will effort to make blogpose very qwik."
Stu
My title refers to an adventure Matt and I had on Sunday. We rented a couple of motorbikes and went looking for footage of city and country life. This is what's called B-roll, illustrative shots that may or may not be used in the film but which are nice to have if you find you need them. Since the OGCDC is in Hue, we needed some footage of life around the city. We also wanted some more farming footage, despite my little run-in with that cow.
So, we rented bikes from the hotel at $1 USD/hour, threw the camera in Matt's bag and the tripod in mine and set off. Now, the motorbikes in question are more like amped up mopeds. Matt kept jokingly referring to his as a hog, but these things don't exactly scream "Easy Rider." They're pretty much the same thing you see all over the place in Europe. Also, virtually no one here wears a helmet, so renting one of those was out of the question. In other words, I'm riding a motorbike with a heavy backpack on, with no helmet, on streets with almost no traffic control, in a country with a sub-par hospital system. Sorry, Amara.
It was worth it, though. We got some great stuff around the city, including at an open-air market that was definitely of the locals-only flavor. Then, we got on the highway leading south out of the city toward Da Nang. After a few km's we turned off the main road, drove through a thin facade of stores and houses, and were almost instantly out in the rice fields. We rode the bikes along this 4'-wide dike between the paddies. (If you've ever been out in midwest or southwest farm country, these dikes are a little like the dirt road grids out there, except they're much smaller and made for two-wheel/two-foot transport only.) We decided to ride all the way to the other side, where we saw a farm village in the distance, and then double back to pick up the scenes in the fields that looked the most promising. But when we got to the village, we realized it was like one of those I described in my last post, a farm village that has no full-size roads in, and is therefore entirely absent of westerners. The village had a river running down the center and a concrete bridge across the river. There were people fishing and bathing in the river, and we got some great shots of this little hideaway. The sight of two tall white men with cameras, as you can imagine, created a bit of a spectacle, but no one seemed to mind, and the kids were hilarious. Everyone seemed to find it amusing to have the camera pointed at them, although several of the shots are way too posey to actually use.
After leaving the village we went back across the dike (which was a little over a km long) and stopped twice to get some shots. Alas, no one was working with a water buffalo, so that shot still eludes us. However, we got lots of other good "rice work" footage and a few shots of something pretty odd. These paddies have lots of little canals between them to use to flood the paddies or pump water out of them. The farmers also use the canals to farm small fish as well (smart, right?). There were two people in a small boat who, at first, looked like they were netting fish in a small net on the end of a pole and then dumping them in the boat. But there were three or four car batteries in the boat hooked up in series. We couldn't figure out why until we saw a wire leading from the batteries down the pole to the "net," which was really a wire mesh basket. In case you haven't figured it out by now, the man was electrocuting the fish. And there was a creepy buzz every time he stuck it in the water. Sure makes it easier to catch the fish!
When we finally returned to the hotel, I realized that I had a problem. I had put on sunscreen, but when I did so I hadn't considered that my shorts would ride up when seated, and I hadn't put any on my lower thighs. So my lower thighs and knees had been in direct sunlight for several hours. Although the area of the burn is relatively small, this is definitely the worst I've been burned in a VERY long time. I'm writing this about 48 hours later, and they're still bright pink. I'm surprised they haven't blistered. Sort of puts a downer on going to the beach here in Da Nang.
Another interesting little tidbit of VN information comes from a trip Matt took a few days earlier. It's too complicated to try to explain why, but on Friday he took a car to Da Nang from Hue and back again. The driver spoke very good English, and Matt had an interesting converstation with him. At one point, Matt told him how some people back home were a little worried about us coming here because they assumed that the people here would hate Americans. The driver, in what has to be one of the best lines heard on this trip, replied, "We don't hate Americans. We look to the future, not the past. We hate the Chinese."
Yesterday (Monday, the 4th) we took the three hour bus ride from Hue to Da Nang. Most of the people on the bus were westerners, but, as on the DMZ Tour bus, there were few Americans. Most of them were Aussies, English, or Irish. There was one woman in her mid-twenties who just wouldn't shut up the whole trip. She was speaking very loudly and ceaselessly to everyone within 10 feet of her in a thick Manchester working-class accent. I don't care how much you like My Fair Lady, that much cockney, for that long and that loud, is just damn annoying!
Half way through the ride, we stopped for toilet (that is, "toilet") and drinks. The people getting off the bus were instantly acosted by people selling tchotchkes. And one local lady had a ripped $20 bill she was trying to exchange for VND. At first this seemed pretty reasonable. We've noted on a few occassions that if a US bill has even a relatively small tear in it, vendors and even banks won't take it. I don't know why, but a ripped US bill is basically useless here. So it's not, on the face of it, so suspicious that this woman would want to try to trade this bill to some westerners. Matt, always the capitalist, was going to offer her 200,000 VND for it, which is about $12.50, but when he took a look at it, he realized it was couterfeit. When he told her he thought it was counterfeit, she got very upset at him. It was pretty funny, because her reaction was of the methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much type; she was definitely running a scam.
As we were getting back on the bus, I asked for a cold Huda beer. Huda is one of two beers brewed in Hue, and it's pretty good, not to mention criminally cheap. I paid my money and waited, but they didn't have a cold one, so they offered me a 333, which is a Hanoi beer. They wanted 3000 more for it, but I didn't have any more small bills (it takes some getting used to to think of 2000 or 5000 notes as "small bills"), so I just asked for my money back. At that point they just let me take the 333 for no extra charge. But here's the thing, according to all the travel guides, 333 has formaldahyde it in. If you get drunk on it, you'll get very sick. Thanks goodness I only had one. (Sorry again, Amara.)
When we arrived in Da Nang, we found a hotel on the beach, which cost, per night, only a little more than the hotel in Hue..."really cheap" as opposed to "dirt cheap." It's right across from the beach, and all our rooms look out over the ocean. In fact, it's a lot like the beachfront strip in Virginia Beach, only a little shabbier. We're here until tomorrow, when we set off for Hoi An.
Da Nang is a tourist town, but most of the tourists are domestic. This is where the Vietnamese come for their beach holidays. So the tourism trade here caters much less to westerners than in Hanoi or Hue. For example, right next to our hotel is a big restaurant that clearly gets its business from the nearby hotels. But whereas most of the other restaurants we've been frequenting were catering almost entirely to western tourists, this one had only one other table with westerners at it and no English on the menu. This made ordering a little bit of a challenge, but, as always, Lan was happy to rescue us. I went back to the hotel and made a short night of it, but some of the ladies went later on to another restaurant just to hang out. This one made a stab at an English menu, but as we find so often here, the translations and misspellings can be unintentionally humorous. At this place, they tell me, an item that was clearly supposed to be steamed crab was listed on the menu as "steaming crap." A few others that stand out in my mind:
1. At the Ho Chi Minh museum in Hanoi, there's a locker area to stow your things with a sign that reads, "Take luggage of foreigners, no charge."
2. At one of the restaurants in Hue, a sign for a tourism company bragged about their roomy busses that would, "comfort many-legged foreigners."
3. A cute little boy seen on the street in Hue wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a puppy and the words, "I like dog." I wanted to ask him if he prefered grilled or fried, but I just don't have the Vietnamese for something that complicated.
That's about as good a place to end it as I can think of. I'll try to make another post soon, or, as a sign in Vietnam might say, "Will effort to make blogpose very qwik."
Stu
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Green Acres
Another day in the country, this time visiting four families who are being interviewed to receive loans to pay for heart surgery for their children. In each case, the child has already been medically diagnosed as having a condition that can be treated with surgery. What we (or, rather, Ms. Tu from the OGCDC staff) were doing was interviewing them to assess need and eligibility for the loan. Of the four, the first and third are worth elaborating on.
The first family we visited was absolutely destitute. The patient was a 6 year old girl with a 3 year old little brother. The mother was there, but the father wasn't. If I understood correctly, he was at a relative's house trying to recover from some sort of food poisoning. While he's away, the family is subsisting on the mother's earnings as a field day laborer, which basically come to around 70 cents US per day. They were living in a building that was a 15x20 concrete slab with three walls and a roof patched together from pieces of corrugated tin and tarp over a frame of scrap wood. It was open in the front and had an open doorway in the back. Inside, there was an old armoire, one thin double-size mattress on the floor, and a 2x3' plastic table with a few kid-size plastic chairs...and that's it. They had nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G. The kitchen was a small fire grate in the back, and I have no idea what they did for toilet. Thankfully, there was a hand pumped well for water.
Even for very poor people, this seemed a strange structure for a house. When this came up in the interview, we found out that they had, last year, borrowed money from the government to pay for a house nearby. Soon after its completion, it was completely destroyed in a typhoon. They still have to pay back the loan. Their son's leg was broken during that storm, but he's recovered, though they owe money for that as well. The "house" they are in now is actually a little lunch shack for field workers that is owned by a relative who was generous enough to let them move into it after the storm. However, the relative needs the income, and the family must find another place to live soon, though they have no idea where.
On our way there, on Ms. Tu's suggestion, we bought some candy, juice boxes, and other treats to give to the kids at the different houses. When we gave some of these treats to those two kids, the mother had trouble suppressing some tears. It was hard to tell if these were tears of thanks or of shame, but my guess is a little of both. It reminded me of an old episode of M*A*S*H in which Major Winchester gives a huge box of candy at Christmas to a local monk who runs an orphanage. A few days later, he sees someone in a bar eating one of the candy bars he donated and finds out that the man eating it bought it on the black market. Winchester confronts the monk, who he's assumed has sold the donation and kept the money for himself. The monk tells him that he sold the candy in order to buy rice, enough rice to feed the children for almost half a year.
And that's the weird tension of giving candy to poor children. On the one hand, a pragmatic person would recognize that the money could go a lot further to purchase food or other things the children need more. But on the other, children in these conditions have pretty much NO luxuries in their lives. It was quite clear to me that these kids live every day eating virtually nothing but rice and drinking nothing but well water. To see how they react to a juice box and a lollipop is heartbreaking; it's a true treasure to them.
The third family was an adventure all itself. They lived in a farming village that was quite literally off the beaten path. That is, we had to walk three kilometers across a series of dikes to get to the village because that's the nearest that any roads go to it. We were wanting shots of farm life, and we got them. We stopped a few times along the way to drink, and Ms. Tu had some conversation with the locals, who all looked at us pretty wide-eyed. I'm guessing it's not every day that have an entourage of white people walking through there.
When we finally reached the house, there was a man outside screaming at the family and throwing a general fit. We got some shots of this, though I was a little nervous about how he might react. I asked Lan if she could tell what the fight was about, and she said the man was insisting they repay a loan. Eventually, he got on his motorcycle and left in a huff. We went in to film the assessment interview, and everything seemed to go fine. After these interviews, the OGCDC staff member takes a look around the house to get some idea of the family's material living conditions. After that walkaround, Ms. Tu and the father in the family had a conversation that seemed a little heated, but I wasn't really paying much attention because I was shooting some exteriors. Then we trekked back to the van...but the plot thickens.
There's a lot of subjectivity built into this process because the families often live outside any clear "documentation" zone. For example, in the states, a similar agency would simply ask to see a few years of tax returns, but there's no similar objective measure to go on here, so they have to make some pretty gut-level decisions about how much money someone has. In such a system, you can imagine the loan applicant's temptation not to be entirely forthcoming about how much money they have. After all, who WOULDN'T want a three year, zero interest loan to cover an operation.
So, after we get back in the van and are on the way back into the city, Ms. Tu gives us the lowdown. She suspects that the family was being quite deceptive about their financial state. It turns out that the conversations she was having with people on the way out were to get some information about the family's condition. Apparently, several people in and around the village told her that the family was not particularly bad off and owned their own tractor (which is a very small motor-driven plowish device that looks almost nothing like a western tractor). In the assessment interview, she asked the father about this, and he told her he didn't own any such item. But in her walkaround, she saw it primitively hidden behind the back of the house.
She also said that the man who was screaming at them when we arrived had passed us on the way there, and that there was something about the way he was talking that seemed very stagey to her, like he was a friend who they'd asked to play the part of an angry loaner to try to give the impression that the family is on hard luck. At any rate, she wasn't sure her suspicions were correct, and she's going to do some more investigating, but she suspects they probably aren't really as needy as some other candidates and are trying to fake it.
Nothing more to add for today. Bye for now,
Stu
The first family we visited was absolutely destitute. The patient was a 6 year old girl with a 3 year old little brother. The mother was there, but the father wasn't. If I understood correctly, he was at a relative's house trying to recover from some sort of food poisoning. While he's away, the family is subsisting on the mother's earnings as a field day laborer, which basically come to around 70 cents US per day. They were living in a building that was a 15x20 concrete slab with three walls and a roof patched together from pieces of corrugated tin and tarp over a frame of scrap wood. It was open in the front and had an open doorway in the back. Inside, there was an old armoire, one thin double-size mattress on the floor, and a 2x3' plastic table with a few kid-size plastic chairs...and that's it. They had nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G. The kitchen was a small fire grate in the back, and I have no idea what they did for toilet. Thankfully, there was a hand pumped well for water.
Even for very poor people, this seemed a strange structure for a house. When this came up in the interview, we found out that they had, last year, borrowed money from the government to pay for a house nearby. Soon after its completion, it was completely destroyed in a typhoon. They still have to pay back the loan. Their son's leg was broken during that storm, but he's recovered, though they owe money for that as well. The "house" they are in now is actually a little lunch shack for field workers that is owned by a relative who was generous enough to let them move into it after the storm. However, the relative needs the income, and the family must find another place to live soon, though they have no idea where.
On our way there, on Ms. Tu's suggestion, we bought some candy, juice boxes, and other treats to give to the kids at the different houses. When we gave some of these treats to those two kids, the mother had trouble suppressing some tears. It was hard to tell if these were tears of thanks or of shame, but my guess is a little of both. It reminded me of an old episode of M*A*S*H in which Major Winchester gives a huge box of candy at Christmas to a local monk who runs an orphanage. A few days later, he sees someone in a bar eating one of the candy bars he donated and finds out that the man eating it bought it on the black market. Winchester confronts the monk, who he's assumed has sold the donation and kept the money for himself. The monk tells him that he sold the candy in order to buy rice, enough rice to feed the children for almost half a year.
And that's the weird tension of giving candy to poor children. On the one hand, a pragmatic person would recognize that the money could go a lot further to purchase food or other things the children need more. But on the other, children in these conditions have pretty much NO luxuries in their lives. It was quite clear to me that these kids live every day eating virtually nothing but rice and drinking nothing but well water. To see how they react to a juice box and a lollipop is heartbreaking; it's a true treasure to them.
The third family was an adventure all itself. They lived in a farming village that was quite literally off the beaten path. That is, we had to walk three kilometers across a series of dikes to get to the village because that's the nearest that any roads go to it. We were wanting shots of farm life, and we got them. We stopped a few times along the way to drink, and Ms. Tu had some conversation with the locals, who all looked at us pretty wide-eyed. I'm guessing it's not every day that have an entourage of white people walking through there.
When we finally reached the house, there was a man outside screaming at the family and throwing a general fit. We got some shots of this, though I was a little nervous about how he might react. I asked Lan if she could tell what the fight was about, and she said the man was insisting they repay a loan. Eventually, he got on his motorcycle and left in a huff. We went in to film the assessment interview, and everything seemed to go fine. After these interviews, the OGCDC staff member takes a look around the house to get some idea of the family's material living conditions. After that walkaround, Ms. Tu and the father in the family had a conversation that seemed a little heated, but I wasn't really paying much attention because I was shooting some exteriors. Then we trekked back to the van...but the plot thickens.
There's a lot of subjectivity built into this process because the families often live outside any clear "documentation" zone. For example, in the states, a similar agency would simply ask to see a few years of tax returns, but there's no similar objective measure to go on here, so they have to make some pretty gut-level decisions about how much money someone has. In such a system, you can imagine the loan applicant's temptation not to be entirely forthcoming about how much money they have. After all, who WOULDN'T want a three year, zero interest loan to cover an operation.
So, after we get back in the van and are on the way back into the city, Ms. Tu gives us the lowdown. She suspects that the family was being quite deceptive about their financial state. It turns out that the conversations she was having with people on the way out were to get some information about the family's condition. Apparently, several people in and around the village told her that the family was not particularly bad off and owned their own tractor (which is a very small motor-driven plowish device that looks almost nothing like a western tractor). In the assessment interview, she asked the father about this, and he told her he didn't own any such item. But in her walkaround, she saw it primitively hidden behind the back of the house.
She also said that the man who was screaming at them when we arrived had passed us on the way there, and that there was something about the way he was talking that seemed very stagey to her, like he was a friend who they'd asked to play the part of an angry loaner to try to give the impression that the family is on hard luck. At any rate, she wasn't sure her suspicions were correct, and she's going to do some more investigating, but she suspects they probably aren't really as needy as some other candidates and are trying to fake it.
Nothing more to add for today. Bye for now,
Stu
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Best day yet?
Today was an interesting day. On the agenda was a trip to visit three families who had been accepted for OGCDC microloans. We accompanied a representative of the staff to visit these three families out in the countryside to the southeast of Hue. In each case, as in our earlier rural trip, the families were remarkably poor. In one case, we had to hoof it around half a mile from the van because that's how far the house was from any road. All three families are basically subsistence farmers who try to pull in additional money by selling livestock.
One of the families was Catholic, and there seemed to be a significant Catholic presence in the area, with several churches and Christian shrines intermingled with the Buddhist ones. This goes back to my earlier observations about the similarities between religious Buddhism and Catholocism. This is a culture that has its roots in animism and ancenstor worship, later importing Buddhism and then Christianity (French, therefore Catholic, Christianity). The result is an interesting sycretism that seems to see no conflicts between the three. The Christian shrines are virtually indistinguishable from the Buddhist ones until you realize the statue is of Mary, not Amida Buddha, and there's a cross, not a swastika. (NOTE: Most of us are used to associating swastikas with the Nazis, but they stole it, in a really historically misguided reading of "Aryan" history, from the Buddhists. It has no racist or fascist connoations in Buddhism. The four branches represent the Four Noble Truths, and the eight lines represent the Eightfold Path. It's a little unnerving to see swastikas all over the place here, but you get used to it quickly.)
After another country lunch, this one far more agreeable than the last, we went to a ceremony at the local Party meeting hall, where the families were distributed their monies and some salutory gifts. It was quite touching, despite the presence of a large bust of Ho Chi Minh overseeing the procedings.
All of these official agenda items were great and provided lots of good footage, but the real fun came from three unplanned excursions. First, in between lunch and the ceremony, our hosts decided to take us to a nearby graveyard. "Graveyard" is nowhere close to an accurate description of this place. When you get to the center of it, as far as you can see in every direction are huge, elaborate tombs. They make the austere, gray western mausoleum look puny. We're talking giganitic, ornate, expensive tombs that wealthier families provide for their parents. They're a riot of color and baroque east Asian design. We got out to shoot some footage, because we'd been talking just last night about how we needed more "decorative" footage of distinctly Vietnamese subjects to use interstitially in the film. I swear, I could have shot in there for days. It was really remarkable.
After getting back in the van, we still had about half an hour to kill, so our host asked us if we wanted to go to the beach. We had no idea we were so close to the water, but in fact there was a beach less than a mile from the cemetery. We drove down and stepped out onto a beach nothing like any I'd ever seen before. It was not a tourist beach at all, although it easily could have been. The vista was tremendous, with the mountains reaching right to the seashore on the south and dramatic cloud formations all around us. There was a small bar/cafe on the beach, but the people there looked at us like we were the first white people they'd ever seen come there. We got more great footage of fishing boats, the clear ocean, even water buffalo on the beach. The Pacific water must have been around 80+ degrees, and it's a shame we couldn't go swimming. But it was a real unexpected treat.
The last little detour happened on the way back into Hue after the loan ceremony. Again on our "authentic Vietnam" footage kick, we decided to get some shots of people working the rice paddies, of which there were many down this one-lane road. We got out at one point and shot some good stuff, but everything was far away. So I ended up with lots of wide telephoto shots, which tend to look a little flat because of the planar distortion you get shooting long focal lengths. So Matt and I became obsessed with the idea of getting up close to someone tending the fields with a water buffalo and we drive on until we saw such a scene pretty close to the road. We stopped the van again and all got out. Matt and I walked down onto this dike between paddies and approached the man with the buffalo, which had by then climbed up onto the dike.
In a move Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) would have been proud of, we offered him money to take the buffalo back into the field so we could film it. I felt a little ethically odd about this but rationalized that it was only decorative B-roll. Matt did his best to convey to the man what we wanted and flashed a 10,000 VND note. That's only about 70 cents, but it's probably about a third of what this man makes in a day. The man seemed to get the general idea, so he took the money and led the cow back out into the flooded paddy. But he didn't hook up the plowish device, so the cow was just standing there in the field. That's when I took off my sandals and climbed in. So there I am, up to my knees in a flooded rice paddy that smelled like what it was, a refined mixture of stagnant water, mud, and cow dung. I'm holding a $4000 camera and hoping to God I don't trip. I'm getting some good shots, but I'm frustrated that we can't get the man to understand that we want a shot of the animal at work. Then the buffalo lowers its head a little and snorts at me. Keep in mind that this is no dairy cow. It's about 2/3 the size of rhino and has a set of horns that would make any person think twice. In its defense, this was probably the first time in its life that it had had a six foot white man walk up to it and point a camera in its face.
I start backing off slowly, still shooting. The farmer starts laughing. I'm sure he was thinking something like, "Stupid American, pays me 10,000 dong so my cow can kill him!" But there was no attack. Given the consistency of the mud, I'm pretty sure charging was as futile an option for him as running was for me. Instead, he made it back up to the dike and started walking away. We tried to get the man to understand that we wanted to get a shot of him working with the buffalo, but at that point the animal was walking off and the man started "chasing" after it, with Matt's money in his pocket. I supposed that's what we get for trying to set up a shot in a documentary. Really "authentic," huh? I imagine that right now that farmer is drinking on us and regailing his friends with his story about the ridiculous westerners he met today.
Several people in the group took pictures of this madness. I'll try to get one of them uploaded to my photo page sometime soon. In fact, I think that would make a heck of a great picture for the back of my business cards. What do you think?
Stu
One of the families was Catholic, and there seemed to be a significant Catholic presence in the area, with several churches and Christian shrines intermingled with the Buddhist ones. This goes back to my earlier observations about the similarities between religious Buddhism and Catholocism. This is a culture that has its roots in animism and ancenstor worship, later importing Buddhism and then Christianity (French, therefore Catholic, Christianity). The result is an interesting sycretism that seems to see no conflicts between the three. The Christian shrines are virtually indistinguishable from the Buddhist ones until you realize the statue is of Mary, not Amida Buddha, and there's a cross, not a swastika. (NOTE: Most of us are used to associating swastikas with the Nazis, but they stole it, in a really historically misguided reading of "Aryan" history, from the Buddhists. It has no racist or fascist connoations in Buddhism. The four branches represent the Four Noble Truths, and the eight lines represent the Eightfold Path. It's a little unnerving to see swastikas all over the place here, but you get used to it quickly.)
After another country lunch, this one far more agreeable than the last, we went to a ceremony at the local Party meeting hall, where the families were distributed their monies and some salutory gifts. It was quite touching, despite the presence of a large bust of Ho Chi Minh overseeing the procedings.
All of these official agenda items were great and provided lots of good footage, but the real fun came from three unplanned excursions. First, in between lunch and the ceremony, our hosts decided to take us to a nearby graveyard. "Graveyard" is nowhere close to an accurate description of this place. When you get to the center of it, as far as you can see in every direction are huge, elaborate tombs. They make the austere, gray western mausoleum look puny. We're talking giganitic, ornate, expensive tombs that wealthier families provide for their parents. They're a riot of color and baroque east Asian design. We got out to shoot some footage, because we'd been talking just last night about how we needed more "decorative" footage of distinctly Vietnamese subjects to use interstitially in the film. I swear, I could have shot in there for days. It was really remarkable.
After getting back in the van, we still had about half an hour to kill, so our host asked us if we wanted to go to the beach. We had no idea we were so close to the water, but in fact there was a beach less than a mile from the cemetery. We drove down and stepped out onto a beach nothing like any I'd ever seen before. It was not a tourist beach at all, although it easily could have been. The vista was tremendous, with the mountains reaching right to the seashore on the south and dramatic cloud formations all around us. There was a small bar/cafe on the beach, but the people there looked at us like we were the first white people they'd ever seen come there. We got more great footage of fishing boats, the clear ocean, even water buffalo on the beach. The Pacific water must have been around 80+ degrees, and it's a shame we couldn't go swimming. But it was a real unexpected treat.
The last little detour happened on the way back into Hue after the loan ceremony. Again on our "authentic Vietnam" footage kick, we decided to get some shots of people working the rice paddies, of which there were many down this one-lane road. We got out at one point and shot some good stuff, but everything was far away. So I ended up with lots of wide telephoto shots, which tend to look a little flat because of the planar distortion you get shooting long focal lengths. So Matt and I became obsessed with the idea of getting up close to someone tending the fields with a water buffalo and we drive on until we saw such a scene pretty close to the road. We stopped the van again and all got out. Matt and I walked down onto this dike between paddies and approached the man with the buffalo, which had by then climbed up onto the dike.
In a move Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) would have been proud of, we offered him money to take the buffalo back into the field so we could film it. I felt a little ethically odd about this but rationalized that it was only decorative B-roll. Matt did his best to convey to the man what we wanted and flashed a 10,000 VND note. That's only about 70 cents, but it's probably about a third of what this man makes in a day. The man seemed to get the general idea, so he took the money and led the cow back out into the flooded paddy. But he didn't hook up the plowish device, so the cow was just standing there in the field. That's when I took off my sandals and climbed in. So there I am, up to my knees in a flooded rice paddy that smelled like what it was, a refined mixture of stagnant water, mud, and cow dung. I'm holding a $4000 camera and hoping to God I don't trip. I'm getting some good shots, but I'm frustrated that we can't get the man to understand that we want a shot of the animal at work. Then the buffalo lowers its head a little and snorts at me. Keep in mind that this is no dairy cow. It's about 2/3 the size of rhino and has a set of horns that would make any person think twice. In its defense, this was probably the first time in its life that it had had a six foot white man walk up to it and point a camera in its face.
I start backing off slowly, still shooting. The farmer starts laughing. I'm sure he was thinking something like, "Stupid American, pays me 10,000 dong so my cow can kill him!" But there was no attack. Given the consistency of the mud, I'm pretty sure charging was as futile an option for him as running was for me. Instead, he made it back up to the dike and started walking away. We tried to get the man to understand that we wanted to get a shot of him working with the buffalo, but at that point the animal was walking off and the man started "chasing" after it, with Matt's money in his pocket. I supposed that's what we get for trying to set up a shot in a documentary. Really "authentic," huh? I imagine that right now that farmer is drinking on us and regailing his friends with his story about the ridiculous westerners he met today.
Several people in the group took pictures of this madness. I'll try to get one of them uploaded to my photo page sometime soon. In fact, I think that would make a heck of a great picture for the back of my business cards. What do you think?
Stu
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Dee Em Zed
Today was a day off from shooting, so five of the seven of us went on a DMZ tour. It was an all-day excursion from Hue up into the Quang Tri province a little to the north. Quang Tri is where you'll find the old DMZ, the Vien Moc tunnels, Rockpile base, and Khe Sanh...along with tons of other noteworthy sites we didn't have time to visit. I had mixed emotions about the whole thing. Mf father and father-in-law are both VN vets, and I respect their service greatly. But at the same time, ever since I first started to develop a political and historical conscience, I've felt in my gut that the war was a massive, stupid, and arrogant mistake...pretty much the same way I feel about our current exploits in Iraq.
Then, yet again, it's a common theme in the war memorials here to take a tone that seems to relish the deaths of American soldiers, and this seems to go above and beyond merely celebrating their victory in the conflict. I tried to stay detached about the whole thing. After all, we have our propaganda too. Is a clearly posed photograph of a VC officer leading troops in an attack really all that different from a painting of Washington crossing the Delaware? Matt rolled his eyes at the frequent use of terms like "liberating heroes" to describe northern Vietnamese soldiers, but I reminded him that we throw the word "heroes" around like confetti when talking about the military. I think we're so used to seeing military history from the vantage point of the American victor, that to see a memorial to a battle we lost, from the other side of the fence, is inevitably jarring. It's hard to decide what unbiased history is in these situations, and I was willing to politely give them their due in the matter, I just wish there were a little less blunt violence in their imagery.
As we were leaving Khe Sanh, a man came up to us asking if we'd like to buy a souvenir. He held up a tray full of tarnished medals and dogtags. That left a distinctly nasty taste in my mouth.
Khe Sanh was actually our main afternoon stop. In the morning we visited the tunnels at Vien Moc, about 10 km north of the DMZ. There is an elaborate tunnel system there that was built to serve as a VC base and to defend the locals from American bombing. All around that area, the landscape was a mess of bomb craters and re-planted forest. (It reminded me of pictures I've seen of Point du Hoc at Normandy, bombed to-hell-and-gone by allied bombers the night before D-Day in an attempt to take out large German artillery threatening the landings. During the war, Vien Moc must have looked like the face of the moon.) There are literally several kilometers of tunnels on multiple levels dug into the rock near the ocean. We went down in two of these, and it was one of the most unnerving things I've done in a very long time. In addition to being very poorly lit, they are really small. The average height of the tunnels is about five feet with a rounded arch at the top, and they are only about two- to three-feet wide at the most. Every few yards, a small cove will jut off from the side, tiny cubbies where people lived, cooked, give birth, and (I assume) went to the bathroom. It was just unreal to see what the human animal can endure when pressed.
Heavy stuff aside, most of the day was spent on the bus, which was populated almost entirely by westerners. There were three other Americans on there other than us, and a few Brits and Germans, but most of the tourists were Aussies. Also, most of the tourists here are younger. Backpacking through southeast Asia appears to be the new backbacking through Europe. We met some nice folks and had a few laughs. The white knuckle ride on that bus through the mountains was also a bonding experience.
The pictures from the trip are on my google pictures page. If you haven't already sent me email asking to see them, let me know (sminnis@vwc.edu).
Stu
Then, yet again, it's a common theme in the war memorials here to take a tone that seems to relish the deaths of American soldiers, and this seems to go above and beyond merely celebrating their victory in the conflict. I tried to stay detached about the whole thing. After all, we have our propaganda too. Is a clearly posed photograph of a VC officer leading troops in an attack really all that different from a painting of Washington crossing the Delaware? Matt rolled his eyes at the frequent use of terms like "liberating heroes" to describe northern Vietnamese soldiers, but I reminded him that we throw the word "heroes" around like confetti when talking about the military. I think we're so used to seeing military history from the vantage point of the American victor, that to see a memorial to a battle we lost, from the other side of the fence, is inevitably jarring. It's hard to decide what unbiased history is in these situations, and I was willing to politely give them their due in the matter, I just wish there were a little less blunt violence in their imagery.
As we were leaving Khe Sanh, a man came up to us asking if we'd like to buy a souvenir. He held up a tray full of tarnished medals and dogtags. That left a distinctly nasty taste in my mouth.
Khe Sanh was actually our main afternoon stop. In the morning we visited the tunnels at Vien Moc, about 10 km north of the DMZ. There is an elaborate tunnel system there that was built to serve as a VC base and to defend the locals from American bombing. All around that area, the landscape was a mess of bomb craters and re-planted forest. (It reminded me of pictures I've seen of Point du Hoc at Normandy, bombed to-hell-and-gone by allied bombers the night before D-Day in an attempt to take out large German artillery threatening the landings. During the war, Vien Moc must have looked like the face of the moon.) There are literally several kilometers of tunnels on multiple levels dug into the rock near the ocean. We went down in two of these, and it was one of the most unnerving things I've done in a very long time. In addition to being very poorly lit, they are really small. The average height of the tunnels is about five feet with a rounded arch at the top, and they are only about two- to three-feet wide at the most. Every few yards, a small cove will jut off from the side, tiny cubbies where people lived, cooked, give birth, and (I assume) went to the bathroom. It was just unreal to see what the human animal can endure when pressed.
Heavy stuff aside, most of the day was spent on the bus, which was populated almost entirely by westerners. There were three other Americans on there other than us, and a few Brits and Germans, but most of the tourists were Aussies. Also, most of the tourists here are younger. Backpacking through southeast Asia appears to be the new backbacking through Europe. We met some nice folks and had a few laughs. The white knuckle ride on that bus through the mountains was also a bonding experience.
The pictures from the trip are on my google pictures page. If you haven't already sent me email asking to see them, let me know (sminnis@vwc.edu).
Stu
Friday, May 25, 2007
Hue, Juarez of the east?
I've been cultivating an observation since arriving in Hue: that it's eeirily similar to north central Mexico. I hard to put in words exactly, more of a feeling. The heat is part of it, and, as I noted earlier, Hue is surprisingly dry though still far from arid. The street culture seems very similar to me as well. The kid who keeps walking by the hotel lobby asking if he can shine my sandals (yes, he expects to shoeshine a pair of Tevas *!?*) is like a slightly less aggressive version of the kids in Juarez that run up to your car and clean your windows or walk down the sidewalks trying to sell you gum.
There are other similarities, but the one that seems most salient to my little theory is the weird similarity between the local flavor of Buddhism and Hispanic Catholocism. A short, non-exhaustive list:
1. Shrines EVERYWHERE. No matter where you go, there are little shrines lurking in trees, corner shops, hotels and restaurants, out in the middle of fields. And their construction is almost identical to those you see in the southwest and in Mexico...little houses on posts, for God incarnate.
2. Nuns and orphanages. What's up with nuns and orphanages? Are they the only people who are willing to take in parentless and cast-off children? Nuns take in orphans; it's a human universal.
3. Jesus and St. Christopher. The personal iconography is the same as well. Taxi drivers have prayer flags hanging from their rear view mirrors (instead of crosses) and Buddhas or bodhisatvas on their dashboards (instead of Jesus or St. Christopher). Everywhere you turn, there are little Buddhist pictures that look almost no different than the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Virgin of Guadalupe pictures on candles in Mexican restaurants.
Shifting subjects, a little camera geek stuff for the camera geeks out there. Despite the aforementioned wonders of the HD camera we're using, I'd just like to complain for a second about how tough some of the shooting situations are here. The contrast between out in the sunlight and inside a window-lit room here is something around the order of 11 or more stops (that's a lot). And if you have a window backlighting your subject, it's practically impossible to get the shot. It's really crazy, because you'll be shooting f11 with 1/32 neutral density one second and f2 with 12dB gain the next. If that last sentence meant absolutely nothing to you, imagine trying to take a shower with only two water temperature options, 40 degrees or 140 degrees. That's what it's like shooting in Vietnam.
And then there's the sound. This is one noisy country. There always seems to be some random noise going on that's blowing your audio. Some common culprits: Construction (blame three years straight of 8% or greater GDP growth). Fans (always present, always running...thank the lord). Loud kids (this just comes with the territory of our subject, I suppose). The language barrier (noise in the psychological, rather than auditory, sense). The audio work for this film is going to be a bear.
Thanks for reading.
Stu
There are other similarities, but the one that seems most salient to my little theory is the weird similarity between the local flavor of Buddhism and Hispanic Catholocism. A short, non-exhaustive list:
1. Shrines EVERYWHERE. No matter where you go, there are little shrines lurking in trees, corner shops, hotels and restaurants, out in the middle of fields. And their construction is almost identical to those you see in the southwest and in Mexico...little houses on posts, for God incarnate.
2. Nuns and orphanages. What's up with nuns and orphanages? Are they the only people who are willing to take in parentless and cast-off children? Nuns take in orphans; it's a human universal.
3. Jesus and St. Christopher. The personal iconography is the same as well. Taxi drivers have prayer flags hanging from their rear view mirrors (instead of crosses) and Buddhas or bodhisatvas on their dashboards (instead of Jesus or St. Christopher). Everywhere you turn, there are little Buddhist pictures that look almost no different than the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Virgin of Guadalupe pictures on candles in Mexican restaurants.
Shifting subjects, a little camera geek stuff for the camera geeks out there. Despite the aforementioned wonders of the HD camera we're using, I'd just like to complain for a second about how tough some of the shooting situations are here. The contrast between out in the sunlight and inside a window-lit room here is something around the order of 11 or more stops (that's a lot). And if you have a window backlighting your subject, it's practically impossible to get the shot. It's really crazy, because you'll be shooting f11 with 1/32 neutral density one second and f2 with 12dB gain the next. If that last sentence meant absolutely nothing to you, imagine trying to take a shower with only two water temperature options, 40 degrees or 140 degrees. That's what it's like shooting in Vietnam.
And then there's the sound. This is one noisy country. There always seems to be some random noise going on that's blowing your audio. Some common culprits: Construction (blame three years straight of 8% or greater GDP growth). Fans (always present, always running...thank the lord). Loud kids (this just comes with the territory of our subject, I suppose). The language barrier (noise in the psychological, rather than auditory, sense). The audio work for this film is going to be a bear.
Thanks for reading.
Stu
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Tara, the work, heat, lunch (in that order)
Sad news. Tara Redding had to fly home. She received email last night that her grandfather passed. Tara wasn't part of the grant group and was paying her own way on the trip, but she'll be missed regardless. If you know her, you should consider sending her some support. She took the flight from Hue to Saigon this morning and is currently waiting in Saigon airport to board her late evening flight to Tokyo, then on to DFW and home. It's a long journey, and I can't imagine what it must be like to receive such news on the other side of the globe.
Now down to seven, we drove into the central highland mountains today. I assumed that the mountains would be cooler, but really it just means you're closer to the sun. (More on the heat in a minute.) Our first two stops were rural special ed. schools supported by the OGCDC. These are VERY humble one-room school houses out in the country, but the education and dignity they provide these young people is immeasurable. Matt and I are getting pretty good at grab-and-go video, trading off shooting, looking for good shot and sound opportunities, and generally covering each other's mistakes. The new HD camera is a dream to shoot with. You could point it at a pile of dirt and get some nice footage. I mean that literally...I've done it.
After lunch (again, below), we visited a family who is being considered for one of the OGCDC microloans. They have a beautiful and spunky 9 month old daughter who has a heart valve problem. If left unoperated on, it will probably be fatal within a few years. The surgery only costs around $660 USD, but the family is incredibly poor. They live in a dirt floor shanty, and the father only earns around $1.25 a day. They have been able to raise around a third of the money from family and friends, but they need the microloan for the remaining amount. Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that the OGCDC microloans have a three year term and are interest free.
Now, on to less intense matters. Let's start with the heat. Hue is so hot...(How hot IS it?!)...It's so hot that today I drank two litres of water and only went to the bathroom once. Every so often I wish I had a thermometer to check, but then again I probably don't want to know. It's dryer in Hue than in Hanoi, but that's small comfort when you find yourself panting like a dog every waking second of the day. And remember, it's not even close to high summer here. Oh, and then there's the air conditioning in the hotel room. The AC works fine, but the hotel insists you turn off a master power switch to the whole room when you leave. This is an admirable power-saving trick, but it means the AC isn't on unless you're in the room. It also means the fridge gets shut off, which in turn means your drinks aren't cold when you get back from a long day of schlepping a camera and tripod through the mountains. If this sounds pretty cheap, I should point out that our hotel in Hanoi did the same thing. I'm pretty sure it's standard except in the most luxurious hotels.
Now, about that lunch. Unforgettable. Really. The way a nasty stomach flu is unforgettable. Up in the mountains we stopped at a small "cafe." This was a locals-only type of place where they probably get about two westerners a month on average. The food was authentic Vietnamese provincial, which I can't recommend. It was a series of dishes served family style: fried fish with bananas, sauteed beef in a bed of clover (seriously), the chewiest squid on planet earth, eggplants that looked like dead eels, and, le coup de grace, chopped chicken, again on clover. Now, you'd think chopped chicken would be pretty inocuous, right? Wrong. You know how you can buy a "whole fryer" chicken down at the Food Lion? "Whole," my foot! THIS was a whole chicken. We saw feet. We saw a neck. And we saw something that looked distinctly testicular at first but upon further examination was probably "only" the kidneys. And I'm lucky I had the beer, because the non-bottled drink selection was novel as well, including something called "Bird's Nest White Fungus," a canned drink with the hue of ginger ale but without the carbonation and WITH flecks of...something...suspended in it. I can only assume that was the fungus. Then, insult to injury, we were charged 57,000 Dong each for this abomination. That's only about $3.50 USD, but it placed it among the more expensive meals we've eaten since arriving. Vietnam is making me VERY cheap.
One last funny bit before signing off. You may have noticed that the Dong is so inflated that you basically can't pay for anything in increments less than 1000. Well, I've been keeping a small note pad in my pocket to keep track of expenses. After a day or two, I got tired of writing three zeros after each number and switched to the common abbreviation, "k." Then, last night, Matt and I had a good laugh when we realize that "48kD", for example, reads, "forty eight kilodong." I think I'll start using the term "kilodong" in the cafes, just to see how people react.
Best,
Stu
Now down to seven, we drove into the central highland mountains today. I assumed that the mountains would be cooler, but really it just means you're closer to the sun. (More on the heat in a minute.) Our first two stops were rural special ed. schools supported by the OGCDC. These are VERY humble one-room school houses out in the country, but the education and dignity they provide these young people is immeasurable. Matt and I are getting pretty good at grab-and-go video, trading off shooting, looking for good shot and sound opportunities, and generally covering each other's mistakes. The new HD camera is a dream to shoot with. You could point it at a pile of dirt and get some nice footage. I mean that literally...I've done it.
After lunch (again, below), we visited a family who is being considered for one of the OGCDC microloans. They have a beautiful and spunky 9 month old daughter who has a heart valve problem. If left unoperated on, it will probably be fatal within a few years. The surgery only costs around $660 USD, but the family is incredibly poor. They live in a dirt floor shanty, and the father only earns around $1.25 a day. They have been able to raise around a third of the money from family and friends, but they need the microloan for the remaining amount. Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that the OGCDC microloans have a three year term and are interest free.
Now, on to less intense matters. Let's start with the heat. Hue is so hot...(How hot IS it?!)...It's so hot that today I drank two litres of water and only went to the bathroom once. Every so often I wish I had a thermometer to check, but then again I probably don't want to know. It's dryer in Hue than in Hanoi, but that's small comfort when you find yourself panting like a dog every waking second of the day. And remember, it's not even close to high summer here. Oh, and then there's the air conditioning in the hotel room. The AC works fine, but the hotel insists you turn off a master power switch to the whole room when you leave. This is an admirable power-saving trick, but it means the AC isn't on unless you're in the room. It also means the fridge gets shut off, which in turn means your drinks aren't cold when you get back from a long day of schlepping a camera and tripod through the mountains. If this sounds pretty cheap, I should point out that our hotel in Hanoi did the same thing. I'm pretty sure it's standard except in the most luxurious hotels.
Now, about that lunch. Unforgettable. Really. The way a nasty stomach flu is unforgettable. Up in the mountains we stopped at a small "cafe." This was a locals-only type of place where they probably get about two westerners a month on average. The food was authentic Vietnamese provincial, which I can't recommend. It was a series of dishes served family style: fried fish with bananas, sauteed beef in a bed of clover (seriously), the chewiest squid on planet earth, eggplants that looked like dead eels, and, le coup de grace, chopped chicken, again on clover. Now, you'd think chopped chicken would be pretty inocuous, right? Wrong. You know how you can buy a "whole fryer" chicken down at the Food Lion? "Whole," my foot! THIS was a whole chicken. We saw feet. We saw a neck. And we saw something that looked distinctly testicular at first but upon further examination was probably "only" the kidneys. And I'm lucky I had the beer, because the non-bottled drink selection was novel as well, including something called "Bird's Nest White Fungus," a canned drink with the hue of ginger ale but without the carbonation and WITH flecks of...something...suspended in it. I can only assume that was the fungus. Then, insult to injury, we were charged 57,000 Dong each for this abomination. That's only about $3.50 USD, but it placed it among the more expensive meals we've eaten since arriving. Vietnam is making me VERY cheap.
One last funny bit before signing off. You may have noticed that the Dong is so inflated that you basically can't pay for anything in increments less than 1000. Well, I've been keeping a small note pad in my pocket to keep track of expenses. After a day or two, I got tired of writing three zeros after each number and switched to the common abbreviation, "k." Then, last night, Matt and I had a good laugh when we realize that "48kD", for example, reads, "forty eight kilodong." I think I'll start using the term "kilodong" in the cafes, just to see how people react.
Best,
Stu
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Ha Long to Hue
I'm sorry it's been a while since my last post. Things have been pretty busy the last few days. On Sunday, we went to Ha Long Bay, which was further away than I thought but worth the drive. It was also nice to see some of the country after being only in Hanoi since arriving. Ha Long is a magnificent site, although it's very touristy and we visited on an overcast day. I think I put links to a couple of stock photos of it in my last post. We took a boat to an island in the bay that has two large caves. One of the caves was discovered many centuries ago and has long been used as a meditation spot for Buddhist ascetics. The other cave was only discovered in the 1980s, and the inside is a riot of gigantic stalagmites and stalagtites, very much like Mammoth Cave or Carlsbad Caverns.
We made it back from Ha Long in the nick of time to catch the train from Hanoi to Hue. Forget any romantic ideas you may have about a train ride through the Vietnamese countryside. The train is more like "adventure" travel. Six people (and their luggage, which in our case includes several bags of video gear) share a sleeper cabin roughly seven feet square and 9 feet high. It smells. The toilet is a squatter that dumps directly onto the tracks. And to top it off, the loud French tourists in the cabin next to us were blissfully ignoring the no smoking signs. "Ugly Americans," indeed. More like "Les Franciase betes."
It probably goes without saying that I didn't sleep much on the train, and I got out of bed at 5 am and stared out the window at the countryside for three more hours until we arrived at Hue. Oh, I forgot, the loudspeaker on the train was playing a loop of traditional Vietnamese music, Asian pop, and historical propganda lessons in Vietnamese, French, and English. It turned of at 10 pm and turned back on at 7 am. I presume that if we had taken a day trip instead of an overnight, we would have been listening to it the whole time...(shudder).
Hue is very hot, but it's much more dry than Hanoi. It's also cleaner, slower, and the people friendlier. We stumbled around town yesterday looking for the office of Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan and finally found it after quite a lot of sweat and sun. Since some of you may still be unclear on what I'm doing here, maybe I should take a minute to explain. Dr. Nhan is a professor at Hue Medical College. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he runs the OGCDC, the Office of Genetic Counseling for Disabled Children. The OGCDC runs a wide range of services for poor children in Hue and in the central Vietnam region. At the most important level, this involves raising money and coordinating microloans to poor families so that children with genetic malformities (especially cardiac problems) and can have life-saving surgeries. But the center also runs a number of coordinated charities to provide services and work to disabled people as well. We are here to document the work of his office and, where relevant, connect the issue to the persistent problem of ecological and genetic damage caused by the lasting effects of Agent Orange use in the war. For the conservative among you, don't panic; we're not making an anti-American film. We're just trying to document how the war reverberates to the present day here and trying to provide a tool for reconciliation. More practically, we hope to find film festival and/or broadcast outlets for the film, as well as distribute it to veterans' groups and Vietnamese cultural organization in the US, perhaps raising funds for the OGCDC in the process. The trip as a whole was funded by a grant by the Asia Network division of the Freeman Foundation, though that grant only funded one faculty member (Steven). So my funding was actually provided by a summer research grant from the college...for which I am quite grateful. The students are doing research in their respective fields that will supplement and support the film work. For example, two of the business students are researching the OGCDC's microloan program, while someone from Earth and Environmental Science is studying the long-term effects of dioxin on the local environment.
We started the real work on the film today, visiting the Hope Shop in Hue City (the old walled city center across the river from our hotel). This is one of the charities coordinated through the OGCDC. It's a place where young people (roughly 16-30) with a breadth of disabilities...physical, mental, blind, and deaf...make a variety of handicrafts for tourist trade. If this sounds like forced labor, trust me, it isn't. It's an opportunity for these people to earn a living and live in a welcoming community in a society that has almost no services at all for the disabled. I was reminded of Lion's Camp, a camp in Texas for disabled children that Amara and I worked at several summers in college. It was quite moving to see what Hope Shop does for these people. Funny story, we got into a conversation with some of the deaf people there, and I was able to hold a semi-competent conversation. You see, after four years of Lion's Camp, I was once a passable signer, though I'm 13 years rusty. But ASL, with some obvious modifications, is essentially a universal sign system. So the easiest people for me to communicate with in Vietnam are the deaf. Go figure.
Then in the afternoon we visited a pagoda where the nuns run an orphanage that includes many disabled children. The nuns run a school for the children in the pagoda, and the OGCDC sponsors special classes for those with disabilities. We were able to interview the abbess, but there was some construction going on in the background that may make the audio very difficult to use. Despite that problem, we got some great footage, and it was exhilirating to be working on something after so long. I've been teaching video production for ages, but it's been years since I actually worked on a project of my own. I'm very much looking forward to the next two weeks in Hue, shooting footage, finding the golden moments, starting to edit in my head in preparation for the actual editing process once we get home.
Internet access here is a little dodgy. Both of the computers in the hotel have intermittent access. I'm going to try to find an internet cafe nearby so that I can keep up with email, uploading pictures, and the blog. Speaking of pictures, I still can't figure out how to add pictures to the blog posts. So if you're interested in seeing the pictures, just email me at sminnis@vwc.edu, and I'll send you a "view pictures" invite for the site I've been using to upload them. Just don't be too shocked if it takes me a while to get back to you. And don't forget that I'm 11 hours ahead of EST.
Best wishes,
Stu
We made it back from Ha Long in the nick of time to catch the train from Hanoi to Hue. Forget any romantic ideas you may have about a train ride through the Vietnamese countryside. The train is more like "adventure" travel. Six people (and their luggage, which in our case includes several bags of video gear) share a sleeper cabin roughly seven feet square and 9 feet high. It smells. The toilet is a squatter that dumps directly onto the tracks. And to top it off, the loud French tourists in the cabin next to us were blissfully ignoring the no smoking signs. "Ugly Americans," indeed. More like "Les Franciase betes."
It probably goes without saying that I didn't sleep much on the train, and I got out of bed at 5 am and stared out the window at the countryside for three more hours until we arrived at Hue. Oh, I forgot, the loudspeaker on the train was playing a loop of traditional Vietnamese music, Asian pop, and historical propganda lessons in Vietnamese, French, and English. It turned of at 10 pm and turned back on at 7 am. I presume that if we had taken a day trip instead of an overnight, we would have been listening to it the whole time...(shudder).
Hue is very hot, but it's much more dry than Hanoi. It's also cleaner, slower, and the people friendlier. We stumbled around town yesterday looking for the office of Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan and finally found it after quite a lot of sweat and sun. Since some of you may still be unclear on what I'm doing here, maybe I should take a minute to explain. Dr. Nhan is a professor at Hue Medical College. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he runs the OGCDC, the Office of Genetic Counseling for Disabled Children. The OGCDC runs a wide range of services for poor children in Hue and in the central Vietnam region. At the most important level, this involves raising money and coordinating microloans to poor families so that children with genetic malformities (especially cardiac problems) and can have life-saving surgeries. But the center also runs a number of coordinated charities to provide services and work to disabled people as well. We are here to document the work of his office and, where relevant, connect the issue to the persistent problem of ecological and genetic damage caused by the lasting effects of Agent Orange use in the war. For the conservative among you, don't panic; we're not making an anti-American film. We're just trying to document how the war reverberates to the present day here and trying to provide a tool for reconciliation. More practically, we hope to find film festival and/or broadcast outlets for the film, as well as distribute it to veterans' groups and Vietnamese cultural organization in the US, perhaps raising funds for the OGCDC in the process. The trip as a whole was funded by a grant by the Asia Network division of the Freeman Foundation, though that grant only funded one faculty member (Steven). So my funding was actually provided by a summer research grant from the college...for which I am quite grateful. The students are doing research in their respective fields that will supplement and support the film work. For example, two of the business students are researching the OGCDC's microloan program, while someone from Earth and Environmental Science is studying the long-term effects of dioxin on the local environment.
We started the real work on the film today, visiting the Hope Shop in Hue City (the old walled city center across the river from our hotel). This is one of the charities coordinated through the OGCDC. It's a place where young people (roughly 16-30) with a breadth of disabilities...physical, mental, blind, and deaf...make a variety of handicrafts for tourist trade. If this sounds like forced labor, trust me, it isn't. It's an opportunity for these people to earn a living and live in a welcoming community in a society that has almost no services at all for the disabled. I was reminded of Lion's Camp, a camp in Texas for disabled children that Amara and I worked at several summers in college. It was quite moving to see what Hope Shop does for these people. Funny story, we got into a conversation with some of the deaf people there, and I was able to hold a semi-competent conversation. You see, after four years of Lion's Camp, I was once a passable signer, though I'm 13 years rusty. But ASL, with some obvious modifications, is essentially a universal sign system. So the easiest people for me to communicate with in Vietnam are the deaf. Go figure.
Then in the afternoon we visited a pagoda where the nuns run an orphanage that includes many disabled children. The nuns run a school for the children in the pagoda, and the OGCDC sponsors special classes for those with disabilities. We were able to interview the abbess, but there was some construction going on in the background that may make the audio very difficult to use. Despite that problem, we got some great footage, and it was exhilirating to be working on something after so long. I've been teaching video production for ages, but it's been years since I actually worked on a project of my own. I'm very much looking forward to the next two weeks in Hue, shooting footage, finding the golden moments, starting to edit in my head in preparation for the actual editing process once we get home.
Internet access here is a little dodgy. Both of the computers in the hotel have intermittent access. I'm going to try to find an internet cafe nearby so that I can keep up with email, uploading pictures, and the blog. Speaking of pictures, I still can't figure out how to add pictures to the blog posts. So if you're interested in seeing the pictures, just email me at sminnis@vwc.edu, and I'll send you a "view pictures" invite for the site I've been using to upload them. Just don't be too shocked if it takes me a while to get back to you. And don't forget that I'm 11 hours ahead of EST.
Best wishes,
Stu
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Rain is good.
Rain is good. This may seem like an obvious point, but, as a person who has never really enjoyed humidity (blame growing up in New Mexico), I was not looking forward to the weather in Vietnam. Now, we haven't seen the worst of it by far, since temperatures have been low for this time of year. However, today was the first day where it rained most of the day. But instead of ruining things, I loved it. The rain, as long as it's not pouring down, is a blessing, especially in the city. It cuts the traffic; it keeps things cool; and, perhaps most importantly, it ameliorates the smell.
You see, Hanoi has a very special smell. One part is exhaust fumes. A horribly polluted city, walking the streets of Hanoi for a day feels like smoking a pack of cigarettes, but without the nicotine buzz. Another part is the various smells of food in open markets. Usually, this is good. There's ginger and garlic and ripe fruits...good stuff. However, there are also various pickled abominations and God knows what sorts of raw fish and meat. What's more, mix with part one (above) and part three (below), you get a weird sort of nasal whiplash--pleasant smells mixed with bad smells. This is not a positive plus negative cancellation. There's a weird math to smells, so that positive plus negative equals very negative.
The third part deserves a paragraph of its own. Part three is a mix of two related smells. The first is the sludge in the gutters. Even when it's not raining, there's a liquid flowing in the gutters. This liquid smells very much like the smell that comes out when you clean the trap from a sink drain or snake a drainout. If you've ever done either of those things, I'm sure you know exactly the smell I mean. It's a really wicked funk, and I'm sure it means there's a high percentage of raw sewage in the gutters. The other part is the trash in said gutters. The trash system here is novel, and it works like this. People (lots and lots of people) put their raw trash right in the gutters. This includes food trash, paper trash, you name it. Then, late at night, the folks who drew the short straws in the socialist work delegation pick up all this trash in bike-driven trash bins. What this means, of course, is that by late afternoon there is a steaming pile of trash every ten feet along pretty much every street.
Mix that smell with the raw sewage, the exhaust fumes, and the riot of food smells, and you get the smell of Hanoi...which is bad. And the rain cuts that smell at least in half. And that is why rain is good.
You see, Hanoi has a very special smell. One part is exhaust fumes. A horribly polluted city, walking the streets of Hanoi for a day feels like smoking a pack of cigarettes, but without the nicotine buzz. Another part is the various smells of food in open markets. Usually, this is good. There's ginger and garlic and ripe fruits...good stuff. However, there are also various pickled abominations and God knows what sorts of raw fish and meat. What's more, mix with part one (above) and part three (below), you get a weird sort of nasal whiplash--pleasant smells mixed with bad smells. This is not a positive plus negative cancellation. There's a weird math to smells, so that positive plus negative equals very negative.
The third part deserves a paragraph of its own. Part three is a mix of two related smells. The first is the sludge in the gutters. Even when it's not raining, there's a liquid flowing in the gutters. This liquid smells very much like the smell that comes out when you clean the trap from a sink drain or snake a drainout. If you've ever done either of those things, I'm sure you know exactly the smell I mean. It's a really wicked funk, and I'm sure it means there's a high percentage of raw sewage in the gutters. The other part is the trash in said gutters. The trash system here is novel, and it works like this. People (lots and lots of people) put their raw trash right in the gutters. This includes food trash, paper trash, you name it. Then, late at night, the folks who drew the short straws in the socialist work delegation pick up all this trash in bike-driven trash bins. What this means, of course, is that by late afternoon there is a steaming pile of trash every ten feet along pretty much every street.
Mix that smell with the raw sewage, the exhaust fumes, and the riot of food smells, and you get the smell of Hanoi...which is bad. And the rain cuts that smell at least in half. And that is why rain is good.
the list
Busy, busy. Things have been pretty hectic in Hanoi, but that's mostly because Hanoi is a very hectic place. I'm writing this on the 19th, which is Ho Chi Minh's birthday. We visited his tomb today, which is very much like Lenin's tomb in Moscow, a huge mausoleum situated on a huge open area next to a lake, with great amounts of patriotic imagery all over the place. Indeed, there's a strong sense of similarity between the Vietnamese and Soviet models of state. Most of the propaganda follows the Soviet Socialist Realist model, and the hammer and sickle appears prominently all around town. On a similar note, tomorrow is election day, and there are banners encouraging people to vote all over the place. Gee...I wonder who'll win...
In some respects, the stay in Hanoi is more useful to the purposes of the students' research, but not so much for the film, so I hadn't had any reason to do any taping until yesterday. We went to a place called Friendship Village, which is about 5 miles outside the city to the west. It was established by an American vet in the late 1980s as a school for kids with a broad variety of physical and mental disabilities. We got some wonderful footage and had a good time with the kids there. Some of it may be useful to the film.
Today is take-it-easy day. I'll be logging the footage we shot yesterday and getting a few shots and audio clips of street life in Hanoi. But otherwise it'll be a day of buying and sending postcards, finding a decent bar of soap, and packing things up for tomorrow. Tomorrow we are headed out to Ha Long Bay and then we'll be getting on a train in the evening for an overnight ride to Hue. Ha Long Bay is a well-known natural wonder in this area. You've probably seen pictures of it (see here and here).
I'll end this post with a few random observations that stick out to me so far:
1. The Vietnamese love a firm mattress. Maybe it's just our hotel room, but the mattress feels like a piece of 1/2" plywood with a blanket on top of it. I've heard that a firm sleeping surface is good for the back. Well, maybe on opposite day, because my back aches.
2. You can get anything in Hanoi except what you need. I've been trying to find a bar of soap for two days with no success yet. I also can't find an envelope large enough to fit some greeting cards in. But you can't walk five feet without some pretty aggressive street vendors trying to sell you all kinds of nonsense.
3. Everyone takes dollars, but you're better off paying in Dong. That way, you can be sure you're paying the marked price instead of a suspect conversion.
4. Western pop culture is here, but it's weird. The western-style clothing for sale in the shops looks mostly vintage 1986. Also, yesterday I saw a shop that sells these carved stones that look like small gravestones. They have places for photographs on them, and I assumed they were for ancestral adoration. But then I saw one that had three photographs on it: Ho Chi Minh, Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai, and Britney Spears. Finally, you simply haven't lived until you've heard the Vietnamese easy listening cover of Hotel California.
5. The Vietnamese have perfected the art of the close call. Remember what I said about the insane driving of the motor bikes? Well, today I rode one as a passenger...it's like a cheap taxi service. It was slightly terrifying, but I'm glad I did it.
6. Vietnam War = American War. The Vietnamese call the "Vietnamese War" the "American War." Go figure. After seeing Boc Ho's ("Uncle Ho's") tomb...on his birthday, no less...a few of us braved a visit to a place called the B52 Victory Museum. As you might guess, it's a patriotic war museum that celebrates victory in the war, highlighting especially the wrecked hulk of a B52 that is strewn around the opening area with some VC anti-aircraft guns. You could still see the faint outline of the Strategic Air Command seal on the fusilage, which I remember from my dad's flight suits growing up. To be fair, the museum was just as much about the defeat of the French (esp. Dien Bien Phu in 1954) as it was the Americans. We were a little surprised to see a photograph of John McCain as he was being captured when he was shot down. No pictures of Hanoi Jane, though.
Must go for now. I have to do a gear check and pack before tomorrow's journey.
Stu
In some respects, the stay in Hanoi is more useful to the purposes of the students' research, but not so much for the film, so I hadn't had any reason to do any taping until yesterday. We went to a place called Friendship Village, which is about 5 miles outside the city to the west. It was established by an American vet in the late 1980s as a school for kids with a broad variety of physical and mental disabilities. We got some wonderful footage and had a good time with the kids there. Some of it may be useful to the film.
Today is take-it-easy day. I'll be logging the footage we shot yesterday and getting a few shots and audio clips of street life in Hanoi. But otherwise it'll be a day of buying and sending postcards, finding a decent bar of soap, and packing things up for tomorrow. Tomorrow we are headed out to Ha Long Bay and then we'll be getting on a train in the evening for an overnight ride to Hue. Ha Long Bay is a well-known natural wonder in this area. You've probably seen pictures of it (see here and here).
I'll end this post with a few random observations that stick out to me so far:
1. The Vietnamese love a firm mattress. Maybe it's just our hotel room, but the mattress feels like a piece of 1/2" plywood with a blanket on top of it. I've heard that a firm sleeping surface is good for the back. Well, maybe on opposite day, because my back aches.
2. You can get anything in Hanoi except what you need. I've been trying to find a bar of soap for two days with no success yet. I also can't find an envelope large enough to fit some greeting cards in. But you can't walk five feet without some pretty aggressive street vendors trying to sell you all kinds of nonsense.
3. Everyone takes dollars, but you're better off paying in Dong. That way, you can be sure you're paying the marked price instead of a suspect conversion.
4. Western pop culture is here, but it's weird. The western-style clothing for sale in the shops looks mostly vintage 1986. Also, yesterday I saw a shop that sells these carved stones that look like small gravestones. They have places for photographs on them, and I assumed they were for ancestral adoration. But then I saw one that had three photographs on it: Ho Chi Minh, Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai, and Britney Spears. Finally, you simply haven't lived until you've heard the Vietnamese easy listening cover of Hotel California.
5. The Vietnamese have perfected the art of the close call. Remember what I said about the insane driving of the motor bikes? Well, today I rode one as a passenger...it's like a cheap taxi service. It was slightly terrifying, but I'm glad I did it.
6. Vietnam War = American War. The Vietnamese call the "Vietnamese War" the "American War." Go figure. After seeing Boc Ho's ("Uncle Ho's") tomb...on his birthday, no less...a few of us braved a visit to a place called the B52 Victory Museum. As you might guess, it's a patriotic war museum that celebrates victory in the war, highlighting especially the wrecked hulk of a B52 that is strewn around the opening area with some VC anti-aircraft guns. You could still see the faint outline of the Strategic Air Command seal on the fusilage, which I remember from my dad's flight suits growing up. To be fair, the museum was just as much about the defeat of the French (esp. Dien Bien Phu in 1954) as it was the Americans. We were a little surprised to see a photograph of John McCain as he was being captured when he was shot down. No pictures of Hanoi Jane, though.
Must go for now. I have to do a gear check and pack before tomorrow's journey.
Stu
Thursday, May 17, 2007
in Hanoi
Hello all. Welcome to my first post from Vietnam. We finally arrived in our hotel in Hanoi at around 11 pm VN time on the 16th. Which, by my count, means our total trip from Norfolk to Hanoi took about 30 hours. The worst part was a 13 hour flight from DFW to Tokyo, but it had it's moments. We flew a northern arc up over the Bering Sea. You could actually see the coasts of Russia and Alaska out the starboard window at one point. That gave a moment of transcendent awe, thinking about the humans who dared that passage on foot hundreds of centuries ago.
The layover in Tokyo was five hours, but I slept for most of it, so that passed quite quickly. By the time we left Tokyo, evening was coming on. I was sitting on port side, and because of the relative positions of the airport and the city, didn't get to see Tokyo from the air, but I did see Mt. Fuji a few minutes later in the late dusk. A few hours later, we were flying straight over Shanghai at night with a clear sky between us and the ground. That was an incredible and slightly scary sight. We were cruising at about 36k feet, but the lights still seemed to stretch to the horizon. The density of that mass of humanity is astonishing. Then, I noticed another thing about China that I already knew intellectually but only in the abstract; I'm speaking of the radical difference between the booming cities and the countryside. When we were away from the cities and flying over the south of China, there were almost no visible lights at all. I could see landforms and some large structures (including an imposing dam), so it wasn't that clouds were obscuring the ground. Rather, there simply aren't many sizeable electric lights (street lamps, etc.) out in the country. Cities like Shanghai may be booming, rapidly modernizing wonders, but I suspect that the people in the country still live in conditions that most of us would consider almost entirely undeveloped.
Hanoi itself is outrageously frenetic. Everywhere you look there are hundreds of motor scooters...and they're all driving insanely...without helmets. What's more, there is virtually no traffic control. No stop or yeild signs, no lights, nothing. It's all just every man for himself. I say "every man," but I've seen families of three a few times. Paradoxically, the only way for a pedestrian to safely walk across a street is to just start walking through. If you stop, look, and wait, you'll never get through, and all the scooters will think they don't have to pay attention to you because you're looking. However, if, like a madman, you just walk without looking or stopping, they all swirve around you.
There's plenty more to tell about Hanoi, but jetlag is a bummer, and right now my body thinks it's 5 am. Time to take a nap. I'll try to figure out how to add photos to this thing sometime soon.
Stu
The layover in Tokyo was five hours, but I slept for most of it, so that passed quite quickly. By the time we left Tokyo, evening was coming on. I was sitting on port side, and because of the relative positions of the airport and the city, didn't get to see Tokyo from the air, but I did see Mt. Fuji a few minutes later in the late dusk. A few hours later, we were flying straight over Shanghai at night with a clear sky between us and the ground. That was an incredible and slightly scary sight. We were cruising at about 36k feet, but the lights still seemed to stretch to the horizon. The density of that mass of humanity is astonishing. Then, I noticed another thing about China that I already knew intellectually but only in the abstract; I'm speaking of the radical difference between the booming cities and the countryside. When we were away from the cities and flying over the south of China, there were almost no visible lights at all. I could see landforms and some large structures (including an imposing dam), so it wasn't that clouds were obscuring the ground. Rather, there simply aren't many sizeable electric lights (street lamps, etc.) out in the country. Cities like Shanghai may be booming, rapidly modernizing wonders, but I suspect that the people in the country still live in conditions that most of us would consider almost entirely undeveloped.
Hanoi itself is outrageously frenetic. Everywhere you look there are hundreds of motor scooters...and they're all driving insanely...without helmets. What's more, there is virtually no traffic control. No stop or yeild signs, no lights, nothing. It's all just every man for himself. I say "every man," but I've seen families of three a few times. Paradoxically, the only way for a pedestrian to safely walk across a street is to just start walking through. If you stop, look, and wait, you'll never get through, and all the scooters will think they don't have to pay attention to you because you're looking. However, if, like a madman, you just walk without looking or stopping, they all swirve around you.
There's plenty more to tell about Hanoi, but jetlag is a bummer, and right now my body thinks it's 5 am. Time to take a nap. I'll try to figure out how to add photos to this thing sometime soon.
Stu
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
First blog post
Okay, so this is my first blog posting for the Vietnam trip. I'm going to be posting to it whenever I get an opportunity to share what's going on with anyone who might be interested. Blogging feels a little vain to me, but I think it will be easier to post a blog than to try to send out form email.
I'll try to post at least every other day starting on the 16th or 17th. I'm not taking a still camera, but I'll try to post pics from the students' cameras whenever I can. Feel free to pass this link on to anyone who you think might be interested. Enjoy...
I'll try to post at least every other day starting on the 16th or 17th. I'm not taking a still camera, but I'll try to post pics from the students' cameras whenever I can. Feel free to pass this link on to anyone who you think might be interested. Enjoy...
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