Karaoke night

Cheesy and in the wrong key for the girls. Just us, a karaoke machine and some snacks for about $6 per hour.

More pics from Amali and Chuck's ride

Little kids working on a cha cha number at Bach Thao Park

Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

Ngac San Pagoda, Hoan Kiem Lake, Old Hanoi

Amali and Chuck's Big Bike Ride -- mid-August

Dragon sculpture and topiary at Bach Thao park

A brief bit of a traditional theatrical performance at the Buddhist Temple right behind our building.

The start of school

Becky arrived four days ago, and immediately got caught up in the whirlwind. She starts work on Monday, teaching at the nearby campus of Singapore International School. SIS follows a strict curriculum called the Cambridge Program. It should be pretty straightforward from a planning point of view, but we'll reserve judgement until she has started. Most of the students are Koreans and wealthy Vietnamese. Becky is teaching several levels of English language arts (not literature, just reading, writing, and speaking). The pay is great, but she has a pretty full 8-3 schedule, and cannot leave until 5 pm. Not ideal, but we'll see how do-able it is once she gets started.

Sivan and Amali have completed their first week of school at Hanoi International School. This is the #2 school in town -- The UN International School is the best, but it has a long waiting list of applicants, so there was no way. Anyway, I am glad they are at HIS. It is more casual, with a strong emphasis on teacher-student relationships and creating a cooperative learning environment (much like Sandia Prep). I was there on Thursday and bumped into the school counselor (Pastoral Advisor is her official title). She commented that the girl's transition was remarkably smooth -- she sees a lot of kids who are resistant and angry about their dislocation and have trouble adapting to their new milieu. Talking about milieus, both girls are taking French, but Sivan has to take French 3!!! It will be tough catching up, but she has a HS senior tutuoring her and I am confident that she will do fine. Amali is taking both French and Vietnamese. It is a small school, so there really isn't any flexibility in the offerings. The girls have made good friends already, with students from Denmark, Finland, Thailand, and Korea to name a few of their home countries. They each have cell phones and have been texting their friends frequently and have facebook friended them as well. In time they will get together socially, I'm sure. The girls have signed up for a southeast Asian international school sports league! Sivan will play volleyball and Amali basketball, and they get to travel to Vientiane (Laos) and maybe Bangkok...

They've been commuting to and from school on the back of a xe om (pronounced seh ohm) -- a motorcycle taxi, but we discovered that we were being ripped off. They took a regular taxi on Friday, which cost 40,000 vietnamese Dong (about $2) with the meter on. The xe om driver was charging us 60,000 -- and xe oms are supposed to be cheaper. I renegotiated the price and we will pay him 40,000 -- still good for him and the girls prefer the motorbike to a taxi anyway. They'll take taxis if it is very rainy, but usually they'll take the xe om. I don't think I feel great about them commuting by bicycle yet, but maybe down the road. Some time soon, I will mount a camera on the front of my bike so you can get a sense of what it is like to cycle here -- crazy!

My first work meeting is on Tuesday, but I've been working all this time getting my courses together. I am intimidated by the prospect of teaching AP courses for the first time, and to teach AP Economics, without ever having taught the subject before is even more daunting, but I have been preparing and with a lot of prep work I'll do fine.

My ability to communicate with Vietnamese people is improving, although I still cannot pronounce anything well enough for any of them to understand what I am saying, even after lessons on how to pronounce their very foreign vowel sounds (recall my constipation reference several posts ago). I have trouble with basics such as numbers-- ba (3), bon (4--and then 'n' is barely pronounced, and bai (7) confuse me. I might accidentally offer to pay 70,000 dong for something that the shopowner just offered for 30,000. We westerners get ripped off routinely (a great example of Price Discrimination for my Econ course), paying 2-3x what vietnamese people would have to pay. We are getting more savvy as time goes on, and maybe by the end will only be paying 50% more than we should...?

Anyway, that's it for now. More later.

We're off to the local boba tea -- "feeling tea" around the corner -- one large tea costs just 20,000 dong (a dollar)! Then tonight, Becky and I are going to the Cinemateque to watch the Redux version of Apocalypse Now -- a free airing sponsored by the Italian Embassy. We would have taken the girls, but the newer version has a bit too much sexual content (according to IMDB). So they get to go out for pho and watch Disney Channel.

Xin Chao,

Chuck

I was warned about shrimp paste. Vietnamese use it in their cooking, sometimes
serve grilled cakes of it, but most often use it as a dipping sauce. We don't
see it in our American Vietnamese restaurants, and two days ago I found out
why. In my many culinary escapades I have tasted things I didn't like or
wouldn't order again, but only once did I taste a food so utterly disagreeable
that I had to spit it out. In Taiwan there is a popular dish called Stinking
Tofu. It is cooked in big vats, often outside the restaurant to attract
customers. The traditional preparation was to cure the Tofu in fermented milk
(yuck) -- now they use artificial substances that mimic that flavor. I tried it
(twice to see if I might acquire a tolerance for it -- I didn't) and it tasted
the way a feedlot smells. Not my favorite. Give me Uni (sea urchin sashimi) with
it's post-nasal drip texture any day over stinking tofu. Mind you, I was willing
to try it twice.

Three days ago, on our way to buy our bicycles, we went to a mid-scale vietnamese
restaurant near our apartment. No translated menus, so we just ordered soups,
thinking that they would come in meal sized bowls like pho'. They came in tiny
bowls, so we looked around at other tables to see if there was an appealing
dish to order. Some young guys were eating fried Tofu, which seemed safe. We
pointed and our order arrived 5 minutes later, with a purplish, grayish dipping
sauce. Not knowing that this was the infamous shrimp sauce, I dipped and popped
a piece into my mouth. The piece came out less than a second later -- the old
men at the table next to us smiled knowingly. The taste was offal. Not awful,
offal. Best association is with the smell of a sewage treatment plant. I
grabbed for my beer -- empty. I took a swig of Sivan's coke. I felt waves of
nausea. I couldn't even sit near the bowl sitting on the table. I couldn't get
the flavor out of my mouth. We paid our bill quickly and headed down the block
to the french bakery. Even after the pastry, I couldn't completely extinguish
the stench.

I have subsequently learned how they make shrimp paste. They toss raw shrimp and
fish in salt, and then let it undergo liquefaction and fermentation under the
warm tropical sun. In other words, it is rotten seafood. Lan, our Vietnamese
teacher, told me that many Vietnamese can't stand it either, but it is popular
in the middle of the country. Will I try it again? I doubt it, unless there was
a lot of money behind the dare.

Then yesterday, we visited a nearby lunch restaurant that we have been meaning try.
We scope these out when we walk by people and see what they are eating, or, in
this case, the restaurant had a bunch of dishes that you could point to. Like
many street restaurants, the kitchen was the front part of someones home. No
door, just an open kitchen, a few tables inside and few outside. The woman
cooking scooped a big mound of steamed rice on each plate and then allowed us
to each point to as many different foods as we wanted, which were arrayed over
the rice. There were fried chicken drumsticks, steamed cabbage, curried coconut
and pork, some seasoned ground meat???, several dishes with fried chicken skin,
gizzards, or liver with various spices or sauces. Steamed collard greens, and
other appealing fare. There was one plate that caught my eye. Oblong, inch long
yellowish things, no sauce, which upon closer scrutiny, were obviously pupae of
some sort of moth or butterfly. Roasted, I think. To keep a short story from
getting too long, they were roasted silkworm pupae. I popped one in my mouth
and bit down. Crunchy on the outside, sweet and salty on the inside -- good
initial experience, but then, after chewing it up a bit more, some internal
tissues clearly did not taste as good as the ones that I first bit through. It
wasn't terrible, but also not so great. I will try them again to see if I can
acquire a taste. Sivan, with great courage, sampled a silkworm pupa as well.
She will not be trying it second time.

So we've gone from horrible, to weird, but there was also the best meal we have
experienced, four nights ago. We saw people sitting at the tiny preschool
plastic tables and chairs that comprise the street vendors' restaurants, with a
round, sterno fueled grill in the center of each one. (Some of the tables were
partially melted). It was a do-it-yourself meal. They brought us a large platter
of raw meats and veggies (one meat was pork skin, a fact I kept from the girls
until they asked why it was so chewy). They gave each of us two sets of
chopsticks -- one for cooking and one for eating. And a thing of butter and
another of oil. Suffice it to say, the food was fantastic. Can't wait to take
Becky there.

Pictures to follow.

more pics...pool, pizza, and bicycles