People are dieing to get out of here: Nothing Much Happened Again Today In Vietnam: VIII

11:05pm Friday - Drinking beer with Adam was just relaxing and enjoyable. Out of our usual Internet cafe we made it down to my favorite deer-meat restaurant and pulled up a table streetside across from the no-tell motel that sports a large sign boasting rooms for 70,000 dong per hour. That's roughly six bucks. The stream of taxi girls in and out of the place stands in stark contrast to the daylong reports of financial crisis on Bloomberg. Whatever crisis we're having it certainly isn't affecting the boom-boom business - in fact it may just be helping it. What better relief from a tough day on the market floor than a good healthy shag - sure we'll have two more bottles of cold BGI beer. B.G.I, pronounced "biggy" by the staff is a damn fine beer that costs about 50 cents and comes in a 16 ounce bottle. Adam and I, drank a bunch of them. - 3:00am Saturday - is a darn fine time to leave the streetside restaurant - having watched them disassemble the place, the tables have all been folded up, woks scrubbed and unbrellas collapsed before a thorough bleaching and sanitization of the concrete and asphalt happens out of big ten gallon plastic buckets - Adam, who has worked in the F&B business remarks on their near hospital-like attention to cleanliness. - 3:10am Saturday - I arrive home to an uncharacteristicly bright building. Why the hell are all the lights on at this hour of the morning? On my way up to the third floor I see that my friend's apt is lit and I can hear the TV. A rap on the door and I'm greeted by a man who looks fresh from a streetfight - his chest cut, arms scratched and a large cut black eye beginning to swell - he invites me in. Not a small man, but a more than robust Irishman who looks to be able to hold his own in most any altercation, he recounts to me a story of playing Jimi Hendricks too loud in another friends apt. and incurring the wrath of another tenant. He tells of the tenant first hitting him with a tazer stun-gun and then returning to his room for a pair of what seem to be described as barber-wire brass knuckles - geez it's all done quite a job on my buddy, but he'll live. Then, almost as if the current story doesn't have enough intrigue he tells me that Rico has died. Rico, an affable German of certain beer adoration was just in his forties and didn't seem to have any physical problems aside from his daily love of suds. The cause of death was described as a heart attack - Around here, in the past year I've heard heart attack and stroke both used to describe deaths that were more probably caused by a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol. I begin to think that the environment I've surrounded myself with may not be healthy. - 3:27pm Saturday - after a sleep worthy of a man who has been up till 4:30am I answer my phone. It's a man I have just recently met at my Internet cafe. He promises to stop by my apt. just to say hi and takes more than an hour to accomplish this. Once in my apt. he tells me that back in Australia he learned he could see other people's thoughts and futures and such, which lead him to understand that he also had the power to cure people's ills with the laying of hands - and things are just getting interesting. His tales proceed to a discovery of the meanings and truths contained within Scientology and his revelations on his first readings of L. Ron Hubbard. Rather than be critical or judgemental or disbelieving, I decide that this would be an excellent time to ask a Scientologist a few questions - I tell him I thought Travolta's BattleField Earth was one of the worst films ever made and he is taken aback - to him it was gospel. I then ask him if he misses the loss of his powers - apparently he could do mystical things in Australia but it doesn't work in Asia due to what he described as "repressive societies". He responds, "No, I was going crazy walking down the street and seeing everybody's thoughts" - It's time we got out of my house. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable and questioning the idea of if any of the days input was healthy. I decided it was not. - 5:47pm Saturday - Exiting my house we are greeted by Robert, a newly found acquaintance of the Scientologist. Robert is from Australia as well and seems a nice enough fellow. I suggest that we all head back down to the deer-meat restaurant. Arriving there we pull up the same table I had had the evening before with Adam and we order some food and again beer. When Robert's female friend arrives it is fairly clear that she is a "working girl" but that not being particularly unusual around here doesn't seem to be much of an issue - at least not to me. But for the Scientologist it seemed to be quite another matter entirely. Seeing the conversation between the Scientologist, Robert and his friend not going in a particularly friendly direction, I decide it's a good time to take a break to the men's room across the street. Upon my return it is explained to me that the Scientologist left in a huff and flurry of unkind words for all the women of the world's oldest profession - strange the most wildly different sets of rules we all set up to govern our inner selves. - 12:02pm Sunday - A text message on my phone and an email from my photographer friend Mads tells me that our public service project is going to be a big hit - great shots, I'll write more about this later. - 2:37pm Tuesday - Reactions to the book are nice and generating a lot of Twitterfare. Had two conversations with other writers this week and felt a little more healthy about life. By the end of the week I finished two days at a new job and was given a nice review by the boss - and other people are just dieing to get out of this place - 6:16pm Sunday - And as I've said before, nothing much happened again in Vietnam today.

Make sure to pause the podcast before playing the video.


For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

The Hair Job II: Nothing Much Happened Again Today In Vietnam: VII

I was originally attracted by the price. As things get tougher the world over, saving over 50% on a hair job can be a big deal, especially for a guy. Previously I had gone to the same hair shop for over two years - the criteria being that they had trained salon stylists, as opposed to the bowl-over-the-head oriental barbers, and that they had a competitive price. My price for a haircut and highlight (streaks of lighter colour as opposed to a complete dye job) had been 250,000 Vietnamese Dong (vnd), or around US $17. To get the whole thing done for just vnd 100,000 (more like $7 US) seemed a bargain too good to be true - and probably any woman, with a sixth sense regarding beauty purchases, would have known that it was. But I, in an effort to maintain a tight budget, trundled on and into the shop at the appropriate time. I had visited a few hours earlier to meet the staff and inquire about price. With minimal English (they understand perfectly, the words "haircut" and "highlight") I was assured by an attractive seemed-to-be-owner that the job could be undertaken upon my return.

Once back in the shop, I found two females sleeping in the barber chairs for lack of customers and was ready to get to work. A male stylist was summoned from the back of the place and once surveying that he had the proper gear (holdster with professional shears, combs, clips, whatever) I proceeded to be draped in silk and appropriately sprayed down for the shear. And a fine job he did. With a little instruction, just here and there, he proved to understand not only the mechanics of the work but the values of design, pyramidal composition, layering, lift and drape. He was good. Maybe too good for this place. Cutting finished we were now ready for the "highlight" part of the job - and that's when the trouble began. Failing to find the previous owner-to-be- there was absolutely no understanding whatsoever amongst the now remaining staff that I had requested the second procedure, but with yet more encouragement I managed to find a hair sample book on my lap and proceeded to riffle through the pages in search of blonde. As you might imagine, the colour palate for this hemisphere is radically different from that in the west and an almost dizzying array of Auburn to Chestnut to Mahogany takes up over 95% of the book with "Madonna 101", the standard bottle blonde colour, occupying just one sample - so I picked that one. Pandemonium ensued.

The universal Vietnamese symbol for "We don't have that", "We're out of that", "We have no fucking idea what you're talking about" is an inversion of the palms skyward, elbows bent, and a rotating of wrists that produces a blender-like motion in the air in front of the communicator's mute piehole. Translation: "You're fucked". It was then, just as nicely explained as they were capable of, that they didn't have the blonde colour and I would have to choose from the remainder of browns in the book. "But that's not a highlight", I protested to deaf ears, "Highlight means lighter and yadda, yadda, yadda" - as I went just so abso-fucking-lutely nowhere. This job was over. And I would have to find my highlights in another shop. I paid for the haircut, a more than fair 20,000 dong, and was dejected onto the street like a pinball through the black hole of hell in a game of flipper-the-foreigner. "Go fish dude". That's how it works sometimes.

Now on the street I was essentially like a car which had had bodywork, bondall and primer but no primary paint job. A half-baked job now looking for completion on a budget of 80,000 dong. Good luck. A survey of shops in my not-so-large four block radius neighborhood will reveal no less than 30 hair shops. They're everywhere, as are the customers, and apparently have not seen yet fit to establish a local business organization that will help them get some handle on proper pricing and services - prices vary wildly. From an arguable 80,000 dong tint job at a shop who didn't have my colour I was now wading through a plethora of the joints with estimates going all the way from 150,000 dong to 280,000!

One thing's for sure, they know how to spot a foreigner who's got a big fucking problem. I didn't see anyone else walking the streets with a 1/2-done hair job, that's for sure.

After a flurry of unsuccessful negotiations with more than five shops, in an effort to get something close to 80,000 dong, I settled on a place for 100,000, after getting them off their original quote of 120,000. I'm convinced I met every gay man in the neighborhood after this ritual and was more than happy to check my head in with what seemed to be a family of stylists - a woman, her husband and two cute sisters - either one of which the male owner was proffering for me to be interested in romantically. I chuckled that off and sat down for the cap. The device with which one administers a highlight job is a rather unattractive shower cap, tied beneath the chin with a little lip of a visor at the forehead and about a hundred holes covering the hairline of the cranium through which very small chunks of hair will be pulled by a crotchet-like hook, producing sort of a mad scientist look before the colouring solution is applied. That done, the solution, a pasty blue goo in a bowl, is painted, with a paintbrush, onto the hair sticking out of the cap. It smells caustic and you look like a complete idiot during the process. Only a person of true unadulterated vanity would submit to the procedure holding a vascilating uncertain hope that, somehow in the end, they would actually look better for it. It takes a real suspension of disbelief to do this.

20 minutes with the goo and you are almost ready to have the stuff removed - thirty minutes in my case as she sits me down in the chair for a final moving about of all the hair with the paintbrush and a hand-sign that says "five minutes". After that one is ushered to the shampoo section and given a thorough washing, scrubbing and massage from which you do emerge, I would certainly say, refreshed and then ushered back out to the front room for a blow-dry, gel and style - but this job was 1/2 done at one shop and 1/2 done here so the stylist is at a bit of a loss as to what she thinks I was going for in the first place. For my assessment, I'd say I was going for Bowie, but ended up with Rod Stewart instead - and that, as even all my veteran friends of the 70s will attest, is not a particularly good thing.

The big shock of hair that sprouts from my widows peak in front had become a neon sort of balloon yellow and the spikey roostery things in back were more of a platinum. I have no idea how this happens but with me as the stylist, uh, creative director of the job at hand, had no one to blame but my budget conscious self and proceeded to thank the staff, pay them and go on my merry way. Bad hair jobs are almost a hallmark of foreigners here. As the prices are so much radically cheaper than those of most western countries, the entire foreign population seems to go around getting themselves transformed into the likes of exotic endangered bird species on a daily basis. For the likes of the hair and nails on the women of the majority of the foreign influx, they are, for the most part ... horendous - and none of the Vietnamese ever seem to notice. They think all foreigners look like this - they've seen them on TV.

The rest of my evening was spent trying to figure out quite what to do next. I had dinner and having not been noticed by anybody yet, went home to hide. The Swiss Army Knife, given to me by my ex-mother-in-law, has yet to see a problem it can not handle. It's little saw has tackled rose bushes at my overgrown lakehouse - the corkscrew, tamed any number of wine bottles and the auger, bored through a number of leather objects, including belts, to produce holes where no holes had been before. The little scizzors have come in handy as well, and tonight would be a test of their true fortitude. Could they swim their way through a virtual forest of oddly colored hair and cut out only the portions I didn't like? Could they master the intricacies of 21st century hairstyling to birth a Bowie from a Stewart? Could they? Could they?

Over the next few days, a number of you will see me. Do not be kind. Be honest. Brutally honest. One friend saw me recently and didn't even understand I had had my hair done, but truthfully, he doesn't know fuck all about these things. A few days ago another friend asked me if I was going for the LA Bowie or the Berlin Bowie. I said, "LA when I'm sober, Berlin when not". He thought that was backwards, but appropriately Bowie-esque. All you will need to do is figure out whether I have been drinking or not to tell me if I have succeeded.

Maybe NY Bowie is somewhere in the middle - or maybe just me. Again, nothing much happened in Vietnam today.

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

The Vietnam sNews - Nothing Much Happened Again Today in Vietnam: V

Yep, today was boring as usual. A slow news day - so I'm going to spend some time with the local paper, The Vietnam sNews and read it to you - cover to cover.

Let's go!

The Vietnam sNews - all the news the censors say is fit.

Front page:

Headline: British glam rocker Gary Glitter freed in Vietnam

By SUPIN WANNAGOHORNY – 4 days ago

BANGKOK, Thailand (PP) — British glam rocker Gary Glitter was refused entry into Thailand, officials said Wednesday, a day after the convicted child molester was freed by Vietnam following nearly three years in prison.

The 64-year-old Glitter arrived at Bangkok, Thailand's international airport after Vietnam deported him. But he refused to board a connecting flight to London and officials denied him entry into Thailand, a senior immigration official told The Associated Press.

Glitter was confined to an airport transit lounge, police Maj. Gen. Phongded Chaiprawat said. Phongded said he did not known Glitter's next destination but that it was the responsibility of Thai Airways International, the national carrier on which Glitter was flying, to fly him out of Thailand. "Those assholes ought to fly him to hell, that f#%&*^$! pervert", he stated.

Another Thai immigration official at the airport said his department received a note from Vietnam and Interpol requesting that Glitter not be allowed entry into Thailand. "Give him the old cavity search for about 18 hrs.", the note read, "He liked that sort of thing in prison". The official spoke on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The immigration official said Glitter refused to board the London-bound plane, complaining of an ear ache. Immigration officials, he said, gave the airline permission to take Glitter to an airport clinic where the doctor checked his complaint. He was then returned to the airport's lounge with the ear having been removed and put into a jar of formaldahyde for reattachment after the flight. Poofter.

Page 2- Business:

Headline: Smelly seafood industry loves exports

By Khanh Thanh Manh– 4 days ago

HCM CITY — In the first seven months of the year, Viet Nam’s seafood export turnover increased by 200 per cent year on year to US$20.4 billion, according to the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Pirates (VASEP). "Geeez, the smell of fish around here is excruciating! You'd think somebody died but we're laughing all the way to the bank", said a representative who wished to remain un-named. In July alone, processors exported over 136,000 tonnes of stinky seafood, worth nearly $476 million, according to VASEP. This is the highest growth rate for quantity and value in the past three hundred years. "This stuff was poor quality anyway. Better to get a bunch of dumb foreigners to eat it than serving it to our own people", the official stated.

Page 3- International:

Headline: Foreign men come by the bazzilions to Vietnam

By Tranh Phanh Schwanh– 4 days ago

(23-08-2008)

HCM CITY — Although this year’s rate of male attraction to Viet Nam is lower than last year’s, the country is still the fiftieth most attractive destination for men among emerging markets, according to the second annual PricewaterhosePoopers (PwP) Emerging Market 20 Index. "You could put your money in Mongolia and chase camels across the Gobi but Vietnam's warmer, has beautiful women and the ability to get over-the-counter drugs that you'd need a court order for in the western world" said an immigrant who wished not to be identified.

"I get a woody just thinkin' about it", he continued. The index shows that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) continue to offer good opportunities for male investment. However, the results of PwP’s innovative country risk and reward model put Vietnam in a class of it's own. "I chase tail in Vietnam every day and all I ever loose is the cash in my pocket, a celphone or an iPod or two. I'm good to go!"

Page 4 - Finance:

Headline: Cashew cash goes south

By Lanh Quanh Danh– 4 days ago

(23-08-2008)

BINH DINH — Farmers are chopping down cashew plants in the south-central province of Binh Dinh, complaining the crop "ain't worth a hill of beans".

Figures from the province’s agricultural department show that the area under cashew cultivation has shrunk by 10,000 ha this year to 180,000ha. Up to another 20,000ha are forecast to be lost this year.

Farmers say that if the weather is fine a ha of cashew yields 400 kilograms of nuts. At VND10,000-15,000 per kilogram, they earn a profit of a mere VND2-3 million per ha. Ha, ha, ha. "Chicken feed, I'd say", said Tranh Long Dich, an ex-cashew farmer

If the crop is affected by disease, the profit turns into a loss, they points out.

With the plants usually grown on hilly land in Binh Dinh Province, they find it hard to apply intensive farming. If there is heavy rain during the time the plants blossom, they bear few fruit, leading to even lower productivity. "This is crap", said another local farmer, "I'm going to Saigon to open a massage parlour. I'm getting a line to Amex and will just bleed expat foreigners coming in here on fat corporate contracts. Now that's a living I tell ya. Screw cashews."

Page 5 - Leisure:

Headline: Belly dancing boyz bare their buttons

By Zanh Xuanh Nanh– 4 days ago

(23-08-2008)

I almost didn’t recognise Nguyen Manh, an office worker, when he changed from business attire to an Arabian dress, adorned with bells and baring his midriff. He is getting ready for his belly dance class with South Korean dance teacher Ara Hwang, who is considered to have first introduced Viet Nam to belly dancing. Many men like Manh are taking up belly dancing as a new fitness and beauty trend in Ha Noi and HCM City. "Being gay used to be a problem in Vietnam but no longer", he said. "Now chicks dig me!"

Lan finds office work repetitive and stressful, he was first attracted to belly dancing as a way to relax, but has since discovered other benefits. He has been belly dancing for over a year, and while other students go to one class a week, he attends at least four.

"Practising once a week is not enough to remember the dance movements, I have to practice regularly," he says.

"Belly dance is not so much for fitness or weight loss, if I just wanted to lose weight, I would go to aerobics class, but I'm gay so all I care about is meeting men who want have rabid uncontrolled wild sex with me!" says Lan. "I love belly dance because it makes me love my body and discover my true self."

Disclaimer: Of course none of this is real. Are you a bleeding idiot? No animals were hurt in the making of this blog. None of the people except Gary Glitter are real. This is satire. Deal with it.

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

Vietnam, at the center of Miss Universe?: Nothing Much Happened Again Today, IV

t Gone are the warping helicopter blade swirls of "Apocalyspe Now" replaced by the dulcet tones of Kylie Minogue (can I go expunge now?) for the finale of this year's Miss Universe Pageant in Nha Trang, Vietnam. Add to that, Donald Trump, Miss Venezuela, Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson, in town for the winner of Vietnam Idol 2008, and you've got either, what is the smoldering product of the latest in sharecropping technologies from Cambodia, or just another surreal day here in Vietnam. q I've been trolling the five-star hotel's lobby bars trying to see if I could pick up Paula Abdul but to no avail. e Alas, Cougars are a bit out of my league. I'm too old. m A white Rolls Royce Phantom pulled up in front of my place of employment the other day and totally eclipsed all those Bentley's I've been spotting. As the Rolls swung up over the curb to rest on the sidewalk, the hood ornament flipped descretely upside down and disappeared into safe mode atop the grill, leaving nothing but a little flat chrome surface – hence, nothing to steal. y Here, in the coffee and coconut capital of Southeast Asia, on everything from a Corolla to a Ferrari, the nameplates must be riveted onto the vehicles so as not to be stolen by two-bit gangsters looking for a neckchain ornament. s No wonder I couldn't find Ms. Abdul. She must have enough cheesy costume jewelry to host a convention for these guys. But that would be funny – they'd have to que up at the registration table to get a name tag that says, "Hello, my name is Phat Phuc". g And so another day passes – aside from the parade of beauties, both mechanically refined and surgically enhanced, nothing much happened in Vietnam today. l

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

My Walk In The Park Today: Nothing Much Happened in Vietnam Today III

Two Hours:

WALKING 5pm
1) Take a hard left semi-U-turn out of my house and you're headed down an alley just wide enough for you and a passing motorbike – well, okay, a lot of passing motorbikes – and then it's down home where the real people live. A friend of mine has said that Vietnam is the only country where you have to watch out for getting run over by a restaurant! And in this tight little alley that is indeed the case, because it is in these tiny alleys that the ladies prepare all the food that will end up on the street vendors carts that travel the main streets. It is also where people these people live and you can see them just three feet away from you, feet propped up on the sofa, shirtless men and shoeless women watching TV or operating their computers. I am always a little self conscious in these areas and try not to look as if I am peering into their privacy, but I have to admit, I am curious. Curious about all sorts of things. 2) Why do they decorate their houses the way they do? The Buddha shrines, with flashing Christmas lights way low on the floor next to the steep wooden staircases – the pictures mounted much higher on the walls than would be a conventional eye level – the multitude of what seem to be more Christmas decorations hung in all the oddest places – and of course pictures of babies or recent graduates in gowns or Jesus or Mary. 3) And out front of the shirtless man watching TV will be a small cart of electrical fittings – light bulbs, plugs, wires, fuses and whatnot along with maybe flour or instant noodles that you can buy from his wife – all that stuff on one cart mind you. 4) And I walk through the maze, twisting and turning my way past the Temple and the kids playing 20 year-old massive video games in a tiny room just big enough for four machines as I survey foods I would never see on the main streets. Oh, noodles (Pho) for sure, but other stuff – pickled, what look to be brainy innards of unknown mammals and other things coated in flour and deep fried to obscure whatever the original food was that is now inside. 5) Then boom. The alley spills out onto one of the busiest streets in my neighborhood, Tran Hung Dao Street, and my appetite is confused. Did I really want to try any of that stuff I saw, knowing full well that nobody will be able to speak enough English to explain to me what it was? Maybe not. But I like fried food. 6) Tran Hung Dao is now the center of one of the largest excavations Saigon has ever seen. A combination of installing the air vents for Line 1 of the new subway system and a citywide drainage project have caused the middle of what would normally be a fairly wide boulevard to be a tall green-sheeted-steel construction site forcing all the motorbikes onto the sidewalk during rush hour and most other hours of the day. Bad place to be a pedestrian. 7) I pull a yellow post-it note from my breast shirt pocket and look at the address – 219 Tran Hung Dao – but it's not my handwriting. And I have no idea what this post-it was doing in the pile of papers I cleaned up in my office today. The mysteries here never cease. Time to track down 219. 219 I surmise, is on the other side of the street in that, that seems to be where all the odd numbers are – but that might not always be the case. Sometimes odd and even numbers change at street corners, and never does a 214 on one side find a corresponding 215 on the other side. That could be blocks away. I have no idea why. In Korea, building numbers designate when the building was built, not it's placement on the street – so it would be perfectly normal to find a 217 next to a 712, because 712 was built many years later on the lot that possibly used to be 219, but not probably. But this is Vietnam and not Korea so I'm sure there's some ancient Confucian logic as to why it's fucked up differently than it would be fucked up in another Confucian society. Check the Anelects for the answer. 8) I know a woman here who will not cross the street. Seriously – she will have the cab driver go a full city block down and u-turn to get her directly in front of an address instead of braving traffic and saving a few dong to do so. Because she was hit once by a motorbike and quite seriously injured – broken leg and all – some hospital time she tells me. But I'm a trooper – and I've installed eyes on all four sides of my head. I used to be a lot better looking before the extra eye implants, but now I look better. 9) And it's not just bikes one needs to look out for – it's buses, two guys carrying sheet-glass or large mirror panels on a Honda, guys carrying beer on a Honda, or a refrigerator, three wheeled motorbike dump-trucks, cyclo drivers and the odd bicyclist, or a whole lot of bicyclists and cops. It's "Frogger" for grown-ups. Quite the trip. 10) 219 turns out to be an air-conditioning shop with some other electrical appliances, water heaters and such. I have no idea what that address was doing in my possession. Doesn't make any sense. 11) Most people have no idea what it's like to see a whole city just shedding it's skin daily and rebuilding itself – better, faster, shiny-er. Absolutely no city in the US has ever gone through this sort of a transition – at least not in modern times – and certainly not at this speed. I am just awash in the construction of new buildings at every glance. Addresses for many places are just positively worthless because it's a fairly good bet, if it was an old building, that it's not there anymore. 12) Inflation in Vietnam is being charted at 20% this year, but you won't find the local papers reporting that much. They say 10% – but that's as much BS as the government can shovel and everyone, certainly the Viets, knows it. That's one of the miracles of Communism. People know most of the info is BS and just go about their business anyway. They had 300% inflation in the late 80s so 20% doesn't look so bad today. 13) Back on the same side of the street I started on, I decide it's time for a little stroll, past some of the new car showrooms on Tran Hung Dao when I find the gem – no, not a Bentley this time, but a Jaguar XJ Vanden Plas. This car retails in the US for an MSRP of around $95,000 with tax differing between states but as the Vietnamese salesman happily explains to me – in perfect English, of course – that he can put me behind the wheel for a cool $230,000 I am just amazed. What a bargain. That's almost 1/2 what the Bentley would have set me back – with the 83% Luxury excise tax included! "Wrap it up", I tell him. "My wife will call you with the Amex number". 14) Geeziz. 15) Now I'm ready to eat some of whatever they were selling on alley #1. I double back and find myself strangely happy again to be back in the midst of normal people. Or at least as normal as they get around here. Any of these rice or Pho ladies could easily sell her three-storey flat for a million dollars as a teardown and buy that Jag with money to spare for the kid's education and a nice suburban home in the States. But she won't today. Today she will sell me a mysterious fried delight! To my surprise the elder of the two ladies, and I mean elder like 80, speaks perfect English. "Banana", she says, "Do you want banana?", she repeats. "No, I don't like banana", I tell her – "What's this one over here?" And that's where we hit the language barrier. Whatever it was, didn't have a name I might understand, and she knew that. But it looked good anyway and only cost 2000 dong, about 12 cents, so I took a bag. One of the things you learn around here is to always take a bite and smile, no matter what you are eating, even if it tastes like utter crap. But this was good. A little crispy spicy fried outside with a bit of a sweet soft chewey center, it was a bit like a Cajun Fry with a surprise inside. Charming actually. "Good?", she queried. "Yes, good!", I told her. An 80 year old grin spread from ear to ear and her daughter, the sixty-something one, nodded in approval. I'm sure they both had learned how to feed a GI or two in the old days. 16) Next up, a real dinner. Just a few steps down another lady had a wok in which she was deep frying something that appeared to be shrimp toast. A baguette split, layered with shrimp, shell on of course, and dipped in a very light rice flour batter and then fried over a little camp stove. I ordered two. They came with a sauce of dark soy paste (Hoysen in the US) mixed with a jelly-like chili squirt and a few ground fresh chilis for the lion-hearted to drive it all home. Stir, serve & dip. Man, these suckers were good. Had I ever been raised a suthun' boy these damn things woulda' made Mama proud. Delicious. – I thanked my hosts and moved along. 17) No day like this would be complete without a walk in the park so I ventured back out the alley from which I had started and made the two-block walk to the big city park nearby. Here I saw what looked like the largest stage I had ever seen erected and the set design, still in progress, resembling a cardboard mountain of sorts, with dancers and singers rehearsing for a director who sat atop a motorbike in the parking lot and barked instructions through a wireless microphone at the performers. And I can tell you, he was less than pleased with two of the girl singers. They were cute as hell but honestly couldn't have sung their way out of paper bags and he knew it. I suspect they knew it too but are probably models or sitcom celebrities and have a little too much princess disease to ever be completely cured – that's what backing tracks and lip-sync are for. But on this particular day, they were doing the vocals live against backing tracks and the director was going to get what he wanted, or at least closer to it. He made them do it again. And they sucked even more. NEXT! 18) The next three girls had excellent voices and could really sing but seemed a bit rusty on their blocking and minimal choreography. That what backup dancers are for. The director hurried them off and a large dance group appeared for a whole routine against music. Flag waving and Busby Berkeley kind of stuff. 19) But throughout this whole time, I had a great need to figure out what all this song and dance was going to be about. I didn't see any pictures of Uncle Ho around and it didn't seem to follow the stock government script of love, war, death, rebirth, nationalistic fury and Communist victory. No, this would be about something else entirely different, or at least, staged radically differently. In looking at the site I noticed banners with the moniker EVN 2008 hanging from all the trees. The four men in the poster stood cover-boy handsomely against a backdrop of what appeared to be, Mount Everest. It would be a trip back home and a few hours later before I would have the answer for sure. It looked like a mountain climbing show, but that doesn't make a great deal of sense in Vietnam now does it? Memories of the Jamaican Bobsled Team come to mind. 20) My walk home was punctuated only by the buying of cigarettes and an event that's become all too common and sad in Vietnam – a motorbike cowboy heist. The target is always the same, an unsuspecting tourist, and the bounty, a cel-phone, iPod or camera not attached to the tourist's neck. The routine works like this: Two guys on a bike circle a street corner, seemingly doing nothing and scout out their mark. Then when he or she is trying to cross the aforementioned chaotic street, they whiz buy and snatch the item. I saw this one almost peripherally and was more concerned about being run over by the heisters before I understood it was a robbery. There was nothing I could do. These are the infamous Vietnam motorbike cowboys and they rule the Wild Wild East on the iron horse than has come to be known as the Honda, Yamaha, or Suzuki. God pray when they start importing Harleys around here. With the Bentley, Hummer and Jaguar already running the rails, that can't be far behind. 21) Home would bring me to the end of this post and this walk. Two hours to do the walking and now a little over two hours to do the writing. 22) So

what does EVN 2008 mean? It means that Vietnamese National Television (VTV) has actually produced a reality show where the contestants have had to climb Mount Everest. I shit you not. The damn thing has taken four or five months and I can tell you that this has not been about eating bugs or dangling from perfectly safe stunt mechanisms over swimming pools. These guys have trained on Kinabalu and Kilmanjaro and have now finished Everest. Take that Mark Burnett! The TV show and stage I witnessed are for the homecoming finale in June. 23) Unfarkingbelievable. I took a walk in the park today and the Vietnamese scaled Everest. Did I mention that nothing much else happened in Vietnam today?

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

The Stevie Wonder Post - Nothing much happened in Vietnam today II

This one's being written as the Stevie Wonder post – because it's being written "blind", quite possibly without me being able to see the final result. I'll include a picture of Mr. Wonder in his honor, and if you're reading this live, you'll hear a few of his songs, later in the podcast. r It's cool and breezy in Saigon today and that is very, very unusual in this hot and rainy season. Last night I actually felt the need for a long-sleeved shirt, almost unheard of in this country. r And so why am I writing blind you ask? Well, that's an awfully damned good question. A few days ago, Saturday precisely, I noticed that I was unable to see my blog on the net. Now mind you, this is pretty strange in that I am still able to post and publish – but when it comes to seeing it live, I'm in the dark. A little trouble-shootizing with the master, EC, in the States and it seems to be down to a server issue. EC is a techno-geek who works in the business of Search Engine Optimization (SOE) and knows his way around a computer extremely well. I'm no slouch myself, but I'm not a pro like EC. I'm just a guy with too much to say and too much time to say it. But on to WTF is going on... r And that's hard to say, so I've hit the skids in an effort to narrow down the options. I've had plenty of trouble with Google based applications here and know well the long delays I can sometimes endure as Google maybe has not kissed as much government butt as can be necessary. r The following quote from Wayne Greene on Mark Robinson's blog may or may not be true on different days at different locations: "Blogger is blocked by some of the postal authorities where ISP’s originate in Vietnam. At many locations, it is not possible to access Joe’s blog or “Vietnamese God”. Yahoo 360 on the other hand is free from those restrictions." r And this plays into the whole MicroHoo saga in Yahoo's dominance in Asia. Yahoo has just been here longer and has endeared itself to the region, in Joint Venture Partnerships, government compliance and customer relations. Google is still a newcomer and "B" player, generally. If Microsoft wants to be a Google-killer, Yahoo is their best shot in Asia. And so the not so difficult question becomes raised, "To what extent does government censorship become an issue in terms of Vietnamese blogs?" And my answer to that particular question is yet unresolved. r I've gone for days with certain parts of the web not working at all; to suddenly have them pop-up and be just fine. Sometimes a re-boot or a cookie-cleaning will resolve an issue. After the tsunami out in the Pacific off Taiwan last year, where a number of undersea cables were broken, things were shit for a month...and then just fine. Vietnam has a particular problem in that "salvage" fisherman routinely troll the waters for expensive undersea cables, drag em up, cut em' and then sell miles of fiber-optic for scrap. Why do I think that the people who buy it as scrap just sell it right back to the ISPs and then they lay it right back down in the same place. Personally, I thinks Aliens do it. Discovery Channel could make a show out of it - like they do about the lobster boats off the coast of Maine! r"See, we're pretty smart", says Captain Nguyen Van Hook, "We know how to pirate more than just DVDs!" r And the story moves on. I have a few notes out to others with blogs here in Vietnam and hope to hear back just some techno-mumbo-jumbo reasons - but I can't see their blogs either. So far, it seems that Blogger and WordPress are the issues. Yahoo360 works ok and WindowsLive seems to work – that's EC's blog you'll see – but my buddy on Blogger here cannot be raised and my own stuff remains dead – at least to me. r And for the designer in me, it's just a darn shame – not being able to see all the little tricks and quirks I try to program in just makes me feel...well...unfulfilled. Stay tuned. r A few little things popped up for me this week – While watching the National Geographic channel, in a story of Dinka Tribesman in Africa who heard cattle for a living, was the following quote - "You can't cook money and eat it. You could starve to death with money in your pocket." I just love that, mostly because it's so fucking true. r And now, here's a note about my Dad – because I know he'll never read it. r A few months ago I received a note from my father's wife saying that they didn't like to read things on a blog, but preferred I just email them things. I responded with a note that included a link to receive automatic email copies of the blog each week. "Just click it and say, OK", I added. And the link just sits. They don't want to do that. ––– In a way it's just a microcosm of my relationship with my dad, which I must say...is minimal. Dad's just not a writer, or a talker, or much of a communicator with me at all. And I find that sad – or I should say, it makes me sad. Somewhere in early adoption it does seem that my mother earmarked me for herself, and knowing the kind of person she was, can see how she could so closely dominate the situation to have left little or no room for my father. Oh, we tried baseball, I asked him to teach me to ski (something he could do) and he was present at my Boy Scout camp-outs, but to say that we ever enjoyed much of a father/son relationship would be a stretch. I'm an artist, writer, theatre, actor, speaker, musician kind of guy and he's an engineer, an electrical one – but I suspect things go much deeper than that. So deep that I may never really communicate with him at all. r Back in 2002, when Mom had passed away, I was able to stay with Dad for a few months. I mowed his lawn, trimmed his trees - so much so that he asked me to stop cutting trees - and cooked for him everyday. I made myself as useful as possible and tried to do things that would make his life a bit easier. And I tried, somewhat in vain, to talk with him. In my mind, I thought this would have been a good time in both of our lives to at least begin a conversation. But alas, that was not to be. Within a few months he had found a woman with whom he shared interests and they would be married a year later. Her husband had passed away in the same month as my mom. And with that, Dad's void was filled. He had found a woman who would take the same position as my mother had had and be a partition between the two of us. And that partition remains to this day. Most of the mail I get is written by her and he maintains his enigma status in the Father & Son Department – by some strange design, that I will probably never understand. r Now I've got technology in the way, or the Vietnamese government. I just checked again and nothing on Blogger will come up. If anybody in Vietnam reads this or gets an email or feed subscription, please contact me, and let me know from where you got connected. I'll continue my research and see if we can get to the bottom of the Stevie Wonder in Vietnam story. r Cheers. r Okay, usually the way this works is that I say "Cheers" when I'm signing off, but late breaking news keeps coming in on this Blogger deal. Here's a note from a guy here in town who's a web wizard and a true local guru. r "Ya, I can see blogger.com and blogspot.com. Yours has a Stevie Wonder post up top. Remember that the admin and actual blog are at different domains. I'm using the FPT ISP. If your ISP is blocking blogspot.com (possibly in preparation for the Buddha's birthday celebrations here), you can try going to blogspot.com via VPNTunnel, http://www.vpntunnel.net/, or another "anonymous proxy server" (in case your ISP is blocking that, too, just Google that phrase in quotes). If you can get to blogspot.com via proxy, then your ISP is blocking blogspot.com." r And so you can probably see how things can get a little confusing around here – as if the language barrier were not enough. And so I asked my friend, who will be regarded here as "Deep Throat", what anybody would have against Buddha and this was his response: r Buddhist groups here are basically divided in two, those authorized and those banned. The banned ones, the United Buddhist Church of Vietnam, are complaining abroad that they're being blocked from the UN's 2008 Vesak (Buddha's Birthday) events and having some of their temples hijacked by gov't for staged events. If you can't see shite via VPNTunnel, try other proxies. Also ask your hotel's sys-admin if they're been required to block some sights. Sometimes the cops impose blocks at the retail Internet level. r Just another Monday in Vietnam. Who says nothing ever happens around here? r Cheers, for real this time!

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

Ear Cleaning: Nothing Much Happened Again Today In Vietnam

CLEAN YOUR FRIGGIN' EARS OUT! Today, I engaged in my weekly pleasure of having my ears cleaned. Ears cleaned you say? With Q-tips? No. I have my ears cleaned by a professional technician, probably with a Ph.D. in ear cleaning, and have come to not only enjoy it but to consider the process necessary as well as therapudic.

It takes around 20 minutes, costs just over a dollar and happens in a barber shop. The technician straps a miner's style light to her forehead, drops my barber chair into the reclining position and proceeds to descend into the deep dark recesses of my ear canal – armed with a trusty toolkit of little picks, shovels and probably trussed by a cable tied to the back wall. The sensation of the procedure following is just positively liberating. Sinus passages clear, hearing becomes cleaner and a general weight feels lifted from ones head. It's finished off by little spinning brushes and a cleaning foam that just makes the inside of your ears feel shiny and polished. Click on the photo and see the tools involved. Now let's talk some shit. As the procedure is underway, the technician will take the deposits she has unearthed and wipe them on your forearm. And let me tell you – no matter what sort of shit you thought you heard the previous week, the stuff you see on your arm will just absolutely scare you. As my ear canals go I seem to get much more shit delivered to my right ear than to my left. Should I have sold you on this procedure, and you're not in Vietnam, I'd direct you to your local Vietnamese neighborhood barbershop in the country of your residence.

TODAY A WAR WAS OVER...

Today we're entering a two day holiday in Vietnam called Reunification Day. It's the day the North Vietnamese Army stormed through the gates of the Presidential palace in Saigon to accept the surrender of the South.

From Wikipedia: The Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 – which ended the Vietnam War – prompted the first large-scale wave of immigration from Vietnam. Many people who had close ties with the Americans or with the then Republic of Vietnam government feared promised communist reprisals. So, 125,000 of them left Vietnam during the spring of 1975. This group was generally highly-skilled and educated.

This resonates with me in remembering 75 because I had acted as a big brother to a Vietnamese guy in my university days at the end of that year. This was an association engineered by my church and unfortunately I cannot remember the man's name. I do remember he was an attorney in South Vietnam and was determined to become one again.

We visited an Andy Warhol exhibition at the school and I taught him how to say beer and cigarettes. That's about all anyone would have needed to have gotten along in America in 1975, right?

THE TORCH LIVES IN VIETNAM!

My walk home tonight included an encounter with the Olympic torch in Ho Chi Minh City – and if you haven't heard about it's Vietnamese Tour, that has been entirely intentional. As China has leaned on it's neighboring countries in Asia, especially the Communist ones, to keep the protests down to nothing, the situation has been tightly controlled. The torch's previous location was in North Korea and you can bet that CNN was supplied with nothing but smiling faces on that tape. Here, maps of the route were entirely secret and all the major dailies each reported different and slightly obscure stories regarding timings and exact locations. As I hit downtown and noticed the throngs of people it dawned on me, "Hey this is the start of the Reunification Holiday", until I ran into a friend and he told me about the torch run. Fearing the pickpockets and general mayhem of downtown during any public gathering I altered my route and made it quietly home. I didn't see the torch but wasn't about to venture into a crowd that stretched for any number of kilometers for a chance to see something that might have already passed. Once home I did find that I would have missed it by being where I was at the time I was. But that's ok. I was closer than I have ever been to an Olympic torch and there must be something to be said for that.

REM RIDES AGAIN...

Not that the rock world is falling out of it's chair when a 27 year old band releases a new record, but today I was able to get a torrent of the new REM album "Accelerate" today and I must say, that band is alive and well. Only two listens now but my impression is that's it's a powerful, tight, terse and almost punkly delivered disk that probably over-delivers on even the glowing reviews I have already heard. This will definitely get a few listens this holiday.

Probably good I started by having my ears cleaned out today.

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning