cathead

I can't believe this is the last day of my one-month trip to Vietnam. Like all such journeys, at the beginning the time sends almost infinite, but its passage seems to accelerate as it goes by. The weather here has turned perfect and I would prefer to stay. I guess if I really wanted to, I could extend my visa and change my flight, but the holidays are nigh and I have plans. The Vietnamese are beginning to embrace Christmas and the 'Merry Christmas' banners are beginning to pop up on storefronts. I bought water this morning at a market and the staff were all donning red and white santa hats and they wished me a merry Christmas. It occurred to me that it probably means as much to them as it does to most Americans. I sincerely hope that noone here in Sai Gon is harboring any illusions about a white Christmas. However, it does in fact snow in Vietnam in the northwest region near the China border.

The title is not a reference to what I'll be having for lunch today, but I imagine the idea is not so far fetched. Cathead is a term I remember from the American south that refers to the large misshapen biscuit formed from the remaining dough after the regular biscuits, all having the same general size and shape, have been stamped from it. So I'll take some leftover stories and thoughts from my trip here and form them into an amorphous lump. Sometimes the kids fight over the cathead biscuit and sometimes it's thrown out.

While on Cat Ba Island, I saw a Vietnamese woman speaking perfect American English, so I struck up a conversation, thinking she must have learned at a very early age or spent time in the States. I was absolutely right on both accounts, but not my initial assumption. She was not Vietnamese, but an American Navajo Indian from New Mexico! It's rare enough to meet a Navajo in my haunts in the States, but to meet one in Vietnam was a real surprise. She said she is often mistaken for Asian and Vietnamese even by Vietnamese. She was traveling with her American husband.

A common practice in restaurants in Vietnam is to serve beer warm in a bottle along with a glass of ice. I abhor the idea of dilution of perfectly good beer and usually pay a token acknowledgment to the proferred glass by pouring a small amount of beer into it and drinking the rest warm. There are many beers brewed in Vietnam, not to mention the bia hoi that you can buy on many street corners, especially in Ha Noi. My favorite is Saigon beer. Next favorite is LaRue. Others you can find here are Ha Noi, 333 (ba ba ba), BGI, Tiger, DatViet and many others I can't remember or haven't seen. There's no shortage of brew in Vietnam. There is a shortage of good wine. That's one thing they don't make very much of here and I doubt my snooty wine palate, spoiled by California's abundance of excellent wines, would deign to tolerate very much of it. I'll stick with Saigon beer. The green (xanh) label only of course. The red (song) is for export. Suckers.

The most people I saw piled onto a single motorbike was 4 in Quy Nhon. They were all schoolboys, but the bike nevertheless appeared to groan under their collective weight and was making quite slow progress. I've heard stories of 5 or more. I've heard a lot of stories.

Restaurants usually offer a towelette in a plastic wrapper prior to serving the food. I was having a difficult time opening the damn things as there's no obvious tearing point on the wrapper and it's quite sturdy. My dilemma was finally resolved when I became aware of a salvo of pops one night soon after a large table was seated nearby.

I'll really miss the street vendors selling fresh sugar cane juice drinks. They operate a small mobile rolling machine that squeezes the juice out of the cane right before your eyes. It's then served in a glass with ice and is delicious.

Vietnamese practice a shared pedaling technique when they double up on a bicycle. Both riders position their feet on the pedals and share the work. I saw only 2 ordinary road bikes here. Most cycling is the leisure (cruiser we American cyclists would say) type. But bikes are still used by many for basic transportation. I saw 2 foreigners blasting their way through traffic on mountain bikes, one in Sai Gon and the other in Ha Noi. The streets here are no place for the timid, but on the other hand there's a high level of cooperation and accomodation that takes place.

If you pass by a salon here and cast a glance inside you may notice a client reclined back in a chair while a salon employee is bent over their head with a magnifying glass and a light both directed into the client's ear while the employee wields some sort of implement intent on the task at hand. I can only guess this is some sort of ear cleaning procedure. Or perhaps some seat of the pants brain surgery. The Vietnamese are very entreprenurial.

I read in the Vietnam News that the government here is considering regulations regarding bloggers and their content. I guess that would include yours truly, so let me quicken my typing. I don't know how they can stop it without a general clampdown on the internet. But being a government they say they can do anything and everything, including allowing people complete freedom and making sure only the truth (and it's all good) gets written about Vietnam. The irony is that this story is the only one that struck me in a truly negative way while I was here. Alas.



A couple of last pics.








This is in my hotel room here in Sai Gon. It's not a seedy hotel. Maybe this is supposed to be a comfort to foreign guests as there are no Vietnamese women that look anything like this!













Flashback to Hue. Iqbal loses the battle for photo real estate amidst an insurmountable onslaught of amped up enthusiastic schoolkids. The kid in front was irrepressible. I had to work hard to get another shot without him dominating the foreground.