VINASAT-1

Last weekend Vietnam’s first telecommunications satellite was launched. While not all that interested in space or telecommunications per se, I thought the international nature of the project was fascinating. To be operated by Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Corporation, the satellite was built by Lockheed Martin in Newton PA, and launched by Arianespace, the European space agency, from its Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, South America. It will, of course, end up over Vietnam again, to be doing useful and important stuff, I suppose. Anyway, the launch poster is on a background of Vietnam’s version of tourist heaven, Halong Bay.

How does that work?

Recommending a short article on "real life" and tourists in Vietnam. And me sitting here wondering if that guy gets paid to ride around on a cruise ship and write about it, or if he just does it for fun...

Quote of the week:

From China Daily:

"China is like a giant elephant riding a bicycle it has to maintain a fast speed, otherwise it will crash."

Remember that!

- ON THIS DAY -

On May 8, 1973, militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrendered.


Once, in another life (a teenage life) I spent some time in Wounded Knee. Hamlet is a good word for it. I remember a hill with a cemetery on it, a handful of trees mixed with a few old buildings, a couple Winnebagos, and a horse corral with a guy in a cowboy hat training horses. Mostly I remember a lot of space and the feeling you get, on the west side of the flat middle bit of the US, that the sky and the earth have not only gotten bigger, but also closer together, leaving less room for all the stuff that people do. More space and less room … It's a feeling I don’t find often in Hanoi!

There is one spot here which always looks very secluded to me, somehow. Every day on the way to work I go through a big intersection, usually sitting at the light amid the crowd of jostling motorbikes and sundry wheeled paraphernalia, and I see a tower on the corner of one building. It’s not really that high, but it is two or three stories higher than all the surrounding buildings. Just a square, concrete tower not any larger than it would have to be to put a stairway inside it. The top is a jumbled mess of green-ness, plants spilling down the sides and pushing up and out like bean sprouts bending toward the sun. Ten square meters of somebody’s private wilderness, spurting above the middle of Hanoi, it’s a personal version of more space created around less room.

The King of Procrastination

A quote from a BBC article, giving an amusing two paragraph synopsis of Switzerland:

Switzerland is what was left over when the Europeans formed their nation states. Italian, French and German ultra-conservatives escaped to the mountains, joined forces and then created 500 years of peace, the cuckoo clock and the gnomes of Zurich.

Today the Swiss feel a bit disorientated, because the country's business model - neutrality - is problematic. Totally surrounded by the EU, they "have no-one to be neutral against".

In more news, today I found out for the first time (being naïve and ill-informed) that Malaysia has a king! Or at least that’s what the paper here said – apparently this is an elected head of state, in a constitutional monarchy. Learn something every day!

Perhaps because I’m American, the whole concept of kings and royalty is somewhat bizarre but also fascinating – in the same way that a fuzzy yellow bobble-head daschund in a roadhouse trinket shop in South Carolina might be fascinating, I’m there, it’s there, there’s nothing else to do… Anyway, speaking of kings, anybody who wants to read the ramblings of the King Father of Cambodia can go to this site which never fails to amuse me.

Vietnam used to have royalty, now it has the guys with REAL motorcycles lording it over the rest of us…! The former prince of Vietnam died last weekend. He was born on Réunion – some of the royal family was ‘banished’ by the French colonial government to Réunion! I guess it would be a good place of banishment, some odd thousands of miles of ocean away from everything else, but it always seemed appealing to me. Mostly because it is really too small to show up on a globe but, since there isn’t anything else anywhere near it, it does show up.

Now that I’ve gotten all that important information out of my head, perhaps I can get some work done!

Drumming Durians

Drumming

As a chronically understated person who is typically happier observing the world than actually taking part in the world, I am not particularly prone to undue excitement. One thing that does nudge my interest is music, specifically music resulting from unusual combinations of influences, either geographic or stylistic.

A thoroughly amateur musician, I have a thoroughly amateur collection of instruments (and ‘things’) which takes up some of my time - when I am at home, I should add - my instrument collection doesn't travel as well as my flag collection! In any case, I do sometimes miss random musical instruments lying about the house. Particularly my d’jembe drum, which is a great instrument for trance, thumb blisters, and creating general astonishment and mayhem in the neighborhood. Listening to West African music just makes me smile, not much more to it.

And I was reminded of my d’jembe this week by an article describing a young Japanese traditional drumming troupe’s visit to and performance in Senegal with a well-known Senegalese drummer. Traditional Japanese drumming is “all about holding the silence and creating a well-placed sound with in it.” Life is like that – don’t forget the silence because without it music is impossible.


Three Gorges

Just read about this film, Jia’s Still Life, which I have not seen but it really sounds interesting. About a town that is being emptied due to the 3 Gorges Dam project. I don’t know when this was filmed or exactly where the town is. Four years ago when I was in China I did a river cruise from Chongqing, down the Yangtze River to the dam. At that point they had just completed blocking the river, albeit symbolically, with most of the dam completed but a gap on one side of say, a half mile or so… Well, not quite that big. Truly, the scale of that project is astonishing. Hoover and Grand Coulee are really not even close to the same league. In any case, my memories of driving through a city which was swarming with workers and sledgehammers slowly demolishing everything to carry it up the hill and reuse for the new city, well you don’t see a city moving too often so I remember that. Right, so if you get a chance watch the film and tell me how it is!

Russ Feingold column on Chad
Pure self-interested political realism meets humanitarian idealism (well, at least in this article), and still nothing happens on the ground.

Kofi Annan speech
Kofi Annan gave a speech the other day. On the UN, on everybody being in the same world and hoping for essentially the same things. Attitudes on the UN here are almost universally positive. Attitudes in America on the UN, based primarily on anecdotal comments by truck drivers (…) are less positive. Leadership involves being in the front, and it’s hard to go forward, even from the front, if you can’t take your eyes off the folks behind you.

Quote of the day from a candidate for Governor of Aceh, from a BBC article.
“Being the governor is like being in prison, I will lose my freedom," he said.

Funny headline:
Govt Allocates Food to Seriously Durian-hit Province
I’m picturing Durians raining from the sky, the besieged wearing spike helmets to split them and gas masks to breathe…

Happy Birthday to me … :)

This is for anybody

who hasn't been to Vietnam lately. Who is wondering how exactly it works here, with a Communist Government in charge of a runaway 8-9% annual growth economy, fresh into WTO membership, entrepreneurial in-your-face marketing going on in every street, everybody wants to work hard and get rich... From the news, this little paragraph just made me smile.

The Vietnamese government is now trying its utmost to speed up
administrative reform. As of November this year, Dung’s cabinet has issued 72 out of 135 new relevant decrees in a bid to complete and streamline, or make transparent, legal framework to facilitate its market-oriented economy on the socialism track.

It's the facilitating that gets me, you have to facilitate it, whatever it is. If you put socialism, or most anything for that matter, at the end of a sentence like that, it can't really make all that much difference! That's how it works.

A good BBC article on Vietnam, in the present and the future, not the Apocolypse Now Vietnam.

AND a movie I saw last weekend, The Prairie Home Companion Movie, which, yes is a bit incestuous, being a movie about the making of a radio show ... ... but it was amusing anyway and I don't hear that many American accents that often here, so it was funny.

Notes from the news

In Vietnam News an article titled "Ceremony Held to Mark Teacher's Day in Hanoi" about exactly that. Except for the second paragraph: "Nhan (Minister of Education) went on to criticize a small group of teachers in the educational system who were not sufficiently devoted to their jobs." Now this has nothing to do with my school or with me, but you know, I thought it fit anyway! Having take the last three weeks off from teaching I am wide open to criticism of being insufficiently devoted. As a result of my sorely insufficient devotion, I'm in the process of getting another job (in addition to teaching, not replacing it entirely) editing the news. I usually read the news anyway, and am always amused at the gauche English that pops up here and there, so I thought it might be a good fit. We'll see about that.

In the classroom, indeed most places here, as far as I can tell, whenever you need to decide something of no real importance you play rock, paper scissors. The street kids in Saigon are great at winning change from you using this game. Apparently there are actual rules and contests for this thing, sport, game whatever, cause there is now a world champion. And, although I'm not sure I remember seeing it, apparently people in the states play this game too because the champion is British and he played somebody from the states... This is important, see, news should make you wrinkle your forehead. If you just nod and say "I expected that" it's not news, is it? So read the details here.


And in 'real' news, something quirky which made me look twice:

General Vo Nguyen Giap yesterday received the Chilean President at his home in
Ha Noi. Giap said though far apart, Viet Nam and Chile were united in striving for peace, protecting national independence and freedom.
Like Viet Nam, Chile was a heroic nation that experienced major struggles to build the prosperous country of today.
Bachelet expressed her happiness in meeting the general, who was instrumental in Viet Nam’s resounding victory in the fight against aggressors.
Giap also presented two books, "Unforgettable Days" in Spanish and "Ho Chi Minh Thought and the Viet Nam Revolution Path," to Bachelet. (link)

Now if my memory of history class serves me correctly, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap cut his teeth a long time ago, being credited with the strategy giving Vietnam victory in Dien Bien Phu against the French in 1954. Not to mention the rest of the war(s) in and of Vietnam since then. He is currently around 94 years old, I believe. When I'm 94, if I make it that far, I'll probably be happy to sit around smoking a pipe on my porch and giving books to my grandkids (if I make it that far...), entertaining foreign presidents must be tiring!

I know people who collect foreign stamps, foreign money (money in general for that matter,) foreign addresses, foreign hats etc. All good, whatever floats your boat. Notice the list of flags on the right sidebar of my blog - this is my collection. It's pretty much the only thing I collect because I don't have to carry them around, and I don't have to do anything to collect them, only watch them pile up. Latest additions are Turkey, the Russian Federation and the United Arab Emirates. Put your mouse on the flag and you should get a map of the place. Maps make me happy. I think my Dad did that to me. Maps also make me poor!

APEC

Today President Bush came to Hanoi. Maybe he got tired of Washington, for some reason. Or maybe he just wanted to hang out someplace relaxing like Hanoi :) The APEC summit is this weekend right here in Hanoi. There have been banners all over the city about this ever since I got here. About a month ago they put up a huge number of photo/billboard displays around Hoan Kiem lake in the center of Hanoi. It is a rather astonishing idea, that you can take countries as diverse as Peru, Chile, Mexico, USA, Canada, Russia, Brunei, Indonesia, Australia and obviously Vietnam and throw them all together into an organization on the basis of, what beaches facing each other? Over a some odd thousands of miles? Random facts - APEC makes up %60 of global GDP, one third of global population (obviously that does not include China). And having just joined the WTO last week, Vietnam is high on free trade. Figure that out. Anyway, I was at an exhibition this week on the event with cultural displays on Vietnam, and a photography exhibit from each member country which was truly fascinating. Chinese PM Hu Jin Tao is here. Vladimir Putin, PM Abe from Japan, etc etc. And me, I'm here too. Just thought I'd point that out. Only the hordes of policemen at every intersection carrying baseball bat-sized sticks don't jump into action and stop traffic when I blow my horn, they just ignore me. They do get pretty energetic about leaping in front of crowds of motorbikes when the rows of APEC sedans or buses goes by. That's about as close as I've gotten to the action. I see the people in suits inside their fancy cars. Vietnamese people are immensely proud of having APEC here, and more than a few people I know have glowingly informed me that my very own president is coming to HANOI. For a taste of the Vietnamese viewpoint on this, read this article. The BBC has a good article on Hanoi's preparations for the event. The NYT headline on the subject was about, of course, the war. The one in Vietnam, and the one in Iraq. An excerpt, click on the paragraph for the whole article:

If Mr. Bush is privately thinking about the war he missed, the White House is
not letting on. Asked aboard Air Force One about “the lessons of the war,”
Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, said, “What’s interesting is
that the Vietnamese are not particularly interested in that.” He added:
“This is not going to be a look back at Vietnam. It really is going to be a
looking forward to areas of cooperation and shared concern.”

What's really interesting is that I actually agree with that! Anyway, that's about enough for today. APEC aside, it's a beautiful day with flowers and lakes and coffee and pho and so on.

Thursday Ramblings

Friday of last week, the last day of the term at my school, all the students went to watch the film Baraka. I had heard of this film before but hadn’t seen it, and I was impressed. It is made somewhat in the mold of Koyaanisqatsi, if that’s familiar to anyone. I’m not sure what exactly to say about it, but if you like simple but remarkable photography, and mesmerizing music, check it out. Here is a link to the associated website. The students thought most of it was too boring. Sometimes I think that my students are sadly sheltered and maddeningly immature. Sometimes I think that I am old and peculiar and staid. I’m probably right on both counts.

The terms at my school are only five weeks long, so they go by pretty quickly. My new class this term has seventeen students, which is rather larger than usual. I had one class last term which was fourteen or so, but remembering their names was a challenge. There were two Ngas - Thu Nga and Thanh Nga, three Trangs - Thu Trang, Quyen Trang and Huyen Trang, two Hungs - Manh Hung and Trong Hung, then a Huong and a Phuong and a Phong... I knew most of their names by the end of the term but it took most of the term to get that far! Anyway, my new class is a lower level than I have taught before. So far it is going pretty well, I have to amuse them a little more than the upper level students, but on the other hand I don't have to explain subordinating conjunctions!

Having been back in Vietnam now for almost six months, I have finally realized that my Vietnamese is not going to improve much by osmosis. Sad. So I am back in language class, at the same university I studied in the first time I was in Hanoi. I enjoy it, although that class is quite noticeably above my level in terms of vocabulary. To offset that I am also taking a sporadic Vietnamese language class at the school I teach in, which is free for teachers, but is noticeably below my level since the other teachers taking that class haven't studied Vietnamese at all, or not until two weeks ago. So I come back from one class confused, exhausted and thoroughly convinced of my monumental inability to accomplish much, and from the other class slightly amused by my colleagues (language professionals, all of them) who can't remember, much less pronounce, the Vietnamese tones... Maybe with the combination of both classes I can move forward!

Tonight I found, behind a very small door on a rather large street in the middle of town, a German restaurant. The Kaiser Kaffee is appealing, if for no other reason, simply because it is called The Kaiser Kaffee and it is in Hanoi! It actually looks sort of German - old fashioned low ceiling with (fake but tasteful) exposed beams and straight-backed wooden chairs like any proper PA Dutch restaurant would have at home. The lady who seemed to be in charge of the place is, well, an unusually German-sized Vietnamese lady who kept on speaking German to me... I guess my Vietnamese was bad enough she couldn't tell what language it was! Anyway, BRATWURST, they have bratwurst. How cool is that! I had bratwurst and Vietnamese fresh spring rolls... The silliest things make me happy!

And speaking of the silliest things, here are my favorite news stories recently:

Man Bites Panda - cute and NOT cuddly
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5364058.stm

The Ancient 26-year-old Terracotta Warrior
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5355546.stm

Vendredi heureux a tout le monde :)

Coughing, Quoting and Cackling to Myself

For anybody who cares (even if it is only enough to open a webpage), I am at the moment in a reasonably good humour but have an inappropriately prodigious nose. Most unfortunately for somebody who is supposed to make a living by teaching, I am also accompanied by the infamous tickle in the throat leading directly to a most indecorous hacking, and crackly whispering vocables that native speakers crinkle their foreheads at, while ESL students hear rumblings and beginnings of thoughts like 'Why school hire American accent teacher very not interesting'. So, I am not teaching today. I was going to do one short two hour class, but my supervisor sensibly told me to stay away. So now I have no reason not to write another blog.

Work itself is going on pretty much as expected. This week is a new term – I introduce myself to my classes as the teacher who croaks. I have a level 6 class this term, new heights of grammatically fortified students expecting me to enlighten them. That is an evening class, primarily adult students, so at least I am mostly unburdened of the testosterone gallery of the class!

Say No To Dishonesty
Speaking of education, I found this article on education in Vietnam exemplary of, what should I say, verbosity masquerading as obtusity, or perhaps the opposite, I’m not sure. That’s the point.

Foie Gras Feast
I always read the important news from the good old US of A. Open invitation to anyone interested in foie gras to head for Chicago. Illegality is so appealing. This fact is demonstrated by what I saw this morning. Red lights, here in Hanoi, are sort of like a gentle suggestion. Typically, about half the traffic stops, the other half guns it and shoots through the congealed blob of stopped motorbikes like hornets through the crack in your window. Usually this is when you use your horn. Today I saw a kid do it on a bicycle, going about as fast as you can go on a bicycle like that, whipping past the motorbikes and, upon hitting the middle of the intersection, he just let out a piercing scream to attract the attention of any traffic foolish enough to assume that a green light means you can go… Think of it as a swarm of Mayflies in Michigan being swatted with a radio antenna, you’ll hit a couple but the herd moves on. On my motorbike, unlike in my life, I try to run with the herd!

Chillies Aid Sumatra Jail Break
Pocket a habanera next time you see one, you never know when it might come in handy.

Prison guard: "The is the first time chilli has been used to get out of this penitentiary,"
Recaptured prisoner: “Nothing takes the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth like … ketchup or yoghurt or bread or anything but chillies!

Can you tell that I am reading a Bill Bryson book right now?

I have never kept much of a reading list, exactly, but here are a few comments on what I’ve read lately. Upon finishing my training in Saigon, I read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, which is a really fascinating, um, history of the world. The most interesting part, for me, was not so much the history itself, but his ability to summarize and synthesize information from many different disciplines into a comprehensible whole. It’s a great book to read when you are jobless – it is dense and it makes you feel like the tiniest blip on history’s radar screen. Somehow that is comforting when you are just watching TV and waiting for the phone to ring all day. And, on top of that, it’s not that difficult of a book to read, not like a textbook.

There were few other books in there somewhere, and one of them was Memoirs of a Geisha which is very informative for anybody interested in Geisha, or, indeed, humans in general since most of us are more similar than different. Even if you have no clue what a Geisha is, you are more similar than different.

Finally, my quote of the day from Bill Bryson’s book on Australia, Down Under.

“Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting on a
rowing boat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren’t biting; it’s
like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps to not
know what’s going on. In such a rarified world of contentment and
inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.”

Anybody who can do what Bill Bryson does and apparently make a living at it deserves my attention!

Thoughts of the day

I am about to become "elegant and civilized." Both at once. I am so excited. I am not joking, see, I have no choice. By virtue of my location I am improving myself, just read the news... Please click on this link for more details about how you, too, could take advantage of this unique and valuable opportunity. Moving to Hanoi, that is!

ps I am not joking, but I may be laughing.

One more link for my Mom. You never know what will show up in the Vietnam News!

Remembering Tibet

This is my third post today, trust me this will not become a habit! Just reading the news and saw an article about the opening of the Chinese railway from Qinghai to Tibet. To be specific, Golmud to Lhasa. Three and a half years ago, in January, I was in Tibet. Anybody who has known me that long, has a really good memory and nothing else to remember, may recall that instead of flying out of Lhasa I took a bus. That bus was from Lhasa to Golmud. I read about the railway project then. The BBC has an interesting article about the opening of the railway, as well as some pictures. If you want to read my account of the Lhasa-Golmud bus, which will presumably now be only taken by foolhardy pennypinchers unwilling to pay for the train, click right here on this link and you should be able to read about the entire sordid affair in your warm soft comfortable space. Bon voyage!!

All the news, that isn't

Pieces of the news that make me look twice, for whatever reason:

“Dac Nong General hospital completed successfully a risky heart surgery.
Doctors at the hospital removed a 2.7 cm knife from the heart of Dang Nguyen
Hoang Minh, 26, a resident of Quang Tan Commune…”

No mention of how or why there just happened to be a knife in this guys heart.

“Vietnamese flowers exported to Russia”

Dalat, in the south central highlands of Vietnam, the only place I’ve been here that had lakes, hills, evergreen trees, and COOL WEATHER, also is famous for vegetables and flowers, and is exporting roses, lilies, tulips, crysanthemums and carnations to Russia.

And new words always pop up here and there:

"Vietnamese and African educationists sat together in HaNoi yesterday to share
their respective experiences in educational reform and development."

Big news, little news

Here is a link to a very interesting article from the Times on Vietnam-US relations in light of Chinese influence in SE Asia. A topic I read a lot about while I was studying here, it is fascinating and aside from being informative, the article has a good picture of the sea of motorbikes that is pretty much any major street in Ho Chi Minh City, or here in Hanoi. I'm trying to imagine the mess if people start buying Harley's instead of old pseudo-Hondas. And the franchise they mention, Pho 24, is truly something different, that I didn't see here three years ago. In spite of it being compared to Mcdonald's, I actually like it a lot. Less character, more consistent. I guess that is McDonalds...

And, in my small world, I got a job. More on that later after I've actually started working and can talk intelligently about it. I do hope, however, to do better than the $640 per capita income quoted in the above article...

­Ðọc đi làm vui - Read and be happy (VERY loosely, for anybody who actually knows Vietnamese)

Slow news day in Hanoi...

Shelburne makes the VN News!