Literary Minds of Saigon

Last night an incredible storm rolled over the rooftops to unleash yet another downpour upon the poncho-clad masses. It was the darkest, meanest skyline you ever did see, as I shall now demonstrate.

The last remaining piece of light in the sky is obliterated as these clouds silently drift over the city.

By the stage of this next picture, you would probably put money on rain.

As the lightning flashed in the distance I sat and thought to myself - is it possible that the gods knew what was about to happen that night? Had word gotten out? Had the meeting of Saigon's most prolific blog authors created a rift in the space time continuum resulting in the apocalyptic storm in front of me? The answer, of course, is no.

Myself, Chris of Charvey in Vietnam and Mel of Antidote to Burnout met and found out a little bit more about each other. We disscussed many things, but mainly blogs and women. Vietnamese women, Japanese women and Western women. It was fun.

On the right is Mel, the guy centre picture is Charvey, and the slob in the Tiger Beer T-shirt is me. So, cheers guys! I look forward to remaining a part of our small Saigon blogging community.

Rain and Fuzz

As Mel says in his post here, the rain has been pretty relentless recently. It's even possible to feel a nip in the air of an evening (and I remember laughing at Chi for wrapping up in a coat last year). This must mean I am truely acclimatised, as I know the temperature never gets below 20 degrees. I am in big, big trouble when I eventually head home to face a winter. Anyway, not the most exciting news today. I have a picture of some storm damage here, when I opened my doors to find someone's aerial swinging around.

And here's a picture of the school in mid-downpour.

Oh, and I got stopped by the police yesterday morning for not having a helmet. Some roads and I think all of PMH require you to wear a helmet, and in the last few weeks it seems the police 'checkpoints' have become more frequent. Usually I get in amongst other bikes or behind a lorry and just cruise by. Yesterday it was just the open road, me and the cream colored uniforms. I was a sitting duck, but 100,000d later and I was on my way. You know when there are police on the road because you notice a lot of traffic turning around, or a group of motorbikes pulled over with their drivers peering at the cops in the distance like nervous meerkats. Notorious routes have stands where you can 'rent' a helmet to get you past the police - you return it later, or to another stall on the other side of the police! This morning they were in exactly the same place, and once again I had no container lorries to hide behind. I just stood my ground in the middle lane, unable to hold an expression of anything other than sheer determination, and I drove right past them without my eyes flinching from the tarmac in front of me. I think from a distance it was the same guys as yesterday, so they let me go this time. One thing I can assure you, yesterday morning, he certianly had a nice wad of notes stashed in his ticket book.

Mysterious Ditty

A strange amendment pointed out to me on the foriegn office website is causing me some confusion (see here and below)

From 15 October - 25 November 2006, category D visas, which are issued to visitors who have no sponsorship for their visit, will not be issued. Holders of this type of visa will not be granted entry during this period. You should check your visa carefully before travelling to Vietnam and arrange appropriate sponsorship from your business partners, friends or travel agent if necessary.

1) I'm not sure what a catagory D visa is.

2) I see no mention of it or the restrictions on the website of the Vietnam Embassy in London.

3) If you have friends coming to visit Vietnam in this period, best check they have the right visa! It seems to say that even if you have already had the visa issued you will be denied entry.

4) Can anyone shed some light on a) what is a catagory 'd' visa and b) why these restrictions for only 6 weeks?!

Football stuff

Saigon Raiders won again, beating the HCMC People's Comittee team 5-4, our first victory against them after previously losing 6-1 and then drawing 2-2.

The previous week we got a good spanking, 11-0. This was by a Nigerean team (it was actually me who organised the game). They train every morning in D7 and most are young lads looking for a club to play pro here. They had fitness levels which would embarass Linford Christie, and a game to match. We simply could not get the ball from them and spent 90 minutes running around in circles. Credit to us though, it was only 3-0 at half time, and there was a period of 20 or so minutes in the second half where we didn't concede, but then followed 10 minutes of watching them jog from the centre circle, put the ball in our net, then calmy jog back and do it again.

To put it in perspective, they were all no older than 30, trian every day, they have a manager (we don't) and they had what must have been the entire Nigerean contingent of HCMC down to support them. We had a squad of 14 players and after 10 minutes one was injured. That means 2 subs for the whole game in the beating afternoon sun. Our average age is a little higher, and level of training and fitness considerably lower (about half the team lights up after the final whistle!). Overall, as we all agreed, it was a good reminder of the level we play at!

The second week of Ocotber sees the start of the Saigon International Football League, or SIFL as football writers from across the globe like to call it. We've been unable to change the 6 team format from last year, with some teams coming and going. This year we have:

1) The Saigon Raiders (mostly European players)
2) The Saigon Saints (mostly European players)
3) Japan (mostly, err, Japanese players)
4) FOSCO (Vietnamese team)
5) RMIT (RMIT students, Vietnamese)
6) Olympique Saigon (French team)

By the way, we need a goalkeeper and a manager. Anyone can come along to our open training sessions on Tuesday nights at Parklands in Anh Phu from 7.00. That's the first step to becoming involved with the Raiders!

Finally!

Here it is in all it's bureaucratic glory. We've finally burst free from the assemblge of red tape which has bound us since April. Although we'll be celebrating tonight, in our minds it's not done until the wedding party later in October. However, we are of course very happy to have gotten this over and done with! I feel I had to blank out some personal details because I am petrified of lonely Internet cyberloonies who will stalk me, yes, I'm talking to YOU.

Just kidding lovely readers.....please come back!

It was strange coming out of the office as a legally married man and then heading off back to work as did the misses. We did manage to squeeze in a matrimonial bowl of pho of which I took a picture in a bid to emulate those countless images on drool-worthy food blogs such as Sticky Rice.

Not bad, methinks, although there is some badly behaved light intruding from the strips above. I think I'll leave it to the experts.

Desperate Measures

It seems that when this road and intersection were being designed in the relatively new area of Phu My Hung, the planners made a kind of half hearted attempt to control the traffic. In fact, it's so pointless that it is kind of pathetic, like they knew they were doomed from the beginning. I'm talking about this run of signs all within 50 yards of one another.

Hello....anyone.....? Errr, there's a sharp right ahead, can you see it?

Hi! It's me again.....one more, is that OK? There is also an intersection ahead. Sorry to bother you.

Ok ok, this is the last one, I promise. There are also some traffic lights. Sorry.

Finally, don't honk.

YEAH MATE! IN YOUR DREAMS!

A street in D5

So I had a few minutes hanging around whilst Chi had her hair and makeup done for our wedding album pictures. I shot a few pictures of life going on around me on Tran Hung Dao.

This one I managed to catch 4 kinds of transport in one shot, including a one armed cyclist and a BMW.

This one shows your average street cleaner. These guys keep the streets surprisingly clean. The system works well, although prehaps not the most hygenic way to do things, people leave their trash on the kerb or in the gutter knowing that it will soon be swept up by one of these guys, and then the orange bins emptied later by the city's garbage trucks, the stinkiest vehicles anywhere in the world.

I've no idea how I managed to shoot this picture! Total accident with the out of focus guy in the foreground and man pushing cart in background. Not sure what he's selling.

Cyclo man delivers a door whilst chatting to his mates on a motorbike. This part of Tran Hung Dao is one way. Yes, the other way.

The people over the road provide parking at the usual rate - you can see the sign in the background, xe dap (bicycle) 500 dong and Honda (motorbike) 2000 dong. Also outside is a small drinks stand serving coffee and cold sodas.

Wish you were here.......

Dealing with Negatives

In light of recent discussions on the way people write about Vietnam, I'd like to point out how far the negativity can go. This disucssion is on the expat discussion board 'Saigon ESL', mainly for teachers in the city. Read it. Unfortunatly, there are negative aspects of living in Vietnam, and this illustrates them. They are things which haven't really affected my life here. I've never been in an accident, I've never been pickpocketed or robbed or targeted in any way. Actually, scrub that, it happened once when a taxi driver tried to confuse me by swapping notes around and pocketing a 100,000, then claiming I had still to pay for the fare. Only the once then. This quote scares me :

I tried to contact my embassy regarding what avenues expats have regarding crime/theft and the answer I received was "Here you are on your own. Try to pay off the police to help you if it is an emergency, but other that that good luck".

You know why it scares me? Because I know it's true. Reading things like this make me realise how I am really walking a tightrope. The people in that discussion are bitter and negative because these things have personally affected them. They haven't touched me personally so I don't have such a negative attitude, but it's important to remember how easily it could be to end up feeling so angry, alone and ostracized, especially considering my experience in England where the police actually help you. My first experience was when my fiancee, to my horror, became victim to a number of burglaries. She told me she knew it was one of her next door neighbours. I told her matter-of-factly "Well call the police then!" but she told me that she would end up paying more to get anything done than had actually been taken from the house. The solution: buy a better door. I suppose my point here is that many foreginers who have an experience like this simply cannot accept such a conflict with their moral belief system and end up living in their own contrived world. Trust me, my girlfriend is as frustrated, fed up and disappointed with the way the governement and the police operate here, and she tells me it's a view shared by many. The Vietnamese know they 'got nothing coming' from the police and to an extent the village community (very much alive in the city) polices itself.

My counter argument is simple, and provided by many people to combat those constantly spreading a negative image of Vietnam - all the crime and theft is relatively petty. Bag and phone snatching, pick pocketing, house burglaries etc. Well, I know where I'd rather be, even if I'm a bigger target for crime in Vietnam, I'm sure I'm in more danger in my own society which truely is one of violence and aggression, where city centers are basically a no-go zone on Friday and Saturday nights because of drunken yob behaviour, where gangs and racial tension are running inner cities and council estates. I'd rather be here where I feel safe late at night on the streets.

In HCMC I marvel at the foreign exchange places where they keep thousands of dollars in a wooden drawer under the counter. Where the banks are policed by one or two unarmed security gaurds and they have huge bricks of money behind the counters, no glass windows, no grills, nothing protecting the staff there. Why? There's obviously no need for it. Can you imagine something similar in London or New York? I didn't think so. In England, the reality is that even taxi drivers are encased in perspex to stop people attacking them. It's sad.

Onto the discussion about the roads, the guy says the following:

The complete disregard for human life is appalling on the roads and the average Vietnamese has a disgusting "life is cheap" attitude that cannot be ignored when being on the road.

This is a horrible statement and the perfect example of a huge huge misunderstanding by an 'expert' who should really be thinking a lot more about what he writes. My opinion is that off the cuff remarks like this are borne out of frustration and anger. Anger that so many people are needlessly killed on the roads simply fuels the ethnocentrism in this statement. Maybe he saw something; it is not to be underestimated the effect that witnessing a bad accident can have on someone, you could end up seeing something similar to that you might see in a war, we're not talking about grazed knees here. I've met people who have been here for a few days and seen people killed. I have never witnessed anything that bad, but I have seen a couple of things where afterwards I barely had the willpower to continue driving home; I did continue, but very slowly, hogging the kerbside. Here's a link to an old report on the traffic situation in Vietnam.

What I will say though is that both the report and the previous link I gave are ethnocentric. There's no such thing as a good pass or an improper pass in Vietnam, there are no driving standards or laws which provide the standards in the first place. There is no driving test to pass. Yes motorbikes are overloaded with people and goods, but what are you supposed to do? Take the kids to school one by one? Make 3 trips to supply your store on the other side of town, or only one? As even the biggest stores don't have delivery trucks everything is delivered by bike - thats including huge TV's, fridges, washing machines and anything else you can think of, and they are often very badly balanced and being stabilised by one hand of the driver. The worst habits people have is talking on their mobile phones whilst driving and not looking when they enter a stream of traffic. The Vietnamese are not bad drivers, they are driving the only way they know how. I think it'd be hard work to change the rules of the road here, but we could start with simple things. Here are some of my ideas to help road safety in Vietnam:

1) Start with advertising on TV and billboards. Encourage people not to run red lights, to pull over to answer their phones and to prepare in advance for their right or left turns. It should be done in an educational way, and many reasonably minded people will recognise the danger of their activites.

2) We have advertising campaigns in the west about drink driving that are really brutal. Would a similar kind of thing hit home in Vietnam?

3) Please, please, lets install some footbridges at junctions and major roads. I see people edging their way across 6 lane highways inbetween honking 40 footers.

4) In regard to number 3, I should remember that even the most basic projects can't occur until money is channelled positivly. I remember my feelings of hopelessness at reading this BBC article. The one thing Vietnam really needs is a better infrastructure, and here we are reading about how it's the most corrupt department going. Until this issue is resolved throughout all levels of government, new roads will continue to fall apart after a few weeks, old roads will continue to be badly maintained and the traffic on the roads isn't helped at all.

There are two sides to every argument. Here I’m trying to balance a little of the negative press Vietnam often receives about petty crime and its road safety record. How did I do?

Banana Tree

School grounds:

Looks hot doesn't it? Well, it was, and it was also P.E time when all the boys were running around at 11.00 playing football. Anyway, I wondered a few weeks ago what kind of trees these were but on closer inspection it became obvious.

Not quite ripe yet so I won't be saving a few thousand dong on my breakfast just yet.

Here's the school in the middle of a downpour. Flooded!

View from the roof

Here's some pics of central Saigon from up high. The pics are taken from the 'Level 23' bar at the Sheraton Hotel. Don't hang around too long here, it's very expensvie, but wow the views are fantastic. They have 2 for 1 cocktails at sunset as well, I think about 70,000 per drink, so that's the time to go.

If you've never been to Vietnam or Saigon, and you're arriving for the first time by plane, try and get close to a window. The view is really wonderful; the sun glinting from a thousand roofs, the buildings all painted in pleasing pastels such as creams, pinks and light blues. There is no uniformity to the skyline as tall narrow buildings shadow small ones, it looks like a just begun lego kit.

Here's a shot looking down on the heart of D1. You can see the town hall on the right, and in front of that is the Rex Hotel (green covers on the roof). In the distance, you can see how many trees there are in parts of D1.

This is slightly elevated from the last picture, looking out over D1 and D3. You can see the famous Saigon landmark, The New World Hotel, the big yellow building top left.

The Citibank building on Nguyen Hue

Nightfall:

She did it!

Results of the interview are in : we passed. We will now recieve the wedding certificate and be officially married on September 22nd! That will leave us in a strange state of limbo - married by law but not publicly- that will have to wait until October 28th. For now however we can rest a bit easier as finally no more documents need stamping and no more palms need greasing (I think). I can't believe it. Married in 15 days!

The rain dash

Yesterday whilst driving to town in the afternoon to see my orthodontist, who is currently trying to fix my train wreck of a mouth, I got caught up in the rain. Not for the first time as my battered old poncho would tell you... if it could talk. People here don't try and second guess the rain. It's not like they look out of the window at the sky and say "Hmmm, looks like rain today love, best take the brolly". Here, you know it's coming. Not taking a poncho out with you here in rainy season would be like not wearing your jacket in winter. Stupid. The fact is however that people carry on regardless until the heavens actually open. Even when you could reach up and rip one of those inky black rainclouds open yourself, you wait until it comes down in buckets on top of you. This results in a mad scramble to pull over, get your cagoule out, pull it on and then get back on your merry way before everything is soaked. Blink and you'd miss it; at the precise second the downpour begins, for a couple of minutes, the streets will be lined with people hastily dragging out their waterproofs. Two minutes later, everyone in the city is in their wet weather gear. It makes the pit stops in F1 seem thoroughly laborious. Here are my feeble attempts at capturing this moment, allbeit I was participating in it at the same time.

Independence Day

Not the movie with Will Smith. 02/09 is Vietnam's 04/07, although it is celebrating a rather more recent date of 1945 when the Viet Minh led by Uncle Ho seized control and declared Vietnam to be an independent nation. This celebration takes place out of stubborn principle, as there barely seems anything worth celebrating about 1945 - it was the start of 30 years of war, first with the French and then the Americans. I think it typifies the spirit of the people here and how they survived such a horrendous time. For the patriot, and lets face it, who wouldn't be after such provocation from abroad , Vietnam has been independent since 1945. A few tried to change that, but none could.

So I'll give you a little photographic tour of the city as people here celebrate their country's independence. It was a very easy day to be a photographer. The red flags were hanging from every house, business and office. The hems (alleys) were so picturesque I could have snapped every one in the city and made a postcard from each. I'll start with a few pics from my own hem. In this picture I love the contrast of the stained concrete walls of the house and bamboo blinds with the ferocious colors of the Vietnamese flag.

This is the view down my hem, again with the red and yellow brightening up the scene.

Now we head out of my little enclave,which is truely representative of the rest of the city, and we head into the heart of District One. First we visit the Reunification Palace. The gates you see are the very same that were smashed down by tanks in 1975 as the last of the American military left Vietnam by helicopter. The banner, I am told, reads "Happy Independence Day to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam". Corrections on that translation are welcome!

Here is one of many similar posters around the city. It reads "61 years, Independence, Freedom, Happiness".

Next, the city opera house, in the middle of Dong Khoi Street, outside the Caravelle Hotel. The opera house is always the venue for open air celebrations come any kind of occasion in HCMC. Here you can see the decorations adorning the building, including the billboard of Uncle Ho waving in the direction of Le Loi.

Here we are with our backs to the opera house heading down onto Le Loi. Again, the banner reads "Happy Independence Day - To the August Revolution and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam".

Last but not least, one more flag shot from a D1 courtyard.

Getting married : Vietnam Style III

After Part I and Part II, here's Part III.

I recently discovered that most people use a company to organise all the documentation for their wedding applications for them. Not Chi, she organised everything herself. Apparently it's quite tricky.....

We dropped into our favourite public office for our interview yesterday afternoon. The new rules. Firstly, again without eye contact, we were told that we needed to have a translator for me. Would have been nice if Mr Happy had told us that last time, but Mrs Happy informed us through what I can only describe as a forced scowl. So Chi calls up her friend from work and he comes down to the office to help us out. We sit and wait and eventually Chi gets called in. She had a 30 minute grilling - the only thing missing was the bright lamp and windowless room. I won't go into the details of what he asked but it was all highly personal, and some of it, in my opinion, highly inappropriate. Stopping short of what color my grandfather's living room is painted, Chi was asked if the people she had invited to her house and travlled to Phu Quoc with over Christmas and New Year in 2005 were really my family - she described her incredulousness to me. Is he serious? I can speak English. I saw them talking together for 2 weeks. I went to Phu Quoc Island with them for 3 days. I saw their passports. He looks exactly like his Dad for GOD SAKE! He then went on to describe to her what would happen if we failed the interview; once again Chi related her feelings to me and it requires some brain-racking to find synonyms for incredulous which I have already used.....ah yes, here we go, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, astonished and thunderstruck. How could we fail? We can communicate. We have no age gap to speak of. We have lots of evidence of our relationship. "Just for example....I have to tell you" he says.

My interview was much more humane, although that may only have been because the office was due to close at 5.00 and I sat down at about 4.30 (we arrived at 2.15). It may also be the norm, and the officials are much more interested in what she knows about me than vice versa. All I know is that this whole process has drilled my better half into the ground and she came out of it a little frazzled and definitely stressed out; it's a little too premature to be relieved, we find out if the interview was successful on the 7th September.