orangwutang

One of my favorite things about living in my new neighborhood - Phu My Hung - is the relative lack of traffic as compared with the downtown districts of HCMC. It is really not safe to go running on the streets of downtown HCMC - you’re constantly dodging motorbikes, vendors, squid bikes, etc. - so unless you live near a park or the zoo or something, you’re pretty much bound to the treadmill if you value your life.

It’s not like that at all in PMH. Even on the main streets there is not nearly the amount of traffic as in downtown HCMC, and what traffic is there is not as congested/dense as the traffic downtown. But it’s also very easy to get off of the main roads and be out running on these country roads that literally have no traffic on them. I love it.

I’ve finally gotten back up where I can run 6 miles at a time, which is the distance I like tor run. I’ve run 6 miles three times this past week, and also ran a quick 3 miles last night. I’m taking tonight off because my legs are very sore - well, not exactly sore, but just don’t feel like they have very much spring in them.

So two nights ago, I was in about mile 4 of a 6-mile run, and I was running across this little bridge over a river out on a country road. Except for the full moon, it was completely dark around me - no lights and no traffic. As I ran out onto the bridge, I saw a canoe slowly making it’s way down the river toward me. I stopped and stood at the edge of the bridge, took my iPod headphones off, and just watched the canoe coming down the river.

There were two Vietnamese women on the canoe. One was sitting in the front of the canoe and the other was standing up at the back of the canoe, propelling the canoe down the river with one long oar. They were clearly making their way back from some market in downtown HCMC, as the middle of the canoe was full of empty boxes that looked like produce boxes. They were quietly speaking in Vietnamese, but other than their voices and the sound of the oar hitting the water every few seconds, it was completely quiet.

I don’t think they even saw me up on the bridge, so I just stood there quietly watching them make their way down the river under the full moon. It was so peaceful. There is no way for me to describe it to do it justice, and I don’t think even a photo or video would really capture it - it was just one of those moments that kind of hits you and takes you out of your element and makes you think “Wow, I am really lucky to be right here, right at this moment.”

The last moment I remember like that occurred about two years ago when I was snowboarding out at Lake Tahoe, California. I’d taken a two-month sabbatical from my job with an Atlanta law firm, and spent a month of it snowboarding in Tahoe. I think I got in 21 days of snowboarding during that month. Anyway, I remember one day it had snowed several feet of snow the night before and there was this incredible powder up on the mountain at Heavenly where I had my season pass. I was coming down the mountain through a forested area - not going too fast, just zig-zagging down through the trees. I had my iPod on, but it must have just finished a song with a lot of dead space at the end of it because for a few moments it was completely quiet and all I could hear was the sound of my board moving across the snow. Then, all of a sudden, Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” started playing on my iPod.

The opening part of that song is incredibly powerful anyway, but it seemed extra powerful in that setting - especially when the harder guitar line kicked in. And then even the opening lyrics seemed especially suitable:

Close the doors, put out the light
You know they won’t be home tonight
The snow falls hard and don’t you know
The winds of Thor are blowing cold
They’re wearing steel that’s bright and true
They carry news that must get through

They choose the path where no-one goes
They hold no quarter,
They hold no quarter.

It was just one of those moments. Anyway, I’ll try to post a link to the song later - I’m not on my normal computer right now.

I’ve also seen a few owls while I’ve been out running here at night. The first owl I saw freaked me out. There are a lot of bats here, so I’ve gotten used to seeing bats looping around the streetlights or just flying over me. But earlier in the week I was running and I saw what I initially thought was a huge bat - but as I watched it I realized from the way it flew and the shape of its body and head that it was actually a big owl, not a bat. It flew by me and landed on the top of a lightpost. And then, as I got closer to it, it got spooked and took off again. It was amazing how silent it was as it flew. I was thinking “Those poor mice don’t have a chance.” Anyway, since then I guess I’ve kind of been on the lookout for owls, because I’ve seen two more - or maybe it was that same one two other times - since then. Pretty cool.

That’s all.  Benson.  Move along, people.

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The above is a photo of the 2008 Tesla Roadster, a 100% electric car made by Tesla Motors.  It goes 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds, gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon, and can go approximately 220 miles on one $3 charge.  According to this video, http://qik.com/video/22264, it accelerates from 30 to 70mph than a McLaren F1.

The 2008 Tesla Roadster is a production vehicle costing about $100,000.  There is currently about a one-year waiting list to get one.  Tesla plans to make a number of different electric vehicles - including some costing a lot less.

If the company’s claims are true, it’s already pretty neat technology.  For the everyday computing that most people do, 220 miles per charge is way more than enough.  The only thing I can see that a car like this wouldn’t be practical for is long road trips of over 220 miles.  If you had to stop every 220 miles and wait around for your car 3.5 hours to charge back up (if from a completely dead battery), that would be a pain.  Otherwise, pretty sweet and definitely bodes well for the future.

For Vietnam, they need to come out with Tesla motorbikes.  This city would be so much nicer with a bunch of zero-pollution, silent electric motorbikes zooming around instead of the millions of loud, dirty motorbikes we currently have to deal with.

Today was my second day at my new job here in Vietnam.  I’m now working as a teacher at RMIT University here in HCMC.  RMIT is an Australian-owned university whose parent university is in Melbourne, Australia.  It is the only 100% foreign-owned university in Vietnam, and is the largest employer of foreign citizens in Vietnam.

So far I have been extremely impressed.  A photo of the main building on campus is above.  The campus is top-notch all the way around, and really it’s only just begun.  There is campus-wide wi-fi, a nice library, abundant computer labs with brand new computers - PC and Mac, etc.  There are several restaurants on campus, a staff-only restaurant and coffee shop, and it has its own Highland Coffee (which is basically Vietnam’s version of Starbucks).

And they are in the process of adding a fifth floor to the main building, building a second, identical building adjacent to the main building, and building a stadium, swimming pool, tennis courts, student recreation center, and residence hall - so it’s going to be even nicer as those facilities come online over the next couple of years.

The best thing about the campus for me personally is that it’s literally about a 3-minute motorbike ride from my new house!

This semester I’m going to be teaching two courses - Commercial Law and Business Case Studies.  I’ll be teaching one Commercial Law class - which consists of two 1.5-hour sessions, and two Business Case Studies classes - each of which consists of two 1.5-hour sessions.  So a total of 9 hours per week of teaching.  We do have to be on campus or working at home - like grading papers, etc. - for 40 hours per week. 

There are about 4,000 students in Vietnam - most here at the HCMC campus and some at the Hanoi campus.  One neat thing is that any teacher in HCMC can go do a visiting semester in Hanoi any time they want to - so if I ever want to go experience living in Hanoi vs. HCMC without having to commit to a permanent move, I can do that easily now.

There are about 220 teachers in HCMC, and 12 new teachers are starting this semester, myself included.  10 have showed up so far, with two more to come later this week.  The 10 that are here are a really neat group:  me from the U.S., a girl from France, a girl from Slovenia, two other guys from the U.S., a girl from Malaysia, a guy from Australia, a guy born in Hong Kong but most recently from Australia, a girl from India, and a guy from Vietnam who grew up in the U.S.  Everyone has interesting backgrounds and I thnk it will be a good group to work with.

The students come on Monday the 25th.  This week we’re just doing orientation and training for the new teachers.

I am very excited about it and looking forward to teaching at RMIT for a long time!

This is more stupid than anything else, but I can’t help laughing at some parts:

I think it’s technically “Old Gregg” vs. “Old Greg.” Props to Mary for emailing.

From the last couple of posts it looks like all I’ve been doing is driving around on my motorbike taking photos with my iPhone. And truth be told I didn’t do a whole lot this weekend.

After work on Thursday, I went for a long run - around 5.5 or 6 miles. When I got home from my run, my German roommates were having a dinner party. There were four German girls, two guys from Belgium, and one guy from Norway. I took a shower then drank a few beers with them. Apparently a few more than I should have, because I had a headache all day Friday. I have turned into a complete lightweight over here.

Anyway, after work on Friday, I went and ate some Thai food, went and bought a movie to watch, then headed home. I stopped by an internet cafe in my new neighborhood and chatted with some people for a while, then went home and pretty much crashed.

Saturday morning I took care of a bunch of errands I needed to take care of before starting my new job on Monday. Next week is just orientation and training - the students don’t come until Monday the 25th. So anyway I just picked up my clothes from the cleaners, picked up the last remaining stuff I had left at Tim’s and took it to my new house, etc.

At noon, I left to make the long drive up to Lam Dai’s house in the Go Vap district. It takes about an hour to drive from Phy My Hung to Go Vap, so kind of far. Lam Dai had invited me to come up and play badminton with her. I got there about 1, we went and grabbed something to eat, then went and played badminton.

I had not played badminton since I was a kid and we would set up a badminton net and play in our backyard in Mississippi. I am always telling Lam Dai that she should exercise more - so when she told me she’d been playing badminton recently, I kind of laughed because in my mind - remembering the way we used to play it - badminton is not really much in the way of exercise.

Well, the way Asians play badminton is definitely exercise. First off, we were basically playing in a big tin shed with no air conditioning:

There’s a nice shot of Lam Dai’s back and she heads out onto the court.

Second, they don’t just stand around hitting lob shots like we used to do - they play a very fast-paced game and smash the hell out of the shuttlecock. Third, they all seem to relish making an example out of an American.

Here’s a blurry photo of Lam Dai preparing to dominate me out on the court:

I don’t know why I could not take a decent photo yesterday, but oh well.

I thought it was just going to be Lam Dai and I goofing around hitting it back and forth, but as soon as we got on the court, this Vietnamese couple joined us and proceeded to beat the hell out of us in doubles. About 5 points in, they said “OK, let’s mix up the teams,” and the guy and I played Lam Dai and the guy’s wife. It was a little more evenly matched then - I’m not even sure who won.

After that we played a few more games with other random people. The one consistent factor was that Lam Dai and I were the weak links on whatever team we happened to be playing on. She is actually pretty good - and I did okay. At first I kept completely missing the shuttlecock because I am used to playing racquetball and the racquet is a lot shorter and has a bigger head - or at least that’s why I’m telling myself I kept missing it!

We ended up playing for about two hours and were both thoroughly sweaty and tired afterward. We went back to Lam Dai’s house so she could take a shower, and I had to drink the obligatory few beers with her father and one of his nephews. Lam Dai’s family is very, very nice and they really make me feel welcome. I enjoy going there - I just wish their house wasn’t so far away from mine! Lam Dai told me yesterday that she shares a room with her two younger sisters and that all three of the sisters sleep together in one bed. I told her that things were a little different in America.

Anyway, we then drove down to my new house in Phu My Hung. Lam Dai had never been to Phu My Hung and was interested to see it. We ate dinner at a restaurant called Tib, but unfortunately it was not very good. First off, I’d been bragging about how quiet Phu My Hung was, but this restaurant happened to be across from an active construction site and about 5 minutes after we sat down they started up a loud generator over there. I suggested we move inside, but she didn’t want to. But then she got bit by a couple of mosquitoes, so I insisted that we move inside. When we told the waiter we wanted to move inside, he wasn’t too enthusiastic about moving us and suggested that he bring a fan outside instead. I didn’t want to do that, but Lam Dai said it was okay we stayed outside. (We were almost finished anyway.) So that was kind of a bummer.

After dinner we drove around Phu My Hung for a little while, then Lam Dai left to drive back home. I read for a while - I just finished a long autobiography of Ho Chi Minh today - then went to bed.

Today I just goofed off - went and had coffee this morning, went and got a haircut, etc. Now at Tim’s office gathering up my stuff since I won’t be working here full-time any more - about to head back down to Phu My Hung to go for a run. I hope you all had a good weekend!

“Well, I know you need me to bring that 7-foot-tall tree over there to your place, but you see all I have is this moped - I don’t have a truck or anything. Aww, to hell with it - me and the tree’ll be right over.”

“He’s a Vietnamese dude, he loves his mama;
He loves horses, and America too…”

I said before that I would try to start taking more photos of the weird stuff you see the Vietnamese hauling around town on their motorbikes. Well, above is a guy hauling around a big plastic container of live prawns that I saw on my way in to work this morning. There were at least two aerators oxygenating the water as he drove - I couldn’t tell whether they were hooked up to a battery or what.

Below are a couple of additional photos. I suspect those prawns are going to have a bad day!

Bonus Download:

Rage Against the Machine
Evil Empire
Bulls On Parade

Tim is back from Bali with my camera, and I forgot I’d taken these photos on the eve of Tet. I was at my old place in Binh Thanh District, and took these from my rooftop. These photos are not really indicative of how impressive the fireworks were - because they were pretty cool. The fireworks themselves were not as big or as fancy as some I’ve seen in the U.S., but the show lasted a long time - much longer than the fireworks shows I’ve been to in the U.S. At least 15 or 20 minutes.

You can kind of tell from the photos, but there were literally thousands of people standing out on the bridge in front of my house watching the fireworks. As soon as the last fireworks went off - and you could tell it was the last fireworks because it was a huge explosion of a bunch of them at once - the whole crowd went “Wooooo!” and then you immediately heard the sound of 1,500 motorbikes cranking up in unison as people left the bridge.

These remind me to a 4th of July party I went to with Katie and Travis in Asheville a few years ago. The party was at Katie’s “Cuz Ryan’s” house, and the whole point of Ryan having the party at his house was because his house was on a hill looking out directly over downtown Asheville. They shot the fireworks off from beneath us downtown, so the fireworks were actually going off right at our level. It was really neat. Anyway, we’d all had a few beers, and right after the fireworks were over I proceeded to go around the party talking like a redneck and asking strangers “Hey! Did you see them fireworks?” After they muttered “Um, yeah” and looked at me like I was an idiot, I’d say “They was awesome!” Reading back over what I just wrote, maybe I am an idiot. But the fireworks - both in Asheville and in HCMC - really “was awesome!”