A Few Random Photographs ...

... that didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

The barber is out, probably sitting across the street smoking a cigarette. Many things that you can have done in a shop, you can also get done on the street. A haircut is one of those things.

A different take on a smiley face, this is from the logo sign from the hotel at which we stayed in Ho Chi Minh City. We'll spend one more night there on our way out of the country.

Ever since I saw the silos in Saskatchewan that had "Laura" written on them, I've enjoyed finding people's names in strange places. This was along a street in Ho Chi Minh City.


Sadly, this is the only reference we've seen to any form of martial arts here. We came here with intentions of practicing regularly, but that's been tough to do. One more month, though, and I'll be back at it with a vengeance.


My brother-in-law once said that you know it's time to move on when you start to get used to a place, when one golden altar in a European cathedral looks just like another. It may be time to move on from here, because I've started to get used to seeing scenes such as this, because I do see them every time I go out.


I may actually have used this one or one like it before, but that's okay. I am not getting used to seeing how much someone can carry using a cyclo or a motorbike, because every time I think I've seen the best one yet, I see a better one.


This is a dorm at Hue University. The clothes are the students' laundry. Most people here do not use dryers, at least not this time of year. When we send our laundry to the hotel to be done, we see it drying in the courtyard below, along with all the hotel sheets and towels.


Know what sort of court this is? If you're American and you've played this game, you probably played in on the grass in the back yard. This is a badminton court, and it's in the courtyard outside the Hue University dorm. The husband played serious badminton at one time in his life, so he liked seeing this.


Think this is a lot of bicycles? It's about two thirds of the bikes outside the dorm. The others were to my right as I took this photo. This doesn't include the motorbikes, either.

I've got a few more photos that I easily could have used here. And I will have a photo of younger son in the Joker suit later tonight. I have also started a post about how East and West mixed at a Christian monastery we visited. I will try to get that finished tomorrow while I'm waiting for the last laundry to come back so that I can do the final packing. In the meantime, though, I'm off to the university's farewell dinner. Since the laundry was late coming back, I'm relegated to wearing jeans, a silk shirt, and the jacket I had tailored at the silk shop around the corner (two colors of silk and two colors of embroidery ... it cost all of $13.00). I thought the ao dai might be a bit much especially since the beer will be refilling itself, and I would hate to trip while wearing that.

OSHA? Not Here!

OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in responsible for all the warning labels and cautions we Americans are used to seeing on everything. For a total change of pace, here's a month of construction on the building next door to our hotel.
8 March 2009
The top floor is even with the fifth floor of our hotel. 9 March 2009
Zoomed out for a fuller view. 10 March 2009
It appears that they're adding a floor. They've also bricked in part of the lower floor.
11 March 2009
A morning view in the fog and an afternoon one in the clear. It looks as though they didn't do too much today.
12 March 2009
They're getting the top floor framed, and they've finished bricking in that lower floor.
13 March 2009
More framing done, and it appears they might be planning for another floor on top of this one.
16 March 2009
I missed a couple of days, but there was work done. 17 March 2009
They're closing in the ceiling/floor.
19 March 2009
Another day I missed and another foggy morning.
21 March 2009
They appear to have slowed down a bit, or perhaps they're working on the other side of the building.
22 March 2009
Where did all the supports go?
23 March 2009
24 March 2009
There's almost a brick wall there.
25 March 2009
More brick wall!
27 March 2009
It's definite. There will be another floor.
29 March 2009
Looks as if they'll be pouring some sort of supports soon.
30 March 2009
They're going to town on that next floor!
1 April 2009
For reference, this man is standing on the top of what will be the seventh floor of the building. He is wearing no safety harness of any kind. He isn't wearing a hard hat either. I've only seen one construction worker with a hardhat here, and he was using it to scoop cement. And if you'll notice how far up the rebar extends on the support columns, there may very well be an eighth floor!

Some other construction notes. If the brickwork looks shoddy, it's because it will be covered up with cement on the outside and wall material of some sort on the inside. THey re-use everything that they can here. I watched one worker take a board, hammer all the nails back through it, then put the board up against another board and hammer the same nails back through the first board to attach it to the second. And if you think you haven't seen much finished lumber, you're right. You haven't. The supports all look like branches, and the pieces of lumber I have seen are far from new. It's amazing how fast everything goes up. Would I have thought when we arrived that I'd see two stories added to the building next door? Certainly not, but I did. And by the time the next UVa professor arrives here in two or three weeks, they may have finished constructing the structure and moved on to covering the brick work. OSHA? They don't have that here yet.

Happy Birthday!

Today is younger son's 19th birthday; it also happens to be the birthday of the other UVa professor teaching here right now. The hotel gave each of them an absolutely gorgeous not to mention very, very tasty birthday cake, flowers, and, at least in younger son's case, a ride to the elevator on the luggage cart while the staff sang to him. After almost a month here, you get to know the people at the front desk, the breakfast servers, and even the housekeeping staff. It's been great! Here's the plug for the hotel, from the side of the cake. That's the Truong Giang Hotel, and we'd highly recommend it to anyone coming here. Here's younger son with the cake and the flowers. As for younger son's present, he asked for something very specific, something he knew that we'd probably only buy him here. He's seen The Dark Knight an unknown number of times, and what he asked for was the suit the Joker wore. It's purple, with a long tail on the coat. The vest is a shade of green. It could only be custom-made, and that's what it will be, yes, at the silk shop around the corner in, I kid you not, raw silk of the purple and green varieties. If I told you how much or little it cost, I'd risk skewing the results of the current contest to price a three-piece cashmere suit, a cotton dress shirt, and leather shoes. I'll release the price of the Joker suit later tonight, when I announce the new winner.

New Price Is Right Results

First off, here are the sons in their tailored three-piece cashmere suits, tailored cotton shirts, and custom-made leather shoes. The report on the shoes was that with the exception of the stiffness of the new leather, they felt like very worn-in shoes, naturally shaped to one's feet. Just how much did this set us back? Well, the shoes were $18.00 per pair. That's right. Custom, made-to-order leather shoes for $18.00 per pair. It's no wonder the husband ordered two pairs, one in brown and one in black. The sons also got custom-made sandals at $6.00 per pair. As for the suits and shirts, those combined to cost $119.00 for each son. So, $18.00 plus $119.00 comes to a total of $137.00. We had some guesses under and one over, but the winner is ... Cousin-in-Law Debi, come on down! Your guess of $90.00 was the closest without going over. Your prize, keeping in the vein of things one can get cheap here, is a ladies Rolex watch. That's right ... a Rolex! And not just any Rolex, but one that is so obviously fake it has its own special value. Here it is. I'm not sure which I like better: the huge 9 or the incorrect Roman numeral IIII. It just looked like a fun watch, and since Debi is a fun person, that makes it a very suitable prize for her. I'll put it in the mail when we get back to the States in early May. Congratulations!

The price of younger son's birthday suit? You know, the Joker one in purple and green raw silk? Yeah, that one was $80.00.

East Meets West

What follows is a post I started in Hue, but other posts intervened, and I never got around to finishing this one. I figured I'd see what I could do now because the alternative is to start repacking for tomorrow's departure from Hanoi, and let's face it, packing sort of sucks.

There's a real mix of Eastern and Western here. Some of it is because of the focus on tourism. A restaurant will have Western items on the menu along with the specialty dishes of Hue. You see signs printed in Vietnamese, English, and French. Nowhere has the mixture of East and West been more striking, though, than the Christian monastery that we visited. There are four Christian monasteries in Vietnam, one a few kilometers outside Hue. We bicycled there with a Vietnamese friend who knows some of the monks there.

From outward appearances, a visitor to the monastery might think they were at a pagoda. There is, for example, the tower found at most pagodas. The one above is from the Christian monastery. The one below is from Thien Mu Pagoda. And this one is from Tu Dam Pagoda. All three have seven stories. We were told, but without an explanation, that seven is an important number in Buddhism. The monk who showed us around the Christian monastery cited the seven days of the week, the seven mortal sins, and the seven sacraments as reasons for the seven stories on the tower there. Still, from all outward appearances, it could be a Buddhist tower. I find this intriguing. I wonder if the Catholic church, knowing that the brothers there would be Vietnamese, designed the tower to be culturally sensitive. Or perhaps it was Vietnamese monks who designed it in the first place. Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask.

Ao Dai

I don't really know where I'll wear this (the boss' Christmas party, perhaps?), but below is my ao dai. I chose purple because it's the traditional color of Hue. Some ao dais are embroidered or cut a bit differently around the neck, but I asked for the traditional design. This is custom-made to all sorts of my measurements. Both the top and the pants are silk. The cost? A mere $27.00, from the silk shop around the corner.

Incense

Incense is a fact of daily life here. You can't walk in the city (except maybe in the middle of one of the bridges over the Perfume River) without smelling it or seeing it lit in a small altar or on sale in a shop. You may also see it spread out to dry. I was a bit surprised at how incense is made. The part that burns actually starts out as some sort of dough that is rolled onto a stick. There's a video of this process below. I had better get used to the smell of incense, because the sons bought a large pack of one kind that I imagine will last them for a while once they get home to start using it.