The end of the road

Thirty kilometres from the itself remote town of Mai Chau, the road runs out. This blog is also drawing to a close. Well, the name will soon be a misnomer: Tim will no longer be in Vietnam. Our time is up shortly and we are planning the staggered ecologically-responsible release of our staff back into the wild and the return to tidying, washing and cooking (and guarding the house) all by ourselves (we won’t be needing a pool lady, more’s the pity).

For the numerati amongst you, the blog had over 100 entries and over 20 000 hits. It was a lot of fun to write and I think I will enjoy re-reading it, to recapture the feeling of what it was like to get to know Vietnam. During our time here it allowed me to maintain some friendships, to re-ignite others and to establish yet others. Here is where the readership was. Norway and Vietnam at the top of the list followed by the UK & US. Fabrice: give yourself a pat on the back for (possibly single-handedly) dragging France up to 5th, thank you for the votes from the Dublin jury, Nick & Mags; take a bow, Hugh in NZ; thank you Schuttenbelts in Delhi and Mundys in Bangkok; Bjørn and Michelle in the US, and Alec making a late run from Brussels; not nice to end on a sour note, but Anders in Laos, honestly, I had hoped you would have read the blog a bit more: You had a lot to learn from it.

I haven’t determinedly tried to convince readers of anything very much but here’s something you might like to consider following my line on. The sea to the east of Vietnam’s long coast: Call it the Eastern Sea. Not what some regional power might prefer us all to call it.

And here’s a closing thought about humanity as we make our way back to the First World. Whether you want to save their souls, to increase their economic value, to reduce their carbon footprint or to appreciate their cultures, we need to take on board more fully that…

…there are more people living inside this circle than outside it.

OK, now I’ve started thinking big, so here’s another one:

That tiny circle around us in our galaxy is where we have found most of the planets we currently know of with life-maintaining potential. We haven’t managed to really check out other bits yet, perhaps because the Milky Way is 120 000 light years wide. And is one of billions of galaxies out there….

Enough.

 

School’s out forever

The school is full of fantastic people. There are the legends like Phi and Pho and the institutions like Mr Lai and Tech Ed.

The average teacher at UNIS knows their stuff, supports students online, at lunchtime, whenever, is ultra-enthusiastic, does extra-curricular activities and smiles around campus. The weak teachers are not common; maybe two out of 50 over four years.

The inspirers are everywhere. Some of the ones we have had over the years include Ms Griffin, Mr Haug, Ms Lepry, Ms Zahid, Mr Ginder, Mr Johnston, Ms Prescott, Ms Arguelles, Ms Drodsz, Ms Rielly, Mr Gill & Mr Gibb, Ms Schneiderman, Ms Renneberg, Ms Sanchez, Ms Kerry and Ms Schneider. NB. Absence from this list does not mean I think you’re rubbish 😉

There have been the genuinely hilarious like the Huffster, Lin Turley and Mr Graña, not forgetting the penetrating and intense Miss Penrose & Ms Key, and the unsung heroes, Mr Hubbard, Mr Sanchez, Mrs Mills and Ms Collins.

All elementary school teachers have given my girl a constant flood of amazing educational experiences. Lucy, you are not forgotten. Laura, too good, Daniel perfect.

The pupils at the school come from 60+ different countries. Numerically, the staff is dominated by contingents from North America, Britain and Australia. The top leadership is American with a soupçon of Britain and about 50% of the teachers are from North America. Notwithstanding the fact that many North American teachers are on my list above, it is clear that internationalising the leadership and the staff would not only bring it in more line with the school’s very nature, it would also improve it. Currently there is truth in the joke that it is really the United Nations American School of Hanoi. Only about 10% of students are from the US, the teaching programmes are inherently supra-cultural and international, and yet, for motives that actually are unclear to me, the school seems determinedly American.

The vocabulary is American (“recess”, “grades”, “freshman”, “varsity”) which you can get used to (though I had to draw the line well before “cleats”). And one learns to distinguish MYP from MVP, and also that Spirits Week is disappointingly unalcoholic. But a school with pupils from so many countries is not an environment where people should feel free to assume that their culture is the default option. It seeps into the teaching, e.g. a unit’s central example of a volcano’s effects on humans: Mount St Helens in 1980 killing 57 people. Is that really the best we can do? One year, all the songs in a medley played by the school band on UN Day were from the US and over the years there were many occasions where one got a less international experience than the the school’s name had primed one for.

One thing that characterises American and British cultures is the poor learning of foreign languages. Maybe it is not a coincidence then that languages are treated oddly at the school. The only subjects where you had pupils from different age groups studying together were languages, on the basis that they had all had the same number of cycles of Spanish or French. It appears to make more financial than pedagogical sense. And also no teaching of the local language to non-native speakers. For me, an astonishing oversight. I think the main thing that pupils learn from this is that, despite the claims to cultural sensitivity you get in the speeches and brochures, English is the only language that really counts in UNsVille. While this may well be true, UNIS should be working to change such attitudes.

I think generally there is insufficient awareness of the historical and cultural context in which one finds oneself. Once, at an elementary school open day, the children presented the stories of migrants, talking in the first person. They recounted life stories in monologue form and there was a fascinating mix of famous people and family stories. Hello, who’s this? Our old friend Henry Kissinger?!? Yes, here was an unknowing child in character, reciting a eulogy to the appalling warmonger. In Christopher Hitchens’ book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, he nailed him as responsible for many deaths in several wars, including sabotaging negotiations to end the American war in Vietnam just as they threatened to be successful. A reviewer wrote “This book is so studiedly defamatory that if Kissinger values his reputation, he really must sue.” He didn’t sue. UNIS: It only feels like you inhabit a bubble, you don’t really and you need to be more sensitive to the context in which you operate.

When one approaches the school leadership to bring up issues, perchance to make educational suggestions, they will meet you and listen to you but mostly they would stubbornly defend the situation, be it the random doling out of detentions, dealing with a teacher utterly out of his depth, or the school’s inability to work out the average of two numbers on a report card. Then, months afterwards, one would discover that the problem had been quietly rectified. It is especially unfortunate that the school doesn’t have the confidence to open itself to informed comment because it turns out that the school itself decides what topics are taught in all but 11th and 12th grade. From 6th to 10th grade (MYP) the curriculum is decided internally, and all assessments are set and marked by its own teachers (with some external moderation). This free hand gives massive scope for parochial decisions to be taken for local convenience which risks leaving gaps in students’ knowledge: So science is taught as a patchwork of units, giving little overall understanding. For instance, rather than being used as an organising principle for the life sciences, evolution is covered here and there, a bit of genetics here, ecology there, and Darwin in the IB.

Anyway, fun times. The international school experience has enriched our children and they have enjoyed it hugely. I loved the buoyant yet relaxed atmosphere on campus, the big, friendly events, watching girls’ football, basketball and volleyball tournaments, the many hours on the tennis courts with such sporting players (not you, Andrew). On UN Day, the most special day of the calendar, two perennial stand-out memories: Chip getting out his guitar rather than giving a speech, and being moved to tears by the flag parade.

So farewell, UNIS. To improve you need to be more open and less defensive. You are very international and yet not internationalist, far too Disney at times and need to learn to keep it real, but thanks for the whirlwind of sport, learning and fun.

 

It’s not quite on the FIFA scale…

…but there are lots of cheats in youth football.

Two of my favourite quotes are due to Pope John Paul II and Albert Camus. Albert, he said, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”. JP2, he said, “Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important.”

I remind myself of these whenever I come across cheating in youth football. It is quite common. I remember two teams in our division in Norway being penalised for fielding overage players, and that was in a league for 13-year-olds. One hopes the coaches involved would be embarrassed if confronted with it now, several years later. Was it that important to win (they didn’t anyway). On the other side of the world, in the league in Hanoi there have definitely been issues with players presenting pristine birth certificates, re-registered in a province other than their own. I noticed that all the boys involved were large and muscly.

Until now the international school sports scene has been squeaky clean, to my knowledge. Not even a whiff of suspicion. Indeed UNIS has consistently refused to field underage players that would have boosted the team. I agree: Rules is rules. If you’re born too early or too late, tough luck. The international schools tournaments of both MRISA and APAC have been pretty sporting on the pitch/court and very friendly off it. Then there was April’s girls’ football tournament in Beijing…

It was fun but the whole enterprise was somewhat tainted by the apparent cheating of a school who thought it was OK to field players from their sister school, 3 hours’ drive away. The cheating was obvious to us because the players in question (excellent of course, some picked for the national team) had already played in a friendly against UNIS for their own school. The school is according to their website “characterized by the Gospel ideals” and indeed maybe this generously inclusive team selection was part of the school’s drive “To lead an energetic fight against moral degeneration”. Anyway, it was a pity that the organisers didn’t just boot the team out, given that they knew of the situation before a ball was kicked. I did have faith that the APAC powers that be would use their wisdom after the event to enforce the obvious expectation that players in a school team should, you know, actually go to that school but I hear that no such action will be taken. Instead they are apparently going to introduce a rule saying that all the other rules must be followed. The mind boggles at the ingenuity of the solution. So anyway, I look forward to next year when UNIS Hanoi will be entering joint teams with UNIS New York, not forgetting to add a liberal sprinkling of Vietnamese national squad players.

Even if we accept Karol Józef Wojtyła’s dubious premise that some things in life are more important than football, I understand the frustration of players who travelled 4000 km to find themselves playing a bunch of rule-benders. Thank you to the organisers, the spectators, the coaches, the officials and to all the other teams, and may the Lord forgive anybody who cheated.

 

Questions for Hanoi

How?

What?

Why?

Who?

When?

The yolk’s on you, all white!

Where?

Hanoi!!

 

Cao Bằng: A stone’s throw from China

My last trip on the bike has been and gone. I had seen some pictures of the Ban Gioc waterfall and knew I needed to get there. It’s on the Chinese border and looked spectacular. I hadn’t been to Cao Bang province before and wanted to go to see if the county shield is in fact an exploding water buffalo.

This is the area where Ho Chi Minh came back into Vietnam in 1941 after a 30-year absence, where he stayed in a cave to avoid capture by the French. The cave, the pools of turquoise water and places he frequented are now touristified. I only saw two other Western tourists amongst plenty of locals, on the eve of the 125th anniversary of Ho’s birth, and perhaps because of the impending big day many of the visitors had had an alcoholic lunch and were wobbling around, pleased to shout “Where are you from?” at me. Some of the guards on duty were also somewhat “tired and emotional”. A posse of them waved me in to park my bike. So I did. Then I found out I could drive further in towards the cave. Back at my bike they made the money sign with their fingers and sent over a young man with a truncheon to claim their ill-justified 10 000 VND to cover the cost of parking my bike for two minutes where his mate had told me to park it. The experienced reader of this blog will know that I like a challenge like this. I talked to him. He breathed ethanol on me. So I paid and he rejoined his friends, leaving his truncheon perched on my dashboard. I handed it back to him as I drove by. It was really light. You aren’t going to put down many ticket rebellions with that thing.

Unsurprisingly, the French didn’t find Ho Chi Minh. Here is the entrance to his cave:

The countryside was fantastic. Outsize limestone menhirs covered in vegetation, valleys, rows of mountains fading into the distance, bright green rice fields. The city of Cao Bang (city shield: not a bovine bomb) was full of happy families, eating, wandering, chatting, the market was scenic, the people friendly. I don’t quite know what I was expecting (maybe something sleepier, a backwater) but this is a proper city.

The next day I rode off to the waterfall. Incredible scenery and the falls were green, grassy and worth driving for a few hours to get to. Rafts carry tourists to the feet of the falls, some from China, some from Vietnam. Again, there were lots of Vietnamese families and I only saw two other Westerners.

Even passing by with my helmet on, people can tell I am foreign, or at least odd, perhaps because of my relative size, possibly particularly my nose, shape of bike, or maybe the rarely-seen luggage carrier at the back, and all around Cao Bang province I saw in my mirrors people turning to stare. Not used to it because in Hanoi one passes unnoticed.

Taking another route back, I drove along the border for a few kilometres, separated from China by a river, before a gravelly pot-holed road back inland. Imagine being on a rollercoaster with bumper cars and dodge’em lorries all in a fog of dust for a few hours and you’ll get the picture. About this time I began to get blasé about the lush mountainous surroundings. Up into the sky around hairpin bends, late afternoon sunshine towards the border town of Lang Son. This was also a friendly, lively town.

After three nights away on my last ever trip, I was beginning to lose my drive to explore. The highway just over there was 150 km straight back home and the weather forecast was for rain up north. I listened to my gut, which was saying please may I have some samosas or flapjacks or pizza, and decided to go home. My mojo was slipping away… I couldn’t even be bothered to take pictures of a frankly daunting mountain chain running alongside the road for kilometres. Each minute I was updating calculations about what percentage of the distance remained and had Guantanamera and Que Sera Sera on two scratched records in my head. I was so distracted I checked the weather in Oslo on my phone (why?) until I recognised the turnoff from a previous trip, so got off the main road.

Quietly tootling along 10 km from Hanoi (in my phonological loop: “Here’s what she said to me, “Wash your mouth, my son”…”), a beige-clad policeman appeared before me, truncheon pointed at my Western-sized nose. I pull over, quietly forgetting that I speak a single syllable of Vietnamese. Opening gambit: “Where are you from?” (What, you too?!) Five policemen at a mobile speed check unit inform me that I was doing 49 in a 40 area. That’s possible, but I didn’t see that they had any evidence of this. They indicated that I should go and stand in the scorching midday sun for a while, a cruel and unusual punishment surely. Then I was beckoned back and my transgression gone over again (“Yes, I do understand: 49 > 40”), I was told to slow down and asked to pay 200 000 VND. I had been preparing for much worse so, while trying not to appear relieved or over-enthusiastic, I paid quickly. The main man shook my hand and I was on my way. I drove slowly back home, searching for my mojo.

It was good to get home, 850 km all told, and that night we had samosas. I can now retire the bike, undefeated, notwithstanding the 200 000 Dong. Proof of something (I’m not sure what) is that the only picture I did take on the way home was this one: A woman making the skin of her dog crispy.

Bon appetit!

 

The Air Force Museum, 40 years after

I came across a museum that I have not been to before. It was the Air Force Museum and focusses mainly on the American War. The lessons of that war bear repeating. Technological and financial superiority are no guarantee of victory. Led by the genius of General Võ Nguyên Giáp and the tenacity and humility of Hồ Chí Minh, the Vietnamese people did not collapse and give up despite being subjected to the heaviest carpet bombing in history (“The bombing of North Vietnam surpassed the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II“) as well as being sprayed with Agent Orange in what must be history’s severest deliberate poisoning of another country (43 million litres at concentrations of over 20 times the normal agricultural level).

Two quotes that give a flavour of what their enemies (including at various times Japan, France, the US, and China) were up against.

General Võ Nguyên Giáp: “Strike to win, strike only when success is certain, if it is not, then don’t strike.”

Hồ Chí Minh: “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”

Today is the 40th anniversary of the desperate, iconic flight from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, the end of the war, even though bizarrely it was fully two years after the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded by a Norwegian committee to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ. The latter, uniquely in the prize’s history, declined the award. He was disgusted by the American violation of a truce when they had heavily bombed Hanoi the previous Christmas, and reasonably pointed out that in any case peace had not yet been achieved.

Hồ Chí Minh also said “the great victory of April 30 represents the triumph of the entire nation, of justice over brutality and of humanity over tyranny.”

Getting into the museum captured some of the quixotic, laidback and confusing way of the world around here. I asked the uniformed late-teenage guard where I should park my bike. He said “Over there, but the museum is closed”. I thought, “Well, the gate is open and you have let me in, so let’s see”. I parked and went back to him. He now said “You need to buy a ticket. 40 000 VND”. I ploddingly went to the ticket booth where I saw that indeed it didn’t open for another half hour. I turned to go, and the boy, who hadn’t moved an inch, said “You pay me”. I can’t recall seeing him put my money into a cash till. Anyway, ticket in hand I walked alone amongst the planes and anti-aircraft weaponry up to the grand building with its impressive staircase. Inside the door there were several military personnel, mainly women, testing the PA system. The museum itself was in darkness. They said, “It is closed”. I stood there blankly, adjusted my glasses and looked vaguely around. Eventually one said, “But you can go and look”. So I wandered around in the penumbra while the speakers squealed with the equivalent of “Testing, one-two, one-two”.

There was quite a range of technological complexity. On the one hand, there was body armour… made of something like straw

Even so long afterwards, it is still hard to fully assimilate the idea that people equipped like this could defeat the US. This painting purports to show a man from the H’re ethnic minority who shot down three helicopters with 10 bullets.

On the other hand, there was a photograph that I didn’t understand but that appears to show a Vietnamese astronaut. I have just looked it up and he was in fact (and of course) a cosmonaut. Called Phạm Tuân, he was the first non-Russian Asian in space, was up there for over a week, orbiting Earth 142 times, and if, dear non-Vietnamese reader, you tell me you already knew this, I won’t believe you.

Here was a chair that the legend informs us “many times utilized by Uncle Ho”

And outside was a helicopter that transported Hồ Chí Minh around.

As I got back on my bike, a convoy of non-military SUVs passed through the gate, stuffed with military personnel staring at me. We sized each other up. “This museum ain’t big enough for the both of us”, I telepathised. Their top boy stared back and perhaps he was thinking, “You want trouble, son?”. As imaginary skirmishes go, it was up there with the time I stood up to Millwall. In the end I did what perhaps others should have done, rode away from it, in fact fled to a nearby café.

 

Beijing fog

After 8 years Jemima and Saskia were going to be playing on the same team for the last time for the foreseeable. The thing was that the tournament was in Beijing. Well, it had to be done so off I went. The UNIS team was inexperienced and error-prone but stuck together well and the girls were a friendly, determined group. The conditions were tough for all-action players: There was smog, sunshine, a sandstorm and constant monitoring of some pollution index. The last game was the most exciting of all, 0-2 with 4 minutes to go, 2-2, and a shootout lost after the 20th penalty, draining for everyone and I was hoarse. It was emotional afterwards to recall the hesitant scuffling around with a football in 2005 on grey gravel outside Nesoddtangen school and how via the Spirit team on KGB and all over Akershus and Oslo, to Gold Star Hanoi, MRISA & APAC, they turned into two fantastic, selfless footballers, spraying the ball about on the big pitch.

Anyway, yes, I was my usual restrained self on the sidelines, sonically booming commands suggestions encouragement in a variety of languages. Afterwards a parent from a rival school said “We couldn’t work out if you were a Norwegian who spoke good English or an Englishman who spoke good Norwegian”. I smiled through gritted teeth and an abrasive tongue. I really have become the Teutonic professor of linguistics who appeared on a game show hosted by Groucho Marx many moons ago.

Marx: It says here that you speak 12 languages

Prof: Yeff, dat es korrekt.

M: Well, which one are you speaking now?

Beijing really was the most difficult place I have ever been to, to get around. The standard script for “Tim in a taxi in Beijing” was approach a driver to explain my destination, whereupon he would turn me down and usher me to an unmarked car with a shark waiting inside who would then proceed to drive me within a kilometre or two of where I was going, turn to me and, with a snarl, demand some Oslo-sized amount of money. Twice in a taxi and once in a cafe I paid bills because of the implied threat of physical violence. One driver came after me and chest-bumped me for money. He had left me at dusk somewhere other than my hotel. I didn’t have many allies amongst the hundreds of passers-by so I paid and wandered through the in-other-circumstances charming 798 art district looking for my hotel. A sandstorm descended as I was on the last lap of my surrealist hunt: “This is not my hotel” etc etc.

Do not get into a car with this man.

Given this background, even more kudos to the director at the Western Academy of Beijing for lending me his driver to take me back to my hotel so that I didn’t have to cause any more trouble for the Beijing taxi drivers by, you know, asking them to drive a customer to a destination for less than a ransom. Actually, a staff member at the Beijing school solved part of the mystery for me. He said that Beijing folk go by landmarks not addresses. When I told the hotel receptionist how difficult it was to get back to it by taxi she said, yes, that’s why I normally give out this piece of paper with directions with landmarks. Doh. In fact, all the staff on the pleasant WAB campus were super hosts, helping us unhouse-trained visitors. Thank you.

So, what to make of China? I had access to BBC on my phone but not NRK (are they still grumpy about the Peace Prize thing?!) There was no Google, no Facebook, and is in fact probably run by L*t*n fans because there was no access to the Watford Observer either. And the lack of Google shows how tied we are to the monster. No maps, no Gmail. Oh, I’ll just look up what search engine they use here. Doh. Oh, I’ll just write to someone to ask. Doh.

After the last match I had a fabulous and hilarious meal with Trinh, then followed Watford on the web all the way to the top of the table and the next day made my way home to Hanoi.

By train.

Why oh why? I will have to plead “rich tapestry of life” or “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” but I accept that it is likely that the court might well conclude insanity anyway. In itself, buying the ticket was a pain in the neck an adventure. A blog had spun an improbable story about how to buy tickets for Hanoi, just that it turned out to be correct in every detail. Don’t go to the railway station. Go to a little ticket office miles away where they will take you to a backroom and chest-bump you issue a ticket in Russian and German. It wasn’t until the Sunday I read the ticket and saw that it said the destination was GIL International Train. Hmmm, that may or may not be Hanoi. Worry worry.

Beijing West station was bustling but not crowded. I was prepared for any standard of train from TGV to British Rail Lincolnshire Chugger. It was much closer to the good end of that scale and I had four beds to myself. Actually, I had the whole carriage to myself. I was Mr First Class. There was limitless hot water for noodles, a bit of muzak to make you long for tinnitus, but it was clean. I sat down for a clear stretch to catch up on reading. No internet, no map (digital or paper), still not absolutely sure it was the right train. I’m sure during the 3 minutes of research I did for this trip I read that the journey was supposed to be spectacular. I didn’t really agree. The first afternoon it was gridlocked traffic, hideous apartment blocks, then grey fields. Some Ha Long-like formations the next day but no sweeping panoramas. Flat is rarely spectacular. But it was comfortable, calm, punctual and unlike me, the time actually flew.

After a mere 23 hours we pulled into Nanning. I wandered towards the exit and a member of railway staff ran after me and told me to follow her. “Excellent,” I thought, “more first class treatment”. We got to the waiting room and she poured me into it. It was full of second-class people. “Wait until 6”. I tried asking whether GIL was actually a Communist joke meaning Hanoi but got nowhere. Everything will be fine, I told myself. If they can’t promise me the thing is going to Vietnam I won’t get on. I’ll just get a taxi to the airport and fly home. (The alert reader may be able to spot at least one weakness with that plan.)

At 5.30 they fetched me (lucky that, I couldn’t hold my breath for much longer) and escorted me to a train that had “Hà Nội (Gia Lâm)” on the side. I was like a GI in reverse. I was almost home. Only 13 hours to go. Again I was the only one in First Class. I loved the solitude. At about 10 pm a train guy told me to get my stuff and go through customs. Luggage was X-rayed and passport checked with about 50 others who gasped in awe at being in the same room as me. There were soldiers with guns and helmets and everything. It was not the time for joking around. Then we clambered back on and waited for an hour with the engine thumping. Frustrating. Especially because soon after we got going, we stopped again and train guy comes on to tell me to get my stuff and go and let the Vietnamese rummage through it. Then we sit there until 2 in the morning turning the engine over before finally setting off for the City of Fair Taxi Drivers. Two border checks, four hours, well done guys. I had a celebratory beer and woke up on the outskirts of Hanoi. The nice taxi driver from the railway station tried to agree a fee off-meter but soon sniffed that I had been around the Hanoi block before and relented. Better luck tomorrow buddy, you might get yourself a first-timer.

 

Lingua frankly

Vietnamese is difficult. The tones, oh the tones, the sextet of tones, the consonant clusters, and the letters. The alphabet looks sort of Western European, unlike the Thai scribble (ท ทหาร), but it does have traps like ơ and ă. And that’s even before you get to how the Portuguese and French missionaries of centuries past elected to transcribe the language. Many words I still cannot pronounce due to my own bucco-lingual stubbornness. But for other words, learning of the pronunciation was impeded for about a year by the way they are written. Words like “học” and “độc”. You concentrate on the dot which is a tone directing you to snatch at the word, say it really quickly, possibly going down in intonation while not neglecting any letter. (Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) apparently described this tone as “chesty-heavy”. Nope, that doesn’t help, Alex). No teacher was ever very pleased with the way I said “học” (or indeed “độc”). But why not? One clue was that when they said hoc or doc they would puff their cheeks out. Try it. It is clumsy. Now I have worked out what the difficulty is. The mistake is thinking of the last sound as a “c”: It should be a “p”. Thanks for nothing, Franco-Iberian monks. Words ending in “-ong” present a similar case: It is obvious how they should be pronounced, right? Except that you would be wrong. The “ong” at the end of a word you should say like a snappy “om”, as would a fish shutting its mouth after its prey has wandered in (cheek-puffing preferred but optional). Words ending in “-ang” are another kettle of fish, whereas “Ng” at the start of a word is simply another sad chapter: It is certainly not pronounced “ng” or “m”. No, it is much more like the sound you make when scraping brown Norwegian goat’s cheese from the roof of your mouth while moaning quietly.

Still, I’ve acquired a few hundred words of Vietnamese and today a translation app understood me (eh, Gunnar?). So to end with, here are some abstract, universal laws of language:

1. A person who says that a particular language is simple invariably does not speak that language

Both in Vietnam and Norway one meets visitors claiming that the local language is simple. Really, well, if so, why can’t you speak it? It’s easy to see where this comes from. It does seem impoverished to an English speaker to find out that in Vietnamese there are no definite articles. Haha, sounds a bit basic. Yes, so if the grammar is “simple”, then all you have to master is the vernacular, the prosody, the terms of address and the count nouns and you’ll soon be successfully ordering chicken noodles all by yourself (as long as you are in a restaurant with nothing else on the menu).

2. Repeating something in a loud voice when not being understood the first time is not a habit exclusive to the English

It is certainly common amongst Vietnamese speakers. OK, I’m mainly thinking of those in bia hois, late at night.

3. After the third use of the word “like”, a sentence may safely be ignored.

4. Multilinguistic people surf in n dimensions while monoglots run in straight lines

That’s not to say that monoglots are lazy imperialists though.

 

Hanoian geography, part 2

It is easy to spend time (days) gazing over West Lake

I have a favourite phở place nearby, where the noodle soup is unsurpassed and the quảy (dogbone-shaped rice fritters?) are always fresh and firm (but not crunchy).

Just up the road there is a calorific snack place. Mushroom and pork fritters, handmade in front of your eyes, passed from one wok of oil to another, served in a small plastic bowl with sweet chutney&chili sauce and thinly-sliced vegetables, eaten with a long metal spoon. And it tastes much better than my description would lead you to expect. Cost for, ooh, about 150 kCal = 12 000 VND

Then there is the charming area near Trúc Bạch lake where all the phở cuốn restaurants are. It is reminiscent of Rue des Bouchers in Brussels with young men trying to cajole you into their hostelry, only here done in a friendly way. Phở cuốn is a pile of fresh spring rolls stuffed with beef and herbs: Delicious. They are made there and then, and can be eaten with fried chipped sweet potatoes dipped in a viscous, translucent red sauce of indeterminate composition, washed down with unsweetened, indeed bitter, iced tea (not selling this very well, am I?).  Also try the fried pillows of rice with rau muống xào.

Three of us in the family have spent inordinate amounts of time on artifical football pitches dotted around Hanoi and two have spent lots of time cheering and cartwheeling on the sidelines. Goals have been scored, injuries sustained, balls shielded, balls put through, boys put on their backsides, ridiculous saves made, lessons learned, 2-4-1 explained, sometimes hair torn out, but in sum, lots of magical moments. The main pitches were at Au Co, Co Nhue, Dang Thai Mai, Xuan La and My Dinh (Apologies to any Vietnamese readers: I have deliberately left off the diacritics here because we foreigners write and pronounce these names without any recourse to your fancy show-off tones. The worst attempt at pronouncing a Hanoi street name I have heard was “Hoo-Ann Doo” for Xuân Diệu: Good luck finding it, mate!)

Here are the pitches on Dang Thai Mai and Au Co, the last picture in tribute to the lady always being late to open the damn gate.

Rebecca is driven three times a week to a bunker where she does gymnastics. Coaches coax and bend and push down on and correct for a couple of hours at a time. I think they would call it character-building. The ride back home is also a challenge: Crawling through rush hour traffic in the dark, motorbikes swarming on to the pavement, buses dropping off their passengers in the middle of the road, lorry horns screeching, an exhausted girl leaning on my back. Tough girl, as she is, she comes home, eats, showers and goes to bed to read.

And how did I get to all of these places? On this beauty:

My companion for 35000+ km, it will be a sad day when I sell it. It says something about the honesty of the Vietnamese and the general level of safety in this country that I have left it in all sorts of places and never had a problem. Many cafés and eateries have a system of down-to-earth chaperone parking where you give your bike to a teenager who wheels it off to park it around the corner, and it does cross your mind that you may never see it again. But you always do. Even out in the remote countryside where people are poor and you obviously have a couple of months’ (or more) of their salary on your person, not once have I felt an oppressive “let’s-get-him” vibe. In fact even rural locals are surprisingly uninterested in you or your motorbike. And apart from the taxi drivers at Saigon airport and the flower sellers on Âu Cơ in Hanoi, the Vietnamese are remarkably poor at marking up prices for foreigners (or maybe I am so rich I don’t notice?).

 

To Mai Châu, Hòa Bình for a swift break

Needing to decompress after an intense weekend coaching my team at a football tournament, I decamped on Sunday afternoon to Mai Châu. I just left straight from the pitches with hundreds of young footballers, the crazed coaches, the hoarse parents and a medal ceremony on to the dusty roads of industrial Hanoi to get out to the beautiful province of Hòa Bình. As ever, I spent the first hour of the trip questioning my own sanity, “this road is depressing, maybe I should turn back, I would have been at home by now…” and then you get out to the green bits with views, hardly any lorries and my mental state lifts. The open road, cruising at literally tens of kilometres per hour, trying not to obsess about what just happened on the football pitch. I would need to keep going solidly to get to the destination before dark. All going well under a grey sky and then after the Hòa Bình town bypass the road leads you up into the heavens, or thick cloud, as it is known. Visibility was perhaps two motorbike lengths. There wasn’t much traffic but I joined a sort of convoy of cars for a while before they shook me off. On the other side of the road, lorries squealed and wobbled past on their way down the mountain and you are struck by the dark thought that it is only convention keeping them on that side of the road and also, darker still, that if they hit you, you would end in a ravine. It was thrilling and forlornly smearing my glasses with a wet finger helped me stop thinking about the football for a few moments here and there. After this Ganzfeld for about half an hour, the merely miserable mist on the other side was like a summer holiday. OK, there were slippery, mud-strewn roads plus the odd pothole but at least you could see where you were going: Visibility really is under-rated. I made it to Mai Châu just as it was getting dark and rolled up to a well-kept house offering rooms. This was the view:

And here it is again, a beer, a shower and 15 minutes later

The next morning I rejected the Western breakfast offered to me (bread and banana pancakes) and insisted on beef noodles. A bird strutted about my breakfast table, apparently unaware that I fancied chicken noodles for dinner.

Then I went to find the back of beyond, 30 km up a mountain from Mai Châu. What do people do out here? Well, of course I still don’t really know but I took some pictures that give a little insight.

: 

It is a very calm place, not bustling, so it is easy to think that nothing is going on. Yes, nothing, apart from making clothes, practicing dance, collecting some sort of insect for drinking in alcohol, making trinkets, and the slow, muddy, never-ending, bent-back work in the rice fields. And they obviously send a lot of letters… three pint-sized post offices off the beaten track

and they play football, or at least have pitches and goalposts that make you stop complaining about the ones we use.

The trip back was in constant drizzle, so a lot better than the way there then because you could actually see your life flash in front of your eyes. And I got back in time for football training.