Pam's Top Ten List

Pam’s Top 10 Things about Visiting Marjie (written by Pam, of course!)

10. Rice cakes. Yum. Yum. And YUM! How do they make things taste so delicious here? The secret sauce that you dip just about everything in is water, fish sauce, sugar, lime, red pepper and salt. Try it at home, and dip away. Everything tastes good in this sauce! Especially the rice cakes wrapped in lettuce with basil…

9. Seeing Marjie’s school. It is a big modern school and the kids all obviously love her. It’s refreshing actually how much respect the kids have for the teachers in general. A different culture, for sure. I think this is about as far away from an alternative school as possible! (these boys are from the neighborhood, not the school, it's just a great picture).

8. Sleeping in the castle. My room is the one that has the balcony looking out over the living room. I feel like standing above and calling out for Romeo! Let me just say that Marjie and her roommates Katherine and Tarn are SO lucky to have found this place. Aside from the lack of A/C in this sweltering heat and the continued power outages, it is positively perfect!

7. Learning about music video DVDs! Marjie already blurted out the truth about my secret obsession with George Michael (OK, so it’s not a secret anymore), but I found an ABBA karaoke CD, with real live ABBA footage and the words! Oh, yes, it is THAT FUN! At the post office today I heard the clerk next to my clerk ask his customer if he had CDs or DVDs in his box, because obviously they aren’t legal and he wouldn’t let him claim them. Uh oh, I claimed mine. I hope they make it home in today’s shipment!

6. Spending a day with Nam. This guy is everything Marjie says. He’s positively hilarious but he doesn’t know it. I couldn’t stop giggling all day! He is a little controlling through, and insists on intervening in everything that you do, what you take pictures of, how you eat your lunch, how you clean your hands, etc… Because, obviously he is the Mother around here and He Knows Best.

5. Saigon traffic. Because I’ve been traveling in Asia for over six months, I’m used to crazy traffic but this is something else. At most busy city intersections, there are no traffic signals, but no one stops. Think about that. Check out this video of turning left across a BUSY road…that just about sums it up.

But then you have to learn how to WALK across the street. You’ve seen the video and how it’s done on scooter. But, you have to do the same thing when you are a pedestrian. You walk very slow and deliberately, because there are virtually no crosswalks or frankly rules that protect pedestrians from cars. Once you enter the street, you are on your own. Today I saw a man holding twin babies (maybe 3 months old?) crossing the equivalent of Highway 99 at Greenlake during rush hour. Totally undeniably crazy, but somehow the system just works!

4. Cooking!! You got to read about it on Marjie’s last two blog posts, but it was so fun! Considering that at home cooking is one of my favorite pastimes, and while I’ve been traveling I’ve only had a couple of chances to get in the kitchen. Best about this kind of cooking though was that it was completely unfamiliar to me, and I got to learn a few new techniques.

3. The Bum Bum. This place is TEN TIMES better than I imagined! It’s a tiny little place at first glance, but then you walk up the stairway to heaven. That is where Tran gave me one of the most amazing massages I’ve ever received – for $3. Then, there was the hair-washing. Who even KNEW that this was possible? It’s not only a very thorough 40 minute hair wash/head massage, it’s also a mini-facial, and then a blow dry that beats any blow dry EVER. That was $2.50. The simultaneous manicure/pedicure? $1. In four days, and multiple visits to the Bum Bum, I didn’t spend more than $15. I so wish that there was a Bum Bum with Bum Bum prices in Seattle. I would never need to go anywhere else!

2. The market outside the Castle. This was one of my favorite things about visiting Marjie. Of course, I’ve read all the posts about the market, but imagine having the Pike Place Market WITHOUT tourists right outside your front door? Every morning, the alley ways come alive with at least a hundred vendors selling seafood, vegetables, materials, food (of course!), and just about everything you can imagine. And, the entire neighborhood comes out for it. I learned that Marjie walks through the market almost every day on her way to school and buys breakfast, snack and lunch. There is certainly plenty to choose from, though Marjie definitely has her favorites!

1. The Hammocks on the Roof. So, when you walk up all five flights of stairs to get to the roof you are hot, and ready for a cool beverage and a seat. Lucky for me, the Castle is now a Two Hammock Castlehold! When you are not lying vertically on the roof, if you spin 360 degrees it is like the movie Rear Window. You can peek into other people’s lives like a crazy old voyeur. You spin another direction and you see some of the city’s neon. Spin another direction and you are watching the sun set over Saigon. Magic, I tell you. Magic. Honestly, I didn’t want to leave the roof.

Except to eat, of course.

What Pam Ate, Part 2

On Friday, Tarn asks me, "Who do we have cooking for us this weekend?"

I tell him that Thuy and Thanh planned to cook with us on Saturday. "So is it clear for Song Han and Ms. Nga to cook for us on Sunday?"

Do you have these kinds of conversations?

Ms. Nga teaches Vietnamese to both students and staff at AIS, and you have met our Mandarin teacher, Song Han- she is the one who was so excited for the Christmas party. They arrive at the castle at 10:00 am Sunday morning, before Pam and I have even finished our market morning eating session. We're a little nervous that we won't be able to eat very much, but we shouldn't have worried...these two cook for two and a half hours before lunch is served (allowing us much needed Bum Bum time).

What we eat: sweet potato, carrot and shrimp spring rolls, fish cakes, a shrimp salad that seems to be shredded papaya but isn't papaya but rather some kind of bamboo shoot, pineapple sweet and sour soup, morning glory, and two other dishes that they leave for Tarn to cook for dinner because they realize they have too much food (it will never happen).

We eat and eat and eat and later claim that they must have put some kind of drug in the food because afterward we nap for almost three hours. Have I mentioned that it's HOT? It's hot.

It's hot and we are eating a lot. And having people cook for us. And sleeping. And Bum Bumming.

Tomorrow Pam will have her Mom Nam Adventure, which we are all looking forward to. Nam has been practicing her name all week. "Pam, Pam, Pam," he will say, then he laughs.

Stay tuned.

What Pam Ate

When I ask Pam what she wants to do during her four days in HCMC, she says she wants to "EAT." Some people make me so happy.


Who Pam Is: Pam works right down the street from my condo on Phinney Ridge, she is responsible for planting the seed for the Scriber Costa Rica trip last year (her company, Parson's Public Relations, has done much to save the sea turtles) and she embarked on a World Adventure(http://seattlepam.blogspot.com/) in September. She started by trekking in Nepal, spent three months in India, only left India for Thailand because her visa ran out (and if you read her (very cool) blog, you will find that her Thailand sentiments are very similar to mine and K's), then to Laos, then to Cambodia.

Now she's here, and she wants to EAT.

Oh, and as I mentioned before, Pam also has a million dollar personality.

Pam and I shared a bottle of wine on my deck the night before I left Seattle and planned to meet in Vietnam in March. Ever since, we have been following each others' blogs. We both think it's pretty cool that we get a taste of familiarity at this point in our adventures, but that we don't have to tell a million stories. We know each other's stories. So guess what we can do? We can concentrate on her desire to EAT.

Saturday morning, I am (as you can imagine), bursting with excitement to take Pam around my market. But K makes her a cup of coffee and I have to wait FOREVER for her to drink it. THEN, I can't believe I do this, but since I have to wait for slow coffee drinkers, I put in one of our prize DVD's: George Michael. Pam goes crazy. We have to watch and watch and watch as she drinks her coffee. She LOVES George Michael. She's gasping as each new song plays...she's out of her chair dancing and singing... finally, when I begin to assess her commitment to her goal, I realize she just needs a little guidance. If we don't go soon, the rice cake lady will close down. So I have to cut her off. I'm pretty sure that in retrospect she will thank me. We begin by meeting Thuy and Thanh at their stand - Pam already"knows" them, of course, through all of her blog reading - and we do a quick tour of the market with Thuy to buy all of the ingredients we need for dinner-making (shrimp and taro spring rolls and hot pot).

THEN, finally, we EAT. We eat an order of cakes each. We eat salad rolls. We buy roasted eggplant and tomatoes and basil and mangoes and pomelo and avocados and shrimp and come back and make a salad of all of these things at the castle. We take little break from eating (and you guessed right, Pam goes back to George but is able to pull herself away for the Bum Bum) until Thuy comes at three to cook more food.

This time, our hot pot has a few different items - in addition to the fish (which we saw grabbed out of the bucket and bludgeoned to death right in front of us), squid, prawns, mushrooms, morning glory and noodles- Thuy buys what turns out to be our favorite treat: (what we think are) squash blossoms. Sweet and delicious.

The broth is the same as last time, but somehow it's better: lemongrass, tamarind, sugar, curry paste. Pam is a certain breed of vegetarian, I call her a Pesca-baca-tarian. An animal lover and a conservationist, she believes in the vegetarian + seafood lifestyle, but every so often, she allows herself to indulge in the joy of bacon. I love this about Pam.

So perhaps it is a bit more difficult for her to witness the murder of the fish for the soup, and perhaps it is a bit more difficult for her to see her soup staring back at her. To be honest, this is bothering me less and less.

Thanh can't join us because their nephew, whom we call "Monkey Boy" since the beer incident on Tet, is sick. Katherine is at a soccer game. So this leaves us and Tarn to eat this huge pot of soup. And I haven't mentioned this yet, but it is HOT lately. I have heard that April is the hottest month here, and I can testify to this. We eat hot pot in the sweltering heat, we sweat it out like we are supposed to, and thank goodness we have a cool, breezy roof and TWO HAMMOCKS to rest in. That's right, K bought a hammock the other day, so we are a TWO HAMMOCK castlehold now. It's such a great spot.

Since it is finally cool, we decide to head downtown for Pam's second mission, one she did not know she had until the morning: she also, it seems, wants to BUY A GEORGE MICHAEL DVD while she is in HCMC. We travel all over the city, and finally find it at our tenth DVD shop. We come back to the castle victorious, Pam proudly owning all of the best of what the castle has collected. We take my laptop up to the TWO HAMMOCK ROOF and watch a combination of Michael Jackson videos and last week's American Idol episode (Motown Week).

I think Pam is happy and full.

Thursday Blog Game: 6E Inspiration

6E is my first class Thursday mornings; every other morning, classes 6A-D come in rather subdued and sleepy. But definitely not these ones. 6E are the Halloween Contest Thriller Winners; they are always choreographing songs and asking me to play their new favorite songs and talking- yelling- in "conversational" Vietnamese for a half an hour before class starts. This morning Weyshan, Helen, Polly and Mia allow me to capture their new dance routine to this song from "High School Musical."

The third video mainly favors Jack and John - two Boy Boys, you know - who LOVE to fight and talk big and make fun of everyone- and who also LOVE really sentimental, soft love songs. They request this song all the time: Westlife's "I Lay My Love on You." I wish the quality was better...the whole class is singing along, but mostly Jack and John.

So the game this week is... sixth grade memories~ I hope 6E inspires you to think of one~

Saigon Jams

Thought I would share my traffic jam from last night. I had an appointment to get my hair cut at 5:30 all the way across District One. Terrible idea. Before this mob began to move I think we sat there for a full five minutes - and we weren't waiting for a traffic light. At many intersections, it's every motorbike for herself...you just inch your way forward and hope for movement.

Kicking Rooster Angels

Today I don't bring my usual three meals to school, so I end up in the cute 6th floor cafe ordering instant noodle soup with egg during a break around 2pm. I find our principal's assistant, Van, there eating rice soup. Van is very, very cool. She's the kind of principal's assistant who runs the school in a very unassuming manner; she does everything, and everything is always done in a controlled, patient manner. She was educated at a California university- holds a masters degree- and is now spending a few post-graduate years at home with her family. She answered the ad for AIS in the summer - just like the rest of us.

Anyway, ever since the kids told me about funerals in Vietnam, I've wanted to cross-check the facts with Van. She, of course, speaks really good English and understands both cultures, so I go to her for the real stuff.

I tell her about my funeral discussion with 6A and she confirms some of it but adds more. (She seems totally fine discussing death over soup.)

"When a person dies, usually they are placed in a coffin and taken home for about four days. During that four days, family members drop in constantly. Usually, a monk is hired to recite prayers, and sometimes large amounts of family and friends are present for that.

"At around the fourth day, they put the coffin in one of those decorated trucks and have a procession to the cemetery. Sometimes, more prayers are said there. If the people are really religious, or can afford to hire the monk for more, more prayers are said.

"On the 45th day after the death, another ceremony is held. Again, if the family has money, they will hire a monk to say the prayers at this gathering, but it differs from family to family. After that, their death days are celebrated just like the kids told you, once per year, on the date of death."

I ask her if monks come to those, too. "Only if the family has money," she says. "It's not so common for that to happen."

I tell her I like how they do death here better than in the States, that I didn't know about the 45 day thing, but that it makes so much sense to me.

She cocks her head to one side.

"Really?" She thinks about this for a moment. "I like the way it's done in America better. Everyone gets together and it's simple. Not a lot of details."

"What kind of details?"

And then comes the rooster detail:

When the coffin is lowered into the ground at the cemetery, a rooster is brought out to circle the grave of the deceased. Everyone must follow the rooster around until it makes its rooster sound: roosters symbolize angels, so when they call, it means that the deceased has been released to death.

"My grandfather died a few years ago and we followed the rooster around for about ten laps. It wasn't making any sound and everyone was getting tired, so finally my uncle kicked it so we could get on with things."

"Your uncle kicked the angel?"

She laughs. "Yes. One year later, my uncle died of lung cancer. Some of my family thinks it's because he kicked the rooster at my grandfather's funeral."

She tells me about other superstitions, like the one about crying loudly at someone's death. It is believed that if you make loud mourning noises, the soul will not feel right about leaving, so it will hover and act as a ghost around your house. "In America, it seems that people don't really cry at funerals. Everyone is quiet. Here, even though they are supposed to be quiet for the sake of the soul's freedom, people cry and cry and wail and scream. It's because our families are so close, I think."

By the end of our soup, we come to pretty fair East Meets West Middle Ground concerning how funerals should go:

The Western service following death is good. The 45 Days after Death Ceremony is good. The yearly death celebrations and the altars are good. Crying is good. Ghosts are bad. The rooster is bad. We can get rid of the rooster.

Brian, I searched Google images for a rooster angel and got nothin'. Any way you can help?

(One day later: see how useful little brothers are?)

Neighborhood Flow

How the Bum Bum Works:

Here is the Bum Bum in full swing on a Saturday afternoon. I am sitting near the opening getting a spa pedicure and manicure ($3 for both). When I first arrive, all the girls and the one hair guy are sitting against the back mirror; I am their only customer.

Within minutes, while my feet are just soaking, women wander in for washings, colorings, waxings, nail art and styling, no appointment necessary. The system at this salon is so unique - I assume it's shared by other salons but I'm not absolutely sure- each girl has a specialty (and there is always one man- as is customary in both Vietnam and China- who does the cutting and styling). Tran, of course, is the massage girl; however, she does everything else, too (except paint nails, she claims she is "really bad" at that). So if she is in the middle of a hair wash upstairs and someone comes for a massage, they pull her off of the hair wash and put her on her specialty. I get a massage at least once per week and only twice in the past eight months have they told me to "come back in an hour" because she is busy. Somehow, the system just flows. More than once, I have begun a hair wash with one Bum Bum girl only to realize that they have switched girls on me while the strips of cucumber blinded me during the facial.

The girl in the green shirt near the front of the picture is Hoa. She is Tran's sister and she is the nail and waxing expert. If she is washing hair, she will get pulled for her specialty. The woman in the back wearing the grey tank shirt is Chin. She is the eyebrow specialist, but every once in a while, I am lucky enough to get her for a hair wash. She is the best washer, for sure - her massages during the facials are very gentle (some of the girls tend to massage a little too rough around the eye sockets and cheek bones) and she is the best at hair straightening. We also love to get Tran for a wash because you get all of her expert massage techniques, too.

The second floor holds five hair washing sinks/tables and the third floor is equipped with a massage table and a waxing table. Again, the stairs leading up are very, very steep and narrow, made for tiny Vietnamese feet. I brace myself each time I come down these stairs.

This is Tran holding the baby on the motorbike (look at her muscular massage arms)- the baby belongs to the newest girl at the Bum Bum. The entire staff adores this baby and whoever is not busy plays with her. If everyone is busy, Bum Bum clients take care of her.

I have made it obvious how much I love this place, but I will say it again: I love this place. It's where this community of women interacts. Vietnamese culture is into beauty - every facet of beauty - and people in these neighborhoods generally do not have elaborate shower or toilet facilities (including, especially mine - right, Michelle?), so grooming becomes a community thing. Just once I would like to know what they talk about while all of the beautifying is going on, but I'm sure the topics are exactly the same as they would be in a salon at home: jobs, kids, gossip, problems, family, men.

When I come, they make me a part of it as much as they can, but they are accustomed to seeing me deep into a book, with the sounds of their talking and the video music playing serving as comfortable background white noise.

How the Seamstress System Works:

This woman is making my Thuy/Ms. Hoa shirt gift - I have not learned her name yet, but she sure laughs when I ask if I can take her picture while she sews my shirt. The girls and Ut are taking a break - something I rarely see at this shop.

When Ms. Hao gets an order, she also assigns it according to specialties. Ut generally does a lot of the cutting, while Ms. Lieu (here on the floor) does a lot of the seams on the machine. The woman doing my shirt always sits on the floor doing all of the hand sewing. They work from about 8 am until 8 pm, but they always have time for a warm wave or a hello whenever K, T or I pass by.

Ms. Hao always takes time to tell me I look beautiful in whatever I am wearing, whether she has made it or not. And Ut - he is such a sweet kid. Often I will hear someone saying "Maggie!" behind me as I walk through the neighborhood; when I turn, I will see a smiling, tailgating Ut, returning from running some kind of errand.

And Here is the Laughing Grandpa

with his lucky granddaugher, who here is caught in a rare, non-laughing moment.

By the way:

You didn't get to hear much about K's parents' visit because I really didn't get to see them much - they kept busy the entire time, going to islands, Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hoi An, the Delta... K's mom, Joan, flew back to Montreal Thursday night, and K's dad, Tim, got on a (very low amount of speeds) bike to ride to Laos on Friday. Here is his blog if you would like to follow along:

http://www.tim-timtour.blogspot.com/