City on Two Wheels

I imagine that everyone who has ever picked up a pen to write about Hanoi has had something to say about the motorbikes.  They’re everywhere.  I myself have written half a dozen essays and dedicated a chunk of a probably never-to-be-finished novel to the subject.  And now a blog post.  Why?  Because it’s time.  It’s time … at long last … to buy a motorbike.

 First, let’s talk about how stupid I am.  Unlike many foreigners who are a helluva lot cooler than me, I was terrified of motorbikes when I first hit Hanoi.  For my first six months in country, my first friend in Vietnam, also one of my first students and still one of the best people I’ve ever met in the world, had to drive me everywhere.  She didn’t want me taking xe om (motorbike taxis) because it was dangerous, and she didn’t want me riding in taxis because it was expensive.  So, just about every day, Thuy drove me home from work.  It took me six months to figure out that Thuy actually lived really far away from my house, and to get up the nerve to ask her to teach me how to drive.

In a show of almost preternatural bravery, Thuy gave me driving lessons, stoically risking her life as I struggled to get the hang of shifting gears with my clumsy, virtually useless, left foot.  In the beginning, I had to really concentrate to shift gears.  I would place my foot carefully on the pedal, angle it just so, and then push down.  This process required complete concentration, so shifting gears meant taking my eyes off the road.  Thuy was very brave indeed.

Once Thuy knew I could drive without killing myself immediatley, she helped me find a little shop in the old quarter where I rented a motorbike.  $45 per month.  That was 2 and a half years ago.  You do the math. Wait.  I’ll do it for you. $1,350, or 21,600,000 VND.  More than enough to buy the exact kind of motorbike I’ve been driving: a Honda Wave Alpha.  So, I’m not a very wise person, and I long ago should have bought a motorbike.  I was going to at one point … but then my rented bike got stolen, and I had to pay the rental shop 12,000,000 VND.  At which point, broke again, I simply rented another bike.

How did that bike get stolen?  Stupidity.  I parked it in front of my house, and feeling very happy go-lucky, didn’t bother to lock it.  My alley was kind of secluded, a cul-de-sac in fact, and it never dawned on me someone would come by and notice my bike was unlocked at 2 in the afternoon.  Live and learn.

So … 12,000,000 VND plus 21,600,000 VND puts me at … 33,600,000.  Enough for a pretty nice bike.

 That I need to buy a bike is beyond question.  In Hanoi, life unfolds on a motorbike.  It’s not only transportation, but also entertainment.  Many people drive for the sheer pleasure of it, and much of every romance unfolds atop Hanoi’s motorbikes.  Men drive the women more often than the other way around, and you can judge how a relationship is going by the way the woman is holding onto the man.  If she’s sitting with her hands on the bar at the back of the seat, then things aren’t going well.  If her hands are on his hips, then everything is pretty much ok.  If she’s got her hands wrapped around his waist and folded in his lap, then things are good.  If her arms are wrapped around his chest and her chin is resting on his shoulder, things are going smashingly.  And is she’s wrapped around him like a second shirt, her face against his back, her eyes closed, and she’s snoring and dead to the world, then they’re probably happily married.

Since learning to drive, I’ve given rides to some pretty interesting people.  I’ve had on the back of my bike, in no particular order: at least a dozen different women who all could be supermodels if they’d been born in the west; a woman so old she could barely move with teeth as black as chips of obsidian; dozens of Vietnamese men of all ages; two girls at the same time (sisters); my girlfriend and her tiny little niece (who was terrified upon getting her first ride from “chu My” or “Uncle America” as they call me); my girlfriend and her tiny little nephew (exactly as tiny as the niece, as they are twins); my Japanese student who wore a skirt and screamed the whole time (her husband works for Honda – he designed most of the bikes we’re all driving around on – but they always go by car (what does that tell you?)); and a half dozen different English teachers from America, England, and Australia.  Oh … and my mother. 

Now it’s time for me to buy a motorbike, and it’s really hard to decide which one to get.  You come from America with some very American ideas, like: It’s ostentatious and unnecessary to have an expensive bike, and all that matters is getting from point A to point B.  But Hanoi also has some really nice looking bikes and its hard not to be drawn to them.  My favorite is, of course, Honda’s Dylan.

I’m not attracted to the Dylan because it’s expensive.  I’m attracted to the Dylan because it looks very futurisitic.  It’s the X-Wing of motorbikes, the only bike I’d want to be driving in an attack run on the Death Star.  The Dylan’s lines suit the Science Fiction fan in me.  And I’d love to have one.  Of course, I can’t afford one. 

The Dylan’s only competition is from the SH, which Vietnamese people call “Ess-Hat” with the Hat sounding like something between Hat and Hot.  I don’t like the SH.  It’s too skinny, almost two-dimensional really, and it looks like it would be hard to drive.  The Atilla and the Spacy are also OK looking, as is the motorbike that I think is just called “@” which the Vietnamese call “Ah-Com,” which I think comes from the Internet, where the @ symbol is always followed by “.com” hence, and I’m guessing here, “Ah-Com.”  These bikes are all automatic transmission bikes (or at least the motorbike equivalent of the automatic transmission) and thus they’re  a step above the bikes you have to shift with your foot.  In that latter category, I like the Future Neo a lot, and even the new Wave Alpha looks pretty nice, with its simple lines and flashy little symbol.  Yamaha’s Nouveau is also very nice looking, but I find the front wheel a little small and it’s not so great from certain angles.  No, in the final analysis, as things far too often work out, it’s the Dylan that I’m drawn to, in spite of myself, in spit of its price tag.

I’ve always valued intelligence over beauty, and I try to think of myself as above petty concerns about looking good.  However, I also have an appreciation for beauty.  I’m going to say here that the absolute most beautiful and most compelling sight you can see in Hanoi, maybe the sexiest sight you can see anywhere in public anywhere in the world, is two beautiful, sexy, made-up, mac’d out, Vietnamese girls, riding together on a Dylan.  The rear passenger on a Dylan, due to the angle of the seat, sits at an elevation higher than anything else on the road.  This elevated position makes a beauitful Vietnamese girl look like a princess, floating above the mass of riff-raff crowding the road.  There are few things in the world, if any, that can accentuate a woman’s physical beauty to a greater extent than the rear seat on a shiny Dylan.

I won’t be buying a Dylan though.  It’s just too damn expensive, and I need too many things to round out my life here in Hanoi, so I’ll never be able to get one.  At least not anytime soon.  Maybe in some future time, after I’m married, own a house, and have figured out how to send my children to an expensive International school year after year … maybe then I’ll buy a Dylan.  Of course, there’s probably nothing less attractive than a fat, aging, foreigner on a Dylan, so most likely I won’t bother.

Still, this leaves the question of which bike to buy, when the dream bike is out of reach.  Any advice?

Superman Returns

Superman Returns.  For someone my age, it’s hardly the first time Superman has returned.  I’m pretty old, but I’m nowhere near as old as Superman.  When I was eight years old, my mother took me to the World
Trade Center for the first time, and in a bookstore there she bought me a collection of Superman comics – a huge tome, a red, hardcover book with hundreds of pages and at least twenty or thirty different issues of various comic books featuring Superman.  Some years after that, Superman died.  I don’t mean the suicide of the first actor to play Superman on television, and I don’t mean the more recent and tragic death of Chris Reeves.  I mean in the comics.  Superman was killed by an alien powerhouse named Doomsday.  It was a huge media event.  Doomsday killed Superman in a knock-down, drag-out slugfest, and the Man of Steel stayed dead for .. what … almost a year? Eventually, he was resurrected.  When I left for Vietnam, Superman was still flying through his monthly comic book.  Since I can’t buy Superman comic books in
Vietnam, I’m not certain what’s become of him since, but the smart money says he’s avoiding kryptonite and doing fine.I enjoyed this most recent return of Superman, this time to film.  I saw the film at the Megastar Cinema in Vincom Tower, which is always fun.  I plowed through a large popcorn and a bag of gummy candies imported from Thailand, and drank my large coke and LA’s too.

The actor playing Superman is tall.  Very tall.  This is good – Superman should be tall.  In the film, a combination of lots of make-up, good lighting, and some tricky digital editing give Superman an almost angelic look.  The film moves at a good pace, and the action sequences are fun to watch.

Philosophically, the film asks the question, “Do we need a savior, a guardian, a protector?” And the answer seems to be Yes.  During Superman’s five year absence – he’d gone into space to search for his home planet of Krypton – it seems that the crime rate and the number of little wars happening around the globe all went up.  When Superman comes back, people are thrilled to see him again, and he sets about his work as not only a super-policeman but also our only protection against the hand of fate.  It seems that it’s your time to die only if Superman is at that very moment occupied saving other people somewhere else.  If not, he’ll fly by just in time to catch the piano that’s about to fall on your head.

In terms of his personal life, his return is perhaps not so welcome.  Lois Lane has moved on, and the movie almost, but not quite, tackles the interesting issue of what it would be like for a guy to date Superman’s ex-girlfriend.  This is an interesting question, as its never fun to date a woman who’s still carrying a torch for an ex-boyfriend she thought was amazing, and no one’s more amazing than Superman.

Romantically, Superman’s a pretty classic bad guy.  He can’t seem to stay away, but at the same time he can’t really make a commitment.  After all, his work is far too important.  How can Superman justify sitting in a theater watching a goofy film – like Superman Returns – with his girlfriend, when people are dying in an earthquake somewhere?  The answer is he can’t, and I suppose we wouldn’t want him to.  What we really want, as the film shows, is someone to save us.

Superman could never resist giving Lois Lane a little taste of what we all know she’ll never be able to have.  This film is like that too, as Bryan Singer (the Director) again gives us a little taste of what we’ll probably never have – a truly great superhero film.

Robbed!

Last night, I went to bed about 10 p.m., dejected because nothing interesting and worth blogging about had happened.  Be careful what you wish for …

At about 6:30 a.m., I awoke to find that someone had called me from the phone in my house.  My house is pretty big, with me on the 4th floor, Mike on the third floor, and Rom on the second floor, while the one lonely phone sits by itself on the first floor. Rather than get up and go look for Mike, I called him back … and heard the harrowing tale of what had gone on during the late night hours.

Mike and his girlfriend had gone for a late ride on his girlfriend’s new motorbike.  Upon Mike’s return, he apparently forgot to lock the front door.  At about 3:30 a.m., Mike awoke to find a shadow creeping through his third floor bedroom.

“Rom…?” he asked. 

The shadow did not reply.  It moved instead to stand beside him, and dark hands moved over the items on Mike’s night table.  Then the shadow receeded, vanished.

Mike rubbed his tired eyes, stood up, turned on the lights.  On his desk, beside his computer, his $2,500 video camera was gone!  On the bedside table, his mobile phone and wallet were likewise gone.

“Thief!” Mike croaked, then louder, “We’ve been robbed!”

I slept through the whole thing.  Rom, on the other hand, sprang into action.  He grabbed a knife so big as to almost be a sword, and went in search of the burglar.  Rom checked the fifth floor.  Nothing.  He knocked on my fourth floor door, but found it locked.  A good thing, since if I’d awakened to find Rom standing in my doorway holding a huge knife, I’d probably have had a heart-attack!

Rom’s own room was also undisturbed.  On the first floor, Rom found all of our motrobikes, our TV, and our DVD player were … still there.  But the front door was wide open.

Eventually, I woke up to spend the morning sitting around with Rom and Mike and Mike’s girlfriend and LA, all of us puzzling over the strange robbery.  Why handn’t they taken our motorbikes?  Our TV or DVD player?  Why had they taken Mike’s big, expensive, video camera, but not his Apple Powerbook laptop which sat beside it? 

We have no explanation yet.  It’s a mystery.  Perhaps it always will be.  My theory:  Mike was robbed by an amateur filmmaker who needed a new video camera.  He took the phone to slow Mike down in his effort to call for help, and took the wallet because everyone needs a little easy money.  Another possibility is the thief knew Mike was the bloke who forgot to lock the door, and thus only took Mike’s things.

Will we ever know the truth?   It’s easy to joke about it, but poor Mike!  The camera, the phone, the wallet.  What a disaster.  A disaster that could have been, and by alll rights should have been, worse.

We’ll all comfort Mike, and I don’t think anyone will sleep too easily in my house for a while.

Technological Rabbit Holes

My plan has been to divide my time like this:  90% for work (65% teaching, 45% business stuff), 4% for relaxing, 4% for writing, and 2% for studying Vietnamese.  Something like that.  There was also a secondary plan, as there has been for some 25 years, to try to reduce the 90% work time to about 88% and use the 2% that would free up for working out and mastering ancient secrets of Kung Fu.  I’ve always wanted to know Kung Fu, and I’m reasonably certain that 2% of 10% of 100% of my time would be sufficient.  I mean, how complicated could Kung Fu be?

The problem with this kind of scheduling stuff is that in this digital age, we ocassionally find ourselves – or at least I find myself – plunging down into these bizarre technological rabbit holes.  A new piece of sofware or a new website or a new video game or a new handheld device will capture first our attention and then the bulk of our time.  So it has been with blogging.  How did this begin?

First, LA’s brother-in-law said, “Why don’t you have a blog?  I thought you were cool.”  The implication here was obvious.  So I did a little research, found wordpress, and it was easy to get started.  No problem.  This blog takes a fraction of the time I’ve dedicated to writing, and it is writing, sort of, so no problem – no big rabbit hole yet.

Then people started telling me that wordpress was lame, and that I should check out Yahoo 360.  Yahoo 360.  Wasn’t that a kind of spam?  The kind of spam that I really hate – the kind that comes from your friends.  Yahoo 360 messages had been peppering my yahoo mailbox for weeks.  Spam with my friends’ names in the subject lines.

So what finally got me to check out Yahoo 360?  I posted a picture attached to a wordpress blog entry, published the page, and there was no sign of the picture.  I didn’t want to wrestle with this problem.  It seemed likely to become a technological rabbit hole.  So I bounced over to Yahoo 360.  Well.  Wasn’t there a lot going on there?  Clearly not a place for a serious writer … it was all colors and pictures and little messages from people and stuff, some of whom were real and others of whom were avatars.  Very high school if you asked me.  But, it seemed easy enough to set up, so I clicked here, clicked there, tried out the blog thingy, uploaded some pictures, and then I realized I didn’t want to blog on 360, because I was a serious writer, and wanted to keep my wordpress blog.  So that brought me to the RSS Feed thingy, which was sufficiently Star Trek sounding to attract my interest, and that proved reasonably easy to set-up and the last thing was to post my photo album.  Well, I didn’t have Yahoo photos yet, and there was some uploading to be done, and lots of signing in, in lots of different places, all with the same name and password mind you, and then …

… darkness.  Darkness everywhere.  It had happened.  I’d fallen into one of those technological rabbit holes.   There was no way out … I mean, the damn yahoo photo album just wouldn’t show on my 360 page no matter how many times I clicked on it, and that meant I’d have to try the “flickr” thing which could give me a photostream (shields up, modulate the shield frequencies to see if we can release the photostream without risking dangerous radiation levels) … darkness. 

…Darkness everywhere.  The sound of cyberbugs in the shadows.  Did G (the boss over in England) know how long I’d been in this TRH (Technological Rabbit Hole)?  I surely didn’t know.  Time had ceased to have any meaning. 

The flickr thing worked.  Five pictures, up on the 360 blog, but why couldn’t I post that damn photo album?  And then there was the wordpress blog, which even though it was RSS feeding its way into 360, it itself still didn’t have any pictures, and that was a kind of niggly naggly thing at the back of mind, and then I looked at Thuy Anh’s page and (she’s over in England now where people are obviously good at this tech stuff because) she had a photostream and an album or two which I still didn’t have …

Then M came into my office.  He had to prepare a lesson and wanted some input from yours truly.  Light, bursting into the rabbit hole.  I blinked.  Blinked again.

“The hell are you doing, man?  You look like you haven’t slept in weeks.” 

“Well, my RSS Feed and my Photostream are…”

“Dude, shut up.  Help me with this?” Mike uses a Mac and has no patience for stuff like this.

And with that I was free of the rabbit hole, back on Earth with everyone else, and left to wonder how many of my friends and family periodically completely lost themselves in some realm of digital self-infatuation or other?

Today, I will fix nothing on my 360 page.  Nothing.  I promise.  I hope.  TRH’s do seem to have a considerable gravimetric field though … hard to resist …. must prepare lesson … SAT class needs me … but …. so …. difficult … 

Wifi Woes

An, New Window.  New Window is a nice cafe.  The coffee is pretty big, a little bigger than Amigo, a lot bigger than places like Hot Coffee.  Ugh.  New Window also attracts a flashy crowd, especially in the evenings.

This morning, though, the wifi was down.  In fact, it’s down more often than it’s up.  This is a big problem for me.  It screws up my whole morning.  It stops me from getting my work done.

So, Mr. Manager of New Window Cafe on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street, please fix the wifi.

The Great Paint Job Mystery

Was yesterday a full moon?  If not, it should have been, because it was one weird day.  I’m not sure how I even found out, because when the Great Paint Job Mystery unfolded, things happened too fast for me to remember how it started.  All I recall is that I got back from filming two shows of the “O,” and immediately was dashing up to the third floor to find that there were, indeed, painters, hard at work, painting Room 301 in my centre.

No one could tell me where they had come from; no one on my staff knew they were there; no one knew why they had picked Room 301 of all places.  But there they were, painting a classroom that was due to have a class in it in the next five minutes. 

I flipped out. Where, I wanted to know, had these people come from?  How had they gotten into my centre?  Why were they painting Room 301?  Why had no one checked with me first?  It was surreal.

Anyway, I threw them out, then I yelled at my staff for a while.   Of course, this was the company with which we were currently in contract negotiations for doing a lot of work on the centre, including painting the place.  But I hadn’t signed the contracts, hadn’t agreed to the price, hadn’t set up a schedule, and hadn’t expected four paintjob-ninja to sneak into my centre and get started despite all of that.

So now, Room 301 is half-painted.  The color is nice.  I like it.  I picked it, in fact.  And I imagine that my staff will maintain a more vigilant lookout for uninvited paintjob-ninjas sneaking into the building in the future.  And eventually we’ll get the contracts sorted out, set up a schedule, and get the rest of Room 301 painted.

Then, as soon as I had banished the paintjob-ninja, and before I could catch my breath, I had to teach.  My mind was still reeling when I walked into my classroom.  The students were sympathetic.  It took me, I have to admit, about five minutes longer than usual to flip the switch from “manager” to “teacher”.  As anyone with a lot of teaching experience can tell you, when it’s time to teach you have to stop thinking about everything else.  Your students expect a good, focused, lesson, not to see you spinning in circles over whatever might be going on in your business or personal life.  You have to turn all of that off, and focus 100% on your students.  It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s a part of being a good teacher.

It was a weird day.  I still haven’t identified where the order to actually come in here and just start painting came from.  Maybe it was Tom Cruise.  Some kind of Mission Impossible thing.  Regardless, this post will not self-destruct in thirty seconds.

Making the “O”

TV stardom.  I once mentioned to LA that I was famous, and her reaction was to say, “You’re not famous!  You’re on TV a couple of times a month for three seconds and nobody cares!”  Maybe she’s right, but I have to say that for all that a heck of a lot of people still recognize me.  Just last night, the delivery boy from Al Frescos said, “Hey, Dude, I know you.  You’re on TV!” when I opened the door to grab my overpriced and only so-so pizza. (I should say that Al Frescos’ pizza is actually better than most big chain pizzas in New York; it’s only not as good as real Italian pizza (Italy-style) or real Brooklyn pizza (Italian-American style).) 

This post is not about pizza, though, it’s about TV stardom.  I don’t often talk much about doing “O” (hence not even using the name of the show here) as I don’t think they want me using my role on the program for any marketing purposes and I don’t want to ruffle any feathers.

 Still, making the show is kind of fun.  I’m never happy when I lose a day of work sitting in the studio, but I do love it when one of the student-contestants is able to get the right answer on an English question and then fluently explain the meaning of the question and how he or she arrived at the correct answer.  That makes me feel good.   I think the best questions are the ones that one or two students get right not by guessing, but because they really get it.

The show has also really done wonders for my Vietnamese.  I’m at the point where I can actually answer (in my head) a few of the Vietnamese questions each week, and I understand pretty much what everyone is talking about during the parts of the show when people are chatting in between segments.

 In case you’re wondering, I never watch the show.  I’m too embarrassed to even look at myself on TV.  Public opinion seems divided, with half the people who watch the show telling me I’m more handsome in real life, and the other half telling me I’m more handsome on TV.

 If “O” goes off the air in the near future, maybe I’ll try to develop an English language program for Vietnamese television.  I think that would be a fun project.  In the meantime, if you have some ideas for English questions, please feel free to send them to me.  Coming up with new questions every month is not as easy as you might think.

Cars vs. Motorbikes

It’s amazing the way one’s perspective can change over time.  When I first came to Hanoi, all the motorbikes on the streets seemed completely insane to me.  It looked so dangerous, and I couldn’t imagine why people would risk their lives travelling around that way.  For my first month in town, I was afraid to cross the street.

Hanoi has changed a lot in the time I’ve been here.  Traffic lights have gone up all over the place, and some streets (like the intersection of Ta Quang Buu and Dai Co Viet) have gone from insane free-for-alls to relatively well-ordered thoroughfares.  Oddly, in yet another instance of “be careful what you wish for”, I find I miss the chaos.

Nowadays, I imagine many Hanoians are planning to purchase automobiles.  To a Hanoian, this is no doubt a step up in the world.  Having a car is certainly a status symbol, and its no doubt safer overall than going by motorbike.  I, however, perceive two problems with this.  The first is the obvious issue of traffic.  Cars, taking up far more space on the roads than motorbikes, are going to make all the traffic problems in the city worse.  I would hazard to say that if 10% of the motorbikes on the streets of Hanoi spontaneously and magically transformed into cars, none of us would ever get anywhere ever again.  Without major and expensive changes to the infrastructure of the city’s roads, having more cars is going to lead a major reduction in the quality of life here.

The second point I have to make is a little subtler.  I recall a long time ago reading a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  While I’ve forgotten much of what the book had to say, I distinctly remember a passage that said that driving in a car, looking out the windows, was just about the same thing as staying at home watching TV.  The car separates us from the street and the world around us, and looking at the world through the car’s windows is not much removed from watching television.

When I first read that passage, I didn’t really get it.  I’d never been on a motorbike before.  But now I’ve spent three years riding around Hanoi on my trusty, rented, Wave Alpha, and I get it.  I really get it.  When you’re on a motorbike, you’re a part of everything and everyone around you.  You can feel the wind in your face, and hear the sounds of the city, and feel the flow of life in your skin and bones.  You can also meet the person on the bike next to you, and have a quick chat at a red light (if the person next to you happened to stop, which isn’t all the time). 

Hanoians are, to me, very open and friendly people.  I’ve opened up a lot in the time I’ve been associating with Vietnamese people, and I know my motorbike has been a big part of that.  There’s something thrilling about a motorbike that a car just doesn’t offer, especially if you happen to be driving through a torrential downpour, watching the streets around you vanish in a flash-flood.  The motorbike lets you remain a part of the world around you, instead of cut off from it, and this may be part of the charm of Vietnamese people.

 I’m afraid that if everyone locks themselves in a car, Hanoians will become as cut off and introverted as the average New Yorker.  And that would be even sadder than spending the whole morning in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

If I had a choice between a Dylan and a Lexus, I’d take the Dylan any day.  I hope a lot of Hanoians will choose the two-wheeled option too, if not for the sake of the traffic problem, than for keeping that special Zen that one finds on the streets of Hanoi.

Now the question is – how do I get rid of this Wave Alpha and get myself onto a nicer bike?

O2 Mini Xda

I’m a gadget guy.  I love electronics.  Laptops, mobile phones, game consoles, DVD players, I love it all.  I don’t have much money though, so I rarely get to indulge my love of gadgets. 

My love affair with gadgets started with Star Trek, the old series.  The crew had communicators, universal translators, and computers you could talk to.  The technology on Star Trek will therefore forever serve as a benchmark of coolness for me.  For example, my computer is not that cool – it can’t talk, much.  In fact, when I tried to use Dragon Naturally Speaking software in order to get a little 24th century into my life, I met with nothing but bitter disappointment.  My computer is so 21st century.  Early 21st century for that matter.  But my phone is another matter entirely.

I have an O2 Mini Xda.  It used to belong to LA, but she tired of it after only a few months, and I was able to get my hands on it.  It required me to sell the Palm Pilot my mother had bought me, and there were a few other financial dealings involved, but ultimately I secured the little guy.

Wow.  Wow.  I love this thing.  If Kirk’s communicator was 24th century technology, than I am firmly in the 26th century here.  My O2 can do everything.  First of all, it’s a great phone.  It’s an MP3 player.  It takes decent pictures, and it can even shoot short, grainy films.  It’s operating system is Windows Pocket PC and that means I can use Word and Excel and move files around, and all kinds of stuff.  I installed Ereader on it, and I download novels from America and read them right on my phone. The screen is just big enough.  It’s got wireless internet and uses a version of Internet Explorer as its browser.  It has changed my life.  It’s little thumb keypad means I can type on it – I can actually create documents on the thing, write a novel if I want to.  It makes me want to giggle at the folks scribbling graffiti on Palm Pilots.  Heh heh.

I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly want to use anything other than an O2.  Most phones are just phones.  IPODS just play music.  This thing does everything.  I love it.

It’s rare that we buy something that completely satisfies us beyond our expactions.  My O2 has done just that.

O2, I love you.

Why I Don’t Eat Roast Pigeon

Last night I went out to dinner with LA and her family at a beefsteak place on Hang Buom Street.  I had no idea it was there.  There’s actually a small sign over the entrance to the place, but I’d never noticed it before. To get to the restaurant you have to walk down a winding hallway, through one of those ubiquitous dirt strewn courtyards, and then into a fairly nice restaurant that’s sort of a cross between a cafeteria and a family living room.  I had been promised beef, and in fact we’d considered going to Chien Beo’s - but you can never get a table there.  When we arrived, I was famished.  I’d just finished teaching my Advanced Workshop and, as any teacher knows, teaching a room full of people who are all smarter than you are is very taxing.  So I was really hungry.

I was a bit disappointed when I learned that the meal would involve two courses, and the first course was roast pigeon.

This is not a New York City pigeon.  New York City pigeons are big, and fat, and can handle themselves in a fight.  No one eats them, as far as I know.  These pigeons are smaller birds, roasted intact, complete with heads.  On the plate, they look a lot like mini-Rhodans.  You know Rhodan?  The giant bird that gave Godzilla a run for his money in one of those Tokyo monster movies I loved when I was a kid?

At this point, I knew I was facing the usual cultural dilemma:  I could eat the bird, or I could decline by claiming, “Chau ko biet an” (I don’t know how to eat that).  If I ate the bird, well, I’d be eating a bird.  Not much different from a chicken or a duck, I’m sure, so no big deal.  If I declined, the entire first course of the meal would be disrupted as everyone tried to console me and make sure I didn’t starve to death during the ten minutes I’d have to wait for the steaks.  I opted not to eat the bird.  As a result, I got more than my fair share of salad, bread, and french fries.

It’s a head thing.  Once I see an animal’s head, I don’t want to eat the animal anymore.  This is true even of shrimp.  In New York, we get rid of the heads of almost everything we eat.  Cow heads, pig heads, chicken heads, shrimp heads, whatever.  They all disappear somewhere.  Some big warehouse filled with heads, I guess.  No one is eating heads.  Thus, I’m unaccustomed to looking my food in the eye.  Everyone else was happy to behead these beasts and suck the brains down through the necks.  Mmm.  Yummy.  No thank you.

The steak was good.  Not Chien Beo good by any stretch, but good.  I ate two portions.  Everyone knows I lost a lot of weight during that traumatic period five months ago when LA and I were on the outs, so I was happy to hear everyone thought I was putting on weight again.

I’ve even learned to enjoy Hanoi beer with ice.  This proves that I’m flexible.  In New York I’d never have accepted a warm beer, much less deigned to drink one with ice.  Now, I actually think I prefer Hanoi beer with ice to ice cold Hanoi beer.  Adaptable.  Maybe someday I’ll even adapt to eating heads.  But not this week.