Dessert Dinners

Entry #11.  April 30, 2012, 3:18 pm.  Living Room, House, District 3, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  Happy Liberation Day.  That would be Vietnam's liberation from AMERICA.  On this day in 1975, the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government was officially dissolved and the National Liberation Front, the army of the communist north, captured the city of Saigon.  The country was united in north and south and the communist government became the new power.  In essence, April 30 marks the day of the end of the United States' only lost war.  Technically, the U.S. withdrew from the war due to a number of forlorn reasons, but in the end the U.S. did not accomplish its mission of stopping the spread of communism in southeast Asia, and the enemy north captured and looted all U.S. strongholds in Saigon.  Thousands of Americans were evacuated in the days prior in the biggest helicopter evacuation mission in history, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees were displaced.  Today is a national holiday in Vietnam, as is tomorrow, and it is the first time I really feel the communism around me.  Vietnamese flags have been set up all along every major road, each taxi has a flag flying from it's driver window, and the hammer and sickle symbol is not to be missed.  There are to be public celebrations throughout the city and I believe April 30 is a vessel used by the Communist Party of Vietnam to remind all its citizens that the power of the communist state is still stable, dominant, and effective.  How bizarre it is to be on this side of a celebration of my own country's defeat.  When I think about it, this is the only day in the only country in the world to mark such an event.

But let's not fall into the trap of only relating Vietnam to a war that ended 37 years ago. Vietnam, as a country, is tremendously more than that, and my greatest hope is that this blog will broadcast the country as something much more than the sum of its parts.  I am reminded today, as an American in a communist country celebrating its most anti-American day, of how forgiving, enduring, and magnanimous the people are and how a great culture has overcome such monstrous obstacles.

A few more weeks have flown by and life is still loved.  I'm becoming familiar with my students and I'm thinking less while driving on the roads on my motorbike- a sign of habituation.  One of my older adult students asked me on a date, but I was told not to mix business with pleasure ("Then explain to me how a putt-putt golf course works." - Andy Bernard, The Office)  The semester is almost over, although, and I do love the Vietnamese species of cougars....

Last week I went to one of the few concerts held in Saigon- a Grand Master Flash concert, nonetheless.    Overall it was a pretty terrible concert.  The venue was too small and there existed a complicated caste system of armbands that restricted me and my friends from all the VIP rooms.  Also, Grand Master Flash (or Grand Master Fail) is a DJ that only knows to shout five phrases: "Yeah", "Uh-huhhh", "Put your hands up!", "Put your fother muckin' hands up!", and "Mmm, mmhmm.".  Good thing we have proper English teachers in Vietnam to fight the war on lyrical slang and reverse the effect of GMF's vernacular.

On a high note, my good friend Stephanie has arrived in Vietnam and is now living in the third bedroom of my house.  Stephanie was a friend of a friend in high school, but we became close friends when she was my neighbor for two years in college.  During senior year she kept hearing me talk about my plans for Vietnam, and as she has nearly as big of a travel bug as I do, she eventually looked into the program and put down a deposit.  A few weeks later, she was committed.  She also went through LanguageCorps, albeit two months later than me, and it is great to have her here and as a roomie.  I'll admit at first it was strange- as George Constanza would say "the colliding of worlds"- to have someone from back home enter my reality in the East, but it is a great comfort to have a good friend to do things with and to with whom I can share the experience.

I have developed two major complaints against my host country, however.  First, the public busses on the roads are a menace.  They think they are motorbikes and drive as such.  My senses are heightened and my nerves frazzled when I am unlucky enough to be behind one while commuting, as the bus will change lanes or turn on the dime as if it doesn't have the capacity to steamroll 20 motorbikers.  Don't mess with the busses.  Secondly, it's rainy season and that equates to intermittent power outages.  They are the worst because I'll wake up at night in a salty puddle of my own sweat and colorfully mutter how much I loathe to be awake at that particular moment.  However, only two gripes is quite a good report, and I'll learn soon enough to share the lane with the road mammoths and to take cold showers in the dark.

I also experienced my first Vietnamese massage last week.  First they gave me some miniature boxers to put on, which were of course three sizes too small even though she gave me the largest available.  So the beginning was sad but the ending was happy.  Just kidding- it was your "normal" full-body Asian massage.  After changing into my latex-like boxers, I was led into a room with music, AC, and subtle hints of minty aromas.  Every now and then there would be some bending of my limbs or a forced crack that was a little strange (at one point I looked up and saw the masseuse's shadow on the wall, and it looked like spiderman had repelled down and was walloping my back), but overall it was superbly relaxing.  Except for the very end.  The masseuse told me to sit up so that she could get on her knees behind me.  She, or someone down the line of 1000s of years of traditional medicine, decided that it was beneficial to dig her elbows into pressure points on my shoulders, between bones directly into tissue that ought to not receive bony elbows.  If I were withholding information, this is the point when I would have cracked and told my torturers anything they wanted to know.  It hurt so terribly and I was sore for the next four days.  The massage was 58 minutes of bliss, and two minutes of persecution.  

I have told Stephanie that at least one night a month she is required to split the cost of a cake and share it with me for dinner.  Dessert dinner, once/month.  The cakes in the bakeries are too alluring to pass up, and I am doing her a favor by making her partake in dessert dinners, a Jmart pastime.  I also found a donut shop that specializes in foodgasms and producing mouth-water.  So yes, I am still eating healthily on that rice diet.

As always, life is wonderful and my perspective is ever-widening.  All is well, except that I do miss my family and friends.  The solution:  I need visitors.