Home stay & how do you say "clutz" in Vietnamese?

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Last night was a tailoring marathon. When we showed up at 6, they asked us to come back at 8:15. From 8:30 until after 11 Tricia, Verona and various staff members made adjustments and alternations. The jacket I ordered was 75% done and once they knew it fit they finished it – changing the collar and sleeves and hemming it. Jack’s suit, sport coat, trousers and shirts were pretty much done and they came out great. My clothes were more problematic since they were not their bread and butter. At 11 o’clock the two sisters were putting buttons on my shirt. It didn’t take them very long. Tricia and Verona have a good size operation with 20 people working for them and it was obvious that the staff was doing a lot of the work behind the scenes late into the evening. They have had this business for 4 years and do a great business on the internet. I would be totally comfortable order more clothes for Jack from them, but my dream of Saks knock-offs for pennies on the dollar will have to remain a dream.

We started the day with a four hour drive to Can Tho which is one of the largest cities in the Mekong. We arrived in Can Tho to have a very pleasant lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Mekong. Our guide took us to a Chinese Pagoda and the Can Tho museum. A lovely young woman who works at museum gave us a tour that our guide translated. The exhibits focused on artifacts from the relatively recent past as well as the obligatory displays of the Vietnamese victories in the French and American wars. The most interesting display was of wooden statues that families made to watch over someone’s grave when they move away from the grave site.

After leaving town and driving for 20 minutes, we pulled off the road and were greeted by the gentleman who would be the host for our home stay. The path to the river was submerged, so he arrange for some guy on a motorcycle to drive us across the flooded area so we could get to where his small boat was moored. We had a 15 minute boat ride before we pulled up to his dock. Hien, the young woman who greeted us is the person who actually runs the show. However, she does not own the house, rather she is a relative of the woman who owns the house and was brought there to do the cooking. I’m going to refer to pictures because it is easier than trying to describe everything. The home had electricity but no municipal water. The water is purchased in jars and collected on the roof. After tea and fruit, we were invited to participate in local activities. It had rained too much for us to plant rice, so we were going to go for a bike ride. We pulled the bikes onto the narrow path next to the canal and as I was getting going I lost my balance and was sitting in the canal with my bike on top of me. Whoever said that once you learn to ride a bike you never forget was a liar. My dignity was hurt worse than my ankle. So Jack went off with our guide and the homeowner and I sat and waited for my shorts to dry. So I wouldn’t get bored, they set me up to fish beside the house The equipment was a bamboo stick, a line, a hook and a piece of a worm. At first I was discouraged and thought my fishing would be no more successful than my biking, but then I got a bite and pulled in my fish – all 1-1/2 inches of him.
Hien, was starting to make dinner. We had a little assembly line making spring rolls which I was in charge of frying. In the meantime she worked on dinner. She had a 3 burner wood stove and she controlled the temperature by moving the wood from under one pot or another to increase or decrease the heat. In her little “kitchen”, she made the following dishes: steamed sea bass with vegetables, caramelized fish, fried rice, green beans and sweet and sour fish soup. There was so much food and it was really good. Eating dinner with us was our guide, Hien, and several cousins including the owner of the house. After dinner we sat around and with a neighbor who played the guitar, they sang to entertain and to have some fun. Before bed I decided I would be well advised to shower off the remnants of my canal adventure. Hien, boiled some water for me that I could use to wash up. Our beds were actually large tables with thin pads. Our hosts set up the mosquito netting for us and made sure it was properly tucked in. With the help of a small dose of sleeping medication, I slept pretty well,
Breakfast was ready early and we left for a visit to the floating market. People live on boats and from these boats they sell food. The buyers are people who arrive on smaller boats early in the morning to buy food that they will take back to their local markets and resell. The boats were run down and it was hard to imagine living in one of them.

Driving in Vietnam between cities is a real challenge. The main north-south highway is a 2 lane road that goes through innumerable towns and cities. Traffic moves really slowly and you can get behind a slow truck doing 30K and simply be stuck there. In many place the roads are dirt and heavily rutted so the driver couldn’t go faster if he wanted to. Traveling from one city to another can take 1 hour in a plane and 12 hours by rail or car. The trains aren’t better than the roads according to the locals.

We stopped for our usual mid-morning break when I thought our guide mentioned that we could see thousands of coconuts. OK not the world’s most exciting site, but it would be a couple of minutes outside the car. What he actually said was thousands of crocodiles. There was one pen with 500 ity-bity 3 month old crocodiles, one with 400 3-year old crocodiles and so on. The crocs looked very well cared for and when they are sleeping, which I guess they do a lot, they look dead and stuffed. The restaurant serves crocodile meat, but at 10 AM it was a little early.

Chau Doc where we are spending the night is a town of 40,000 people so it is at least an order magnitude smaller than all the other cities we’ve been to. We are at another Victoria hotel which has a high speed boat service to Phnom Phen that we are scheduled to leave on at 7 AM tomorrow. After lunch we visited Buddhist monastery on a high with a great view and drove to the top of the lone mountain in the area from which you can see Cambodia. Given the choice of another Pagoda or the hotel, we opted for the hotel and a quick swim. We have finally encountered hot weather and the pool was great.

Our guide for the past two days is the best guide we’ve had. His English is good, he is very knowledgeable and wants to talk about his experiences in the war and since then. He has one older brother who was a pilot in the South Vietnamese air force and escaped to the US two days before Saigon fell. His father went to prison for 7 years. His younger brother was in university when the “reunification” took place and was allowed to finish, but he was barred from the university. He has spent time in the US with his brother who appears to have a pretty senior position with Boeing. All of our guides from the South have talked about the privation and suffering that took place between the end of the war and the lifting of the US Embargo in 1989. While I see a lot of poverty, they see a lot of improvement.

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Photos

4 generations
The baby's mother is not in the photo