Life and times in Haiphong

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This blog may seem a bit disjointed and doesn't really follow any chronological order...it's just a few snapshots from our last few weeks in our new home...

House-warming the flat

As we pointed out in a previous blog - with pictures - we moved into 1 bedroom flat in Haiphong just before Christmas. Once the festive season (as much as there was of one in Vietnam..!) had subsided, we decided it was time to toast our new abode with a get-together. So we set about inviting all and sundry.

We then found out that we were planning to have our party on the same night that Lisa (a fellow teacher, from New York) was planning to have her leaving drinks. Her contract had expired and she was moving on. As things turned out we decided to combine the events and invite all her friends to our flat too! So...on the night of the party, our little flat was suddenly surrounded by a gang of motorbikes and a load of people we didn't know. Much like the events of a 1980s American teenage movie where some bad people turn up with hilarious and yet moral consequences.

Anyway, in contrast to the aforementioned movie scenario, in this case the party-goers were well mannered Vietnamese people on mopeds, not Harleys and they even took off their shoes before they came in for fear of damaging the carpet. Even better they delivered a crate of 24 cans of Hanoi Beer...of which they drank about 6 and left the rest! Perfect!

It was nice. We met a lot of new people - many of which took our telephone number for future meet-ups. Plus our boss came from Apollo bearing a huge box of cakes (see picture) and our new Vietnamese teacher, Bich (pronounced Bic) was there too as well as Hoa, one of the female Vietnamese staff at Apollo. But after a short while, Lisa decided it might be better to relocate to our regular bia hoi bar over the road for more food and drinks. Fair enough, we thought.

Waiter, waiter. There's a snake in my wine.

We caught up with Lisa and the crowd a little later and we were welcomed into the upstairs from of the bar by rapturous applause from a crowd of largely Vietnamese people that we didn't know! Everyone was seated round a gigantic table laden with food. Alas we'd already eaten...but then if we hadn't I'd have had to navigate my way around the table using my crap chopstick skills in order pluck up food clumsily - like in one of those crane games you get in arcades where you can win a fluffy toy. We opted for beer only and it was flowing freely. We met a whole load of new people, as well as some "old" friends (the ones we met at the party earlier..) and I managed to carry off a conversation on football and Sunderland footy club, even though I have almost no general knowledge on such subjects. It's easier to bluff when English isn't their 1st language.

It was round then we met some of Haiphong's limited number of expats - specifically some British people who work for a company that exports Vietnamese clothes to the UK! Well, I guess Haiphong is a big seaport.

As the party progressed and spirits raised the bar owner got very excited and decided to bring out the shots. He poured everyone a decent mouthful of a cloudy white liquid into small china cups and the usual Vietnamese tradition was followed of counting as a group before necking the lot. By this point I'd struck up a conversation with the girl to my right and as I supped the spirits which I presumed was some kind of rice wine (they called it "wine" anyway..) she leaned over and asked...

"Have you ever been drunk before?"

For a second I hesitated and much of my life flashed before my eyes. I saw myself hurtling through a field in a shopping trolley pushed by my mate Mark, drinking Old Somerset Cider...I saw myself knocking over a tray of dirty pint glasses with my coat in my local pub back home...I saw myself running through the fire exit of a club and setting off the alarms in Sheffield...and riding a wheelbarrow around a garden in Liverpool (again, pushed by Mark..) whilst inadvisedly drinking birthday whisky.....

I thought about it and decided to reply, inexplicably...

"Once...I think"

She looked very worried when I drank hers for her.

Anyway...it was only later that I found out that this was "snake" wine. This is basically, (as you'd imagine - right?) rice wine with a dead snake in it. The size of the snake varies and presumably this affects the price. I saw a huge bottle the other day with what looked like a king cobra in it. Hmm. Allegedly it makes you virile.

Perhaps not so much the day after though...

Making friends is easy

Clustered around our flat is a number of restaurants and bars and karaoke venues with flashing neon signs. Not being much of a singer we usually opt for a quick drink in a local bia hoi bar after work. We basically pull up a small plastic chair on the pavement and a glass of 10p beer arrives in no time. Anyway, although there are several such places by us - we chose one local and stuck to it. Particularly as the staff began shouting and waving at us on our way to work and we would feel awful going into their next door neighbour's bar. After a few visits the waiter at our local began being bolder in his attempts to talk to us and teach us Vietnamese words. His English is pretty limited, but we could get by for a while with gestures and a few snippets of vocabulary - unsurprisingly this is a skill of ours that seems to have grown since 2006. Then one night, Uy, as we got to know him as, invited us to lunch. It was all arranged for our day off. He'd pick us up and take us to his house.

So one Tuesday morning at 11 we met him on his bike on the main road and he took us off through winding streets to a small house consisting of one large room and a kitchen and toilet at the back. There we found his sister and another girl who worked at the bar busy preparing dinner. Despite the fact they couldn't speak English, they looked really happy to see us, and before long we were sat on the floor around a big pot of steaming soup and our bowls were being continuously filled with noodles, veg and meat and our glasses with beer.

Bearing in mind that this is a bloke we randomly met who served us in a bar and that we'd never shared a common grammatically correct sentence, I think this is pretty amazing. We sat there long after the meal in this house as a lot of his friends arrived to meet us. Usefully, they could speak a little more English and they were students at the local maritime university. And they were all keen to find out about us.

Somewhere down the line a guitar was produced and I was forced to play for the assembled audience while being continuously filmed by a bloke using his mobile. Watch out for the vid on Vietnamese Youtube. Unfortunately they were unimpressed that I knew no Abba or Carpenters, but what can you do? I promised to learn some for next time.

After several hours we had to make our excuses as we simply couldn't eat any more..and we had a Vietnamese lesson with Bich back at our place....

Learning Vietnamese..

Despite being language teachers, we don't have a great reputation for language learning. I seem to know how to say hello and to count in a surprising variety of languages. But can I hold a conversation??

So we chose to come to Vietnam and attempt to learn Vietnamese. No mean feat. It's not really known to be a compatible language for an English speaker - and vice versa. It's tonal, like Thai, it has a complicated alphabet and it has southern and northern dialects that are like different languages. So we started out on our Vietnamese adventure when Bich arrived and introduced us to the Vietnamese alphabet. We thought we'd have an advantage here over other Asian languages as it's written using a modified form of the Roman alphabet (allegedly invented by a European missionary in the 17th century (?) - check Wikipedia). Rather than looking like a mish-mash of pretty patterns and dots like Thai, Lao or Cambodian...Vietnamese has very discernible ABCs. Albeit, surrounded by dots and dashes and light strokes of ink. It's these dots and dashes that'll get you. For example, the vowel - "A" has three different pronunciations depending on its accompanying swarm of flecks. As does "O" and "U". "E" has 2. Then...further symbols are added to words to change the intonation of the word...is it rising, falling, low, broken, normal or shortened...???? As you can imagine, this ramps up the complexity.

Hmm.

Easy then.

We spent two hours learning the letters in the alphabet and I felt quite retarded. I just couldn't hear the difference between some letters. I think your brain gets so programmed with the language you speak that other subtle differences in different languages become very difficult to identify. As it turns out, Vietnamese writing is a bit like written music. All the information you need to know is there on the pronunciation - you just need to know how to read it. In contrast, pity the poor Vietnamese learning English. As they've pointed out to me, they never have a clue how a word should be pronounced because all they have are the letters - with no guide to tone or which syllables should be emphasised or diminished.

Still, Vietnamese ain't easy. We'll keep trying....

A local culinary delicacy

There's no polite way of saying this. I'm just going to come out with it.

People in Haiphong like to eat dogs.

I might even stretch to - they love to eat dogs. At the end of our street are a number of restaurants that specialise on this culinary "delicacy". You don't have to decipher the Vietnamese script outside, their fares are proudly displayed in glass cabinets outside. Cooked, hairless pooches hang from their hind ends on spikes to tempt in hungry punters. As we walk by, it's customary for the odd Vietnamese man to wave at us and beckon us in laughing - clearly aware of the average westerner's aversion to eating man's best friend.

And they're right in the case of me. I'm not particularly squeamish when it comes to food. I scoffed insects in Thailand and earlier I drank snake wine...but I couldn't bring myself to eat dog. It makes me feel quite sick to think about. Having grown up with dogs as family members and been in contact with them all of my life I can't imagine ever wanting to eat one, but here it seems as normal as having a steak. Maybe I'm a hypocrite. Maybe I should spend a few months living with cows and then I'd decide I couldn't eat beef. I dunno...

Anyway, to illustrate how shockingly normal it is, the Vietnamese teacher in a local nursery we teach in asked me the other day if I had any pets. I said my parents had dogs and explained they had 2 labradors. She nodded and without an ounce of dark humour she asked the genuine question - "have you eaten dog? It's very good!". I was quite shocked. How could she link talking about our Barney and Bob with edible things???

"No" I said.

"Ah, not yet!" she smiled.

No, not not yet. Not ever.


So I'll stick to the cat-burgers...

(that was a joke by the way).

Jogging like Rocky in Haiphong

Since moving to our new flat I decided to find somewhere I could go for a run. Luckily, as the streets are generally impenetrable even when walking due to foot-level power cables and head level market stall awnings it was nice to discover that there was a big lake right by us with a relatively quiet path stretching around it. It's actually quite pretty. The houses around it it are tall with a load of balconies and there's often several small boats out on it with some people fishing. It also has swan-shaped pedalos - though I've never seen anyone out on them. If you ignore the occasions when the wind changes direction and you can smell a drain-like odour coming from the water, or the regular occurrence of coming across a Vietnamese man shamelessly urinating directly into the lake from the banks...a stroll/jog around is quite pleasant. Plus, it sometimes makes me feel famous...

Needless to say, a lot of people stare at me and I've seen any other runners as yet. Plus, if I happen upon a crowd they inevitably wave and shout hello as if I'm in the London Marathon. Then, and perhaps most comically, there's the times when I have to overtake some unsuspecting member of the public who hasn't seen me. I've given several people quite a fright when they turn their heads at the last minute to see a towering hairy white man running towards them. Well, just imagine it. It's a bit like sighting a yeti.

Anyway, my aim is to recruit a band of jogging Vietnamese kids. A group that slowly grows as I run around - you know, like that scene in Rocky. Then I'll just have to find some steps to run up with them and get the Rocky theme put on my iPod.

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Photos

How many people can you fit on one sofa
lots of Vietnamese people at our housewarming

Kris' new guitar
It's handmade. It came from a shop up the road from us, which sells paint and wood preservatives and guitars.

New friends
Robin, an American teacher at Apollo, Hua, who works on reception, Bich, our Vietnamese teacher and her friend Xon. All at the bowling alley. Kris' second ever attempt at bowling. Luckily bowling appears to be a new thing to Haiphong, and everyone around us was really, really rubbish. Honestly, someone threw their ball down their alley, and ended up sliding down ours!

La Villa Blanca
huge beer hoi bar in the grounds of a big white colonial building

Kris in La Villa Blanche
beer hoi place. It also does good, cheap food.

Passport booth
you sit on the chair in front of the blue screen in the street, and someone with a camera takes your photo, then runs off to get it processed.
It's no Photome booth, but I bet people don't stare so much when you get your passport photos taken in Asda.

Complicated coffee
Vietnamese coffee comes in it's own little perculator. You sit and watch it drip into the glass onto the condensed milk. It takes ages, you only get about 5 mm and it's really really strong. But it tastes really good.

Women selling vegetables
they sell fruit and veg like this on the street all over the city.

Buildings reflected in the big lake near our house
Kris runs around this.

Fishing in the big lake
you wouldn't want to eat it. People piss in it and it smells of drains.

Park around the big lake
called Ho An Bien, near our flat

Flower market
in the centre of the city, near the opera house