Mad dogs, Englishmen...and Quy Nhonese?

Let me begin by saying that Joelle and I come from the Pacific Northwest, a part of the world that receives only slightly more direct sunlight each year than the dark side of the moon.  When the sun appears in Washington, people flock to it.  We soak it in, knowing that it might not appear again for weeks or months.  In the long days of summer, when it’s light out until 10:00 (or later) at night we eat dinner outside, play Frisbee or go for long bike rides at 8:30 at night, delay going to bed until midnight…all so we can catch a few more of those precious rays.  Embedded deep in the psyche of every true Washingtonian is a simple equation that states:  SUN = GOOD.

So it was funny to me at first when I moved to Vietnam and realized that people here avoid exposure to the sun as assiduously as I might avoid exposure to, for instance, anthrax or news about Justin Bieber.  When class is over and my students are going home for lunch, they transform from pleasant, casually-dressed college students into armored, bicycle-mounted UV-battling warriors with nary a millimeter of skin showing.  Jeans and long-sleeve shirts with sweatshirts over top, gloves that go past their elbows, face masks that drop all the way down the neck, toe-socks to cover the feet and yet allow for the wearing of flip-flops, topped off with an umbrella (not for rain but for sun).  We’re talking UV-Protection Level Midnight. 

This has become completely normal to see over the years and it’s quite understandable. If you’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes uncovered in the sun here you quickly realize that your primary goal in life has become finding shade (preferably air-conditioned) and staying in it until nightfall.  Here's a typical beach scene in Quy Nhon between the hours of 8:00 AM and 4:30 PM.  Notice:  Population zero.

That’s why I laughed in my friend’s face when he mentioned in passing this morning that today was a special day.  A holiday of sorts in which lots and lots of people go to the beach at high noon to take a dip in the sea and look at the sun.  Those were his words:  look at the sun.  At noon.  Not only did this sound foolish and potentially dangerous, it sounded like the least Vietnamese thing imaginable.  It was as if once a year everyone just went crazy for 10 minutes and did the precise opposite of what they were supposed to do.  It would have been like the whole population of Bellingham running up to Canada to go shopping and buy gas at Canadian Costco for an afternoon.  Never happen.

I wasn’t sure I believed him, so at 11:45, forsaking lunch and my family (for 20 minutes), I grabbed my camera and headed down to the beach.  Sure enough, the world had gone mad.  Quy Nhon is known for looking absolutely deserted from about 11:00 AM till 3:00 PM.  People who arrive in town for the first time at midday sometimes wonder if the zombie apocalypse has actually begun.  No one ventures outside if they can possibly avoid it.  The old saying from India about “only mad dogs and Englishmen” going out in the sun rings true here, as the only type of person you would tend to see on the beach at that hour (other than a fisherman) is the pasty European kind, punishing their skin because hey, they’re on holiday and they figure a raging sunburn will make everyone back home jealous. But the beach today was far from deserted.  Kids and parents, grandmas and college students—up and down Quy Nhon’s 3-mile long crescent of sand, they were sprinting or hobbling or sauntering out to the water and splashing around in the glaring hot sun like it was no big thang.  

Hundreds—maybe thousands—of people were out there, many of them fully clothed, enjoying a little dip, laughing and playing.  There was something wonderfully childlike about it all, as though some usually strict parents had allowed their little ones to stay up past their bedtime just this once.  

I even saw a guy waterskiing behind a fishing boat, it was that nuts.  (I’ve never seen anyone waterskiing in Vietnam, let alone behind a fishing boat.)

The most I’ve been able to find out about this holiday, named Tết Đoan Ngọ, is that it falls on the 5^th day of the 5^th lunar month every year—shortly before the summer solstice.  (That, incidentally, would explain why I’ve never heard of it because we’ve always been back in the States for the summer).  Tradition says that a dip in the sea at this time is supposed to wash away bad luck and give strength and health for the time ahead.  Like many traditions that people here might not fully understand themselves, it probably came “from China.”  It’s also interesting in that the whole dipping-in-the-sea-staring-at-the-sun part of things seems to be almost entirely localized to Quy Nhon.  When I do an image search for the name of the holiday, the only swimming pictures I get are of Quy Nhon’s beach.  Students who came to Quy Nhon from other provinces have confirmed that this is something only "those crazy Quy Nhonese" do.

 In any case, I walked along the beach for a bit, enjoying the atmosphere though not partaking in the actual process of it all.  After a while, soaking wet people started filtering back to their motorbikes or running back to their houses across the hot sand.

It was a good reminder to me that sometimes life refreshingly chooses not to fit the mold that we like to put it in.  Expectations get turned on their heads, and I recall that I still have a whole lot to learn about this place and these people.  I also saw it as a kind of cheerfully defiant act of civil disobedience toward the sun itself, which can start to feel like a merciless dictator in this season.  Distant echoes, perhaps, of the children of Israel turning their backs and walking out on Pharaoh (who was, after all, supposed to be the embodiment of the sun god himself).

I’m willing to bet that an hour after I left, the sun once again ruled over a desolate beach.  I can’t be certain, though, because by that time I was taking a nap with Micah in a dim, air-conditioned room and leaving the beach to any mad dogs or stray Englishmen who happened to be about.

The Big Rain

We had ourselves a real rollicking-good rainstorm on Saturday afternoon.  I’d say it was somewhere between your typical tropical downpour and a typhoon.  It had been overcast and muggy most of the day, but around 3:00 the sky went from gray to dark gray to black-green.  Our normal plans for an afternoon walk got put on hold as the first big drops started to fall, and soon the street in front of our house was a small river.  Schoolkids who had gone to class in sunny, hot weather now had to bike home in a tempest.  We saw them wheeling past our gate, soaking wet, laughing—for the most part—as they went.  In rainstorms like this it doesn’t matter if you’ve got an umbrella or a poncho (or even a roof over your head, sometimes), you’re just plain going to get soaked and you might as well enjoy it.

Well, just when we thought it was about to wrap up, the rain started to pound even harder and that’s when I shot the video that you see below.  There’s just something about the raw power of crazy weather phenomena that makes me want to go out and get drenched.  I missed my calling as a storm chaser, I think.  In the video I walk down to the end of our little street but dare not venture any further, because the wind in the cross-street is whipping at a good 20-30 mph.  “Sheets of rain,” (which is usually just a figure of speech) were quite literally draping themselves all over the place.  I was standing in the lee of a building and still getting pounded.

But it was when I came back from my little venture outside that things got really interesting at our house.  I was just about to head upstairs and change out of my wet clothes when I noticed a small (but quickly growing) waterfall draining straight down our stairway into our living room.  I grabbed some towels and followed our new, unwelcome indoor water feature upstream to see where it was coming from.  On the third floor, a small lake on our balcony had overflowed into our storage room and was cascading out of the room, onto the landing and from there dropping straight down to our first floor. 

So there I was, soaking wet, bailing water off our balcony (the drain has been plugged for who knows how long) with water cascading down three flights of stairs behind me.  At that very moment, a leak which we’ve noticed before in our kitchen floor decided to bubble over so Joelle was occupied with a flood of water there.  Micah sat in about the only dry spot in our house, playing with Play-Doh, while Sedakah bounced happily in her chair, oblivious to the whole situation.  For a while it felt like we were on a tropical version of the Titanic, but finally it subsided and we were left with nothing more than a few stray puddles of water to clean up.  We tidied up, rinsed off and had dinner, thankful for the cooler weather…and for a house with tile floors.

The kids

Some videos of the kiddos that made us smile.

Our first one shows Micah's first experience with chopsticks (albeit a pair of training chopsticks with Thomas the Tank Engine on them).  Our teammates got us a set while we were all on a visit to Hanoi in April.  Micah loves them and figured out how to use them remarkably fast.  The other people in the video are ELI Vietnam folks; we were all in Hanoi for some leadership team meetings.

Video numero dos is Micah falling asleep at lunch one afternoon.  For some reason the kid can't help waking up at 5:30 in the morning, so by lunch he's usually more than ready for his afternoon nap.  This time it was a little more extreme than others...

And finally, a sweet one of Sedakah cracking up at Micah.  She smiles at everyone, but doesn't really laugh for anyone except her big brother.  We agree with her that he's a pretty funny kid.

Children's Park

Whew.  There’s something about relocating your family across the planet with a 2 and a half year old and a 2 and a half month old in tow that makes a person want to lay down and sleep for a month or two.  Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s there.  But with two beautiful little ones like this, it's all worth it.

We are, in fact, back in Quy Nhon with TWO kids now and we’re happy to be here.  The process of getting here went rather smoothly, despite the fact that we had a veritable mountain of luggage.  Micah was a great traveler as usual and our wild-card unknown, Sedakah, proved to be a fantastic traveler too.  She seemed to enjoy being on an airplane more than she enjoys most things, and was content to lie in her bassinet and smile at the ceiling for most of the trip.  Getting settled has taken a bit longer and been more stressful than usual due largely to the fact that Micah picked up a bad cold or flu bug on the way over and was sick for probably 10 days.  He was a fairly grumpy, needy kid for a while which made the rest of life more difficult.  He’s feeling better now, though, and we’re happy to have our joyous, funny, smiling little boy back.

We decided to celebrate finally getting settled (and mostly healthy) by a trip to the Children’s Park yesterday afternoon.  Now, the Children’s Park is a place we have been many, many times.  It’s on the beach right across from the university, so we tend to at least pass through it with some regularity.  But it’s only this year that Micah has really gotten to the age where we figured he would enjoy more of what the park has to offer.

If you’re an American and you hear the words “Children’s Park” you might imagine a grassy, treed area with some swings and slides and a ball field or two for the kiddos to go entertain themselves with.  Apart from the grass and trees, you would not be imagining Quy Nhon’s Children’s Park.  Think “Permanent Carnival, Set Among Trees” and you would be getting closer to the truth.  It really is a nice setting, with big shade trees and a cool breeze off the water.  For Micah and his buddy Ezra, it was Shangri-La.

Our first stop on our Children’s Park odyssey was the fish pond, where you use a plastic fishing pole with magnetic “bait” on it to catch a whole bunch of plastic fish, turtles, alligators and various other aquatic creatures with screws in their mouths.  Micah tried his hand at spear fishing a few times, with little to show for it.  Fun, but really just a warm-up for what was to come.  Cost: 7,000 VND or about 33 cents for a pole and unlimited plastic fish. 

 

Right next to the fish pond was a small paved area that was just perfect for driving little electric cars around.  As Micah started to tire of the angler’s lifestyle, he began longingly eyeing the cars with their youthful drivers zipping back and forth next to us.  It was only a matter of time before we seated him in a plastic jeep with laser turrets and let him go.  I (Steven), ever the watchful parent, followed him around to make sure he didn’t drive into a tree or go off the embankment onto the beach.  Ezra got stuck with the pink and purple Barbie car, but didn’t seem to be too fazed by it.  Cost:  12,000 VND or about 57 cents for perhaps 5 minutes of motorized joy.

After the cars, Micah was really keyed up and ready to go.  He strolled through the park asking to go on every single ride.  Miniature swan boats that had to be paddled by hand.  Big pit full of dirty plastic balls.  Spinning spaceship ride.  We finally settled on what seemed to be the tamest option, a mini roller coaster that went round and round a small oval track.  When I say “mini,” I mean mini.  I went along with Micah to make sure he didn’t get bored and try to climb out midway through the ride.  It required some serious folding of my 6’ 4” frame to fit me into the roller coaster.  Apparently they don’t make these things for adult male Americans. 

Whatever the case, we got onto the mini roller coaster with little Ezra and his dad, Will, as well as a couple of Vietnamese dads with their sons, paid our money and off we went.  Around and around.  And around and around.  And then around some more.  Pretty fun for the first six, seven, eight times.  Started to get old after 12, 13, 14 revolutions.  How long does 50 cents buy me on this ride? I started to wonder.  Then I looked around and realized that the ride operator had just up and left us to ourselves.  And I mean left.  He had gone down the way to let some people onto a bigger roller coaster and seemed in no hurry to get back to our ride to shut it off.  Micah—the kid who gets motion sick and upchucks within 20 minutes of climbing into the back seat of a car—was not the ideal child to be riding with on an endlessly circling roller coaster.  I kept asking him how he was doing and he kept replying, “Fine.  Fine,” but I didn’t necessarily trust his answers.  Finally Will’s wife, Kristin, saved us by going and flipping the kill switch herself.  We all climbed out and sauntered away as the operator continued AWOL.  Cost:  10,000 VND or about 48 cents per person but be prepared to stop the thing yourself.

One of the best parts of the whole roller coaster experience, in addition to the operator's disappearing act, was this guy.  Wow.  Just wow.  He stood and gawked at us while we returned the favor.

As we prepared to leave the park, Micah started his whine/crying and “I-don’t-want-to-leave”’s to let us know that, yes, he had had a good time and yes, he wanted to come back again sometime.  All-in-all it was a fun, refreshing experience for everyone and a sort of rediscovery of a very familiar place.  For all the times I had strolled through the Children’s Park, not once had I stopped to fish or drive cars or go on the roller coaster.  Not once had I looked at it through the eyes of a toddler.  Now, I have.  And it is indeed a wonderland.  All for less than 2 bucks.

The things that kid says

Well, we just celebrated Micah's 2nd birthday in grand style here in Quy Nhon, complete with a "gravel pit" chocolate cake with all sorts of heavy machinery driving across it.  Micah was suitably impressed, and we had a great time with our friends and their little 'uns.

We're discovering that this is a really fun age, as Micah picks up language at a breathtaking pace.  The kid is a sponge, and we never know from day to day what he's going to say next.  Mealtimes are often a monologue of Micah chattering away about cows and thunderstorms and playing at the park, while Joelle and I do our best to fit in a word or two edgewise while he's chewing.

I wanted to write down some of the more amusing things he's said in the past week or two, just to give you an idea of his goofy personality and great imagination.  So here, in no particular order, are FIVE THINGS MICAH SAID LAST WEEK:

 

1) Said while making banana bread with Joelle.
"Let's mix this bad boy up."  (Not really sure where this came from.  It's not a regularly-occurring idiom in our house.)

2) Said while repeatedly slapping a picture of a tiger in an animal book.
"No, tiger!  Stop!  Don't bite Micah!  Go-to-another-place!"  (Last sentence said with great emphasis.)

3) "Steven, come play toys."  (We had just revealed to him that day the shocking truth that mommy and daddy's names aren't actually "mommy" and "daddy.")

4) Steven: "What do you want to pray for tonight, Micah?"
Micah:  "Pray people no take Micah's toys away."  (Pragmatic, if nothing else.)

5) Joelle:  "Did you have a good nap, Micah?  What did you dream about?"
Micah:  "Jesus driving fire truck."  (Once again, he put that one together all on his own.  No "Jesus-the-fire-truck-driver" books or videos in our collection.  Although it's a fantastic idea...)

That's it for now from our side of the world.  Signing off with this picture of us enjoying some banh xeo with teammates and students.  (If you don't know what banh xeo is, it's impossible to describe in a way that makes you want to try it.  My advice is just to eat some.)

It's Saturday, this must be Cambodia...

Yes, Cambodia it is.  Phnom Penh, to be exact.  I (Steven) arrived here from Vietnam last night and will be here for about 9 days to serve as a mentor teacher for new teachers from our organization who are going through a training program.  Starting Monday I'll teach a couple of--ahem--"model" lessons for Cambodian students and will spend the next few days observing the new teachers showing off what they've learned during the last 3 weeks of TESL training.  I'm excited for it.

Joelle and Micah are back in Quy Nhon.  We arrived there about a week ago from America and had time to get the house mostly cleaned and get over jetlag before I had to take off.  At the end of next week we'll all be meeting up in Hanoi for some Team Vietnam orientation time before the school year starts.  Craziness.

Since I have a little bit of time, I thought I'd update everyone on how our travels went and what we've been up to.  Our trip from Washington to Quy Nhon was, in a word, sweet.  Micah once again proved that he is a champion traveler and once again garnered praise from someone sitting near us on the 11-hour Seattle-to-Seoul flight.  A lady told Joelle at the end of the flight that Micah was one of the best behaved little ones she'd seen on a flight and that Joelle's parenting skills were top-notch.  I concur on all counts.  Somehow she kept a 23-month old happy and occupied for probably 8 of the 11 hours we were in the air (he slept the other 3 hours).  Not an easy task in a tin can traveling at two-thirds the speed of sound across the Pacific Ocean.



We had a short plane transfer in Seoul and arrived in Saigon late in the evening.  We all got a good sleep at our favorite hotel (the aptly named "Happy Inn") and flew to Quy Nhon the next afternoon.  Our house was in remarkably good shape for having been left to its own devices over the summer, but it still required a good spring (fall?) cleaning.  Joelle once again proved her awesomeness by getting things cleaned up while Micah and I played toys.  Our teammates the Bankstons showed up a few days after us, with their little one Ezra in tow.  We've been enjoying their company and helping them get moved into their new house off-campus--just a couple of blocks down the street from us.  So far things are going very well.  No dog bites or hospital visits like last year.

Here we are in the taxi on our way from Quy Nhon's airport to the city.  Somehow Micah (although he weighs about 1/6 as much as I do) triples the amount of luggage we have to carry.  The massive stack of bags behind us is, embarrasingly, all ours.  Micah is zonked out on our laps, demonstrating his ability (inherited from his mother) to fall asleep just about anywhere.

We've enjoyed getting back to Vietnam for many reasons, not least the food.  Micah loves him some coconut, and in the following shot we're breakfasting on xoi (sweet sticky rice) our first morning back in Quy Nhon.  Both are, in Micah's estimation, "ummy."

After long travels and a couple days of hitting the cleaning hard, we opted to spend an afternoon at our favorite "staycation" spot:  A local hotel with a nice pool and a rooftop cafe overlooking the bay (where we had to wake the waiter up from his afternoon snooze to order a banana split).  We love you, Quy Nhon.

This last shot, I include just because of its sheer awesomeness.  Before Micah was born I told Joelle that I wanted a chubby, happy baby.  She totally delivered (pun intended).  Add some robotron sunglasses, a wolf shirt and a we-are-the-champions-my-friends pose and you've got a pretty good idea of what our little man is all about.  With a baby girl on the way this winter, I'd better figure out what I want to order this time...  :)

2012 in Review

Hi folks.  Yes, it's been nearly a year since I last updated this.  That's going to change, though.  Promise.  :)

For now, you can have a look at our "Year in Review" slideshow/movie, with pictures from this past year.  Go ahead.  Watch it.  It's only 2 minutes long.  How bad could it be?


Shetterly Year in Review 2012 from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.