You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

• the refrigerator you bought for Christmas is adorned with a massive sticker of the not-so-well-known superhero, Mr. CoolPack.
• one of the main selling points of said refrigerator is that it can "stay cold all day when the power cuts out."

• finding a real, honest-to-goodness turkey breast at the supermarket is one of the highlights of the holiday.
• the only thing around that smells remotely like an evergreen tree is the scented candle someone gave you from the States.

• Christmas breakfast consists of eggs, bacon, Swedish tea ring and fresh mangoes, guava and dragonfruit.
• your visitors from "freezing" Hanoi go swimming on Christmas Day. In the ocean.

It's been a great Christmas--there were 13 of us who got together to celebrate. Seven friends with our organization came down from Hanoi to spend the holiday with us--a family of five (the Breedens) and a retired couple (the Davenports) spent about five days here enjoying the warmer weather, ocean views and quiet life of Quy Nhon. Since this city can feel a bit isolated at times--especially during the holidays--it was a blessing to have such fun people to share a few days with.

A few days after Christmas we decided to give a belated gift to the vendors of Cho Khu 2, the market where Joelle usually shops. These ladies have gotten to know Joelle over the past couple of years and--as Vietnamese women are prone to do--asked her repeatedly when she was going to have a baby. After all their asking, they were thrilled last year to learn that Joelle was pregnant, and even more excited when she returned this year without the belly. But where was the baby?? After several solo visits to the market, Joelle felt that a riot was imminent if she didn't bring Micah soon.

Yesterday, they got their first chance to meet Micah, in all his cute foreignness. The resulting chaos is chronicled on this video, which I shot while Joelle fielded questions and fended off pinching fingers. So, for a glimpse into Vietnamese market culture and the excitement surrounding babies here, watch below. (For those reading this on Facebook, you need to click the underlined title of the video, which takes you to the page where you can watch it).

Micah's Market Adventure from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

That's so METRO of you (and other stories from our first two weeks back)

Since our time back in Vietnam thus far has been fairly chaotic, this is going to be a hodgepodge of snapshots from what we've experienced.

Snapshot 1: It's Tuesday, this must be Quy Nhon...
So until recently, Micah hadn't slept in the same place for more than a couple of nights ever since leaving Washington: the plane, a hotel in Saigon, the first hotel we stayed at in Quy Nhon, our apartment, a different hotel where we had a retreat with our teammates, and now back at our apartment. The poor kid has no idea where he is going to be from day to day. We've finally settled back into our apartment for the next month or so (until we head to Thailand for our winter conference), so that should provide him a little stability. He really does take most things in stride, and although he's been poked and squeezed and tugged at and sniffed (yes, sniffed) by more people than we can count since coming back, he almost always has a big, dimpled smile for new folks that he meets. Kind of irresistibly cute, really.


Snapshot 2: That's so METRO of you
Honestly--and perhaps sadly--one of the things we were excited about upon returning to Quy Nhon is the fact that METRO has arrived. What is METRO, you ask? Well, to Westerners like us you could say it's a little slice of paradise.

First, some context. Imagine, if you will, living in a city of a quarter million people where practically the only baked goods available are little loaves of French bread and little rolls with cheese and mystery meat baked into them. Imagine a place where ice cream comes in flavors like "Taro Root," and tastes like they forgot to add the cream. Where the only condiments you can put on a sandwich are mustard, mayo and ketchup (if you're lucky). Where you have to bike a mile and a half across town in hopes that the one bakery in town where they sell cheddar cheese won't be out of stock (again). Where the only two breakfast cereals readily available are corn flakes and something called "Honey Stars" which tastes like sweetened, ground-up drywall. It comes to this: The Vietnamese do a wonderful job of cooking Vietnamese food. In general, they could care less about Western food and thus they don't stock any of it in their stores.

It makes a lot of sense, but for those of us who like a bit more variety in our diets, we're kind of out of luck. Selection is limited, and tends to be scattered in stores across town, so that if you want to make burritos for dinner you end up biking six miles and visiting four different places for all the ingredients. A good way to keep in shape, for sure, but a little disheartening as well.

Enter: The Game Changer. METRO is a German-owned company (we think) that tends to sell things wholesale to businesses. Think Costco. This October, they opened METRO Quy Nhon, and eating will never be the same again. We visited it for the first time this past week with our teammates and I think I walked through the whole place with a dazed smile on my face, whimpering under my breath in shock. It's as though Santa Claus himself opened a warehouse and stocked it with stuff just for me.

Australian ice cream. (Mint chocolate chip, even!) Salmon. Washington apples. Whipping cream. Massive blocks of New Zealand cheddar. Balsamic vinegar. Hershey's and Dove chocolate (all of which are locked in individual cases with electronic alarms). Multigrain bread. Shall I go on? Dried cranberries. A dozen different kinds of cereal, including All Bran (hello, bran muffins!). Hot chocolate. Tons of colored paper and office supplies for teaching. Tasteful Christmas decorations. Barbecue sauce.

We truly have no idea who in Quy Nhon will buy most of these products, other than the 15 or so foreigners who live here, but man is it fun to see all of that goodness in one place.

So then, what will this do to all the mom-and-pop businesses that you find on every street within the city? My guess is: Not much. We, for example, will still buy our fruit and veggies and meat at the local market. It's fresher, cheaper and very relational (really, how many mega-grocery store checkers pat your butt and tell you that you look more beautiful today than the last time you were in? This is the kind of personalized service Joelle gets--for free!--when she goes to visit the local market ladies) Presumably, most Vietnamese realize this as well and only the ones drawn to the "modern" (expensive) way of living will be tempted to buy lower-quality produce at higher prices. But if we get a hankering for rocky road ice cream or a vinaigrette salad dressing or (heaven forbid) Hershey's dark chocolate, it's nice to know where we can find it now.


Snapshot 3: Meet the Rowleys
One big change since last year is that our teammates are new. Our good friends and teammates of the past two years, Jill and Jason Fizzard (and their two girls Ella and Madeline), have accepted a position with our organization's leadership in Hanoi and are relocating there.

Our new teammates, Jeremy and Laura Rowley and their son Isaiah arrived in September and by all accounts have done a great job of getting settled into teaching and daily life here in Quy Nhon. We feel kind of bad that they were here for three months without us, but they seem to be doing swimmingly. The Rowleys are from Manitoba and, like us, prefer the quieter, slower pace of life in Quy Nhon to the hustle and bustle of the bigger cities. They also like the outdoors, coffee and U2. We should get along just fine. :)

Home and thankful

It's about time we got this blog thingy started back up again, don't you think?

After six great months back in the States, we've returned to Quy Nhon as a family of three. It's good to be back.

As I type this from the Seagull Hotel, our son Micah (cutest little guy in the WORLD) is snoozing in his travel bed and Joelle is across the street at the university doing some apartment cleaning before we move in. We'll be tag-teaming the apartment today while the other one looks after the little guy.


Micah was a joy to travel with; although we were a bit worried about how much plane-sitting, taxi-riding and hotel-sleeping he could endure it turns out he's just as happy a kid at 35,000 feet as he is at sea level. With the exception of a couple of short cranky spells, he was all smiles and giggles (or snoring) the whole way across the Pacific.

As expected, Micah--being the cute, chubby white baby that he is--has drawn plenty of attention on this side of the world. Everyone from waitresses to hotel workers to flight attendants have wanted to pick him up, squeeze his feet and make funny faces at him. We've been told that for some reason it's not culturally appropriate in Vietnam to call people's babies "cute" or "lovely" or any such thing, but that rule has been broken with impunity when it comes to Micah. The stardom hasn't gotten to his head just yet--he seems to be just going with the flow, for the most part.

Joelle has already received her first unsolicited piece of advice on parenting as well--the kid needs to wear a hat, according to the lady cleaning the floor in the Saigon restaurant where we ate breakfast yesterday. When we explained to her that we had walked all of 30 feet (across the street from our hotel to the restaurant) she seemed to accept that.

Around Quy Nhon the weather has been downright chilly--all the way down into the low 70s, if you can believe it. We were reminded just how different people's perception of temperature here is on the ride into the city from the airport--a little boy was riding his tricycle alongside the road while wearing a full-face ski mask. Winter's icy grip seems to be loosening, though, as the next few days are supposed to be up in the low 80s with sunshine.

All told, we're glad to be back. It was hard to leave family and friends behind in the States, but we both sense that this is where we're supposed to be. And although it's a bit more complicated than before, it's a lot of fun doing it all as a family of three.

Cúp điện!

Cúp điện, cúp điện. The two-syllable phrase is heard all over Quy Nhon these days, often accompanied by a sigh and roll of the eyes or a resigned half-smile. The power's out. Again.

In a country that is heavily dependent on hydroelectric dams to provide electricity to its citizens, water is power. Literally. Which means that, after what's been called the driest rainy season in 40 years, Vietnam has precious little energy to go around.

Rolling blackouts started in Quy Nhon a couple weeks ago. Not wanting to begin with half-measures, they started by shutting off power to whole swaths of the city for 15 hours at a time--a move which proved to be rather unpopular, disruptive to business and life in general and (it was later discovered) actually forbidden by law. Fine then. Fourteen hour blackouts became the norm. Twice a week, in most parts of the city.

Then someone came up with the bright idea to conserve by shutting down power to the entire city all night on Sundays. Now, when I was living in Washington the electricity would occasionally get knocked out at night during a storm and I wouldn't realize until I overslept my alarm the next morning and saw the clock blinking "12:00" at me when I woke up. But in Vietnam, nighttime power outages are pretty much impossible to sleep through.

With overnight temps in the mid-to-high 70s, humidity to match, and sun-baked brick buildings radiating off the heat of the day, our apartment quickly becomes stifling without fans or some sort of air movement. I would reckon that most folks in Quy Nhon (Joelle and I included) had about two hours of uncomfortable, much-interrupted sleep the night they shut the whole city down.

Realizing that they were well on their way to creating a city full of irritated, sleep-deprived zombies, the authorities most likely fired or exiled the yahoo had suggested the all-night outage, because it hasn't happened since (a very good thing). Instead, they've begun cutting power daily from 5:00 to 7:00 in the morning--all-in-all a much more bearable state of affairs.

Living on the university campus has had its advantages for us, as we've been spared from the long daytime cuts (though seemingly random cuts lasting from 10 minutes to 2 hours have been common enough).

During all of this, I've reflected on what would happen in a North American city, were the civic leaders suddenly to declare four or five months of regular blackouts in the middle of summer. I think "tea party" doesn't even begin to describe the sort of outrage that would be directed at the government. Lawsuits would be plentiful. Senate hearings would be convened. Militias would be organized. Eco warriors living off the grid would chuckle to themselves and pour another bowl of organic muesli. Most people, in other words, would basically freak out.

Not so in Vietnam. Though some might grumble, the attitude here seems to be one of "We've been through a lot worse than this. Just make the best of it." So people just take long naps, head out to the beach where the breeze is fresh, or cruise around the streets on their bikes and feel the wind. The guy who runs the photocopy shop I frequent has just lost about 30% of his business due to lack of power. Rather than spending his free time organizing riots and making molotov cocktails in the back room, he now spends two days a week kicking around a soccer ball in the park with his friends or visiting people in other parts of the city. It's just what you do.

So, next November and December, when the heavens open up and the rains pour down I promise I won't grumble about not being able to go out, or whine about the mold growing on our walls. Instead, I'll smile, flick on our electric tea kettle, and quietly say thank you.

The Binh Dinh Exploratory Commission Inaugural Journey

Yesterday was an "I love Vietnam" day for me (Steven), and particularly an "I love Binh Dinh province" day. I'll tell you why.

As I'm sure I've explained before, Quy Nhon is far from the beaten tourist track (though it's grown noticeably more popular in the last year and a half since we arrived). But compared to the rest of Binh Dinh province, Quy Nhon is a veritable tourist magnet. Except for a couple of spots on the main bus routes, hardly anyone who's not Vietnamese ventures very far outside the city, including us.

This was going to have to change. And change it did. A couple weeks ago, a New Zealand volunteer living in Quy Nhon told us about an old Catholic seminary he had been to. He described for us the general part of the province it was in, but said it would be hard to find if you'd never been there before. Perfect. I did some digging online and Jason rounded up a few of our friends with motorbikes. We set out from Quy Nhon yesterday morning under delightfully cloudy skies with some vague directions clipped from a website (in Vietnamese) and a not-so-detailed map of the area.

As it was, we only had to backtrack once and we got far more than we were hoping for out of the whole deal. The seminary was great--quiet and peaceful, with stately old trees swaying in the breeze. It's been officially shut down by the powers-that-be since the early 1980s, but an elderly Vietnamese priest still lives there and cares for the place, and employs a husband and wife couple who help him out.

We've heard two different versions of the history of the place--one, that the seminary and church were built by the French in the early 1900s; another, that they were built by the Portuguese long before that. It's possible that both are true--the site could have been used by the Portuguese (perhaps even as early as the 1700s) and then re-built by the French later on. Either way, the grounds are well-kept and it's a wonderfully quiet place surrounded by rice fields and well-shaded by the trees. I asked the priest/caretaker if it was possible for people to come spend a night or two there (they certainly have enough rooms) and was told with a smile that sure it was possible so long as permission was granted by the authorities. Which, I'm guessing, means "No."

Either way, I'd like to go out again and spend the better part of a day with a Good Book and a journal. Seems to be a great spot for reflection and thinking.

Our journey wasn't over yet, though. As it turns out we were right out near the hometown of one of the friends who had come along with us. Following his lead we wound our way through more villages and rice paddies until we came to a Catholic cemetery that, according to our friend/guide, dates back four hundred years. The tombs were impressive and shaped like lotus flowers, turtle shells and other crazy, unidentifiable objects. One of the tombs even had stairs that descended underneath it--right down to the water table (which in that part of the country was only about five feet beneath us). We didn't venture down to see whether the tomb's occupant was hanging out down there or not.

From the cemetery it was just another couple of miles to an old Cham tower--the oldest of the 14 towers left standing in the province, apparently. The Cham were a people group from India who settled most of southern Vietnam a long, long time ago. They were eventually driven out by the Vietnamese coming down from the north, but not before they'd built themselves a bunch of brick towers all over the countryside. This tower dated from the 11th century, and was in quite good shape for being around 1000 years old. The Cham were remarkable for building things with bricks but no mortar. Somehow they fitted everything together so precisely that they didn't need the stuff.

From the tower we circled back around the lagoon behind Quy Nhon and hit the new highway which runs the length of the sandy, deserted "economic development zone" across the water from the city. We cruised along the wide, vacant stretch of asphalt and across the long bridge spanning the lagoon, back to the city and civilization. All told it was a tour I would have been happy to pay $30 or $40 for, which we got instead for the price of a couple liters of gasoline and lunch for our friends. Days like that make me happy to be here in Vietnam, happy to have friends willing to drag me around by motorbike for half a day, happy to be slowly unfolding the history and character of these people.

Rather than just posting a bunch of pictures, I thought a video would be in order to share a little more about this trip, so you can take a look at the link below. (Watch it in full screen for full effect, of course.)

Binh Dinh Exploration from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

Chuc mung nam moi!

Well, a happy New Year to everyone. No, I didn't just awaken from a six week long coma or look at the wrong month on the calendar this morning. Here in Vietnam, the (Lunar) New Year happened just a few days ago.

New Year's is a big, big deal in Vietnam. It's known as Tet, and the celebrations go on for a good week, at least. Traditionally, Tet is a time when families welcome back the spirits of their departed ancestors by putting goodies like fruit, rice wine, and sticky rice "cakes" out on the family altar. They send them off after a few days by burning paper money (which the spirits presumably take back to spend in the afterlife). In the meantime there are fireworks and lots of visiting of relatives and friends.
We're not gonna lie--there are some fairly annoying aspects of Tet. We find that kids are given a long break from school and no one really knows what to do with them. Packs of middle schoolers roam the streets with airsoft guns shooting bystanders who catch their eye (including foreign teachers who happen to be riding their bikes around town at the wrong time). Happy New Year to you too, kids. People also tend to drive their motorbikes with an extra dose of crazy thrown in at this time of year and we hear ambulance sirens with sad regularity.

One of my favorite things so far about Tet, though, are the colors. Vietnam is normally a colorful country (in many ways) and Tet is the colorfullest time of year, to coin a new word. Yellow and red are the main ones, but it seems that, so long as it's bright it's all right. Here are some recent pictures with brief explanations for you.

This is the cay may--a special kind of tree that blooms at Tet. I think they're rather expensive, though, so they're much less common than these flowers...

...which lined one of the main streets in town for a good mile on both sides, right up until New Year's Day, when they all mysteriously disappeared.

Flags are plentiful. It helps, I suppose, that red and yellow are big Tet colors.

There's a Children's Park with rides and playground and such right across the street from the University that's usually fairly mellow and quiet. Not during Tet, though. Balloons are the big thing.

My attempt at a cool shot.

It seems that Wal-Mart doesn't have a worldwide monopoly on silly oversized inflatable holiday characters.

All of the markets close down for three days or so during Tet, so everyone does their holiday shopping the day or two beforehand. Crazier than usual.

Visiting graves, cleaning them up, burning incense...all part of the package for most people.

Of course, the cows continue to do their part in keeping the grass trimmed.

Prettier than any firework, balloon or massive inflatable creature--in my humble opinion.

It's a bird...it's a plane...

What on earth are these people doing?



Beach ballet?


Fleeing from oversized, crab-clawed extraterrestrials?


Ultimate Fighting: Beach Edition?

Here, maybe this picture will help…



That’s right. Not Ultimate Fighting, but Ultimate Frisbee.

What you’re seeing are the first publicly released photos of the Vietnamese National Ultimate Frisbee Team in action. What’s that you say? You didn’t know that Vietnam had a National Ultimate Frisbee Team? Well, they do now. Because that’s what our shirts say, and there’s no one around to tell us different.


It all began last year when I (Steven) took note of the fact that the only sports people seemed to play on the beach in Quy Nhon were volleyball, soccer and a local specialty I’m going to call “throw handfuls of wet sand at members of the opposite sex and run away.” Since I don’t particularly enjoy or excel at any of these sports, I decided—along with my teammate Jason—to introduce something new to the mix.

Jason and I happen to own identical 175-gram Ultimate discs (a sure sign that we would be good friends from the get-go). One day, we pulled them out and started tossing them around with students on the beach at exercise time.

At first, the kids were--to be honest--downright terrible. Many were the Frisbees that had to be fished out of the ocean. There were plenty of near-misses, with wildly-flung plastic discs nearly causing serious injury to elderly folks, young couples and small children alike.

But things slowly improved. Under the patient tutelage of Steven and Jason, the students (shall we call them ‘apprentices’?) stopped hurling the discs willy-nilly and gained some control. They began catching more than they dropped. They learned different styles of throwing. They discovered Rule #1 of Frisbee, which is this: It really isn’t that difficult.


The students—who numbered just three or four at the beginning—enjoyed tossing the Frisbee, but they didn’t really understand what the big deal was. Throw, catch. Throw, catch. Throw, miss, chase into the ocean and retrieve. It got a little tedious after a while.

But wait, we told them. There’s more.

One day, when we had a total of six people out on the beach, we played our first “real” game of Ultimate. As expected, it started off pretty terrible but the students caught on quickly. And they enjoyed it.

Throughout the second half of last year and the first half of this year, we’ve continued playing regular games of Ultimate with the students. The group has grown from three or four regulars in the beginning to seven, eight, sometimes ten students (plus the two foreign coach/players). At times crowds gather to witness the sheer awesomeness unfolding before them. Some of them actually have enough courage to come down and play with us, and a few of those stick around and become part of The Group.

We even have visiting foreign players who put in an appearance now and then—Joelle plays once in a while, and we usually rope most of our visitors into playing at least one game while they’re in Quy Nhon.


Partway through first semester this year, I realized something: These students were good. I mean, they were really good. They were fast, they knew how to throw and catch, they understood the game. And they made me work hard to keep up with them. When others showed up to play, the students themselves were able to explain the game and teach the newbies how to play much more quickly than I could. Hmmm. An important Nugget of Wisdom in there somewhere, to be sure.

We finally reached the point toward the end of first semester this year that we figured our skills (and, indeed, our fame) had grown to such a point that we would have to make ourselves official. And by “official,” I mean we had to make cool shirts for us to wear.


In a time-honored Vietnamese tradition, I went out and “borrowed” a couple of design ideas from various places, put them together, and we had ourselves a shirt design. This is what I came up with.

So, now that we are the undisputed representatives of Ultimate Frisbee in Vietnam we just need some other national teams to contact us and play a game or two. Any takers? Anyone?


P.S. Yes, we're aware that there are already some Ultimate leagues in Hanoi and Saigon...and we're willing to consider taking them on as minor league partners to our franchise.

P.P.S. Thanks to Sylvia for taking some great pictures of the team in action, and to Paul, for being a visiting foreign star player.