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.

More Micah and a trip to Thailand

For those of you who aren't on Facebook (all three of you) I'm posting a link to some sweet recent Micah pictures that I posted to our online album right about...HERE.

Saturday we fly down to Saigon, spend the night and then head out the next day head for Chiang Mai, Thailand where Steven will be taking his TESOL Master's classes and we'll be attending our organization's annual conference. We're looking forward to seeing the rest of the members of Team Vietnam, as we missed being with them at the usual beginning-of-the-year festivities. All told we'll be gone about 3 weeks, so we might not be quite so able to stay in touch in the near future here.

Rest assured we're all well, Steven taught a couple of classes this week (and loved it), Joelle has made banana bread for half the city in celebration of the Lunar New Year and Micah continues to grow. And smile. And look really cute.

Laters.

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.

You have entered...the Economic Development Twilight Zone

This holiday season has been a full, busy, but great time for us as we've had a chance to share about Christmas and our reasons for celebrating it with hundreds of excited students. It's really quite impressive to look at the holiday from an outsider's perspective--just how much effort and money we as Americans pour into Christmas. No other holiday even comes close. No wonder people around the world are fascinated with it.

In addition to trying to explain Christmas to everyone, we've been doing all our 'normal' stuff--teaching classes, hanging out with students, going to the market, meeting with teammates, etc. etc. etc.

We've been busy, so it was with no small amount of enthusiasm that we woke up last Saturday, saw that it was going to be a relatively cool (less than 85 degree) day, and decided to get on our bikes and flee town. The trip we took was one that we had been planning for a long time--one that would only really be possible in cooler weather, due to the time and distances involved. It was, as it turned out, a trip into Utter Weirdness.

We started by riding across town to the Thi Nai bridge--currently the longest bridge in Vietnam at about two miles. The bridge was built across a big lagoon which lies behind the peninsula that Quy Nhon occupies. It was constructed for the express purpose of connecting Quy Nhon and its port to another, larger peninsula on the other side of the lagoon which is slated to become the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone (take a look at the map below, if that helps).

Since real estate on Quy Nhon's narrow peninsula is in short supply, it made sense in someone's mind (or pocketbook) to encourage industrial development on this other peninsula in an area resembling the Sahara desert, with towering sand dunes and little else. The result was a kind of weirdness which seems unique to East Asian countries with centrally-planned economies.

The best way I can describe it is as a cross between the setting of a 1960s "last man on earth" sci-fi movie and Alice in Wonderland. Roads that go nowhere, creepy deserted warehouses, concrete animal statues--this place has it all. Upon reaching the far side of the bridge we found out that our camera batteries were low, so we weren't able to take very many pictures. But take a look at what we did capture, and I'll try to let the pictures do most of the talking.

Here we see the Thi Nai bridge in the background and a fit young man with a sweet steel-frame bicycle. (No it's NOT a girl's bike. All the bikes in Vietnam have the angled cross-bar like that. They really do.)

Our first discovery when we reached the far side of the bridge was an exciting one. At the base of the bridge, some sort of resort was under construction. And as anyone who's been to Southeast Asia knows, no high class resort is complete without a menagerie of concrete animals to "enhance" the natural landscape. In this case, the animals were dolphins (apparently being launched into the air by an underwater explosion of some sort) and seals...

...harpooned seals...

...with holes in their heads...

...and giant swans.

Leaving our animal friends behind, we moved further into the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone, past a huge (deserted) gas station, and a (deserted) strip mall with billiards tables, a cafe, and a karaoke bar. We entered an area with big roundabouts and massive six- and eight-lane, newly paved roads...

...many of which dead-ended in sand dunes...

...all of which were almost completely deserted and half covered with sand.

In fact, the only economic development we saw in the Economic Development Zone (apart from the deserted gas station, half-constructed resort, and empty strip mall) were some big warehouses that must have taken a beating in the two big storms this year; the majority of their roofs were lying in pieces scattered about on the sand beside them.

After some further biking on deserted six-lane highways through the dunes, we came to the little fishing village of Nhon Ly. To reach the village you have to bike past a massive graveyard that's probably as big as the village itself. Graves stretch across the dunes for perhaps a half mile before you actually come to the village. Kind of creepy.


Nhon Ly village was a friendly little place with narrow, winding streets and some nice-looking (though not-so-clean) beaches. But it's a long ways from nowhere.

All told it was a good, worthwhile trip--if not for its scenic beauty then for its sheer oddness and its glimpses of another side to life in a quickly-changing country.

Local adventures

For a more complete set of pictures relating to this story, check out our photo album.

So far this year our schedule hasn't allowed for any far-ranging trips into the hinterlands of Vietnam. (We'll save those for when we have visitors here with us), but we have been able to get to know the area around Quy Nhon a little better and that's been a very good thing.

A random encounter with a Dutch tourist looking to explore the surrounding area provided the motivation for Joelle to organize a trip with a couple of the girls she tutors. They headed about an hour out of town to a 'natural area' called Ham Ho--a river with some cool, sculpted rocks--and then hit up some Cham towers on the way back to town. The Cham people lived in this part of Vietnam long before there was a Vietnam--they were a Hindu culture from India that once ruled a good portion of Southeast Asia. The area encompassing Da Nang, Nha Trang and Quy Nhon was their main center of operations in Vietnam. There are still some hilltop towers left in the area to remind us of what once was. (Not quite Angkor Wat, but still pretty cool.)

The next day we hopped a bus with our friend, Phung, and headed out to her hometown in the same general vicinity as Ham Ho. Phung lives in the hometown of a guy named Quang Trung (or Nguyen Hue), best known for driving the Chinese out of northern Vietnam and uniting the country under one ruler back in the late 1700s. There's a museum in his honor, which Phung was proud to show us.

We also had a chance to visit with her great family. Phung's grandparents, who spent 14 years living in Louisiana, are now back in Vietnam living with her mother and younger brother (Phung's father passed away in a motorbike accident several years ago, prompting their move back to Vietnam). One of the first things her grandpa did when he saw us was to shuffle into the other room and return with his green card and Louisiana driver's license, which he was evidently very proud of.
Older Vietnamese people--with their pajama suits and comb-overs and beautiful smiles--have a way of just charming the heck out of you and these two were no exception. We loved them pretty much instantly. Now we've got a date to return and celebrate Tet (Vietnamese New Year) with them, which should be a hoot.

Oh yeah, and while visiting Phung's hometown, Steven had to ride around on a ridiculously small bike, much to the amusement of Joelle, Phung, and everyone else on the street who saw him.

Ways to know you're back in Vietnam

Should you one day wake up to find yourself in the middle of a hot, humid country and you begin to wonder exactly where you are (Belize? Brazil? Bangladesh?) it may be useful to check the following telltale markers to determine whether you are, in fact, in Vietnam.

Marker 1: Whilst walking on the sidewalk, do you find yourself frequently having to avoid motorbikes that don't fit on the street? If so, you may be in Vietnam.


Marker 2: Are shower sandals provided in your hotel bathroom? Are said sandals much, much too small for your feet? If so, you may be in Vietnam.


Marker 3: Whilst standing in your hotel shower, does the showerhead point directly at your belly button? (See "A") At the same time, are you in immediate danger of giving yourself a concussion on the water heater? (See "B") If you answer "yes" to both of these, chances are quite good that you're in Vietnam.


Marker 4: Do you see people taking advantage of a road flooded by an overflowing lake to wash off their motorbikes? Further evidence that you may indeed be in Vietnam.


Marker 5: Are you astounded and humbled by the beauty of this place--the sky, the rice fields, the ponds, the people? Have you answered "yes" to each of these questions? Then yes, you can safely assume you've found yourself in Vietnam.


We're baaaaaack...