Gimme a brrrrrreak!

Well, it’s gotten down to a bone-chilling 68 degrees here in Quy Nhon, so I guess you could say winter has arrived.

Actually, the weather has been cloudy and cool (for the most part) since we showed up in early December. The lows get down into the upper 60s and let me tell you—that feels plenty cold for Quy Nhon, especially with a fresh breeze blowing in off the ocean. Joelle and I can’t recall a stretch like this where we’ve been comfortable wearing long pants and long sleeves (even socks and shoes!!) outside for such a long period of time. Come April when it’s 85 degrees at sunrise I’m sure we won’t believe it was ever this cold.

When the temperature here drops below 70, the locals start piling on the clothes. Layers and layers of clothes. Jackets with fur-lined hoods, turtlenecks, big puffy ski-type jackets, gloves. Kids run around in full snow-suit outfits complete with ski masks. It looks a bit like that awful movie The Day After Tomorrow (if you’ve never seen it, you’re fortunate). This screenshot should suffice to give you the idea:

Anyway, in the midst of all this wintry weather, Joelle and I regularly take Micah out for walks in his stroller along the beach. In fact, we consider this to be ideal walking weather because a) we’re not soaked in sweat within 30 seconds of leaving the apartment and b) the normally crowded sidewalk along the beach is often almost deserted at this time of year.

The Vietnamese we do see when we’re out think we’re downright nuts, I’m sure, and neglectful parents to boot. I mean, we’ve got our four month old baby outside in 68 degree weather wearing nothing but long sleeves, long pants, socks and a blanket. For shame. Where’s the snowsuit? Ski mask? Scarf? Moon boots? Some of them just look at us, look at the stroller and shake their heads. Others stop and take the time to explain that it’s certainly not weather for babies to be outside in. They point to the cloudy skies and we hear two words repeated again and again from many different mouths: lanh (cold) and gio (windy).

An interesting side note here: In traditional Vietnamese belief, “bad wind” is responsible for just about every malady known to man. When it gets windy, people start dropping like flies. I was made aware of this during my first year of teaching when one of my students fainted in class and had to be carried back to her dorm room by some classmates. Why had she fainted, I asked her classmates, thinking that perhaps dengue or malaria or at least a good strong case of typhoid fever had been the culprit. “It’s windy today,” came the reply. Ah hah.

In windy weather, children should—at minimum—be dressed like this one:

In any case, we often either smile and nod knowingly at the advice folks give us and keep walking or else we explain that Americans like “cold” weather, that the current temperature back home is somewhere around 35 degrees, that Micah was born in America and that the inside of our house was around 68 degrees for the first few months of his life. So khong sao. No problem. As if bad wind ever hurt anyone. Pshaw. Now if we can just get over these darn colds…

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.

Tropical Storm Mirinae

On Monday, November 2nd, Tropical Storm Mirinae lumbered ashore in central Vietnam, bringing a surprising amount of wind, rain and waves along with it.

Having recently survived Typhoon Ketsana (a Category 2 storm which hit about 200 miles north of us) we weren't really expecting too much from a puny tropical storm like Mirinae. The main difference, however, was that instead of hitting 200 miles away, Mirinae slammed into Phu Yen province, just a few miles south of Quy Nhon.
We weren't the only ones surprised, as this article makes clear. While the wind in Quy Nhon was definitely stronger than Ketsana due to the storm's proximity, it was the rain that we couldn't believe. 600 mm of rain fell in our province in a 24 hour period. That's 23 inches in 24 hours, the heaviest rain here in about 60 years and far above and beyond anything we ever saw in "rainy" Washington State. Since the bulk of the city is built on a fairly sheltered sand spit far from any large rivers, Quy Nhon itself was unaffected by floods but many of the low-lying areas in this part of the country were inundated. So far, 98 deaths have been blamed on the storm, with 20 people still unaccounted for.

Despite everything it threw at us, we stayed safe and dry in our on-campus apartment here (except for the occasional foray outside with ponchos and video camera). Through the entire storm the power never went off and we never ran out of water. The same can't be said for much of the rest of the city, which is currently going on 5 days with no running water. Everyone seems to be taking it in stride, though. Life is basically back to normal in the city, with students attending classes and people back at work.
A friend of ours who had returned to her hometown (about 40 miles from Quy Nhon) to weather out the storm with her family brought back this random and kind of sad story: An old man who lived down the road from her kept 100 pigs on his little farm. As the rains started to fall, he didn't pay much attention--this is Vietnam and it rains a lot here, after all. But by 9 PM the water had risen quickly and washed all of his pigs downriver. A single sow was saved by a man who somehow either hauled it into his boat or towed it to shore. He took it back to the old man and sold it to him for 200,000 VND, or about $12.

And now, if you're not tired of storm videos yet, here's what things looked like from our perspective...

Tropical Storm Mirinae - Quy Nhon, Vietnam from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

Typhoon video

A short video of Typhoon Ketsana as seen from Quy Nhon--before, during and after. Not quite CNN quality, but you get the picture. (If you're reading this on Facebook you probably don't see the video. Click here to go to it.)

All quiet on the eastern front

Well, that was interesting.

We are alive and quite well after a slight grazing by Typhoon Ketsana. The storm rolled ashore around midmorning, 200 miles to our north, and I'll tell you what--I wouldn't have wanted to be any closer. (If you look closely, you can see "Qui Nhon" down on the bottom half of that big orange-looking storm).


Starting around sundown yesterday, the wind started howling and growling as the storm approached land, and didn't really let up until midafternoon today. Joelle contemplated heading out to the market this morning during a short lull, but abandoned that idea once things really started kicking. It was a good choice, as a ride around town late this afternoon showed--trees all over town had been snapped and tossed before the wind.

During one particularly fierce gust this morning we heard a crash next to our apartment, followed by a sustained chorus of high pitched Vietnamese girl-shrieks. We walked out on our balcony to see what had happened--an 18-inch diameter tree standing in the middle of the students' bike parking lot had snapped and fallen right in the midst of the crowded lot with students all around. It smashed a few bicycles but, to everyone's great relief, no students. Shortly after that, classes were cancelled for the day and the students headed quickly home to ride out the rest of the storm.


Something I had anticipated which didn't materialize (thankfully) was a big storm surge. Our apartment is about 200 yards from the beach and I half expected to see saltwater spray outside our front door this morning. No such luck.

Da Nang and places north of here didn't fare as well. Around 2 dozen people are confirmed dead already and that number will probably rise as news comes out from the more remote areas. Keep them in your thoughts.

I'll end with a collage of the storm's aftermath (click on it for a larger version). Take care, everyone, and stay dry!

Storm update

It's about 11:30 pm (past our bedtime) but we're awake listening to the wind howl outside. After a lull this afternoon, the wind picked up again this evening. There have been some good gusts so far but nothing more severe than a typical stormy November day in Washington.

However, the same can't be said of our friends and teammates, the Farnums, who flew from Hanoi to Da Nang the other day to celebrate their wedding anniversary at a nice beachside resort. Da Nang happens to be directly in the path of the approaching storm--currently a Category 2 with winds around 100+ mph. They've been moved out of their cabin on the beach and put in a hotel about a football field's length away from the beach where they can watch the whole thing go down.

Also, the parents of Mo ("Muh"), a student that Joelle and I got to know last year, live right in the same area. Their house floods regularly as it is, and it looks like this one's going to be worse than normal. She sent Joelle a message this evening telling her that she's very worried for her family. (You can read about our visit to her family's house last year here.) Please keep Vietnam in general and especially the Farnums and Mo's family in your thoughts over the next few days here!

More updates as time, internet and electricity availability allow...

Typhoon Ketsana

Well, the tropical storm which just dumped 13 inches of rain on Manila has beefed itself up to a Category 1 typhoon and is now bearing down on Vietnam's central coast. Currently it's still a ways out at sea but the winds have kicked up and the rain has definitely started.

It's predicted to make landfall near Da Nang, about 200 miles north of us, with 70 to 90 mph winds and lots of rain. The effects here in Quy Nhon shouldn't be nearly as bad. For us, any troubles we experience will probably come from rainfall. It's kind of interesting (and a little scary) to watch the swells roll into the bay here, though. Quy Nhon itself is in a fairly well-protected little cove, but looking out across the bay you can see where the waves roll full-force into the rocks. Powerful stuff--and this is from a fairly weak system a couple hunred miles away.

I'll end with the requisite picture of a palm tree blowing in the wind, and a promise to keep you all updated if anything exciting should happen.

Tropical Storm update

The storm ended up moving well to the north of us, and I think it lost its "tropical stormness" (i.e. the winds died considerably) even before it moved onshore. But it did bring with it a whole lot of rain. Hanoi hasn't been affected, but the rain has wreaked havoc in the far north of the country. Over 70 people have died up near the Chinese border due to flooding and landslides. This all hits a little closer to home for us since we were up in that part of the country just a couple of weeks ago. Some of the roads we traveled on were frighteningly unstable--we could see evidence of landslides and washouts everywhere--so I imagine they're in much worse shape now.

A family from our fellowship was traveling this week in that part of the country when their train became stranded between two landslides. They had to wade through waist-deep water to get to a nearby town where they've been stuck for the last couple of days--no way in or out by road or rail. Scary times.

For us, life continues as normal but for many people outside the capital this is a difficult time. Keep them in your thoughts!

Tropical Storm Kammuri Bears Down on Hanoi!!!

(Cue the dramatic music and show the sweet graphic with the palm tree bent in half by the wind.)

This just in: Tropical Storm Kammuri is lashing the southern Chinese coastline with ferocious winds in excess of 30 miles per hour! Currently, the monster storm is working its way westward toward landfall in Vietnam some time Saturday. Fearing the worst, Hanoi's terrified foreign residents have begun stockpiling essentials like ChocoPies, peanut butter and ice cream. Local stores are nearly sold out of flimsy ponchos and cheapo umbrellas.

Said frightened U.S. citizen Steven Shetterly, "It rained today. I had to ride my bike and my feet and legs got all muddy. So that was kind of gross." As Kammuri prepares to pummel northern Vietnam, only time will tell whether Mother Nature will spare Shetterly from having to get his feet muddy again.

Okay, in case you couldn't tell, the above was a bit tongue-in-cheek, overdramatic CNN/Fox News style reporting. Yes, there is a tropical storm moving toward landfall northeast of Hanoi. No, we're not particularly concerned. As of now, the maximum windspeed here is forecast to be in the 20-25 mph range. Which sounds like a breezy May day in Washington. It has actually been raining a lot today, which could prove to be much more of a concern than the wind. We live on the 2nd floor, though, so I think we'll be good to go. We'll keep you posted in case anything exciting happens.

Ugh...

In case anyone asks why businesses shut down and people sleep through the afternoon in Vietnam, three to four months of the following should provide sufficient reason:

It rained the other day...

...and how.

This was not your typical Pacific Northwest drizzle, nor was it even your not-as-typical Northwest downpour. This was Southeast Asia rain, and for a while it felt as if the entire South China Sea had been picked up and dumped on top of us.

We were in the middle of language lessons when it started, and the rain was falling so hard we were having a little trouble hearing each other talk inside our apartment. By the time it stopped a couple hours later we had a good five or six inches of water in our courtyard, and parts of the alleyway outside our house had perhaps a foot or so of water. I looked outside to see leaves, bits of styrofoam, garbage bags, etc. flowing out into the alley and on out of sight.

Except for putting on ponchos and grabbing umbrellas, people in the neighborhood more or less carried on as normal. From our roof, I saw that one of the ground-floor offices near our place had opened both their front and side sliding doors, apparently so that the waves that were being kicked up by passing motorbikes could flow through their place more easily. (Reason #75 why tile is a good idea and carpet a very bad idea in Vietnam.)

Our language teacher was stranded at our place for an extra hour or so, reluctant (with good reason) to venture out on her motorbike in all the water. Steven couldn't restrain himself and had to go out and take a few pictures. He made sure to wash his feet and soak his Chacos in bleach water when he returned.

We've put together a video for you to get at least a little taste of what a Vietnam rainstorm is like. And yes, we were assured by our other language teacher the following day that storms/mini-floods like that are a common occurrence here during the summer. Anyone got an extra couple pairs of hip waders they'd like to ship to Hanoi...?

Quick note about the video: You might want to turn your sound down a bit before you play it. For some reason the volume came out really loud.