Virtual-Doug

Homesick for Huê

A number of readers are either former residents of Huê, or have visited Huê in the past – some Vietnamese – some foreigners.  Maybe you have a twinge of homesickness for the beautiful city of Huê.  If so, here is a ride around the city.  I’m not going to include all the tourist places – though those are familiar landmarks – but rather both the famous spots and the not so famous spots.

Be sure to click on the photos to see a larger version.

This is not a famous place – it is the Phú Cam Canal looking west towards the bridge on Điện Biên Phu Street.  Sometimes small sampans can be seen floating by, but most of the time it is quiet and peaceful.

But, just east of this spot is one of the most famous landmarks in the city – the Phú Cam Catholic Church.  It is a cathedral – meaning the Bishop of the Diocese of Huê is seated here.  While the architecture is obviously not Vietnamese, it is a beautiful edifice nonetheless.  The Mystery Guest Blogger and I attend services there on Sunday evenings.

The street signs give you an idea of how Huê sees itself as the location of some of the most striking World Heritage sites in Việt Nam.  The icon in the middle of the signs is a graphic of the Forbidden City – the residence of the emperors within the walled city built in the early 1800s as the new capital of Việt Nam.  Nguyên Huệ Street is a main street that begins at Lê Lọi Street, the main east-west artery on the south side of the city that parallels the Perfume River. (By the way – check the link to the map on the right side of your screen.)

The walled city is called The Citadel, and it is still very much a residential part of the city.  One of the central landmarks of the walled city is the Flag Tower.  It is a beautiful sight that can be seen in many different parts of Huê.

The oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning in Huê is Đại Học Sư Phạm – or the College of Pedagogy.  Americans would call it a teacher’s college.  Today, it is part of the University of Huê   It is on Lê Lọi Street near the old bridge.  Most tourists walk by the gates without realizing what it is.

On the other end of Lê Lọi Street from Sư Phạm is one of the three most prestigious high schools in Việt Nam.  Entrance to Quoc Học (say quock hop) is extremely competitive, and it’s graduates go on to study at the best universities in Việt Nam.  Both General Giap and Hồ Chí Minh studied here.

Húng Vương Street is the main north-south street on the south side of the river.  It is the center of the tourist district.  One of our favorite haunts is the Mandarin Café, shown here with its owner Mr. Cu and his wife Thanh.  Both have not only kept us well fed, but have been good friends, helping us feel our way around a land where we don’t know the language.

Everybody has seen pictures of the famous old truss bridge over the river – but nobody takes pictures of the new bridge.  The old bridge no longer carries heavy traffic (except for the occasional taxi that sneaks past the traffic police), but the new bridge is much stronger and wider and handles the truck traffic traveling up and down National Highway 1.  Yes – that is the Flag Tower in the background.

Like most Vietnamese cities, Huê is a city of markets.  One doesn’t go shopping for two weeks worth of groceries here – there is no way to store, refrigerate, or freeze your purchases.  One goes shopping every day - sometimes twice a day.  One of the larger markets in Huê is the Chợ An Cưu. (Chợ means market -  An Cưu is the name of the neighborhood.)  Its on Highway 1 at the Phú Cam Canal.  It used to mark the southern entrance into the city, but the “suburbs” have grown well south now.

Huê currently has three over-the-air television channels, though the government is in the process of expanding that to ten within a few years.  Two of the channels are national, with the third devoted to local broadcasting.  The vast majority of Vietnamese have a TV in their home.  It is the principle means of getting information out to the people.  Programming is a mix of news, documentaries, corny soap operas (similar to Mexican novellas), and game shows. All of the channels emanate from this facility.  The tall antenna is festooned with lights and is quite pretty at night.

If you have enjoyed this brief trip around Huê, leave a comment and let me know if there are places you would to see. Maybe we’ll do this again sometime.

One Building’s Construction

How does a construction crew in Việt Nam get concrete up above ground level?  How is the fresh concrete mixed?

Labor is cheap in Việt Nam, and builders takes advantage of that fact.  Concrete is not pre-mixed and delivered by truck.  Instead, the ingredients are brought to the site, combined, and put in place.  Notice the pile of sand on the left, the pile of gravel to the right, and the pile of bags of concrete.  Note too that there is no cement mixer on the site.

Be sure to click on the photos to see a larger picture.

The mixing is done by throwing the various ingredients together into a mound, then making a cone for water.  Remember when you were a kid and you used to make a hole in your mashed potatoes for the gravy?  Same idea.  The workers combine everything together with few turns of the shovel, then load it into a bucket which is winched to the second story.

Those of you who are involved in the construction industry are probably wondering about the consistency of the mix.

Me too.

By the way – do you notice the person in the blue shirt?  That’s a woman.

 

At the top, each bucket was unloaded, then  returned to the ground for more.  I’m sure the mixing was improved a bit just by the manual effort of moving it around up there.  Notice all the safety equipment the man is not wearing.  Once the laws are better defined in this country, it will be a lawyer’s paradise.

But, if you think this concrete job was hard work, look at the method that was used to mix and move concrete to the second floor of another house nearby.  The concrete was mixed on site in much the same manner – combine the water with the dry ingredients using shovels – but then the mixing was really enhanced by how it was elevated.  The “mixers” got a shovel full of concrete, then hoisted it up to a platform over their heads.  Workers on that platform then got a shovel full, and threw it up to the next level, who then tossed it up to the floor where it was spread.  That did a better job of mixing the concrete.  The method also saved money.  Remember the power winch used on the first site?  No need for such expensive equipment here.  Labor is cheap in Việt Nam. 

And again, I noted about half of the workers were women.  I’ll bet these ladies don’t go to many high-falutin’ parties.

Comments on the Comments

I realize many readers do not read the comments other people post - that's because you read the main story, make a comment if you wish,  but seldom go back to read other people's thoughts.

With that in mind, I did post a comment to some comments - and here is what I wrote:

Nguyen - yes, millionsmore dong!  Those "scooters" are expensive!

Bro - My bike in Atlanta was small - a mere 350 cc, or over 3 times the power of the moto.

Chris - No - have not seen the new xe mini -

And - would the commenter from Harvard please post another comment and leave your email address?   I'd like to talk to you.

The Duck Herder

Việt Nam is primarily an agricultural country, and the principle product is rice.  Seldom does a meal go by without cơm.  Rice is the basic staple of the Vietnamese diet.  One of the favorite meats is duck.  It is as common to see duck on the menu as chicken.  The Mystery Guest Blogger even did a story about ducks going home for dinner.

In our area of Central Việt Nam, there are two harvests of rice per year.  After the rice is harvested, there are still grains of rice left in the field that escaped picking.

This is where the ducks come in.  Duck farmers send their flocks into the harvested paddies to glean the remaining kernels of rice.  The rice farmer gets his field prepared for the next planting by ridding the field of old grain and by a little fertilization from the ducks’ droppings.  The duck farmer fattens up his birds for market. It’s a good deal all around.  Nobody gets paid – its just a great symbiotic relationship.

I have no idea why the ducks don’t fly away.  Maybe they just know they have a good life with lots of rice.  Maybe their wings are clipped, but I doubt that merely because there are so many ducks.  One Vietnamese tells me that this breed of domesticated ducks cannot fly further than 10 meters or so.  (About 30 feet.)  Nonetheless, the duck farmer has no trouble herding them from one paddy to another using his long bamboo pole.  He motioned for me to move a little way down the road, then he deftly herded them right by me as they crossed to road to another field.  Too bad I couldn’t capture the noise of a couple hundred ducks quacking away as they waddled past.

On a more somber note, I am sure somebody reading this is beginning to worry about us catching avian flu.  I know it is major topic in the western press now, but the pandemic (if it occurs) will come when avian flu is transmitted directly from humans to humans.  At present, you can only catch the flu directly from ducks or chickens. If  I immerse my hands in duck doo doo, or if I drink some raw duck blood, I might have a chance of getting bird flu.  But, I was yards away from the birds.  At present, I am in no more danger of contracting bird flu than any of you in the west.

Two-Wheeling in Việt Nam

Maybe you are a dedicated motorcyclist in North America, Europe, Australia, or other industrialized country  – or maybe you are newly arrived in Việt Nam and you’d like to make things a little easier on yourself and ride one of the ubiquitous motorbikes seen all over the country.  They are easy to rent, and cheap to buy.

The Vietnamese call them a môto, and they are quite different from a motorcycle.  Yes – they look pretty much the same.  They have two wheels, a small engine, and a seat designed to carry two people (albeit small Asian people.)  There is a throttle on the handlebars operated by the right hand, and a lever for the front brake.  There is a foot pedal for the rear brake, and a foot lever for shifting the gears.  It has a headlight, brake light, and turn signals.  Sounds like a motorcycle – but it ain’t.

A môto is intended to be an inexpensive people mover around an urban area.  Motorcycles are intended to be ridden at American highways speeds.  (I’m not talking about dirt bikes here – that’s another story.)  The engine in a môto cannot be bigger than 125 cc, and can only be one cylinder.  Bigger than that, and they are taxed at a much higher rate.   I cannot think of a street bike in America with an engine smaller than 250 cc, and they are usually twin cylinders.  The môto is geared for lugging heavy loads around at slow speeds.  I seldom use first gear – even with the Mystery Guest Blogger on the back – simply because I don’t need it.  First gear is suitable for pulling tree stumps.   In normal driving around Huê, I seldom go faster than 30 kilometers per hour.  (About 18 miles per hour.)  Pretty slow, eh?

Môtos are also easy to ride.  They have no hand clutch, but rather an automatic  centrifugal clutch that engages the gears as you add power.  Need to shift gears?  Just back off on the throttle, then snick the front of the gear lever down.  (Motorcycle riders can be confused by this at first – you want to use your toe to lift the gear lever, but a môto is designed to just rotate through the gears by pressing down all the time.  You can downshift if you want, but you do it by stepping on the back part of the gear shifter.  If you are not a motorcyclist, and have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it.)  Pay a few thousand dông more, and you can buy a môto that looks like a scooter and has an automatic transmission.

A motorcycle is designed to carry a person at highway speeds with neck-snapping acceleration.  Maybe – just maybe – a môto will go 60 kilometers per hour (about 38 miles per hour.)  In America, you will get run over at that speed.

A môto is intended to be primary transportation.  Few people in the west own motorcycles as their only transportation – a motorcycle is a luxury for having fun.

Probably the biggest deterrent for most foreigners to riding a môto in Việt Nam is the daunting traffic patterns – or, in reality, the lack of traffic patterns.  When you arrive in the country, and are riding through the streets of Sài Gòn or Hà Nội  in your air conditioned bus, the traffic looks positively chaotic.

And, it is.

How to learn the traffic patterns?

Ride a bicycle for a few months.  You can’t learn the traffic patterns from a car window nor while walking – you need to be in the traffic on two wheels.  A bike is the safest way to learn.  The Mystery Guest Blogger wrote an excellent story about bicycling on May 30th.  Also take a look at the posting on Antidote to Burnout, a blog by a man making his first sojourn back to Việt Nam since 1972.  It’s true – there is no road rage in Việt Nam, and its also true about people cutting you off, turning into traffic ahead of you, turning right from the left-hand lane, kids riding four abreast on their bikes, and riders doing other things that would irritate a saint in America.  But there is no road rage.

Read both postings – then come back for more on Two-Wheeling in Việt Nam.

One Building’s Construction

You can see some progress with the brick work.  I am curious to see how this kind of “outside” work will continue as we are just getting into the rainy season.

I thought a side perspective would also give North Americans some idea of how narrow some Vietnamese homes are built.  While certainly not all of them are this narrow, it certainly is not unusual either.  Notice the wood and bamboo internal supports are gone.

Small World

Total astonishment.  That’s the only way to describe my thoughts when I met with my first year speaking class yesterday and saw one of my students in this t-shirt.

As the shirt says, Florida Southern College is in Lakeland, Florida.  It is a small liberal arts school with fewer than 3,000 students.

It is also my alma mater

Small world indeed, but as Bruce says, I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.

New Blog

I don't spend a lot of time linking to other blogs, but I just found a new one I recommend highly.  Vietnamese God is a young blogger from Nha Trang who currently lives in Ha Noi.  He writes in English - and does it quite well too.  But what intrigues me the most is that he is a good observer of his world.  Posts about weddings, risky jobs, and pavement pounders show a high skill at seeing the world around him. 

For my friends back in North America - keep checking Vietnamese God.

For my Vietnamese friends who say their lives are boring and therefore they cannot blog, take a look and see how he does it.

Snake in the Bike

The small motorbikes in common use in Việt Nam have a very small engine.  The motor is shielded on the sides by a panel that also protects the rider from puddle splashes.  The white panel in the front of this motorbike is an example.  (This picture shows one of our best friends here in Hué with her daughter on the back.)  In the side of the panel is a small hole used to get at some of the controls for the engine.

This picture shows the engine as you look through the hole in the panel.  You see engine parts - - and something else that looks long and tubular and rather soft.  You might also see something that might look like the head of a snake.

No – its not a snake.  It’s a snake skin.  In this photo, taken from the other side of the bike, you can see a bit more of the body.  As you know, snakes must shed their skin as they grow.  Our Guest House is surrounded by rice paddies, and I have no doubt there are a fair number of snakes in those paddies where they hunt and help control the rat population that eats large amounts of rice.  (I read somewhere that about 20% of all rice in Việt Nam is eaten by rodents.)  So the recent owner of this skin is not some nasty poisonous thing, but rather a beneficial guy who just needed to come in out of the water in the paddies so he could find something rough to help him shed his skin.

One part of the skin fell off the bike as soon as the owner touched it, and it landed on the  ground underneath the bike.

The bike was parked inside the Guest House.  There is an area designated for us to park our bicycles and motorbikes inside.  That allows them to be under lock at night.  The Gentle Reader might ask “How did the snake get in the building if the place is locked up?”

Silly Gentle Reader. 

The locked door keeps out people, but the two inch gap under the closed door doesn’t keep out growing snakes.

One Building’s Construction

Sorry about that.  I missed a week of watching the house grow because I was in Thailand for meetings.

The most obvious change over the past two weeks is that the building has sprouted a second story.  Notice also that steel reinforcing rods are sticking out of the concrete columns, which means there will be a third floor – or more.  Most homes in Việt Nam are built that way.  I don’t know why, but even in the countryside, it is not uncommon to see multi-story houses.  Maybe a Vietnamese reader can add a comment to answer that question.

(Be sure to click on the photos to see a larger version.)

I took these photos on Sunday.  As I have mentioned before in this blog, Sunday is not a “day of rest” to the Vietnamese.  Many of them work seven days a week.  You might ask why there are no workers in the top photo.  Its because I took the photo at 12:30 in the afternoon, and that is nap time.   These workers, and most Vietnamese, rise early in the morning – about 5 AM.  For most, the work day begins at 7 AM.  (Our classes start at 7 AM.)  By 11:30 (or so), they eat lunch, then nap for an hour or so.  The work day continues to five PM.

Notice the wooden supports used during construction.  These are used even on big building projects.  It is also the norm to see scaffolding made of bamboo.  Before you dismiss that idea as third world backwardness, you need to know some kinds of bamboo are incredibly tough and durable.  I like the idea of using biodegradable construction tools that are inexpensive and locally made.

Finally, I ask my readers to check the “Comments” section at the end of each posting.  You will find Vietnamese students making comments about what they read.  It’s a great way for me – and you – to learn more about the Vietnamese culture.