Reason 183 To Learn Vietnamese...

...to learn how to say, "Just cut a little bit."

I thought showing with my fingers how much I wanted cut would do the trick but clearly not. Now if only I could find a hat that fits me in this freaking country.

A Few Quick Anecdotes

Yesterday was a blogger's dream. I had a ton of hilarious things happen to me and here's just a few:
1. I began teaching. 75% of my classes were fantastic. The other 25% was an hour and a half of six year olds who don't understand a word of English and have more energy than any kids I have ever seen. A few highlights from that class were:
a) A sandal flying by my face twice. Apparently they use them like boomerangs.
b) A "slow" kid who sat in the corner and broke the window shades and picked his nose and put it onto my teacher's book when I asked him if he did his homework.
c) Announcing homework five minutes before the end of class and then promptly having fifteen kids rush for the door. Apparently it's like Pavlov's dog. They are so conditioned to leaving when told their homework that they don't look at the time. I literally had to block the door and fight over fifteen kids...who are a lot stronger than they appear.
d) Just when the class couldn't get any worse I let everyone out and one kid pushed another who fell into a little girl. The little girl proceeded to cry hysterically for ten minutes. I brought her to the office since, again, she didn't speak any English and didn't understand "are you okay." She was okay. I wasn't though.

2. On my lunch break I met the teacher whose classes I took over and he said to me, "this afternoon you've got a kid who is obsessed with bananas." I just nodded and said, "Sounds good." Sure enough in my third class I had everyone introduce themselves and this awkward 13-year-old in the corner says "My name is Banana Boy." After that literally every other word out of his mouth was banana.

3. One of my class lesson plans was based around this CD that comes with the book. Sure enough when I put the CD in it was the wrong one. I ad-libbed on the fly and made it work.

4. At the end of the day while teaching a class about natural disasters, a crack of lighting struck outside the window. It was followed by eight hours of pouring rain and lightning.

5. Huyen came over for dinner. I cooked some pasta and after about two bites she announced, "Vietnamese people cannot eat this." More for me.

6. Huyen used my bathroom and walked out holding "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", the book I'm reading. She said to me: "I see you are in the habit of reading on toilet. Me too." I then said, "I thought you don't have a toilet." She replied, "Yes, only at my parent's house."

7. At 9PM Huyen said she must leave. She put on her raincoat, plastic bags around her feet, windbreaker etc. She screamed out, "So dangerous!", laughed, and then took off into the typhoon. Five minutes later she called my cell phone, "I must come back. I am lost and it is very wet."

8. At 12:30 at night I was awoken by knocking on my door. It was Ryan: "Yo, um, our house if flooding." The roof had about six inches of water and was waterfalling down the four flights of stairs into our kitchen. Ryan braved the elements and went on to the roof and cleaned the drain with a hanger. Problem solved...kind of. Two minutes later the drainage pipe in my bathroom ERUPTED with black water. After ten minutes of blowing up in my bathroom it stopped and all was normal.

Good times.

I Didn't Tie Peter Cullen For Nothing

(PICTURE: Members of the Vietnam Ultimate Frisbee Team)

Some of you might recall that I tied Peter Cullen for "senior athlete" in the senior superlatives. Yes, it's still as shocking today as it was in '97 that people actually thought I was as good of an athlete as Pete.

Last weekend I joined the Hanoi Ultimate Frisbee Club (http://www.hanoi-ultimate.com/). I played pretty well despite my $15 knock-off Adidas cleats coming apart in the first ten minutes of the game and having a pretty hard collusion on the first play of the game. After the practice I was told that the following Saturday (yesterday) there would be a tournament. Sign me up!

All week long I was psyched to show my fellow Hanoians what I got. The only thing worrying me was I was unbelievably sore all week. Not having done any exercise since leaving NJ, I was in, well pretty bad shape. And apparently I was in worse shape then I thought since I pulled my hamstring in warm-ups yesterday. Yes, warm-ups. I was gimpy all day running up and down the field yet still managed to hold my own on the pitch. In fact, I scored the first touchdown of the tournament and immediately went down on the ground and asked someone to stretch me. This guy David (apparently "one of the top ultimate players in southeast Asia") came up to me and said, "you can't get hurt on your first catch.

Anyway, long story short --and I have to run to my first day of class-- my team ended up winning the whole tournament. I've got a fancy new hat to prove it...although the hat is clearly made for Vietnamese people since it doesn't come close to fitting on my head.

Um, yeah, I might have a Vietnamese Girlfriend

(PICTURE: Huyen wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress in front of The Temple of Literature)

So Huyen (the girl who asked me if I "was going to make water") and I have hung out a couple more times recently. She and her sister came over on Tuesday night and cooked an amazing house-warming dinner for Ryan and I. Then yesterday she swung by during the day to talk for a little while and to drink fresh melon shakes.

Now the question is, how many times does it take for a boy and a girl in Vietnam to hang out before they are considered boyfriend and girlfriend?

In case you're wondering here are Huyen's stats:
Age: 23
Occupation: College Student at the University of Hanoi; finishing her thesis in economics.
Languages: Vietnamese (A+), Russian (A+), English (B), French (C+), Japanese (C+)
Height: 5'7 or 5'8. She's a giant out here.
Extra Curricular Activities: Badminton, Cooking, Riding her motorbike, going to the movies, hanging out with family.

One negative about Huyen is that she literally might kill me. Yesterday I made a joke about her bothering me and she started to strangle me and said, "You are so mean!" I'll keep you posted on this budding romance. If it does turn into marriage, I expect everyone to fly out for the wedding.

Honesty Is The Best Policy

(PICTURE: Vietnamese Dong. Everyone's a millionaire here)

Minutes ago I embarked on an adventure: Finding my neighborhood pho shop. At my "old" apartment I had a couple of great pho places that I frequented every morning. When Ryan and I looked at this new apartment the first thing I asked the landlord was, "Are there good pho stands nearby?" She responded, "Of course. Everybody loves pho." Well the other day Ryan and I went walking to find one and it took us about twenty minute before we came upon a shop. The pho was half decent but when the bill came we knew we'd never come come. The bill was 120,000 Dong for two phos and one fried rice. That's almost exactly 4Xs as much as any place I've been yet.

So this morning, solo, I went for a walk in the opposite direction. It took me only about two minutes before I found a street pho place where the soup was literally cooking on the sidewalk. There were three old ladies sitting around the ingredients and an ample amount of flies for me to know this place was legit. I took a seat, got my usual "why is this white person here" stares and ordered a steaming hot bowl of beef noodle soup.

On my pho scale I gave the soup a solid B+. However, it will be a long time before I go back to this particular stand. While I was finishing my soup I watched the only other patron pay. He handed over 15,000 Dong and went on his way (this is about the right price for pho although my favorite place is 12,000). After sucking down the rest of my broth and proceeding to sweat profusely because of the chili floating on the bottom, I got up to leave. I handed the money lady (one lady handles money, one lady handles pouring the broth, one lady handles cutting up the meat) a 50,000 Dong note and she gave me back only 30,000 Dong change. I asked her, "is that it" and she shook her head no and stared down at the ingredient table, refusing to make eye contact. I had clearly been ripped off by 5,000 Dong or roughly thirty eight cents. That's a lot of money out here. The moral of the story is this: if the lady had been honest she would have had a regular costumer for months on end. However, she wasn't and I'll be taking my business elsewhere.

In other news, I went to the Apple store yesterday and was told that "my file is very big." Come back this afternoon. In the afternoon I got this text message: "Hi Mr Benjamin August. I'm from Apple's istore 63 Kim Ma Str. Your hard disk drive got some problems.it changed to blue screen or got computer hanging problem while it is running. we will try but we are afraid that we can not keep the memory in your hard disk space. could you come back tomorrow afternoon?" Yeah, not looking so good....

SOMETHING ELSE WAS MISSING THIS MORNING!!!

(PICTURE: Some random dude with a more disgusting rash than me)

...my heat rash!

Thank god for Jewish doctors. Last week I met Steve's friend David and Michael Shapiro. Immediately upon hearing that Michael had just graduated Georgetown Medical School I whipped off my pants and showed him my lingering heat rash. Well, turns out it wasn't a heat rash at all but a fungus: "Kind of like athletes foot." (How do you like me now ladies! I got a fungus on my groin) Michael walked me into the local pharmacy and helped pick out the proper cream. One week later, I'm all cleared! Watch out world...

In other exciting news I now have skype. That means I can call the states for a whopping two cents a minute (plus a ten cent connecting fee) or for free if you have skype. So, can someone go to my house in Livingston and install skype for my parents. Thanks!

Good News And Bad News Part III

(Dr. Marcus Brody -- I'm sans camera and I refer to him later so yes, it makes sense)

THE GOOD NEWS:

I got a job teaching English at a really good private language school called Language Link. Here's the website:

http://www.languagelink.edu.vn/index.php?lang=en

If you look at the picture on the top of the homepage I'm the white guy in the front row...or at least will be soon. The job is perfect: it pays well for Vietnamese standards, is right near my apartment, has free bottled water, gives me a cubby for my stuff to be properly stolen from, allowed me to sign a six month contract with bonuses for finishing it (most schools want one year contracts), gives me money to join a gym and has a plethora, yes a plethora, of cute girls working there. The best part is that I only have to work a few hours each day and don't have class until 4PM every day so I can write in the morning and make my body look damn sexy at the gym in the early afternoon.

THE BAD NEWS:

Some of you may recall a little incident in which I was robbed of all my belongings in the middle of the night while sleeping. You know, that whole Ninja thing. Well, you may also recall the "good news" in that blog entry. I believe I mentioned how I luckily had recently saved everything from my computer onto an external hard drive and that somehow the robbers didn't take it. I think I said to at least thirty people, "Thank god my hard drive wasn't taken." If that isn't the exact quote it's a damn close variation of it. Well, yesterday I bought a new mac and plugged in my hard drive. Immediately some message comes up:
"Would you like the Time Machine to back up your hard drive on your passport (passport is the name of my external hard drive)."
I thought, "yeah, that sounds good. I want my stuff backed up." So I clicked yes.
Then another message came up: "Erasing External Hard Drive."
Um, what? Excuse me? Then the wheel on my screen starts to turn as if it's starting to work. I freaked out and did the only thing someone who doesn't know crap about computers would do--I pulled my external hard drive plug out of my Mac. Phew, saved it. Um, not so much. I then tried to plug back in my external hard drive and well, the computer wouldn't recognize it. Panic started to set in, more so then when I realized I was robbed last week.

I took a few deep breathers and thought, "I'll just try it on Ryan's mac." I went up to Ryan's room and plugged in my external hard drive into his slot (that is not a gay joke and for the record since I've gotten a few too many emails about this: RYAN AND I ARE NOT GAY LOVERS). Well, his computer couldn't recognize my hard drive either. Yeah, I think I did what the robbers couldn't do: I LOST ALL MY PICTURES/MUSIC/SCRIPTS/ETC!

Hold on, hold on, there is some possible good news:
1. This morning I took my hard drive to the apple store here (which by the way I'm pretty sure isn't really an apple store and, like everything else, is a rip off of a major brand) and the IT guy said he thinks he can fix it. I left him my HD and was told to come back tomorrow.
2. The other day I put all of my scripts onto Steve's computer. Well, Steve is traveling in Cambodia and Laos at the moment so who knows if he'll make it out alive or with his computer. It's kind of like that scene in Indiana Jones when Dr. Marcus Brody has the grail and Indiana says he could never be caught but in reality he could easily be caught. In this scenario I'm pretty sure, based on his blog, Steve would trade his laptop for a night of spooning with a girl.
3. I recently put online all of my Australia and China photos. Also, Ryan stole a bunch of my Cambodia photos which I'll soon steal back.

The moral of the story is never, never ever, hit "yes" on your computer if you don't know what you're doing. Ironically the thing called "Time Machine" won't allow me to travel back in time and fix this problem.